February 19th, 2010

For 400 days, Charles Broskoski diligently worked his way through a downloaded torrent file of 356 .pdf files displaying computer programming books written in a highly technical language.

As he read through the books, Broskoski took daily notes compiled in .txt files, as well as a series of .jpg-compressed photographs depicting a list of the downloaded programming books.

In each photograph, he would cross an entry out every time he successfully completed a book.

This performance art is the bedrock of his work Computer Skills.

In the wake of the performance, there was an exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York in which Broskoski exhibited two trace elements of his performance:

1. A sculpture.

O’Reilly, the company which publishes the computer programming books read by Broskoski, agreed to send the artist physical copies of 250 of the books which he stacked in a grid of four columns – each column of the grid fit into the cut-out nook of a brick wall.

2. An epic poem.

Broskoski printed out and bound a book consisting of the notes and digital photographs he took during his performance organized chronologically.

Each page of notes in the book is framed by a pair of thin black lines which form a round-cornered box around the body of the text.

This framing allows one the opportunity to view the chronologically organized notes as something not noted, but written.

As the notes develop, the absurdity of his task mounts and the clarity of the notes themselves begins to devolve.

He asks existential questions and begins to view reading the books as laborious. But this labor gives him a thought:

He writes:

Honestly, the thing that resonated with me the most was the amount of times the authors thanked their significant others for letting them spend time on the computer while they were on their honeymoon.

I think what I gained is a heightened sense of how computers operate, and a better idea of the humanity behind all programming languages.

*****

With this is mind, one views the humanity of Broskoski’s performance as well.

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February 19th, 2010

I use the Internet but hardly ever think about the fact that it is all code.

I know the code is there – if you ask me if it exists, I’ll gladly tell you it does – but, it makes me anxious to see it there in front of me, despoiling my fun-land of uploaded pictures for family and friends.

The code is yucky and blunt.

Like a bloody finger, it reminds me of how real things can be.

So, I tolerate code.

I allow it to exist, but only if it stays in its own worlds – away from my freshdirect.com.

If I see it in my surf, we’ll each acknowledge the other, but anxiously, tolerantly – unknown to the other – each assuming the other’s world is unfortunately, but necessarily incompatible with our own.

We should each get to know the other better.

This is politics.

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February 17th, 2010

2001<<<>>>2006 by Guthrie Lonergan is, to begin with, composed of one smaller YouTube player embedded on top of – and, thus, foregrounding – the center of a second, larger YouTube player.

The smaller, foreground video is appropriated material.

It is composed of a rhythmic series of quick zooms into the center of still images – each of which depicts teenage boys mugging for the camera as they mess around with two default image effects.

These image effects are:

1. A “mirror” tool which vertically bisects the video, creating a series of distortions including an effect which allows the teenagers to resemble the doe-eyed, large-foreheaded cliché of the “space alien.”

2. A “swirl” tool which deforms the faces of the teenage boys into swirling spirals.

The soundtrack in this video consists of the Queen song “I Want to Break Free.”

The larger, background video is the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which Dr. David Bowman “breaks free” of the laws of Cartesian space-time as it is visualized in two motifs.

Those motifs are:

1. Traveling at high-speed in-between two vertically (and subsequently horizontally) bisected walls of colored light.

2. Slowly approaching evanescent cloud forms resembling high-powered telescopic imagery of distant galaxies and spiraling supernovas on his way to the dawning of a new evolutionary leap.

The soundtrack in this larger, background video is the film’s original musical score, which is dominated by the heavily atmospheric, collaged strings of Requiem by the composer György Ligeti.

When one plays both videos at once, the rhythmic zooms into the bisected center of the mirrored photos in the video of the teenage boys create a counter-point to the evenly-paced movement towards the horizon of the vertically-bisected walls of light in the larger, background YouTube player.

In addition, the pounding, danceable rhythm of the Queen song creates a counter-point to the experimental sound-scapes of Requiem, and, furthermore, as one continues to view the work, the rhythmic zooms into the swirled faces of the teenage boys counter-point the spiraling inter-galactic imagery of 2001.

These counter-points of imagery and soundtrack in 2001<<<>>>2006 are either a gimmick or a creative leap forward in the way appropriated content is re-contextualized on the Internet.

Perhaps it’s both.

The disturbing thing about that baby at the end of the film is how simultaneously dumb and sublime she is.

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February 16th, 2010

A functionality of YouTube is to automatically select as a given video’s thumbnail the frame of the video in the exact middle of its temporal runtime – no matter what the frame’s content or how much relevance it affords the theme of the video.

