Archive for May, 2010

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Friday, May 28th, 2010

Surveying the American Cultural Habitat by Hayley Silverman is a video composed of a short clip appropriated from a Bollywood musical which the artist slows down, plays in reverse, plays in forward motion again, and, then, in reverse again in an endless loop.

The action of this slowed down, reversed, and endlessly looped clip involves a South Asian woman holding a video camera in front of her face as she slides horizontally into the middle of the frame, removes her eye from the camera viewfinder (which is pointed directly at “us,” the viewers of the clip) and, then, smiles at “us” in a sort of half-awed, half-patronizing gesture of approval.

Also, the soundtrack of the video is a piece of music which is itself slowed down, played, reversed, and looped, resulting in a low, ominous undercurrent to this otherwise brightly colored and happy imagery.

As one begins to view through this loop, perhaps the first thing one tries to do is rationally understand it—to deconstruct all of these elements described above and, then, piece them back together into a satisfying story.

For example, the collision of the anthropological-sounding title—Surveying the American Cultural Habitat—with imagery involving a South Asian woman pointing a video camera back at “us,” the viewers of the clip, might lead one to say that the work is in some sense, anyway, inverting the practice of “othering” back out to the “American” viewer who is watching the clip.

It is not the “American” who is surveying her cultural habitat; but she who is surveying the “American” cultural habitat.

Perhaps.

But, as one continues to view through the repetitions of the loop, one may realize two additional things:

1. First of all, as one watches the repetition of the clip, one’s understanding changes each time—each repetition involves the present experience of the clip—yes—but also both the viewer’s ever-increasing past understandings of the clip as well as their future predictions for their understandings of the clip.

Thus, each time one views through the loop, one experiences a different clip with a different understanding which it affords.

2. And, second, due to this continuous change in understanding, it becomes difficult to assume that any effort at rationally understanding the clip will ever come to any ultimate fruition.

Every time one thinks they understand it, the next time one views through the loop, that understanding is mutated by the experience of comparing the understanding to the actual viewing of the clip.

And, at that point, one might catch on to another level of understanding in the work:

What the viewer is show to be othering here is (in its own way) the video itself.

By looking at the work in the hopes of decoding it, dissecting it like a forensics report, one is going to miss it every time as it continuously slips out of one’s grip.

As such, one’s attempts to understand the work must then be conducted with a certain humbleness—an automatic understanding that no understanding is final.

Tags: change, hayley silverman, loop, other, othering, repetition, slow, south asian, surveying the american cultural habitat, understanding, video
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Thursday, May 27th, 2010

From The Penultimate Truth (1964) by Philip K. Dick:

Below, a wide river like wet silver wiggled from north to south, and Joseph Adams leaned out to view the Mississippi and acknowledge its beauty.  No reconcrews had accomplished this; what glistened in the morning sun was an element of the old creation.  The original world which did not need to be recreated, reconned, because it had never departed.  This sight, like that of the Pacific, always sobered him, because it meant that something had proved stronger; something had escaped.

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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

“The ink wasn’t dry yet on their divorce papers before he was shacking up with you-know-who.”

In this sentence, there’s an idiom—“the ink wasn’t dry yet”—which does a nice job of creating a picture of a temporal event—a relatively short temporal event—by thinking of this event in terms of observable material phenomena—ink drying on paper.

One could say, “It didn’t take that many days after their divorce before he was shacking up with you-know-who,” but, in so doing, one loses the image of time as material; it lacks the bite of the previous sentence in which time is given the same oppressive materiality as an object in space.

Here’s another example:

“We’ve each said things we don’t really mean, so let’s let the dust settle and talk this over in the morning.”

Again, one could say here, “We’ve each said things we don’t really mean, so let’s wait a couple of hours and talk this over in the morning,” but, in so doing, one might lose something of the imagistic power which the idiom “let the dust settle” affords the sentence.

All of the sudden, that stretch of time becomes an object—an accumulation of dust following a confrontation—and, thus, becomes more dynamic than a reference to the passage of time through standardized time units—minutes, hours, etc.–which are decidedly more difficult to picture concretely.

