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A helpful "no murder" pledge from Steve Gilliard:
Some bloggers, mostly right wingers, after being embarassed by the conduct of some of their peers, have created a pledge of Online Integrity. Which, if one is aware of the rules of the internet and common decency, is as useful as a third nipple.
One should not have to be told to be decent.
But if we're going to have pledges, I think we need to pledge not to kill other people. Murder is so destructive and if we all agree not to do it, then we can have a better world. Here is the News Blog's 15 point no murder pledge
1. You cannot hire a man to kill your wife in a custody dispute. Murder is not a legal option in marital discord
2. Driving by homes and firing automatic weapons is unacceptable behavior.
3. Ed Gein is not a role model
4. Neither is Jeffery Dahmer
5. You cannot use Saw or Hostel as training films for kidnapping and torturing strangers
6. Axes are for wood, not virginal coeds
7. Just because someone steps on your brand new Nikes, you cannot cut their arteries with a boxcutter
8. Hitchhikers are not deer, you cannot hunt, gut and make jerky of them
9. Killing someone for insurance fraud is unlikely to work, ask Fred MacMurray
10. Farms are not disposal areas for meth dealing bikers on the wrong end of a drug deal. And, no, you can't store the hookers you kidnap and strangle there either
11. Just because you hate your neighbor, you cannot wire C-4 to his engine block, then wait for the explosion. And I know some of you can do just that.Don't.
12. I know your mother in law is annoying . Feeding her seconal and then letting her drive is STILL MURDER. Sure, your hands are clean, more or less, but your actions led to her death
13. Even if he has a gun, if you shoot someone in a home invasion, you've committed murder
14. Even though your wife left you, barging into her parents home, killing everyone inside and driving away is an overreaction.
15. Just because you own a high powered rifle, doesn't mean you can climb to a roof and start picking people off
Now that people understand the rules, they should follow them
"LoopB4YouLeap" [mp3 removed]
The B-4 is a software synthesizer version of the Hammond B-3 organ. Here an insistently stereo-panning riff gets the Glass/Reich/Ratledge treatment; I envision doing more rock-y sorts of things with those notes in the future. And normally when I see the phrase "loop-based musical styles" I reach for my revolver, but it's OK if I do it. Ha ha.
Draft checklist for my exhibition at artMovingProjects, opening Friday, May 5.
1. OptiDisc, DVD-R, projection dimensions variable
2. Double Centrifuge, DVD-R
3. Eyeshades, DVD-R (see above)
4. Guitar Solo, DVD-R, music by the artist
5. Sensor Readings, DVD-R, music by the artist
The e-card for The GIF Show, opening tonight at Rx Gallery in San Francisco, is here. A del.icio.us directory of the works in the show, including my vid "End Notes" (featuring my GIFs and ones I made with jimpunk), is here. Curator Marisa Olson says "Of course, many of these [works in the directory] will look quite different, installed in the gallery... What's not there, as of now, are Tom Moody's drawings, Lovid's fabric pieces, Guthrie Lonergan's gif avatar video, or Paper Rad's "Welcome to My Homeypage" gif video..." (link added to quote)
We began installing my show at artMovingProjects yesterday. I'm approaching this as an experiment and a reality check. The gallery consists of one large-ish white box room, so the decision was made some time ago to show my video work and not my 2-D work (drawings and paintings made with the computer). For reasons of light levels you can't have projected video in the same room with overhead-lit pieces--the two would cancel each other out.
It's ironic to be talking about "my video work" because until a few months ago it didn't exist. I had been doing animations and short films for the Web but never thought much about putting them in a physical space. But I was getting asked to submit videos to things, so I've been scaling up existing vids and thinking more about scale in making new ones.
Up until recently I'd only seen much of this work on the computer or a small TV monitor. Now we're going through the process of seeing how things look large and hearing how the sound works in a big room. It's premature to say where we'll end up Friday, but it's looking like less-is-more is the order of the day. Probably the show will feature only pieces with no sound, and the music lecture performance thing on May 19 will emphasize the "music video" pieces.
