Crashpop.

"1945-1998," 2003, Isao Hashimoto

2010-07-13T20:12:00.000-07:00

From the Artist: "This piece of work is a bird's eye view of history, by scaling down a month's length of time into one second. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many (nuclear bomb) experiments each country has conducted."

It's a mesmerizing, War-Games kind of video, with nuclear tests forming the soundtrack. Also, a reminder of what kind of information artists and designers can make concrete using time-based maps.

Shortly after the primary video, we are shown another time-lapse map of each country's nuclear tests, but the detonations leave artifacts on the screen correlating to size and location. The result is stunning.

Crashpop World Service Mix for May 2010

2010-05-03T23:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a Crashpop World Service Mix for May, since the radio show has been suspended. 12 tracks, just in case anyone else has finals they need to be distracted from.

Flannel Magazine

2010-04-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

Here's a "shouting outs" to Flannel Magazine, Maine's finest and grittiest lo-fi, DIY zine-book dedicated to local underground artists and writers. Add them on Facebook or just go ahead and buy the new issue.

Yes, I'm a regular contributor. No, I don't get any money out of spamming you about it.

Playing Super Mario Bros. with Roger Ebert

2010-04-17T21:22:00.001-07:00

Braid trailer 1.2 from David Hellman on Vimeo.

Roger Ebert, who is actually really awesome about films, and about all kinds of other things, seems to be really (disappointingly) weird about video games.

About Braid, he writes: "Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie."

He's basing his review of Braid on a YouTube video of Kellee Santiago's 2009 talk at a TED conference:

Instead of playing these games, Ebert is basing his opinion on a description of the games, not on actually playing them. No one would write a review of a film based on seeing a lecture about the film, so I don't get what he's doing.

Examining games in an old-media context is weird, because the "art" happens in the interaction, not the storyline or the explanation of the game's gimmicks. Experience changes the 'meaning' of those gimmicks in a tangible way - you transfer yourself into the screen, so it's not the same as "taking back a move" in chess (That's Ebert's comparison) but more like watching a film rewind itself precisely when you need it to, and being able to see a different output.

You can't like Run Lola Run without loving video games, or understanding them as art. That film follows Lola as she runs through three 'levels' of 'missions' to save her boyfriend; Ebert was lukewarm on the film, but he made an odd note (even after acknowledging the video game parallel in his lede). "Film is ideal for showing alternate and parallel time lines. It's literal; we see Lola running, and so we accept her reality." It's weird, then, that he so easily dismisses video games when they achieve the exact same end.

Ebert says games are closer to the chicken scratch end of the art spectrum, but notably, he's not a gamer. You can't get the culture of games - or understand something like what Braid does differently, without knowing what the culture of games is. Maybe that's an indictment of gaming's insularity as an art form. But the context of mediocrity - there's a lot of bad movies, and a lot of bad games - actually kind of defines what happens when a movie dodges, expands, or devastates the cliche's of its genre. That may be meaningless on its own. Perhaps you won't have your mind blown by reversing time in a game if it's the first game you've ever played. But I do think it's important.

Ultimately Ebert is a film guy, not an images guy, it seems, but the "it ain't art" argument is dead, dead, dead. I mean heck, I was writing about Video Games as Art back in like, 2009, guys.

On YouTube Art's Aesthetics, or "OMGart"

2010-04-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

Jacob Ciocci, "The Peace Tape," 2009, on YouTube

Of course this is what art looks like in the 20-teens.

This stuff, Jimmy Joe Roche,

and Ryan Trecartin,

and Everything is Terrible, is more than just pastiche/collage of images/sounds. It's a pastiche of mediums - art about VHS tapes and about what's on VHS tapes. Art on YouTube and about what's on YouTube. Simultaneously. And arranged into microblips (microkitsch?) to mirror the 'frenetic onslaught of information in the digital age' (TM), with the nuggets plucked out and exploded, the art of a world that has too many search engine results for "corgi dog +awesome".

Here's curation in 'the future of art' - just as journalists, stock brokers, photographers and anyone else who had a sweet job in the 20th century has been replaced with some variation of an RSS feed, curation can be done with an iPod touch and a Tumblr app. "We don't need guys in museums" showing us archival 1990's kitsch, because the Tumblrkids and the VHStubers are going to do it for us. And they aren't even going to argue about the role of the curator, or the role of the museum, or the role of the gallery.

Don't worry, you guys, all of that is dead already. The most significant cultural export of the 2010's will be 15-year-old kids reassembling old shit.jpg's / trash.mov files and passing it on and making fun of how lame instructional videos for the Internet are, while galleries go the way of movie rental stores and newspapers.

Everything is Terrible, 2010, '90s Gaming is Very Cool'

Which is why I have been fascinated by Tumblr as a sort of manifestation of Walter Benjamin's dream to write a book using only passages from other books. Benjamin struggled with it, but now teenage kids in Wisconsin do it for fun without even knowing it's 'art or whatever'. This is a gallery and it's a zine, and it's what curation looks like, circa 2010-2020.

Authors are dead and talking about the author being dead is dead. It's all about the curator and the collector and it's a first-hand, instinctual impulse to make art that makes sense of all these raw materials. And that collector is recombining all of the stuff into a new thing where authorship isn't assumed or considered, where the museum is a museum of images which themselves are museums and it's all under some kid's YouTube screen name followed by a couple of numbers.

OMGArt guys amiright? It's even stupider if you say it out loud.

Peace Tape comes by way of All Everyone, United

Xiu Xiu, "This Too Shall Pass" (Music Video), 2010

2010-04-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

C. Spencer Yeh, "This Too Shall Pass" video for Xiu Xiu, 2010

Pitchfork calls this video 8-bit, but I have my doubts. It's still pretty great.

The video for Boy Soprano was also '8-bit':

Jose Perez III, "Boy Soprano" video for Xiu Xiu, 200(?)

If anyone's up for a surreal nighttime activity, you can scour YouTube for Tweens who make fanvideos for Xiu Xiu songs, like this video for Apistat Commander made from the computer game 'movie studio' which made me really uncomfortable.

Jamie Stewart's lyrics consist of self-aware, hyperbolic angst that kind of mocks itself at the same time that it's being really sincere, which I guess is also the feeling of being 15 and having access to the Internet.

Let's look at the videos kids are making for Xiu Xiu songs (If I didn't link, there's a reason):
1) "I Love the Valley (Oh!)" is set to simple cuts of different LiveJournal Icons;
2) Tweens build nuclear bombs for "Poe Poe"
3) Tween stares at a mirror real scary and mouths along between cuts of John Ashcroft and antidepressant medication,
3) Tweens with Disco Balls and glitter-soaked victorian garb stand on train tracks.

What would your YouTube Xiu Xiu video have looked like when you were 14? What experimental percussive/electronic noise band did you make music videos for in middle school?

Charanjit Singh, "10 Ragas to a Disco Beat," 1982

2010-03-27T19:43:00.000-07:00

I don't usually post music here, despite running a world music program by the same name, but since I'm not doing the show and since this is retro electronic music, here you go.

In 1982, Indian electronic musician Charanjit Singh decided to reimagine traditional Indian Ragas in the style of contemporary electronic pop music. The result is explained in the title: "Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat."

Which sounds promising enough in a hokey, disco-kitsch kind of way, except that the music is pure acid, ahead of its time (We'd get that 303 squelch stateside sometime around 1989, unless you were in Detroit).

Check it out below on the blog, or at the link if you're on FB/RSS:

(Youtube: Raga Bhairav, 1982)

It's so good that I almost don't buy it. The sound quality is kind of too pristine (compare it to other, mainstream Bollywood musical recordings: Disco Dancer's 'homage' to 'Video Killed the Radio Star', for example):

Which is funny, because Charanjit's music could have actually benefited from tape warble; it would have made a pretty sweet chillwave record. As it stands now, the most accurate comparison I've seen is to Aphex Twin's "Analord" series. The melodies do fit in with the standard Raga fare.

