BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.
Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Re: Re: Re: Re: setting up the punch line
g:
> Back to your initial question here: what if the technology isn't
> "apparently" doing what it is "actually" doing -- what does that
> mean,
> actually? In your piece, the randomness subtly changes what could be
> thought of as a series of static images. So that we don't and can't
> figure out when the series loops, because it doesn't. Imagine a piece
> where the viewer/user is confronted with a piece that does loop, but
> loops for one session only. So that only in communicating with other
> viewers/users could ever be deduced that the piece is in fact not a
> series of static images but is in reality randomised. Would this be a
> good example of a piece that is "apparently" doing something else
> than
> it is "actually" doing?
c:
yes. crankbunny.com had a piece like that where it was a flash animation that played out differently depending on how/when you visited the site (kind of like the rhizome logo). You only realize that it's not linear upon your second visit (or upon reading the accompanying explanatory text).
g:
>And now -- why does this matter? Isn't it
> true
> that the code itself presents and represents the true colours of the
> piece? That the fact that we humans are experiencing the current
> instance of the presentation of the code as a series of static images
> is irrelevant for the importance of the piece?
c:
I guess it depends on what the piece is about. My synesthetic bubble gum cards use code, but they aren't really about the code itself. They are about the subjective experience that the user has with the visceral media, and part of the visceral media is controlled by the code. For example, the "place" pack of cards are trying to represent the memory of a place more accurately than just a static series of snapshots or a segment of linear video. But if the user thinks they are watching a linear series of prefab photo collages, then part of the intended effect is lost. So is it cheating to say, "hey, here's what you're really looking at." Does coming out of character to give that didactic bit of para-art instruction do more harm than good to the piece? This is what I'm honestly wondering.
http://www.mjt.org are the "stay in character on camera and off" superstars. Like if Matthew Barney had dressed as the Laughton Candidate at the Cremaster Guggenheim opening reception.
> Back to your initial question here: what if the technology isn't
> "apparently" doing what it is "actually" doing -- what does that
> mean,
> actually? In your piece, the randomness subtly changes what could be
> thought of as a series of static images. So that we don't and can't
> figure out when the series loops, because it doesn't. Imagine a piece
> where the viewer/user is confronted with a piece that does loop, but
> loops for one session only. So that only in communicating with other
> viewers/users could ever be deduced that the piece is in fact not a
> series of static images but is in reality randomised. Would this be a
> good example of a piece that is "apparently" doing something else
> than
> it is "actually" doing?
c:
yes. crankbunny.com had a piece like that where it was a flash animation that played out differently depending on how/when you visited the site (kind of like the rhizome logo). You only realize that it's not linear upon your second visit (or upon reading the accompanying explanatory text).
g:
>And now -- why does this matter? Isn't it
> true
> that the code itself presents and represents the true colours of the
> piece? That the fact that we humans are experiencing the current
> instance of the presentation of the code as a series of static images
> is irrelevant for the importance of the piece?
c:
I guess it depends on what the piece is about. My synesthetic bubble gum cards use code, but they aren't really about the code itself. They are about the subjective experience that the user has with the visceral media, and part of the visceral media is controlled by the code. For example, the "place" pack of cards are trying to represent the memory of a place more accurately than just a static series of snapshots or a segment of linear video. But if the user thinks they are watching a linear series of prefab photo collages, then part of the intended effect is lost. So is it cheating to say, "hey, here's what you're really looking at." Does coming out of character to give that didactic bit of para-art instruction do more harm than good to the piece? This is what I'm honestly wondering.
http://www.mjt.org are the "stay in character on camera and off" superstars. Like if Matthew Barney had dressed as the Laughton Candidate at the Cremaster Guggenheim opening reception.
