Serial Consign

RevMinds III

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:16:40 +0000

[SYMBRION & REPLICATOR - self assembling swarm robots]

A thematic recap of the material I posted during my second (and final) month hosting the Revolutionary Minds Think Tank blog:

Edward Einhorn's excitement over advanced projection technology and Tesla coils in theatre saw me reminisce about Artificiel's incredible POWEr performance at MUTEK 2009. On the topic of worlds colliding, I compared the manner in which Anthony Dunne and Bruce Sterling discuss design and speculation.
Given his research on NGOs and "aid analysis" in Rwanda, Josh Ruxin vocally endorses private sector management strategies as a key means to improve medical facilities in developing countries. I provided some additional context to clarify this outlook and gave a quick overview of the intersection of the open data movement and healthcare.
In terms of information visualization, I outlined the Astronomical Medicine project mentioned by Michelle Borkin and examined Nick Matzke's "docuinformatics" in relation to history flow, a 2003 project that maps edits to Wikipedia documents over time.
Fernando Esponda discussed artificial simulations of immune systems and this inspired me to investigate SYMBRION & REPLICATOR, an ongoing venture dedicated to engineering a network of "self assembling swarm robots". Also drawing on complexity theory, I dug up a 1986 paper by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen to contextualize some of Saleem Ali's thoughts the role of entropy in economics.

What a fun gig! As I stated in my final post, I can't imagine there being another platform where it is appropriate to write about the ethics and economics of tourism one week and recent developments in robotics the next. Many thanks to ScienceBlogs' community manager Erin Johnson for the invitation to host the blog spin-off of SEED magazine's Revolutionary Minds project.

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.txt/091031

Greg J. Smith — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:22:10 +0000

Recently noted:

One of the most prominent websites on earth, WhiteHouse.gov (pictured above) was just relaunched and is now running on the Drupal content management system. While this transition has garnered extensive media coverage (some clueless), it is Tim O'Reilly who recognizes the big picture implications of this decision for governmental transparency and the open source community. O'Reilly on wanting to see advances connected to the the White House e-infrastructure given back to the broader community: "Releasing code is more than just being a good open source community citizen, though. Code sharing is a major cost-saving opportunity for government."
There are few writers as capable of summarizing and contextualizing an entire symposium/conference as Liz Losh of Virtualpolitik. Losh recently provided an overview of the Nowcasting: Design Theory + Digital Humanities conference that took place at UCLA two weeks ago. The second post covering this event should be of particular interest to Serial Consign readers as it documents presentations by Trevor Paglen, Jeffrey Schnapp, Johanna Drucker, Warren Sack, Lev Manovich and Erkki Huhtamo—there are some great perspectives on information aesthetics being batted around here.
A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing is a new publication authored by Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova of the Near Future Laboratory. This issue of The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series outlines a case for "epistemological monkey-wrenching" in the city by way of social objects and mediated interventions.
Jon Dale has posted a lengthy, excellent interview with experimental musician Terre Thaemlitz for Little White Earbuds. This conversation contains everything that is missing from most experimental/electronic music journalism—serious conversations about gender and queer culture, critiques of market-driven distribution and a nuanced historical excavation of the last few decades. Thaemlitz on 1980s NYC clubland: "The East Village scene had a tendency to take itself too creatively."

I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web. Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items or add me to your delicious network if you want to tune in to the material that I'm bookmarking.

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Out of Context: Artists and Web Inventories

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:23:58 +0000

I'm almost done porting my older Rhizome articles over to Serial Consign and it is only fitting that the below piece (published last January) had already been degraded by a moderate case of linkrot.