So there could be a video in which two old men are having a picnic in the park and the thumbnail could be some randomly blurred image of a bunch of grass which happened to be the exact middle of the video.

This convention’s absurdity, which might be described as a Web 2.0 perversion of the movie poster, is regularly exploited by YouTube users who will insert a single frame of a girl in a bikini in the exact middle of a video in order to get more views.

At times, though, the default YouTube thumbnail has a certain unintended power in its own right.

When one uploads a webcam vlog to YouTube, for instance, the thumbnail is often an image of one’s self which one would never think to choose as their personal online representation.

Perhaps one’s eyes are closed or one is in the middle of an expression that distorts one’s facial features in an un-becoming manner. This un-intended, un-becoming-ness might create an anxiety – it shows me what I look like – out of control; not becoming.

It is a portal to see how things look. A post Internet photography.

The light catches a bowl of rice in a living room filled with cigarette smoke; a family unloads a red bike from a station wagon as a blue bike whizzes by; a Scottish teenager’s eyes catch the lens of the camera directly, allowing one to see her.

One of the unspoken dynamics of surfing through YouTube is that, by and large, most all interaction with video online is conducted through these secret messages, these unintended crystallizations, which afford one, not the theme of the video, but a random moment – a glimpse into a world which never agreed to be glimpsed in such a naked way.

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February 15th, 2010

Whew! Age, a performance by Marisa Olson at PS122 in New York, is about the twin concerns of chilling out and heating up and chilling out and heating up.

In a set composed of cardboard crystal shards outlined in dayglo duct tape and cheap-o Persian rugs sparkling with glitter and tinsel, Olson interacts with the video projection of a customer-service rep-slash-self-help guru (played by Olson, herself).

On the one hand, the guru character leads Olson inside herself on a mission to “chill out” and stop worrying about all the things she thinks she needs.

It’s a sort of pop-Zen-New Age stand-by: eliminate your desires to see yourself as a being blinded by desire.

To some extent, it works.

Olson comes to the stage in a translucent mask and the guru is able to get her to take the mask off (there’s a gag where after Olson takes the mask off, it reveals another mask, but the guru is sharp enough to have her remove that mask, too).

On the other hand, the guru is a sleazy con-man, convincing Olson to put on blinders – avoiding hope in more rigorously intellectual traditions such as empirical science, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis.

And, in a musical montage in the middle of the show, the new age approach of the guru is marketed as a cheesy, 100% guaranteed enlightenment or your money back-style video series.

This tension between sleaze and truism is explored in a moment when the guru demands of Olson to put her finger in her mouth and imagine that her finger is a glacier.

Olson does so and the guru says to be as chilled as the glacier.

This starts to work, but then one remembers that the glaciers are melting.

And this melting – ostensibly due to climate change – is what created anxiety for Olson in the first place.

Between wisdom and bullshit, chilling and heating, going in to one’s self and back out to the world, is the space Whew! Age inhabits.

It is, the performance tells us, after the New Age of crystals and Enya.

The Whew Age doesn’t profess to offer peace of mind through true enlightenment, but a piece of mind through its demonstrating the impossibility of true enlightenment.

In and back out, truth and illusion, in a pattern.

A spiral.

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February 13th, 2010

Bootyclipse (2007) is a YouTube channel by Dennis Knopf in which he freezes frames from “booty clips,” YouTube videos in which performers point their butts toward the camera and begin shaking them to the sound of dance music. However, the frames he chooses to freeze are all empty – only displaying the room in which the dancer will perform.

For Knopf, the moments before the performer enters the frame (after having turned the camera on?) are the secret key to these videos.

He holds on these empty moments in messy bedrooms and dimly-lit kitchens, looping them through the entire length of the original clip’s soundtrack, and, thus, providing the user with a peek into the world in which the performer lives.

They are a post Internet form of social realism.

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February 13th, 2010

Whereas once there were amateur photographers – hobbyists whose interest in the camera’s aesthetics led them to a love of privately displaying their pre-digital photographs – there are now what Ed Halter, in his essay “After the Amateur: Notes,” calls “sub-amateurs” – users whose interest in the camera’s functionality in communication led them to a need for publicly displaying their digital photographs.

Think: family album versus Facebook.

The same could be said for the world of amateur filmmaking (pre-camcorder) in relation to the world of YouTube.

The amateur filmmaker often embraced her 8mm or 16mm film camera out of a sincere interest in the technology; the sub-amateur YouTube user often embraces the functionality of the webcam out of a sincere interest in communication.

