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17 matchs for jodi:
My photos of JODI's installation Composite Club at vertexList. The exhibit closes today--go if you can! Efrain Calderon Jr explains the art here; in a nutshell, it repurposes a game-related video camera (coupled with motion recognition software) called an "Eyetoy," designed to turn a child into a human joystick or data glove. As the kid moves head, arms, and torso, the camera reads the motion and a videogame makes countermoves, keeping the child physically active and away from the Doritos bag. Instead of kids, JODI has aimed the Eyetoy on films ranging from cyberpunk classics to Sophia Loren/Marcello Mastroianni romances. The movements of those films trigger video game actions, which are simultaneously layered over the films. Yes, this means you can watch Darth Vader play an anime ping pong player, but such one-to-one matchups happen only intermittently. (The bottom photo, a moving projection on the gallery wall, shows the various formal attributes the camera reads while the movie plays--screen position, light/dark values, etc. The top two are screenshots of "games" in progress.)
JODI (Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk) are the most painter-like artists working with computers and video today. Imagine Robert Rauschenberg using such tools at the time he did his "combines"--his work was called Neo-Dada and bridged Abstract Expressionism and Pop and that's essentially what JODI does now, with their densely layered amalgam of Japanese videogame weirdness and cult film cinematography, dissolving and mutating before your eyes. The conceit of the "the movie playing the game" isn't always comprehensible in these clips but for me this is a feature, not a bug. Art isn't about rubbing one ordered system up against another to get a third, but rather achieving an energized chaos that reveals something about the initial ordered systems, a la a Burroughs cut up. This revelatory randomness launches Composite Club beyond the pat realm of XYZ new media art. The artists use software like an auto-destructing Jean Tinguely painting machine and let chance processes do the work. They then discerningly edit motion captures of game play to make "best of" DVDs. The results are stunning--as good as anything you'll see in the galleries these days.
An earlier discussion, on why JODI isn't showing with one of the Manhattan cyber-galleries, is here.
An excerpt from Efrain Calderon Jr.'s review of the JODI show at vertexList (edited wiki-style and for length--not too obtrusively I hope):
Taking up most of the space, however, was the multi-monitor "Composite Club." Part of JODI's current "screen grab" period, the piece documents different results obtained from their hacking of Playstation's Eyetoy video game device. Eyetoy incorporates a camera input that has direct effect on gameplay: the software interprets speed of movement, direction of movement, as well as light and dark parameters. Instead of the movements of players JODI substituted popular movies, cartoons, and classic films as camera input.
The end product is a simulacrum so complex Baudrillard might have had a tough time unpacking it. With their recordings of video game programs interacting with prerecorded works, JODI shows us the absurdity of each bit of media as it tries to come to terms with others with totally different value sets and determinations of success or failure. The video game plays against a movie that is unaware that it is playing a game. The game is exposed as nothing more than its own interpretation of various physical stimuli, destroying any suspension of disbelief.
In one screen, for example, the Spider-Man movie was prompted to file the virtual nails of an Eyetoy game "customer." Spidey, doubled in speed, was aided by the director's fast cuts to help trigger the right game response. Though ultimately Spider-Man lost, the game still proclaimed "You met the quota." This might be a comment on modern cinema's box office success even with trite storylines and regurgitated concepts in our "remix"-dominant culture. Most likely though, JODI is exposing the very absurdity of perception and communication. The inability of these different media to interact correctly could apply to our own world. Each person's perception of the same thing is completely unique. Whether each film wins or loses the game is unimportant. The game itself is unimportant, and the fact that it is pre-recorded only points this out further.
As these ideas flooded my head, I realized I could barely make out the sound effects over the chatter of the reception. I tried not to focus on a specific screen of "Composite Club," and as I moved my eyes around I realized that I was as much a part of the "club" as anyone else in the room. Couples and friends were talking and laughing, each enjoying the artwork in completely different ways. Social norms played out at the refreshment table, with lines forming, and polite "thank you's" and "you're welcomes" escaping the guests" lips. Why did one woman choose the Chardonnay over the red wine? Did that blonde really want to talk to that guy? These questions seem just as much a part of "Composite Club" in their absurdity.
Though mass produced, Eyetoy's code is written like any other computer programmed device but its unique code only makes sense to its processors. Similarly, at the core, our ideas are personal and unique, occasionally hacked and exposed by monitors that can reflect our own limits and inabilities in each of our own life long interactive "games."
Student essays on JODI's current New York exhibition, from the vertexList blog. Efrain Calderon Jr.'s is especially thorough and helpful and does not read as if it were written at gunpoint. And here are some shots of the JODI opening, also from the vertexList blog. Looking forward to seeing the show this weekend.