On any given day, the average web user may log into as many as a dozen different social web services. Interaction with these sites could involve any number of activities including browsing photography, commenting on blog posts, planning trip itineraries, looking for a lover or updating a resume. While the sequential (or parallel) manner in which we navigate these databases and the generic aesthetic of the web 2.0 interface might suggest these sites form a unified network, that is simply not the case. In engaging the social web we voluntarily fragment our interests, social ties and demographic information in order to make them "machine readable" and allow us to participate in these communities. With these rules of engagement in mind, several recent projects speak to these conditions and explore the notion of web inventories in relation to identity, aggregation and as binding legal agreements.

Like much of his other work, Aram Bartholl's Are you social? (2007 - pictured above) exhibits a nuanced optimism towards social media. The project is founded on the notion of a wearable checklist with which an individual can highlight their "networks of choice" from a selection of about 80 services. Bartholl repurposes the T-shirt (the ultimate canvas for self-expression) as a surface upon which users can advertise their personal interaction with the web. Donning one of these shirts would provide new acquaintances the opportunity to execute a rather revealing once-over and quickly determine the online activities of the user. In preparing the visual checklist, Bartholl collaborated with Markus Angermeier who created a series of "micro-buttons" which consolidate the names, logos and color schemes of leading web services into a standardized wearable display - the T-shirt as webform.

A superficial reading of this work might interpret it as an unconditional surrender to Web 2.0 but, in fact, there is a tension that underlies these arrays of candy-colored logos. Are you social? compresses the web into miniature form; it suggests uniformity when it flaunts the distributed self. When this shirt is filled out and worn, what exactly is it telling us about an individual? Furthermore, how much is revealed through the personal inventories we create in engaging these platforms? In his statement for the piece, Bartholl contrasts online exhibitionism with the restraint and privacy associated with city life: "In the network the private lives of a wide range of people are revealed, sometimes with elaborate reports of the previous night's party. The new services present great potential benefits for the user, however the extensive transparency poses many questions." While he concludes that users have to learn to use these services, Are you social? suggests the public's need to learn how to read them.

This year, Bartholl will be further investigating the idea of social media as wearable technology with his What are you doing? T-shirt, a prototype for displaying social network "status" on clothing that he is currently developing at the V2_Lab in Rotterdam [see this related interview published a few months later].

Christian Marc Schmidt's Compressed Portals (2008) is another example of what might be described as a web inventory. The project utilizes the Alexa Top 100 metric to identify the most popular websites by country and, true to the name of the piece, screen captures from these sites are horizontally compressed, ranked and displayed on a single A0 panel. The sites populating the image above were the top web sites in the United States on June 4th, 2008.

The fact that Compressed Portals draws web data from Alexa is worth noting. Having existed for a decade, the web ranking service is the most recognized (if not most accurate) benchmark in monitoring commercial web traffic. This speaks to the tone of this piece as an aggregation of the general web experience of an entire nation. If Are you social? questions the possibility of self-expression across networks, Compressed Portals is decidedly impenetrable - the browsing habits of tens of millions of web users homogenized into one amorphous gestalt. The piece takes the web off the screen and reimagines it as a new, tangible artifact, one that is part bar graph and part abstraction.

[Terms & Conditions - exhibition at the Tobacco Warehouse, Istanbul]

Terms & Conditions (2007) is a project by Burak Arikan which reconsiders the text of the terms of use from popular social media services. In signing up for these sites, users tend to overlook the (often ambiguous) binding legal agreements that dictate acceptable conduct and outline the ownership of content. How many people actually study these statements? Furthermore, how intelligible are they to the average reader? Arikan repurposes the terms and conditions from five services and uses this content as material to construct new texts. These legal documents have been re-typed and filtered through a generative script, reconstituting them as typographic experiments that are far too idiosyncratic to be ignored. Arikan describes the goal of this exercise as "recycling unread terms & conditions" and "pointing to the moment where people give away their rights to [social] capital." This desire to draw attention to the ownership and value of user-generated content is evident in Arikan's other projects - most notably in Meta-Markets (2007) and User Labor (2008) which were produced with collaborators Engin Erodgan and Cenk Dölek.