There are liner notes in the sleeve, for what it's worth. Props to Bombay Connection Records for the find.

Short Take: Lo-Fi Super Mario Bros.

2010-03-13T21:48:00.000-08:00

Super Mario Bros on an 8x8 LED matrix from Chloe Fan on Vimeo.

Because Super Mario hacks will never stop being awesome.

By way of Engadget.

"8-bit NYC" by Brett Camper and Additional Notes on Video Game Cartography

2010-03-08T22:12:00.000-08:00

Statue of Liberty overhead map rendered by 8-bit.

8-bit NYC is a totally zoomable, interactive map of New York City rendered in the style of NES games - personally, I think it most closely resembles the maps of the Dragon Warrior series:

Awesomely, Camper is soliciting funds to Build 15 more cities, including Boston, San Francisco, D.C., London and Paris. (Kyoto, home of NES headquarters, is conspicuously absent). And, if you contribute, you can get a number of various goodies, including the option to name a city for inclusion.

Video Game Cartography
The whole thing has got me thinking about video game cartography, guys.

Video games depend on cartography. Essentially, games are designed as maps and performed, by the player, as musical scores. What can video game cartography show us about the world?

There seem to be two categories of video game world maps, provided we begin by eliminating the side-scroller:

A) Video game maps with real-world parallels.
B) Video game maps of completely fictitious worlds.

Video game maps with real-world parallels.
Destiny of an Emperor's map of China, Gegege no Kitaro 2's surprisingly beautiful map of Japan.

I can't find a rendering for the Japan of "Nobunaga's Ambition" or the China of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms."

Nor can I find any video game that includes a map of the United States, or any continent that isn't Asia. Perhaps this explains a generation of lackluster geography students. These maps don't blink.

I can, however, find Disney World, as rendered by the game "Adventures in the Magic Kingdom" -

Video games of completely fictitious worlds.

This is, by far, the most dominant mapping of video game space.

Some enormous maps: Earth Bound, Faria, and of course, Hyrule from Legend of Zelda.

When Maps are the territory
With enough time and effort, someone could put together a visual culture analysis of how video game maps reflect our interactions with the spaces they claim to represent.

Korzybski writes, "The map is not the territory," but for the sake of video games, the map IS the territory. Neil Gaiman writes, "One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory."

The maps of video games are the most accurate maps possible, because the map and the territory are the same when you're playing. Notably, renderings of game maps (often included in the boxes or sold in strategy guides) aren't interactive, so they are less useful than the actual game map. The game, itself, is "perfectly accurate and perfectly useless." Maybe you get your character killed in the process of figuring out the space you occupy in the game. C'est la vie.

Perhaps an academic study of the visual culture of video game cartography would find that a generation raised on an interactive fantasyland of playable maps - maps which are the territory - ended up with an instinctively different concept of real vs. virtual and organic vs. synthetic interactions. An 8-bit induced 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness.'

No question that 'simulations of interactions' can now be treated the same way 'in-flesh interactions' are treated: See Twitter, Facebook and flame wars. Growing up with the world of the primal map - where our bodies sit motionless while our minds and screens explore caves, shoot aliens, fight dragons, unify Japan and spur real, physical and psychological responses - has left us in a limbo where the real world and its simulation are no longer separated. The map is the territory, and the screen is where the action is.

TLDR
This is our future, guys.

(8-bit NYC came to my attention by way of Michael Mandiberg)

Kőnigh Péter - Indián dal (1987)

2010-02-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

Here's a music video from 1987, part of the Peter Timar's music-video-as-cinema project, Moziklip, which was like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" if every song on "The Wall" was performed by a random Hungarian new wave bands and curated by the director. I like this one (above) in particular because of it's cynicism about revolution in the Soviet states, which I am writing a secret thesis about.

Link for you RSS-types.

The African Casiotone Hand Clap Crisis

2010-02-07T20:53:00.000-08:00

Guys, I've been thinking about the prevalence of Casio keyboards in contemporary African cassette culture and in the Middle East.

It's something you don't hear in America's presentations of 'world music', like the Putomayo releases. You know, the little cardboard, biodegradable cases with cartoonish looking drawings of people in a cafe that spell "Mexico" with a chili pepper.

According to the Putumayo Web site, “the label has become known primarily for its upbeat and melodic compilations of great international music characterized by the company's motto: 'guaranteed to make you feel good!'”

Getting Americans to enjoy that stuff means they need to leave the hand claps at home, despite that the synthesizer's affordability and flexibility have made it a standard for folk musicians around the world. But the Casio isn't just an annoying handclap-making machine. In a digital culture, it's the new washboard. And this is the new (Western) folk music:

But heard in 'folk music' from other cultures - cultures that we usually associate with poverty - it's also evidence of globalization, and Putomayo releases give white folks a satisfying mirage of 'uncorrupted peoples' whose cultures haven't been 'tainted' by the West. Because that would be too 'real'.

The Casio hand clap is the bastard child of Western culture, a sonic baby so disfigured and inauthentic that we have literally banished it to foreign lands. And reminding Westerners of its existence informs us of the hand clap's infection of these cultures, which brings our romanticism of 'the simple poor folks' to a messy, sloppy halt.

The Putumayo problem keeps true folk movements away from representation, presenting a tranquil, peaceful music at odds with the reality of global politics. After all, a lot of these countries are war zones. Why would they be listening to music that is “guaranteed to make you feel good?”

(The irony of a Palestinian Hip-Hop group subverting footage from middle-class "weed-rap" Snoop Dogg concerts is great).

The Putumayo approach to world music presents the most uncomplicated version of any culture's sound, often recorded in European studios by immigrants, or even second-generation immigrants, of the culture it claims to present. African music, as heard through a Putumayo release, will include a number of talking drums, a marimba and a group chant and, for whatever reason, some European flair to water it down. The end effect is an admittedly sentimental, pleasant and uncomplicated music that is simplified enough for Westerners to consider safe, but exotic enough to consider 'authentic.'

This form of world music is the aural equivalent of Binyavanga Wainana's ironic advice to Western writers in Africa that “African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.”

On a Putumayo release, you will not hear, for example, the quirks of second-hand '80s Casio keyboard tones, including hand claps, that are all over the underground folk cassettes of Africa. Or in Middle Eastern dance music:

The Casio is grating to the American ear; the sound of a chintzy toy instrument. When it becomes an influence on folk traditions in the developing world, the '80s Casiotone hand clap smashes the mundane realities of globalization into the exotic fantasy of the 'other'. The '80s Casiotone hand clap in a folk song is a moment of distinct rupture between Putumayo's mission “to make you feel good!” and the reality the troubling power relationship Western culture imposes.

Greg Barz, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University, says that libraries often rely on archiving releases from labels such as Putumayo, which are often produced in European studios, rather than seeking out and archiving cassettes available in Africa of actual African musicians.

“It would be like us only collecting people who covered other people's music, which is ridiculous to even think about,” he told the Vanderbilt Community Register. “But when it comes to other people's cultures we very often will only trust interpretations rather than going to the source.”

Barz notes that “cassettes are the reality of everyday music in Africa,” and a number of online resources are dedicated to making digital copies of the music available online and (as you can see) YouTube. This has opened up a kind of globalism feedback loop, as American indie rock bands have picked up on sounds of the African underground and translated them into American rock. Vampire Weekend, which borrows heavily from JuJu and Highlife music from Northwestern Africa, has even been covered by a Malawi immigrant to England, Esau Mwamwaya, and the American band's frontman performed on a song written by Mwamwaya, bringing the cycle of globalism to its completion.

