27 February 2006

back from boston




Well, I made it through several days of panel discussions, dinner parties, art parties, and snow. Despite staying in downtown Boston, I managed to spend nearly every night in Cambridge, where my old friends and I held nightly office hours at the MIT hotspot, the Miracle of Science--that is, until I got super sick at the end, after which I was holding office hours under two duvets!

There are so many people who deserve shout outs, at this moment, from friends new & old who came to my panel & artist talk, to the many awesome people who made the above happen--and others. Still sick, I'm a bit weak & cross-eyed, at the moment. This post is a placeholder for a more coherent moment. Meanwhile, above are some bad, dark cameraphone pics of Trevor Paglen, Tad Hirsch, Rich Pell, Marisa Jahn, Ryan Griffis, and Ricardo Miranda Zuniga. All were taken at Miracle of Science, of course... Trevor has promised to send me better pix, which I'll post asap.

17 February 2006

CAA Panel & Art Interactive-Upgrade Talk in Boston


Look out, Boston! I'm there this week, and I'm looking forward to a fun time.

First I'll be moderating a panel, on behalf of the New Media Caucus at the College Art Association's annual conference.

The title of the panel is "From database and place to bio-tech and bots: relationality vs autonomy in media art." It's a mouthful! When I first proposed it, I had in mind looking at current new media practices (including specific works by some of the artists who ended up being on the panel), in order to reconcile what I saw as points of overlap and discrepancy in Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics and Bey's notion of the "Temporary Autonomous Zone"

Yes, it's kind of a nerdy premise, but I thought that we'd all be ready to go there in Boston, while also looking at some very interesting art work.... I'm very pleased that my panelists are all artists, in addition to being theorists, historians, and/or curators of new media. Some of the presentations will register on the more theoretical side of the scale, while some will be much more practice-oriented. We're going to take a more conversational approach, and present a number of work samples, in exploring the semiotic, political, and formal connotations of 'relationality' and 'autonomy' in media art.

It should be fun! Here are the key details:

"From database and place to bio-tech and bots: relationality vs autonomy in media art"
Moderator: Marisa Olson, Artist; Editor & Curator at Large, Rhizome.org; Rhetoric/ Film, UC Berkeley
Panelists:
Tad Hirsch, Artist, Institute for Applied Autonomy
Warren Sack, Artist; Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz
Brett Stalbaum, Artist, C5; Lecturer, University of California, San Diego
Helen Thorington, Artist; Co-Director, Turbulence.org, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.

This panel will take place, in room 304 of Boston's Hynes Convention Center, on Thursday (2/23) at 12:30-2:00 pm and is FREE and open to the public at large. Get directions here.


I'm also giving an artist talk at Cambridge's Art Interactive, as part of the Upgrade series, from 7-9pm, on Friday, the 24th. The talk/series is organized by Turbulence.

I'm nervous that no one will show up on a Friday night to hear me yack about my work, but we'll see...

14 February 2006

Kisses to You


Looking back over my blog archives, recently, I noticed that my semi-weekly "what I'm up to" posts have slowed down... The truth is that I'm just kinda tired of talking about myself. In honor of Valentine's Day, I thought I'd send out a little luv lttr to the internet and list all the blogs that I love reading. But then I got lazy. You see, I read a couple hundred blogs a day! That's a lotta href'ing, you know? So here's what I thought I'd do. I'm giving you separate, but preexisting link lists. There are the feeds for the Rhizome reblog, the art blogs I heart, some blogs & blog-related stuff bookmarked on my delish, and the archives of my addictive reblogging at Eyebeam--their feeds are on the left-hand column. Big high calorie truffles to all of you. In the near future I might post individual out-shouts for some of my more favorite faves; right now I'm feeling lazy (sorry, it's hot in California!) and don't wanna leave anyone out...

10 February 2006

Net Aesthetics (Post #2) on vers 1 & 2



My original post on the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at EAI was getting long and I thought I should break out with a 2.0 post of sorts... (Along with an image from MRiver's Tinjail blog.)

Some new info: EAI has posted an MP3 of the discussion.


Time Out New York is also publishing a "roundtable" on the panel, in their next issue. Here's the linky link.

There was an amazing turnout at the event and lotsa deep thoughts & giggles. It was incredibly well-managed, and it was cool to be a part of a panel in which the conversation spilled out into the bars, the emails, and the internets, for several days, afterwards...