Are you social?, Compressed Portals and Terms & Conditions all function as aggregators of web culture, transporting familiar online experiences away from the context in which we normally encounter them. These works can be read as inventories of affiliation and economies of attention, they reposition social media and web services as objects to be considered rather than simply consumed. As notions of identity and presence become increasingly networked, it is crucial that users remain mindful not to lose themselves nor take their agency for granted.

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Vague Terrain 15: .microsound

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:16:37 +0000

[dextro / video_11 (still) / 2005]

We launched a new issue of Vague Terrain last Friday to celebrate the tenth anniversary of .microsound. Curated by the American composer/electronic musician Kim Cascone, the issue provides a number of textual and sonic examinations of "sub-atomic" sound design and a window into the microsound.org community. In the following excerpt from his forward, Kim provides an overview of the last decade of electronic music:

The promise of technology had failed us, leaving us to choose between two paths: the ivory tower of sterile academia or the seizure-inducing din of the dance club. Both paths, with a few exceptions, had become formulaic and resistant to innovation ... As I watched this 'post-digital' aesthetic ferment due to advancements in computer technology and the Internet, I felt compelled to create a place on-line where like-minded artists could act as nodes in a network, exchanging ideas and information in hopes of resuscitating experimental electronic music.

Kim isn't exaggerating as microsound.org has developed into an active network for the exchange of ideas and as a forum to facilitate conversation and organize collaborative projects ("Two Documents of .microsound" provides a thoughtful overview of the role of the mailing list within this community). So, to collect work for this .microsound "retrospective", a semi-open call was issued to solicit essays, video and tracks to document the creative output of this globally distributed community.

Vague Terrain 15: .microsound features text & video contributions from Ben Neill, Charles Turner, Dextro, Joanna Demers, Pere Villez, Thanos Chrysakis, Thomas Bey William Bailey and William L. Ashline.

The issue also contains a pair of compilations dedicated to the Deleuzian notions of "smooth" and "striated" space with contributions from Mike Rooke, Lubrication, Ronnie Cramer, [ruidobello], Richard Lainhart, sound art, TomDjll, Brett Ian Balogh, Scant Intone, Yota Morimoto, Jorge Castro, Joaquín Gutiérrez Hadid, Francesco Rosati, Asférico, Water Falls, Yann Novak, John Hanes, Epoch_Collapse, Jhenner Gayap Benadrilled, Skjølbrot, Markus Jones, Jon Hawken, Adern X Fades 4:38, Julien Ottavi, Vanessa Rossetto, Kim Cascone, Larnie Fox, eddie135, Di.J Crisis, shg, Cheryl E. Leonard, Noé Cuéllar, Gary R. Weisberg, Osvaldo Cibils, Kotra, Gintas K, John Kannenberg, Ricky Pannowitz, ocp, TheSAD, Margaret Schedel, Pereshaped, so/on, Eric Miller, Nux Vomica, v4w.enko, UmanoidSomeday, Epoch Collapse, Umanoid and Noé Cuéllar.

You can view Vague Terrain 15: .microsound here.

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José Luis de Vicente Interview

Greg J. Smith — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:51:07 +0000

José Luis de Vicente is a Barcelona-based researcher, curator and writer cultivating several idiosyncratic pockets of digital culture. Director of the Visualizar program at Medialab-Prado (Madrid), Vicente has been showcasing a variety of exciting new media work for the last decade. He's been involved with an impressive range of curatorial projects that include the Machines and Souls exhibit (2008) at the Reina Sofia National Museum and experimental interfaces such as The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space (produced in collaboration with Irma Vilà and Bestiario).

I met Vicente last year at Visualizar'08 and it was immediately apparent that his thinking about visualization and "data practice" was several years ahead of the curve. I was excited to discover that the imminent edition of Visualizar revolved around public data and I definitely recommend that anybody within striking distance of Madrid consider applying to be a collaborator on one of the selected projects that will be prototyped in a month. Over the last few weeks, Vicente and I had the following exchange which delved into his experience with arts programming, his assessment of the current interest in visualization and the optimism intrinsic to the open data movement.