A few months back a NY cyber art dealer made a comment here expressing regret that the dealer's space could not show JODI "because of the lack of support for this type of work." In fact, none of Manhattan's supposedly computer-specializing galleries stepped up, despite JODI's cred and long history as Dadaist hacker artists. Fortunately two galleries saw an opportunity: vertexList in Brooklyn and And/Or Gallery in Dallas, which are hosting simultaneous, feed-connected JODI shows. My understanding is that sales of unique and editioned works have been made at both venues, so, so much for that "lack of support."
Update: In the comments, VONA says, "JODI has shown at Pace and a big solo show at Eyebeam in the last few years. It’s somewhat of a distortion to imply, as I feel this post does, that they are locked outside a commercial art realm." My reply:
Eyebeam is a non-profit space--not sure how that show was in the commercial realm. As for the Pace exhibit--that's one group show, not much of a commitment. As discussed here, Pace seems to have flubbed that installation, projecting the wrong DVDs on a cross-shaped wooden construction built specifically for another video work.Update 2: Turns out the issue with VONA wasn't that I was distorting the record but that new media artists need to "forget" showing in Chelsea (still the key to wider art world recognition, last I heard--not a guarantee but the place that collectors, curators and writers tend to go to to see art) and I wasn't sufficiently respectful of this aspiration of VONA's.
Anyway, the point of this post is JODI's doing fine in the commercial realm, with galleries outside of Manhattan.
Petra Cortright: from Selected System Landscapes:
10
18
Karl Blossfeldt meets Tron by way of pixel art. The image above is a "remix"--apologies to the artist, just wanted something self contained and looping for the blog since most of imagery fills the entire screen. You can page through the presentation, which is somewhat JODI-esque but with more of the cool botanical imagery--by clicking anywhere on the screen. Just singling out a couple of pages I like--for the busy surfer.
1997 JODI interview
?: Aren't you afraid that your work will disappear at one point because of technological paradigm changes? For example, that it can't be viewed anymore because browsers change overnight?via camille pb. Update: Another excerpt, about the differences between European and American Internet surfing. This has changed now, I assume?
Paesmans: Fear is not a good condition for work. We have no fear. We make these things because we are angry. People perceive this anger when they are on the other end, at the receiving computer...
?: Why are you angry?
Paesmans: Because of the seriousness of technology, for example. It is obvious that our work fights against high tech. We also battle with the computer on a graphical level. The computer presents itself as a desktop, with a trash can on the right and pull down menus and all the system icons. We explore the computer from inside, and mirror this on the net.
When a viewer looks at our work, we are inside his computer. There is this hacker slogan: "We love your computer." We also get inside people's computers. And we are honored to be in somebody's computer. You are very close to a person when you are on his desktop. I think the computer is a device to get into someone's mind. We replace this mythological notion of a virtual society on the net or whatever with our own work. We put our own personality there.
?: There is this rumor that your site causes people's browsers to crash. Is this true?
Heemskerk: No. That is not a challenge. You could shut down anybody's computer with one line of code. That's not interesting.
?: My impression is that a lot of people look at your site briefly, and then go somewhere else, without ever exploring the details of it: "Oh, there is this site that looks like your computer is broken", and then it's back to CNN or Yahoo or whatever. Does that bother you?
Paesmans: No. Media art is always on the surface. You have to get people very quickly. You need to give them a karate punch in the neck as soon as possible. And then - of course - they don't get to the details, and the site will just sit there for the next five years or ten years, or maybe 100 years. And maybe their children will have the time to explore the details... (laughs)
?: I remember that one of you made a remark about the difference between the European and the American internet. This seems strange, because the internet is supposed to be an international network, that surpasses national boundaries. What do you mean with this, and how does this difference affect you as artists?
Paesmans: The Americans don't have to pay for their connection time...
?: ...because local calls are free in the US...
Paesmans: ...so the internet is just an extension of their local computer.
Heemskerk: It suits their geographical sense as well, because some places are so remote, that they need a means of communication. Not only the internet, but also the telephone. If you pick up the phone in the Netherlands and call somebody in Germany it seems really far. But in the US they spend hours on their phones with their neighbors.
Paesmans: And it's the same with the internet: home office workers for example can stay online for hours, because they don't have to think about the telephone costs.
?: And how does that affect you as artists?
Paesmans: We cannot explore the net the way we want to. For example we cannot check the dutch newspapers in the morning on the net, because connection time is too expensive. You can look at your email, but you cannot look around for an hour, because you have to pay the expensive morning rates for a local telephone call.
Heemskerk: The result is a whole different way of viewing. If you have to pay for the hour you want to see something immediately. You are not prepared to look for something for an hour. But you have to do this on the internet.
Paesmans: Otherwise you just log into the little areas you know. It doesn't become this jungle where you go to discover things you did not know before. But this is just the interesting part of it. It is fun to find things from the Philippines or Morocco. So you have to get organized and do your surfing at night, because the rates are cheaper then.
