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John Parker, solo performance on the Elektron Monomachine, at the vertexList benefit last night. His gig combined live improvisation with programmed sequences built up in the studio note by note. Manufactured by Swedish hacker types, the Monomachine is a sophisticated descendant of the old 8-bit chips (Elektron also made the Sidstation, using a Commodore 64 chip) and has a nasty edge of pure DSP (digital signal processing), which may explain Parker's popularity with the 8-Bit crowd in attendance last night. Also, his penchant for unexpected dark metal riffs popping up out of the sometimes atonal chaos of live sequencing and knob turning didn't hurt.
The Reeler has a report on the Digital Art and Video fair (DiVa) at Miami, penned by Paddy Johnson, who covered all the Miami events this year on her blog. She concludes that
...by and large the ratio of good stuff to crap was much better than that of other fairs. Still, how good can a fair possibly be if nobody knows about it? I met some of the most fascinating artists I had seen in a long time, and I feel like I was one of maybe 20 people who noticed. The odds of something like this occurring during a time where there are 1,400 journalists in the city covering the art seem wholly unquantifiable. In the end, it may also serve well as the most compelling evidence that cinema and digital art are of little importance not only to fair organizers, but also to those who attend and report on them.Among the reasons cited for the lack of traffic at this fair (which I had work in) were bad weather, remoteness from the main fair locales, and underpromotion via flyers, etc. But as Johnson suggests, the chief explanation is that "Miami" is about selling objects, not experiences. After a couple of decades in which conceptual art, performance art and video made inroads into the art marketing system, we are in a period of conservative retrenchment, greased by "Bush millionaire money" in the hands of undiscriminating collectors, where almost any bad thing flies off the wall as long as it has physical presence and the perception (usually wrong) that it can be easily unloaded later.
Ironically, or as if reflecting some perverse inverse ratio, this tulip mania for painting and sculpture is occurring just as a new art model--one that is neither performance, conceptual, or video, but was reflected in some measure in the DiVa fair--is on the rise: I refer to art made with home computers, as well as (or overlapping with) art being made on and about the Internet. That's where the intellectual juice is now, not the nth repetition of neo-expressionist painting.
In case you were wondering what Daniel Mendelsohn looks like, here he is. Who is Daniel Mendelsohn? He's the writer who so burns with jealousy over Jonathan Franzen's success that he wrote a memorably hateful hatchet job on him in the New York Times. Several people I talked to, including ones who'd never read Franzen, read that piece and were appalled by how harsh and personal it was. (Also badly written.) Mendelsohn is the subject of a lengthy interview on Salon today, discussing his just-released, "Proustian" book about the Holocaust. Yes, that's how it's described. We already know everything we need to know about Mendelsohn, though, from his Franzen review, and that publicity photo, which I think you will agree is very...smooth. Oh, and one more detail--he lives in an upper West side apartment that Salon describes as "elegantly furnished."
Some funny responses to the photo from the comments, after the jump.
Party with Design*Sponge and the other design bloggers! (Everyone in this picture looks miserable.) From Curbed.
vertexList gallery is having a benefit raffle tonight: photos of the donated artwork are posted on its blog. The event lasts from 7-10 pm; raffle starts at 8.30 pm; tickets are $200--details here. jenghizkhan (aka John Parker) will perform a couple of new music pieces live at 7:30 pm; other attractions include limited edition t-shirts by Eteam, limited edition pins by Sakurako Shimizu and a sign-up sheet to reserve a copy of vertexChips, a compilation CD in a micro-edition of 50 that will be released next week, featuring Covox, Bubblyfish, Role Model, Herbert Weixelbaum, Receptors, Bit Shifter, jengizkhan, Nullsleep, Treewave, David Kristian, Glomag, Huoratron, and yours truly.
Be there, aloha. It would be nice if New York landlords would support the art community here but that's not what they do--they raise rent so they can live like Lords and say FU to the rest of us!
Updated with new info about the CD.
Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects, in the gallery's shipping container at the DiVa (Digital and Video Art) Fair this year in Miami. In the background is my DVD OptiDisc.
Update: The photo above is by Paddy Johnson, using Namenwirth's camera. Aron has posted more photos here.
"Hacker Fashion" [mp3 removed]
A kind of ongoing duet between a "warm, fluid" analog synth and a "cold, brittle" digital synth, mirrored underneath by the allotment of analog percussion to one channel and sampled digital beats to the other. I'm interested in similar oppositions and symmetries in visual art--a balance of "grains" and their accompanying "philosophies." Not to mention the binary use of scare quotes.
Update: I dropped the digital synth parts a semitone, muted some high notes, and raised the filter cutoff frequency so those parts are a tad more mellifluous.
Large Mill, 1995, acrylic, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 90" X 88" (Stage One)
Stage Two
Final Version
never exhibited--done right before I moved to NY and started working with a computer. the piece got more difficult to look at as it was completed--by the end it was impossible for very long without retinal strain and headaches--the early stages appear tasteful in the polaroid scans but the colors are pretty artificial and obnoxious in person--I contemplated stopping the process and calling it done at many stages but pressed on out of some innate sense of responsibility to the initial premise. the "disc" design was originally based on paintings of rolled-up silk seen end-on in a Russian constructivist-influenced painting, I think by Liubov Popova.