[Visualizar'08 Exhibition / photo: Medialab-Prado]

Greg J. Smith: The original edition of Visualizar (2007) acknowledged visualization as means of representing and understanding the massive data sets associated with "scientific and social processes". That definition certainly spoke to the utility of visualization and the excitement around the discipline at that moment, but I'm wondering if you can provide some context on how the Visualizar project came to be? I know you have an extensive background with curating and festival programming, how exactly does Visualizar relate to and extend out your past work with ArtFutura, Sónar and OFFF?

José Luis de Vicente: Before Visualizar, in my position curating for different new media festivals I had already touched upon the emerging work of a generation of designers and artists that were creating very exciting projects proposing innovative strategies for the representation of complexity.

For instance, this was one of the main elements in Randonnée, an exhibition I curated along with Oscar Abril and Andy Davies for Sónar 2005, including work by Jonathan Harris, Ben Fry, Martin Wattenberg, and a commission by Ben Cerveny—today at Stamen. Most of these artists had also being featured as speakers at the OFFF Festival, that I co-curated between 2005 and 2007. OFFF was a good context to start focusing on Visualization as a language and we also did some hands-on work there, like the advanced Processing workshop that we hosted at Hangar (Barcelona) in 2006. But I was interested in finding an institution with a stronger research-oriented orientation, where we could be productive raising some questions about the potential of Visualization in different contexts, like art, journalism or activism, and launch new projects.

Luckily the perfect occasion appeared in late 2006 in a conversation with Marcos Garcia (head of activities at Medialab-Prado), while I was hosting an evening of presentations at the ArtFutura festival around data aesthetics. A year earlier, Medialab-Prado had started developing a format of workshops with several interesting characteristics: international calls for ideas and collaborators, that would enroll in open, non-hierarchical teams working very intensively for two weeks, in an environment that would encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, and with the assistance of renowned artists. This was the formula they had used with great success in their Interactivos? program of workshops, and Marcos was thinking about applying it to other fields of practice. We both agreed that Visualization could be a great topic for this, and we were specially keen on bringing on board people with very different backgrounds and abilities. The teams that have worked on the previous two editions of Visualizar have included not only artists, designers and programmers, but also statisticians, computer scientists, journalists, architects… so we are really happy with that.

The parallel discussion to your curatorial/organizational experience is what visualization projects have affected and inspired you the most? What were some game changers for you personally?

I have a soft spot for projects that allow you to "manipulate" planes of reality that were previously inaccessible. A personal favourite is of course Josh On's They Rule (pictured above). Something that interests me a lot about this project is how it helps to locate a certain kind of visualization projects culturally. They Rule to me is not important as a functional tool (the data it presents is by definition outdated, and there are important aspects of the system it surveys that it is unable to convey). However, it perfectly explains how a particular system operates.

I have always found there is something particularly touching about Jonathan Harris' We Feel Fine. The project is not only technically outstanding and very spectacular from a design point of view, but it also generates very different responses in people. Some celebrate its capacity to create an intimate model of communication, others find it appalling because it highlights a shallow kind of exhibitionism.

Laura Krugman's One Million Dollar Blocks is also a great example of the power of visualization as part of a certain kind of social research that has important implications.

[Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey / Bicycle Built For 2,000 / 2009]

And lately I have enjoyed a lot Aaron Koblin's projects, from The Sheep Market to Bicycle for 2,000, where a question is posed and the data to explore that question is generated from scratch by a collective of participants that are never aware of the global picture.

The theme for Visualizar'09 is "Public Data", and the workshop dials right into the burgeoning desire for transparent governance, policy-making and open research. One of the things that struck me about your call for work was that you are not only seeking out projects, designers and scholars, but databases - organizations can share their data sets as potential "raw material" for the workshop. Given the broad scope of this endeavour how is organizing this upcoming Visualizar different than the previous editions?

