A Musical Memoir

See my new interactive digital piece at --> michaelwpollard.com

The Yes Men - The Next Generation of Activists

The Yes Men What can I say about the Yes Men? Their brand of culture jamming is classic in contemporary society and rather than simply criticizing or undermining media and advertising culture, they have creatively and humorously inspired change in a way that creates new forms of cultural production. In this way, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno (Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, respectively), have transcended rather than merely negated the status quo. Culture jamming, AKA; subvertising, guerrilla communication, night discourse was once again new territory for me as far as terminology. Closer inspection revealed the antics of the Billboard Liberation Front of the seventies which I remember happening, but wasn’t quite in tune with the intent at the time. I was also familiar with the work of Morgan Spurlock and the whole McDonald’s, “SuperSize Me” documentary thing back in 2004 where Spurlock ate only food from McDonalds for 30 days. I can certainly appreciate the use of satire and humor to expose truths that everyone should be aware of. Research also revealed that this form of social activism and anti-consumerism has roots in the past. Once again we can see influences in the Situationist International philosophies of Guy Debord and the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of 1960s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman. I think the Yes Men have broken new ground with their unique style and this activist duo has used the satirical approach with great success to help mass media uncover lies and expose truths in today’s media culture.

How To Create A Cinemagraph In Photoshop

The future of photography I wonder.

My Rhythm Science

I just sampled Paul D. Millers Rhythm Science and listened to the CD 3 times this afternoon. Not bad indeed. The idiot, griots, a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, musician. Dub tradition, audio alchemy, encoding, the mix, sound collage, sampling, wildstyle, carnival, parade, fragments, algorithms of everyday life, detournement, the past, history, my history. Music from the invisible machine, music from my machine, music is always a metaphor, music reminds me of my past, what could have been, what will be; “the more you have heard, the easier it is to find links and to recognize quotations…the difference is that people have a more emotional approach toward music” (pg. 56). Maybe I can dig what this guy is talking about, maybe I can’t. Why would I want to remix DJ Spooky’s remix? Why would I want to remix at all? What if I prefer to mix my own mix? What would my mix look like…it’s all in the mix right? My earliest memories of music started in the 60’s and my mother’s vinyl 45rpm days of Marty Robbins and Herman’s Hermits. I can still hear “Henery the eighth I am I am, second verse same as the first…over and over and over again. My mix would start with my first clock radio (my day’s version of the invisible machine) and Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 show in 1970. Kasem's signature sign-off was "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars." It was all a young teenager needed to dream of seeing the world and traveling to exotic places. Elton John and his hit “Rocket Man” gave me the inspiration to dream big and the Army gave me my “Ticket to Ride”. My mix would continue in the flavor of David Loggins’ “One Way Ticket To Paradise”, England Dan and John Ford Coley’s “Soldier In The Rain”, through the esoteric sounds of fusion jazz and Jon Luc Ponty’s “Cosmic Messenger” or mind bending acid rock of Pink Floyd’s “Speak To Me” and Alan Parsons tune “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”; but of course I could lay back with a few tracks from The Flying Burrito Brothers or Dan Fogelberg’s LP “Souvenirs”. Mr. Miller talks about writing becoming his own temple; mine has always been finding and appreciating artists and songs that speak to me on a deep level and maybe to write a bit in the end. I currently have a collection of over 10,000 songs; so few because I had to start over a few years ago, after all my vinyl and magnetic tape were stolen. My mix continues today with my ghost in the Pandora mixing machine in the form of Indie Pop, New Age, Alt Rock, Experimental, Acid Jazz, to Meditation and New Acoustic. You see, my life is a mix on the “Ventura Highway” overlooking “Moon River”. I don’t feel the need to remix any of it. The mix itself is the joy I get from laying down a pristine track of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by the Beach Boys and transcending time and space to a simpler day. If it is true that it is all in the mix, well I like mine plane and uncomplicated. Call me square or unhip if you like while I add variety to my Punch Brothers radio station. “I don’t care what you say anymore this is my life.”

