I just started working with Adobe Creative Suite 6, which is proving to be a challenge after 3 years of using only the GIMP and Inkscape. My reaction:


Mostly it amazes me how often people treat simple layer effects like "Bevel and Emboss" (the 3D brushmarks up there) as edgy and painterly gestures. Come on, that's like getting excited about "Sharpen." Here are two attempts where I was trying to use the filter "incorrectly":

taken from dump - photo credit Erik Stinson

One thing Photoshop does better than the GIMP is distortions. I will not miss "iWarp", the open source version of "Liquefy." Don't get me started on "Puppet Warp", though...





TMC:



Some IRL drawings and paintings:










 That last one is called "Uncle Jesse Majestic" - the gentleman holding up the painting is a friend of mine who approached me in January with the idea of collaborating on a painting. He had never painted before, so we worked together on the canvas from underpainting to the final glow-in-the-dark layer. Oh yeah.

Agh, I meant to post these much, much sooner. "Battle Royale" was an exhibition of Pokémon fan art I attended on April 20th at Light Grey Art Lab, a new art space just down the street from MCAD. In these first few pictures, I want to point out how absolutely packed this tiny place was - there were easily 300 people there during the hour I spent at the show. The curators were standing on benches hocking prints, and all the attendees wanted to do was was buy, buy, buy! Crazy.

Team Rocket by Daniel Krall

A totally creepy portrait of gym leader Misty by Andres Guzman

Clefable by Katie C. Turner

Drowzee by Kali Ciesmier

Cloyster by Sabrina Paralin. I don't know if you can tell, but this print was made from a cross-stitch.

Hitmonlee by Dustin Harbin (1/2)

Hitmonchan by Nathan Bulmer (2/2)

Hardware from Cory Arcangel's Masters, 2011

Jaques Henri Lartigue, Grand Prix of the Automobile Club of France, 1912

Davis doing his stuff in Drive-in Movie Tennis

I haven't talked much about "cinemagraphs" on the blog. They're GIFs similar to what most people think of when they think of GIFs: appearing to stem from a film or TV show. The "high art" cinemagraph, however, does one other thing specifically (for some reason) that most GIFs do not: the cinemagraph reduces movement in a scene down to a few localized areas, such as a person's eyes, hair, or a scarf blowing in the breeze. It thinks very much of itself.

Stage (we are familiar) has produced, in retaliation, a series of faux-cinemagraphs that reverse the localized movement: twitchy, wobbly eyes and uncanny jaw movements turn what appear to be normal humans into uncanny-valley monsters. Watch and enjoy.

LINK to AFC comment thread where I lose my shit - who is behind this? Why? What do collectors in Dubai want with net art? Why is Constant Dullaart the representative of the community? How did the audience respond? Why does everyone think that archiving a website or web content is akin to videotaping or photographing a performance? Isn't it the perception that matters over the material? If you can replicate the perception exactly, why worry?

In the debate, Marius Watz hedges with the common complaint about net art/artists being undefinable. I can't speak for Watz, but generally the complaints I see like his are all on Mr. Moody's 14 definitions of WTF a net artist is. (here's #14) I disagree with Tom and Marius because I think that by proposing a definition you can establish methods of evaluation. Here's my stab at a broad definition of the genre:

Net art is either artwork produced for web-based consumption with an implicit awareness of the culture and power structures that govern its dissemination, or physical artwork produced with a more explicit awareness of the same in mind, or a combination thereof.

It seems to me that intentionality is key here - self-awareness, awareness of the qualities of the Internet. Anything implying a lack of understanding while billing itself as art is untrustworthy and patronizing. If it's not intended to be net art, it's outsider art or just a really funny website. If you feel otherwise, comment here and I'll duke it out with you, but be prepared to provide examples.

One last link before I go to keep this on-task: The Idiocrats by Alexander Provan, a gentleman mentioned in the panel as arguing against non-Internet-aware net art.  I'm not familiar with Triple Canopy yet, so if you know more please chime in.

Notes from March:

• QR CODES ARE ADVERTISEMENTS
• Movie of people saying their screennames
• "concept" Facebook albums - cats, cropped
• Website that's just a timer
• Website that gets louder with more people on it

 MIA sketches:




 Stupid meme idea and some stuff I"ll never make:

• Saw Lifelike at the Walker Art Center. Quite a well-curated show, layout-wise - totally destroyed the John Waters one that began its run in June. Too bad that their website is overdeveloped (and the bees are just annoying netart), I'd link out to more works. Related: Is Frank Gaard a Stuckist? And how can he out-compete the dolphin?
• Drafted some "voxel studies." I need to get away from cubes - these turned into a painting that I ended up knifing out of hatred.
•  Added a few thoughts on the Great GIF Fiasco of 2012
• Ended up watching a bunch of French New Wave film, just because Francois Truffaut was the scientist guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The 400 Blows was very memorable - really bold tracking shot at the end.