Every edition builds upon what we have learned in the previous one, and since last year we had a very strong interest in starting to collect datasets as part of the process of preparing the workshop, with the idea of making them available to the teams at the beginning of the process.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one is practical; one of the first questions the teams working on the projects have to answer is, do we have access to the data we need to follow this line of inquiry, or does that data even exist? Sometimes getting access to the data is the more difficult part of the process and takes a good chunk of their time; other times, in the scope of two weeks it is simply impossible. Having the datasets available could help them to focus on conceptualization and development faster, even if it means changing their initial idea - which in most cases tends to change anyway.

[photo: Medialab-Prado]

The second reason is related to the bigger goals of the Visualizar project. One of them is supporting open data initiatives and promoting the right of citizens to access and use datasets that are generated by public processes and paid with public resources. Medialab-Prado is a public institution that is part of a City Council department, so encouraging other departments of the City of Madrid to make their data available and help us to do interesting things with them is of great interest to us. Also, as Fernanda Viégas (pictured above) from Many Eyes said in her talk at the first Visualizar, the use of data visualization as a popular form for social communication is only feasible if access to data is sorted out first. In a way, the fate of dataviz is connected to the success of open data and open government initiatives.

Or, maybe the fate of "widespread" dataviz is connected to open data. Right now we have "experts" that have the time, funding or institutional affiliations to negotiate access to databases but maybe in several years an average high school science class could access the same information. Given your past experience as an activist/organizer for free and open source culture what do think the public has to gain from open data? Is this just another iteration of the question of copyright and intellectual property that we're used to hearing about, or is it something new?

Part of it extends the argument of the open source movement of course, specifically that which deals with the importance of having open alternatives to proprietary systems. Initiatives like OpenStreetMap have been groundbreaking in arguing that for every dataset it is crucially important in many applications for there to be an open, nonproprietary alternative.

Another key point is defending that resources of general interest that have been funded with public money should be accessible to the public. Some prominent global organizations still charge a lot of money, for instance, for global development data. It is important for many reasons that this kind of data is accessible.

Finally, the notion of open government has been an important factor in the discussions around open data. The idea that governmental transparency will be facilitated by providing public access to as much data generated by government has been the most encouraging sign about the contemporary idea of open data.

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.txt/091017

Greg J. Smith — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:14:22 +0000

Unfortunately, the catalog pictured above is about as close as I'll probably get to the noteworthy Towards the Sentient City exhibition that is currently taking place in New York City. On top of having a commendable online presence, the Mark Shepard curated show has inspired a nuanced discussion by design thinkers that has spilled out across many of my favourite ~~internet watering holes~~ blogs. Here is a hotlist of related (or indirectly related) recent commentary:

Dan Hill methodically considers the exhibition, the various projects and then ponders the implications of the show for the profession of architecture. Hill: "Devising the architect’s new sensibility - what Paul Dourish would describe as “the designer’s stance” for the discipline - will also be fundamentally important. Either way, complex urban systems are well beyond the ken of the sole master builder; they have been for years, but increasingly so with this ever more multi-layered understanding of the city."
Mimi Zeiger weighs in and situates the exhibition in relation to the ubiquitous middle school science fair and the fine line between optimism and pessimism.
Enrique Ramirez asks two important questions: "Who isn't an urbanist? What object doesn't have significance at the urban scale?" Ramirez examines language, past utopian models and invokes the sage perspective of Aldo Rossi.
You could almost insert any post by Adam Greenfield into this array of links but his recent overview of urban system design absolutely nails the energy, significance and opportunities presented by this emerging paradigm. Bryan Boyer's comment is equally astute: "What you describe is the ability to navigate a diverse collection of inputs, to coordinate their confluence, and to guide that conversation towards the implementation of an equally diverse range of solutions. To me this sounds like Eliel Saarinen’s famous quotation about designing for the “next largest context” freed from its emphasis on the built environment."
Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes' mammoth has done a great job of tracking conversations in and around the mediated city, this blog has become essential reading for me over the last few weeks. I really enjoy the landscape and environment-based readings of this trajectory in design research (see also Design Under Sky).