Re: Re: setting up the punch line
c:
> > But there is a problem with new media that foregoes an accompanying
> > explanation -- if your technology is not *apparently* doing what
> it's *actually* doing, nobody will know what it's doing.
g:
> I don't think I really understand your question here -- do you mean
> that it's not overly clear what's happening in the piece. Or perhaps
> you realise that you're testing the viewers' patience -- asking the
> viewer to stay for longer than a few seconds to appreciate the piece.
c:
maybe that piece [ http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/ ] is not the best example of what I'm talking about. Its autogenerative nature is *eventually* apparant in time. A better example might be a student piece I recently saw here in Asheville. I guess it was using max/jitter or something, but there was a percussionist playing electronic drums off to the side of a screen, and it was explained to us prior to the performance that the audio input from the drums was tweaking the video on the screen. But once the performance started, the video looked like plain old linear video (albeit a bit abstract). Had the introductory explanation not been given, and were the percussionist not visible, there would have been nothing *apparently* real-time/reactive about the piece. So if a piece must rely on such accompanying explanatory texts to make known its underlying experimental technology, how successful is such a piece as experimental technology?
g:
> As always, an explanatory text is just one of the many aspects of art
> waiting to be freed from it's functional shackles. (In there with
> resumes, documentation, book-keeping, paying bills, debts, bubble-gum
> stuck to the undersides of the studio tables [seriously!].) Pieces
> will suck less if the artist realises this.
c:
Amen. There is an entire scene of graphic designers who make toys. The toys are usually very cool and quirky and meticulously crafted, and the packaging of such toys is almost as much a part of the experience as the toys themselves. Graphic designers are fetishistic about controlling the entire context of a user experience (down to designing shelving within the retail stores that is in dialogue with the objects for sale on the shelves.) This awareness and detail over all aspects of the user's experience is one of the things that legitimizes graphic designers as craftsmen to me.
There is a famous story about Frank Lloyd Wright choosing even the silverware for the residential homes he designed. He would re-visit these homes after they had been lived in for about a year, and if the furniture had been removed from its original locations, he would re-arrange the furniture and put it back, often to the bewilderment of the homeowners.
Such attention to contextual detail I would expect to find in contemporary art (particularly in contemporary conceptual art interested in questioning context and playing with viewer expectation), and yet there is an almost tacky sloppiness about the way many contemporary artists allow galleries (online and off) to present their para-art information and to contextualize their pieces. It's as if the artist assumes "the art starts here," and then whatever happens outside of that "art" area is subject to the (often aesthetically boring) rules of the academy and gallery culture.
> > But there is a problem with new media that foregoes an accompanying
> > explanation -- if your technology is not *apparently* doing what
> it's *actually* doing, nobody will know what it's doing.
g:
> I don't think I really understand your question here -- do you mean
> that it's not overly clear what's happening in the piece. Or perhaps
> you realise that you're testing the viewers' patience -- asking the
> viewer to stay for longer than a few seconds to appreciate the piece.
c:
maybe that piece [ http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/ ] is not the best example of what I'm talking about. Its autogenerative nature is *eventually* apparant in time. A better example might be a student piece I recently saw here in Asheville. I guess it was using max/jitter or something, but there was a percussionist playing electronic drums off to the side of a screen, and it was explained to us prior to the performance that the audio input from the drums was tweaking the video on the screen. But once the performance started, the video looked like plain old linear video (albeit a bit abstract). Had the introductory explanation not been given, and were the percussionist not visible, there would have been nothing *apparently* real-time/reactive about the piece. So if a piece must rely on such accompanying explanatory texts to make known its underlying experimental technology, how successful is such a piece as experimental technology?
g:
> As always, an explanatory text is just one of the many aspects of art
> waiting to be freed from it's functional shackles. (In there with
> resumes, documentation, book-keeping, paying bills, debts, bubble-gum
> stuck to the undersides of the studio tables [seriously!].) Pieces
> will suck less if the artist realises this.
c:
Amen. There is an entire scene of graphic designers who make toys. The toys are usually very cool and quirky and meticulously crafted, and the packaging of such toys is almost as much a part of the experience as the toys themselves. Graphic designers are fetishistic about controlling the entire context of a user experience (down to designing shelving within the retail stores that is in dialogue with the objects for sale on the shelves.) This awareness and detail over all aspects of the user's experience is one of the things that legitimizes graphic designers as craftsmen to me.
There is a famous story about Frank Lloyd Wright choosing even the silverware for the residential homes he designed. He would re-visit these homes after they had been lived in for about a year, and if the furniture had been removed from its original locations, he would re-arrange the furniture and put it back, often to the bewilderment of the homeowners.