The idioms in which time is pictured as an entity with its own materiality and its own objective weight on one’s experience are often powerful because they nudge one towards the intuition that time is as much a material as space (albeit a very different kind of material).

In Damon Zucconi’s Grey series, which consists of (as of right now, anyway) eight images created using a digital scanner and varying amounts of naturally-occurring dust and light leakage into the scanner, the artist invests himself in a similar experimentation with the material representation of time.

As viewed through his website, he presents, to begin with, a series of four images composed of dark shades of grey, accented by bursts of horizontal white bars, and pools of off-white specks that remind one of the scratches, hairs, and other noise of poorly preserved celluloid films.     

In the fifth instance of the series, one views a similarly dark grey field which, likewise, contains traces of light leakage and dust and, then, an additional bright burst of orange/tan (almost fleshy) light which extends vertically in the upper right corner of the work.

In the following two instances of the series, a dark grey to black field is crossed by a series of rhythmically ordered straight horizontal lines of varying colors.

And, then, in the most recent instance of the series, one views another dark grey to black field upon whose entire right edge bursts a bright white streak of (almost cosmic) light whose own inner edge is a shade of bright green.

Now all that said, in each of these instances, one views the varied constellations of formal elements just mentioned—yes–but one also views something else—a unique picture of materialized time.

One views the changing amounts of dust and light recorded in each particular image which, in turn, are records of particular lengths of time.

Each formal variation here is due to an experimentation with time—whether it be the amount of time allotted to accumulate dust on the bed of the scanner or the amount of time allotted to accumulate light flares of varying degrees of strength.

Thus, as one reflects on a given formal element in the work, one is nudged towards reflecting on the time which each of these elements records.

Tags: accumulation, damon zucconi, dust, grey, image, light, material, materiality, scanner, series, temporal,
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Friday, May 21st, 2010

Pre-Sensation by Hayley Silverman is an approximately four minute video in which one views a  laser pointer track over the projected image of another video which itself depicts rhythmic hand-held camera movements over sculptures representing “natural” forms and abstracted nude bodies.

The motion of the laser pointer here is composed of improvised, arcing motions which reflect the improvised, arcing motions of the camera over the sculptures depicted in the projected video.

Additionally, the video is paired with an improvised jazz score by a band named “Willendorf” and is also intercut at one point with several shots of a male sculptor as he washes the dirt from one of his sculptural tools and, then, from his hands.

Silverman’s movements with the laser pointer are legible as a sort of pre-intellectual, pre-sensational sensuality harmonizing with the shapes of the sculptural forms.

The fact that she is pointing her laser beam and her camera lens all over these sculptures, though, is not a neutral gesture.

Rather, the aggressive scopophilia on view here in which the laser and camera ogle over representations of breasts, thighs, penises, and asses is an act of primitivist othering which mirrors and, thus, brings to the forefront, these sculptures’ own participation in this process.

That is to say, as one views the laser pointer and camera scope-out these sculptures as if they were sexual conquests, one feels, perhaps, empathy with them as in—hey, you’re basically raping it with your eyes instead of considering the object as an equal being.

In turn, the sculpture’s own problematic relationship to idealizations of otherness is, then, almost unavoidably brought to the forefront of one’s view on the work.

The history of primitivism in 20th century art, after all, (of which the sculptures depicted in this video are in sincere dialogue) is (it is widely thought) premised on an illusion in which non-Western cultures are presumed to be closer to nature and, thus, more pure than self-loathing technologically-tainted Western cultures.

What was intended as praise for these cultures, is received—in reality—as the worst kind of imperialism in which anyone outside of Western culture is reduced to a myth or a symbol of purity—that is, non-existent (or if  existent, then existent only in order to serve as a reflection for Western culture).

Now, it’s important to emphasize the fact that the performance here is intercut with images of a white, male sculptor (ostensibly the sculptor of these sculptures) as he washes the dirt of the sculptural process off of his tools and hands.

By including this particular footage, Silverman both upsets the rhythmic flow of the performance, as well as nudges one’s view on the work towards the fact that the sculptures here were created by a white male artist as an instance of primitivist art.