In the New Yorker's review of musician Maya Arulpragasam, a.k.a MIA, whose music is a global pastiche incorporating the hip-hop of UK street culture with the droning siren-music of her native Sri Lanka, Sasha Frere-Jones writes: “It’s a voice from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot.”

Not sure what that means on a global scale, guys. But it seems to me like Putumayo is making CD's that let us ignore Western interaction with other cultures, and sells a dream that this process isn't taking place.

This globalization is already here - and irreversible - so there's no reason to assume that a folk tradition wrapped in fake amber is any more 'authentic' than a folk tradition infected with Casio synths and drum machines hand claps. But one offers us a genuine insight into the world, and the other one just preserves a series of Western myths.

Race Noise and Crashpop

2010-02-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

Kelefa Sanneh: Often with a subgenre that’s like a noisier version of X – often X is a black music, and the noisier version involves white people. Very recently that could be, adding noise to jungle. But we can go back and talk about distortion and amps. We can talk about rock abstracting itself from blues.

Bidoun: Post-punk abstracting itself from funk.

KS: Right. And often the impulse to make something noisier is to make it less black.

From Bidoun Magazine Issue #19 (here), via Mudd Up!

8-bit Taiko Drum... Hero

2010-02-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

This Japanese video game, Taiko no Tatsujin 2 for the Wii, is like "Guitar Hero" with a Taiko drum. If that weren't enough to post about, it also includes a track specifically written by 8-bit/Chiptune Electro musicians YMCK. I especially appreciate the animals doing the pogo at the 1:53 mark.

Sayat Nova, 1968

2009-11-11T20:48:00.000-08:00

I know about as much about this as you probably do. From "The Colors of Pomegranate," 1968 (of course).

Anu Tuominen

2009-09-21T19:53:00.000-07:00

Finnish installation artist Anu Tuominen collects and categorizes everyday domestic objects, such as mittens and socks and clothespins. Her arrangements possess an ethereal and kind of comforting feeling. They remind me of cabinets of curiosities, as if Tuominen is trying to preserve a piece of Finnish natural history. -Lg

See more of her work here, via Teagan Tall.

"Home Movie Reconstructions," Elliott Malkin

2009-08-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

Elliott Malkin had his family reenact scenes from their silent home movies and vacation movies from the 70's. Then the new movies are played alongside the old ones. Malkin appears in the originals, but in the reenactments he is absent. It's brave to look at the past this way.

You can watch them here.

Twombley Spiders and the Reused Folkway Whisper

2009-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

Links below are for MP3's to the remix album for The Twombley Spiders and the Whiskey-Fueled Sparrow. Notype has been holding on to this one for about a year now, and I figured I can probably get it out faster than them at this point. I hope you like it.

The Twombley Spiders and the Reused Folkway Whisper
Remix Album + 1 new track

UPDATE: Now it's available at Notype.

Artist's Talk: Iain Kerr

2009-04-06T22:15:00.000-07:00

Art emerges from small sources of inspiration. Proust had his madeleine cookies. Nietzsche had Wagner's opera. Artist Iain Kerr has a bunch of seagulls in Cleveland.

OK, it goes a lot deeper than that. There's paleontology, fossil excavations, Inuit history, global warming, cat harnessing experiments, Darwin and the philosophy of time. It is, you might say, dense.

Kerr is an associate professor of interdisciplinary studio and theory at the Maine College of Art, who came to speak at the University of Maine Wednesday evening. He began by describing a recent installation piece, "Deep Time, Rapid Time," forged in collaboration with the artist collective Spurse.

To continue, click to see the rest of this article at The Maine Campus.

JODI, "YouTube Records," 2009

2009-04-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

So, JODI, apparently, is taking YouTube videos of people singing, etching them into vinyl records, playing them on a turntable and recording it, posting the resulting video to YouTube.

It's a very un-JODI project, but I love it. Here are four things I said to some kid about what the "point" was. So, here are four points.

Four Points:

1. I collect records, even though I could have MP3's. I also put out a print newspaper even though it could exist entirely on the Web. But putting something into a tangible form like a CD or a record - or a newspaper, or a printed photograph - has a much heavier resonance and feeling than simply looking at it on the screen and storing it on a hard drive. We have a vastly different relationship with digital media than we do with tangible media we can hold in our hands. Why?

2. Our relationships with the media we make. Everyone is producing something on YouTube, even if it is some kid singing along to Alicia Keys. So when someone takes that and elevates it to the status of a record, you can say they're actually taking that culture a lot more seriously than its producers are. So what does that say about the producers? And the state of what it means to be a producer, on the Internet, where everyone is producing and producing into a channel of complete obscurity? (Ira Glass talks about what a giant act of will it is to make anything that isn't mediocre, that entropy drives creativity into mediocrity. This would seem to sum up the Internet.)

3. The YouTube fantasy: When people post videos of themselves singing along to something, they do it, at least a little bit, out of the hope that they'll be "discovered," or made famous. They throw themselves a little bit into the mythology of the spectacle in the hopes of swept up into part of the spectacle's machinery. Then JODI comes along and links to a video of themselves playing a record they made of your version of a song - and it's a very weird way of playing with that idea and notion. I see it as kind of a celebration of that dorky impulse to celebrity - a "Hey, you're a star to us, kiddo!" kind of thing, but it could also be cynical. It's probably both. JODI is hard to read.

4. They're saying, "This is something we want to preserve," but why? It seems funny to want to preserve throw-away YouTube videos, to elevate them to a collectible status. But if that's the case, why look at YouTube at all?

"How To Kill a Vampire," Eryk Salvaggio, 2009

2009-03-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Still frame from "How to Kill a Vampire," a project involving corrupted jpeg files from Vampire films set back into an animation. Above is a still from Vampyr. More to come.

8-Bit: Tree Wave, Glomag

2009-03-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Caught the movie 8-bit at Floating Point last Friday, which was a great overview of the videogame/art scene (particularly in New York) with interviews with superstars of the new mediasphere. But I particularly loved the chiptune section of the documentary.

Tree Wave (video above): Sleep
Glomag: Disorder (Joy Division Cover)

Tree Wave's got an amazing dot-matrix printer rigged up as a synth; Glomag is all Gameboys.

Floating Point 6

2009-03-26T01:31:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all. Still alive.

I went to a conference about Video Games. Particularly, how video games can/might/have mature(d). The folks at Turbulence have my write-up over at their networked_culture blog, check it out: "Video Games in search of a Warp Zone."

Twitter Bandwagon

2009-01-16T20:32:00.001-08:00

I have decided to announce my twitter feed to the Crashpop Universe. I'm Owls_McGee. I post more often on Twitter. But stay tuned here, too, especially if you are interested in: Diseases, ASCII Art, or Vampire Semiotics.

Doin' Fine in the Oh-Oh-Nine.

2009-01-11T19:34:00.001-08:00

The Sound of Arrows - M.A.G.I.C. (Mini-video) from The Sound of Arrows on Vimeo.

Well it doesn't get much better than that, does it?

Our Cat Wants to Get Married

2008-12-07T13:04:00.000-08:00

While doing some research for a project I am doing on 78 rpm and Wax Cylinder recordings, I came across this Slovak gem from 1929: "Our Cat Wants to Get Married."

Lyrics:

Our cat wants to get married
Yesterday she promised it to her boyfriend
Hey cat, don't do it!
Who will catch our mice?

Be careful little cat
When you get married you will be stupid
because your boyfriend doesn't want to work
and you will become a beggar

Hey tomcat, you've got sharp claws
Don't walk around our walls
You never do anything
Except date our white cat

Construction of a radio for Anne Frank, as described in Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Into the Aeroplane and Over the Sea.”

