October 9, 2015 – January 31, 2016

ARC (the Contemporary Art Department of the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris)

“Co-workers: Network as Artist” is a large and inclusive exhibition of digital art, and perhaps the first one to focus on the network, the internet, or the web as the creator of aesthetic experience. At this point digital works and web based works reach out into multiple arenas of the social and aesthetic worlds, in different voices with separate emotions, discrete social connections, and particular perceptions. The primary three impressions given by this survey of works made by this network and the people using it are that the works first of all are resolutely diverse and even individualistic, second reassert the presence the body as a social and physical source, and third reflect social concerns related to digital networks.

The first room confronts you immediately with the body as social media and personal event, through the Los Angeles artist Parker Ito’s 2015 work PBBvx.12345678910111213_son_of_cheeto_1415161718192021222324 . The images presented like posters around the walls are gathered from the screens computers and phones, and altered to speak for the artist and his body, as in the repeated phrase, “The inside of my balls is a network of some sorts.” However in Ito’s work, as in many of the others, images are repositioned, juxtaposed, printed over each other, seemingly both eventfully but obscure, immediately available through the digital imaging and complex printing systems, yet also obscure in terms of locations, references and meanings, which are not absent or absurdist, so much as mixed, mixed up and multiply connected.

The virtual and the photographed body, its locations, shells, processes, social activities, and networks, appear throughout the exhibit in the works of Ito, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Aude Pariset with Juliette Bonneviot, Cecile Evans, None Futbol Club, Ryan Trecartin, David Douard, Hito Steyerl, GCC, DIS and Shawn Maximo. Roadmaps and ideas that run through this exhibition include the body and its locations as well as social structures as imagined in different visual regimes. Aude Pariset uses reformulated printing processes to create three-dimensional sheets of color, line, and hanging materials that are as much from the world of advertising images as from social media—perhaps advertising as social media and designed communication. Like Ito the digital network is involved, but the images are reprocessed through a lens of aesthetic and documentary processes. In Aude’s works reformulated printing processes and digital processes extend each other’s ideas and meanings

Groups and collectives are represented, including GCC, None Futbol Club and DIS, the latter, known through the online DIS magazine, designed the show. The DIS work in the exhibition, The Kitchen (KEN), locates us and our bodies in front of computer screens, head-phones and photos of an array of futurisitic latrines around a pool.   Bodily functions, social relations and digital engagement are mixed and reshuffled. Throughout the exhibition the viewer is drawn into relations re-established and redefined through both technologies and our social uses of them.

The reflections on human nature, social control and functioning, and narrative power are drawn from the interactions of the body, its locations, and its desires for connections and displays. Work no. 2B by None Futbol Club equates identity and haircuts between Marcel Duchamp and athletes, using neon, photographs, and stylish gym bags. The location is the locker room, but the function is social identity and branding. On another spectrum and from another visual regime, David Douard’s We’ve Ne’er Gotten shows an image of an individual turned in on his own world in a backlight photo-box. The world is drawn-in and located through psychological isolation. The image is powerful through its multiple references to public and private space, recognizable from older mass medias and sensationalized journalism, as well as newer transformations of this such as YouTube and Facebook, here repositioned as personal insight into a human condition.

The idea of media is still present in these works, but recedes into the background of the technological handling of the media. Photography, film, installation, sculpture, video, painting, and printing are present, but augmented, manipulated, and engaged with the means provided by digital media and the internet. To be clear, in the end here it is not clear if the network of the title is the digital network, meaning the network within a computer, or the network of the internet, the network between computers. In the final consideration, I think it is fair to say that this distinction is blurred, if not erased. It is easy to forget—even for people who have lived through the change in the last thirty or forty years—how quickly and decisively we’ve moved from the now archaic world of personal computing, to a digital network in which a separate computer or phone is an outmoded device, barely usable and impoverished, if unconnected or un-connectable to a network.

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February 9 to March 6, 2016
16B Orchard Street, between Hester and Canal streets
New York City, 917-533-5375, info@firewallcafe.com

Firewall Internet Café is a fascinating pop-up exhibition that allows visitors to simultaneously search images on Google and the Chinese search engine, Baidu. Americans will not be surprised to find that Baidu’s results are “filtered” but preconceived ideas of censorship, one discovers, are complicated by nuances of language and translation. “Mao,” for example, has come to mean pornography; “firewall” conjures mythological imagery; and “Ai Weiwei” results in images of Exercycles and sweethearts. (As for censorship, Google has withdrawn from the Chinese market, but Bing remains.) The Chinese-American artist Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, whose informative installation this is, has collaborated with technologist Dan Phiffer (mastermind of the “dark net” used onsite by Occupy), along with a worldwide conspiracy of proxy hosts to bring off this seemingly simple exercise. (Simple or not, it seems to have struck a nerve in China: a Chinese citizen studying here was forbidden to participate on a panel connected with the show.) Google users, theoretically unrestricted, would do well to get to know the Party-approved Baidu, now in full export mode with notable market penetration into Brazil, Indonesia, Egypt and India. Indeed, Lower East side gallery goers, whose acknowledgement of Chinatown is usually restricted to cheap food, can get a guided tour of a future cultural, economic, and political reckoning.

Comparable Google/Baidu searches:

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March 12 to May 15, 2014
36-01 35 Avenue (at 37 Street)
Astoria, Queens

The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture was a small exhibition of 37 GIFs projected on a wall in the lobby of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY. (The exhibit has recently closed, but all of the GIFs are of course accessible online.) Jason Eppink, Assistant Curator of Digital Media at the museum, crowdsourced the exhibit with a callout on the social media site Reddit. Addressing the community at large, he wrote, “Comment with what you would consider classic reaction GIFs… then briefly explain what it means when you use it. Think of it as if you had to describe how reaction GIFs are used in Reddit comment threads to your grandmother.”