09 February 2006

Shout Out: Jon Rolston


I recently/finally went to see Walk the Line, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny Cash. It made me lose a lotta sleep. This was partly just because I was up thinking about lyrics and writing songs, but also because the movie made me miss my old band, White Stool. (Yeah, no one liked the name but us!) It really didn't help that Joaquin Phoenix reminds me of my bandmate, Jon Rolston.

Even though we all wear many hats, these days, most people's hats are clearly labelled. Not Jon's. He's his own special breed of writer, anthropologist, musician, and lotsa weird stuff in between. Basically, he rocks in hard-to-describe ways. The movie most made me miss him when June Carter & Johnny Cash sang their duet, Ring of Fire. It reminded me of the time Jon & I turned Hank Williams's Setting the Woods on Fire into a duet, for our last concert, at New Langton Arts, depicted here:



That is probably the most fun I ever had on stage... Anyway, these days Jon & our other bandmate, Marc Horowitz, are down in LA becoming TV stars, and I'm travelling too much. But I miss making music.

I think I'd like to collaborate on some duets and backup singing projects, via the internet. Anyone out there interested?

Mo money, mo money!!

It's that time of year. Rhizome.org has opened the call for proposals for net art commissions. Check out the guidelines and apply already! You could receive $900-3,000!!

UPDATE: We've extended the deadline to April 7! So get your application in!

06 February 2006

Remixologee!!!


Today is an exciting day! 893 has posted some awesome giffords (see above & below) and an mp3 on his blog that remix some images and vocal recordings of moi... Backing up, I sang the text of one of his blog posts about his concern for Michael McDonald, for Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs. He wrote to me and said that he felt that my singing might contain secret clues about the whereabouts of Mr. McDonald. He asked if he could break it down (a process requiring major major scientific skillz uniquely possessed by 893) to look for the clues and he seems to have found one! Check out his post and the awesome 'Yodel Counter Yodel Null Yodel' remix!


Lemme also take this moment to say that being remixed is the greatest, most flattering, exciting, radically awesome honor. In the season after I auditioned for American Idol, a few people started keeping training blogs which they said were inspired by mine--and it really inspired me!

Remixing and sampling should never be illegal! It's how we make sense of things for ourselves, how we find our place in a media saturated culture, how we pay homage, how we participate in the politically important process of parody, and how we evolve. In the tightly regulated words of that tennis shoe company, just do it! :)


Along the same lines, I wanted to point you to two nice videos that sample material from my two recent blog projects with Abe Linkoln. Michael Szpakowski sampled my King Winkles mp3, from AMSTB, in his video, The March Shout Outs.


Also, in a very lovely piece called Flamenco Jellyfish Dream, Curt Cloninger samples images from Universal Acid.

Major big time thank-you's to these artists!

02 February 2006

Net Aesthetics 2.0 at EAI


This Monday, I'll be speaking on a panel moderated by Lauren Cornell & co-organized by Rhizome and Electronic Arts Intermix, called Net Aesthetics 2.0. I'm honored to say that my co-panelists will be Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith, Caitlin Jones, Michael Connor, and Wolfgang Staehle. Full details & bios are here. Next week, Time Out-New York will print a fun roundtable with all of us, and I'll keep you posted about that. {Actually, UPDATE: Here it is.} Meanwhile, here are the Flavorpill and Village Voice pieces, and below is the description of the event:

Net Aesthetics 2.0
Monday, February 6, 2006, 6:30 pm
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 337-0680

Rhizome.org and EAI are pleased to present a panel that will consider current expressions of Internet art in light of larger technological and cultural shifts. Over the past ten years, Internet-based art has transformed, moving away from a medium defined by an intimate, international avant-garde towards a more loose and dispersed range of conceptual and formal practices. This development has, in large part, to do with the expanded and diversified terrain of the Web itself. What was previously a thin network of interlinked pages, construction signs, and awkward animated gifs is now a sprawling area, home to some of the best new business models, largest communities, and billions of users both amateur and expert---a second stage some call the "Web 2.0." Now, artists working on, or drawing source material from the Internet, face not only a faster, richer, more complicated landscape, but also one whose parameters for art practice are continually being pushed out by artists and non-artists alike.

Update: The awesome Art Fag City has made a nice, funny post on the event and Gothamist also posted one of my nerdiest pix ever (in which I'm wearing my favorite t-shirt ever!), here.