2008-11-10T18:11:00.000-08:00

Edible Wires:
In order for a fruit to conduct enough electricity to carry a sound wave, the wires should be constructed of a fruit with a high water yield, such as a grape or apple slices.

Ear piece for Two:
Should be constructed of an inexpensive silver material such as aluminum. In order to limit the listeners to two, should be one part with two speakers, encouraging head-to-head shared listening.

Additional Construction Notes:
The radio fuselage must be sealed in a small glass container with the tuning mechanism operated by a series of pulleys and weights.

Listening Instructions:
Upon completion, the radio is stored in a locked box until nightfall. Any station broadcasting to this device must operate exclusively at night and must contain musical numbers and fictional radio programs hosted by Anne Frank. Since no recorded material exists, re-enactments from her diary are permissible, so long as they are read by a girl of the same age as Frank, who can never be otherwise identified.

Countdown: Barack Obama

2008-11-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

"Four years ago Time photographer Callie Shell met Barack Obama backstage when she was covering presidential candidate John Kerry. She sent her editor more photographs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, "I do not know. I just have a feeling about him. I think he will be important down the road." Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since." - digitaljournalist.org

The caption on the above photo: Two staffers had just passed this site and done two pull-ups. Not to be outdone, Obama did three with ease, dropped and walked out to make a speech. Missoula, Mont., 4/5/2008.

Bill Morrison, "Decasia"

2008-10-21T22:08:00.000-07:00

This is a conversation with Bill Morrison about "Decasia," which I'm watching for a class right now. It's really moving and creepy and beautiful all at once: Old, moldy, decaying films, taken and re-edited (no other treatment is used, even the seemingly computer-generated halos). Here's another clip.

Part of it is the film's uncanny ability to make you aware of death; the film is old and deteriorating and the people and images behind it are emerging in a supernatural way, from beyond their respective graves, a haunting by way of media.

The images in and of themselves, I am sure, would be fine. Seen through the natural decay of the film, a new layer of media emerges: it's not even self-aware. It's dead.

If you forgive some melodrama, it creates the distinct sense of looking beyond death, as if these are films from beyond the grave. For this reason, the film can be horrifying at times, and the music doesn't help. Neither does the rather exotic and obscure subject matter of these films: dancing men in traditional middle eastern costumes, Japanese Geishas, re-enactments (we hope) of military battles.

I can't imagine many people have the patience to watch this film; but I found it surprisingly hypnotic.

John Chiara

2008-10-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

John Chiara made a box camera the size of a truck. It is awesome.

Rainbows in CMYK

2008-09-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

Some very beautiful net.art (it never had to be an oxymoron!) over at Rainbows-in-cmyk.com. Make sure you click a lot.

Michael Kenna

2008-09-06T11:34:00.000-07:00

I tend to be very reluctant about landscape photography. In fact, if I think about it, the subjects of photography are always bland in concept: "Portraits." "Landscapes." "Flowers." "Nudes." Whatever.

So it goes, of course, that the real challenge is making a subject interesting using the camera alone. Michael Kenna does this with landscapes, and it's even more amazing because he does it with black and white landscapes.

Kenna returns to similar motiffs over a span of decades, saying he likes that work he made in 1975 can sit next to work he made in 2005. He also keeps them at a size of 8" by 8", small enough to stay small.

Hands on a Hard Body

2008-09-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

Fans of "This American Life" familiar with the story "Hands on a Hard Body" (It was re-aired this week) may be happy to know that the feature-length documentary is available online, for free, over at Google video.

For those who don't know, the film follows an event in which a Texan car dealership gives away a truck to the contestant who can keep their hand on it the longest. They stopped doing it in 2005, after someone committed suicide. They presumably lost.

Warhol FAIL

2008-09-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

(click to enlarge)

Sewtography?

2008-09-03T08:39:00.000-07:00

A textile designer in another life, Laura Breitman makes work out of fabric - and that image above is just part of this larger image:

Nice! c/o Moloco

Keith Haring v. Banksy: Why what looks cool now looks lame later

2008-08-31T22:46:00.000-07:00

It's hard to imagine that Keith Haring was once considered a cutting-edge artist in the same way that Banksy is today. This video doesn't help his case at all, unless the presence of Seinfeld music is ironic.

But it raises the point that the art is significantly less important than the context of the artist. In the 1980's, Keith Haring was famous and sold his work without shame, while Banksy is anonymous and doesn't profit much (though more than most people seem to think). So: will Banksy's anonymity look as cheesy in ten years as Haring's image does today? What might replace it? Will we look like a bunch of whiney, melodramatic mopers, whose restraint and hesitancy prevented us from making work that could withstand the coming decades?

Perhaps the Keith Haring/Banksy continuum in 2020 will involve some third reaction to anonymity and celebrity: the first hive-minded flash mob graffiti artist collective? An Al-Qaeda influenced series of artist cells? A twitter network?

Parts 2 and 3 of the Haring documentary. And, my god, just watching the first :18 of part three will tell you everything you need to know about what went wrong with Haring's work.

Lastly: He's from the same tradition and the same scene, so: Why does Jean-Michel Basquiat still look so damn cool?

What's so great about Ryan McGinley?

2008-08-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

I have this theory about photographs: If you take pictures of naked, beautiful people, you will probably end up with a photograph that people want to look at.

So, I was instantly skeptical of the hipster art world's obsession with Ryan McGinley and his photographs of young, beautiful people taking a cross-country road trip and hanging out naked in trees and whatnot. It's like the worst art-world-preoccupation hybrid: The Romanticised, tragic "Youth," and the ready-made beauty of getting them naked.

The problem with this theory is that Ryan McGinley trudges through in spite of all of that bullshit and still makes unbelievably stunning images, despite the fact that his subjects are one of my most resented go-to art cliches.

I wanted to know what is up with it. So I decided to look at some of his non-naked-young-people, leading-a-life-you-can't photos, and turned to his photos of people at Morrissey concerts.

First off, this is a great idea for a photo series. Second, in this picture and in this one (opens in another window), it strikes me that there's a theme going on: the careful observation of light. In terms of concert lighting and in terms of the space that the light is allowed to permeate.

What McKinley does in this series is not so much take a photograph of his subjects, but takes photographs of the light around his subjects.

This might be a trite, photo-102-ism, but in terms of textbook examples, I can't think of someone who does this better than Ryan McGinley. These are not images about bodies, they are images about the spaces that surround bodies:

The works McGinley creates are desexualized, despite the raw sexual energy that should exist within them. That's because the point of the nudity, despite the years of training by Calvin Klein ads, is not about sex, but about power: the power of a body to mold space. The light exists because it is shaped by the human form; the result is that all of his images carry the reminder of the power of human will, combined with the gentleness of human fragility.

(More NSFW examples here and here.)

This is missing from, say, his straight-up pictures of people fucking, which lack everything awesome about what McGinley can do and instead teeters into dumb American Apparel advertisement + vacuous (worst of) Warhol territory. Which is a shame. I know, I know: Edgy, fringe-of-society, blah blah blah. Very progressive or whatever. Sadly, it's also been made instantly boring since its appropriation by Vice-magazine-styled douchebaggery.

Don't get me wrong, Ryan McGinley, you're brilliant and I tend to resent other artists who are my age most of the time, so totally rack that last paragraph up to good old-fashioned envy. But I wish you'd stick to the light, is all, sir.

(Oh PS he did the album art for the last Sigur Ros album).

Erik Boker, "Product Dissections"

2008-08-29T10:35:00.000-07:00

"Oral-B Stages for Kids: Bubble-Gum Magic - Disney Princesses," part of Erik Boker's "Product Dissection" series. "God for Dummies" is a lovely series, as well.

As usual, c/o Shoot!

