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Selected group websurfing blogs:
Double Happiness
Supercentral
Nasty Nets (disclosure: I'm in this)
The heirs to SCREENFULL and 544x378(WebTV)? The latter were daily blogs with original audio and visual work, now sadly archived, that were heavy on recycled/mashed Internet/pop culture content. I suspect it was hard for two people (jimpunk and Abe Linkoln) to sustain that creative pitch, but with a group blog the work is distributed more evenly. Whether they'll last any longer is another question. All have a certain ad hoc quality that keeps them unpredictable but Internet creative chemistry is so flighty. On the other hand, what happens with real-world co-ops is that one or two people end up doing all the work (and therefore laying down rules for the others) but low overhead and a low bar to participation makes the Internet model potentially different. Still, someone has to deal with the nightmare of comment spam and other realities of the internet, even if all costs are shared equally.
Update: There is something on the Nasty Nets front page that is either crashing my browser or prompting me to install non-existent Quicktime add-ons. I think it is the embedded "Mr Wizard" file. (I have Firefox on a PC.) It will soon be gone from the front page after a couple more posts. It would be good if this could be fixed because I have a commenter blaming an excess of animated GIFs for "harming" his computer--this completely killed any discussion of the content of the page.
Today through Sunday are the final days for BLOG, the exhibition, where this weblog is being displayed as an ongoing performance work at artMovingProjects in Brooklyn, NY. There will be a closing party Sunday, June 24th. I will not be attending but will continue to perform from an undisclosed location. My blog "terminal" is in the project space; the main space features an installation by Zoe Sheehan Saldana, including some tobacco plants she has been growing in the gallery. These plants will be given away at the party. Please attend, and be sure to leave me a comment--as BLOG is "fully interactive."
Paddy Johnson discussed the show here; it is more a review of the blog than BLOG, which had only recently opened when she wrote it. She likes the critical and political side of the project and mostly sidesteps the issue of the cartoony molecular and quasi-scientific imagery that pops up here like clockwork. (The swimming pool piece she picked is unusually sedate for me.) I'm pleased to say many of the cartoony GIFs have "gone viral" on the Net--the lack of good taste in a critical context seems to be an asset elsewhere. Also, a fair amount of music gets posted here, and some video, and those have also found audiences. In my own defense I'll say the critical mind (to the extent it exists) leads to the inexorable conclusion of "bad boy" content.
hat tip to L.M.
"Whiskey Tango Fubar" [mp3 removed]
Expect there will be more variations of this, with different instruments, added harmonies, etc. I wrote the "main theme" while waiting for an out of town guest to come over for a studio visit. Originally it was all synth (the part that comes in in the middle) but I liked the relentlessness of it on the piano. The drum machine parts combine live and sampled hits (live as in live electronics). I wanted them kind of loose and desultory to contrast with the piano--all of this can be tightened and made more "classical."
Stephen Hendee, The Eye, New Britain Museum, New Britain, CT, USA, 2005
points of comparison to the Nathaniel Stern work in the previous post:
-specifically evokes "wireframe" computer model (or "invokes" in the case of Stern, who uses the word in his title)
-reproduces wireframe outlines as an actual object
-"problematizes" computer drawing with surrealist invention, deformation
-use of materials such as tape and foamcor (Hendee) and rope (Stern) suggests folk-like or cargo-cult-like reification or fetishization of high technology
-inverts the idea of a computer as effortless and airy through the conspicuous employment of hand labor
Apologies for the aggressive enlargement and resulting blurriness and artifacts in this photo by Joy Garnett. It's an installation of some photos of a performance work by Nathaniel Stern called The Wireframe Series: Sentimental Construction #1. Some clearer photos are here. This blog had its own wireframe aesthetics series a few years back so the topic is of interest. Paddy Johnson has little use for Stern's piece in her review of it today but it merits a stab at a long distance defense. The idea is to haul an Oldenburgized version of a 3-D computer drawing (what might be called "giant soft building outline") out into the streets of Dubrovnik and photograph people erecting it in the style of an Amish barn-raising. Thus hard becomes soft, virtual becomes actual, private becomes public. The sculpture is not of itself interesting--it is activated through its contact with people (like certain objects by Franz West or Helio Oiticica that were meant to be carried or worn) and by being photographed. In the photos, the softened or molten outlines of the rope building become a classic surrealistically "problematized" image, re-envisioning something hard and artificial as pliable and organic. They also represent a regression or devolution of the CAD-generated modernist box by being juxtaposed against the cobbled streets of an older Mediterranean city, and by their handling by real live human beings. Looks good from this side of the Atlantic and this side of the computer screen.