Rob Myers
Since 2003
Works in United States of America

ARTBASE (3)
PORTFOLIO (2)
BIO
Rob Myers is an artist and hacker based in the UK.

I have been creating images of the contemporary social and cultural environment through programming, design software and visual remixing since the early 1990s. My work is influenced by popular culture and high art in equal measures. My interest in remixing and sampling has led to my involvement in the Free Culture movement. I have been involved in the public consultation regarding the Creative Commons 2.0 and CC-UK licenses. All my visual art is available under a Creative Commons license.

My interest in programming has led to my involvement with the Free Software movement. I developed the Macintosh version of the Gwydion Dylan programming language compiler. All my software is available under the GNU GPL.
Discussions (509) Opportunities (1) Events (0) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: FW: Questioning the Frame


On Thursday, December 16, 2004, at 09:56PM, Dominique Fontaine <dfontaine@fondation-langlois.org> wrote:

>-----Original Message-----
>From: On Behalf Of coco fusco : animas999@yahoo.com
> [...]
>Terms such as " mapping," "borders," "hacking,"
>"trans-nationalism," "identity as spatial," and so on
>have been popularized in recent years by new media
>theories' celebration of "the networks"-a catch-all
>phrase for the modes of communication and exchange
>facilitated by the Internet.

Sweep that generalization!

Which New Media Theories? What is a New Media Theory anyway? Exclusively by New Media Theories? Or have NMT simply soaked up more general humanities buzzwords and themes. Are all New Media Theories the same? Are there any examples or exemplars? Why doesn't the author give any?

>We should proceed with caution in using this
>terminology because it accords strategic primacy to

Notice the primacy given to language, intentions, appearances. This is a critique of form, not content. Of style, not substance.

>space and simultaneously downplays time-i.e., history.
>It also evades categories of embodied difference such
>as race, gender and class, and in doing so prevents us
>from understanding how the historical development of
>those differences has shaped our contemporary
>worldview.

Ignoring Einstein's spacetime for a moment, "categories of embodied difference" are themselves atemporal and ahistorical academic fantasies. If you want to actually achieve anything by historical materialist criticism, breaking class relations down into packets of "difference" only gets in the way.

>Technocentric fantasy

Yes, this is a critique of a technocentric fantasy, but a fantasy on the part of the author, not their imagined subject.

>The rhetoric of mapping and networks conflates the way
>technological systems operate with modern human
>communication.

Huh?

>According to this mode of thought we
>are to believe that we live inside the world of
>William Gibson's Neuromancer

This would be a polluted, brand-obsessed, corporate-dominated dystopia?

>and that salvation is
>only attainable via very specific technological
>expertise unleashed against the system-i.e., hacking.

"Hacking" is an ethic, a mode of activity. Not "skript kiddies" breaking into your PC. Neuromancer is twenty years old, wannabe cultural studies lecturers really should let it go and try some Neal Stevenson instead.

>Consider the heroes of Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters
>such as The Matrix whose power lies in their knowledge
>of "the code." It is implied that we operate in
>networks because computers and the Internet have
>restructured "our" lives and because global economic
>systems have turned us into global citizens. Hacking
>then comes to stand for all forms of critical
>engagement with preexistent power structures.

In fact this is a more criticism of deconstruction and text-based retreat from real work in general. Actual hacking (not in the sense the author obviously misunderstands it) is the *creation* of something, the solving of a problem, a shamanic exercise of personal creative skill to answer a need, *not* just breaking something down.

>I'm just a little too old to believe these new media
>mantras unquestioningly.

Except to criticise them

>This rhetoric implies two
>possible explanations for the difference between the
>networked present and the non-networked past.

== The misunderstanding of a misrepresented and generalised "rhetoric" can be distilled into two straw men.

>The first explanation suggests that no one on the left

Wtf has this to do with the "left"? Is technoutopianism leftist? Wired-ism tends to be "libertarian" (right-wing anarchistic).

>before the age of the Internet practiced subversive
>manipulation of existent media, tactical intervention,
>investigative reporting and infiltration of power
>structures. It also would seem that before the dawning
>of the networks, no one knew what being an organic
>intellectual was about, no one elaborated alternative
>communication systems and no one was aware of or
>sensed a connection to geographic regions other than
>Europe.

Where this judgement on the part of... who exactly? ...has been extracted from I don't know.
Who does the author speak for in offering this description of ...someone... 's failings?

>The second explanation would be that electronic
>communication has produced a form of networking that
>is so radically different as to imply a neat break
>with the past.

As opposed to an explanation that nothing has changed?

These are both straw man arguments, ventriloquism without even a dummy.

>In either case, these arguments
>conveniently situate their advocates outside history,

As they are designed to by the author. (That is, it's not that anyone holds these extra-historical postions, it's that the author can neatly isolate these straw men in this way).

