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Sally McKay has documentation up of the "Mods & Rockers" show she curated for Digifest 2006 at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto (on view through July 9). A few posts back I ran some pics of kids looking at the part of the installation I collaborated on with John Parker. Below are some pics from Sally that give the overall layout of the show. There are 8 "display windows," each with video capability and divided into pairs. Each of the four participating artist teams (consisting of one Mod and one Rocker) was assigned a pair of display windows. Headphones common to each pair of windows played audio from a single sound source. John and I opted to have the videos running independently from each other--both are looping, "steady state," psychedelically flavored digital abstractions (documented earlier here ). The audio (documented here) is a tune we jointly composed, with the idea in mind that it would generally "go" with the videos without being in sync with them-- thematically, as well as with random rhythmic and melodic correspondences the viewer could potentially experience. Our installation seems to work as a stand-alone piece (based on the feedback I've had from Toronto) but it is also a "digital non-site" in that the various stages of it, our experimentation and thought process, frames, fragments, sound bites, false starts, and "tech content," were documented on this blog and John's website. The subject matter one viewer kindly described as "full on digital." This is from our statement:
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.
It's been fun knowing you all on the Internet, but the party's coming to an end unless we start lighting up the phones at Congress.
What Would a Non-Neutral Internet Look Like?Excerpts of a debate between an amazon exec and Telco spokesman/hack Mike McCurry here.
by Matt Stoller, Mon Jun 19, 2006 at 01:18:36 PM EST
Ok, it's March, 2008. You go to your computer and open your Verizon-supertier browser, and everything comes at you with blazing speed. You access your bank, NBC news, Andrew Sullivan's blog through Time.com, and check your email. You watch the last five minutes of Scary Movie 7, which you fell asleep watching the night before. Pretty cool.
Then you remember your best friend set up a new blog about her band and asked you to check it out. It's kind of irritating, because she set it up on the slow tier. You minimize the Verizon browser, open up Firefox, and type in the web address. It takes thirty seconds to load. Ugh. The site's fine, and there are some cute pictures of her band performing in a dive bar. You click on a song, and the browser begins loading the first minute of the song. After twenty seconds, you curse the fact that she didn't pay to be on Verizon's internet, and you close the browser. You're even thinking of canceling your slow-tier internet account, since shelling out the $45/month for that plus the $29/month for Verizon super-tier isn't worth it.
Welcome to a non-neutral internet.
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The net neutrality fight is coming to the Senate this week, with the Commerce Committee set to mark up the bill on Thursday. If you live in one of these states, call your Senator. We need strong net neutrality provisions in any telecom reform bill, and those that came out in the second draft over the weekend are not acceptable.
Chairman Ted Stevens (AK), (202) 224-3004
John McCain (AZ), (202) 224-2235
Conrad Burns (MT), Main: 202-224-2644
Trent Lott (MS), (202) 224-6253
Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX), 202-224-5922
Gordon H. Smith (OR), 202.224.3753
John Ensign (NV), (202) 224-6244
George Allen (VA), (202) 224-4024
John E. Sununu (NH), (202) 224-2841
Jim DeMint (SC), 202-224-6121
David Vitter (LA),(202) 224-4623
Co-Chairman Daniel K. Inouye (HI), 202-224-3934
John D. Rockefeller (WV), (202) 224-6472
John F. Kerry (MA), (202) 224-2742
Barbara Boxer (CA), (202) 224-3553
Bill Nelson (FL), 202-224-5274
Maria Cantwell (WA), 202-224-3441
Frank R. Lautenberg (NJ), (202) 224-3224
E. Benjamin Nelson (NE), (202) 224-6551
Mark Pryor (AR), (202) 224-2353
"Its a political fantasy world and unless you're in the Tolkien family, those worlds end and end badly."
From Steve Gilliard:
You know, I sit back, watching the news media and consultants shit their pants over Kos and I have to laugh. They're worried if Warner has too much influence, why they don't like Hillary Clinton, why does he have such influence. They're dragging the party to the Bush-hating far left.Update: Speaking of Counterpunch, co-editor Alexander Cockburn has a few choice words about lefty bloggers.
They just don't get it.
Bush-hating? I can introduce you to some widows and Gold Star Mothers who hate Bush with a white hot flame, who are not from the Sheehan and Berg families.
Far left? Uh, Counterpunch is that way.
That's not the issue here. Those are just cheap terms by scared people.
If they had a clue, they would realize that Kos is just the pointman for a lot of extremly unhappy people, and that efforts to diminish him is well, pointless. Because he's not the issue, it's his site, and his site can be replaced. But what's behind that site can't be.
The right and the media were just fucking jealous at Yearly Kos, looking to pull it apart because the peasants have entered the room. How dare they have big parties, they aren't consultants.
No, they're average people who are no longer apathetic and don't like what they see in politics No more bitching to friends, no more whining to the spouse. They can get involved and make a difference. And that's a gift to this democracy. It may not seem it on K Street, but Bush is a petty, Oedipal man, driven to succeed over the bodies of the dead. He will fail, and when he fails, the odds of the 25th Amendment coming into play increases exponentially.
