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Shoutbacks--Thanks for the shouts this week from:
Tim at Travelers Diagram, whose lists of books spotted on New York subways I always enjoy, along with the other diverse and entertaining finds on his weblog, such as this story about war criminal Henry Kissinger reading about his own outrageously advanced pot belly in the New York Post. Congratulations on your wedding, Tim!
paul at dataisnature, who talked about my molecule-cum-product-box installations (been thinking about doing more of them). I look forward to perusing his archives and looking at more pieces like this one, speaking of fanciful molecular forms.
Rob Myers for his post on Swarm (but there's no scanning or retouching in that work--just printing and overprinting, and cutting with an X-acto). In this interview he talks about his admiration for the conceptualist outfit Art & Language and his fondness for remixing others' work. Yet the pieces in his San Jose series and the Smileys series are quite joyful and individualistic, not just an illustration of theory--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they're their own semiotic theory in a tangible, pleasurable form. Examples from "San Jose" are below--he thinks it's his "weakest work" because it's not directly influenced by anyone else, but maybe he's just being modest or ironic. I would describe these as biomorphic tags done corporate logo style, and would like to see them in a show with Ryan McGinness and Anton Vidokle, who have also done hard-edged logo-like imagery. They're really nice:
Posting (also email) has been crimped this weekend due to a surprise outage by Comcast Cable Co. They made a long-planned switch to a new, company-owned server and told everyone about it but their customers. 48 hours with no service and they can't send an email? I was so angry I decided to switch to another cable co-- oh, right, there is no other cable company. DSL is also not available on my block, due, I'm assuming, to the rotting phone lines Verizon has been planning to fix for about 10 years. A repairman told me a few months back that in last corporate reshuffle, a several-million-dollar figure allotted for infrastructure repairs, which the company elected to postpone, exactly equaled the executive bonuses that changed hands at the closing--and hey, I believe it!
I expect a big shitstorm of self-congratulatory hype from Comcast once they get their new internet pipes in place. The fact is their content is the worst, lowest common denominator cheese. Whenever I check my webmail, their front page always has the latest celebrity news, pictures of two-headed kittens, and verbatim press releases from the White House saying how well things are going in Iraq.
"Fly by the Pool" [mp3 removed]
Abe Linkoln--full size with sound here.
jimpunk--full size here. Showing my ignorance--who is the guy in the photo?
[Answered--see comments if you too are having a shameful, momentary lapse.]
From the press release for the exhibition RHIZOME ArtBase 101* (Rhizome.org at the New Museum, June 23 - September 10, 2005): "In extreme animalz: the movie: part 1 (2005) by U.S.-based collective Paper Rad and Pittsburgh-based artist Matt Barton, .GIF files of animals, sourced through Google's Image Search, are woven into a digital tapestry that is mirrored by a surrounding cluster of mechanized stuffed animals." [And taxidermied road kill (see detail below). The blurriness in the above photo is from the animals spinning and bobbing on cams and rotors like a carnival booth in the late stages of amphetamine psychosis. The aforementioned .GIFs are on video screens mingled in among the animals. --tm]
More from the press release: "In Dot Matrix Synth (2003), American artist Paul Slocum reprogrammed a dot matrix printer so that it plays electronic notes in accordance with different printing frequencies." [Couldn't hear this over the opening crowd noise, but it was printing away when I walked up. Yes, it makes music and still prints. --tm]
*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://archive.rhizome.org:8080/exhibition/artbase101/
Rare Blog-like Personal Rant
If you're riding your bike on a public path that includes walkers, skaters, etc, and you yell out "On your left" instead of just slowing down and maneuvering around them, you are an asshole. Your barked-out command (and make no mistake, for most people who use it, it is a command--to stay put or move over) is just as likely to startle the walker you're trying to pass into swerving or going the wrong direction.
If you're in-line skating, weaving all over the path, and a biker comes up behind you and silently passes you, swinging well wide of you and you bark out the command "Call a side," you are an asshole. You are especially an asshole if the biker says, "Nah, I don't do that," and you say, "You're going to get someone killed."
If you do say that, you might hear something like "I've been riding this bike twenty years and haven't killed anyone yet. Calling a side is a control thing, I don't like it." That is, assuming the doppler effect doesn't muffle this rant, delivered in a matter of seconds as I am passing you.