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I'm Not Here To Make Friends

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:46:52 +0000

[Rich Juzwiak / I'm Not Here To Make Friends! / 2008]

The above video is a supercut-edit that stitches together scenes of reality television dramatic tension where contestants assert their independence. I'm not here to make friends - a bold declaration that is not so much directed at other contestants but the home audience. I understand this is a game and I won't be crippled by empathy. If I watched more television I'd recognize what a cliché this utterance is; instead, I find the repetition of the statement perversely fascinating as it is sadistic and speaks to the desire to schematize and manipulate social relations. Ironically, this brand of televised Darwinism still thrives in an era in which we (the audience) obsessively micromanage our "friendships" through the social web.

"The Digital Given: 10 Web 2.0 Theses" by Ippolita, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter was just published in the most recent issue of Fibreculture and the missive offers a scathing critique of what remains of the web 2.0 bubble. The text offers point-by-point commentary on the financial meltdown, how the word "free" is a stand-in for "service economy" and the manner in which web services homogenize interactions. The authors on how social networks function similar to dissociative substances:

Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. 'I might know you (but I don't). Do you mind knowing me?'. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms—how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customization?

This description of the social web is foreign, confused—we can assume that there will be no handy autocomplete functionality to get us out of this mess. Elsewhere in the text the collective outlines the reductive qualifiers by which we describe our relationships on the web:

We are addicted to ghettoes, and in so doing refuse the antagonism of 'the political'. Where is the enemy? Not on Facebook, where you can only have 'friends'. What Web 2.0 lacks is the technique of antagonistic linkage. Instead, we are confronted with the Tyranny of Positive Energy.

Asymmetrical warfare, asymmetrical friendship - this is cynicism put to good use. The essay is completely cranky but it suggests that it is indeed possible to pull back from and consider the protocols of the networks in which we are enmeshed. In listening to the misanthropic catchphrase in the video and contrasting that with the idiocy of "thanks for the add" (the rallying cry of banal accumulation) we get perfect dissonance. Perhaps "I'm not here to make friends" is a mantra for social pruning.

If nothing else, "The Digital Given" will provide a brief pause in your daily web-routine. It definitely forced one on me earlier today and it goes without say that I highly recommend the text. Kudos to Ippolita, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter for this vital document and to editors Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie for putting together what appears to be a great collection of essays.

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Glitch: Designing Imperfection

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:21:28 +0000

I was excited to finally receive my copy of Glitch: Designing Imperfection last week and I've been savouring the compendium for the past several days. For those unfamiliar with the project, the book was spearheaded by Iman Moradi and Ant Scott to provide a fixed archive for the ephemeral glitch art scene. Transitioning screen-based media art to print is always a tricky endeavour but the pair of curators (aided by Joe Gilmore and Christopher Murphy) have constructed an impressive document that collates error-related work from approximately eight dozen artists. Glitch is extremely thorough and provides a precise overview of a hyper-specific strand of media art.

The captions for the majority of the work in Glitch reveal a mix of software and video-based practices and the text is constructed as an index of screen captures that allude to motion graphics, hacked video hardware and software art. Iman Moradi describes how glitch artists' methodologies demand a code and platform-level awareness of specific technologies and techniques:

...which stems from an understanding of their tools: computer hardware (storage media, memory and display technology) and software (operating systems, image processing libraries, file storage and data transmission protocols). Fundamentally though, everything boils down to principles of composition, color and personal taste, which are immutably non-specific and timeless. Aesthetic considerations therefore govern the way glitch artists crop, compose and even provoke the generation of images.

