February 9th, 2010

Blackmoth.org is a website by Kari Altmann.

The content of the site is a relatively lengthy, vertically-scrolling display of approximately seventy still images and YouTube video players set off against a white background – no text.

That in itself is nothing new – artists have been making these types of heterogeneous found image displays for some time now and, as Seth Price points out in his Teen Image essay, the style is itself lifted from something print magazines have been exploring for at least fifteen years.

But what distinguishes Altmann’s project from what Price terms “hoardings” is the self-reflexive intentionality of her particular images.

She wants to show you something in particular: time, decay, built-in obsolescence. We see collisions of two themes: obsolete technologies of the “just past” such as compact discs or previous generations of flat-screen televisions as well as crumbling architectural details and rock formations of the ancient past.

In the most potent images, we see both at once – dialectically. The first diptych of images at the top of the page gets at this. In the image to the left of the diptych, one views what appears to be two fangs – the sort of relic one might see in a display of fossils and bones of pre-historic animals at a natural history museum.

However, there is a USB connection sticking out of the base of each of these fangs. Their power resides not in the prick of their tips, but in the information they store as little Flash Drives.

In the image to the right of the diptych, one views a broken slab of what, at first glance anyway, reads as an “ancient monument” – perhaps a temple – displayed behind a glass cube in a museum setting.

However, as much as one views the ancient slab, one views the rainbow colored reflection ring generated by the flash of a digital camera. The image is a collision between the ancient and technological.

As one scrolls-down through the rest of Altmann’s images, this tension is explored again and again and again. Through the repetition of the theme of technology and ancient ruins, Altmann creates a portrait of endless technological obsolescence.

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February 8th, 2010

Can one be bad at the Internet?

Can one use the Internet in such a way that it is objectively-speaking bad?

Well, yes, and no.

On the one hand, yes, I’m personally bad at the Internet because I don’t know every trick to get free music.

I’m also bad at the Internet because I don’t know *that much* about how the Internet works or its history or coding languages.

In a very real way, I’m bad at that stuff.

So, yes, one can be bad at the Internet.

I’m certainly bad at the Internet.

But, on the other hand, so is everyone else.

If you’re good at understanding the legal frame of the Internet, you may not be good at understanding the cultural memes of the Internet – you may be bad at it.

If you’ve developed an elegant mathematical model of the Internet which accounts for every node, you may not understand the current security threats posed by hackers.

And so on.

In fact, we’re all pretty wildly bad at using the Internet.

Perhaps that’s why we cluster in circles, spinning our wheels amongst the same voices in a fit of future shock – it’s a way to deal with the troubling fact of the human brain’s limitations that the Internet makes obvious.

So, the problem is not whether one can be good or bad at using the Internet.

The question is badly stated.

Perhaps we can say “does one use the Internet with intention?”

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February 8th, 2010

Digital imaging software converges as much previous visual media as it can handle – painting, photo, film, video, animation, printmaking, newspaper, etc. – and creates automatic simulations of gestures that read as these media.

For instance, the “film grain” look or “sun flare” effect or the “spray paint” tool.

These digital effects, though, take on their own visual look that is distinct from what they imitate.

Similarly, digital imaging software has created to a suite of effects that are derived from analogical functions, but have gained their own uniquely digital feeling, such as the ubiquity of the “rounded corners” look familiar to users of Macs or Web 2.0 applications, or the jagged, hard-edged look that comes from a rough usage of the “lasso” tool in Photoshop, or the uncannily smooth, but hollow lines created in the Maya 3D imaging software.

With this is mind, Poster Company (the duo of Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff) have created a series of digital paintings that throw all of these digital affects and effects – both in reference to functions analogical and digital – into a stew of action painting, untutored Photoshop fiddling, glitchy Quicktime files, 8-bit vampire castles, Matisse, Leger, Lichtenstein, soft film footage of lunar landings, Terminator 2-esque liquid-metal, Kandinsky, late 60’s psychedelia, ”cheesy” public-access video effects, etc.

Each of these “posters” contrasts effects with each other, which allows the viewer of the work to see each of the effects as an effect. Typically, an effect or a digital aesthetic is viewed in the context of giving some other message. It is meant to disappear. Here, though, the effects are divorced from any context and allowed to be viewed as chunks of visual language bouncing off of other chunks of visual language. This is not to say that the posters are a mess. On the contrary, the artists are able to create powerful, often eye-popping compositions from these materials in the same way that an artist like Rauschenberg used the trash on the street near his studio to create his combines of the 1950s.