For the grandmothers among us, it should be explained that reaction GIFs are short, looped videos used to convey reactions in written exchanges online—on Reddit, in emails, via text message, etc. (For example, if a particularly delicious disagreement begins, you might post a GIF of young Michael Jackson in a movie theater, stuffing popcorn into his smile, eyes fixed on the screen, to convey expectant glee.) GIFs are “performed language,” Eppink says. While many reaction GIFs are something like art—they pique the mind and emotions; they are mesmerizing—for Eppink and other users the actual GIF is not as important as the way is used. Put simply, the reaction GIF is a rhetorical device.

Yet like any well-timed turn of phrase, decontextualization diminishes its wit. Projected (ancient technology!) on the wall of a museum (ancient institution!), the GIFs at the Museum were more like cultural relics than language. Superfluous captions by the Reddit users who submitted them explained what was being conveyed less as grandchild to grandmother than as Mindy to Mork. The thing about humans—and what makes the GIF immediately digestible—is that none of us need a subtitle to explain Orson Welles’ unblinking slow-clap or Jennifer Lawrence’s sarcastic thumbs-up. From Charles Foster Kane to JLaw, our culture’s iconic characters are iconic specifically for their clarity of expression.

A little cultural context would have been more useful. The reaction GIF signifies a web of references beyond its gesture. See (A) rapper 50 Cent in a convertible, looking almost concerned before breaking face to raise his eyebrows, laugh, and pull away. You know what it means. 50 Cent is laughing at you, but even as an object of ridicule you’re not worth enough for him to stick around. It would add a layer of meaning, however, to know the clip is from Entourage, a show known for its mocking treatment of social hierarchy. Or (B) Scottish actor David Tennant sadly standing in the rain , one illuminated raindrop tumbling off the tip of his nose, lending some absurdity to his sadness. That Tennant is better known as Doctor Who, a character popular among (dare I say) nerds—who themselves are likely familiar with feeling at once lonely, silly, and dejected—emphasizes its power. GIFs’ provenance enhances their meaning. Lifted from movies or shows that themselves carry specific cultural meaning, GIFs are iconic not just culturally, but semiotically.

There is charm to GIFs that halt, then cut back: the charm of the return. But the charm of the seamless GIF is the charm of purgatory. The best GIFs are those which seem not like videos that have been cut and looped but like single, recurrent gestures. Among the GIFs at the Museum of the Moving Image GIFs was a husky gray cat getting repeatedly hit in the chest by a model train. The poor animal’s Beckettian ennuie, his unflappable expression, his very catness (cats being, of course, the internet’s favorite fools), infused this GIF with a little extra value. He was a kind of passive Sisyphus—his fate was his nature, his nature his fate—his action equal to his reaction. I was inspired. On a roll—so to speak—I tested the internet to see if a more perfect feline Sisyphus was somewhere out there. (Of course, one was.) Predictably, I ended up on an hours-long wild GIF chase through gify.com, an extensive searchable trove of embeddable GIFs that make it possible for anyone to curate a thematic exhibition of GIFs. (Stay tuned for my upcoming Tumblr, GIFyphus.)

The exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image was meant to be not a show of GIF art, but a primer on reaction GIFs, a casual survey of GIF as cultural phenomenon. Still, the limitation of the reaction GIF is exactly what makes it problematic as exhibition content: The reaction GIF is a synesthetic metaphor. It is a way of saying, “I feel like this looks,” and as such must connect the visual with its context. Yet artists like Yoshihide Sodeoka, Evan Roth, Jon Cates, and Sophie Alda treat the GIF as a medium in and of itself, not just a device. Their GIFs do not require any context—and many of them are not just mesmerizing or witty but aesthetically shrewd, idiosyncratic, startling, and sophisticated. Since GIF art is still an emerging form, GIF artists are a diverse group, with backgrounds that range from art to design to computer programming, from film and animation to photography to fashion; what unites them is their rigorous, insightful play with what’s really interesting about the iconic GIF.

So the reaction GIF is fun. But it’s no longer the point. Next time I see a GIF in a museum, I want it to be the work of an artist like Adam Ferriss, Erdal Inci, Emilio Gomariz, Peekasso, HatePlow, Ryder Ripps, or JD Molero…

…I could go on.

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In May 2013 the app publishing company Art Intelligence released Art Intelligence: Keith Haring, a decidedly comprehensive and dynamic app designed exclusively for iPad 2.  The program’s introduction screen, in an essay entitled The Politics of Dancing, notes that Haring was a follower of the Warholian tenents of mass-production. This was first evidenced in the early 1980s in ephemeral chalk drawings in New York City subways in which he employed the black paper used to cover old advertisements as canvases for his iconic visual vocabulary.  Today the wide availability of Haring watches, coffee mugs, and even cleaning supplies speaks to this same interest—perhaps then to be able to download a piece of Keith Haring is the logical next step.  Haring opened his Pop Shop in 1986 making his iconography available to the denizens of downtown Manhattan, but now not even geography can preclude the digital consumer from getting a piece of Keith.

The app’s “curator” Bridget L. Goodbody describes Art Intelligence: Keith Haring as a “visual Wikipedia on steroids,” and she has a point: the energy of the 1980s art scene is reanimated through a virtual library of photography, video, and artwork that the user is invited to explore.  The app successful skirts the line between accessibility and political and art historical investment; clearly designed for adults, the descriptions are often wordy and sometimes academic, though younger users could appreciate the app equally for its incredibly comprehensive catalog of artworks and archival photos.  In this way, the app mimics the accessibility of the artist’s own work—Haring created a collaborative mural project with public schools in Chicago in 1989, and his famous 1986 “Crack is Wack” mural was designed for children, painted on a Harlem handball court.  His later focus on socio-political themes such as AIDS prevention and Apartheid in Africa birthed (sometimes pornographic) works obviously designed for adults, but his cartoonish visual vocabulary has always lent itself to young fans.

