Posts Tagged ‘digital’

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Ancient Artifacts by Brad Tinmouth consists of a series of four product-shot style photographs depicting down-market kitsch sculptures of, respectively, a “Pharaoh,” a “Buddha,” a “Cat Goddess,” and a “Krishna” over each of which the artist has applied a layer of clear resin.

In each case, this layer of clear resin “spills out” beyond the bottom edges of the object, thus creating, not just a synthetic “sheen” to the object’s surface, but an expanded surface area to the object’s base composed of the dried resin, as well.

Due to this ejaculatory marking of his own objects, one views both:

1. Mass-produced objects which are the synthetic versions of once-unique objects (appropriated kitsch gods).

2. As well as a series of unique objects in their own right (the serial mutations of appropriated kitsch gods).

Each work’s totemic power resides here, then, not in either (1.) nor in (2.), but rather in the oscillation between (1.) and (2.) from original to version to original to version and back again.

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Avatar in 3D by Artie Vierkant is a slowly-spinning animated 3D sphere.

On the surface of the sphere, the entire one hundred sixty-two-minute runtime of the film Avatar has been warped and stretched-out in order to cover the total surface area of the sphere.

By turning Avatar into an image object – a “thing” – the work illuminates how Avatar itself is not just a movie, but a gigantic meme, an entire world, extending well beyond the runtime of the film.

One of the most significant developments in film history is George Lucas’s recognition that Star Wars is not just a movie, but a franchise that fans can wander around in via all of the extra media and merchandise that surround it.

In a hyperreal world of endless media unreality, consumers have the desire and now the ability to amble through metaverses, consuming media franchises in ways that diverge from simply sitting in a theater and watching projected light for two hours.

The slow, painful death of movies is a testament to this as consumers now prefer the scope of entire television series or massively multiplayer game universes like Halo or World of Warcraft.

In the event that someone wants to go to the movies, it’s to see a new installment of a franchise that expands the world of the characters; in the event that someone wants to read a book, it’s to read an installment of a series like Harry Potter, Twilight, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones books.

Films are still on some level stretches of time told through cinematic language, but they are now also, perhaps primarily, things, objects expanding through the Internet and culture at large.

This is what Vierkant’s work shows me.

An avatar for Avatar.

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Right now, on the main page of Charles Broskoski’s personal website, one views paintings created with digital tools as well as clocks which read-out the amount of time passed since each artwork was initially uploaded to the site (in this case, for the more recently uploaded painting “2 days ago…” and, for the less recently uploaded painting “3 weeks ago…”).

One, thus, views both the paintings and the paintings’ built-in obsolescence.

The most recently uploaded painting, Avocado, is a token of a traditional painting genre – the still life with fruit; on the other hand – with its ghostly, blurred brush work which fights to keep from dripping down (to the past of the artist’s painting) and up (to the future of the artist’s painting) – the work is an allegory of painting on the computer:

Not present in space, but streaming through time, fighting for its life to be there in the room (on the screen) despite the inevitability of its passing.

That is to say:

1. A picture of avocados (they are there).

2. A picture of avocados blurring through time from future (an ideal) to past (a memory) (they’re gone – ghosts).

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

The age of digital information networks, according to the Jogging collective’s text “Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age,” has so radically mutated the way information is distributed, that a revolution in the way artists exhibit their work is called for.

Jogging writes:

The internet offers a chance for art’s users to experience organizational models of viewership in ways that are non-dependent and non-hierarchical. Allowing institutions to dictate the function of the Internet, be it through copyright, privatization, and/or the commoditization of information, simply digitizes pre-existing modes of viewership built upon problematic power relations.

To that end, Jogging has mounted two non-hierarchical exhibitions – READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 and AN IMMATERIAL SURVEY OF OUR PEERS – in the past two weeks.

READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 is an art action involving a word-of-mouth exhibition on the Facebook Wall of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in which hundreds of artists posted their work.

AN IMMATERIAL SURVEY OF OUR PEERS is a Tumblr of installation shots from the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in which the works depicted were digitally inserted into empty shots of the galleries to look as if they were installed in the physical space.

However, what one views when one views the exhibitions is not non-hierarchical resistance, but rather a hierarchical structure in which Jogging is the sun around which the other artworks orbit like planets.

