Martine Syms, film still produced for the cover of Most Days (2014). LP. Mixed Media Recordings, Brooklyn.

The undersigned, being alternately pissed off and bored, need a means of speculation and asserting a different set of values with which to re-imagine the future. In looking for a new framework for black diasporic artistic production, we are temporarily united in the following actions.

***The Mundane Afrofuturists recognize that:***

We did not originate in the cosmos.

The connection between Middle Passage and space travel is tenuous at best.

Out of five hundred thirty-four space travelers, fourteen have been black. An all-black crew is unlikely.

Magic interstellar travel and/or the wondrous communication grid can lead to an illusion of outer space and cyberspace as egalitarian.

This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured upon a "master/slave" relationship.

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Chuck Colby with Homebrew Computer Club wares (Credit: Amy Desiree Photography) 

The buffet occupies two tables; the rest are covered with computer paraphernalia. In many ways, it feels like another tech meetup. Well-rehearsed elevator pitches are offered: "It's like Minecraft and The Sims smashed together and put on the web." One young programmer was attracted to the meeting because, "It's in the Bay Area, it's on Kickstarter, so why the fuck not?"

But this is the 38th Anniversary Reunion of the Homebrew Computer Club, the group that "launched the personal computing revolution," or so the story goes. Temporal and ideological anomalies abound. The hardware is all vintage, and while some participants are there in search of networking opportunities, others are still out to change the world, to put technological tools into the hands of the people. A veteran whips out his $90 paper tape reader, insisting no one can understand Homebrew unless they’ve hacked one. An Altair 8800 that famously produced music at an original meeting is here for an encore—no drastic restoration necessary, the thing just works. At serial inventor Chuck Colby's table, there's a stack of printouts which read:

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When all of my friends are on at once, organized by Gene McHugh

Chat rooms, ScReEnNaMeS, AdultKing, cheat codes, Everquest, AOL/Rent essay writing contests. While the cultural forms we encounter on the internet are always changing, there was something palpably unique about the early web; for many of us, this is simply because we encountered it for the first time as adolescents. As many of the entries in When all of my friends are on at once detail, adolescent experiences online in the pre-mobile computing era were often alone, all-engrossing, and/or associated with some form of embarrassment. Launched today, this new project organized by Gene McHugh collects the thoughts of 48 contemporary artists engaged with technology on their first memories of being online.

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Exterior view of I Thought It Was a Pull, but It's a Push at the Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (COR&P). Photo: Tim Smith.

Last autumn, the Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (COR&P), a project space founded in 2012 by Ryland Wharton and Kris Paulsen, held a solo exhibition by Michael Bell-Smith entitled I Thought It Was a Pull, but It's a Push. The following interview explores the themes from that show, as well as the 12" record published alongside it, delving further into the ideas raised in Bell-Smith's recent piece for Rhizome, "Creative 2 Professional: 7 Things to Think About."

COR&P: COR&P's mission is to facilitate and present research-based art practices. In previous exhibitions, artists have conducted archival research (such as Shana Lutker's history of Surrealist fistfights) or mined data in real time (Aspen Mays' tracking of shipping traffic). It is apparent from your work that you are an avid collector of digital ephemera. Do you see the process of searching, downloading, and collecting files as a type of research, and how does that research inform your practice?

MBS: When I'm working, I never think in terms of "research." It implies a division between your input and your output, that you put everything on pause to conduct "research." Who has the time for that? When I think about it though, I conduct research all the time. I spend hours sorting through collections of stock footage. I clip things from across the web, logging them in different websites, applications, and folders. I'll pull out my phone in the middle of conversation to jot down the name of an article, tracking it down later to read from my phone while on the train. I take photos on the street. And so on.

With various levels of intervention these things might be flipped into "production"—input becomes output. So, my research is intertwined with my daily life and the process of actually making things.

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Matthias Fritsch is an independent artist from Berlin, most well known for his work Kneecam No 1—the live video that brought Technoviking to the internet. Over a decade after he uploaded the clip that went viral, Fritsch now is enduring a long legal battle with Technoviking himself, who sued for the reproduction, proliferation, and unwarranted use of his likeness. In response to the process, Fritsch is making The Story of Technoviking, a crowd-funded documentary that aims to shed light on the legal issues surrounding viral images. Below, Fritsch talks about what it’s like do battle in court with a viking, the ownership of images in the internet age, and hopes for his current project.

My Life Without Technoviking—since the trial began, Fritsch is no longer allowed to use images of the plaintiff's face.

DQ: Matthias, I'm of course curious about the video that originated it all. What was, for you, Kneecam No 1 (2000) before it became an internet meme? Why did you upload it to YouTube? Were you expecting such a viral reaction? What did you think when it happened?

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Portrait of Stoya by Molly Crabapple.

Creative Time Reports and Rhizome present Glass Gaze, a one-time performance in which artist Molly Crabapple, wearing Google Glass, creates life-drawings of Stoya, porn star and advocate for fair labor practices in the pornography industry, as she strikes a variety of poses. The performance was streamed live on the Rhizome website on Dec. 11 from 3pm to 3:30pm. In early 2014, Creative Time Reports and Rhizome sites will co-publish the video along with an essay that Molly will write about the project.  

Looking means taking. The gaze, whether the stereotypical male gaze or the gaze of an artist, is rapacious and objectifying. But technologies like Google Glass add a new layer to looking. Now, the gaze itself can be commodified, quantified, and sold—whether to advertisers or the NSA. Google Glass lets your audience, or the government, see the world from your perspective.

A classic act of looking is that of the artist staring at a model. In Glass Gaze, I will draw porn performer and aerialist Stoya while wearing a Google Glass that has been hacked by journalist Tim Pool, enabling it to live stream. Viewers will see art-making directly through my eyes.

The choice of Stoya as a model is an homage to Degas's drawings of dancers. Degas is an archetypical artist of the male gaze. In the 21st century, the subjects of his drawings have been stripped of context, but in 19th-century Paris, many dancers doubled as sex workers and mistresses. His ballerinas were iron-tough athletes, working-class women hustling to survive and finance their art. As an artist, I love Degas's dancers, but not his misogyny and alienation. Glass Gaze attempts to see what the gaze sees when the artist is not other, although the gaze itself is commodified and captured by an intermediary. 

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"CREATIVE 2 PROFESSIONAL: 7 things to think about" is based on a lecture commissioned by Aily Nash and Andrew Norman Wilson as part of Image Employment at New York's MoMA PS1. Read the curators' afterword here.

#1: Scot Halpin

In 1973, the rock band The Who were opening their US tour for Quadrophenia with a sold-out concert at the Cow Palace outside of San Francisco.

Halfway through their set, drummer Keith Moon passed out on his drums, allegedly due to a mixture of animal tranquilizers and brandy. After unsuccessfully trying to revive him, the band soldiered on drumless for a few songs. Eventually, Pete Townshend, The Who's guitar player and main songwriter, asked the crowd if anyone could play the drums.

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On December 2 and 3, Rhizome will present Rendered/Realtime, a series of 24 interactive animations designed and developed by Vince McKelvie. The works are displayed on the front page of Rhizome.org, occupying most of the browser window save for a minimal header and footer. Created specifically for this context, Rendered/Realtime uses a technique adapted from video game graphics, the sprite sheet, to allow the user to rotate, move, and deform rendered animated gifs in real time. Rippling and undulating, riffling and turning inside out, McKelvie's 3D forms defy easy visual comprehension, landing somewhere in between liquid geometric abstraction and sci-fi fantasy.

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