Additionally, the fact that the name of the band who scored the video’s improvisatory jazz score—“Willendorf”–is presumably taken from the twenty-four thousand year old nude sculpture, the Venus of Willendorf, also nudges one in this direction.

As such, the performance’s physicality and sensuality activate one part of one’s mind, while the artist’s careful critical framing of this very physicality and sensuality, activates another part, a counterpoint, calling into question its own premises.

Tags: , gaze, hayley silverman, myth, naturalism, other, , post colonialism, pre-sensation, primitivism, sculpture, venus of willendorf, video
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Thursday, May 20th, 2010

In You As In User, an academic text on Web 2.0 economics, Dennis Knopf (aka Tracky Birthday) explains the way in which large social networks such as Facebook thrive on the sale, not of network space, but rather of information culled from network users.

Facebook, without this data, is worthless.

Value here is traded through its users’ voluntarily offered likes, dislikes, pictures, keywords, ratings, and other personal information which advertisers can, in turn, use to micro-target clusters of audiences, maximizing the ratio of advertisement signal to advertisement noise in each user’s daily media diet.

For some, this is seen to be progress—a “win-win” situation in which the consumer is afforded the freedom to seek out their most intricately individualized desires and the corporation offering this service is afforded the freedom to transform all of the data traces left by users into streams of financial capital.

But think of what this does to the potential for shared experience.

As one’s consumption becomes more and more individualized, does it perhaps decrease one’s ability to personally connect with other people consuming other sets of media?

And, furthermore, think of the existential dilemma posed by the ostensibly infinite choice of networked consumption.

As one’s initial mania for endless novelty wanes, is there a point in which this enthusiasm transforms into a dread regarding the possibility of endless fun consumption, endless deference of “true” satisfaction?

What exactly is the consumer getting out of this deal?

Knopf (following a thoughtful, not to mention substantial, presentation of research) writes in his conclusion:

The myth of complete consumer freedom and the seeming focus on giving users the chance to express their individuality is to be questioned. Web2.0 has opened up a world of opportunities and introduced technologies that have changed our relation to media.  But as long as strategies like the walled gardens and the segmentation of media are just to construct differentiated, homogeneous audiences then the world of Web2.0 is not much of a democracy.

*********

That said, though, what is the user supposed to do here?

Perhaps one severs their relationship to digital media in disgust and starts reading Hegel all day.

Perhaps one says, “the Hell with it,” leaping head first into the void of novelty, hoping to burst through to some other realm.

Knopf’s own suggestion takes a different path.

Effective counter-culture–here–aims to inform users of their exploitation in the system; he points to the practice of “culture jamming” in which the content of, say, an advertisement is designed to alienate the viewer of the ad from the ad’s message, thus catalyzing the viewer’s criticality towards not just this ad, but (ideally) all ads.

What would it mean to confront these conditions in contemporary art?

How does the contemporary art audience become conscious of contemporary art’s own involvement with these very economic models in which information is more valuable than material?

One place to look for an answer to both of these questions is the artist Ben Schumacher’s Immaterial Labour works.

In Immaterial Labour 4, for example, one views three beach towels inverted to hang on a wall.

Printed on each of the towels is a black and white photographic image of, respectively, a young woman, a man reading art books in a room filled with other art books, and another young woman.

It turns out that these images were not created by Schumacher, but rather were appropriated by him from the Facebook pages of users who identified that they were going to attend that show in which the towels were first exhibited.

Schumacher selects the image he wants to display, prints it onto a towel at Walmart, and, then, when the user attends the event, he or she sees themselves transformed into a work of art.

In each work, what one is viewing, if one is to follow the title’s lead, is not necessarily a person, but a concept—immaterial labour—the post-industrial labor of, for example, data sharing, the service industry, intellectual consulting, etc.

For an artist, particularly a young artist working in a networked culture, the capital they manage, before it’s financial capital, is social capital which can be quantified in terms of, for example, how many other Facebook users (and which Facebook users) acknowledge that they are going to attend your show.