Halter writes:

The amateur enjoyed spending time with the camera, and thus could become caught up in its formal possibilities; the sub-amateur sees the camera in terms of pure and immediate functionality.

*****

A vein of contemporary Internet art has, according to Halter, emerged in accordance with the rise of sub-amateurism on the Internet.

He points to artists such as Guthrie Lonergan, Oliver Laric, Double Happiness, and Petra Cortright who conduct investigations into the functions of sub-amateur web usage in order to unveil these functions as functions rather than formal qualities.

They illuminate the function of the software default rather than a particular form so that we, the viewers of their artwork, may better see these default functions as conventions in the way we speak to one another in 2010.

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February 13th, 2010

Infinity Float by Kari Altmann is a video animation depicting a missile.

Altmann’s missile, though, never hits a target.

Rather, it draws infinity signs in the plume of its continuously billowing smoke again and again and again and again until one begins to watch the continuous delineation of infinity as much as the missile drawing this delineation.

What disturbs this pleasant vision of blissed-out endlessness, though, is the float of the infinity sign, itself.

Past.

As the sign rises slowly but continuously towards the top of the frame and finally beyond it, it ends up reading less as “up” and more as “out” – a memory.

And as one peers into the background upon which these memories were staged, one begins to delineate the background as much as the memories it provokes.

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February 12th, 2010

Exotic-A by Kari Altmann is a video of continuously fracturing digital imagery depicting a natural “exotica” of tropical flora and fauna.

Video documents move in, out, and through one another in a continuous flux. They are bound by both a static, “bedrock” background image, as well as a static, diaphanous foreground “gauze.”

The views shift in and out of focus and it all remains dreamy and illusionistic.

The work, thus, mirrors the indeterminacy of the natural world.

It is not a coherent form with an essential focal point; it is an ecology – in motion.

Altmann’s broader project works with these same ecological principals.

When one views Altmann’s website, most of her projects are listed, but not linked to as they are either works in progress, or research for future projects, or simply not available to be viewed.

But, go back to her site a month later and something’s changed.

Some of the work from the more distant historical past is made available, and some of the work from the more recent historical past is made unavailable.

Altmann understands her personal archive of work to be mutable, taking advantage of the instantaneousness and general ease of change in the digital, to place her own history in flux.

Projects are listed; projects are taken away.

All one can do is describe the view as it slips out of one’s grasp again and again.

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February 10th, 2010

R-U-IN?S Catalogue #0001 is a zine and .pdf by Iain Ball, Sebastian Moyano, Matteo Giordano, and Kari Altmann, who initiated the project.

It consists of 95 pages of collaged photographic media depicting digital technophilia such as product shots of Sony flat screen televisions, computer-generated pornography, and portable memory storage devices, as well as crumbling geological formations in barren landscapes such as canyons, deserts, and beaches. In many of the images, these themes are combined as in, for instance, the product shot of a flat screen television displaying imagery of the Grand Canyon.

At first glance, this confrontation of the ancient and natural with the contemporary and electronic may seem arbitrary, but as one moves through the imagery, a provocative logic emerges.

The title of the piece gives one a clue as to where to go from here.

R-U-IN?S

It reads as both “Are you in(s)?” and “ruins.”

“Are you in?” mutated into the text message lingo of “R U IN?” brings to mind social status, cliques, peer pressure, coolness, fashions, and the latest technological gadgetry. R U in or R U out? It also reads as something aggressively temporary – something one knows will quickly lose its luster, but for the moment, is the only place to be.

“Ruins,” on the other hand, are the crumbled remains of what was once “in.”

Taken together, there is a fluid exchange between “R U In?” and “ruin.”

That is to say that the newest technologies are monuments to themselves before they are created. No one really believes that a piece of technology will last beyond a couple of years at most.

When one pages (or scrolls) through the Catalogue, one, then, sees less of a clear delineation between “new technology” and “old rocks” and more a continuous stream of dead surfaces: ruins.

In the text which appears on the final two pages of the Catalogue, the artists explain their intentions in similar terms.

They write:

R-U-IN?S is a project initiated by Kari Altmann using an archaeological approach (online and offline) to search the deteriorating surfaces, objects, and codes in the contemporary world. Topics of interest were addressed as ruined places and times in the database, from which artifacts and recordings were taken.

*****

Shortly later in the text, the artists make the point that because this “archaeological” investigation into the database is conducted in the very database it mines, “it became a study in and of itself.”

This suggests that, not only are all of the images and actions depicted in the pages ruins, but that the software and hardware one uses to view the images are always already ruins as well.

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