>since either way tactical media practitioners have
>nothing of value to inherit from the past.
>
>While I can understand that there might be a dearth of
>knowledge about tactical interventions of previous
>centuries, I am perplexed by the apparent loss of
>short-term memory of many cultural theorists now in
>vogue, who were alive and active in the '70s.

Such as the author.

>Can we forget Daniel Ellsberg's publishing of the
>Pentagon Papers, the uncovering of the Watergate
>scandal, the break-in to an FBI office by an anonymous
>group that led to revelations of COINTELPRO and the
>Freedom of Information Act, the many Senate
>investigations of FBI corruption, the widespread
>solidarity with Third World independence movements,

Sounds like "cracking" (what the author would misunderstand as "hacking") to me! Why would the existence of historical successes undermine or invalidate contemporary efforts?

>the plethora of underground and alternative presses
>and global mail art networks-all operated by radical
>activists, artists and intellectuals?

Are these examples of technological or sociological action? If the former, they are weak. If the latter, are these meant to be new? Look at C19th use of (and legislation regarding!) telecommunications networks. Whilst there is nothing new under the sun, the sun didn't first rise in the 1970s.

>Those of us who
>can at least recall the ways that these strategic
>interventions transformed political and cultural life
>in that decade necessarily cast a skeptical glance at
>the messianic claims of technocentrists.

And those with an interest in technology who have done their research cast a skeptical glance over "been there, done that" claims that don't mention precedents older than half a century.

>The shift from Eurocentric internationalism to a more
>globally inclusive worldview came long before the age
>of the Internet. It was launched outside Europe and
>America, and emanated from the geopolitical margins.

How did we hear of this, then?

>The process took place across a range of fields of
>knowledge, culture and politics. This revision of the
>world picture was catalyzed by postwar decolonization;
>the Non-Aligned Movement launched in 1961; and civil
>rights struggles in the developed world, including the
>Black Power and Chicano movements-all of which
>invariably affirmed their alliances with Third World
>revolutions. This political process was expanded upon
>by a postcolonial understanding that various diasporas
>shared transnational connections and that these
>diasporas were produced by the economics and politics
>of colonialism and imperialism. The historical bases
>of these movements are consistently obfuscated by the
>technocentric rhetoric of networks and mapping that
>emanate from Europe, North America and Australia.

So the technology isn't inherently good, it's inherently evil? (Yes, that's a deliberate straw man. It is designed to reveal the flaw in the argument.) This is the very technological fixation the author claims to be criticising.

>Instead of dealing with these histories, contemporary
>discourses on globalism and new technology tend to
>dismiss postcolonial discourse as "mere identity
>politics." They tend to confuse bureaucratic efforts
>to institutionally separate the concerns of ethnic
>minorities with what always have been the much broader
>agendas of anti-racist political struggles and
>postcolonial cultural endeavors.

Instead of dealing with technological change and inequality, of placing it in broader economic or even (gasp) historical context, we should try to return to the safe havens of "difference"?

I'm loathe to recommend "No Logo" to anyone, but in this case I'll make an exception.

>I am a great admirer of the practice of electronic
>civil disobedience and have used "hacktivist" software
>such as Floodnet to engage in online protest actions
>myself.

Never heard of that package. No real hacker would use an off-the-shelf package to achieve their own ends, and none would disrupt anyone else's work using it. "Hacktivism" is embarrasing, a cultural-studies-created misuse of a misunderstood word.

>But I find the willed historical amnesia of
>new media theory to be quite suspect, and even
>dangerous.

Try deconstructing it socially or historically rather than technologically and it makes a lot more sense.

>One of the reasons I chose to make a/k/a
>Mrs. George Gilbert, a video art piece about the
>Angela Davis case, was because I wanted to reexamine
>crucial histories that are now being forgotten within
>the contemporary conversations on globalization. The
>alienation caused by multinational corporate
>domination (otherwise known as Empire) that many
>middle-class young adults in the Global North feel is
>just the last chapter in a long history of reactions
>against imperial projects.
>Mapping mistakes

Ah. A *video piece*. Not "New Media", video. Much better. Analogue or digital video? Analogue? Much better.

>Another issue of concern is the new media culture's
>fascination with mapping-a fascination that it shares
>with the military strategists. The news of the Iraq
>war frequently involves men in uniform pointing to or
>better yet walking across maps of various Middle
>Eastern countries-so when I then walk into galleries
>and cultural conferences in Europe and find more men
>(without uniforms) playing with maps, I start to
>wonder about the politics of those representations.

Video is also used in war, and still video cameras recently recorded torture. Clearly we should think of Abu Ghiraib when we see the author's work.

>In the American media, maps dominate representations
>of warfare. While realistic depictions of the violence
>of war via photographs and film have been banned from
>American television news, maps are acceptable to those
>in power because they dehumanize the targets.
>Similarly, in the context of the art world, maps have
>come to abstract and thereby silence individual and
>group testimony.