If a ton of people indicate that they’re coming and a ton of people the artist desires, in particular, to indicate that they’re coming, then his show is, all of the sudden, worth something which might result in financial capital down the road.

Schumacher—in these Immaterial Labour works—transports this very process of others conducting free, immaterial labour for him into the eye of the art space.

What one views here, then, is, on the one hand, a towel whose face value (like Facebook’s face value) is negligible; and, on the other hand, a towel containing information (like Facebook’s user information) which is worth something.

It’s culture jamming.  The product is a self-reflexive critique of its underlying economic function.

Tags: , ben schumacher, consciousness, data, dennis knopf, facebook, immaterial labour, process, social capital, towels, tracky birthday, web 2.0, you as in user
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Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org) is an approximately sixteen minute video depicting a diptych of video images.

In the video to the right of the diptych, one views a young man who has (it appears) hung himself to death.

In the video to the left of the diptych, one views a continually changing series of  random computer users who are responding to the sight of this hanging man.

More specifically, the video is a documentation of the Chatroulette interface in which one of the artists (Franco Mattes) performs the role of the hanging man and leaves it up to the algorithms of Chatroulette (and the pool of Chatroulette users on-line at the time) to generate the bulk of the video’s subsequent content.

The first thing to note is that one’s focus through the duration of the video is nudged further away from the video of the hanging man and closer towards the video of users’ varied reactions to the sight of the hanging man.

What one takes away is the picture of a virtual public responding to the possibility of a real suicide.

In most cases, a legible pattern forms in which, first of all, a “shock effect” invariably occurs wherein the user confronts the image of the suicide and exhibits a strong reaction.

The sight of a suicide on-line or off is obviously going to be unsettling, but, there’s something about placing a suicide in this context which is unsettling in a very particular way.

For example, the hanging man here is “live” in the sense that their virtual persona is functioning, but the user (the actual hanging man, himself) is “dead” in the sense that his biological body is no longer functioning.

So, can one really say that he’s definitely not there?

(Like a ghost, his presence in the bedroom is palpable.)

But, can one really say that he is there?

(Of course not, he’s dead.)

So, one asks one’s self:

Is a dead body the same thing as the real person?

And, then:

Is the on-line persona of a person representing themselves as their own dead body the same thing as the person?

Furthermore, the body here is suspended in the air—both floating, free from the laws of gravity (as if surfing through the Web) as well as falling, on the precipice of physical collapse (as if dying).

That is to say, the body itself is in-between the reality of the ground and the non-reality of the sky, which only adds to this confusion regarding its location.

After this initial shock effect, then, a range of reactions occur from apathy, to pondering, to sexual excitement, to denial, to the need to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera, to amusement, to vicious insulting, to hilarity, to confusion, and, in one case, to calling the police.

Some people assume it’s a joke, some people think it might be real, and most people aren’t quite sure.

Within this range of reactions, though, there is one underlying theme which remains as constant as the presence of the hanging man himself:

The question:

Is this real?

That is to say, first of all, is this really a dead body or is it rather a clever fakery perpetrated by, say, a performance artist?

And, second of all, is this real, as in is this the sort of real human situation wherein I—as a real human being—am ethically called upon to really act (whether it’s real or whether it’s fake)?

That question is by far and away the most common theme brought up by the users throughout the video’s runtime.

Is this real?

NOTE: This post might be read in conjunction with the essay “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Hatian Trickster Sprit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” by Julian Dibbel (1993)

Tags: 0100101110101101, actual, , chatroulette, death, diptych, , eva mattes, franco mattes, no fun, postmasters, real, reality is overrated, simulation, suicide, video, virtual
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Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Jay-Z’s “Young Forever,” a re-working of the “80s” Alphaville song “Forever Young,” opens with the same moody synthesizers one finds in the original and, then, (almost) the same romantic, Sting-esque vocals (the difference here being that the contemporary pop star Mr. Hudson fills in for the Marian Gold vocals in the original track).