?: How many hours do you spend online per day?
Paesmans: Not many. Maybe half an hour. If we are working on something it might be longer. I like to look around at Japanese sites, which are incomprehensible to me. The characters are totally unreadable, and they have beautiful screen designs.
camille.pb on the interview I did with Paddy Johnson and Michael Bell-Smith last year:
...they discuss the traditional distinction between low art and high art and bring their new perspective, consisting in making the most out of easy webtools (via an interesting discussion of the animated gif's qualities for instance). The phrase Software art as I study [it] can be deceiving: one could think it has to do with super high-tech up-to-date and expensive software used by experts. Same for the word art, which could easily be interpreted by its application in the high fields of art history and institutions. When the two come together, though, here is the twist: they seem to degrade each other - and that's where the fun is: "art becomes web junk" says M. Bell-Smith. [...The artists] also develop a non-political stance, and it's interesting to find a way out of this boring debate of what is political art. It gives way to an idea of art practice that is not political by representation but by practice, by the context in which it is elaborated, by other stuff that the artist does and that he does not call art; Tom Moody's blog is filled with newspapers' extracts on american political life but in the interview he claims the right to political irresponsibility. I once heard the same words spoken by the net.art duo JODI: "the freedom to be irresponsible in front of one's computer," says Dirk Paesmans (in Matthew Mirapaul's 4/21/03 NY Times article "Distorting the digital mechanism").A good role model is the American proto-Pop abstractionist Stuart Davis, who was active politically but largely kept it out of his art. Writing in The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, 1973, Dore Ashton tells an anecdote about his formative years, before the First World War:
[committed socialist John] Sloan was the artistic director of the radical magazine The Masses, to which Davis, Glenn Coleman, and Art Young contributed visual commentaries, based very often on their observation of the city, especially of the impoverished immigrants. Not long after Sloan arrived at The Masses, an ideological battle developed in which Max Eastman, John Reed, and Art Young insisted that only an art of "ideas" had a place in the magazine, by which they meant an art fully captioned. Art Young, whose life, as he wrote, was dedicated to the destruction of plutocracy, was an uncompromisig propagandist. Opposed to them were Sloan, Coleman, and the young Davis, who stood for "pure" art (genre scenes that needed no captions). In the dispute that ended his cartooning career, Davis learned, as he said, to be forever suspicious of "an art of ideas" and in fact, even when he was in the thick of political agitation later in the thirties, he never again brought his art and politics together.(To reiterate what I said in the interview: "Art should be like dreaming, and dreams don't always take us to good places, or places we want to go. Is it good for art to be 'apolitical' when the country is being driven off a cliff by fools? One person's frivolous pleasure states could be another's rejection of, or opting out of, the dominant control systems. I'd rather allow art to be 'immoral' and 'irresponsible'--and then analyze why I feel that way.")
Notes on the 8 BIT premiere at MOMA, Oct 7 (work in process)
--the 420-seat theatre was 5 seats shy of being completely full, I was told.
--My description of Game Boy music as "that tuneless stuff Malcolm McLaren likes" and Nullsleep's vituperative response from a live stage got a laugh. I'm resigned to my role as "the heel," as it is called in professional wrestling. Post-screening comments about that "battle" were interesting: a media critic who attended called it a "mods vs rockers moment" and a higher-up in a media arts non-profit said to me: "I was surprised--I thought you supported our music." I do, most of it--I guess this person hasn't been reading my blog lately.
--The movie favors a sociological, narrative, theoretical style of art. A different 8 BIT would tilt more to the crazy, pointless, Dionysian (but not wholly uncritical) side, represented by Paper Rad, who use game imagery and techniques extensively in their online and offline cartooniverse. Kristin Lucas's pioneering game-based videos emphasizing (Modernity-damaged, personal) psychology over Marxist socio-crit could also be included.
--Rumor has it JODI footage will be inserted--I love them, but they were established Internet-dismantlers before they became game dismantlers (correct me if I'm wrong). They would be the logical centerpiece to 8 BIT: The Return. 8 BIT already borders on long--not sure it can handle much more run time.
--If 8 BIT as currently constituted seems balanced (and it does), it is because the music clips and the montages of game "trash" supply the ebullient, anarchic counterpoint to institutional critique.
--the audience laughed at the funny parts and everyone seemed into it, including many who hadn't encountered Super Mario Clouds before.
--the movie is driven by excellent music and, as mentioned, relentlessly tasty videogame imagery--these are the glue binding together what is otherwise a series of (intermittently great) talking head interviews.
--Music-wise, Bodenstandig 2000 is a perfect mix of gritty chip tone techno-rave, Nitzer Ebb white b-boy rapping/chanting, and Laibach-ian Euro-gloom: they're accomplished "major label" musicians keeping it real with gear anyone can own. Snippets of other outstanding performances keep the film humming.