When they showed this work at Foxy Productions, the artists focused on quantity as much as quality.

The first thing one notices upon walking into the room in which their work was exhibited is that there are a lot of posters – too many, a surfeit.

However, it comes very close to working because they play this overwhelming output against the formal skill and care going into each individual image and the whole thing holds together.

One oscillates between the feeling of being overwhelmed – both inside and outside of the posters – and the focus on a particular image or gesture, which resonates and harmonizes the work.

I say “comes very close to working,” though, because there is something going on in their process which does not come across in the gallery show:

Performance.

If there is, in the end, a power to what Poster Company is doing, it resides in the project’s continuous devotion to daily production.

The question “what is a digital painting?” is here better phrased as “what is digital painting?”

The significance of their work lies not in the individual compositions, nor in the volume of output (although these elements are undeniably crucial for the full execution of the work to occur), but rather in the performance of the work.

I’m not sure how one would convey this in the gallery without being gimmicky, but it, nonetheless, seems to be a dimension of this work (and work like it by artists such as Harm van den Dorpel and Charles Broskoski) that needs to be explored.

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February 7th, 2010

Kevin Bewersdorf wrote a series of texts such as “The Four Sacred Logos” and “Spirit Surfing” which merged corporate motivational speaking tropes with a vision of the Internet as a spiritual space.

These texts are now lost – erased from the Web by Bewersdorf himself.

If one is to speak about them, then one must remember them.

The way I remember them is that they made a claim – the Internet is a space of spiritual movement – and then they cross that claim out by wrapping it up in a shtick which points to loss – loss of any hope one may have had for the Internet as corporations changed the Internet into a giant Wall Mart.

Bewersdorf’s use of the word “logos” in the “Four Sacred Logos” texts is an example of how this works.

It’s a pun.

On the one hand, there are “logos” (plural) as in branding devices such as the Nike “swoosh.”

Bewersdorf designed “sacred” corporate logos for each of his texts which are not unlike the corporate logos found in erectile dysfunction medication pamphlets at the doctor’s office.

On the other hand, there is also “logos” (singular) which is something like the primordial divine truth through which all creation emerges as described in ancient philosophy and theology.

Bewersdorf’s logos of the logos cancel each sense of “logos” out in endless loops of belief and skepticism.

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February 6th, 2010

In September 2009, as part of the AND Festival in Liverpool, Guthrie Lonergan presented an alternative version of the film Groundhog Day (1993).

Groundhog Day is a film about a man who re-lives the same day over and over and over again. Lonergan’s version is a series of eighteen short videos, each composed of still-frame slideshows that represent scenes from the film’s narrative.

These still frames are underscored by Lonergan’s own first-person summarization of the narrative from the point of view of the protagonist, played by Bill Murray.

The number of videos corresponds (approximately – it’s difficult to judge) to the number of days that Bill Murray re-lived the same day over and over and over again.

Lonergan also released these videos not all at once, but one by one, so that it became performative. By breaking the story up into the number of days that Murray re-lived the day and presenting the videos over the course of a couple of days, the viewer gets more of a sense of this endless repetition.

The story’s eternal return theme, then, takes on a new air of uncanniness. The idea of endlessly cycling through the same day shocks you a bit more and allows you to see what this time would mean in a deeper way.

In one of Lonergan’s poetic/philosophical asides, he captures this.

We view a still image of Bill Murray in bed at the end of his first full day of return.

As the image very slowly fades to black, Lonergan (as the protagonist) muses:

I’m pretty lost at this point.

And I’m thinking about why this, why this is happening.

And… about how I’m a, a weatherman.

And this connection between you know weather and time and predicting things using patterns.

And can weather have patterns… and maybe time, as well.

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February 6th, 2010

From Synners (1991) by Pat Cadigan:

Rosa laughed a little. ‘You’re approaching my threshold for that kinda talk. I’m a hacker, not a philosopher.’

Fez turned to look at her. ‘Good choice of word, threshold. The way we all kept adding to the nets did exactly that, passed a threshold. It got to the point where the net should have collapsed in chaos, but it didn’t. Or rather, it did, but the collapse was not a collapse in the conventional sense. Because the net kept accommodating the demands we put on it – that was its purpose, after all, to accommodate data. When it reached the point where it was burdened to the limit, it had two choices – crash, or accommodate. It did both.