Such attention to contextual detail I would expect to find in contemporary art (particularly in contemporary conceptual art interested in questioning context and playing with viewer expectation), and yet there is an almost tacky sloppiness about the way many contemporary artists allow galleries (online and off) to present their para-art information and to contextualize their pieces. It's as if the artist assumes "the art starts here," and then whatever happens outside of that "art" area is subject to the (often aesthetically boring) rules of the academy and gallery culture.
setting up the punch line
Setting Up the Punch Line:
Some Thoughts on Para-Art Media
I've been thinking a lot lately about media that accompanies an
artwork, and the kind of artwork that relies on such accompanying
media. Accompanying media can include the artist statement, but it
can also include instructions on how to use the work, as well as an
explanation of what the work is actually doing.
Let's deal with each type of accompanying media in turn, citing
specific examples.
1. Artist Statement:
Think of Sherry Levine's "After Walker Evans," where she takes
pictures of Walker Evans' pictures. Without the explanatory artist
statement, we think we're looking at pictures of Alabama
sharecroppers taken by Walker Evans. We wonder what these pictures
from the turn of the century are doing in a contemporary art gallery.
It's only after we read the artist statement that we understand we
are looking at pictures of pictures, and we get it.
I've dissed conceptual work like this before, and it's not my
intention to kick that dead horse again. I just want to point out
that, although the "art" of this piece is in its concept, the punch
line of that concept is revealed in the actual accompanying media of
the artist statement. The artist statement is like the "Da-dum-bum!"
that cues us to the joke. So although Levine's meta-media conceptual
artplay is supposed to be heady and subtle, the gag is actually
revealed with all the subtlety of a vaudeville clown. Understated,
Steven Wright-type humor this ain't. When Steven Wright pauses for a
very long time, then mumbles "I stole all the erasers to all the
miniature golf pencils in the world," the joke is as much in the
subtlety of his delivery as it is in the content of his punch line.
We get no such subtlety from artwork that relies entirely on
accompanying media to convey its concept.
2. Instructions on How To Use the Work:
This is just one example of many, but check "Free Radio Linux":
http://gallery9.walkerart.org/bookmark.html?id672&type=object&bookmark=1
There is an introductory text blurb at the gallery9 site itself.
Then after you link to the URL of the actual piece, there is even
more accompanying media before you get to the piece itself, telling
you how to get to the piece, what software you need for the piece,
etc.
These instructions are necessary for the use of the piece. To his
credit, the artists tries to tie-in the tone of the instructions with
the overall concept of the piece. The piece deals with sourcecode,
and the instructions are written in a "readme" type of voice. Still,
all of these how-to interruptions place barriers between the user and
the piece itself. If this were Amazon and the piece itself was a
book being sold, few people would ever get around to clicking on the
"buy now" button. Which may be just as well in this case, since the
piece is just an audio stream of translated software code with little
aesthetic appeal. The instructions of how to access the piece may be
as interesting as the actual piece itself.
To return to our stand-up comedy analogy, this piece is like a
comedian who spends his entire routine testing the sound system and
the acoustics of the room, and then he tells a fart joke and walks
off stage. My critique is that the accompanying explanatory media
distracts from the impact of the art. It's not setting the user up
in any intentional way to experience the art. It's not leading her
into the art. It doesn't help contextualize the art. If anything,
it decontextualizes the art. Just like labeling every tree in the
wilderness with a placard describing its uses and phylum and genus
detracts from my hiking experience rather than adding to it. (This
critique admittedly presumes that art is meant to have some sort of
overall experience on a person besides just explaining something to
her intellect.)
3. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can already tell):
A lot of times, these explanations of what a piece of work is
actually doing are gratuitous, because it's quite obvious what the
work is doing. Yoshi Sodeoka recently had a piece at Turbulence
where he was asked to come up with some sort of introductory
statement as part of the commission [
http://turbulence.org/Works/sodeoka/ ]. The piece doesn't need an
introductory statement, and Sodeoka solved this problem by giving a
sort of non-introductory statement in the form of a FAQ --
Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining?
A: This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself.
Sodeoka's evasiveness was pegged (derided?) by Eduardo Navas as
enforcing a kind of structuralism. And in a sense, he's right.
Sodeoka, as a graphic designer, is used to being able in maintaining
contextual control of the user's experience of his work. His work is
meant to be visceral and somewhat disorienting. So accompanying
textual media that orients his users actually runs counter to the
experience he is trying to create. But I don't think it's any kind
of intentional structuralism as much as it is a desire to sneak up on
the punch line, to keep the audience guessing. It's mostly an issue
of timing.