--the other thing that drives the movie is, once again, a busy visual sensibility centered on games. This has less to do with the individual artists featured than the producers' in-depth research and use of found clips that show a real love for the idiosyncrasies and poetry of games. This unified visual style supplies the feeling of an art movement--even when the artists actually have quite different backgrounds and intents. (I personally see the DIY, WTF work of Bodenstandig and the BEIGE crew as being opposed to the overdetermined, overproduced global capitalist apologetics of, say, John Klima.) Producer/Co-director/Director of Photography Justin Strawhand deserves special mention for this unifying use of images and clips mined from the net and creatively montaged. (Not to slight the contributions of Director and original concept-er Marcin Ramocki)
MOMA 8 BIT page (there's a second screening on Wednesday, Oct 11)
8 BIT website
I had a table (html) art piece here that I took down. It worked fine in Firefox and IE but once again Apple's Safari hates my art. A friend with that browser said that the table was too wide, forcing him to side to side scroll to read my page. That should never happen (I design this for an 800 x 600 screen), and if it does, please tell me. While I'm crying about Safari, please take a look at this blog from the jodi.org blogroll.
Last night the artist team JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) presented their 2-channel video Max Payne Cheats Only at Electronic Arts Intermix in Chelsea. One of the earlier and still best "net artists," JODI favors anarchy, entropy, and irony over the world-bridging utopianism of much net practice; their site jodi.org famously, creatively dismantles itself (and your browser) as you use it. Max Payne Cheats Only wreaks similar havoc with the realistic "film noir" videogame Max Payne, concerning an Everyman who enters the underworld seeking Charles Bronson-style revenge after a criminal gang kills his family. The JODI version consists entirely of "cheats"--shortcuts and fragments of imagery buried in the code that are widely disseminated via (company sponsored) fan websites. Physics and perspective-flouting manipulations such as: Max walking through a wall when he gets cornered by the bad guys; Max becoming magically bulletproof--but also fun stuff like making the gangster's moll run around naked.
JODI reassembles the cheats' fragments and freaky camera angles with the manic verve of a sadistic child playing with dolls in a Dr. Caligari-like dollhouse, opting for maximum disorientation and grotesqueness. Thus, Max pounds the floor endlessly with a lead pipe, rapidly changing characters run headfirst into the same stretch of wall, the nude moll pirouettes like a ballerina in "bullet time," faces are stripped of skin and muscle leaving gaping, floating dental work. The vids meld the psychic fragmentation of Hannah Hoch's collages, the pointless headbanger repetitions of Paul McCarthy videos, and the claustrophobic worlds-within-worlds of Cronenberg's Videodrome or ExistenZ.
This work appeared a few months ago in PaceWildenstein Gallery's "Breaking and Entering: The Art of the Videogame," which exhibited it incorrectly, we learned. It's meant to be viewed flat on a wall with the audience seated; instead, the gallery displayed it on a cross-shaped wooden partition constructed for another, unshown piece (a four channel video of cars obsessively circling on grass, asphalt, and in the sky). By projecting the 2-channel Max Payne on the four-walled construction (using a couple of backup Payne DVDs to expand the video from two to four projections), PaceWildenstein in effect created a third work, which the artists, who live in Europe, didn't find out about till after the show's end. It's a shame, because the "cars circling" vids, a couple of which were shown last night, would have been impressive in a gallery space. They are repetitive and "ambient" as opposed to long and "linear" and thus more appropriate to show in a physical setting where viewers walk around and are unlikely to stand and watch for long.
A bit of drama: Right at the point in the panel last night when the artists and attendees were mulling over what PaceWildenstein could possibly have been thinking (were they sloppy, high-handed, or both?), someone (a dealer, I was told) angrily interjected from the audience that the speculation and criticisms regarding the gallery were inappropriate. "Of course they were negligent, we don't need to discuss it," he declared. Rather weird. Fun panel--thanks to Caitlin Jones for moderating and EAI and Rhizome.org for hosting this event.
An earlier post on JODI is here.
www(dot)pulp(dot)href
Briefly noted, this excellent video/Net DIY collage piece by jimpunk. You need Quicktime 7 to view. The elements of the grid, the composite, and short loops could all be seen in an earlier work, Michael Ensdorf's Momentary Distractions. What jimpunk adds is the ability to mix and match clips, a slew of pop culture and historical references (a pistol-wagging Benicio Del Toro, Flight 93, Jodie Foster panicking), ambitious graphic design in the more psychedelic patterns, snippets of found and/or industrial style music, and an overall sense of anarchic humor. Net Art seems to be evolving here, or perhaps a better metaphor would be morphing into an explosively violent alien entity, like Natasha Henstridge in Species.
