YES & NO

>MTAA made some web art and we're saying we made it in 2008
no

For some reason when I look at this work I think of Robert Irwin. It's the social nature of transported minimalism that grabs me. It seems completely "of the web", it's not beyond self reflection but it doesn't fall into the self indulgent.
That I know you and River share more than this site makes it work after first encounter. I wonder how you negotiated the perfoemance. I wonder how you decided to vocalize your various affirmitives and denials.
Then I laugh at myself for reading in my own projected assumptions.
I don't know either of you off list, yet I'm intrigued.
The Irwin reference has to be revisited however. It's the offhand, social nature of a minimal provider that made me get to that point. I think others will bring more insight at this level.
I think the work may be the most successful new media work of the past few years.
It doesn't quote a a pop paradigm, it doesn't refer to a dead European philosopher. It is what it is in a very formal way.
It's new and not of "games" "media" or any other pop obsessions or observations.
The sequence of yes and no works on a liminal level that I find really refreshing.
Nice work.
Eric

I like this a lot. It's very Naumanesque of course, a *good thing* in my book, & seems in keeping with one aspect of the MTAA mission which is a kind of "classicizing" impulse, the sometimes explicit, sometimes unspoken reworking of material & ideas from recent art history in a net context, which remaking inevitably comes with a slightly cheeky ( very Brit word -substitute an appropriate equivalent) warmth & and a feeling of a comfortable relaxation with the material; it's not the first time out for the *content* so no-one's too nervous about *that* and *playing* can happen.)
It is slightly giltchy, but I *like* the glitches -I like also the fact that you're not too controlling about the formal aspects of the piece ( more evidence of that relaxed classicism - early Nauman would have been much more obsessive/neurotic about shoehorning the content into the *form*) -there's some interesting stuff going on with contradictory speech/gesture (hmm, it'd go down well in Bulgaria where, confusingly, shaking the head means yes & vice versa) but there also seems to be a voice off? or is that a glitch ?- I see there are two separate Flash pieces abutted -they don't talk to each other do they? -I'm a Flash ignoramus. I assume each piece calls up fragments from a yes/no vid database -presumably sometimes it struggles a bit on the net which accounts for the occasional pops and grinding noises at the begining and end of fragments..
Don't fix it! I know ( and this also is evidence of your role as classicists) you have a lovely line in *finish* generally but the slight roughness of this is an attractive and fecund feature…

Just thinking about that Bulgarian thing…
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or do the yes' represnt 1's and the 0's no …?
011011010110000101110010011010110111001100100000011100110110000101111001011100110010000001111001011001010111001100100000011000010110111001100100001000000111010001101001011011010010000001110011011000010111100101110011001000000110111001101111

Yes - the two windows run separately (think wheels on a slot machine)

Yes. - they both pull randomly from a data base of “Yes” and “No” clips ( it was around 60 take total)

No - they don’t code out a preset message (again, they run random) but we did talk about binary nature of the work while we planed it out. We talked about how the meaning moves between the frames and the combination of frames.

Yes - it’s ‘glitchy. When we run it locally, it moves fast and smooth. It seems very different but I like the clunky web version.

Yes - thanks for the comments.

(Compare | Contrast) the apparent (decoupling | random coupling) of facial expressions (from | to) head nods to Stelarc’s “Prosthetic Head."

http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/prosthetichead/
http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=490
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=491