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Vermeer lives: Home Life, by Andrew Coulter Enright. Full size image can be found on his weblog.
Enright also asks an interesting question about the High Line, the elevated rail line in Chelsea slated to be renovated as a public park: how is it going to integrated with the rail yards that are the proposed West Side Stadium location? From maps he posts on his site, the two properties overlap significantly on the High Line's north end. The stadium developers will no doubt love having to delicately build around the old rail structure. ("Whoops! We accidently compromised some load bearing girders with a backhoe! Damn, now we'll have to tear the rest down!") I'm sure it's all being taken into consideration, though, given Mayor Bloomberg's concern for environmental factors in that part of the city.
The SCREENFULL dudes started off their reBlogging stint at Eyebeam politely enough, but total chaos now rules. My browser actually just crashed--you're advised to let everything load before attempting to scroll. I keep thinking of Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working ("essential late Lewis..." Cahiers du Cinema), a walking disaster who can't keep a job. He's rinsing glasses at a bar that's just hired him, staring at the exotic dancer's leg above him on the counter, trying to control himself, but you know by the end of the scene he's going to be grabbing the leg screaming "I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT!"
"Steamboy" [mp3 removed]
"Dedicated to BK" [mp3 removed]
Karl Jensen, Tetrapod #3A, printed paper; Momenta Art benefit
John Monti, Lil Rosette, urethane rubber, also from the Momenta benefit exhibition.
Felicity Hogan, Kick Start, oil, acrylic on canvas.
Steve Voll, PTG066, acrylic on Ultra-Lite.
Annette Cords, Zoned #90, acrylic on board. All of the above photos were taken at the opening of the annual Momenta Art benefit, where I also have a piece. The work will be raffled at White Columns on April 30.
The images I posted earlier of wallpaper paintings evoking HTML frames have gotten the SCREENFULL treatment. Just in case your life wasn't "meta" enough.
"Calypsum 2" (formerly "Theme from PLUTE") [6.1 MB .mp3]
The volume level is a tad lower than other pieces: I discovered I was recording them too loud and they were clipping at high volume. This is my first work using "continuous controllers"--the filter sweeps aren't actually live. Why tire your hand turning knobs when you can draw a controller curve and let the machine do the work?
After putting up a "plute"-related graphic and adding a back story I changed the name of this piece. It sounds too dreamy and smeary to me to have such an obnoxious word in the title. "Ploot" is supposedly what atomic industry workers call plutonium; I was spelling it differently and may use it again, just not in this piece.
HTML Frame Paintings, etc.
From Olia Lialina's A Vernacular Web: The Indigenous and the Barbarians: "In 2003 the students of the Merz Akademie celebrated the First Ten Years of the WWW by creating an exhibition of objects that symbolized the landmarks of the web's history. The tribute to wallpapers consisted of a huge board of real wallpaper, (from OBI), arranged in a frame style layout. Even in this simple construction it was clearly the skeleton of a web page."
Lialina's article, which is highly recommended reading, covers many elements of early, DIY web design, such as "under construction" pages, homemade buttons, and collections of backgrounds, always in the context of how they've been replaced in a second wave of web practice, dominated by blogs and search engines. Here is a particularly funny comment on MIDI:
As all the instruments were standardized in 1983 the sound effectively goes no further than Italo Disco. There will never be any new and exciting sounds, only updated versions of old sounds. New sounds would only break the compatibility with all the existing MIDI files. Software vendors can't change the "trumpet" to a "Neptune's kinda honkashizzle" because, on the web, you can find all kinds of MIDI files that use the trumpet in many different ways. In this case the only solution is the lowest common denominator. The trumpet sound must fit into James Brown's "Sex Machine" in the same way it fits into "Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner. It does this by not really fitting into either. At least that's equality.[via]
The result is that most of the time MIDI files give the impression of somebody playing hit music on an electronic organ in the privacy of their own home. In reality this happens at village weddings or the annual gathering of a rabbit breeder's association.