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As we near the end of the Web's First Decade of Widespread Use, it was only a matter of time before connoisseurship of bad web pages really got off the ground. Herewith I recommend Dirt Style 101, a vicious, take no prisoners critique hilariously masquerading as a home design course. Sample hint: "Dirt style projects must be nasty. Think 4th generation VHS dubs, Xerox copies made with a cartridge low on toner, post rap Vanilla Ice, or any car made in the '80s that ran on diesel. Now translate that into Web Design." I said the critique is vicious, but Professor C. Dirt also obviously has affection for the maimed, moronic, or just slightly off web pages he links to. If you've ever designed a web page, look at your peril! You'll probably find an example that looks like something you've done.
Reviews of the film One Hour Photo (no longer in theatres but due out on DVD soon) concentrated on its stalker theme and its critique-of-suburbia theme but pretty much left its art theme the hell alone. (Caution: this discussion reveals plot points.) Charles Taylor, in an incredibly obtuse write-up in Salon.com, called the movie “art house horror” but only used the word “art” as a tossed-off insult in the course of demolishing it on more typical (dramatic, cinematographic) grounds. He never considered whether the filmmakers might be interested not just in the “art house,” but art itself, and overlooked another fair reading of the movie: that it’s a parable of creative regeneration told under the guise of a psycho-slasher film (a parable only half-interesting, but more on that below).
Thoughts on the Hydrogen Economy. In his new book Jeremy Rifkin makes the case for hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels, imagining a World Wide Energy Web where nations, municipalities, and individuals have the ability to upload and download electricity (from fuel cells, solar, wind, biomass) whenever and wherever needed. His proposals make absolute sense as a set of goals. It'd be good to get some more opinions about whether they're all technically feasible--that is, based on technology we have now, as opposed to something we hope to discover--and of course they're almost impossible to sell politically, what with all the vested interests at stake. Still, this is a real, optimistic vision for the future, as opposed to the Dick Cheney "let's just steal it and burn it" approach to energy.
Bedroom Buckyball, ink on cut paper, map pins, 80" X 75"
On Wednesday, Nov 20, I attended a panel discussion on "Painting in the Age of Digital Manipulation" at Artists' Space in NYC. Mark Tribe, director of the new media website rhizome.org, moderated, and each of the four panelists, Claire Corey (image below), Millree Hughes, Sherry Mayo, and Fabian Marcaccio, showed slides and fielded questions. The panel was a clash of cultures, to some extent, since rhizome.org exists within an infrastructure of funding and exhibition spaces largely distinct from the "gallery world" that the four panelists inhabit. Tribe's opening remarks contained an intriguing word choice. He described the panelists as painters using digital tools, as opposed to technologists making paintings. This immediately made me wonder "Who would be in the latter category?"
I'll go ahead and answer my own question and say that John Maeda and Golan Levin, programmer/artists from the MIT Media Lab environment, immediately spring to mind as "technologists making paintings." Their inclusion might have made the panel more meaningful, but it was frankly more enjoyable looking at work by technological autodidacts who really know how to push (virtual) paint around. Interestingly, although all four panelists are concerned with output, printing their work on canvas or other materials for ultimate display in galleries and museums, they all used multimedia tools--CD, DVD, digital animation--to show it to the audience. During these presentations, their work was indistinguishable from much new media art. One's respect for Corey's and Hughes' work really deepened when you saw animations of their work-in-process. Corey's DVD took viewers through 25 stages in the development of one of her paintings, and it was amazing how radically the piece changed from one stage to the next. Hughes, who uses Flash as his primary paint program, showed an interactive game where an unseen button pusher makes random combinations of colors, sizes, and spatial orientations; Hughes works the "byproducts" of the game into his creative process.
Hughes also read an eloquent prepared statement, in which he discussed the activities of the digital painter in the context of the "contingent reality" of the Internet, where every opinion is given weight and facts are hard to separate from hearsay. He distinguished the digital painter's choices in making art from the consumer's choices online (the former being infinite and problematized; the latter being determined largely by checking boxes in multiple choice forms). Sherry Mayo made a similar point later when she analogized computer art to early video art, which subverted the conventions of commercial TV by making the tapes longer than most people's attention spans, through odd cropping strategies, and so forth.