Back to the stand-up comedy analogy -- Sodeoka is a Gallagher-like
comedian who likes to run out on stage and begin throwing rubber
chickens into the unexpecting audience. In this instance, he's hired
to play a comedy club (Turbulence) where the house rules dictate that
every comedian must have a proper biographical introduction. This
requirement undermines his comedic surprise attack, so as he's being
introduced, Sodeoka sits in the wings and throws rubber chickens at
the MC.
3b. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can't
tell otherwise):
Now here is a problem I'm encountering in my own work. One of the
fun things about the web is that you're not obliged to contextualize
your art as art. You needn't have any accompanying explanatory media
whatsoever, and you can simply throw your user straight into your
piece. You can even create faux accompanying explanatory media that
actually sets-up your user for your punch-line (cf:
http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/rebranding/ ).
Mouchette is the classic example.
But there is a problem with new media that foregoes an accompanying
explanation -- if your technology is not *apparently* doing what it's
*actually* doing, nobody will know what it's doing.
A case in point is this piece:
http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/
There are user instructions, but they are cryptic ("wait for a magic
transformation"). The underlying technology is calling in discrete
images and autogeneratively collaging them according to a semi-random
code. You can watch each card and see sometimes thousands of
different combinations. But you may have to keep watching before you
realize that these collages are being generated in real-time.
Otherwise, you might watch 4 or 5 different collages, and think that
each one is a static, pre-fab single image. In which case, it seems
like you are watching a slide show of a few discrete collages, when
in actuality you are watching a collage-generating machine.
My honest questions are:
1. Would adding an accompanying explanation of the underlying
technology make this piece more enjoyable and meaningful? Would it
increase the value of the user's experience?
2. Would adding such an explanation detract from the whimsical,
disorienting context of the piece in a way that hurts the piece?
3. If a new media piece needs accompanying text to explain how it
works, if its underlying workings are conceptually important but not
experientially apparent, then does that piece fail as an
autogenerative/reactive piece? If I'm looking at one of Lev
Manovich's autogenerative database cinema pieces, and it just looks
like a linear movie to me, then has he achieved his artistic purpose?
+++++++++++++++++
Personally, I suspect that the most successful pieces evince their
underlying workings and concepts without the need for a bunch of
accompanying explanatory text. Without the accompanying text, the
artist is allowed to hijack more of the user's context. This gives
the artist the ability to dialogue with a more holistic/gritty area
of the user's mindspace; it makes the work less antiseptic and
quarantined. Granted, the artist who is comfortable relying on
accompanying explanatory text may object, "But what if the user
doesn't get it?" My knee-jerk response is, "Then it's probably not
that good." But things are probably more complicated than that. I'm
coming to believe that a piece of work may well be enhanced by
accompanying explanatory text, *provided that*:
1. it's absolutely necessary
2. the tenor of its copy is in dialogue with the approach of the piece.
3. it serves to contextualize the piece rather than de-contextualize
it. [cf: http://www.memexengine.com ]
4. it isn't full of a bunch of blah blah Adorno-quoting art school
bullshit [cf: http://www.playdamage.org/market-o-matic ]. Oftentimes
the accompanying explanatory text is used like overabundant A1 sauce
to mask the rank taste of an underlying cut of bad beef. If your
piece sucks, alluding to John Cage isn't going to make it any less
sucky.
_
Some Thoughts on Para-Art Media
I've been thinking a lot lately about media that accompanies an
artwork, and the kind of artwork that relies on such accompanying
media. Accompanying media can include the artist statement, but it
can also include instructions on how to use the work, as well as an
explanation of what the work is actually doing.
Let's deal with each type of accompanying media in turn, citing
specific examples.
1. Artist Statement:
Think of Sherry Levine's "After Walker Evans," where she takes
pictures of Walker Evans' pictures. Without the explanatory artist
statement, we think we're looking at pictures of Alabama
sharecroppers taken by Walker Evans. We wonder what these pictures
from the turn of the century are doing in a contemporary art gallery.
It's only after we read the artist statement that we understand we
are looking at pictures of pictures, and we get it.
