BoinkFace

This ship

That sleep mold is growing over me, and it's not even 9am. That tired fuzz from anxious sleep is pouring into every crevice of my fatigued body. The fashion show looms off in the distance like a foreign ship breaking through fog, its helm of anticipation creased with uncertainty.  It seems like a dream, the something-out of nothing fashion show that Erin and I have finagled. And a dream it shall remain, as I'm so tired this day will surely continue its surreallism through the culmination of the event.

a savant (sorta)

bring out the gimp

weird. this guy has a strange way of expressing himself. who needs roses when you can stack tables of love and devotion??

Chapter Summary: Chapter 1

Internet Art: Rachel Green

Chapter 1. Early Internet Art

The Internet started gaining increased popularity in the early 1990's, changing the production and exchange of information.  Email, bulletin boards and the independent web site opened new avenues for public discourse.  Methods of communication focused on consumer’s needs for instant gratification, with the rise in cell phone usage, live 24-hour coverage of the gulf war, and reality TV shows. Internet browsers determined by corporate interest often buried Internet art below links they deemed more profitable, in an initial attempt to counter any overly revolutionary ideas.  Internet artists initially sought to create a direct dialogue with other artists around the world.  They met in chat rooms or on bulletin boards and developed valuable collaborations that way. The Russian avant gaurde film scene was adaptable to internet art.  The narratives fit well with the interactive potentiality of the internet.  The graphics of these werks were very lo-fi graphics but the art was more of a means of conveying a message, “reality reflextion” more than a visual aesthetics. A new media vocabulary inclusive in the art commented on the medium.  For instance, in jodi.org’s http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org,  a webpage was turned inside out, with it’s code on the main page and hidden coherent images. 

more to come...

PianoPong

< a href=http://www.neural.it/nnews/pianolinae.htm> Pianolina : game or musical instrument? It's a synesthetic nightmare, as the tonal color designated to these squares would surely clash with many synesthetics who have thier own colors already assigned to them. "Tones are represented by coloured squares that you can drag and drop into what you could call the physical space of performance, determining intonation and chords". Immediately I began flicking the squares around the "physical space of performance", resulting in mad gonging pong of tonal chaos. Then, I figured out that I could start with an already constructed melody and shift each note slightly to form my own. Then I got bored and flicked them around again, I couldn't help it, watching the colored squares zipping about was a beautiful sight to behold. "You can play an unusual variation on Beethoven or create an original melody, fill the space with different sounds, or let the melody dissolve itself in a minimalist composition". I had to go move my car, but I left Pianolina playing on my desk, one note still ponged incessantly upon my return. It started annoying me, so I added more notes, but I couldn't control it very well, those damned tones were too fast to grab with my mouse. I see now, that Pianolina is more of a game, any musician would want more control over thier instrument.

Go! Metrobus!

Moving words. Poetry on buses, yay for this !!!

Wall Snatcheroo

View this photo If “all art is mediated by values arising from its culture and from its immediate context" ( Dipeveen, 9), then what can I make of street art, pulled off the street and placed in a gutted Staples store in the heart of Georgetown?  I’m thrilled to see graffiti appreciated as an art form, but while I enjoyed the Wall Snatchers exhibit, I found myself disappointed, feeling like some of the pieces were incomplete or rushed.  Despite a few exceptions (Faile’s mural and everything Bask)  I felt unsatisfied, because the contex of the graffiti had been so disoriented.  I think this has a lot to do with graffiti being stripped of its usual street mystique, as graffiti tends to be strategically placed on interesting buildings or walls allowing previous layers of advertisements or the texture of a brick wall to interact with the tag or the mural.  By extracting these works from their usual environment they seemed shivering, naked. The space in which these works were presented also distorted their context.  By housing them temporarily in a gutted out Staples, I couldn’t help but notice a bit of residual corporate goo trickling into that which fight so hard to oppose any such institutional or corporate involvement.  Though the Washington Project for the Arts & Corcoran had good intentions for funding such a project, it inadvertently stripped the pieces of their allure, allowing the space in which the work was celebrated to unintentionally deride it.

Gimme Fi5e

Within the first chapter of But is it Art, Cynthia Freeland refers to  Lucy Lippard's “three pronged” approach to analyzing Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ by considering it’s material properties, its content and its contextual qualities. I’m sure this is a basic model for critiquing art that she’s adopted.  I find Lippard’s approach particularly relevant to contemporary and postmodern art, as the context of these artworks is usually appropriated and reflects an increased complexity through its compilation of historical movements and references. Looking at  New York artist Fi5e’s Graffiti Analysis  as an example, first, I examine the material qualities of the piece.  Fi5e created a computer program which captures the strokes of a graffiti artist’s pen, translates the pen stroke into pixels, captures them in a computer and then projects them through a digital projector onto any surface. This allows the artist to tag any surface non-permanently, in any size, and any location.  This is in direct opposition of the typical permanence of graffiti’s spray paint to a building, car or wall. 