‘Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage. The second was recovery – since it was programmed to accommodate, it did. But the only way it could accommodate was to exceed the limit. Institute a new limit, and when that was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover and institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth.’

‘Ad infinitum,’ Sam said, expressionlessly. ‘Like a fractal growing from the bottom up instead of the top down. Triggered by catastrophe.’

‘It didn’t get a break while all this was going on, of course,’ Fez continued. ‘The information never stopped coming in, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos is just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net now than the one we started out with. We woke it up.’

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February 5th, 2010

In the film Camera Buff, the eponymous protagonist begins to film reality.

The more he films reality, though, the stricter his criteria for “reality” becomes.

It is not enough for him to film events that are meant to be filmed.

He has to film the events that are not meant to be filmed, as well.

The catch is that as the camera buff comes closer to capturing something “real,” the farther away from his wife and child he grows until they are simply outside of his world.

Thus, his real life is destroyed and a new real is born.

What happened here?

The film’s answer is that in filming reality, the filming of reality changed that reality.

A world is gained.

A world is lost.

Camera Buff’s claim is that one cannot know if this gaining and losing is for the better or for the worse – all one can do is acknowledge it as change and give it significance.

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February 5th, 2010

Cory Arcangel made several paintings employing simple actions on the Photoshop imaging software.

One of these is called Photoshop CS: 72 by 110 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Spectrum”, mousedown y=1416 x=1000, mouseup y=208 x=4.

From one point of view, the work is about obsolescence.

Arcangel maxed out the printing technology of 2009/2010 and is interested to see how this maximum level becomes obsolete in time. Also, in several pieces, he stamps a date onto the image as a way to mark it as indelibly tied-up with its own moment in time.

From another point of view, though, the work is about deskilling and automatization.

The object is beautiful due to his use of the cutting-edge c-print technology and the blurring of colors in the gradient, but it is depressing because the gesture is automatic.

Finally, from a third point of view, the title is to be read word-for-word as much as Fountain is to be read word-for-word.

It’s not Photoshop blah, blah, blah… a bunch of funny technical language.

It’s:

Photoshop CS:
72 by 110 inches,
300 DPI,
RGB,
square pixels,
default gradient “Spectrum”,
mousedown y=1416 x=1000,
mouseup y=208 x=4.

*****

Computation as readymade.

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February 4th, 2010

For Kevin Bewersdorf, what is of consequence in the sculptures he showed at the V&A gallery in New York is less the object and more the surf through data that led to the object.

He writes:

[…] most art consumers are very wrapped up in the material world of restaurants and nice coats and taxis waiting outside the gallery. I care very little about the material world, and I’m completely certain that the most profound experiences in life can’t be contained by gallery walls, so the art object in “gallery space” for me can only represent a limitation, a disappointment.

I try to deal with this by presenting the object itself as pathetic and mediocre, but the information it conducts as sacred.

*****

By reducing the sculpture’s physical appearance to kitsch, but contextualizing it as the product of a “sacred” Internet surf, Bewersdorf is able to say something about art that goes beyond technology: the aura of an art object is often not its phenomenological properties, but rather its testimony to a creative process.

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February 3rd, 2010

Kevin Bewersdorf intentionally reduced his presence on the Web to a single image – a flickering flame sourced from a .gif of fireworks set off in front of a suburban garage. Over the course of three years, this flickering flame will grow smaller and smaller into a field of Yves Klein Blue.

It’s called PUREKev.

As one returns to the work again and again and again – not daily (although, perhaps daily) – one views a mutation in time as the flicker goes deeper and deeper and deeper into the void.

The website goes in the exact opposite direction of most Internet production, focusing on slow, imperceptible change over the course of years. By doing so, it allows one to see (as if for the first time) what it opposes. The extremity of Bewersdorf’s slowing-down nudges the viewer to project their own image of what “normal” time on the Internet feels like. It’s the creation of the image in the viewer’s mind that allows her to see what this time looks like.

There’s something unsettling about viewing PUREKev and returning to it every now and again. It’s always there – always going a little bit deeper, but never quite finishing. As the rest of the Internet is in a race to produce more and more, Bewersdorf’s resolute focus on one thing – watching a flame die out in a blue void over several years – is sublime.

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