Tom Moody

tom moody

The fruits of my video and music collaboration with John Parker will be on view this Fri, May 12, in Toronto. The exhibition is Mods and Rockers, curated by Sally McKay as part of digifest 2006: mods:

Artist teams are:

* Myfanwy Ashmore & Lorna Mills
* Chandra Bulucon & Andrew J. Paterson
* Rob Cruickshank & Veronica Verkley
* Tom Moody & John Parker

In Britain in the 1960s, mods and rockers frequently clashed in bloody battles. For this exhibition, however, we ask them to merge in the name of art. Four pairs of artists, one Mod and one Rocker per team, will collaborate on art, video and sound works that illuminate the polarities of the partnership.

And here is the statement for our piece, anti-phallically titled Rodmocker, which will be displayed on two TV screens with an asynchronous music soundtrack on CD, playing through headphones:

Tom Moody and John Parker
Rather than have some kind of face-off, or rumble, we are merging sensibilities. The collective inner Mod is the high tech influence in the form of some sophisticated audio software and a newish laptop used to edit and burn the video, and the inner Rocker is the low tech source material: 8-Bit-style tunes on an old Mac (some originally composed in the '80s) and animated GIFs by Tom based on MSPaint versions of Web images of John's work.

We're trying for some sort of parity between the audio and visual material. Pixels and square waves are both medium and subject.

The work was composed in public, on this blog, over the span of about a month. The posts are documented on John's site eyekhan.com.

If you're in the Toronto area, I hope you will check it out!

TV sketch artist, documenting the atrocities...

Thor Johnson remixed a piece of mine posted a few months ago:

"Tasteful Triphop (Thorrific Shruti Box Remix)" [mp3 removed].

The original tune is here:

"Tasteful Triphop" [mp3 removed].

Johnson's version is darker and more haunted. It is no longer tasteful, but instead might be described as a combination of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and Can's "ethnographic forgery series," with a modern but gritty digital edge.

Johnson also has a new web video (approx 24 MB Flash file), a psychedelic montage of Dick Cheney's recent, much-booed "throwing out the first pitch" photo op with the debated-and-then-quickly-forgotten clip of American soldiers shooting the wounded in Fallujah. The repressed returns to mingle with the banality of evil (that baseball jacket!).

Time Tunnel was a pretty boring Irwin Allen TV series in the '60s where the protagonists go back in time to key moments in history--like, right before John Wilkes Booth is about the assassinate Lincoln--and inevitably face the same paradoxes and moral dilemmas week after the week. But what a set! The concentric rings pulsed while the two time dudes ran through the tunnel. Sometimes there were narrow escapes, like, they had to get out of the tunnel fast, before the universe exploded. [/Spicoli]

"Grey Grid (Aron Namenwirth)" [.mov file removed -- thanks, Apple -- see GIF version]

This is an animated remix interpretation I did of an acrylic-on-panel painting by Aron Namenwirth. It should be set automatically to loop in your Quicktime player and move very fast. (If not, something's out of whack. But the movement should be irregular--that's "in whack.")

Tom Moody, "Room Sized Animated GIFs," artMovingProjects, NYC. Checklist (with links to Internet versions) and work as installed in the gallery (projected and on assorted monitors)

1. OptiDisc, DVD-R, projection dimensions variable

2. Double Centrifuge, DVD-R

3. Eyeshades, DVD-R

4. Guitar Solo, DVD-R, music by the artist

5. Sensor Readings, DVD-R, music by the artist

Installation Photos

OptiDisc Installation

Adam Green on Net Neutrality:

If Net Neutrality is gutted, Google, eBay, and YouTube either pay protection money to companies like AT&T or risk that their sites process slowly on your computer... And the little guy with the next big idea would be muscled out of the marketplace, relegated to the "slow lane" of the information superhighway.

Green's post has some links for the little guy to use to help stop the pro-AT&T legislation that is winding through Congress like a big bowel movement. Unlike the fake populist website ex-Clintonista McCurry set up ("Hands Off the Internet"--as in no regulation, even though regulation is what keeps the Internet a level playing field), the various pro-neutrality forces are the real good guys here. Or at least better guys.

Thanks to whoever sent me this cellphone pic of the OptiDisc installation. This was in my inbox when I got home from the opening last night.

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