6x6x6". Plaster, paint, and USB hub.

 Click for full. This is a follow up to the online gallery discussion, among others.

I know this totally looks like I'm ripping off Tom's post from a few minutes ago on the same subject, but I swear this has been on my to-dos for today since last night. I'm on a small mailing list of net art aficionados (...................yeah, it is what it is), and recently we were discussing Nicholas O'Brien's latest article, "Observations on the Proliferation of Online Galleries." One of the more interesting points made (that for some reason didn't show up in the thread?) is the similarity between how O'Brien discusses these online galleries and his analysis of  R. Gerald Nelson's (tumblr and 4chan have killed the image <_<) Image Aggregators (IAs) in an older article. O'Brien is in on the list, so I responded to him with a few questions, hoping others would chime in as well. No one has responded yet - I'm pretty sure I'm a thread killer by nature :( - but I thought that it might be a good thing to blog about to open up the discussion a little more, just in case. The points below are slightly reworked versions of my original questions.

O'Brien speaks initially about an overlap of artists between online galleries. I wonder if it's a question of who is seeking "real" institutional representation that determines this crowd. This kind of goes against what he says later about the "willingness [of galleries] to support the programming and curation of an underrepresented scene."

O'Brien also mentions that these artists are engaged in "long-term processes... exploring their craft and culture," and that the online galleries' programming fosters this by encouraging the creative process over a period of time. This creates a certain closeness between artists and gallery, resulting in a tightly knit audience. This seems circular to me - I'm reminded immediately of tumblr communities with endless reblogging/permutations of posts - Image Aggregator feedback loops. I wonder if that is what we're seeing here, albeit in a more delayed (temporally), professional-looking skin.

If this is the case, the online gallery then could be considered to function more as an IA with a greater degree of transparency in intent than a brick-and-mortar gallery, but a greater degree of restraint as well in content than your average IA might provide. This answers the "framing" question (Why put net art on a webpage other than its own?) - the work of one artist in the loop of the gallery requires a peer context. This also seems to suggest the (general) failure of the standalone webpage. [I've been thinking this over and I now disagree, what we see is that these select artists prefer the context an online gallery provides.] Net artists trade autonomy of intent to be part of a collective aesthetic - a network, rather than addressing the totality of the web directly. The online gallery, then, breeds less spontaneity, a clearer message, and a limited audience focused on a specific aesthetic-based form of discourse.

Extra credit: Where does Tight Artists fit in?

I am very excited to release a new interactive website called DUMP HAX! For those of you who are not very familiar with dump.fm, the chatroom's moderators have the unique ability to use HTML and JavaScript in their posts. When I became a mod in late 2010, I began collecting popular HTML hacks (hax) in a text document, then a Google Docs file. Later on, I opened up the document to other mods, so we could rewrite each other's code and share ideas.

Though I no longer frequent dump, the mods continue to use and add to this document today - kudos to them for their work and expertise. I announced my plans in November to turn the hax file into a website that allows for working with the code in realtime, and as of this morning I figured out a way to do so. Yes, it's a bit of a hack in some ways, like the current iframe setup, but I think it's better to share than not, and isn't that the point anyway?

One of my contributions to the SOLO JAZZ CUP madness sweeping the Internet

Following up my recent post on Jennifer Chan's essay, Tom Moody and I hashed out some potential issues with the group ("net artists") identified in the paper, as well as shared our opinions on how to discuss commodifying and therefore money in an art context. I'm still working out my feelings on the matter. I think that any conversion of a digital object into a physical one is going to bring up the issue of money, and as a young artist who works an unrelated day job it's not hard to feel the pull of "commodifying at any cost." Historically, artists besmirched by institutions would host their own exhibitions in alternative spaces (like today's BYOBs), but now I'm wondering if giving a net art object physical form is caving to societal pressure in the first place. Hmm. See Hennesy Youngman for more on institutional critique.

Create your own art movement - drumroll - was a flop! View the delightful 3 responses here. Kudos to the contributors for their bravery. I might work something up for the hell of it.

To end on a lighter note, I ordered myself a custom mug a few weeks ago after getting fed up with my current work mug. This video is for art historians and 20th century mug slogan aficionados; everyone else should just roll their eyes.