If you hate the mainstream news media, you'll like the Daily Howler. Bob Somerby is very good at showing how the major newspapers and TV networks distract us with trivia ("Kerry has a personal valet," "Kerry threw ribbons, not medals") while the Republican Party, which controls all three branches of the government, robs the store. As our army (and Treasury) are slowly chewed to pieces in Iraq, Maureen Dowd talks about Kerry having peanut butter sandwiches made for him. But let's let Somerby tell it:
While they clowned about Gary Condit, Osama’s men were tooling those planes. And now, as they clown about peanut butter, Osama’s men are still at work. And what will happen to your country because [Jodi] Wilgoren and Dowd set the tone? Let us finally tell you your future: Osama’s men will come with a bomb [...] and they’ll destroy an American city. American society will end on that day. And when it does, you can think of Wilgoren and Dowd—and you can think of the “letters editor” who laughed in your face with that letter today.1 They’ve made a joke of your discourse for years—while your enemies hunt for a bomb.In his most recent screed, Somerby catches the New York Times subtly pushing the Republican script that Kerry voted against certain weapons systems. The paper tells you Bush's ads on the subject are "cynical" but doesn't tell you why. You have to search NEXIS to find that out Dick Cheney opposed the same weapons systems during Bush I. Now, it's hard to defend Kerry on any level, but he's our only reasonable hope of getting rid of Bush, and unfortunately the Times is still pluggin' away for old George, using the same tactics they used to bring down Gore. Somerby shows how the journalists advance the Republican meme du jour with everything from subtle word choices to the numbing repetition of long disproven canards such as "Gore says he invented the Internet." His parsing of the propaganda is invaluable.
1. The Times printed a letter stating that Kerry had “only fingernail scrapes to show for his three Purple Hearts.” In the case of his first Purple Heart wound, Kerry had shrapnel dug out of his arm by a medic. There were no stitches, apparently, just ointment applied, but "fingernail scrape" simply isn't true. The other Purple Heart wounds--shrapnel in the legs and butt--were unquestionably more serious. Maybe the Times editor thinks having jagged pieces of metal penetrating your flesh is no big deal.
We're continuing to discuss that dumb New York Times article about Net Art here. There has been a sea change that the writer completely missed--an influx of artists redefining the medium, not so much through browser-dismantling code a la Jodi.org, but testing the limits of how much a window can hold, like turning an amplifier up to 11. These largely basement producers handle Net graphics in a painterly or expressionistic way, cocking a half-appreciative, half-horrified eye on all the weird content out there on the Internet. The phenomenon isn't about marketing (yet) but rather thrives within the Net's potlatch or "gift economy" of upload exchange. Artists put up simple animations made with .GIFs or Flash, with sound or without, as well as appropriate, resize and mutate found .GIFs and jpegs, attacking visual phenomena the way a junglist attacks sound (to make an electronic music analogy). Rebellious defacement and smartass humor trump the tedious academic-cum-Sol LeWittoid pallette of earlier net practice. In the Times thread Sally sums up the first generation of self-defined Net Art as "long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof." There are just too many sites resembling university sociology projects, rarely repaying the time you invest in them, illustrated with diagrams like this one from 1997:
.
It's not that MTAA is humorless, but their art is very much about pointing and clicking and following steps, rather than just having raw sensation flooding into your browser. For an example of the latter, check out this remix of the above diagram by Abe Linkoln, one of the bloggers at 544x378(WebTV). Talk about the Oedipal slaying of a forerunner. Here's another piece from the WebTV site (I think also by Linkoln). This was done by searching "544 X 378" in Google Images, picking a blurry, faintly appalling image out of a page full of possibilities (in this case a random dork in a mask sitting at his computer), then adding a kind of Sigmar Polke screen of "plus" signs as a shifting psychedelic overlay. This use of dimensions to search for images has the randomness of a drive-by shooting. Or check out this .GIF by jimpunk, an image both sublime and gritty, resembling a sleek physics demo that appears to be destroying its own background:
With more of this happening, the Whitney might think about setting up those terminals again!
UPDATE: My own reconfiguration of the "MTAA simple" and "Linkoln complex" net art diagrams is here.
UPDATE, 2012: The GIF I thought was posted by Linkoln was, in fact, posted by Linkoln (then called Abe W. Linkoln), on March 15, 2004 (permalink to the post doesn't work).
The NY Times ran another in its endless series of chin-scratchers on "Internet Art" yesterday. The writer talked to a few of the players but couldn't reach any conclusions, so he opted for the annoying "on the one hand/on the other hand" format, while still trying to make it sound like some Rubicon had been crossed. Or retreated from. Or something. He mentions one noteworthy fact as evidence of the "death of Net Art"--that the Whitney included no internet section in the Biennial this year--but then doesn't talk to the current Biennial curators to ask why that decision was made. (Maybe it's just because the terminals never worked.) Instead, he tracks down the curator of the 2002 Biennial and gets some exquisite hot air on the subject.