Miniature Street Art

2008-08-19T07:13:00.001-07:00

I just found these images from British street artist Slinkachu's 2007 show at the NuArt gallery (Norway, not New Mexico) and thought it was pretty clever. Slinkachu has another great project I've been meaning to post about: Inner City Snail, in which miniatures are affixed to snails and set loose on the city. This looks like it has got great potential, but there's nothing particularly stunning on the blog yet. I hope we see more updates, though - and if I ever find the book, I'll probably invest.

David Maisel's "Library of Dust"

2008-08-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

"... these canisters hold the cremated remains of patients from an American psychiatric hospital. Oddly reminiscent of bullet casings, the canisters are literal gravesites. Reacting with their ash inhabitants, the canisters are now blooming with secondary minerals, articulating new metallic landscapes." — Geoff Manaugh, Contemporary

To do these photos any kind of justice, you should read the rest over at the amazing Bldg Blog. David Maisel has a Web site here.

Choosy Moms

2008-08-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

If you don't love Sweet Gifs then we're not really friends anymore. (Heads up to the less-savvy: use the arrows under the triangle to navigate it).

Finally, a generation gap

2008-08-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

Kalx just tipped me off to a whole new level of wtf: a youtube phenomenon in which the kids are taking small samples of Super Mario Brothers cartoons and looping them for several minutes. It's like Musique Concrete, which means it is also as horrible as Musique Concrete is. Yet, strangely compelling.

Here is toast coming out of toasters for three minutes. Believe me, it's the best to emerge from the underground Mario-noise-video scene so far:

And Luigi saying "Spaghetti" for five minutes:

It's official, I am old.

Art of The Republic of Georgia: Safo

2008-08-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

The above is obviously a polaroid, but it appears from some self-portraits that she's also using a Zenit, which is sometimes packaged here as a version of the Lomo LC-A. You could probably tell that from the photos themselves anyway.

More photos at her Flickr site.

Earlier Art from The Republic of Georgia: Ako Kharistvalashvili

Latest news: Russian military pushes into Georgia

Errol Morris in the New York Times

2008-08-12T04:54:00.000-07:00

HANY FARID: This picture? It’s a fake. But you know what people remember? They don't remember, "It's a fake." They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it. They did these great studies, especially with older people. They give them information about health, Medicare, Medicaid, that kind of stuff. And they say, "this information that you heard? It's wrong." And what ends up happening is, that information gets ingrained into their brains, and even if they are subsequently told it's wrong, they end up believing it.

New York Times, Photography as a Weapon, essay and interviews by Errol Morris. Anyone interested in photojournalism and "fauxtography" should read this. Even the footnotes are fascinating.

M83's "Kim and Jessie" Video hates Rollerskating, Synchronization and Lesbians

2008-08-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

Something about the new video for M83's "Kim and Jessie" bothers me. And while this may be petty to most people, I have found myself thinking about it for days. It's something I should like: A Video About Rollerskating.

But rollerskating is such a ripe music-video fruit that I will not settle merely for its presence in a mediocre video, and everyone else should demand more. And that's not the only problem.

1. You can tell the girls in the video don't really love to roller skate. Compare them to the hula-hooping girl in the Frankmusik Video for "In Step:"

That girl clearly loves what she is doing. In contrast to the M83 girls. Who are smiling but don't love roller-skating.

Here's where it gets deep: I'd bet the difference is that the Hula-Hooper is Italian, and the M83 girls are likely British or American. Anglo's aren't as good at feeling joy at the expense of their image, we're too self-consciously dorky to be dorky in a purely liberated manner.

2. Speaking of liberation: Why not just let them be lesbians? For the love of god, the video is clearly supposed to be about lesbians. There's no reason we have to keep fictional characters in the closet care of some douchey-looking roller-hippies.

3. I know this is supposed to be "synchronized" roller skating, but outside of about 30 seconds, it's not synchronized. At all. It's constantly annoyingly unsynchronized: "No one really gives a shit about roller skating anyway so let's just get it done in two takes, ladies!" People leave the frame at different points, are different distances from the camera when they shouldn't be, etc.

Look, I know this is petty stuff. The reason I care? Most of it comes down to the Anglo-cultural "Can't look like I give a damn" idea of "cool" and frustration with a culture that is terrified of looking dorky. Dorky here is a synonym for passionate, I suppose. It is more troubling to me when it reinforces this cool detachment with the "Nah, we're not REALLY lesbians!" finale. This seems to me like a video about restraining yourself from what you love, except that no one was aware of it.

M83 = fail. Lesbians who love rollerskating deserve to be recognized.

Art of The Republic of Georgia: Ako Kharistvalashvili

2008-08-08T12:18:00.001-07:00

Photo by Ako Kharistvalashvili

I particularly love the work of Ako Kharistvalashvili. These are Lomo from the lands that invented it. I can't find much else about him, not sure if he's specifically from Georgia or nearby — partially because the language is not Google-able — but these are gorgeous.

85, originally uploaded by AKO KHARISTVALASHVILI.

More of Ako's work is available here.

A Gold Medal for Subversive Architecture?

2008-08-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

Or is someone just trying to appease a guilty conscience? SPIEGEL talks to the architect of the Olympic Stadium in China, which was completed this year and is already being depicted on Chinese currency. The primary architects are Swiss, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

Herzog: We see the stadium as a type of Trojan horse. We fulfilled the spatial program we were given, but interpreted it in such a way that it can be used in different ways along its perimeters. As a result, we made everyday meeting places possible in locations that are not easily monitored, places with all kinds of niches and smaller segments. In other words, no public parade grounds.

SPIEGEL: They exist in front of the arena.

Herzog: But the stadium itself is more like a mountain with all kinds of different routes and paths where people can run into each other in unexpected ways. Although we have done similar things with museums in London and Barcelona, in a country like China these kinds of urban spaces acquire a different, almost political meaning. We think that many people in Beijing will understand it this way and use it for their pleasure...

Jonathan Jay Murder is a good man

2008-08-06T08:10:00.000-07:00

People telling stories directly is a rare find in print journalism. Steven Hirsch has an amazing project called Courthouse Confessions in which, simply put, he approaches people leaving a New York City courthouse, photographs them, and transcribes a brief interview.

(I'm leaving the photos out of this post, for various reasons).

Found via Shoot! - which you should probably be reading instead of me.

Mary Ellen Bute, "Dada," 1936

2008-08-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

Animated work by an American pioneer. I can't help but think this thing could be suitably appropriated for some modern-era noise, but then it also reminds me of this video for Stereolab's "Noise of Carpet" (and apparently re-used for several other videos for Emperor Tomato Ketchup):

Bute's film found via Today and Tomorrow.

Mr. Toledano

2008-08-05T06:13:00.000-07:00

A lot of people are talking about Phillip Toledano's photo essay, Days with my Father, and rightfully so: I recommend it to anyone who has some time to spend and hasn't seen it yet. But on the other end of the spectrum (in many ways) from that project is Toledano's Video Gamers series of portraits capturing people's expressions in the midst of some heavy video-game action, which is quick and fun. His whole site has some great work, and it's worth a linger.

Syrian Street Decay, by way of New Zealand

2008-08-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

New Zealander Ben Smith's photography is all quite good, but I particularly love the street-art element incorporated into his "Campaign Phanthoms" series, photographs of Syrian campaign posters — or the remnants of them, anyway.

8-bitten, Twice Shy

2008-08-04T09:58:00.000-07:00

There's some old-school, broken-video-game graphics (my favorite kind) over at ilbm.info, by French VJ Julien Ducourthial.

A Slow News Day at the End of the World: Adbusters vs The Hipsters

2008-07-30T23:44:00.001-07:00

Apparently, the biggest enemy Adbusters has this month is the scourge of 17-year-old kids with fake glasses and lomo's.