After the four articulate presentations, I felt like groaning when someone in the audience asked the (predominantly abstract) artists on the panel, "Can each of you say how you're addressing the issue of content of your work?" Beneath this question lies a very tired, conservative accusation: that pictures of people, places and things have content and abstract art does not. All the artists patiently
(re-)answered the question, even though they'd been discussing content for the previous hour. Tribe also raised a rather old-fashioned issue, half-apologetically (considering his stake in new media), when he asked (of all but Marcaccio): "Do any of you miss pushing actual paint around?" The consensus was that the artists didn't. Tribe also asked if the four artists felt they were the vanguard--if they felt more historically important--being the first to use a new medium. No one was trapped in that kind of pomposity, but of course they are more courageous and enterprising to move into an area that has minimal collector support.
Just ordered 2 books from amazon.com: Xtreme Houses, by Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham, and the recent reissue of Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World.
Here's an excerpt from the publisher's notes on Xtreme Houses (I'll review it myself after I get a copy; I'm plugging it now because Courtenay's a friend of mine and I've been following the progress of the book pre-publication):
“The house has become to contemporary architects what the seven-inch single was to Punk bands,” declare Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham. “It is a liberating challenge for its designer and an immediate, accessible product for the end user.” Xtreme Houses examines forty-five newly designed and built dwelling spaces by architects, artists, collectives and individuals from around the globe. Responding to the changing desires of consumers and the inevitable influences of overpopulation, suburban sprawl, environmental concerns, technological advances and economic fluctuation, each of the selected projects offers radical and unique solutions to our basic human need for shelter.Xtreme Houses considers four general approaches to residential dwellings. The first chapter entitled “Self-Construct” covers a variety of do-it-yourself strategies. From private individuals who consider custom building a luxury to impoverished self-builders for whom it is the only means to obtain shelter, taking matters into one’s own hands and starting from scratch has resulted in exceptional and innovative housing solutions. Three pioneering examples are Michael Hoenes’ Tin-Can Houses in Africa, Brooklyn artist Vito Acconci’s House of Cars #2, and Atlanta-based Richard Martin’s Global Peace Containers in Jamaica, an entire community constructed from converted shipping containers.
Aided by the Internet, fewer people are bound to their jobs by location and are opting to live in rural areas. Chapter 2, “Move to the Sticks” focuses on nontraditional country abodes that work in harmony with their surroundings. Unlike conventional country cabins, these homes disappear into the landscape, as is the case with Michael Reynolds’ Earthships, float on water like Jean-Michel Ducanelle’s Aquasphere, or rest in the trees such as Softroom’s Tree House. As with other dwellings throughout the book, many of the projects take tremendous strides toward sustainable building, including Rural Studio’s Corrugated Construction made from recycled cardboard.
Chapter 3, “Bring Your Own Building,” explores modern takes on nomadic living. In addition to discussing the plight of forced nomads, such as refugees, the homeless and other displaced people, this chapter also examines transient living as a purposeful choice, often adopted by fashionable young urbanites and the super wealthy. California architect Jennifer Siegal and New York artist Andrea Zittel revisit the mobile trailer home, while other designers explore portable pods and articles of clothing that double as architecture, also known as “clothes to live in” or “buildings to wear.”
The final chapter, “Space Invaders,” discusses innovative methods of inhabiting the rare empty spaces left in cities. Through stacking, hanging, inserting and inflating, these homes playfully reclaim unused urban gaps. Many tap into underutilized resources, such as New York-based Michael Rakowitz’s inflatable homeless shelters which attach to the ventilation systems of public buildings. Others hang outside windows or are inserted into the existing infrastructure, such as LOT/EK’s Guzman Penthouse which rests on top of a Manhattan skyscraper.
Well-written and generously illustrated with photographs, drawings and plans, this exciting new book provides a sampling of the most cutting-edge developments in residential housing. Whether spurred by the latest advances in technology or the scarce resources of poverty, these homes challenge our traditional notions of what a house can be and demonstrate architecture’s ability to shape the way we live. They will undoubtedly set the standard for where and how we live, now and in the future.