Lorna Mills

Canadian alt-film-based and internet artist Lorna Mills has been active in solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990's so you could say she is a part of NET ART history already. She has worked in a variety of mediums including Cibachrome printing, painting, super 8 films, and has been producing raw and ethereal digital video animations since 2005, sometimes incorporated into restrained installation work. She has also worked as a game programmer since 1994, starting off in children's CD-ROMs, before moving to web based programs and currently edits video for IPTV and iPad delivery.

Lorna’s latest work revolves around animated GIF’s which she appropriates from the internet in the form of original public unattributed GIF’s grabbed from viral YouTube videos, network news and movies which she then manipulates into her animated collages. The end result is a piece that can be offensive, sexy, violent, and quite often just plain bizarre. These works are made of components from the digital world and are completely designed for viewing on the internet. “They absolutely have to exist on the internet first before I change their context for real life projects”, she explains, “It’s the conditions of the net, economy and compression that make the gifs more interesting to me than just straight up video”. The irony is that in most cases Lorna makes the work off line and it equally lends itself for a unique exhibition experience as well. Her friend and associate on their blog (www.digitalmediatree.com), artist/writer/publisher/curator Sally McKay, compares Lorna’s latest exhibition, “ The Axis of Something”, at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn, to the aesthetics of the 1280 Florentine artist Cimabue and his application of gold leaf on canvas; …”Lorna Mills’s artworks have a similar quality in that they impact on several perceptual registers at once. Scanned images of shiny ceramic animals, printed out so large that the highlights become colorful rivers of molten abstraction, gleam with a physical sheen of applied gloss medium. On the monitor, animistic fabrics twist and morph while the digital tools of their making - control handles and anchor points - feather and twitch around them like weird antennae. On another monitor, screens depicting maps of the earth jump around spasmodically, reminding viewers that today's material moments of earthly aesthetic interaction transpire in a conceptual register of global interconnectivity."

Lorna herself describes her GIF work as hovering between film and photography and feels that a looping GIF feels more organic with the jerky looping action somewhat mimicking biological functions like a heartbeat or breathing. She explains that she tends to gravitate toward the ridiculous and has a good sense for it. Extreme and absurd activities appeal to her; so masturbating kangaroos, animals humping inanimate objects, animals who smoke, people fighting, animals fighting, pro wrestling and owls doing absolutely anything are staples in her personal collection of imagery. She says that she spends about two hours a day collecting this odd stuff and when asked what she is trying to say she confesses, “I'm not always sure of that, but for the most part, absurd perpetual conditions, obsessions, perhaps puzzlement over and recognition of 'otherliness'”. A thin but very important thread that has tied all my work in different media together for over 20 years has been my belief that the particular and peculiar can expand to universals which, at an alarming rate, contract right back to the particular and peculiar - basically, constant oscillation punctuated by the odd abrupt rhythm”. Lorna seems to be well balanced between her on line and off line activities with a strong curatorial output and a hybrid practice, blending art production with art criticism, cross-promotion and dialogue. She is a founding member of the The Red Head Gallery which was established in 1990 and is Toronto’s most enduring collectively run art gallery. It has stood the test of time as an exhibition space as well as a collective where critically engaged, highly productive artists enjoy curatorial control over the presentation of their work. Over the past two decades more than 100 artists have been part of The Red Head Gallery and have produced over 200 exhibitions. She has also co-curated monthly group animated GIF projections with Rea McNamara for the “Sheroes” performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event “When Analog Was Periodical” in Berlin co-curated with Anthony Antonellis, and a touring four person GIF installation, “:::Zip The Bright:::” that originated at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, with artists Sara Ludy, Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva. As far as promotion there was not a lot of information about this artist but just enough to find out what she is up to and where she will be. There are postings of exhibition info on G+ and Facebook and random GIF’s in the G+ streams and here and there, but if you weren’t looking for her specifically you wouldn’t find them. On her own site, the gifs are just posted as she makes them and I sometimes had to look closely to see whether it was her piece or one of her many GIF friends’ work. One of the influences she mentioned was the work of Francoise Gamma (http://francoisegamma.computersclub.org/), which is absolutely amazing. As I looked at more and more of her work I couldn’t help thinking that her GIF work reminds me of a moving version of the work of the famous photographer Jerry Uelsman; not bad company at all.