"Hipster: The End of Western Civilization" takes anecdotal evidence to prove that some kids that hang out in dance clubs are superficial, and takes it to mean that all of youth culture is dead and decaying.

1.
"Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed."

The article also chastises the inauthenticity of putting brakes on fixed-gear bikes. Because nothing else is happening right now? Rather than focusing on the kind of predatory absorption of youth culture that has made certain corporations rich, Adbusters wants to blame the kids for getting pulverized: all they wanted to do is go to an art party, and take some pictures of themselves having fun. And the fact that American Apparel or Urban Outfitters wants to sneak on to their Facebook accounts and appropriate what they're doing is something the hipsters are supposed to be in control of, and resisting.

According to Adbusters, hipsters are out of fucking control for daring to show and share their youth culture. They ought to be hiding in attics as the Urban Outfitters Fashion Police pass them by, lest they get dragged out and sent into a concentration camp, assigned to the labor of taking items from thrift stores, stamping a skull on them and making them into fashionable Hot Topic items.

2.
I know why Adbusters is so defensive: because the hipster scene used to belong to the kind of hopeless, depressing vision of global annihilation that the magazine puts forward. It crushed the hope out of that scene, and now the kids want to dance like the world is ending, because: fuck it, it is.

The entire "bored" affectation is a defense mechanism against the fact that there's so much fucked up about the state of the world, whether these vapid teens know it or not. With so much guilt attached to every form of fun, every expression of youth, there's no wonder a veneer of ambivalence to that guilt is going to develop. It's either going to be that, or anxiety. Anxiety is what Adbusters thrived on in the 90's: "Go off your medications and burn down the system!"

My impression of Adbusters, by the way: "Everyone is batshit crazy because they are not spending enough time in the fucking woods! You are a fucking asshole for not spending more time in the fucking woods!"

3.
I'm not saying the kids are alright. The drugged-up fashionistas of Williamsburg; the kids who smoke cigarettes with glazed-over eyes and talk obsessively about hair metal and make rape jokes, these kids are not OK. But these kids wouldn't be OK in the 60's, the 70's, or ever. They'd always be dicks, posers, over-cultivators of shitty cultural currency.

But to a large extent, if the rest of the kids don't seem to care too much about advertising and the subordination of youth culture to capitalism, it's because they don't give a shit. That ambivalence penetrates everything, unfortunately, but a good number of hipsters also possess the following attributes: Oversensitivity (Emo), Anger (Punk), Creative Frustration (Artscene), high anxiety (Usually, chain-smoking fashionistas).

All of these are actually evidence of giving a shit. If capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath them by making their lives into a product, they're used to it. They'll go on doing it for the same reasons kids have done what they've done forever: because it's fun, and might get them laid.

4.
Finally, don't take me as saying the hipster scene we've got is the best youth movement. It's not. It's pretty weak, actually. But a lot of artists are working in it, and like any sane artist, you work within the culture you're given, and you hope the work transcends that.

Take an artist like Girl Talk, which is attacked in the article as "a mix that sounds like he took a hatchet to a collection of yesteryear billboard hits, from DMX to Dolly Parton, but mashed up with a jittery techno backbeat") isn't doing something interesting with our culture of information-overload, then I'll be damned. The status of this "unoriginal" culture is actually born out of the Adbusters-idealized 60's, in which artists acknowledged that technology has made everyone a producer, so now you can sit back and re-work what has already been produced. It's a fine stance.

The problem here is that Adbusters is looking at raw consumers and assuming that they are not producers, simply because we can't see people making art at a dance club.

5.
"I take a look at one of the girls wearing a bright pink keffiyah and carrying a Polaroid camera and think, “If only we carried rocks instead of cameras, we’d look like revolutionaries.” But instead we ignore the weapons that lie at our feet – oblivious to our own impending demise."

Jesus Christ, somebody call diaryland. 1998 is calling, it wants its melodramatic apocalyptic visions back. In an article that decries nostalgia as a means of escaping superficiality, this sure does bring to mind the same, once-meaningful postures of French students in 1968. Sorry, dear writer, but that revolution ended and now has a 20-year-old child.

Youth culture is not, inherently, a resistance culture. Right now there is so much information for youth culture to process that it will inevitably be the mashup culture we see now: 90's indie rock aesthetics mixed with 60's psychedelia, 90's Nintendo Nostalgia from people with Preppy 80's V-necks and ironic mullets.

Are there no activists these days? I dunno. I just like thinking that they've figured out more pragmatic ways to get shit done. They're voting more than the precious Gen-Xers ever did. They're more likely to donate money to a cause than ever before.

So what's the big problem? Could it be that the kids are more interested in hope, and less interested in the pessimistic brainwashing provided by Adbusters, the only propaganda rag for manic-depressives?

12 Glowing Men, Martijn Hendriks

2008-07-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

Dutch artist Martijn Hendriks has a Web site dedicated to a 4 min excerpt of "12 Angry Men" in which rainbows inexplicably appear on the actor's skin. It is half "wtf" and half gorgeous, which makes it 100% awesome, as the real-life, grown-up art critics would say.

Here's the link: 12 Glowing Men

c/o deliciousghost.

Lorie Novak

2008-07-29T08:49:00.001-07:00

Lorie Novak, "Midnight Swim," 1990

Lorie Novak is another photographer who works with "photographs-of-photographs," this time by projecting slides onto nightime landscapes and photographing the results.

Lorie Novak, "In Flames," 1991

c/o Shoot!

Photo-graff

2008-07-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

Photographer and Graffiti artist JR has figured out a unique and beautiful way of combing his work: Take portraits, print those portraits into enormous posters, place those posters in unique settings, and then photograph the posters.

With so much work dependant on "sampling" or re-appropriation of images, which is respectable in its own right, it's nice to see a completely original take on street art that isn't just Banksy-lite.

According to the Web site, JR's next project involves traveling to Africa to photograph and interview women in combat zones. He'll be pasting their portraits and stories in other areas of the world. That sounds really quite fantastic.

c/o the wooster collective

It's Japanese Photography Day!

2008-07-19T07:51:00.001-07:00

I really love these half-submerged shots by Asako Narahashi, from her series "Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water." Found via Shoot!

Trying to find more info on her, I uncovered a few other great photographers from Japan. Like Miwako Iga's "Madame Cucumber" series with posed dolls:

Or Lieko Shiga, who photographs in the Netherlands, and took a series of photos with people outside some London apartments. Photographed using a black cloth and intense lighting, the effect looks a bit spooky:

Both of those c/o the Asian Photography Blog.

"Stills from Co-Ed Secrets," Eryk Salvaggio, 2008

2008-07-18T09:08:00.001-07:00

"Co-Ed Secrets" is a 1940's film reel that was sold to be shown at "Stag Parties." The original is available over at the Prelinger Archive, and consists of women in giant underwear (no nudity whatsoever) spanking each other with ping-pong paddles and/or tickling each other during what must have been framed as a sorority hazing.

I made these using the VLC media player, which now allows you to play any film clip you want in ASCII mode, though it's more like ANSI.

It also looks significantly dirtier in this format than it actually is.

Art for Beaches

2008-07-18T05:28:00.001-07:00

Theo Jansen builds giant, wind-powered animals that he releases, sometimes in herds, onto beaches.

If you don't quite understand how awesome this is, just imagine hanging out on a beach while this thing passes by:

Got this care of Cracked, which has a pretty awesome list of Art that can kill you.

Banksy ID'd

2008-07-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Daily Mail claims to have uncovered who Banksy is: a middle-class (and now middle-aged) art school student.

Shrug.

The Lace Fence Paradox

2008-07-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

A surprisingly simple idea for functional design is this lace fence by the Dutch designers, Demakersvan.