A virtual gallery of Keith Haring’s art is presented through detailed high-resolution reproductions.  Organized chronologically, the user is invited to browse a massive selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and murals.  These works are then searchable via the “Timeline” tab, which is divided into the broad categories of “life,” “art,” and “world” providing a social and historical context for the artist’s work. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how Haring and his art were at the forefront of public consciousness, each artistic milestone can be clicked on for more information. For instance, in 1985 Brooke Shields posed nude for photographer Richard Avedon with a Haring-painted pink heart.  The caption for the image reads: “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Keith.”  Haring was at the forefront of a scene that dominated downtown Manhattan, and his ties to major players in fashion and music, in relation to his cartoonish subway drawings, created an instantly recognizable visual iconography.  Also in 1985, Haring produced his Free South Africa poster for the concert where Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Hall and Oates sang “We Are the World;” a video of the performance is available via YouTube on the app.

The “Connections” tab is organized by themes such as “art,” “birth,” “Africa” or “AIDS.”  The user can maximize each image to see a short blurb: I stumbled upon a 1987 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show entitled “Lets Talk about AIDS.”  The “Resources” tab includes links to a selection of film, music, and literature that the creators feel is somehow relevant to Haring’s work.  Toni Morrison’s Beloved is listed for purchase alongside Paris is Burning, a 1990 documentary about ‘80s drag ball culture in New York City, and Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio.  These choices are thoughtful, and while many address a historical relationship, a work such as Beloved (set 100 years before Haring’s birth at the end of the American Civil War) speaks instead to the artist’s commitment to visual representation of marginalized groups, a trope which is often schematized in Haring’s early work, which shows dogs, human figures and aliens in the same scene.  Perhaps the least useful portion of the program, at least currently, is the “Conversations” tab, which touts itself as “a forum to express your ideas to fellow art geeks.”  In this early iteration there are few conversations to be had, though in our era of digital anonymity and polemical web boards the prospect of sparking debates and sharing experiences is encouraging.  Fittingly, Art Intelligence: Keith Haring has a feeling of dynamism that recalls Haring’s own playfulness, as well as his simultaneous emphasis on stylistic consistency alongside innovation.

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Carla Gannis and Peter Patchen are colleagues at Pratt Institute where they are Assistant Chair and Chair, respectively, of Digital Arts.  artcritical let them loose in Play Station,  the exhibition of artist-made video games, curated by Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum at Postmasters.  True to form, the venerable professors soon adopted avatars from Street Fighters II in a series of tweets and SMSs on the show.  What follows is the edited version of their exchange.

Chun-Li (Carla Gannis): In high school for two days or so I had the top score in Pac-Man at my local arcade. I played home console games too, but public gaming spaces really appealed to me. Competing and having fun was a different experience from my painting and piano classes, where I was expected to be serious and thoughtful and focus on “Capital A Art.”

The Postmasters opening last Thursday night, touted as “fun, exciting, post-video game, interactive,” whether it was or was not, provided its own counterpoint to art in all caps, and a relief to the after taste of Miami Basel blue chips and over-priced cocktails.

The cacophony of sound and action, of hands wielding controllers and keyboards, of voices shouting in victory or sighing in defeat, transported me back to a pre-internet ‘80s arcade, then forward to a post-formal art space where notions of precious art are subverted by prescient ideas.

Ryu (Peter Patchen): Nostalgia was certainly in the air at Postmasters. I felt like I was carried back to a 1990’s LAN (local area connection) party, video games on all of the walls, projectors everywhere and everyone seemed to have brought their own wonky computer. Beeps and squawks, guns, fighting noises and…was that a cowbell?

I expected to see another showdown with Feng Mengbo in Q4U (2002) but it was you in Street Fighter II (Travis Hallenbeck’s contribution to the show).

Chun-Li: Thursday night definitely was bonus round night, including not only the Play Station exhibition, curated by Marcin Ramocki and Paul Slocum of 12 digital artists (Mike Beradino, Mauro Ceolin, Mary Flanagan, Travis Hallenbeck, Jeremiah Johnson, Ernesto Klar, Joe McKay, Jason Rohrer, Rafaël Rozendaal, Eddo Stern, and CJ Yeh) but BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), where ten artists (Chris Burke, Zach Gage, James George, Travis Hallenbeck, Matt Parker, Billy Rennekamp, Erik Sanner, Alan Shaffer, Paul Slocum, and Charlie Whitney) brought there own games pieces to project.

The “salon style” installation of video projections and screens in a packed house made it difficult to find a focus at first. One piece from the BYOB group of artists that really stood out to me was Erik Sanner’s piece The Problem With Destruction Is That Once You Destroy Something, You Can’t Redestroy It (2010). A video of an orange traffic cone was projected above an enticingly big red button. Upon pressing the button you shot the traffic cone. Press it repeatedly and you could shoot the cone to bits until the video looped and you shot it all over again. I compulsively pressed the button again and again until a friend intervened, assuring me I’d never get a vote from him for president.

Ryu: That big red button certainly was irresistible. Sanner’s idea of recursive destruction as a creative act kept the crowd busy all night. I don’t think there were 5 minutes without the Sanner family gunshots ringing out. This piece stood out as an artwork from the rest of BYOB projections that were straight-up video games like Street Fighter II.

Chun-Li: It seems that your suggesting straight-up doesn’t represent “games as art.”  I found it refreshing that some pieces, such at Street Fighter II, were ready-mades so to speak. And James George’s ShudderShutter VS (2011) part of the BYOB crew, certainly crosses into the realm of art. In his words it’s an antagonistic mobile game. The gist is two players compete against each other by violently shaking their respective iPhones while live feed video of them is projected from both phones.  A shudder is rapidly closing over both projections and the more aggressive “shaker” distorts her footage but keeps her image on screen longer. (I use the female pronoun here because I remember beating you in this game Ryu).

Ryu: Winning and losing aside, no, I don’t think all of the BYOB pieces were “games as art.” The dividing line for me is whether or not the work engages any concepts beyond gameplay.

Chun-Li: Right, that said the dividing line for “art” has become so much more about price tag, status, and where an artist earned his/her degree. The works on display opening night and in the official exhibition appealed to me because they did not seem to embody art ideals established by the “1%.”

The pieces on view, and in use sans tokens, provided platforms for social critique, personal narrative, or as in Rafaël Rozendaal’s Finger Battle (2011), an impetus to explore ones own OCD behaviors. There was a resonance in the physical juxtapositions of old, new and hybrid hardware and software. I don’t think you could achieve the same affect online.