Below is an annotated version of the article.
March 31, 2004
DIGITAL
Internet Art Survives, but the Boom Is Over
By BEN SISARIO
IT'S dead. It's thriving. It's everywhere and nowhere.
Like most things in the online world, the state of Internet art is subject to no small amount of exaggeration. During boom times, as art made with ones and zeroes entered Chelsea galleries [Postmasters] and blue-chip museums, the new form was seen as the wave of the future [by reporters and publicists]. But now, ask an artist or a gallery owner or a blogger about it and you are likely to get a groan [; ask an artist about it and you're likely to hear that no one calls it Net Art anymore; ask a blogger about it and he will mention a hundred wack things he's found lacking any institutional imprimatur.]
Vigilante or Punisher?
Below is a synopsis, followed by some discussion, of an Alan Moore-scripted story for the DC comic book Vigilante (nos. 17-18, 1985), titled "Father's Day." Moore is the writer of Watchmen, From Hell, and other amazing graphic novels. Poor Vigilante had no legs compared to Marvel's The Punisher, a similar, rival comic from the '80s that is hitting the big screen this year. But Moore's comic makes me wish the reverse was true, and that Moore was still involved: despite its brutality, it has the ambiguous edge of '70s movies.
"Father's Day"
By day Adrian Chase prosecutes crooks for the county but after hours he pursues them extracurricularly as a costumed hero called Vigilante. In an earlier case of his, a man named Carl Linnaker raped his own 8-year old daughter. Chase put him away, we assume (but aren't specifically told), with a little help from the old alter ego.
Now Linnaker is out of prison. The book opens with Linnaker's wife telephoning Chase in a panic. While she is on the phone, Linnaker breaks down her door. Before Chase can get to her apartment, Linnaker stabs her to death. Their daughter Jodie, now 11, flees out the fire escape and upon reaching the street is nearly hit by a car.
The driver is a pot dealer named Fever, ferrying her half-drunk roommate Louise, a prostitute, across town. They are acerbic, sympathetic characters. Learning Jodie is being pursued by a psycho dad, they take her to their apartment.
The next morning the cop-shy Fever goes out for a meeting with Chase to discuss a place to hand over Jodie so the cops won't find Fever's dope stash. Chase shows up in his Vigilante guise. Hand to hand combat and verbal sparring ensue. Ultimately Vigilante agrees not to bust Fever if she'll just hand over the girl.
At the same time hung-over Louise foolishly makes a trip to the store to buy the kid breakfast. Linnaker tails Louise home from the market, knifes her, and snatches Jodie. Fever returns to the flat with Vigilante to discover her best friend and roommate bleeding to death on the floor. Distraught, she vows to avenge Louise.
Searching the back streets for Linnaker, Fever is more savvy than the uptight Vigilante. She has better luck questioning neighborhood people and laughs when his fancy motorbike is stripped for parts while chained to a lamppost. As they continue their search--Fever driving and Vigilante riding in the back after she almost ditches him--she kids him mercilessly about his moral rectitude. One of her girlfriends sees them and asks if he's G.I.B (good in bed). Fever replies "He's OK if you put a bag over his politics." Later, this exchange takes place:
Meanwhile, Linnaker makes plans to drive to the Adirondacks with Jodie, whom he obviously adores. In voiceover we hear him reading excerpts from the tender letters he wrote her from prison, pleading for her not to think of him as a monster. In the car, he frets that her mother has "turned her against him." With the child in tow, he steals a pistol from a gun store, then pushes the proprietor's head through the glass display case.
As Linnaker's car is pulling out of the store parking lot, Fever spots him and Vigilante shoots out his tires. Linnaker flees on foot, taking Jodie with him. Vigilante catches up with him and the two fight. Jodie screams for them to stop. Linnaker drops his gun and Jodie picks it up. Then, surprisingly, she takes aim and shoots, not Linnaker, but Vigilante, in the shoulder. Before Linnaker can grab Jodie again Fever comes around a corner, hits him with her car, and in an act of cold premeditation, locks the rear wheels on her 4WD vehicle and makes a mess of him with the spinning front tires.
At the end of the story, Jodie is taken to the hospital (in shock). Fever kisses Vigilante before leaving town, which she must do to avoid explaining 40 kilos of marijuana found in the apartment with her dead roommate. Chase returns to his flat, nursing his bandaged shoulder, and as he is taking off his costume we hear the voice of the dead Linnaker reading more excerpts from his gentle prison letters to Jodie.