Kind of attractive on its own, but in practice, looks like a damaged fence. This is one of those situations where design aesthetics and design purpose seem to conflict: This thing only looks bad "in the wild" because of crappy, damaged fences, while isolated from that context, it looks really interesting and cool.

D.Billy

2008-07-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

D.Billy is a ~~Washington, D.C.~~ Brooklyn-based artist who uses balloons, electrical tape and other party goods to do a kind of graffiti that is rather harmless but completely amusing.

Thanks Laura, who got it c/o And I Am Not Lying

The "Terrible Ideas in New Media" File

2008-07-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

Apparently, a time-traveler from 1996 has stumbled into our modern era, and they are doing what everybody did in the 1990's: A hot new internet startup! Based on "Virtual Reality!"

Wired reports on a company called Vivaty Scenes. The marketing pitch seems to be something like this:

"Hey, why surf YouTube or Facebook when you can load up another application and take charge of a (3D!) avatar that you can surf YouTube or Facebook with? As an added bonus, your instant messenger friends can also load up this program to talk to you via instant messenger (wow!) while you look at a Sims 2 clone of them with clothing that may or may not, in the future, be assigned to them by corporate sponsors.

It's gonna be awesome, especially because it takes cues from the MyCoke social network and expands on them."

Remember the MyCoke social network? No, because no one does. Except 9-year-olds. Who abandoned it.

Anyway, if you want to live life as it was lived back when you were totally excited about the Sneaker Pimps, you can check out Vivaty which, by the way, has a totally meaningless and unpronounceable name.

Pulse, by Markus Kison

2008-07-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

"Pulse" is a visualization of emotional states as described by personal blogger.com sites. As keywords for certain emotions come up, a computer scans the site and adjusts the sculpture accordingly. As a result, it seems the sculpture changes shape every time it finds new information. Video below.

Kison's Web site for the project is here. c/o Computerlove.

Why isn't Crashpop more like 4chan?

2008-07-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

Four Lies

2008-07-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

Related: Faked tiger photo sparks Web furor

Guy Maddin is not married to Madonna.

2008-07-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

I've been a fan of Guy Maddin's work since I saw The Saddest Music in the World, a film which is part David Lynch, part Kids in the Hall doing a parody of David Lynch and part McSweeney's Melodrama.

I regret to say, though, that I thought the picture was a fluke result of Madonna's boy-toy director, Guy Richie.

Guy Richie is not Guy Maddin. Guy Maddin is awesome, and makes documentaries about Winnipeg that are kind of full of half-lies, and he made this video, Sombra Dolorosa, which is only 4 minutes long (7 minutes in France, according to IMDB).

For four minutes, you could just watch the damn thing, so I'm not gonna explain it beyond repeating: part David Lynch, part Kids in the Hall doing a parody of David Lynch and part McSweeney's Melodrama.

Richard Galpin's "Peeled Photographs"

2008-07-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

Richard Galpin just came to my attention thanks to the wonderful Wrong Distance blog.

Galpin's "Peeled Photographs," like the ones you see here, are actually photographs with most of the pictures scraped off. The result is skeletal, abstract images that look more like paintings or illustrations.

Rapping Pirates? But, for who?

2008-06-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

And that's why I'm voting for Mike Huckabee... for President!

c/oEverything is Terrible

Crashpop's July Muxtape

2008-06-26T22:18:00.000-07:00

Crashpop Beach Party. 12 songs, 41 minutes 59 seconds.

Some summer-feeling music in time for moping around on the Fourth of July. New (Beach boys-ish?) Sigur Ros, some unsigned bands from Vancouver, African Highland music and some 40's French crooning.

(image courtesy of bighappyfunhouse.)

New Kids on the Bloc: Your Guide To What Went Wrong With Soviet Hip-Hop

2008-06-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

The Wikipedia article on Soviet Hip-Hop is an interesting read. Mostly, hip-hop didn't penetrate the Iron Curtain until the end days of the USSR. At that point, a Russian producer eyed American pop music and observed the New Kids on the Block phenomenon, and pieced together a band of breakdancers who could be taught to rap, and manufactured them into a Soviet version of NKOTB, called Malchishnik.

The problem is that the lyricist and lead DJ, Dolphin, was influenced by explicit, obscene American acts like 2 Live Crew - and proceeded to lead the group in that direction, with such gems as "Sex Without a Break" and "Miss Big Breast."

Regardless, Malchishnik ended up achieving a degree of commercial success that cemented them as the pioneers of the hip-hop sound in the Soviet Union.

Here's the video for "Sex Without a Break:"

While censorship in Russia kept Malchishnik off the airwaves in '91, post-collapse media restrictions have been even more rigid, sending Malchishnik "underground," or, that is, into the dustbin of cultural irrelevancy. The sound and style seems to have endured through imitation, with the explicit lyrics tossed out for rap groups seeking commercial success in Russia.

Post-Human / Post-Rock: Jeremy Boyle

2008-06-18T18:11:00.001-07:00

Another robot-rock band, this one designed by Jeremy Boyle, who used to play with the post-rock, what-we-used-to-call-emo band, Joan of Arc. The videos aren't embeddable, but well worth checking out, patricularly the one right here.

The Trons

2008-06-17T18:44:00.000-07:00

The Trons - Self-Playing Robot Band.

This fits into my jurisdiction, I'd say: New-Zealand based Garage-Rock band, The Trons, consists of robots that play instruments. Details are hard to come by, but all you need to know is: Kiwi robots rockin' out. Go be one of their first 30 friends on Myspace.

Brought to my attention by Nerdcore, my favorite means of doing German homework.

Two minutes is probably enough

2008-06-16T15:57:00.000-07:00

I like to think this is from the finale of the Bollywood-Musical version of The Shining. But, it's not. c/o Everything is Terrible.

A Pigeon Looking at a Painting

2008-06-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

Scientists in Keio University in Japan have discovered that Pigeons are as smart as 3-year-old children.

At Prof. Shigeru Watanabe’s laboratory, pigeons could discriminate paintings of a certain painter (such as Van Gogh) from another painter (such as Chagall). Furthermore, pigeons could discriminate other pigeons individually, and also discriminate stimulated pigeons that were given stimulant drugs from none. In this experiment, pigeons could discriminate video images that reflect their movements even with a 5-7 second delay from video images that don’t reflect their movements. This ability is higher than an average 3-year-old human. According to a research by Prof. Hiraki of the University of Tokyo, 3-year-olds have difficulty recognizing their self-image with only a 2 second delay." - Primidi (blog)

The next experiment will involve pigeons and children going head-to-head.

Today is Electronic Music Day

2008-06-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

This is the coolest thing I think I've seen in a few months.

It's not a music video or just a remix. It's a music video documenting the production of a remix for Radiohead that uses only a printer, scanner, a broken hard drive and useless, tape-driven computer (that enormous squeal you hear at the beginning is the sequence itself being loaded, care of a tape-drive, and including it is a nice touch, but you'll probably want to wait for it to stop before passing judgement on this video).

Related, albeit definitively less cool music-wise but equally cool nerd-wise, is The Graphite Sequencer by Caleb Coppock, which I found out about here.

Caleb uses wires to brush over graphite on disks; as a result, you can "play" drawings. The result is less pleasing in terms of sound than the Radiohead piece, but fun to look at.

NSFW is the new SFW

2008-06-11T08:41:00.000-07:00

BPA, "Toe Jam" video.

This video for the Brighton Port Authority (apparently a Fatboy Slim project, with David Byrne)as a whole is particularly clever; but the censor-bar Pong is a stroke of genius.

I Think She's a Feminist

2008-06-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

A provocative female rapper in Germany, Lady Bitch Ray, who runs her own independent label, Vagina Style Records, grabbed headlines when she accused Ms. Roche of stealing her explicit form of empowering raunch.

