Jumpin’ jumpin’

January 14, 2009 at 1:44pm | In design, internet, new media | 2 Comments
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wallsm1

Light Energy Studio is a company that sells “innovative decorative home furnishings, unique sculpture, lighting, furniture and art,” including all manner of LED floors, “plasma sculptures” and “infinity mirrors.”

If you have no idea what any of that means, that’s fine. Thankfully, they have a walk-through of “The Vortex Club” – a nightclub design ted entirely with Light Energy Studio furnishings – available on their web site. It is probably the greatest thing on the internet right now. Enter the Vortex!

(Thanks for the link, Cat!)

RIP TRL (or, Has Internet killed the video star?)

November 17, 2008 at 5:44pm | In culture, internet, music, new media, television, video | 1 Comment
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This Sunday, the 10-year run of “TRL” (how long has it been since the show was actually called “Total Request Live”?) on MTV came to an end with the show’s 2247th episode. A New York Times article on the final episode details the performances (Beyoncé, P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake) and the Times Square spectacle (sign-waving, screaming teens corralled behind police barriers) that characterized the final episode, echoing the height of the show’s popularity – the late 1990s and early 2000s, when boy bands dominated the charts and drew herds of shrieking fans outside of MTV studios every afternoon.

Does the end of “TRL” – as Ben Sisario’s Times article hints – mean the end of the reign of the music video, the end of MTV’s hegemony over teen culture? Despite attempts to keep clips under control through DRM and take down notices, music videos and other proprietary content still vanish into the dark corners of the Internet, never to return safely to DMCA-controlled territory – opening up new channels and modes of viewing not available under the auspices of MTV producers. Watching “TRL” constrains the viewer’s access to content; sites like YouTube, however, offer a plethora of related videos, playlists, ads and fan-created content to be browsed at will, a wealth of media and information for the avid pop music fan. The linearity of “TRL” – a slow progression of video clips, guest appearances, performances, contests, news and commercials – pales in comparison.

In other words, in an age of web 2.0 media bombardment – with music videos posted to YouTube and imitated by fans or mashed with the pop-culture-phenomenon-of-the-week, with celebrity gaffes blogged about, discussed in Us Weekly and “The Soup” and then blogged again – the “TRL” format seems quaint, even endearing in its outdatedness. What need is there for new “TRL” appearances when fans have nearly the whole 2247-episode show catalog available at the click of a mouse, to be downloaded, remixed, parodied at will? While this increase in content access allows the target audience of “TRL” (teenage pop fans) greater agency in the production and consumption of culture, it may also decrease the ability of current music/video producers to create truly singular, original or interesting content. As the pop star is subsumed more and more into a field of public property, the music video and the pop single lose their capacity for innovation bit by bit; defining moments in these media risk being drowned out in the general babble.

Then again, with music videos like this one, who can say the age of the music video is over?

I wouldn’t change you if I could

February 26, 2008 at 7:33pm | In art, culture, new media, photography, video | Leave a Comment
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I Would Like To Be In America, 2007

Bad Beuys Entertainment is a French art collective, founded in 1999, working somewhere on the border between popular culture – specifically that of the French banlieue suburbs, or the hyper-masculine world of hip-hop – and contemporary video, sound and installation art; in other words, the place where Bad Boy Entertainement meets Joseph Beuys.


Sauvageons, 2004

The images above – from the DVD I Would Like To Be In America (2007), which provides subtitles in a random language to the song “America” from West Side Story, and Sauvageons (2004), a cliche photograph of the unemployed masses of the French suburbs, used as Bad Beuys Entertainment’s official press photograph – come from pieces which make hilarious but cutting comments on American and French pop culture forms and stereotypes, as well as the meanings and biases they help to create. However, Champions #4 (1999), a ridiculous performative send-up of the music video, is probably one of their most entertaining videos – and even more interesting now than it was when it was created 9 years ago; in 2008, it is impossible to see something like Champions #4 and not think of the massive numbers of people creating and distributing similar videos every day for a shot at online fame. Humiliation through music-video-imitation: it’s not just for artist’s anymore.