Ryu: I still contend that there is a divide, an interesting one, between art and game within the game context. You can’t deny a stark contrast between Street Fighter II and  Mauro Ceolin’s RGB webdroids 2 (2009). While both are “video games” webdroids 2 comments on current socio economics while Street Fighter II just lets me body slam you Chun-Li!

Chun-Li: Touché Ryu. I’ll admit Thursday night felt more like the “party til it’s 1999.” When I returned to the gallery on Saturday I formed different impressions for quite a few of the pieces.

Ryu: I agree about the return trip. On closer inspection each game had it’s own sense of time and distinct place in time. While some games like Rozendaal’s Finger Battle used the very contemporary iPhone, most had a sense of nostalgia ranging from Atari or Nintendo controllers to familiar game tropes like asteroids or missile defense. I think the quiet gallery helped the more contemplative pieces like Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] (2003).

In contrast to the arcade quality of the main gallery, Ernesto Klar’s Luzes Relacionais (2010) provided a more contemplative space. While Klar’s work is more contemporary, technologically speaking, than many of the nostalgic pieces in the front gallery, Luzes hearkens back to Anthony McCall’s Long Film for Four Projectors (1974)– 16mm film wedges of smoke-filled light ending in interactive minimalist lines create a wonderfully simple work. By the way, what exactly was I breathing?

Chun-Li: The back gallery offered full immersion. I stood under one of the triangles of light and asked Scotty to “beam me up.”

It’s interesting that Klar pays tribute to Lygia Clark, but not to McCall. I wonder if he is aware of the McCall work? I wasn’t, prior to your mention. A lot of earlier installation and digital art has only begun to be re-examined.

Ryu: The question is, are the interactive elements in Klar’s work sufficiently unique to make it significantly different from McCall’s installation?

Chun-Li: I think context is significant. McCall would have probably incorporated interactivity in his earlier work had there been the technology to do so, but there wasn’t. When we see a photo of the McCall and the Klar they seem almost indistinguishable, and this is when experiential aspects really come into “play” (pardon the pun).

Ryu: Of course, McCall’s work was also interactive, that is, people interrupted the light and changed the installation through physical interaction. With digitally mediated light, there are more possibilities or variations but the question of whether it significantly changes the concept remains.

Chun-Li: I don’t see a problem in an artist expanding upon the ideas of earlier artists. Honestly how can it be avoided at this point in history? A more interesting aspect of the installation, in the context of the Postmasters show, is its inclusion of Luzes Relacionais as a game. Organic lines of light, both independently expressive and responsive to our gestures, and sound as an amalgam of integrated algorithmic and biological participation– these aren’t elements we commonly find integrated into game engines. The curators’ extension of interpretation excites me.

To that point I did feel a dichotomy in my own reactions to the broad spectrum of gaming that the works represented. Mary Flanagan’s [domestic] for example I watched, interpreted, and even while “playing” I absorbed meaning. On the other hand in Joe McKay’s Swatter (2011), an insect killing game, I figured out the mechanics and played for the high score. The physical interface was certainly novel; the player directs his aim with a wooden knob and smacks a fly swatter on a DIY table to shoot projected insects crawling down the gallery wall. A blue emergency button sometimes worked to save you from the onslaught of bugs.

Ryu: I find Flanagan’s [domestic] to be a very different experience from the other pieces. The work is a large video projection of a “house” on fire with a video game controller hanging from the ceiling of the gallery. As the game controller slipped into my hands I automatically began moving quickly through the space as though something were chasing me. It was a very visceral response that works against the contemplative content of the work. As I explored the game controller, I discovered I could shoot a green glob at most any surface that would turn into a romance novel. While the piece was rendered in a video game engine and controlled with a game controller, the work is actually an interactive exploration of Flanagan’s memories of a house fire. In order to really see the work, I needed to slow down and read.

Chun-Li: Yes, it took a while to slow down my reaction time to all of the works. What I appreciated was that there was no “false advertising” in the show description. Flanagan’s [pileOfSecrets]: Jump + Ascend (2011) was the only spectator piece, where a viewer couldn’t also be a player or user.  Quite a counterpoint to the Social Media show a few months ago — a rather static show about online social engagement. There was very little representation of “real” virtual engagement within the exhibition.

Ryu: Mauro Ceolin’s RGB webdroids 2, an Astroids style shooter game is a good example of this kind of engagement. With the Happy Mac startup icon replacing the spaceship blasting the logos of E-bay, Skype, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and my personal favorite, Wikipedia. I think Ceolin was smart to leverage iconic game play that we all know to comment on the relentless data noise of the Internet. Of course, along with the game trope comes the concept that you can never win.

Chun-Li: I’m very competitive as you might have noticed when we competed against each other in Finger Battle, Street Fighter II and Shudder Shutter, but I take perverse pleasure in interactions that are recursive and inconclusive, like RGB… or Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky (2011). Oddly or not Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of 10 came to mind with Rohrer’s piece. The work “Playing a painting”, a fully functional Atari 2600 painting, Mike Beradino’s Electric Paint 2.0 (2011) had its conceptual and perceptual charms.

Ryu: You are competitive! Four Finger Battle defeats and you kept coming back for more. After your run in with shooting Sanner’s pylon, I was almost afraid to win… almost.

Chun-Li: Despite my losses to you, my right hand did beat my left hand in Finger Battle. There were two Zork-like games. One, Jeremiah Johnson’s Void Gaze (2011) I found engaging and an evolution of the original platform. Through the right keywords you could unlock images that expanded the narrative and aesthetic experience. Travis Hallenbeck’s RPG (Random Party Game) (2011) I found somewhat frusterating. The set up—“Dec 20th, 2012 at 11:30pm”– conjured up all sorts of narrative potential that felt thwarted once I began to interact with the AI.

Ryu: As I mentioned before I found it interesting that each game had its own pacing. The older the game was, the slower the tempo seemed to be. I couldn’t focus at all on RPG or Void Gaze at the opening. The next day, in the serenity of the quiet gallery, I felt transported back to the 80s and actually slowed down enough to explore the work.