5x7", vector image and sticker paper on metal.

I'm reading and re-reading Jennifer Chan's recent essay "The Commodification of Net Art" (PDF download) right now, and I'd love to discuss it with anyone interested. Chan makes some incredibly lucid points about what happens to net art when "commodified," i.e. turned into a physical object. So far, the two main insights I've taken away from the article are:

• Web-based artwork has a "digital aura," a quality which informs the viewer of its origin. This aura is easily lost outside of the context of the browser because display methods (such as a screen or a sheet of paper) ultimately complicate the reading of the work in a designated physical space.
• "Non-discursive" art blogs encourage insular image critique, marginalizing the artwork as "hipster capital." Chan gives the example of Sterling Crispin's Greek New Media Shit tumblr as a site which demonstrates how in-jokes can reduce actual critique to shorthand aesthetic conventions. Hipster capital in this case refers to the trading of images and references within a scene, only comprehensible by those in the know.

Initial thoughts on these points so far: I still think it's fascinating to see the attempts people make to commodify net art. Maybe it's because I enjoy accumulating hipster capital. I would love to see an exhibition predicated on the "fruitlessness" of the commodification process.

Chan's insight on in-scene feedback loops is probably the most astonishing part of the article in my opinion; online aesthetic shorthand, " Internet memes," are often discussed as inevitably ballooning in popularity like a fad. However - and I know this sounds dubious - from personal experience, for every LOLcat that makes it big there are 100 images that are just as [useful/shareable/funny] that remain in-scene as modes of "discourse." Of course, as Chan points out, is a readymade meme a useful form of discourse after all, or does it actually restrict your audience, not to mention your thoughts?

Highlighter on notepad, 4x6"

Also another highlighter drawing based on a terrible Yahoo "News" headline I saw today. Still practicing likenesses.

I've made a website where you can directly contribute to the next big art movement! Click here to add your input. We'll regroup in a week or two to discuss the results!

Hits on the blog since 2010. No need to alert Cory A. about the new post.

I miss the old Internet ways sometimes because things made more sense. Before the rise of DRM, streaming media, and "maintained identities," it was easier for us all to see that the underlying structure of the web was just files linking to other files. I remember wondering in the early 2000s if we would always have to download shared files and programs off of "ugly" hyperlinks, rather than being able to click through directly to the experience. Nevertheless, I was thankful that the links were there in the first place, so I could download that content for later use. I still have in my possession MIDIs and Pokemon GIFs I saved in 1999 from a few generous sprite-ripping websites (shut up, I was 10!).

Nowadays it can be easy to lose sight of that elegant simplicity because it's been so carefully disguised, for better and for worse. Not that the web isn't improved by the existence of streaming media and the magic of style sheets, but too much of the illusion causes us to forget what makes this mode of communication so great: sharing data.


The illusion of the web caught up to me several months ago, when I was going through a creative slump. At the tail end of the Rotors project, I was writing and thinking a lot about formal qualities of what I was calling "conglomerate" digital media, like websites (since in actuality websites are made of multiple files). I kept churning out rotors, but I felt like I was stagnating and I wasn't getting hardly any feedback from friends or acquaintances on the series. Why make net art if not for other people to look at it? I became concerned that I had chosen a format (HTML + CSS & JQuery) which, although web-native, was too "loaded" in its formal qualities to be approachable. I then began to try and evaluate other popular formats, such as files (GIFs, JPGs, HTML) in order to determine what might be a better direction for me to take.

This landed me in a huge mess, because once you start trying to figure out which formats are "relevant" and "valid," you will never escape. I stopped making sites, GIFs, everything. I went back to art history books and read abysmal histories. Then I just gave up and started playing Minecraft.

Attempt at irony, problematizing the game element.

Apparently I chose the right game for an art block. Have you seen what people build in there?! You might think an in-game computer built out of torches would be practical, but trust me, it's anything but. This got my brain going about "virtual media" - media contained within a specific digital context. For Minecraft, the medium would be the blocks that make up the world. For something like dump.fm, the virtual medium would be the limits o the post format (x characters long, text and image files only of certain scales). You can even look at Facebook posts in this way. Was the difference between Facebook-based art (has a provided context) and my HTML experiments (context-free) what was keeping me from reaching people? Was I wrong to distrust a provided context? Is the lack of context what continues to doom physical presentation of digital files? I spent my time making concessions and their associated tumblr skins, only to hate them. I thought I was getting close, but something still felt wrong.