This is fetishism, this is poetics. This is the author mapping their head.

>New media culture uses maps to read the world in terms
>of extremes. Contemporary cultural theory is rife with
>renderings that celebrate macro views and micro views
>of the workings of the world, both social and
>biological-which is to say, maps of vast spaces and
>physical phenomena and maps of the most minuscule
>thing. We hear over and over again about global
>systems and panoptic vision on the one hand and genome
>chains and nano-entities on the other. When I first
>noticed this phenomenon I was struck by how it
>complements the resurgence of formalist art
>criticism's love affair with the grid. By this I am
>referring to the return in the '90s to the definition
>of art as a search for "perfect forms," and a
>celebration of the formal characteristics of objects
>and surfaces. What I have become more concerned about
>as time goes on, however, is how this fetishizing of
>spatial extremes enables the resurgence of Descartes'
>idea that humans are rational, autonomous individuals
>and that the human mind and mathematical principles
>are the source for all real knowledge.

This is a chronic failure to consider the social context of the work. Why these interests? Why now?

>However objective they may appear, maps do have a
>point of view, and that is one of privileged
>super-human sight, of safe distance and of
>omniscience.

Rosalind, is that you?

>The mapmaker charts an entire field of
>vision, an entire world, and in doing so he (yes he)
>plays God. Whether you are beholding the map as a
>viewer or charting it as the cartographer, you rule
>the world before you, you control it, and, in putting
>everything in its place, you substitute a global whole
>established through pictorial arrangement for an
>actual dynamic engagement with individual elements and
>entities. The psychological motive behind assuming
>that position of power is not questioned, nor is the
>predominance of white male techno-elites in that
>discourse seen as anything more than incidental.

Whingeing incoherently won't change the author's local situation. It's more balanced elsewhere at grass roots level.

>It is as if more than four decades of postmodern
>critique of the Cartesian subject had suddenly
>evaporated.

We can but hope.

>Those critical discourses that unmasked
>the way universals suppress difference, which gave
>voice to the personal experience of women, the poor
>and disenfranchised minorities, are treated as
>inherently flawed by both the progressive and
>conservative discourses of globalism.

They also work against any shared struggle. Funny that.

>Progressive
>media advocates dismiss these discourses of difference
>as "essentialist" while Republicans decry them as "the
>tyranny of special interests." But both provide
>ideological justification for the dismantling of
>legislation protecting civil rights.

Civil rights woiuld be easier to protect if we all acted together, rather than reducing society to dozens of conflicting and romanticized special interest groups as the author does.

>Viewing the world as a map eliminates time, focuses
>disproportionately on space and dehumanizes life. In
>the name of a politics of global connectedness,
>artists and activists too often substitute an abstract
>"connectedness" for any real engagement with people in
>other places or even in their own locale.

Hang on.

All the successful examples of media intervention given earlier were political acts. It is frankly insulting to refer to them as art.

Yet from "New Media Theory", to direct political action, we now turn to the practice of art...

>What gets lost in this focus on mapping is the view of
>the world from the ground: lived experience. What is
>ignored is the pervasiveness of the well-orchestrated
>and highly selective visual culture that the majority
>of Americans consume during most of their waking
>hours. Most people are not looking through microscopes
>and telescopes and digital mapping systems to find
>truth about the world. They are watching reality TV,
>sitcoms, the Super Bowl, MTV and Fox News, all of
>which also offer maps of a completely different kind:
>conspiracy theories that pit innocent Americans
>against the Axis of Evil, embedded journalists'
>hallucinatory misreadings of foreign conflicts,
>allegories of empowerment through consumption and
>endlessly recycled, biblically inspired narratives of
>sin and redemption.

Most people looking at church art didn't work in heaven. Most people looking at modernist grids didn't live in art galleries. And most would-be critics who compare the aesthetic concerns of art with patronising fantasies of base proletarian interests don't live anywhere near their adopted flock.

>Going off-grid
>
>Finally we should consider what is being left off the
>maps and why? What has happened, for example, to
>institutional self-critique in the art world?

It has been very successful commercially and textually but new fads have come along.

>Why has
>such examination become taboo in exhibitions or
>unpopular with artists who gravitate to political
>subjects?

Because it has no transformative critical power. Because it is complicit with the financial and critical interests that demand it. Because it reflacts the managerial ego rather than questioning it.

Because it is a set question with set answers that changes nothing.

It is critical form, not critical content. Appearance, not action.

>Why in the midst of myriad investigations of
>corporate control of politics and culture is there
>little or no attention paid to corporate control of
>the museums and of corporate influence in art
>collecting?

Because it was established long ago and everyone knows it. So what do we do next?