Chun-Li: Indeed the opening night was frenetic. I’m looking at a photo of you from the evening leaning over a keyboard, shoulders hunched, mouth agape, glazed over eyes and your fingers are a blur. Let’s not talk about the photo of me trying to obtain the true secret to happiness by jumping towards the Google+ block in CJ Yeh’s Happiness X 100 (2011).

No digital conversation is complete without keywords. Here’s one that I know will put you on the defensive. Nonlinear.

Ryu: n.o.n…um…linear?

Chun-Li: Yes! N.O.N. L.I.N.E.A.R. as in nonlinear narrative.

Ryu: O.K. Chun-Li, I accept your challenge.

Chun-Li: Nonlinear narrative — “disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order. It is often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory but has been applied for other reasons as well.”

That’s what Wikipedia says.

Ryu: Wikipedia!? Where’s the RGB webdroids 2 Asteroids blaster when you need it?

Each action, idea or thought comes in a linear progression. An ever-new idea is understood only by comparing it to previous experience. While we may take different paths or revisit an earlier stage in a work or game, we can’t un-know what we have already experienced. This is as true in Jeremiah Johnson’s text-based Void Gaze as it is in Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-filled Sky. Iterative, recursive, multi-pathed, yes, but nonlinearity doesn’t exist for humans. Take that! Right(2) Forward Back Square! (Not Forward Right(2) Square Back).

Chun-Li: It exists for humans with short-term memory disorders. (I’m cheating).

Ryu: No fair! We call that insanity.

Chun-Li:  I think it’s an issue of semantics. I think linearity connotes a direction that doesn’t diverge from one path. I think of nonlinearity as multi-pathed, as a branching form. I suggest the inherent nature of the Internet is nonlinear, where one always has multiple options (trajectories) instead of a single one. Flanagan’s [domestic] provides a nonlinear narrative. The user is provided the agency to experience the work out of sequence.

Ryu: Tomato – Tomato eh? O.K. I block your semantic punch and answer with a ludology/narratology combo!

Chun-LI: Ah game theory! Ludology as I understand it focuses on the rules of play as the central aspect to gaming. Narratology posits games within a tradition of other narrative and expressive forms. Finger Battle could be favored by a Ludologist for example. Eddo Stern’s Earthling (2011), with its suggestive keywords: road work, survival of the fittest, progress to the right, perhaps would appeal more to the Narratologist.

Ryu: Why are these mutually exclusive? Shouldn’t the gameplay be informed by the narrative? It seems to me that context is key in understanding any narrative and gameplay is certainly context. This also seems like a very one-sided debate. as I doubt that the Ludologists named themselves this.

Chun-Li: “Ludologistlovestoriestoo: notesfromadebatethatnevertookplace”

Ryu: Nice kick Chun-Li, I stand corrected.

Chun-Li: I got a few good kicks in by the way, “for a girl.” Which does bring me to the point that out of all the artists in the Play Station show and the BYOB, there was only one woman. Is there an elephant in the room anyone? (Of course one in full-on matrix kick suspension)

Ryu: I noticed that too. Gaming seems to be one area in which women haven’t gained much ground. I think the numbers of women in interactive art programs are on par with men. Maybe the disparity is just on the game side and not art/tech in general?

Chun-Li: On par if not surpassing in school enrollment numbers. But certainly within the commercial game industry there is a dearth of women.

Ryu: There are some pretty significant female role models in tech– like Rear-Admiral GraceHopper, co-inventor of COBOL – that are getting more attention now. In gaming do you think that has to do with opportunity or the relative maturity of young men versus young women?

Chun-Li: I think the game industry can be comprised of more than men in extended states of adolescence. Brenda Laurel, Theresa Duncan, and Flanagan come to mind as women who have made or are making inroads into games for girls and getting women involved in gaming as “players” (in both senses of the word). I’m optimistic about women being involved in innovative forms of gaming, and as one potential, the extension of passive narrative forms into participatory experiences.

Ryu: Interesting, I think the extension of classical narrative forms and not just gameplay is a key feature in a game as art. Of the works in the Playstation show, I think the more successful artworks transcended time. Mary Flanagan’s Pile of Secrets for example used clips that ranged from Mario Brothers (1983) to Oblivion (2007).  These edited clips of Flanagan playing 1st person shooter games follow characters across multiple games performing the same actions and reinforcing the same limited patterns no matter which game it is.

Jump. Shoot. Punch. Kick. Run. Kind of a sad list in regards to human potential.

Chun-Li: Yes, but her other piece Ascending is more aspirational. [Insert smile emoticon].

Ryu: I think it will get better soon in the arts. The technology is making its way into the hands of artists who are interested in more than just the technology. The question is, when will the collectors of interactive arts become sophisticated enough to see past the eye candy to the content (or lack thereof)?

Chun-Li: What’s exciting about the Postmasters show, particularly following the Miami fairs, is that you and I are compelled by the work to ask so many questions, and that there are so many tangents to them. There are not a lot of other art experiences that excite me, rile me, or force me to ask questions about my own preoccupations with art and technology.

The post “That Big Red Button Was Irresistible”: Play Station at Postmasters appeared first on artcritical.

Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users often modify. The text is usually chatty and has an insider feel to it. Long time users appear to have developed genuine friendships. However, as long as you can keep up and communicate something using the visual grammar and syntax that lies behind the at times seemingly random flow of images you can join the fun. It’s easy to save any of the still images or animated gifs that appear in any given thread, allowing users to easily modify them. Users can also click on an image and drag its URL into the submission box, making it that much easier to build on some theme or joke or commentary, to use juxtaposition and modification to make something new.

Dump.fm is a unified field in the sense that there are a number of things going on at once and they all tend to flow by seamlessly. The description I have given above might give some flavor of the site, but to try and define exactly what the dynamic on dump.fm is by looking at one facet of it would be like examining one neuronal firing to discover the origin of consciousness. Users post images found on the Internet and re-contextualize them, celebrating in a devil may care fashion what Duncan Alexander calls “remix culture”, where authorship becomes meaningless, and composition takes precedence. Images and animated gifs can be used in place of words, and they can represent a complex notion. There is a lot of recycling on dump.fm. Images that have been around for a long time have been radically transformed, lovingly modified, again and again.