OK, let's count the ways this story is subversive: (1) Vigilante is a peripheral character, and kind of a buffoon (2) Two females, operating "outside the law," are strong, smart, sympathetic leads; the one who survives is cleverer than Vigilante (3) The child molester loves his daughter (4) More troubling, the daughter loves him and uses violence to protect him (5) Just as our sympathies are vacillating because of the daughter's unexpected if misplaced feelings for her father, we watch her become an orphan (as does she) in a spectacularly sadistic fashion. This is played as black comedy. By contrast, the upcoming Hollywood Punisher appears from the trailer to be a typical, by-the-numbers Xtreme Revenge fantasy.
Revising "BitStreams" (a curatorial thought-experiment in progress)
"BitStreams" was the Whitney Museum's big "computer art" show in 2001. Like the Matthew Barney exhibit at the Guggenheim this year, it was an inexplicable hit with the general public but few artists I know (including many so-called computer artists) liked it. One problem was the curator tried to float a bunch of "discoveries" from the Bay Area and elsewhere that didn't measure up to the exacting standards of us rough, tough New Yorkers. The show suffered from a kind of mid-30-something parochialism, favoring a bunch of earnest data-crunchers the same approximate age as the curator over younger artists with a much more instinctive handle on the medium and also interesting pioneers, like Nancy Burson. And finally, it's tricky to include so-called pop culture in a so-called high art show but let's face it, there's stuff out there kicking the art world's sedentary ass. (George Bush helped word this post.) I wrote about the show here but continue to think of work that would have improved it. Some of the revisions below are tongue in cheek but most aren't:
John Klima ecosystm Joe McKay Color Game
DJ Spooky DJ Assault
Marina Rosenfeld Monotrona
Jeremy Blake videos Cory Arcangel Data Diaries and Clouds
Paintings "based on" the computer Paintings made with the computer
Lew Baldwin milkmilklemonade.net JODI % MY DESKTOP
Paul Pfeiffer Paper Rad
Jason Salavon The Top Grossing Film of All Time Jason Salavon Golem
John Simon LoVid
Planet of the Apes with sod Planet of the Apes without sod
The Spacewürm Scanner
Lutz Bacher dealercam 100 random camgirls/guys - videowall - nudity
Sally Elesby mouse drawings Kristin Lucas mousepad drawings
Jim Campbell Ambiguous Icon #5 (Running Falling) BEIGE ASCII hotdogs
Richard Devine Dynamix II
Jordan Crandall Matt & Mike Chapman
Inez Van Lamsweerde Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately) and/or Jon "Clone Tool" Haddock's Kent State/Vietnam backgrounds Laura Carton erased p0rn images
Jon Haddock Sims Tributes Creepy Clown
etc etc
JODI's current installation % MY DESKTOP at Eyebeam Atelier raises everyday machine disfunction to the level of the sublime. Occupying one long wall in Eyebeam's cavernous raw space, four standard computer screen desktops are projected side by side: two Windows on the left and two Apples on the right. The screens tower over the viewer at about ten feet in height. Invisible users appear to click the menus and desktop icons in real time, but what you see are actually recordings of these activities, presumably on DVD. To stand before the screens is to be immersed in an elegant chaos.
On the far left, a user attempts to move groups of icons to other positions on the same desktop. The new positions don't "take," but instead leave grey silhouettes, which gradually become cumulative, tangled masses of icon-shadows. In the middle left, the user methodically clicks unintelligible lists of wingdings, opening dialogue boxes full of more wingdings, and so on. In the middle right, sound files are randomly triggered, filling the space with a cacophony of clicks, martial arts grunts, and punching noises. And way over on the right, the letters underneath icons become long, conjoined strings of verbal gobbledegook, which are superimposed again and again.
There's nary a pigment stroke in sight, but the scale and handling of these pieces is very painterly, specifically Abstract Expressionist. JODI's process of cyber-vandalism--tinkering with browser software and then further abusing it through excessive, mindless icon-clicking--recalls strategies of "creative destruction" familiar from the work of the de Kooning generation (build up, wipe away, leave a residue, build up again...) It's also a cyber-critique, specifically playing on our legitimate fears that information-processing technology will break down when we're using it the hardest.
The messy visual record of "incorrect," panic-stricken choices is the kind of disobedient, Dionysian use of the computer sadly lacking in "BitStreams," the Whitney Museum's 2001 survey of computer art. If % My DESKTOP could have somehow been included in that exhibit, the focus and tone would have dramatically shifted from the utopian magic of thinking machines to their ad hoc, poorly-understood nature. With its size, ambition, and (refreshing) lack of reverence, it would have been a much stronger centerpiece than, say, ecosystm, John Klima's gee-whiz videogame salute to the raptor-eat-raptor world of global capital.
The end of the year is approaching, and with critics everywhere publishing their Top Ten lists, I decided to do a narrative wrap-up of stuff I obsessed about in 2001. Organized into the broad categories of "film & TV," "art," "books," "politics," and "music," these events (or things) didn't necessarily happen (or come into existence) during the past year--in the true solipsistic weblog spirit, the only common thread is that they "happened" to yours truly.
