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Mark Dagley ~ 1986 Tony Shafrazi "Machine Shapes, Stars & Germs"
- bill 9-26-2010 3:02 am

tom moody Facebook and Artists

Nice jpeg (I assume) of a painting by Mark Dagley from 1986, viewable on Bill Schwarz's page.

I clicked on the painting to find out more but it went to a Facebook login. It sort of belatedly amazes me that "gallery artists" embraced Facebook, since from I'm told it has one of the worst image handling policies (no GIFs, everything converted to jpeg, images transferred to a server the artist doesn't control, no outside linking, etc.--please let me know if I'm wrong about any of this). You would think artists would resist such an odious scheme of corporate coercion, but ironically it was Zuckerbook that "brought artists online" after so many resisted blogs in the early to mid-'00s. Compared to say, a Word Press blog, it seems like about the worst place in the world to show work.
- bill 9-30-2010 5:26 am [add a comment]


mark just posted this show to his photo file on the abaton fb web page. i recall they are mostly oil and wax on canvas.

the model artists are using for web presence is based on bands or performers (and other cottage professionals) use of myspace. i personally dont require the gif option which harkens back to message board avatar identities. in my drag to desktop world jpegs are just fine as a universal format. once anyone has uploaded any image to the net they no longer control it. if its an attribution issue then the publishing party should watermark it or embed it with pertinent text.

The top of the (now way top heavy) art-world has never really embraced transparency and the artists in vogue during the (blog era) 00's boom seemed reluctant to rock the boat with substantive opinions. im enjoying the shift from status quo ive noticed since the crash, creepy saltz factor notwithstanding.

every one is going to have their peeves though, i personally have no use for twitter.


- bill 9-30-2010 2:55 pm [add a comment]


the guy who does this

if im not mistaken you can join fb with a pseudonym and "friend" public people or "like" various entities. for instance the artist tom moody could be "the guy who does this." image found here.
- bill 9-30-2010 3:49 pm [add a comment]


True that, I am friends with several kitties.
- L.M. 9-30-2010 4:02 pm [add a comment]


Ouch, that's supposed to be animated and it's supposed to be crisp. I guess you must have uploaded it to Facebook before posting it here. That's what I'm getting at--how do artists, who normally obsess about fine details of self-presentation, allow someone to make those decisions for them? Let's say I hate that jpeg of my animation (I do) and wanted to delete it from Facebook. I can't--it stays on their server. I gave them all my content in my license agreement. (And yes, once it's on the Web it's beyond my control but here we're talking about a self-inflicted failed promotion.)

I'm glad if Facebook got the art world out of its top down model but it seems to be "transparency lite" with a heavy cost. All my friends who are on it say "yeah it's creepy but it's also addictive and, well, you can't not be on it at this point" and "it's brave of you in a tinfoil hat kind of way not to be in there but frankly I don't know how anyone can not be on it."

I appreciate that I could use it in a guerrilla sort of way but I would rather bide my time until it becomes so intolerable that key people start to leave.

As for GIFs "harkening back to message board avatar identities." thanks a lot, man. There are other uses for the file type--but not on Facebook. They are a foreclosed avenue of expression.


- tom moody 9-30-2010 4:38 pm [add a comment]


I just tried to friend you on facebook, Bill. And don't you go playing hard to get like that snotty bitch Yoko Ono.
- L.M. 9-30-2010 5:21 pm [add a comment]


You two have fun "friending" and "poking" each other.
- tom moody 9-30-2010 5:31 pm [add a comment]


i dragged the enlarged version from marks (abaton) fb page. its pretty clean (no?) and hosted for free. and ready for instant up loading here. im not aware of value being an issue there.

lots of sposed to's there for something thats out there avbl to reworking. sorry you dont like how it looks. i like it in this twig and ink iteration. i think netiquette allows for wide open reinterpretation. granted the op is entitled to their opinion too. but i dont think you can (or should be able to) delete my reworking either.

what fb offers is quite malleable. i doubt users would consider a nom de plume guerrilla use. some people have 5000 fake network friends that they never met. some people have 5 - 50 friends and family members and there are millions of variations in between. so generalizing (using hearsay) about use doesnt really hold. every one adapts it to their wants and needs. to see it from the inside out is the only way to form an opinion and is as simple and anonymous as getting a gmail address.

transparency lite is of course a baby step and thats how any change happens. but once its busted open theres no turning back. thats good not dangerous.

internet speed has changed a lot since the origin of gifs. you can keep battling internet change if you want to. i remember your issues with various browsers supporting gifs too. i thought harkening was part of your process. thats the problem w/ obsolete technology, support ceases to exist. que the 8-track cart.

"I'm amused by the lingering rhetoric of futurism--the Buck Rogers, 'machines-will-change-our-lives' spieling--that continues to surround digital production in our society. The computer is a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication. I am intrigued by the idea of making some kind of advanced art with this apparatus--objects, images, and installations that hold up to prolonged scrutiny in real space. At the same time, I am drawn to 'cyber-kitsch' in all its forms, whether in old programs such as MSPaintbrush, the amateur imagery that abounds on the Web, or the unintended poetry of technical glitches. My work proudly inhabits the 'lo-fi' or 'abject' end of the digital spectrum."