The very act of posting on dump.fm calls into question the burdensome concept of the unique object. One and all welcome borrowing/stealing and celebrate the creative impulse in a fairly pure form. Taking someone else’s post and making something of it is the ultimate compliment. Long time users could probably point out the origins of some image that has been turned into an evolving meme through time, but new users will have no idea where or when or even how the animated gifs and collaged and tweaked digital images were made. But the creators of dump.fm are not trying to baffle or mystify the public and the fact that there is a pull down menu on the top of the homepage that allows users to go to the online programs that enable a person to create many of the effects that are on display in every thread on dump.fm, emphasizes the egalitarian ethos of dump.fm.

There is an unabashed celebration of popular culture and an awareness of current events present as well. In fact, the timeliness of the image play on dump.fm is unmatched in the world of visual arts, as is the love of archiving and sharing images. The image is truly ascendant and isn’t just a vessel for ill-formed postmodern ideology. There is a strange combination of frivolity and complexity present and in terms of authorship, there is a strange combination of anonymity and camaraderie as well as a cult of personality on display in the often modified and tongue in cheek webcam photos users post. These webcam images then get brought into the mix, get trimmed and cropped and pasted into a new context.

Users criticize the dregs of American culture while endearing themselves to it in some way, avoiding the political correctness and self righteousness one sees on display in the art galleries. Unapologetic images of the celebrity flavors of the month get posted, along with knowing winks at current events in the world of politics. Emotional sentiment swings from mockery to adoration very quickly in a thread. Very few subject matters are taboo. The blending of a weird cyber-transcendentalism, expressed through psychedelic and trance-inducing animated gifs, whose looped movements are efficient at capturing the gaze, along with a enthusiastic courtship with  the obscene materialism of our capitalist culture, celebrated with coded, blinged-out reveries, often leads to frank personal discussions filled with drug references, complaints about financial woes and crumby jobs, and straightforward yearning for basic necessities, and more importantly, sex. Users are surprisingly welcoming to outsiders or newbies who don’t know the language of dump.fm, and you are not allowed to block anyone.

There is something refreshingly and unpretentiously utopian about dump.fm. No one is selling the content they post, and in one important sense everyone is treated like an artist. If you come up with the goods it gets acknowledged. And although a lot of the visual and text-based discourse on dump.fm is humorous and frivolous — when was the last time a work of visual art actually made you laugh out loud? — some of the images and animations posted are genuinely disturbing and thought provoking, with an unforced element of social critique

Each posting has the potential to be a number of different things. It could be part of a conversation, someone posting an image or animated gif that they worked on and wanted to share with the community, and something the user had in their voluminous archive of images that they built up through time and wanted to share with people who would critique or appreciate it, and more importantly use it to make something new, based on its composition and value as an image. Finally, an image or animation could be the beginning or part of an exploration of a visual theme. Thematic threads can be on any topic.

Mentally combing and sifting through the billions of images available online can generate a sense of discovery. Every user loves to experience stumbling upon something that they know will generate activity in the community or even better become part of the vocabulary. Appropriating the right image, one that has a strong visual appeal and is funny or disturbing, takes a certain skill set.

Some of the animated gifs posted on dump.fm are comparable to the many religious rituals that incorporate repetitious movements to induce trance states. Loops are stuck in time, take viewers out of linear time. Animated gifs consist of fragments of Youtube videos, usually of Hollywood movies or music videos or archival TV footage, or they are original designs, usually of a geometric nature, but not always. Watching one, you slowly become aware of the start and end points of the loop. In the animated gifs made from appropriated images, there is usually some sort of epiphany, a certain action or facial expression that gets repeated, that is pulled out of context, and becomes a symbol or the epitome of a mood, feeling, or state of mind. The animated gif is the perfect combination of movement and form. It lies outside any narrative structure and is not static. It is related to the avant-garde short films of Peter Kubelka in its use of repetition. The strategies art critics use again and again to enlighten readers about an exhibition of paintings don’t apply when it comes to animated gifs. They exist in time. They contain specific movements/transitions/transformations, of forms, lines, and colors. So change is inherent to the meaning.

The Internet has had a profound impact on human consciousness. The qualities unique to the Internet, a girth of free digital content and software and the ability to hyperlink and work with all types of media simultaneously using only one machine, provide many rich tools for talented and intelligent artists to use. Until the value of works of art is freed from their status as coveted, unique objects whose value is further determined and inflated by a highly specialized discourse, the extraordinary and innovatory art being made with and for computers, will remain outside existing market structures.

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YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video, the Guggenheim Museum’s laughably belated celebration of YouTube wound down on October 21, when a panel of cultural celebrities from the worlds of film, music, and visual/performing arts, including Douglas Gordon, Laurie Anderson, and Darren Aronofsky, chose the cream of the crop, or 20 videos, from a shortlist of 125 videos culled from 23,000 global submissions. The quality of the videos on the shortlist varies, but not greatly. The range goes from boring/unoriginal/pretentious/predictable, to amusing/cute/watchable but instantly forgettable.

One gets the feeling that the Biennial of Creative Video was really just an excuse for the Guggenheim to show off video projection technology that made it possible to project separate video feeds on each ringed layer of the exterior of the museum. In fact, if one visits the site, it is made clear that the projection technology is the real star of the show. Added on top of this, the dire-sounding band OK Go, who marketed themselves quite successfully through their use of YouTube years ago, performed on acoustic guitars while perched on tall orange ladders in the center of the floor of the museum during the culminating event on October 21. One supposes that performing on the floor wouldn’t have been artistic enough, and would not have allowed the person who was filming the event to place the museum’s projection technology, which was constantly flashing on every surface of the architecture above everyone’s heads in nearly every frame, in the spotlight. Forget about trying to figure out what video was playing and what was happening in each video. Just enjoy the projection technology!

