Michael Szpakowski
Since the beginning
Works in Harlow United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

Re: new work: rsstango


That's extraordinarily lovely Jess, and beautifully
made too (as always) - maybe I'm being stupid but I'm
not sure how much the links out ( or indeed the actual
detailed origins of the piece) help ( it took me
awhile to realise the thing was moving inexorably
forward anyway -I initially thought I had to explore a
link from each page before I could continue).
The core thing for me is the beautiful & incredibly
atmospheric animation which does work so well with
that music -it'd be a shame for folk to take you at
your 'don't bother' word & view it without the music.
Anyway, great to see you back!
michael
--- Jess Loseby <jess@rssgallery.com> wrote:

---------------------------------
rsstango

http://www.rssgallery.com/rsstango/rsstango.htm

visually annotated rss feeds*

(*news. blogs, tech, worm lovers etc)

jess loseby

BROADBAND/ HIGH SPEED CONNECTIONS ONLY

you will need java enabled on your browser. scripts
work best on IE with Firefox or Safari working with
limited loss

if you want the music you will need Flash plug-in on
the front page only. if not, don't worry then...

I was going to make it random but we seem to have
databases coming out of our ears at the moment. how
about some#160; imposed narrative?*shock*:)

o
/^ rssgallery.com
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DISCUSSION

Re: music


HI Jim
What I find quite interesting is the, in general,
complete lack of interest shown by those working in
contemporary visual arts for what could be described
as contemporary "art" music.
Read an interview with a visual artist and it almost
inevitable references popular music of some stripe (
including, to be fair, often quite challenging stuff
at the far end of the 'popular' spectrum)
I can't help feeling though people are missing out on
lots of good stuff - I've had a mini Elliot Carter
revival at home recently and it is *staggering* stuff
-but it does take quite a lot of thought and
engagement and it's by no means instant in its
rewards.
Other folk doing great stuff are the two Hungarians
Ligeti and Kurtag . Luciano Berio, who died recently,
always repays attention.
The unfortunately named but wonderful German composer
Heiner Goebbels definitely worth a few hours of
anyone's time.
In jazz I listen to everything Brad Meldhau releases.
I think there's a reverse ( but similar) problem with
Meldhau in that on a cursory listen he sounds almost
too easy to get along with and its only repeated and
careful listening that reveals his enormous depth.
I've given a little thought as to why there is this
strange disjunction- I think one of the reasons is
simply that there is little of this stuff available
for download. A second is that popular ( in the very
broadest sense) musicians have embraced digital
technology much more quickly and thoroughly than
either "art" ( the terminology is horrible and
clunky..) composers or jazzers and so certainly many
people working in new media tend to have an almost
built in predisposition towards that sort of work
which ften reflects their techniques and perhaps their
concerns.
Personally I listen to everything, but I am getting a
bit bored with stuff, often digital, that has a
surface shininess ( nice/interesting new sounds) but
no structure or real depth beyond that - lots of
electronica is for me like eating way too much
chocolate.
In that connection it's revealing to read things like
"Sound on Sound", which are pretty much new sounds
pornography - they are exclusively about how to make
new *sounds*, completely in isolation from what one
might then do with them, which of course is the
interesting and difficult two thirds of the iceberg.
best
michael
--- Jim Andrews <jim@vispo.com> wrote:

> Douglas Coupland, when asked what new band he's
> listening to that he can't
> stop listening to, recently said:
>
> "I think the day of discovering a brand new band is
> largely over.
> Everybody's a musical curator now, young and old.
> What's interesting is that
> people over 30, who throughout the 20th cenury more
> or less stopped engaging
> with music, are back in the trenches experiencing
> music they never would
> have found sans Internet. For me right now it's
> 1960's feel-good bands like
> the New Seekers as well as 1970's dinosaur rock like
> Emerson Lake and
> Palmer, which I didn't like when it first came out."
>
> I don't know. Sounds a bit myopic to me.
>
> The last day or so I've been listening to/watching
> the music videos
> available through the media library of winamp 5. I
> don't know whether I
> should be disappointed in the media library or music
> more generally or
> myself, but there just wasn't much that really got
> me. I got the strange
> feeling I'd heard it all before. Mind you all this
> stuff is from AOL, ie, it
> all hits a certain pro level. yet by dad there's an
> awful lot of sameness in
> that media library.
>
> My own suspicion is that there *is* music out there
> that is really new, but
> for all our communications devices it's still hard
> as hell to hear it, to
> find it. It is inaudible as far as empire is
> concerned. Like that Vicki
> Bennett/People Like Us music I put a link in to a
> while ago. That's
> interesting contemporary music, not an endless
> repeat loop--though it uses
> other peoples' music from the 20's through the 90's
> as its only material.
>
> dazed & confused,
> ja
> http://vispo.com
>
>
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DISCUSSION