Francoise Gamma "Rhetoric on Sublime" Animated GIF References (http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/973600/the-newest-new-media-lorna-mills-on-the-evolving-niche-of-gif) (http://www.triangulationblog.com/2012/04/lorna-mills.html) (http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/) (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/LornaMillsImageDump/)

Digital Flux Persona

"The advent of digitally networked culture and the social media performance art practices we all now must role-play as an operational mode of survival in an ever-transforming age of aesthetics creates an unusual opportunity for new media artists to develop alternative paths in the construction of their flux personae and to focus on the “cybernated life”" ---Mark America Thanks for your direction Mark.

Assignment 2

History of Digital Assignment 2 In the first two pieces we looked at, Shelly Jackson’s “My Body” and Adrienne Eisen's “Six Sex Scenes”, the conceptual framework is very much about how these women feel in their own skin. So much so and so personal that it made me somewhat uncomfortable to read. They are very much about coming of age but made me feel like I was snooping in some little girl's diary. I get that it is tough for girls growing up in a predominately misogynistic society, but I’m not really interested in hearing about someone sniffing their panties or being confused about where exactly pee comes from. I had my own curiosities about biology but to this day, I still wouldn’t write about it for millions to read. Guys just don't talk about stuff like that I guess, nor do I know any that write in a diary about it. You can call me old fashioned or square all you want. Sorry but I really couldn’t get through but just a few pages of these very intimate details; give me a great sci-fi story instead. Tina Laporta’s piece had much more to offer I feel when questioning this phenomenon of “presence” in today’s ever increasing online environment. It had a somewhat linear narrative that is reminiscent of a screenshot of a chat session from a Facebook conversation told in the third person. Donna Leischman's “redridinghood” had some technical issues and I couldn’t get past the part where her mother was handing her a basket. I did like the interactive story format with the moving cartoon characters and looked at some of her other work as well but it seems a lot of it has Flash problems. All the stories could be fiction but the last two seem the most likely. The link strategy on My Body and Sixty Sex Scenes was very similar. Random pages of a diary or the authors’ stories that the user selects sends the reader in random directions depending on which hypertext link that you select. The user has only a faint idea of what the next page will be about so you didn't really know where you were going within the story and each new link felt like another page of a diary with no structure or no sense of a structured autobiography. For me I just felt kind of lost and confused and didn't really care to move on past three or four links which could be a lack of this kind of sensibility caused by a lifetime of reading books in a linear fashion. The structure caused me to lose interest but the content could have also been a factor. Tina LaPorta's piece explored a much more interesting storyline for me; the actual disconnect that we all have in an age of constant communication. Again the linear structure is something I am used to. As Tina explained, this was a dialogue that she did in fact have where she photographed the interaction as it happened. Overall I didn't feel like any of these artworks was very literary but more like a journal or diary (and not even a social media page) as in the first two, or more scientific as in Tina Laporta’s investigation of the “disembodied and dislocated nature of on-line communication.” I also didn’t see them as visual or performing art pieces either. Since the electronic environment is not subject to restriction to a degree it has allowed these women to express themselves without rebuttal or immediate criticism, making it a very arbitrary decision contingent solely upon their discretion. Once again, arbitrary or not, you wouldn’t catch me writing something like this. “What happens in Vegas”…, you might say.

What is Internet Art?

So I started digging through the vast cyber space trying to find out what this internet art thing was all about. Doing my Google search like a good little member of the collective, I stumbled upon an article; 11 Net Artists You Should Know by Marina Galperina . This form of art is entirely new to me being only familiar with the traditional gallery and museum system. All the works are quite different but a treat to experience in such a different way than I am used to. One of the net artists I was drawn to right away was Lorna Mills from Toronto.