(Thanks to Cat, for the info on Bad Beuys!)

Adventures in Intertextuality 3: “Simplify”

December 5, 2007 at 9:51pm | In art, internet, new media | 1 Comment
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From JPEGmess.org, the 3rd piece in a series called AiTube:

aistill.png

i start my days with some youtube. when illustrator opens, it always obscures my screen.

As a series, I’m not sure how well it works; some of the screenshots are certainly a lot more inventive and eye-catching than others. I can get down with the concept: capturing the ephemeral for posterity (here, the “Simplify.aip” plug-in initializing), turning the mundane into the semi-interesting, and the annoying “waiting and procrastinating about making art while watching sketchy videos on youtube” time into art itself… Not all of the pieces in this series work quite as well as this one, but I’m really feeling this particular color scheme and the look of this girl’s face.

A Psychic Vacuum

October 28, 2007 at 11:17am | In art, design, new media, video | Leave a Comment
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Last week, I went to New York with a class; we visited a number of galleries and art exhibits on the Lower East Side, including Mike Nelson’s “A Psychic Vacuum,” a conversion of the Old Essex Street Market into a massive, maze-like installation. The empty rooms of the former market are scattered with random, ominous and bizarre objects – taxidermic animals, portraits of the Kennedy family, statues of Buddha, voodoo dolls. By making random turns through the seemingly infinite space, I eventually came to the end of the installation – a massive warehouse space, full of sand. The confusing, endless, empty hallways and their strange contents (all right in the center of New York City) are simultaneously enticing and off-putting – the piece functions as a sort of contemporary art haunted house. “A Psychic Vacuum” closes today (October 28th) – if you’re in New York, check it out!

Another art discovery (care of Your Daily Awesome), just in time for Halloween – German-born, Tokyo-based artist Oliver Laric’s “Webchat with Andy,” a piece composed of “a conversation with Andy Warhol, contacted through a psychic with mediumistic abilities via webchat.” Laric’s other works – video, music, design, 2D and digital media – have the same playful approach – art with a sense of humor. I’d definitely recommend looking at his other works, especially the video “Aircondition.” Laric’s work is definitely a welcome break from the deathly seriousness of contemporary art that has been bothering me for weeks.

A Touching Relationship with the Medium of Tomorrow

September 7, 2007 at 5:58pm | In art, culture, design, new media | Leave a Comment
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Artist and Professor of New Media Olia Lialina has published Part 2 of her presentation/essay/deeply meta internet art project, A Vernacular Web: The Indigenous and the Barbarians (2005). Lialina’s project is not only an analysis of the evolution of web culture and design, but also a refuge for many of its most disdained and forgotten artifacts: animated gifs, ‘under construction’ graphics, midi tracks, starry night tiled backgrounds. I must admit a sadness at not finding angelfire.com’s classic running dog gif amongst Lialina’s archive (my brother and I once shared a deep fondness for that dog, and even named him “Fluffy”).

Lialina posits that “glitter graphics” are the contemporary answer to the animated gifs and starry night backgrounds of the mid-90s. “They … look almost the same,” she writes, “the particles of flickering light on a darker background. But there’s a huge gap between these two. Starry backgrounds represented the future, a touching relationship with the medium of tomorrow. Glitter decorates the web of today, routine and taken-for-granted.”

On the subject of what she is definitely NOT going to talk about, Lialina mentions:

1. “Unfinished research on the topic of cats in today’s Web. They are becoming so important that in the nearest future conferences binded with Internet subjects will have to announce LOLCats or Kitten of the Day panels to discuss things that really matter.”
2. “Animated cursors: a phenomenon equally ridiculous and dangerous.”
3. “Relations, Marriage, Pregnancy, Breastfeeding, Child age calendars, as an ultimate form of life visualization in online communities and diaries.”

If that little list doesn’t entice you to read further, I don’t know what will!

(This comes via Beyond the Beyond.)

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