This said, we can read glitch art as "rationalized" surprises generated in that moment that Scott describes as "when software doesn't do what you expect it to". Glitch provides a sprawling inventory of graphic artifacts born through software sketches, application crashes, broken interfaces, hacked cartridges, adventurous signal processing and convoluted HTML. Contributing artists include: Cory Arcangel, David Lu, JODI, Karl Klomp, Mario Klingemann, Marius Watz, Paul Prudence (and scores more) and interviews with Angela Lorenz, Ant Scott, Kim Cascone, O.K. Parking and Johnny Rogers.

The above spread, featuring work by Lia + Miguel Carvalhais (left) and reMI (right), reflects the general layout strategy of Glitch - a liberal use of white space and images ranging in size from full-bleed spreads down to thumbnails. Due to the general consistency of the imagery, the spread-by-spread variation in layout makes the book a pleasure to browse through and explore.

In addition to a smart layout strategy, the text also boasts a numerical system for indexing the contributors and image chronology. In and of itself this is a clever means of organizing work, but the protocol also alludes to the austere file naming conventions often associated with glitch and generative art. Designers Qubik and Fehler should definitely take a bow for their rigorous arrangement of this vast body of work.

Glitch: Designing Imperfection is so well crafted that a reader might not clue into the specificity of practices and techniques that generated this work. Delivered in the form of an impeccable coffee table book, the project almost seems to domesticate the glitch—perhaps the timing is correct as we are now living in a post-Kanye West era of digital art. While the text would have benefitted from some artist-written essays delving into approach and aesthetics—or touched on related installation work—any speculation on where this book might have "erred" is superfluous as the project is fabulously successful at documenting a decade of relatively esoteric multimedia experimentation.

Glitch: Designing Imperfection was produced by Mark Batty Publisher and released in September, I'd go as far as labelling the text as essential for anyone interested in software art and experimental video.

In the interest of disclosure, I'm far from an unbiased reviewer of this text. Ant Scott was an early contributor to Vague Terrain and Iman Moradi and I have corresponded for several years. Regardless of these ties, I think my response to the project is objective.

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We Must Repeat

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:39:52 +0000

[DEVO / Devo Corporate Anthem (still) / 1979]

Senior editor Ceci Moss was kind enough to encourage my wandering off on a tangent for my most recent article for Rhizome. Notes on Going Under: A DEVO Primer traces the mythology of the new wave anachronism through their Akron, Ohio origins and prescient video work without mentioning energy domes, potatoes or John Hinckley, Jr. The essay was a riot to research and it forced me to confront the body-horror implicit in their early work—a facet of their identity that I hadn't really wrapped my head around until writing this text. Between multiple viewings of The Truth About De-Evolution and listening to the E-Z Listening Disc on repeat, I'm left feeling both disturbed and (re)inspired by work that I thought I knew pretty well to begin with.

You can read the article here.

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Coming Attractions

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:56:16 +0000

[Fritz Kahn / Das Leben des Menschen, vol. 4 plate VIII / 1929]

It goes without say that posting has been quite sporadic over the last few weeks. I had the misfortune of getting quite ill as I hit a major deadline bottleneck and I'm just starting to get my strength back. I'm totally out of the loop though and I can't even cough up a .txt post—I've hardly even opened my RSS reader over the past few weeks (oh, the humanity). The wheels are turning though: as I mentioned yesterday, I'm still playing host over at the Revolutionary Minds Think Tank, I'm in the process of signing off on a pair articles (to be published elsewhere) and I've got a few interviews underway that will be posted here later this fall. I'm also in the midst of organizing a new web project and Neil Wiernik and I are collaborating with Kim Cascone to organize the forthcoming .microsound issue of Vague Terrain. I look forward to directing considerably more energy to Serial Consign once I'm through this patch of craziness (and when I'm back at 100% healthwise), so please bear with my herky-jerky post frequency in the meantime.

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