Harlo has a blog.: June 2008

Monday, June 30, 2008

A proper picture of Shana, my moped

For all my friends and family at home who haven't seen her before, this is my moped. I named her Shana, chiefly after the drummer/guitarist of Jem and the Holograms. In fact, I name most of my important stuff after characters from that show. My computer's name is Jetta, and my last big project was code-named Pizzazz. (Both Misfits.) The show had a HUGE impact on me.

Shana is a 1988 Tomos Bullet A-3. She's currently in the shop having her carb cleaned, petcock and valves looked at. Also, the exhaust pipe is coming off, which, as Noah informs me, is messing with the compression. I love her still...

A totally indulgent & self-referential work that I've been wanting to do for some time

I finally, after talking about it for so long, wrote the block of code that can interpret XML files to control various video parameters in Processing (thank you, proXML library for being so handy). Jonny and I had this convo about a year or so ago, discussing how rad it would be if an art object was somehow conscious of how popular/valuable it was, and was then able to react accordingly. If it wasn't doing so well, it would spruce itself up to get your attention. Conversely, if it was doing extremely well, it could flaunt it. This would be an exercise of pure cynicism in the face of "net.art" and its convoluted market, and would explore the tension between the facets of a networked art object that are participatory (or require active participation from the viewer) and those that are autonomous to the object itself (i.e. its aesthetic).

I will post some vids or other visual proof-of-existence once there's more to look at; I've been using a boring-looking video to do my testing. But, now that the engine is up and running, I can start populating it with beautiful images. Also, I have to think about the indices I'd call upon to continually test the object's value. Last year, Maegh (a Marxist scholar who studies art movements through a socialist lens) and I started thinking about what a Mei Moses index for net.art would look like. This is a difficult question, because the object in itself, by definition, exists in a place that is accessible at all times by anyone. In a traditional art market, collectors pay for an object that is a stand in for the artist's "genius" and non-alienated labor. But in net.art, the prospect of ownership gets nullified (although the genius+non-alienated labor combo is still there); the net.art object requires a shift/reorganization of the market forces.

I'm still on the fence about how to quantify such an object's worth, though. I guess the clearest indicator is whether or not the artist has gained the stamp of approval from the various cultural institutions. But is there more than that?

BTDubs, I just had a dream in which a novel was written about Olia Lialina. I saw a commercial for it on TV, and jumped up to go buy it. Then I woke up, sat down at the computer, and for some reason, my code started working... Creepy!

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

MySpace asks the hard-hitting questions

Q:

I love targeted advertising! Enjoy this jewel... (and who are those green people?)

Monday, June 23, 2008

...thus spake Momus

Momus has this amazing blog called Click Opera that I read so regularly it's made its way to my Netvibes. Today's post is about the seemingly recent dearth of new bukkake porn (is that redundant: bukkake+porn?) that has made the spring dry after a good wet twenty years, and he makes the following analogy:

"A Kafka short story describes how leopards broke into the temple and drank the holy wine. They did it again the following year, and before long it became part of the ceremony."

I <3 you, Momus.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Media Makers Conference at MIT's Media Lab

Went to a great conference organized by the MIT Media Lab's Media Fabrics group yesterday. The group's director, Glorianna Davenport, chaired a great series of talks about the group's legacy in multimedia, outlined the particular challenges in multimedia production, and introduced some notable alumni who've gone on to found start-ups that continue to tackle some of these challenges.

The overview of the group's legacy, starting from Davenport's days as a graduate student in the 70's, was impressive. I was especially surprised to see how many of the projects her group pioneered wound up in my classroom as an elementary school student in the early 90's. Their use of HyperCard (hypertext creation software) as an artistic medium informed the way I created media when I was a kid. Their exploration of interactivity in film (as seen through the Aspen Project ) paved the way for those great educational tools on laser disk, like à la rencontre de Philippe (where you tore around the streets of Paris bumming Gauloises in cafes, and looking for a place to crash, if memory serves!)

Davenport then introduced Confectionary, a multimedia publishing tool that is not unlike YouTube. There are several key differences that I find charming and disconcerting at the same time. The tool has a great-looking interface; fully enveloped in the classy, arthouse aesthetic of some of the older net.art practitioners. (Courier font, the grey and white simple interface, a sendup to the old Macintosh days of the mid-90's.) Its look is very anti-YouTube, and although the idea is the same, Confectionary's goal is to provide a social media publishing environment without all the noise, thoughtlessness, and irrelevance of YouTube. It dawned on me that this group is dedicated not only to exploring themes of social media, but also exploring the relationships between the object produced and the aesthetic choices of the interface. By repackaging YouTube as something more formidable, even intimidating, the produced work is repurposed. This is a space where the mundane becomes art and the "prosumer" transcends to become an aesthete.

I looked up Davenport when I got home, and started reading a whitepaper of hers, "Improvisational Media Fabric", that fully captured the spirit of her presentation (despite having been written in 2002). One key quote:

"...digital cinema is freeing itself from its linear celluloid base; it is evolving into a "meta-cinema" where one's own memories, perceptions, actions, and desires connect with others through a continuous process of communicating, interweaving, and reconfiguring tradeable bits within a universal media environment."

The ability of the media maker to be a collector, a scrapbooker, in addition to storyteller, is what's most important here. It is in the glorification of what Davenport called the "improvised collection" that our stories become art. Technically, the creation of that art is aided by its interface, its frame, or presentation. This is an electrifying idea to explore: is the interface through which we interact with the story just as integral to the narrative as the story itself?