I've dissed conceptual work like this before, and it's not my
intention to kick that dead horse again. I just want to point out
that, although the "art" of this piece is in its concept, the punch
line of that concept is revealed in the actual accompanying media of
the artist statement. The artist statement is like the "Da-dum-bum!"
that cues us to the joke. So although Levine's meta-media conceptual
artplay is supposed to be heady and subtle, the gag is actually
revealed with all the subtlety of a vaudeville clown. Understated,
Steven Wright-type humor this ain't. When Steven Wright pauses for a
very long time, then mumbles "I stole all the erasers to all the
miniature golf pencils in the world," the joke is as much in the
subtlety of his delivery as it is in the content of his punch line.
We get no such subtlety from artwork that relies entirely on
accompanying media to convey its concept.
2. Instructions on How To Use the Work:
This is just one example of many, but check "Free Radio Linux":
http://gallery9.walkerart.org/bookmark.html?id672&type=object&bookmark=1
There is an introductory text blurb at the gallery9 site itself.
Then after you link to the URL of the actual piece, there is even
more accompanying media before you get to the piece itself, telling
you how to get to the piece, what software you need for the piece,
etc.
These instructions are necessary for the use of the piece. To his
credit, the artists tries to tie-in the tone of the instructions with
the overall concept of the piece. The piece deals with sourcecode,
and the instructions are written in a "readme" type of voice. Still,
all of these how-to interruptions place barriers between the user and
the piece itself. If this were Amazon and the piece itself was a
book being sold, few people would ever get around to clicking on the
"buy now" button. Which may be just as well in this case, since the
piece is just an audio stream of translated software code with little
aesthetic appeal. The instructions of how to access the piece may be
as interesting as the actual piece itself.
To return to our stand-up comedy analogy, this piece is like a
comedian who spends his entire routine testing the sound system and
the acoustics of the room, and then he tells a fart joke and walks
off stage. My critique is that the accompanying explanatory media
distracts from the impact of the art. It's not setting the user up
in any intentional way to experience the art. It's not leading her
into the art. It doesn't help contextualize the art. If anything,
it decontextualizes the art. Just like labeling every tree in the
wilderness with a placard describing its uses and phylum and genus
detracts from my hiking experience rather than adding to it. (This
critique admittedly presumes that art is meant to have some sort of
overall experience on a person besides just explaining something to
her intellect.)
3. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can already tell):
A lot of times, these explanations of what a piece of work is
actually doing are gratuitous, because it's quite obvious what the
work is doing. Yoshi Sodeoka recently had a piece at Turbulence
where he was asked to come up with some sort of introductory
statement as part of the commission [
http://turbulence.org/Works/sodeoka/ ]. The piece doesn't need an
introductory statement, and Sodeoka solved this problem by giving a
sort of non-introductory statement in the form of a FAQ --
Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining?
A: This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself.
Sodeoka's evasiveness was pegged (derided?) by Eduardo Navas as
enforcing a kind of structuralism. And in a sense, he's right.
Sodeoka, as a graphic designer, is used to being able in maintaining
contextual control of the user's experience of his work. His work is
meant to be visceral and somewhat disorienting. So accompanying
textual media that orients his users actually runs counter to the
experience he is trying to create. But I don't think it's any kind
of intentional structuralism as much as it is a desire to sneak up on
the punch line, to keep the audience guessing. It's mostly an issue
of timing.
Back to the stand-up comedy analogy -- Sodeoka is a Gallagher-like
comedian who likes to run out on stage and begin throwing rubber
chickens into the unexpecting audience. In this instance, he's hired
to play a comedy club (Turbulence) where the house rules dictate that
every comedian must have a proper biographical introduction. This
requirement undermines his comedic surprise attack, so as he's being
introduced, Sodeoka sits in the wings and throws rubber chickens at
the MC.
3b. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can't
tell otherwise):
Now here is a problem I'm encountering in my own work. One of the
fun things about the web is that you're not obliged to contextualize
your art as art. You needn't have any accompanying explanatory media
whatsoever, and you can simply throw your user straight into your
piece. You can even create faux accompanying explanatory media that
actually sets-up your user for your punch-line (cf:
http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/rebranding/ ).
Mouchette is the classic example.
But there is a problem with new media that foregoes an accompanying
explanation -- if your technology is not *apparently* doing what it's
*actually* doing, nobody will know what it's doing.