This is the problem. You can study something until the end of time, but above quantum level obsevation doesn't change things.

You need to do something. Actually do something. Not write; do.

>Why is it acceptable to the art world for
>an artist to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
>but not to address the pressure put on the organizers
>of global art exhibitions to showcase a
>disproportionate number of Israeli artists?

Good question. I think some sort of action would be better here as well.

>Why is it
>fine for black artists to celebrate the construction
>of black style but not to make visible the virtual
>absence of black people as arbiters in the power
>structures of the art institutions, galleries,
>magazines and auction houses where black art is given
>economic and aesthetic value?

" " "

>We live in a very dangerous time in which the right to
>express dissent and to raise questions about the
>workings of power is seriously imperiled by
>fundamentalisms of many kinds.

http://www.lessig.org/blog

is currently talking about previous reductions in rights. You ain't seen nothing yet compared to World War One.

>Now more than ever we
>need to keep the lessons of history foremost in our
>minds and to defend the critical discourses and
>practices that enable differing experiences and
>perspectives to be heard and understood.
>
>There are just too many important parallels to be
>drawn between COINTELPRO and the excesses of law
>enforcement brought about by the Patriot Act to be
>dismissive of history. Socially conscious artists and
>activists, rather than embracing tactics that rely on
>dreams of omniscience, would do well to examine the
>history of globalism, networks, dissent and collective
>actions in order to understand that they are rooted in
>the geopolitical and cultural margins.

This essay is confused, poorly argued, and unreflectively polemical. The author is clearly angry about something, although quite what I couldn't say.

The techno-utopianism of Wired, currently best represented by the "emergence" craze, is indeed bogus.

But demanding that artists reveal Watergates or that we ignore all the women who produce and organise technologically-based art so we can cling to a comforting fantasy of repressions is counter-productive. Worse, demanding an illustratively political art is the kind of failure to differentiate between form and content (and art and life) that means I still think Flash Formalism says more politically than net.art .

Wan hem fullap mekem nois, saenem natin.

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Arts Intolerance: Emily Jacir/Ulrich Museum Wichita


On 15 Dec 2004, at 18:56, Plasma Studii - uospn

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Arts Intolerance: Emily Jacir/Ulrich Museum Wichita


On 15 Dec 2004, at 17:55, Plasma Studii wrote:

> ok. that's just the galleries own conflict of interest. they
> invested in the artwork and then invested in a protest against it
> (though to a far, far lesser degree). but that's the gallery
> devaluing something it invested in. but it's not any affront to the
> artwork or artist. it's just a mildly contradictory move. says "our
> selections aren't important ON EVERY LEVEL". that's all.

IMHO this is like saying it's OK for the gallery to drape transparent
blue cloth over all the works because you can still see the work
underneath. In both instances the viewer's perception of the work is
colored by an intervention, it is recontextualised by something that is
placed before it.

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Arts Intolerance: Emily Jacir/Ulrich Museum Wichita


Imagine that Rhizome caved to pressure to prepend the following
disclaimer to your posting:

"The following posting is complete nonsense. It is counter to the
facts. People who make this kind of statement should be pitied as
simpletons. And beside, they kick puppies. I have proof. Look! Puppy
kicker!"

And then published it on the web for all to see. Don't worry, they
won't add that to anyone else's posting, just yours.

That is the problem with this case.

On 15 Dec 2004, at 16:42, Cinque Hicks wrote:

> Furthermore, did I read correctly that the University wishes to put
> the offending material just *outside* the gallery?

Yes, as in "before you see the show". Why is a premptive strike needed?

> I’ve never been there, but I’m imaging some sort of foyer or entry
> hall that would house the material? Does anybody know if this is the
> case? If it is, then I especially have no problem with this.

Cool. What value do you feel it adds to the show?

> Again, it’s sort of tacky, but I also don’t have such a
> sanctimonious, pious view of art as some quasi-religious object that I
> don’t think it should risk coming into contact with the messy real
> world.

"Pious" and "sanctimonious" are kinda opposites. Unlike freedom of
speech and the moral right of integrity, despite whatever
constitutional Wookie Defense you feel like deploying.

Give the NeoCons their own art show. That would solve this. They can't
get one? I see. Very interesting...

- Rob.

DISCUSSION

Re: Best Practices for Artists


You'll probably need to glue this back together to make a proper URL:

http://www.a-n.co.uk/cgi-bin/db2www.exe/topic.d2w/input?
section=4&topicu008&username=&password=&textonly=0

Failing that, www.a-n.co.uk and look for the good practice guide.

- Rob

On 15 Dec 2004, at 15:17, Pall Thayer wrote:

> The definitive guide:
> http://painting.about.com/cs/paintinganimals/qt/tipsFur1.htm

http://yerf.com/
Go to the bottom of the page and search for "ipod" ...

- Rob.