As, then, the track continues to open, one settles into a schmaltzy, but compelling reverie as the vocalist muses:

Let’s dance in style,
Let’s dance for a while,
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst,
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?
Let us die young or let us live forever,
We don’t have the power but we never say never,
Sitting in a sandpit,
Life is a short trip,
The music’s for the sad man

********

Now, the hook of romantic lyricism like this is that the tragedy of it all—the fact that the singer’s prayer for eternal youth will never be answered—is known by the singer as he sings.

One falls for the fact that despite the certainty that his protests against death will go unheeded, he protests nonetheless.

It’s mad (it oscillates between the depths of depression and the heights of romantic ecstasy), but it’s pretty.

And one can almost imagine it to be true.

He sings:

Forever young,
I wanna be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever and ever
Forever young I wanna be
Forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, forever

*********

In Jay-Z’s version of the track, though, a shift in emphasis occurs as the words here are not hauntingly ironic, but seemingly literal:

The singer’s prayers will be answered.

Indeed, there they are—on contemporary pop radio more than twenty-five years after their conception and just as young.

Forever young.

In Jay-Z’s rap, he addresses the way in which media archiving allows the paradoxical situation of endless youngness to emerge.

The opening line (following an ad lib toast to the act of living in the moment), finds the artist declaring the following words:

So we livin’ life like a video

*******

Now, this opening declaration could have two possible readings:

1. On the one hand, it could mean that he and his crew are living a life of expensive cars, beautiful young women, freely flowing champagne, etc.

That is to say, the sort of life depicted in cliché rap videos.

2. On the other hand, though, it could be read to mean that the way they’re living is like a video in the sense of its being indelibly captured in archival media.

That is to say, one’s body may age, but one’s bodily presence in the media archive is forever young.

The lines of the verse succeeding this opening nudge one, first, in the direction of (1.), and, then, in the direction of (2.).

Here it is in its entirety:

So we livin’ life like a video
Where the sun is always out and you never get old
and the champagne’s always cold
and the music’s always good
and the pretty girls just happen to stop by in the hood
and they hop they pretty ass up on the hood of that pretty ass car
without a wrinkle in today
cause there is no tomorrow
just a picture perfect day
that last a whole lifetime
and it never ends cause all we have to do is hit re-wind
so let’s just stay in the moment, smoke some weed, drink some wine
reminisce, talk some shit, “Forever Young” is in your mind
leave a mark that can erase neither space nor time
so when the director yells cut
I’ll be fine
I’m forever young

********

They’re living like a video here, then, in the sense that, if life is going too fast, then “all we have to do is hit re-wind” as life itself has been archived in video.

This makes a certain amount of sense to consider in the case of a star such as Jay-Z whose own life is lived in video to a non-negligible degree; no matter what happens to his body, “when the director yells cut,” he’ll “be fine” as the now exists indelibly printed in media storage—forever young, “neither space nor time.”

But, is it really him?

If not, than what is it exactly?

Before dismissing this question out of hand, though, consider the importance of the avatar—the media representation of one’s own self—which one increasingly manages as much as one manages one’s own physical body.

That’s just to say that even though one’s personhood may not intuitively mix with anything but a biological body, pragmatically speaking (and no matter how repulsive it may seem), one’s person is uncannily out (t)here in the infosphere.

(If it’s not you, who is it?)

That said, though, (and no matter its truth) there’s an anxiety:

Things—both biological things as well as media things—die.

There’s nothing guaranteeing that Jay-Z’s video representation (being it actually him or not) will itself actually be forever young.

Indeed, by glancing at the pop charts, one sees that Jay-Z’s version of the track has already peaked–at number ten.

So, whether immortalized in media or not (and whether this has any bearing on anything or not), the track will age.

Before one gets caught up here, though, let’s return to the rap to see how it addresses this very issue, developing its own philosophy towards it.

Jay-Z raps:

Fear not where, fear not why, fear not much while we’re alive
life is for livin’ not livin’ uptight
until you’re somewhere up in the sky, fear not die
I’ll be alive for a million years, bye bye
so not for legends, I’m forever young, my name shall survive.

******

What one  might take from these lines is that, according to Jay-Z, if one is to be forever young in archival video media, then one must, it seems, live in the moment.