The kick of An Immaterial Survey of Our Peers is not that it is a great way to exhibit the artists in the show (it’s not), but that it is a work of art itself – by the Jogging.

What is interesting here is Troemel and Christiansen’s gesture – that’s where the aesthetic kick occurs.

This is just to say that Jogging is creating art, but not political art.

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

The exhibition READY OR NOT IT’S 2010, organized by the Jogging collective and virally announced just one day ago (March 30, 2010), is an open call for artists to post work or link to themselves en masse through the stream of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Facebook Wall right now (today – March 31st, 2010).

The point of the show is to resist the hierarchical historicization and canonization of contemporary art by art museums and other art institutions.

In the words of the exhibition’s announcement text:

[…] digital artists should take the task of historicization into their own hands.

*****

And:

The manipulability of art museums’ Facebook walls allows artists the chance to wrest curatorial control back from institutions empowered by years of exclusionary practices.

*****

As one begins to view the exhibition, the impressively active and continually growing stream of art posts on the LACMA Wall by a broad spectrum of artists seems like an event – a “happening” right there in the virtual space of a collecting museum.

However, as one continues to watch, one might begin to grow anxious about all of this happening.

What is happening?

Is this really the emergence of a Web 2.0 resistance to art world gatekeeping?

Or is LACMA’s authority is simply re-inscribed?

As one continues to view the exhibition, the artists and artworks may come across less as liberated individuals expressing their individuality and more as ammo – data – or, in Jaron Lanier’s lingo, “gadgets.”

This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing interesting happening here.

On the contrary, one begins to take-in an alternate point-of-view regarding the way in which art might work in the network:

That is, as a stream.

The art occurring on the LACMA wall right now is not found in the individual posts (as interesting as many of them are), but rather in the visibility of the stream of posts itself – the curatorial gesture by Jogging.

A stream.

In an interview on the Counterfeit-Mess Tumblr, Jogging’s most visible member Brad Troemel speaks to this very understanding of contemporary creative practice as an ongoing, publicly-visible, and remotely-followable stream:

A couple years ago when I became a Photographer-hater, I realized that you can’t possibly explain the world through a single tool. I feel that way now in regard to The Art Project, that 10 projects can’t explain everything or anything either. All you can do is have a constant engagement with art, trying to find meaning. On Jogging, we, the creators, are the art and artists.

*****

And:

Creating this way makes assessing/accessing our work on the whole difficult.

There’s no fitting “grading rubric” for everything at once because the intent of the art is multiple.

So, you can either assess every single work individually, or, you can assess us, ourselves, as the work.

*****

With this in mind, READY OR NOT IT’S 2010 becomes another status update in Jogging’s own publicly-visible stream.

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Watching feature length movies shows one “the two hours,” “the hour-and-a-half,” and “the three hours” and if one views enough feature length movies one begins to develop a picture in their own mind(s) regarding these lengths of time. “This is what two hours feels like.”

Thus, when a feature length movie is successful it perfectly corresponds with the picture in one’s own mind of “the two hours,” “the hour and a half,” or the “the three hours.”

(That is to say, it finishes at the same you do.)

But what about other lengths of time?

Well, television figured out that we could be trained to picture “the hour,” “the half-hour,” and “the thirty seconds” and it began to regulate these particular time-units vigorously.

Thus, the joy of good television is the spasm of correspondence between the episode or commercial’s account of “the hour,” “the half-hour,” or “the thirty seconds” and one’s own trained picture of “the hour,” “the half-hour,” or “the thirty-seconds.”

When one downloads an entire season of Mad Men, for instance, one begins to get off less on the content of the individual episodes and more on the rhythm of the individual episodes in succession as each one fills in “the 48 minutes” again and again and again and again as versions on a theme.

What time, though, does the digital network picture?

On the one hand, everything’s gotten shorter:

Blog posts are short, videos are short, news articles are headlines.

However, on the other hand, everything’s gotten longer.

One blog post is merely a version on a theme developed in an ongoing performance inhabiting “the several months and years.”

Does the digital network, then, polarize one’s desires for time – make you crave for both the instantaneous and the epic?

Make it schizophrenic?

