Tom Moody

tom moody

From the comments, some back and forth about Cody Trepte's recent show at NYU is below. To recap, it included three types of work: "binary cross stitches," an essay by pioneering computer scientist and codebreaker Alan Turing with everything but the 1s and 0s removed, and collages consisting of the cut-out negative spaces (spaces between words) from another Turing essay.

t.m. (from the original post) The show is a non-standard take on "computer art" in the gallery context. The formal vocabulary is reductive (or accumulative) minimalism a la Yayoi Kusama's airmail stamp paintings, and while the subject matter is the language of both the computer and the computer scientist, it's treated not in a literal way but rather as an absence, or anti-content. As the press release explains, Turing was gay and accused in the not so swinging '50s of "acts of gross indecency." His "sentence" was an "experimental hormone therapy" consisting of estrogen injections to "reduce the libido." He died a couple of years later, apparently a suicide, but with questions lingering. Trepte's work is thus not the typical Buzz Lightyear computer-fetish celebration but rather an examination of the repressed, fragile, elegiac back story to the "machine that's changed our lives."

p.d. tom im struggling with this stuff a bit...
cos i want to see computer art that isn't exhibited on a computer, and while this isn't computer art i dunno it seems superficial. with a process like this, why mess with turing as a subject?? to me it's arbitrary output is completely at odds with turing's work - an extremely insightful approach into the nature of numbers with [in his mind] applications towards the understanding and hopeful emulation of human consciousness.
maybe it's an idol worshipping thing cos to me turing is pretty much the Biggest Playa In Da Game and anything made about him would probably seem like it hasn't done enough. but in this case i feel like i wouldn't gain anything from seeing the work and much of it [according to the press release] actually seems to misunderstand its own subject matter.
btw i think he did dream in code: i've read that turing was comfortable doing base-32 arithmetic in his head. talk about a nerd!

t.m. I'm reminded of the joke about the old man in the powdered wig found in Beethoven's crypt carefully erasing musical scores. "What are you doing in here?" someone said. "Decomposing," he said.

But seriously...

There's 2 bodies of work here that kind of get smeared together. The cross stitches ask us to look at code as pure form and are not particularly "deconstructive." The erased texts are meant as a kind of protest mingled with process art and are also pretty seductive as objects.

I usually gripe about art that relies on a back story to be complete but in this case I'll give the artist his "repressed history of computing." John Nash was also gay, or bi, but you'd never know it from A Beautiful Mind, the movie. It's freakin Russell Crowe and his wife is Jennifer Connelly!

I'm for this show because Turing was all about meaning and look where his talent got him. Compulsory hormone treatments! If someone wants to highlight his texts in a combination fan tribute and act of negation (a la Rauschenberg's erased de Kooning drawing), I think there's room for that.

The peripheral stuff of computing, the things on paper, the markings, have their own presence and constitute a kind of mute, parallel language that an artist can illuminate for the rest of us. A bit like JG Ballard calling corporate memos and charts the true literature of our age.

I guess I'm saying there's different ways to pay homage to Turing. But it's true his virtues are largely left out.

p.d. jesus - who let the dogs out on the beethoven punchline? that was ripe. more jokes AND paintings of american mammals in the future please!

gotcha with the homage thing, i guess what im saying is i find the back story - creative guy who's repressed homosexuality got him killed [sickening as it sounds to non-Republicans] - historically a bit common. i think his theoretical ideas, ideas that have little to do with binary numbers per se, are far more worthy of inspection through art practice especially since they are still little understood by most artists who use modern day Turing-complete machines [i.e. every computer on the planet].

This tepid statement in Newsweek by Barack Obama, the supposed Hope of 2008, casting doubt that the Democrats can (will?) do anything about the coming Iraq escalation, is "discouraging," as Matt Stoller of MyDD understatedly puts it :

Before Barack Obama was a senator, he opposed the war in Iraq. Now that he is one, he says that sending more troops would be "a mistake that compounds the president's original mistake." But don't expect Obama--or most other Dems--to try to block George W. Bush when he asks Congress in the coming weeks for another billion-dollar bundle for the war. The party won't deny the funds, and may not even try to attach conditions to them. Obama made that clear last week when I saw him in his office, a sunny space filled with portraits of Thurgood Marshall, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi and Muhammad Ali. "To anticipate your question," said the Harvard-trained lawyer, "is Congress going to be willing to exercise its control over the purse strings to affect White House policy? I am doubtful that that is something we are willing to do in the first year."

[...]

Even as they decried the "surge" and declared that it is "time to bring the war to a close," Democrats offered reasons for staying out of Bush's way. Obama took the safest ground. "I cannot in good conscience," he said, "cut off funding for our troops that are already there." He and others will insist that future requests be included in the regular budget. Sen. Joe Biden, whose Foreign Relations Committee will launch hearings on the war this week, said that Congress's role is simply too limited to be effective. "It's all about the separation of powers," he said. Last month he told Bush: "This is your war, Mr. President, and there's nothing we can do to stop you."

We need to call Obama's office and remind him that people outside Washington DC do not support the war. One reason to be discouraged is it does indeed, appear to be "all about the oil," according to this article in the The Independent:

Iraq's massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. "So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies," he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through "production-sharing agreements" (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world's two largest producers, is state controlled.

Yet the companies still have to find a way to extract the oil without getting their employees killed. Recall that Bechtel recently decided to pull out of Iraq after losing 52 people on the payroll. Bush's pathetic plans for escalation aren't enough, he's just hoping and praying it will work, while cowardly legislators such as Obama go along with him.

mark posted this in the comments.

Another, time delayed version by Damon Zucconi is here.

"Slow Robollywood" [mp3 removed]

To be played with the above spirals (either version). If you have tabs you can make your own YTMND.

Or you can just listen to it (or not).

"RingMod Plus Beats" [mp3 removed]

The two previous sound files combined, one after the other, with a reprise of "RingMod" on the final note.

The link was broken...for 18 hours. *moan* Thanks, Thor.

"Beats (Song 8)" [mp3 removed]

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