The silent pieces are on the peaceful hypnotic looping side--this OptiDisc one is looking like a likely centerpiece. Coincentally Google Images just archived the Net version recently and it's been getting a lot of traffic. The music vids, where my own tunes have some visual accompaniment, are aggressive beyond my hopes on a big scale, as in rock and roll. "Exit Maurice," "Sensor Readings," "End Notes," and "Guitar Solo" do more than "hold the room"--they pretty much grab it by the throat. I'm tempted to have one of these be the "centerpiece," but am kind of leery of videos with soundtracks in a gallery that play over and over. As in, I usually hate it. Still thinking about this.
Two shows opening this week:
Tom Moody, Room Sized Animated GIFsAnd, Rhizome.org Net Art News on The GIF Show*:
artMovingProjects
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
166 North 12th Street
917-301-6680
May 5 - June 25, 2006
Opening: Friday, May 5, 7:00PM - 9:00PM
Music Performance/Lecture: May 19th, 8PM
Note: gallery closed June 8-11
Animated GIFs, the tiny, blinking, often annoying image files that draw your eye to particular parts of a Web page, have been around since the Net's early days. There is a sizeable do-it-yourself culture built up around them, which now includes a second generation of Web and gallery based art using them ironically and/or proactively.
For the past several years, Moody has been drawing GIFs in a simple paint program and posting them on his blog. The gallery will project two of these pulsing, but defiantly lo-fi animations huge on opposing walls of the space. Others will be displayed on monitors scattered on the floor.
The gallery will also feature a lecture/performance by Moody where he will present some of his music. These catchy compositions, made with a combination of old computers such as the Macintosh SE as well as more current soft synths and samplers, have a punchy concision similar to his GIFs. The styles range from videogame Electro to a string quartet piece written for a softsampler. --from ArtCal
The GIF Show, an exhibition opening May 3rd, at San Francisco’s Rx Gallery, takes the pulse of what some net surfers call ‘GIF Luv,’ a recent frenzy of file-sharing and creative muscle-flexing associated with GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format files). Curated by Marisa Olson in a West Coast Rhizome collaboration with Rx, the show presents GIFs and GIF-based videos, prints, readymades, and sculptures by a range of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). GIFs have a rich cultural life on the internet and each bears specific stylistic markers. From Myspace graphics to advertising images to porn banners, and beyond, GIFs overcome resolution and bandwidth challenges in their pervasive population of the net. Animated GIFs, in particular, have evolved from a largely cinematic, cell-based form of art practice, and have more recently been incorporated in music videos and employed as stimulating narrative devices on blogs. From the flashy to the minimal, the sonic to the silent, the artists in The GIF Show demonstrate the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files. The opening is sure to be just as lively, with music by Eats Tapes and visuals by Nate Boyce. Spread the luv! - Rhizome.orgThe MySpace page for The GIF Show has a lot of new material added.
*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/apr/29/gifs-galore-and-more/
From US News and World Report:
Skewering comedy skit angers Bush and aidesSome kind of personal smear will no doubt be surfacing about Colbert: "not today, not tomorrow, but when he least expects it." Bush is like the character Paul Lazzaro from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Nursing grudges and getting payback is what he's all about.
By Paul Bedard
Posted 5/1/06
Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert's biting routine at the White House Correspondents Association dinner won a rare silent protest from Bush aides and supporters Saturday when several independently left before he finished.
"Colbert crossed the line," said one top Bush aide, who rushed out of the hotel as soon as Colbert finished. Another said that the president was visibly angered by the sharp lines that kept coming.
"I've been there before, and I can see that he is [angry]," said a former top aide. "He's got that look that he's ready to blow."
Colbert's routine was similar to what he does on his show, the Colbert Report, but much longer on the topic of Bush, suggesting that the president is out of touch with reality. Aides and reporters, however, said that it did not overshadow Bush's own funny routine, which featured an impersonator who told the audience what Bush was thinking when he spoke dull speech lines.
In fact, some aides crowed over reports that the president easily bested Colbert in the reviews of both comedy acts.
Today is the third anniversary of Bush's aircraft carrier photo-op. On May 2, 2003, I posted these pics:
I mentioned at the time that "[t]he photo above and left is an Agence France-Presse photo. As documented here, the AP story changed the wording of the banner to make the protesters sound more violent, or desperate: 'Sooner or later US killers we'll kill you.' Hardly any US media ran the above photo, only AP's altered description."
Amazing and sad that after so many Americans and Iraqis have been killed, Bush is still in power and the press is still covering for him.