We cannot continue with politics as usual, because it's the politics of denial. We deny the truth about everything around us and act shocked when it doesn't work out. Health care, no problem, Iraq, no problems, dependent on immigrant labor, no we aren't, ship them back. Sex tell them no.
Its a political fantasy world and unless you're in the Tolkien family, those worlds end and end badly. We will be coming to account and it won't be pretty.
So what happens, you have the whiny-ass titty babies like Jake Tapper whining about Media Matters, and the breck girl of the right, Byron York wondering if Kos is on the pad.
Let me send this message to the consultant class right now, the right will miss it. You do not have to worry about Kos, Atrios, Matt Stoller or anyone else, certainly not me. We are not your problem. It's enough to control what's posted to our blogs on a daily basis.
Our readers, otoh, are a different story. They hate you, they would like nothing better than to drive you from business and into penury. They would hunt you down like dogs and seize your homes. They blame you for ruining America. Bloggers are just conduits for the feelings of lots of people. You confuse the two at your peril. Anyone who thinks our readers are docile slaves, well, they're nuts. They can challenge us like it was a sport. Parse our words like lawyers. And you can never tell what will drive someone nuts.
Piss them off and you've got a problem. We know, we've all done it. Kos has been the scene of nasty fights, same with most sites. Our readers hold us accountable in a way which would make Jake Tapper cry.
It was the readers who propelled the Lamont bid, not the blogs. At best, we're pointmen for a lot of ordinary people. People forget that at their peril.
Cory Arcangel: "In collaboration with Galerie Lisa Ruyter and the museum in progress, I have placed a horizontal rule of gif smilies onto the Wein & Co building in Vienna..."
From the museum in progress website: "Cory Arcangel's stripe is based on 'horizontal rules,' horizontal lines of images which were common for early webpage designers to divide their webpages horizontally."
That's the front story and the back story. How many people walking down the street in Vienna will recognize that line of smileys as kitsch from the early vernacular web, to use Olia Lialina's phrase? I don't care--I like the utter banality of this piece whatever the viewer gets from it. I'm guessing it's invisible to the passerby, and there's something really beautiful about that. On the other hand, maybe it has a slightly alien quality that makes it pop (that's a verb) out there on the street. That's the curse of reacting to work from secondhand sources: we just don't know.
Update: For the Lisa Ruyter referred to in this post see Francis Ruyter.
Young art consumers viewing the collaboration I did in Toronto with John Parker. The exhibition is "Mods & Rockers." The videos are documented here and the audio is here.
"Suite 6 (Almost Live)" [mp3 removed]. An older tune I had adapted for a live playing situation when I did my lecture/performance on May 19. It's "rougher" in that the Sidstation gets glitchy when you change patches and turn knobs aggressively. In doing a studio version of the live version (of the studio version) I did some overdubbing, but it still has more of a live feel of egotistical musicians stepping on each other.
An important factoid omitted from my talk (because I just learned it)--the company that makes the drum machine (Vermona/HDB) used to be the state synthesizer company of the former East Germany.
The interview Paddy Johnson did with Michael Bell-Smith and me has concluded, but I want to address one point Mike raised at the end, so I'm carrying the discussion over to my page. The other participants have blogs and can do the same.
MBS: [...] The work in the [Foxy Production] show was created with a gallery in mind and I wanted it to feel that way. Rather than playing off the tensions of bringing new media into the gallery - as I feel Tom has with his show – I wanted it to feel like a natural fit, again, like maybe this is just how we make art these days.
I don’t think flat screens in a gallery feel especially high tech. For me they’re less loaded than traditional TVs/monitors (which feel consciously lo-tech), high end CRT NTSC monitors (which tie into a history of video art in the gallery) or large projections (which feel cinematic or as Tom pointed out, aggressive).
For me, the containment of wall-mounted flat screen monitors is about putting the work on a physical and spatial par with painting, drawing or photography. I think creating that kind of familiar physical relationship between the viewer and the work may serve to combat the tech gap: at the very least the viewer knows how to deal with the piece on a physical level. [...]
TM: These are good points. I want to add that, although I recently did a blog post called "Showing new media work in a gallery: what's at stake," that isn't the main content of my show, any more than Mike's content was his delivery system. The gear I used is to deliver the strongest statement--which is to say, to get the most out of the pulsing abstractions, repurposing of a Star Trek sensor as a "simulacratracker" (as one commenter described it), and the embarassing acting out (or faux acting out) of Guitar Solo (which actually is on a tiny flat screen). I've argued with a couple of people about my use of tube TVs instead of LCDs for three of the pieces. I chose the tubes because they deliver a punchy image, punchier to me than what I'm seeing on flats these days. Tubes aren't that "retro"--J&R Music and Video still has a wall of CRTs for sale as an alternative to the wall of LCDs. I know, it won't last, but we're talking about the present. Translating animated GIFs from a computer to a single dedicated image on a TV adds an element of the unexpected, and a gritty texture I like. These choices aren't just to emphasize "new media in the gallery"--although that's definitely an aspect of the content.
One of my recent "out and about" pics is the Photo of the Week on NewMusicBox, the website of the American Music Center. Thanks to Molly Sheridan for the linkage.