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librarian/museum educator.

complete biography: texas, brazil, mexico, venezuela, china, india, london, new york, saudi arabia, boston.

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DISCUSSION

JODI: Street Digital



1. in standard museum practice, the retrospective exhibition becomes a narrative of the artist's search for the iconic within a given time and place, employing a chosen set of mediums; on a broader level being an account of the artist's evolving process/language.
2. if the artist's definition of the iconic hinges on disruption, then the traditional format of a retrospective will become problematic. if information-content=surprise, the retrospective will seem to present a lower total density of information.
3. however, the image of a critic wandering through a gallery in which all of the works seem to communicate a specific mode of obsolescence/obstruction, which invites frustration and aggression... is itself a form of disruption.
4. the only shame is that we don't have any footage of the critic's experience of SK8MONKEYS: this might have been the iconic moment of the whole enterprise. critic skating on a broken keyboard. why is it broken? because people have been skating on it. excellent!

DISCUSSION

The Banality of The New Aesthetic


an excellent article in furtherfield. great summary of the discussion, with links to relevant parties/view-points.

i'm definitely sympathetic to bridle, his project, and the language which is accumulating.

a language which seems to be developing beyond simple nouns, and verbs-- although the work has been structured around digital "found-objects", the project's basic value/orientation seems to be: an exploration/exposition of the relational and qualitative aspects of these works to the context of our pervasive experience of an evolving digital medium.

and that is the key thing-- the development of a new structure of discourse of our experience in the medium, about the medium.

the vast vacuuming database of the internet has provided us with the nouns, verbs, and basic adjectives.

social media/ubiquitous technology is providing us with the basic pronouns, yes? i, you, me, we.

now we need: prepositions, complex adjectives and adverbs, auxilary verbs, negations, conjunctions, quantifiers.

language that will define rich and highly ambiguous relationships, in terms of digital information and experience.

language that will be capable of expressing complex propostions and moral and poetic metaphors.

of course, all arts has always been about the invention and reinvention of language, through rich, specific, and highly ambiguous experience. painterly dissolution; harmonic dissonance; keat's negative capacity. so it goes.

DISCUSSION

Portable Black Hole by Tom Estes at The Guggenheim


good. "black-hole" resonates within the guggenheim on other, apparently unintended levels: frank lloyd wright originally conceived of a building defined by a spiraling, cantilevered ramp in the context of the "gordon strong automobile objective", which was supposed to contain a central planetarium.

this building was never constructed, and when wright was later approached by hilla rebay/solomon guggenheim, and asked to design a museum of non-objective art, wright basically just picked-up the original design for the gordon-strong building and adapted it: by turning the building inside-out and upside down, essentially. the outside car ramp became an inside gallery ramp, and the "ziggurat" was inverted.

however: in the early designs for the guggenheim, wright continued to feature a planetarium.

what makes this especially interesting, is that (to my understanding) neither gordon strong nor hilla rebay ever requested such a feature.

at any rate: "astronomy" is in the guggenheim's dna, although the expression of that gene has been somewhat suppressed.

however, i don't know if the black-hole metaphor is a good fit for hilla rebay in particular-- because in order for a black-hole to be created, we must have the collapse of a star of sufficient mass and internal gravity to bring-about an event horizon.

the baroness rebay was a individual of spectacular will, and in the correct circumstances, persuasion; but i do not think we can compare her to a star of any great magnitude.
because she did not really shine of herself: she was extremely clever, at adopting/adapting and proselytizing the ideas of others (kandinsky) and at convincing the powerful to implement those ideas (guggenheim) in a spectacular fashion (wright).

and granted, we might nuance the stellar metaphor to say that hilla rebay was especially good at "capturing" the matter of others; but even in making that allowance, rebay never created out of herself anything approximate to a lasting solar system; and her influence over the guggenheim didn't end in any spectacular downward spiral (she was not lady macbeth) but rather when the board and heirs of solomon guggenheim decided to cut-her-out.

she was isolated and easily contained; a true black-hole would have taken everything with it.

in this case, i would suggest that the actual black-hole is: the compulsive need of post-modern awareness for an ever-expanding babushka program of critique and self-critique, in an expanding series ad infinitum.


DISCUSSION

The Impermanent Book


fascinating article. but in the case of a digital book, couldn't we simply write a program that will compare one version of the work against another? to instantly: confirm the fidelity of transmission against an "established copy" (which could be hosted by the author, publisher, vendor, or perhaps by a library) or else we could compare existing pirated and/or altered copies to identify precise differences, and perhaps statistical differences.

granted, uncertainty permeates and will continue to permeate our entire digital discourse, in that "digital experience/reality" is always in partial construction--is always being assembled, disassembled and reassembled by the technology, by other actors and by ourselves.

but again, i suspect that we will negotiate this inherent challenge in the medium by adopting further levels of technology/programming, to provide a useful awareness of when and how the information is being assembled (and by whom) and again i suspect that this technology will gradually become "smart" enough to provide us with a pretty-good idea of even an anonymous author's linguistic and psycho-social profile, and his or her entire history of interaction with any given text, subject or discourse. perhaps in the future you will be instantly alerted whenever anybody makes a comment in a forum that might be of interest to yourself, or attempts a scurrilous edit on wikipedia with which you are somehow concerned; and in short order, the program might be able to trace commenter or devious editor across his or her entire pattern of interactions, and present you with a clear picture of that person's identity and character.

and frankly, having thought through all of that, i do not know if i am cheered or mortified by the prospect of such a future.


DISCUSSION

Remote Control


just because television's gone flat-screen, digital and ubiquitous doesn't mean the beast has been discarded-- it's more like a hydra, yes? you cut-off the head, and it grows a dozen new ones; the essential thing having always been the transposition/dislocation of time, the image, and our "viewing".

pynchon's novel vineland makes this dislocation into a metaphor for death-- he invents an entire ghost population, the thanatoids, who spend all of their time watching television, because this is how they parse their deadness.

but i quite like this bit by denny, this sudbury transmitter. and i wholeheartedly agree with you, that: "--there are gadgets and phantoms that form our current broadcast networks that could also do with an ousting." not least of these: room 641A. perhaps an altogether more malevolent haunting.