A case in point is this piece:
http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/
There are user instructions, but they are cryptic ("wait for a magic
transformation"). The underlying technology is calling in discrete
images and autogeneratively collaging them according to a semi-random
code. You can watch each card and see sometimes thousands of
different combinations. But you may have to keep watching before you
realize that these collages are being generated in real-time.
Otherwise, you might watch 4 or 5 different collages, and think that
each one is a static, pre-fab single image. In which case, it seems
like you are watching a slide show of a few discrete collages, when
in actuality you are watching a collage-generating machine.
My honest questions are:
1. Would adding an accompanying explanation of the underlying
technology make this piece more enjoyable and meaningful? Would it
increase the value of the user's experience?
2. Would adding such an explanation detract from the whimsical,
disorienting context of the piece in a way that hurts the piece?
3. If a new media piece needs accompanying text to explain how it
works, if its underlying workings are conceptually important but not
experientially apparent, then does that piece fail as an
autogenerative/reactive piece? If I'm looking at one of Lev
Manovich's autogenerative database cinema pieces, and it just looks
like a linear movie to me, then has he achieved his artistic purpose?
+++++++++++++++++
Personally, I suspect that the most successful pieces evince their
underlying workings and concepts without the need for a bunch of
accompanying explanatory text. Without the accompanying text, the
artist is allowed to hijack more of the user's context. This gives
the artist the ability to dialogue with a more holistic/gritty area
of the user's mindspace; it makes the work less antiseptic and
quarantined. Granted, the artist who is comfortable relying on
accompanying explanatory text may object, "But what if the user
doesn't get it?" My knee-jerk response is, "Then it's probably not
that good." But things are probably more complicated than that. I'm
coming to believe that a piece of work may well be enhanced by
accompanying explanatory text, *provided that*:
1. it's absolutely necessary
2. the tenor of its copy is in dialogue with the approach of the piece.
3. it serves to contextualize the piece rather than de-contextualize
it. [cf: http://www.memexengine.com ]
4. it isn't full of a bunch of blah blah Adorno-quoting art school
bullshit [cf: http://www.playdamage.org/market-o-matic ]. Oftentimes
the accompanying explanatory text is used like overabundant A1 sauce
to mask the rank taste of an underlying cut of bad beef. If your
piece sucks, alluding to John Cage isn't going to make it any less
sucky.
_
school o' rock [monosyllabic remix]
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery;
and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific
phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make
swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go
rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying
thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for
themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to
express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say
"The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by
all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a
more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking
like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside
your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown
to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill
of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the
hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more
metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word
"degeneration."
- gkc
http://lab404.com/plotfracture/whorl/tom.html
http://pastemagazine.com/action/article?article_idA8
http://playdamage.org/55.html
_
and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific
phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make
swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go
rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying
thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for
themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to
express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say
"The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by
all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a
more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking
like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside
your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown
to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill
of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the
hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more
metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word
"degeneration."
- gkc
http://lab404.com/plotfracture/whorl/tom.html
http://pastemagazine.com/action/article?article_idA8
http://playdamage.org/55.html
_
Re: chan marshall was my pat benatar
http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=chan+marshall&type=1
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=%22chan+marshall%22&q2=%22pat+benatar%22&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us
curt cloninger wrote:
> pick us up out of a line up
> stranded and strange
> just as innocent as kids
> the found are leaving and they're trying to forget
> the old world, the whole world is
> going on and on (forfeit the shape to fit)
>
> http://images.google.com/images?&safe=off&q=%22chan+marshall%22
> http://www.matadorrecords.com/rams/cat_power/nude_as_the_news.ram
> http://www.matadorrecords.com/rams/cat_power/cross_bones_style.ram
>
> _
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=%22chan+marshall%22&q2=%22pat+benatar%22&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us
curt cloninger wrote:
> pick us up out of a line up
> stranded and strange
> just as innocent as kids
> the found are leaving and they're trying to forget
> the old world, the whole world is
> going on and on (forfeit the shape to fit)
>
> http://images.google.com/images?&safe=off&q=%22chan+marshall%22
> http://www.matadorrecords.com/rams/cat_power/nude_as_the_news.ram
> http://www.matadorrecords.com/rams/cat_power/cross_bones_style.ram
>
> _