And one must continuously create one’s self every moment by existing fully in every moment, living life as if it will end not someday but in the very next moment.

The star–here–lives forever young by living life as if the opposite were true, as if nothing matters but the inhabitation of this moment.

And, for Jay-Z his star lives forever not just through video media, but through legend—oral history passed down through generations.

He raps:

Through the darkest blocks, over kitchen stoves, over Pyrex pots, my name shall be passed down to generations while debatin’ up in barber shops
young slung, hung here showed that a nigga from here with a little ambition just what we can become here
and as the father pass the story down to his son’s ear, younger get younger every year, yeah
so if you love me baby this is how you let me know, don’t ever let me go, that’s how you let me know, baby

********

Now before going on, at the end of this verse—it should be said–an interesting moment of hesitation occurs.

To reiterate, Jay-Z raps:

So if you love me baby this is how you let me know, don’t ever let me go, that’s how you let me know, baby

********

That is to say, Jay-Z—at that moment—indicates his own knowledge of the possibility that his legend will not persist unless those that love him refuse to let him go.

His destiny is–it seems–in the hands of others.

Why would Jay-Z  be basically begging for his fans to never let him go if he didn’t doubt his own existence as a “true” star?

But, once again, at that moment, Jay-Z turns the kaleidoscope.

As the timeline of the song is itself on its own last legs, he raps:

Less than four bars,
Guru bring the chorus in,
Did you get the picture yet?,
I’m painting you a portrait of young

*****

“Did you get the picture yet?” he asks.

Did you see that all this talk about forever young and life in a video is not drawn out here for its own sake, but rather to create a broader picture?

And what is this picture?

A portrait of “young”—the last line of the song.

The endless same-ness of young-ness in which one does everything in their power and thinks through every possible angle to ensure their immortality, but only ends up in knots.

Tags: 80s, alphaville, , , cover, , document, endlessness, forever, forever young, immortality, jay-z, knots, media, music video, now, obsolescence, person, pop, record, romantic, star, , video, young, young forever
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Monday, May 17th, 2010

In “Free Art,” a text by the Jogging, it is suggested that the Web’s economy of re-blogging and fast-paced communal interaction creates its own economic model and, thus, its own best practices for understanding how value around work is accrued.

Furthermore, it is thought that the art world–even if it did acknowledge this work–would not know what to do with it as this online economy is alien to its own—premised as it is on the exchange of materially sensual objects for amounts of (financial) capital unavailable to all but the most wealthy members of society.

Jogging writes:

In the lives of contemporary artists, Free Art is a place to find one’s self through the existence of others– to individually reclaim the ability to self-mythologize and empathetically pick from your peers for influence. Thus, Free Art is marked by the compulsive urge of searching (or, surfing) to connect with others in a way that is not dictated by profitability, but found and shared charitably among individuals based on personal interests.

***********

A couple of thoughts:

I’m not sure that the Web is any less tainted by economics than the art market.  The re-blogging format preferred by Jogging did not appear out of nowhere; power relations are alive and well (t)here as one might say that all of this activity is ultimately in the service of market research for corporations.

Meanwhile, the world of contemporary art is obviously not perfect, but it’s not entirely dominated by auctions and abusive gatekeeping, either.

And if one is interested in placing their creative endeavors on the Web in both the most critically sympathetic as well as the most critically astute environment possible (the environment in which it will be judged as more than style alone), one can’t so easily dismiss the art world as it has been thinking about these questions very seriously for a very long time.

Furthermore, the work will (if it is as good as it thinks it is) end up back in the art system as saleable objects; the question here, then, is how much control does the artist exert over this entry into the system.

This is just to say that the conversation occurring inside the art world is worth taking a second look at before one abandons it outright.

Also, Jogging’s reference to the immaterial or de-materialized quality of the work is problematic.

For the sake of argument (and it is debatable), let’s say that—yes—a virtual .jpeg of a sculpture is immaterial—free of the problems of aura and material commodification which the sculpture depicted in the .jpeg itself affords.

But, what about the hardware displaying this content?