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Untitled (The Birds without the birds) by Martijn Hendriks is an ongoing performance in which Hendriks digitally removes every image of a bird from every frame of the film The Birds.

By taking the birds out of the film, Hendriks suggests that terror is psychological.

Terror is Tippy Hedren – the icy blonde with everything in control – being mercilessly stalked by her own fear of losing this control.

A key to the project is that Hendriks digital elimination of the birds is not seamless, but rather highly present. There are sort of digital scars that foreground the fact that something has been taken out.

Also, he didn’t remove the birds from a single frame of the film (which he could accomplish in a day), but rather performs his removal of the birds from every frame of the film in which a bird appears – a performance he has been continually working through since 2007.

He writes:

[…] I’ve realized that I like this performative dimension best when it introduces a kind of questionable or unproductive element, so that I really need to believe in something to go through with it. Making an art work is also about believing in something enough to follow it through, to stick with it even when that something lacks all credibility or value.

*****

If the work was a one-liner dashed off quickly or with a tool that did it automatically, it would be less meaningful and I wouldn’t want to follow it.

But I do find it an idea worth following because of this performative element and the sheer, absurd labor of it all.

It’s the time implied in the work that makes it beautiful.

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Painting (with mouse pad) is a sculpture by Harm van den Dorpel consisting of:

1. A framed and matted print of an abstract digital painting (found by Van den Dorpel on the Internet) leaning against a white art gallery wall.

2. A vertically-inverted mouse pad depicting a cliche Chinese landscape painting resting on the top right edge of the painting’s frame.

When combined, the painting and the fan don’t seem to add up to anything. Van den Dorpel has talked about wanting to create images and image combinations that don’t mean anything – that create a certain neutrality. This sounds absurdly simple, but, in fact, it’s difficult. In an image-saturated world, almost every image ends up carrying some clear message or point or symbolic weight. In this work, though, the combination of the images ends up creating a double negative, an unsettling feeling of meaninglessness. The more the viewer tries to create some sort of connection, the more they get trapped in the middle of the work.

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Charles Broskoski paints on a computer.

However, he understands that by employing digitally automated “painterly” tools on a computer, he re-orients the launching-off point for a consideration of these works.

In the current design of Broskoski’s personal website, the artist displays his most recent painting – in this case, a layering of long, wide, generally vertical “brushstrokes” in the airy style of the late de Kooning into the form of a primordial “ball” – a locus of energy, both budding and dying, aggressive and nervous, which calls to mind Philip Guston’s early abstractions (as well as a muddied take on the reds, greens, blues and blacks from Guston’s palette in these abstractions).

The bottom edges of this “ball” seem to “put the brakes on” in an act of inertia, curling in against a threat of pure formlessness.

And, at the top, the brushstrokes seem to be shooting upward (as in transcendence), but – in a reversal of the physics occurring at the bottom – suffer a smooshing down (as in gravity).

The result is a stormy mass of energy simultaneously expanding away from its self and contracting into its self.

It has a kick.

But – as a painting – it also lacks a kick.

The painting is created on a computer with a mouse and a suite of digital “effects” rather than paint and canvas.

Also, it looks really nice, but it’s just one of the thousands of images that hit my eye through the light of a computer screen while I’m online.

So, where does this leave one?

A clue may be found in the caption to the work (the title to the work?) – a sort of clock reading “7 days ago…”

“7 days ago…” refers to the amount of time past since Broskoski uploaded the painting to his site.

Yesterday it read “6 days ago…”

The day before “5 days ago…”

Tomorrow it will read “8 days ago…” or perhaps “1 week ago…”

And so on until Broskoski uploads another work, thus resetting the clock.

What this counter adds to the work is a whole new type of meaning.

Like Josh Smith, Broskoski and artists such as Harm van den Dorpel are re-examining the possibility of a certain sincerity in painterly expression, but doing so not in the individual painting (well, not primarily in the individual painting), but as a performance – in time.

Broskoski is struggling with how to reconcile the tradition of painting with the computer.

As one returns to the site again and again and again and again, watching him upload new work, trying things out, performing his creation, one begins to see it.

It turns out that what the computer shows me is not space, but time; not the digital painting, but digital painting.