Yes, the artMovingProjects version definitely tipped the idea away from the personal home computing experience (although it was shown on a standard Samsung LCD monitor with Mac Mini visible nearby) and injected it into the realm of video art, which has a history and value-set independent of any emerging "net aesthetic." Without saying whether that is better or worse, or more true or untrue to the source material, it is certainly one of the best translations I've seen between contexts. Ah, what the heck, I think it was better piece, for the simple reason that you could watch the actions on all five screens simultaneously without having to scroll up and down and with no loss of scale or resolution. In a sense the full poetry and all the visual connections of the simultaneous disasters could be felt at once. It was a technical tour de force to get that to happen and extra kudos go to Slocum for figuring it out.

You will have to engage your intellect to properly consider these questions."

Curt, there you go again.

It would be nice to hear from John Michael about why he picked this piece.

Credit should certainly go to all the nameless videographers capturing phone poles wherever they may burst into flames.

Forgot to mention the artMovingProjects showing of the piece also appeared on the Rhizome calendar a while back.

Guess not. Anyway, Aron Namenwirth, artMovingProjects co-owner, singled out this piece from the mass of spiritsurfers posts and went to special trouble, working with Slocum, to find a way to present it forcefully in a gallery setting. I saw it and it was interesting in that: (i) the monitor was rotated to portrait position to accommodate the five video clips in a vertical row (ii) white space surrounded the group of adjacent clips giving them a more iconic reading, and (iii) the piece was transformed to a series of YouTubes with ordinary, interactive controls into a rather elegant video collage that saved you having to grope for a mouse.

My understanding is the piece was sold to a private collector.

After Namenwirth's version of the piece opened in December 2008 ( http://artmovingprojects.blogspot.com/2008/11/paul-slocum-transformer-fire.html ) Marcin Ramocki included a link to Transformer Fire in his Best of the Web entry for Art Fag City ( http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/01/08/best-of-the-web-contributors-edition-part-six-of-six/ )

It was also featured on ArtCal, I believe.

In any case, this piece has a history predating its appearance on Rhizome with no explanation or back story about 10 days after Slocum's show closed at artMovingProjects. This comment is an attempt to give some of that background.