It’s truly difficult to pick a favorite among the entries because one is overwhelmed by the ultra-thin artistic veneer covering all of them. If you made a checklist of artistic pretensions you would fill it up quickly. Black and white and grainy footage of African Americans living in the projects with rap music playing in the background, check. Surreal anime-inspired animation that verges on pedophilia and focuses on the female character’s vagina, check. Plenty of high art references that remind the viewer more of ancient MTV programming, when they actually showed music videos 24 hours a day, more than anything else, check. A bland form of feminism and social critique that includes many close ups of the actor’s deadpan face, check. 8-bit animation-inspired scribbles and barely legible narratives, check. Music videos starring actor or rock-rap star wannabe artists, check. Unfortunately, the clichés just go on and on.

The entry, “999 Days: Russell Higgs URBAN BARBARIAN” consists of 999 still images of the artist wearing silly headgear and covering parts of his face with – or sticking in his mouth – various common objects. The artist’s description of his work is snicker-inducing. According to him it is about “Being and Time” and “how we look and how we are looked at”. Well dude, this video consists of you wearing a bunch of stupid shit on your face and head. Not unlike every other entry in this strange contest, this video is tasteful, carefully put together, seamlessly constructed. It has art-appropriate editing and composition, all backed by a moody Brian Eno-esque artsy-fartsy soundtrack. These formal qualities are diametrically opposed to the true YouTube aesthetic. And to top it all off, the entries are rampant with professionalism: many of them have been winners of, or shortlisted for prestigious film and video awards. All of which completely undermines what the greatness of YouTube is all about.

YouTube videos have aesthetic value primarily because they exist outside any institutions and they are 100% unprofessional, if they are not archival footage. The artistry and profundity consists entirely of happy accidents, the oddities and quirks of amateur composition. Watching YouTube videos on your home or work computer and coming upon accidents and surprise juxtapositions, and jukebox-like videos that feature one still image and a song playing in the background, can truly be an exciting and surprise-filled experience. One can wade through videos or old television commercials or shows and satisfy nostalgic impulses, or come upon live footage of bands that do not exist in any other context. There is bizarre material aplenty and it is indeed quite difficult not to find something that relates to your interests in some way. Homogenizing the experience and presenting it as High Art in the museum context not only falsifies what the millions of computer users who visit and enjoy YouTube everyday get out of it, it also presents social and cultural history in a completely false and ahistorical manner.

The post Missing the Magic: YouTube Play at the Guggenheim appeared first on artcritical.

The beta version of the new subdirectory of the PBS.org website, announced with the fanfare of a media release, is not, alas, particularly user friendly. When the homepage loads we see the title “Ruin & Revival”, and collection of video shorts that focus on post-Katrina New Orleans. The clips are supposed to be a part of something called “Craft in America”, and since I wasn’t sure what that was I clicked on the phrase. I was taken to an “unable to locate” screen. Among these clips was a fragment of a Tavis Smiley interview with Branford Marsalis in what is billed as a “curated” exhibition. But we are not sure who the curator is or whether the web designers really needed to use the verb “to curate”, so wildly overused of late. Is there a thesis behind this collection of video clips? Obviously they all have to do with post-Katrina New Orleans, but beyond that there really is no rhyme or reason to them except that they all have to do with art in some way. There really is nothing much else to the homepage except for these video clips which are smack dab in the middle. There are some menu items, in small white font on a black background at the top of the page and towards the bottom of the page there is yet another row of the same video clips covering the top of the same page. The rest of the website is an archive of sorts.

The top menu includes the following items: PROGRAMS A-Z, TV SCHEDULES, SUPPORT PBS, SHOP PBS. The lower menu items are all arts related: DANCE, THEATER, VISUAL ART, FILM, MUSIC. I clicked on VISUAL ART to see where it would take me. There were three rows of six hyperlinked images that take the visitor to slide shows of images taken from different episodes of Art in the Twenty First Century (Art:21). Annoyingly, there were no links to the actual full episodes the stills are taken from. Visitors have to back track and search anew to try and discover the link to the full episodes.

I went back to the homepage and gave PROGRAMS A-Z a try. A quick search box and a number of hyperlinked icons for a number of popular PBS shows came up, but only three out of the eight shows had anything to do with the arts. Further down the page there was an alphabetical listing of many different PBS shows. The ones in the list that related to the ARTS were not singled out in any way. This was frustrating to say the least. Since there is no indication whether or not the links take you to text, images, or a video clip I decided to randomly click on one that I thought related to the arts. I clicked on “Thomas Eakins: Scenes from Modern Life” and I was taken to what was essentially an overview and advertisement for the film. So there was no real content there. Then I clicked “Power of Art” and I got the annoying 403 Forbidden screen. I was determined to find substantial content. I clicked on “Hans Hofmann: Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist” and I was taken to another advertisement and overview of a film that was not available for me to watch but I that I could purchase.

Finally I clicked on “Art in the Twenty-First Century” and after clicking through a few pages I was able to access Seasons 1-5 of the show. Clumsy website notwithstanding, it should be stated that this show will teach the general public more about how artists work than anything that has or likely will appear on Bravo’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”.

The post Beta Get Your Act Together, PBS: A critical look at their new arts website appeared first on artcritical.

Francis Valentine O’Connor is probably best known as a distinguished scholar and connoisseur of the work of Jackson Pollock, but he has other areas of expertise as well. One is the many paintings, mosaics, and even tapestries designed for public spaces in America over the past millennium. Now – after thirty years of preparation— he has decided that the best way to share this knowledge with fellow scholars, curators and art-lovers is to put his book, The Mural in America, online. The resulting website has eight parts, divided into 36 chapters, in turn subdivided into 207 sections that range in length from one paragraph to many. The reader also gets more than 300 illustrations, eight bibliographies, one appendix, multiple links (with gratifyingly easy navigation), and a search box so far superior to any hard-copy index as to vindicate on its own online over traditional, print publishing.