She makes animated GIFs that come alive on your monitor and can be strange but familiar having a certain odd yet sexy quality to them. Her style moves from a playful aesthetic to sophisticated organic abstraction. Although these images move, unlike what I am used to looking at, they do have a certain quality that appeals to me. This was not the case with most of the other work I looked at, which was confusing and hard to navigate at best. In many cases, the viewer is drawn into some kind of interaction with the work and I’m not sure how keen I am with having to be a part of the piece rather than sit back and contemplate it. As I dove into this maze of techno-imagery I found out about some of the pioneers of this new art form and the key organizations that brought this genre about, to include; SITO; The Thing; Adaweb, directed by Benjamin Weil; and Alt-X, founded by our own Mark Amerika one of the oldest online art and literary networks. Much of the imagery is very busy and seems cluttered and all over the place but that could be the point, I couldn’t say. I’m sure this “art” needs one to develop a new sensibility but at this point I just don’t get most of it. Take Jeremy Rotsztain’s “Action Painting” series for example, talk about Jackson Pollock meets the 21st century. It is a very cool piece and I do appreciate taking the idea of Hollywood action movies and combining moving visual elements with the perceived action. I’m just not sure about what he is trying to say. I almost wish he would have used music, still very inventive. Apparently with social media facilitating a transformative shift in the distribution of internet art, the direction it will take in the future is anyone’s guess. The production of meaning seems to be externally contingent on a network of other artists’ content which brings us back around to appropriation in this age of file sharing. Call me old fashioned but I still like to look at stuff hanging on the wall.

Very Angry Birds

Hacktivism at it's best. It just really cracks me up to see "artists" hack into our pop culture.

A Cultural Phenom!

What was that again about people leaving the planet's most vociferous social institution!

Not What Bush Envisioned!

Vannevar Bush in his essay couldn't have predicted how people would use this new tool that is capable of sharing all of mans collected knowledge. Cyber bullying and related harmful uses weren't even noted. Such a powerful tool and look at the ways we use it.

Vannevar Bush - As We May Think

I hadn’t heard of Vannevar Bush before taking the introductory Atlas course here at CU. I quickly learned that he was the big cheese in R&D for the military as well as the founder of Ratheon. His memex microfilm viewer quite possibly could be considered the genesis for the World Wide Web. I think he would be astounded at the way the internet has responded to his call for sharing of information. Even by the time of his death in 1974 they couldn’t have guessed that it would become so much a part of how we live that few can remember going without it. In the same manner that Bush asked “of what lasting benefit has been man's use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence” maybe we should be asking what we should be doing with the internet. He would probably roll over in his grave if he knew how deeply social media has burrowed into the fabric of our society. The serious question today is the issue of how connected but disconnected we are. Applications are coming and going at such a rapid pace today that they are obsolete in a matter of months. Instant messaging has almost replaced email (let alone a phone conversation) as our primary mode of communication and family albums can be stored in our phones. Bush talks about the economics of the situation and well, I think we have crossed that threshold where we can afford to develop any certain technology we want to. I still can’t understand why we are dragging our feet on clean energy solutions - but that is a political thing I believe. “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.” Yes it has Vannevar but do we really need all these “cheap” devices. What a great essay though, kind of Treky even, the way Bush describes the future. I just love the way, he is describing modern day digital photography; “often it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and to look at the picture immediately.” And so funny to hear him describe our modern supermarket transaction all the way down to minute details like the magnetic strip on the back of our debit or credit card with a point-of-sale merchant. What a delight to hear him ramble on about our futuristic “work station”, where I am at this moment speaking, yes voice recognition software, into my personal computer and creating one of his “threads” while I am at it. The personal computer even has its own acronym which a military man such as he could appreciate. He talks about systems of indexing which uncannily suggest web pages. The collective knowledge he speaks about can be accessed in a matter of nano-seconds and the threads he mentions are being mathematically hypothesized by search engine algorithms that know what you are looking for two letters into your search. In his paper he basically defines every little detail about our digital culture today. Another very important question here concerns the ethics of online interactivity. With all this sharing of all this collective knowledge it begs the question who has gained the upper hand. We are starting to sound like the Borg from Star Trek. What is this doing to our individuality? With the advent of Life 2.0, people are living fuller lives online than off. Mr. Bush couldn’t have possibly known the side effects of all this technology when he wrote of “his excursion being more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important (Pg. 19).” We have already seen this in the web's ability to both facilitate and destroy human relationships. Where do we go from here?