A German novel which tells its story through a history of it's protagonist's orifices is stirring up some controversy.

One Squirrel To Unite Them All

2008-06-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

My final act of penance for the angry rant re: the "assassination" exhibits, it's Sugar Bush Squirrel, c/o Cuteoverload. This domesticated squirrel is posed in various outfits evocative of breaking news of the day, from the war in Iraq to the death of Benazir Bhutto, all without a trace of irony by his loving mom, country music star Kelly Foxton.

pink elephant

2008-06-05T07:37:00.001-07:00

pink elephant, originally uploaded by nhungsta.

Every so often, I'll be posting a photo culled from the many hours I spend wasting time over at Flickr, mostly from abstract and low-fi pools.

This post in particular is to counteract the caustic nature of my last entry.

Everyone is horrible

2008-06-05T04:47:00.000-07:00

The New York Times today has an article on 24-year-old artist Yazmany Arboleda's gallery installations, "The Assassination of Hillary Clinton" and "The Assassination of Barack Obama." Perhaps unsurprisingly, secret service agents took the artist in for questioning, which I am sure he was totally bummed about and wasn't at all a result he was looking for, or anything. He was totally gonna make it to the New York Times anyway. Right?

Arboleda has "documented" the spaces with two (fictional) Web sites: one for Barack and one for Hillary. The exhibit itself, from what I could see, looks like a 4chan thread, but I guess that's the point: "It's about character assassination."

Hey! Check out how he made it look like Obama's book was called "The Audacity of BLACK Hope." Cuz Obama's black, and some people are racist! OMG that artist is totally challenging my understanding of the media!!!

Because Manhattanites have yet to discover murder, the titles in the window have been covered up by the NYPD, protecting our innocent little angels from bad ideas forever.

Awesome, Yazmany Arboleda. You made my day totally awesome.

The Decapitator

2008-06-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

The Decapitator is a London graffiti artist who spots an ad, makes up a giant sticker (see above), and places the sticker over the ad: the finished product ends in a decapitation of the figure in the advert (see below).

A full collection of these works is up at Flickr.

Nesting

2008-06-04T08:51:00.000-07:00

I really don't know what the hell is going on in this photo series from Rotterdam, but it's great. Best viewed without context, but here it is anyway:

Dutch artist Benjamin Verdonck built a nest on the side of a Rotterdam skyscraper and lived in it. Across the street was a giant egg. The rest is in the pictures.

Sticky Notes

2008-06-04T07:30:00.001-07:00

Stephen Lenthall made this series of photographs, "Tape," out of various kinds of - well, tape. It's quite lovely. Also check out "Icebergs," a series made out of packing foam, plastic cutlery, etc.

More from "Tape" :

If there's anything better in this world, who cares

2008-06-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Franmusik, "In Step" video

I can't tell if I like this because it's unleashed a long-hidden Hula-Hoop fetish, or if I like it because it manages to be "sexy" at the same time that it manages to be so totally, unmitigatedly dorky.

A Photo A Day

2008-05-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

Jamie Livingston took one polaroid picture a day, every day for 18 years, or, the day he died. His widow has placed the photos in chronological order on the Web, and it's stunning.

A synopsis, of sorts, is over here at Mental_Floss, but you can access the project directly (on one of a series of mirrors) here.

US A v SR: 1967, 66: Computer Animations: The Secret Cold War: Electric Boogaloo

2008-05-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

A 1967 Computer Animation from the Soviet Union. ASCII film, sort of.

While the Pinkos were doing ASCII Art Animations, America's Invisible Hands of Computer Animation were clearly trippin' out on LSD:

Side note: In half-hazardly trying to research LSD's impact on Russian/Soviet culture, it becomes clear to me that there was no impact. At all. In fact, it seems LSD was seen as a tool of the CIA? Conspiracy theorists get a last laugh, or awesome? I can't tell.

ADDENDUM: An incomprehensible propaganda film in which Soviet ideals are taken to Mars is available here.

La Bionda

2008-05-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

Maybe it is relevant to mention that the late-70's Italian Disco band La Bionda have wikipedia entries in Eastern European languages (and Italian) but not English.

Nascent Sexuality Polaroid Study

2008-05-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

Nascent Sexuality Polaroid Study by Nate "Igor" Smith is a Google-Maps-and-Polaroid Project, which he describes best:

"I have spent the last decade of my life trying to make up for my short comings as a kid and that has left me perpetually single and probably a bit more promiscuous than is healthy. But my unhealthy relationship with women started slowly and those more innocent times bring back amazing memories and that’s what this project is all about. Working thorough those early sexual encounters and finding out what the fuck went wrong."

"No One," Eryk Salvaggio 2008

2008-05-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

Kent Rogowski

2008-05-08T11:30:00.001-07:00

Kent Rogowski is an artist who makes collages out of various puzzle pieces for his new exhibition, "Love = Love."

"Love = Love is a series of puzzle montages. Flowers and skies were taken out of over 40 puzzles and combined to form a series of spectacular landscapes. Although puzzle pieces are unique and can only fit into one place within a puzzle, they are interchangeable within a brand."

The resulting puzzle images look like beautifully chaotic, misread sprite images from corrupted video games. But I am sure that speaks to my particular interests.

Tron Guy @ ROFLCON

2008-05-05T13:49:00.001-07:00

Tron Guy at ROFLCON. And there's me, at the 3:15 mark! Thanks, Ryan.

Andy Rooney

2008-04-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

Take the first line from an Andy Rooney monologue, then add the last line. That's it.

I'm the best, man. I did it.

2008-04-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

No really. Watch the first thirty seconds or so, get to know the world of Eli Porter. Maybe watch the first guy. But make sure, for the love of Christ, that you watch Eli Porter shred the mic at the 2 minute mark.

I want comments.

Also: He's not retarded. At least, if he is, don't tell me he is. I don't want to feel bad about this.

Two Videos.

2008-04-21T23:04:00.000-07:00

Art:

Within the sound-editor for the SNES "Mario Paint," watch as Super Mario performs John Cage's "4'33."

Star Wars:

A "Sweded" version of "The Empire Strikes Back."

The Kuleshov Effect

2008-04-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia:

The Kuleshov Effect is a montage effect demonstrated by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in about 1918.

Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, an old woman's coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same." [Pudovkin, "Naturshchik vmesto aktera", in Sobranie sochinenii, volume I, Moscow: 1974, p.184].

You Have To Burn The Rope.

2008-04-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

Click here to play: You Have to Burn the Rope

The catchiest video game of all time? This is the video game of your life. You need about seven minutes, and the sound to be on.

If you need help, you can consult this walk-through video:

Paper Cam

2008-04-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

The Dirkon Paper Camera.

Here's a camera you can make at home, with just a printer and some glue.

The original camera was distributed in a Czechoslovakian Magazine in the '70s.

Polaroid's dead, and Pivi is born

2008-03-30T21:43:00.000-07:00

It will be cool for about three months in 2009, and then for 5 years in 2029. But with the demise of Polaroid's instant film, the digital alternative is already on its way: A hand-held, digital camera that prints your images in 20 seconds, the Fuji Pivi.

It's been available in Japan since 2006. You can order it elsewhere, of course, you just have to be crafty. (And it's kind of cheap, actually).

The Sparks - Number One Song in Heaven.

2008-03-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

Do keep in mind that all three synth performers are the same guy. And he is looking at you.

International Tragedy Breeds Severe "WTF" Moment

2008-03-04T21:08:00.000-08:00

Dear Hamas,
I know that you aren't making your dead bees and a rabbit-that-eats-Israelis children's show for me, per se, but I tend to think that this sort of shit isn't helping matters much. Just a heads up.

Yours,
Crashpop