Finally, a late-night wander through some long-forgotten haunts on the web lifted the veil for me. The problem wasn't the context, the virtual medium or the validity of the format. In the end, it's all data. In the end, it's the sharing that counts. What you share goes before how you share it. I had to - have to - rethink what I'm sharing and why.  So I will.

I have a piece in an exhibition tonight by Nicholas O'Brien entitled "Notes on a New Nature." The theme of the exhibition is the effect of the Internet on contemporary depictions of landscapes. You can read more here, and Mr. O'Brien will be giving a streaming walkthrough at 3PM EST tomorrow here.I hope you take a look!

UPDATE: O'Brien recorded a Notes on a New Nature virtual "hike" through the exhibition at 319 Scholes: click here to watch. I had only seen a couple of these works before, was totally bowled over by the video and show overall.

A few ideas for digital art group shows/locations:

• "Photo blankets" group show. Photo blankets are like $100-150 to have manufactured, so not a huge risk for participating artists. And you get a blanket!
• Salon-style projections of GIFs covering walls. I'm thinking something like ITP's Big Screens projects but lots of little images. Horror vacui. Who was it that said GIFs are only good in groups?
• No Computers Allowed: all physical artifacts of digital works. Artists must translate by any means necessary.
• Icon Show: Group of artists makes physical work based off of their favorite computer icons. I'm imagining big butterfly collection-type displays.
• Offline Store: Store that sells different mass-produced net art objects every month (like photo rugs, USB drives, etc.). Takes out the middleman - no need to copy the original when you can send the file to the manufacturer. Artists may not have say as to how their work is displayed.
• Net art fashion? I think there's more up this vein than just what PBS tells you. Pepper from Scannerjammer has been making some cool shirts, and I know we have a few other merch pushers waiting in the wings.
• Bigass lenticulars/holograms - one day, Joel!
• OS: operating system-themed works. I have at least two large works planned for something like this, just need a wealthy, loving patron. Reach me at hypo@hypothete.com!

Dumped Images Page 5

Dumped Images Page 6

Expansionism (resize the page)

New work online: let's start with Rotor 62, a scooting robot I built for the Minnesota Opera! More pics and a video here.



SUPERSTIJL - I took GIFs and still images from various sources and turned them into palette scrolling images. I then finally reduced the images to only five colors - red, yellow, blue, black and white. This is where the dumb art history reference comes in, but I liked the effect enough to group them on a page. Epileptics beware (as always).



Sliders 1 and 2. Maybe trying to be funny, maybe something about resizing algorithms? 2 holds my interest the most, but sometimes I've found myself opening 1, adjusting until I'm comfortable, and then leaving it open in a tab as I surf. Not sure what that means.

Finally, this isn't so much an art thing as a browser thing - LET'S ROLL. For bloggers or tumblr-rs that need cycling text-shadows on their non-IE-compliant pages. The code is commented.

  Well, I finally wrote that kinetic art post I was talking about! It's taken a few weeks and some great editing work (major kudos to Will Brand & Paddy Johnson) but now I think we're ready to start off the discussion. Take a look, and feel free to discuss over on the comments section at AFC.

One of my interests that I don't talk about a lot on the blog is human color vision. Cones, the cells that detect color, do not simply pick up red, green and blue. It's more like this:

thanks, Wikipedia

 ...where 700nm is pure red, and 400nm is deepest violet. Two things I find interesting about this are 1. we see that certain colors and combination of colors "peak" in perceived intensity, and 2. there is a high degree of redundancy between cones, that is your red cones pick up some orange, yellow, green etc. This redundancy gives humans an advantage over modern digital cameras when it comes to color vision: we can see a wide range of wavelengths, whereas cameras rely on the RGB color model. This means that certain color phenomena such as fluorescence cannot be photographed, only seen.

Guessing from my previously paragraph, you can probably see where I'm going: I've been working with highlighters fairly intensely for the past month, but they don't photograph well. I'm sharing anyway.






All of these drawings are fairly small. After recruiting some volunteers this afternoon (thanks frakbuddy and weh) I tried a larger drawing today, and I'm pleased with the result:

webcams, 36"x12", highlighters on gesso/MDF

 Thanks, Google. New pages:


I need to post some new writing soon! As those of you who follow my Twitter account might know, I recently discovered at the library some books detailing the history of kinetic art from this guy on. Seems to me that when the art world encountered the Duchamp situation in the 20s that there was some sort of schism, driving some artists towards meaning and and the object, and others toward a study of space-time. There seem to be a lot of gaps in the literature, so once I have a clearer picture I'll draft something.