Re: BEACON


<An oldie but a goodie that seems relevant:
http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/news/twhid/google_netartmasterpiece.html
submitted in the spirit of discussion.>

Indeed. This is very interesting -I'd read it on the
list & forgotten I had. SO the T&C piece is clearly
even more zetigeisty than it felt.
The bottom line seems to me though, "artistic
intention", which I would maintain is a necessary, but
not sufficient, condition for art. Not that I don't
think the Google display (or the things on Alex
Galloway's list) couldn't be an object of *aesthetic*
contemplation & pleasure, as indeed can the sunset or
thick grey clouds over the Derbyshire moors on a
winter's afternoon, without involving human artistic
intervention. But art ( as opposed to simply an
aesthetic sense) is a *human_activity* or it's
nothing, even if this activity is simply a "framing"
or conceptualisation - of course then we can argue
about the value of each specific piece.
( of course one could argue that the act of
contemplation of nature or Google is similar to the
above last.. I think this is pushing it a bit however
then I think of snow viewing ceremonies &c and the
line does seem very blurred.. maybe we just have to
have a kind of Wittgensteinian approach to the thing..
and the dynamic nature of human history and thought
means inevitably perhaps that *static* definitions are
doomed or at least partial, hence the importance of
this sort of discussion..)
I *do* like this Beacon piece more each time I look at
it - and Thomson and Craighead get points for plucking
the idea from the zeitgeist and realizing it, I think.
michael

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DISCUSSION

Re: BEACON


Curious to find myself defending, if this is the right
term, a piece like this, which ordinarily would not be
at all to my taste .
It's the massively concentrated *calling attention to*
the linguistic content of the search strings which are
here denuded of their original context - assisted by
the rather splendidly austere design of the page-
which does it for me.
The outcome is genuinely poetic and moving , it seems
to me, and thank god, irreducible to an artist
statement or simple explanation - its something to do
with zeitgeist, yes; also something to do with an
enormous sense of multitude but also something to do
with a linguistic pleasure akin to me to that I derive
from the work of Alan Sondheim, for example.
And that pleasure isn't simply ,abstractly, linguistic
but also refers very directly to the world out there
in a sort of updated automatic writing -but rather
than the outpourings of a single unconscious, we have
access to almost literally a *collective* unconcious.

On the whole I'm bored rigid by *good-ideaism*, by the
artistic one liner, which has struck me as a
particularly lazy form of aspiring to art ( I hated,
for example, Data Diaries) - but there's no point
arguing when something hits you in the viscera.
I'm also generally rather more predisposed in favour
of stuff involving perhaps a little more craft (
although there's clearly real care and thought here
-reminds me of MTAA in that respect) -but sometimes,
as we all know, it just happens. It does here.
michael

--- Alexander Galloway <galloway@nyu.edu> wrote:

> There have been many projects that use real-time
> displays of random
> search strings, here are some:
>
> http://www.metaspy.com/
> http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
> http://www.wordtracker.com
> http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/jeevesiq.html
> http://50.lycos.com/
> http://buzz.yahoo.com/
> http://search.store.yahoo.com/OT?
>
> How does Beacon differ from these other sites? more
> specifically, what
> makes it an artwork?
>
> On Jan 5, 2005, at 4:39 AM, Jon Thomson wrote:
>
> > BEACON. A new on-line artwork by Thomson &
> Craighead, 2005.
> >
> > At 00.00hrs on January 1st 2005 an automated
> beacon began broadcasting
> > on the web at:
> >
> > http://www.automatedbeacon.net
> >
> > The beacon continuously relays selected live web
> searches as they are
> > being made around the world, presenting them back
> in series and at
> > regular intervals.
> >
> > The beacon has been instigated to act as a silent
> witness: a feedback
> > loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves to
> ourselves in
> > real-time. As resources become available,
>