Other featured dwellings by: Cal-Earth, FAT, Doug Garofalo, Herman Hertzberger, Doug Jackson, Jones, Partners: Architecture, Lacaton & Vassal, Atelier van Lieshout, Greg Lynn FORM, Monolithic Dome Institute, N55, Oosterhuis.nl, OpenOffice, Po.D., Marjetica Potrc, Michael Rakowitz, Jessica Stockholder, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among others.
And here's my amazon.com review of Dick's Counter-Clock World, posted four years ago, when the book was long out of print:
Packs more paradoxes to the page than the brain can handle, July 10, 1998Dick attempts the impossible task of making time seem to flow backwards as the reader moves forward through the book. An eerie and unforgettable premise has the dead being "born" in their graves, crying out to be exhumed so they can begin their reverse trek through life. In other scenes food is vomited onto plates and then boxed and returned to the shelf, while bodily wastes are ingested through a "sogum pipe," a process alluded to several times but mercifully never depicted. Eventually the book reaches an action-packed climax (shouldn't it have occurred at the beginning?), in which bullets are sucked back into firearms and so forth, but by that time the paradoxes have come so fast and furious that the reader's brain has imploded. As in so many of his novels, Dick throws too many balls in the air to keep the juggling act going, and as scientifically plausible fiction, it's a mess, but only a genius would have attempted an idea as weird as this one, and taken it as far as Dick does.
Okay, Digital Media Tree is now on a new server. Everything should be the same here. I'm still working on my review of One Hour Photo--it's harder and more involved than I thought! I only saw the movie once, and came out of the theatre with the theory that Sy Parrish, the moto-photo manager/nutjob played by Robin Williams, is a latent artist. On the surface the story is about his psychological meltdown but on a subtext level--what the images are telling you--it's about the personal paradigm shift of a frustrated creative type. None of the other reviews discussed that aspect. I still think I'm onto something but to make the piece work I have to explain some of the underlying art precedents--Hanne Darboven, Sophie Calle, Wolfgang Tillmans, etc. [Addendum: I finally finished the piece and it's here.]
Speaking of art in movies, it's ironic to me that Jeremy Blake's colorfield animations were tapped for Paul Thomas Anderson's movie Punch-Drunk Love. In an article published last year, I noted that Blake's work was primitive compared to Hollywood's most run-of-the-mill magic (say, the credits in Hollow Man) but that the art world was gaga for how "high tech" it was. Evidently PT Anderson is awed by the aura of art and picked Blake to incorporate some of that "art mystique" into the film (or maybe found his work inexpensive by Hollywood standards?).
In any case, I was right that Blake's art looks really low tech up there on the big screen, compared to what we're used to seeing. But, to add another irony loop, it kind of works on that level! I'm not sure what the hell these color bars and Morris Louis blobs are doing in the movie: I suppose they represent the zany hallucinatory state of its mentally ill main character, played by Adam Sandler. Considered alongside the toy organ that keeps popping up incongruously in the film, I thought of the Optigan, a '60s keyboard instrument with discs that "played colors." (See Bruce Sterling's "dead media project.") Anyway, I thought the Blake stuff worked but maybe not for the reasons anyone involved with the project did. Am I wrong? What was PT Anderson thinking?
Maybe PTA included the Blake because its slightly crude, retro look invoked the '60s, in a movie that is in many ways a self-conscious throwback to the madcap counterculture comedies of that era (e.g., Coppola's You're A Big Boy Now). But Blake isn't celebrated in the art world for being crude and retro--his work is sold as the latest cuttin' edge computer art! There's a contradiction that needs to be addressed here.
Digital Media Tree is moving to a new server, which is great. Don't be surprised if you check this page Friday, Nov. 15 (to see the giant alligator or whatever) and get a "page not found." The site'll be down for 24 hours or so, and when it returns I hope to have my critique of the movie One Hour Photo finally posted. Or maybe not.