Politics. You would have thought that after the Gulf War, when Mr. Cheney used his newfound contacts with the Saudi sheiks to obtain lucrative business contracts for Halliburton while ailing veterans got the shaft, that we'd be a lot more skeptical about rolling out the American War Machine abroad. All it took was one day of (admittedly cataclysmic) mayhem to turn us back into a country of howling football fans, endorsing whatever dubious and unnecessary plans our unelected leaders proposed. I've been enormously thankful for three websites since 9/11, which served as a kind of reality check against the Official Media Version of things: the left/progressive CounterPunch and Cursor and the libertarian site Antiwar.com. The brave dissenting voices on those pages reassured me that the entire country hadn't gone nuts.
Books. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I bought Jonathan Lethem's post-apocalyptic novel Amnesia Moon at the World Trade Center bookstore a few days before 9/11. Further upping my personal "disaster synchronicity factor" (I warned you this would be solipsistic), I also read three novels by Greg Bear over the summer that had a weirdly prescient bearing (no pun intended) on 9/11 events. Blood Music features a frightening trip up the North Tower of the World Trade Center by a young Brooklyn girl who is the sole survivor of a nation-engulfing plague (the tower itself eventually dissolves into organic goo). In the The Forge of God and its sequel Anvil of Stars, Bear deals with the ultimate terrorist event: the reduction of Earth by hostile ETs to a ring of pulverized rock orbiting the Sun. Forge describes, among other things, the ineffectual response to looming global catastrophe by a Bible-thumper in the White House who essentially loses his marbles, while Anvil explores the morality of revenge, as the few survivors who managed to escape Earth head across the galaxy in search of the planet-killers. Published in 1987, Forge vividly captures the unreal-but-doom-laden feel of the mid-'80s, when Reagan was ramping up the nuclear fear factor. It's great to have the Republicans back in office, isn't it?
Film and TV. Japanese animation has been a subject of much enjoyment and "independent study" this year. It blows me away that an entire country prefers moving drawings to live action shows for their prime time entertainment. I'd love to live in a nation where a great mystical work like Princess Mononoke isn't just the highest-grossing animated film of all time, but the highest grossing film, and where subversive psychodramas involving cyborgs and folkloric demons are discussed at the water cooler. (Instead, I live in a country that adores Titanic and Survivor. Ookay.) I've watched and rewatched tapes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was a hit series in Japan several years ago, and continue to find in it new levels of psychological complexity and political paranoia. I love the series' mood of melancholy, and its use of subtle visual details (rather than explanatory chatter) to move the story along. I've learned a lot about it and other shows from Susan Napier's book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke. Napier, a professor of Japanese lit at the U. Of Texas, provides a cultural context that helps explain the themes of mechanization, sex, and apocalyptic feeling that run through so much anime. For my own thoughts on the 2001 rerelease of Akira, please check out this recent post.
Art. 2001 was a banner year for shows involving "the computer"; gradually this device that has touched every aspect of contemporary life is making its way into the last pocket of medieval resistance--the art world. Right now there are several camps operating: (1) Artists who aren't giving up painting, sculpture, photography, and installation art, but feel the need to "respond" in some way to the computer (for an excellent round-up of so-called digitally-inspired shows in 2001, please see this post by my friend Hector Pitts); (2) "Net artists," doing the types of interactive and data-crunching projects (frequently covered by New York Times cyber-critic Matthew Mirapaul) that are conceptually interesting but make little concession to the needs and pleasures of meat space (a few things in this category are good, of course, such as the jodi.org website and Michael Ensdorf's excellent video piece Momentary Distractions); and finally, (3) Fine art-trained artists who question the logic and look of the computer, while at the same time using it to make "decelerated" objects for contemplation in a gallery environment (I include myself in this somewhat paradoxical category, and this weblog will be devoted, off-and-on, to other artists with the same concerns).
Music. I spent most of 2000 dj-ing at a bar in lower Manhattan, and gave myself a crash course in recent electronic dance music. I started out the year playing a lot of hiphop and electro but by the fall I had settled into more pub-friendly deep house and 2-step garage discs. I'm still keeping up in 2001, but my consumption dropped off once I stopped receiving my weekly cut of the bar (after 10 months, I was worn out, so I retired in Nov. of 2000--for now). One of my most interesting "discoveries" was Dusseldorf producer Stefan Schwander, who records as Antonelli Electr. and rhythm_maker. His tracks are minimal but eminently listenable; I'm astonished by his ability to get such warmth and depth out of fairly simple loops. And the production is exquisite--every beat and chime feels wrapped in velvet. Although I like a variety of dance subgenres, I prefer Detroit (Juan Atkins)-style tracks and German "deep minimal techno house" for home listening; this is music that thrives both in the foreground and the background.