Graffiti has always been challenged as an art form because artists use it as a rebellious means of defacing property to express idealisms.   Fi5e’s projection allows graffiti to be stripped of this context.  Suddenly, a viewer is subject to a laser light show (of sorts) and can look beyond the negativity that is often attached to a work of graffiti.  The projection is temporary, inoffesive and transitory. Participants have the chance to appreciate the taxonomy, which (Fi5e did a separate brilliant piece on) and the semiotic value of a tag.  Fi5e’s projections nod toward the inevitability that media culture has on our lives, that we experience it and it experiences us. Oh, I could write endless media theory papers on this, but not now.  Finally, the content, the tags that are projected, are collaborative.  They’re not just Fi5e’s tag’s, Typically, though not always, graffiti has been an isolated art, refined to self-promotion of beliefs and style of the individual artist. Fi5e has even put a call on his website looking for more collaborators for this project.  Lippard’s 3-prongged styles is useful for getting really in-depth with any artwork, though I find it particularly useful for works such as Fi5e’s. In the future, when I visit openings, I’m going to jot down briefly in my notebook next to artist and works that I like: material, content, context. Then I’ll answer them as briefly but succinctly as possible. I think this should become a fine habit to get into for exploring and understanding any artwork.

pannarrative=remix

I've been interested in collage poetry for some time now,  especially that which combines more than one sorce text or disjoints one primary source to the point of unrecagnizsability. The Cuckoo by Peter Streckfus is an example of a pannarrative.   Streckfus chose lines at random from Hsüan-tsang’s sixteenth century Chinese novel The Journey to the West, collaging them together into a purposefully disjointed and nonsensical narrative. This poetic form is fascinating to me and complex.  I found an excellent discription of the form on Generator Press which I'll paste below. 

Pannarrativity

 

Pannarrativity:

narratives (bits and pieces [fragments] of narrative) removed from their original

context and placed [incorporated] into a new context take on new meanings (while

retaining something of their original intention). Narrative — the word / logos —

is everywhere. The world is a narrative. The world “writ large.” Pan-

narrativity.

 

The “pannarrative text.” A “text-collage” composed of bits and pieces (words,

sentences, verses, various elements) of narrative (narrative as found /

appropriation) “stitched” together.

 

The pannarrative poem begins by seeing all the world as one great narration, a

narrative that is known in proportion to the degree of the relation of its parts.

 

The pannarrative poem, then, is constituted of fragments of narrative (which in

their dislocative / disjunctive state are potentially plurisignificative) and uses

juxtaposition as a principle of composition. (And like the metaphor, produces

semantic changes, and thereby increases language.)

 

While not quite on the level of the metaphor, I see pannarrativity as coming to

be a sort of stand-in for the metaphor, requiring, to its own end, an intuitive

competence — an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars as found

in the disjunction (the logoclastics) that posits the juxtaposition. (And like the

metaphor, produces semantic changes, and thereby increases language.)

 

Pannarrativity and Anonymity

 

The problem of pannarrativity and anonymity.

 

anonymous writing. one does not belong to what one has written.

signature / voice / sensibilities

 

 

 

no place like home

I snagged a copy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique at a thirft store for .50.  I picked it up for my mama, who's been an unhappy housewife for about 25 years now. After reading the first 50 pages or so, it became clear to me that it was dated and though a seminal work in the feminist movement, I didn't think it would really hold my mother's interest for that long.  I sold the copy to Book Bank.

After reading an essay about Friedan in the New York Times Book Review, I regret having put this book down.  According to the article, the woman discussed in Friedan's books  "were married to the alienated middle managers...they weren't seeking excitement or a challenge, they were seeking a safe haven".  This is what attracted me to giving it to my mother, who basically followed my father around while he pursued his career.  She's made numerous remarks to me about regretting not persuing a dance career. She was good enough to be on broadway, offered a part, I believe, but then got pregnant with me and ther rest is history.  Now, I admire my mother greatly for sacrificing 25 years of her life to raise 4 children. But, I know that she has regrets, and perhaps there is part of her that has hidden in a safe cacoon of domesticated bliss for a tad longer than she should have.  Anyway, this isn't supposed to be an expose on my mother and her life decisions.

The book is probably worth reading, but I'd rather read Camile Paglia, if I"m gonna read anything right now.