The wealth of information in The Mural in America is staggering. Beginning with prehistoric Native American rock art, the narrative progresses through landscape decorations in the parlors of Colonial and Early American homes, patriotic murals  in the U.S. Capitol, allegorical academic murals of the Gilded Age, Art Nouveau and Art Deco murals, murals with concrete historical symbolism during the Progressive Era and early 1930s, mural painting under New Deal sponsorship in the later 1930s, the “private” murals of abstract expressionism in the 1940s and ‘50s, and the reversion to murals intended for public spaces since 1965, including the conceptual work by Sol LeWitt, the Community Mural Movement and, taking the story into the present century, thecool illusionism of  Richard Haas.  Truly, there is something for scholars of every historical period here.

Much of this makes absorbing reading, whether one is being introduced to unfamiliar subjects, like the delightful “Painted Forest” in a lumberjack’s lodge in Wisconsin by the itinerant German limner, Ernest Hüpeden, or reintroduced to familiar ones, like Maxfield Parrish’s impish “Old King Cole” Art Nouveau decorations in the bar of Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel. O’Connor incorporates into each of his eight parts contextual discussions that are illuminating and sometimes provocative, ranging from one on Native American concepts of time and space to another on the rising importance of women in later 19th-century society as an explanation for the primacy of the “dynamic virgin” in academic murals.  Particularly solid and rewarding are those sections in the book dealing with the historical murals of Thomas Hart Benton, the politically radical Mexican muralists, and the aims and activities of the many governmental bodies who sponsored mural-painting during the New Deal (not just the WPA). Pollock, surprisingly, is deemed a failure as a muralist, because even his larger paintings weren’t designed for appropriate public spaces, and because the artist (in O’Connor’s opinion) was concerned solely with self-expression, as opposed to public concerns.

O’Connor says this book is the first comprehensive history of mural painting in America. He must know, but as his bibliographies show, many scholars have discussed individual artists and/or projects.  He not infrequently refers the reader to such discussions instead of incorporating what they say.  The book is extraordinarily rich in original research, but all these references to other authors, while generous, also make it seem as much a master plan or compendium as a single, unified work.  Nor is it finished.  Frequent sections on individual undertakings (not unlike Wikipedia) wind up with a comment to the effect that “more research is needed.” Graduate students looking for dissertation topics should find happy hunting ground.

That said, one is often reminded that this is a self-published work, which seems to have gone online without editing. O’Connor shifts back and forth between referring to himself in the first person singular, as “I,” and in the third person singular, as “the author.” Consistency here might have made the text less confusing. The book expresses many personal opinions.  Mostly, this is very refreshing, but occasional outbursts sound ill-considered and incompletely thought out (the kind of opinion that an editor might have questioned).   For example, O’Connor blames the “modernist” emphasis on personal expression for the fact that Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder have gotten more scholarly attention than the academic muralists Kenyon Cox and Edwin Blashfield. But the capacity of an artist to achieve personal expression has been prized since the Renaissance (if not perhaps in the Middle Ages).  Did not Giotto,  Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rubens, Tiepolo, and Delacroix all have very personal ways of expressing themselves, even in their murals?

Later on, O’Connor relents and finds good words to say about Eakins and Homer.  Again, an editor might have caught the inconsistency. As for Blashfield and Cox, to judge from the rather small illustrations of their work available online, their styles were even duller and more insipid than their similarly classicizing British contemporaries, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederick Leighton.  Granted, the iconography of the most ambitious murals by Blashfield and Cox is elaborate enough to delight the heart of any art historian, but art historians (even the best of them) can sometimes allow themselves to become diverted from formal values by iconography.

One wishes that O’Connor had hired a proofreader, copy editor and/or fact checker, but he doesn’t even seem to have used his computer’s spell-checker. Thus we have  “emblemized” (for “emblematized”), “howevetr” (for “however”), “non-descript” (for “nondescript”), “expatriot” (for “expatriate”), “niceities” (for “niceties”), “shetle” (for “shtetl”), “clientel” (for “clientele”), “immediatley” (for “immediately”) “nobless oblige” (for “noblesse oblige”), “tromp l’oeil” (for “trompe l’oeil”), and “ilusionistic” (for “illusionistic”).  Some errors couldn’t have been detected by a spell-checker, as when a wrong but still correctly-spelled word appears. O’Connor has ”lightening” when he means “lightning,” “cantors” when he means “canters, “ ”capitols” when he means “capitals,” “fist” when he means “first,” and “boarders” when he means “borders.”  Then there are proper names: “Chagal” (for “Chagall”), “Kirshner” (for “Kirchner”), “Lowrey Sims” (for “Lowery Sims”), “Benglesdorf” (for “Bengelsdorf”), “Maurice Stern” (for “Sterne”), “Walter Kaufmann” (for “Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr.”), “Falling Water” (for “Fallingwater”), Georgio Cavallon” (for “Giorgio Cavallon”), “Rackstraw Downs” (for “Downes”), and “Kenneth Nolan” (for “Noland”).  As for factual errors, Thorstein Veblen didn’t publish an exposé of the meat-packing industry. Upton Sinclair did.  It’s doubtful that Ben Shahn depicted John L. Lewis organizing garment workers, as Lewis was head of the coal miners’ union.

To be fair, almost all these errata appear in passages peripheral to O’Connor’s interests.  When dealing with his own areas of expertise, he clearly knows what he’s talking about. Still, another problem is repetitions, passages where he may have hit the “copy” key on his computer without being aware of its effects.  In his discussion of the Bardstown Murals in Kentucky, the paragraph beginning “First, the broadside describes…” is repeated twice.  The first paragraph in Part Eight, “A General Overview,” is repeated verbatim as the first paragraph in the introduction to Chapter 36. These errata have been pointed out in hopes that, given the wonders of electronic publication, they can easily be located through the search box and corrected.  But O’Connor will have to deal by himself with all the little missing words throughout the text, and the idiosyncratic use of commas and apostrophes. It’s a tad distracting to find, every so often, a comma used to separate the subject of a sentence from its verb, even (or perhaps especially) in such a magisterial tome.

Francis V. O’Connor, The Mural in America.  Copyright © 2010 Francis V. Connor, Ph. D.

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