- bill 9-30-2010 5:51 pm [add a comment]


sorry, i was laboring over the last post. i really dont see too much poking going on out there.
- bill 9-30-2010 5:57 pm [add a comment]


Bill, you always personalize these discussions and try to "gotcha" me with my own writing. If Internet speed wasn't an issue Facebook wouldn't convert all files to jpeg. They do it for speed of loading their pages, same reason I use GIFs instead of .mov files. (Lots of other artists too--dump.fm is a GIFcentric host and most of its users are under 30.)

You characterize not signing up for Facebook and questioning its core assumptions about image handling as "Battling internet change." The Facebook public relations dept couldn't have put it better. Stop battling, grandpa (they might say)--get with the future and find your friends and family online!

- tom moody 9-30-2010 7:27 pm [add a comment]


with any big project choices are made. what services or formats to include, what to exclude. you tube has replaced gifs plain and simple. they are a romantic relic of the past. you know, three years ago past, but past. dump-fm can be read as a nostalgic gif ghetto for like minded enthusiasts. how do you expect an "effect" technology from a narrow time span to stay main stream relevant outside of an artificially supported site? i like what you do with gifs and that they exist but i dont expect them to have the same meaning now as when they had "dial-up" use value relevance. using your terms loosely, they now embody their own tragicomic limitations. not a gotcha moment, just trying to keep important road markers in place and terminology consistent.

i could care less if you are on board w/ fb outside of its limitation on your knowledge and assumptions of how it works. i cant see where you have shown that fb is any more dangerous for artists with image handling than the net at large. its freakin' free w/ a caveat. just like the rabbit ears tv ( w/ commercials) that we grew up with.

as for being a fb apologist. ha! im more interested in the weaknesses in your proclamations of good technology and evil technology. i dont have a dog in this one, you do.

*fb is fucked for sharing user info they said was confidential which is a policy matter not a format problem. everyone knows that. see the movie yet?
- bill 9-30-2010 9:50 pm [add a comment]


in short, i posted a link to the place i found the image. whats the problem with that again?


- bill 10-01-2010 1:41 am [add a comment]


Technically, youTube eclipsed Quicktime. (and it is a fucking improvement due to standard compression rates so that the damn things now play reliably)

You have to compare gifs to flash animation capabilities. gif making software is dirt cheap compared to Flash. Flash has a huge learning curve and until recently flash players would not run automatically in a browser. I make bags of money off the more difficult software, however I'm on the side of cheap shareware for getting art projects done.

My one other point of disagreement bill, is your assertion that that gif animations are romantic relics, especially because the technology is so old. I consider it a highly successful technology, and I'm not interested in any nostalgic aspect. (In fact I'm really fucking tired of curators & writers taking that position whenever an exhibition of gif based work opens.)
- L.M. 10-01-2010 3:07 pm [add a comment]


points taken. there are plenty of things patented over a hundred ears ago that are still in use now more than ever. i just got so tired of hearing the rants about how gifs didnt look right on safari, etc and now fb is evil cause it doesnt support gifs? phooey! i do enjoy the hell out of yours sallys and toms gif project though. thanks for those.


- bill 10-01-2010 7:44 pm [add a comment]


I wasn't offended at all.
- L.M. 10-02-2010 3:41 am [add a comment]


cool. im glad. none intended.
- bill 10-03-2010 5:39 pm [add a comment]


spiral gif

here goes our tom again...

Update: Things got a bit ugly when I criticized Bill's use of a Facebook link. He accused me of trying to freeze the internet and let me know exactly what he thinks of trying to repurpose animated GIFs for artistic ends. (Not much.) In view of those digs, it's hard for me to focus on his defense of Facebook as a great place to be an artist.
please, please read his more recent posts intended clarify his feelings expressed here. i havent rewritten or deleted anything from this post/thread so will let the record speak for it self. for Mr. Mac-and-Facebook (thats me! as though...) toms paraphrasing and habitual use of false dichotomy renders the material useless to this discussion.
- bill 10-04-2010 4:26 pm [add a comment]


chuck kirby

the fun never stops w/ TM. 5 days later and still spinning his wheels. time to grow up and own that temper bro.

too-late Pop

Why you should wait a day before posting. Wrote this in a fit of pique after someone dissed animated GIFs:

I'm told the non-pointillist color version of this is from the anime Parasite Dolls. Frankhats posted an inverted black and white animation and I isolated this still and messed with it. I know it's just a GIF but this seems kind of, I don't know, Pop Art to me.

Was being mildly ironic: the "pop art" link went to an '80s [Chuck Nanney] painting of a Jack Kirby panel that I was calling "late pop." The point was you can make whatever continuities you want with GIFs, or not, but to peg them solely as a late '90s relic was as limiting as definitively calling them art.

The text above was screen captured and posted to dump.fm by a, er, vocal Dumper who thinks calling online activity "net art" is the height of pretension (as best I can make out from his complaints). I wish I could make every post nuanced since I am no fan of most things self-consciously described as "net art" either but sometimes you just get annoyed.


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