The notion that the Web has accomplished some sort of Hegelian transcendence is precisely what, say, Steve Jobs wants consumers to believe:

Go on, keep chatting with your friends, watching videos, listening to music—it’s all fluid and immaterial now and that’s great—just so long as you do so through the iPad.

These devices which display the work which Jogging thinks of as lacking aura, are, in fact, highly susceptible to aura or, from a slightly different angle, fetishism.

One can’t wait to get home and log-on to their machine, touch it, ride the time of computing cycles; anytime the threat of boredom creeps in, one can immediately start fingering their iPhone, dexterously running their hands all over it in the hopes of generating more immaterial content.

Indeed, perhaps one could think of the endless stream of a blog as lubricant—sweet nothings in one’s ear, easing one’s entry into a more rhythmically sustained fingering of their device.

This is just to say that the materiality of digital culture is worth taking a second look at before one denies its presence outright.

Now all that said (and on the other hand), there’s another consideration which comes into play here:

“Free Art” was posted on the Jogging tumblr on May 12th, 2010.

In the five days which have passed since the 12th, Jogging has posted six additional unique works—each possessing their own unique power and each propelling my own following of their posting (as in an on-going performance).

As a matter of fact, this immediacy and performative enthusiasm is relatively more exciting (to me, anyway) than most things happening in most of the shows advertised via, say, e-flux.

Which is precisely the effect which Jogging describes in their text.

An anxiety arises:

I have some issues with the idea, but I’m compelled to follow it nonetheless.

That is to say, it can’t be dismissed outright as the artists demonstrate it for me, placing it directly in front of me, demanding my acknowledgment.

And through this acknowledgment, I may never quite decide for certain if the idea of Free Art is naïve or pioneering (or both), but I may be infected by it, nonetheless.

Tags: , art world, brad troemel, community, , device, , economics, essay, free art, freemium, immaterial, , ipad, jogging, lauren christiansen, material, , text, ,
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Friday, May 14th, 2010

“3 weeks ago” Charles Broskoski uploaded a diptych of images, each of which depicts a digitally-created still-life composed in a painterly style.

One views, in the first of these images (the image to the left of the diptych), a vertical composition composed of  an open door which itself frames—in the foreground–an arrangement of fruit situated on a small end table and—in the background–the obstructed view of a window.

Additionally it should be said that these figurative elements are themselves each carved out in chunky, geometrically-legible units of color.

In the second of these images (the image to the right of the diptych), one views a similar composition whose differences with the first are localized to shifts in color and re-considerations of the given shapes of objects (perhaps most notably in the cubist-inspired centerpiece of the fruit arrangement).

Now, one might say that Broskoski’s model here is not necessarily an arrangement of objects in space, but rather, an art-historical style—say, Fauvism.

And these particular works are apt studies of the style; they’re well-executed and have a certain aesthetic appeal.

But, that said, whereas the Fauves (“The Wild Beats”) were notorious for depicting objects in space in an un-realistic manner (or, alternatively, mutating their own definition of “realistic”), Broskoski’s pair of paintings here lack that sort of “shock effect.”

Indeed, one’s mind apprehends each image here less as a phenomenological entity and more as an icon reading as “painting” or “art” or “art history.”

Now, that said, the fact that these images do not catalyze the shock effects which, say, Matisse’s work catalyzed in its own time should not be surprising.

After all, Matisse’s work was once contemporary, but is now safely at home in Ikea or Pier One Imports; it’s been absorbed and neutralized into the flow of commodofied  signage.

So, where does this leave Broskoski?

Well, to start, this diptych—as it is displayed on his website, anyway—is situated directly below another diptych which itself is housed under a heading reading “2 weeks ago…”

In the lower-most image of this second diptych, one views iconography reading less as painterly or in reference to any other art historical style than it does digital and visionary.

One views what might be taken for a 3D “metal fence” (3D in the sense of digital “3D animation” not trompe-l’oeil ) through which undulating chunks of lightly-shaded colors which might be taken for “stingrays” pass through and intermingle with small, concentric circles of color which might taken for “eyeballs.”