Walter Benjamin

In response to Walter Benjamin's essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” I felt like I had to wade through a lot of philosophical ramblings to discover his point or as Susan Sonntag pointed out; he had a "freeze-frame baroque" style of writing and cogitation which was difficult. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they self-destruct". Although the essay was a bit hard for me to decipher at times, Benjamin, being the philosopher that he was, made some interesting observations in regards to art works having a soul (or “aura” as he called it) of their own. His reasoning that “the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual”, Part IV) tells us a lot about how far we've come in today's digital realm. Not as far as we might think! As I am writing this and staring at a computer screen (ritual?), I am not feeling any sense of aura as I see this blog post materialize before my eyes, not to say that it's a piece of fine art. But if I add my own text, design and pictures to my blog post does it then develop a sense of aura, uniqueness and originality for the author, or has it moved toward a piece being produced or designed for the soul purpose of reproducibility and therefore lost its aura? We have new rituals now…think texting and imaginary farms or PS/2 (or whatever version). That old tired argument is as fresh now as it was when Benjamin wrote this essay; what makes this piece original, what is unique about that one, why did the artist do it that way? Terry Barrett reminds us in his book “Why Is That Art”, defining art is a major enterprise in aesthetics, historically and recently. I believe that our sensibilities have changed but deep down our idea of aesthetics hasn’t. That’s to say that we constantly have to define what art “is” before we can determine if the impact of mechanical reproduction or technology even matters. Take the Shredder for example; there is to some degree an aesthetic to the work and we can’t deny its originality. This is a piece that embodies technology yet is still a work of “art” BECAUSE of mechanical reproduction not in spite of it. All this talk of originality and authenticity got me to thinking about the commercials I see on television where they provide you with a “certificate of authenticity” on something they're trying to sell you - whether it's a copy or not. In Walter Benjamin's time we can be sure that there weren't as many copies as there are today but the original will always be the original (no matter then or now) and will always have its own innate value no matter how many copies of it are made. How does that translate in today's culture of limitless copies of just about anything? Does the original even matter anymore? Like he said its pointless to ask for the authentic print of a photo negative. On page 9 the author writes, “With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones”. In the previous sentence you can easily replace the word readers with subjects and the word writers with photographers to represent today's visual culture. With everyone and their brother and sister being picture takers these days where does art fit in the conversation? In Donald Kuspit’s book “The End of Art”, Kuspit writes that “works of art no longer have any important human use: they will no longer further personal autonomy and critical freedom. A commodity identity has overtaken aesthetic identity and they have become everyday artifacts. Almost a century apart these two authors basically agree, Benjamin talking about film and a mobilizing of the masses by distraction and therefore forming a habit; think texting again. Regardless of whether a piece of art is unique, original, authentic or seems to have some type of “aura”, technology continues to move us in directions we can't even fathom and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Benjamin mentioned that our sensibilities change with the times and it's just human nature to look backward. The sudden interest in outdated photography processes leads me to believe that the discussion will keep coming around every time a new technology takes hold.

What is Net Art?

http://www.artnews.com/2013/06/12/the-new-world-of-net-art/ And we thought a game called Truth or Dare was risque in my day. On the subject of art, the lines continue to blur in today's digital culture and "Dorm Daze" is a prime example of shredding the boundaries of what we call art and a small glimpse of how it may be viewed in the future.