And, in the upper image of the diptych, one views a similarly surrealistic arrangement of iconography; however, in this case, the icons do not read solely as “painterly” or solely as “digital,” but rather as a collision between the two.

The background and immediate foreground here are composed of graffiti-like scribbles created with a tool that automatically re-produces this “real world” effect, and the middle-ground of the image is composed of a series of “3D” representations of what one might take to be “vertebrae” extending not in a straight line (as in a spine) but in a wild swirl throughout the space of the image (as in a nightmare).

It should be said, though, that as with the images in the diptych mentioned above, these more digitally-inflected images are themselves each well-executed and sort of privately powerful, but perhaps lack the bodily shock effects which the various avant-gardes of art history are interested in.

Which would be fine—perhaps Broskoski isn’t interested in that sort of thing—were it not for the fact that, if one is up for it, there’s another way to view what’s going on here with its own unique shock:

When the artist places these paintings in conjunction with one another and in the context of an on-going stream of paintings which a viewer might follow (as in a performance) on his website, the viewer’s lens on the work here is nudged away from each of the individual images and closer towards the legible pattern of filtration through which the individual images stream.

The shock of shifting one’s lens from such simultaneously well-executed and differently well-executed images creates a space of indeterminacy—a sort of surrealist heterotopia picturing less space than movements in time.

Tags: 3d, charles broskoski, , fauves, images, matisse, maya, , , surrealistic, , virtual, website
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010

“Nothing To Blame But Gemini” is an installation of fourteen works by Whitney Claflin now on-view at Real Fine Arts in Williamsburg.

The installation is  composed of one-half modestly-sized abstract paintings produced by the artist and one-half similarly-sized glossy posters printed-out by the artist which themselves each depict an abstracted detail of one of her own abstract paintings (not—it should be noted–the paintings in this particular installation, though).

The first thing to say about the installation is that one isn’t immediately sure which of the works here are the paintings and which of the works here are the posters as they’re each roughly the same size and they each depict iconography which one reads as “painterly”—drips, slashes, goopy brush strokes, etc.

(If one were to view the works through a computer screen [or a printed-out checklist], it would be effectively impossible to differentiate them via their media [rather, the “take away” message--in that case--becomes the sign of “painting,” or, alternatively, of “art.”])

However, as one spends time with “Nothing To Blame But Gemini” (as in the case [if one goes for this sort of thing, anyway] of spending time with a person born under the sign of Gemini), what at first glance appears to be singular, gradually reveals a strong duality.

The key variable of difference between these works is their materiality as objects—the paintings are sculptural, tactile; the posters are flat, glossy.

In the paintings, one views onto a surface molded by the artist—that is to say, a phenomenological space—the action occurred “here”; in the posters, one views into a surface automatically printed-out by a machine—that is to say a conceptual space—the action occurred “out there.”

Going one step deeper, the surface of the paintings calls to mind production as the location of the work (present tense), while the surface of the posters calls to mind both pre-production as well as post-production as the location of the work (past and future tenses).

And, at this point, if one is willing to go this far with the work, another layer emerges wherein each individual image harnesses these very tensions between “the hand of the artist” and “automatic effects.”

For example, in the painting works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the application of objects (broken ceramic, pieces of canvas, newspaper, string, glitter, etc.) which automatically produce iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s application of paint which manually produces iconographic elements.

And in the poster works, collisions emerge between, on the one hand, the data of the photograph which automatically produces iconographic elements and, on the other hand, the artist’s digital manipulation (using “painterly” effects in an image editing software) of the photograph which manually produces iconographic elements.

Finally, the painterly gestures in the works themselves (be they conducted with paint or pixels) point one in the direction of these dialectical tensions as they reveal an indeterminacy—a hesitation to settle anywhere for certain.

One views wiggling lines and almost haphazard juxtapositions of iconography and media; things never quite coalesce.

However, if one is willing to think of the work occurring here as located less in the individual objects, and more in the dialectical tension pictured by the installation as a whole, then suddenly a strong, singular point of view reveals itself.

Tags: , automatism, conceptual, dialectical, material, nothing to blame but gemini, object, , poster, real fine arts, tension, virtual, whitney claflin
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