the see-not gate
Feb. 19th, 2018 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanama28 days until the Vernal Equinox
A woman wore patterned pants and combat boots and a pendant of stone and a pendant of a six-petaled flower. She had a pin on her bag that said ARTIST and a pin of Linda Belcher's face.
A woman had a malachite pendant, or some kind of green stone that wasn't jade.
A man had blue hair and a white beard. A woman had green hair, a woman had blue in her hair.
One of the docents had spiderwebs shaved into the side of her January sky blue hair.
A woman had pink hair. According to her boyfriend's shirt, she's the sign of the Gigas.
I met a dog who looked like she was part shih tzu and I met a bearded collie who would prefer it to be 5 degrees out and his owner who likes it hot and said that an unseasonably warm february afternoon is the best compromise.
Duke looks very androgynous but he has a masculine name and voice.
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 (the year the World Wide Web was introduced, as well as the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Tiān'ānmén Square protests happened, as they point out ) to today (Black Lives Matter, the election of Donald Trump, the debates about net neutrality, metoo).
These may not be safe for work.
Part the First: Networks and Circulation - a sea change in information flow and the ubiquity of cameras.
Gretchen Bender - American Flag: taken from a broadcast as it dissolves in a transition.
Dara Birnbaum - Computer Assisted Drawings: Proposal for Sony Corporation.
Nam June Paik - Internet Dream
envisioning the internet as something that would foster genuine connectivity and understanding between diverse groups.
It kinda didn't.
I had a thought about the death of AIM and how I stopped using it in 2009 because everyone else moved on and how AIM was suffering from walled garden syndrome, and eventually, AIM stopped working for me until I updated and the update looked really dodgy so I didn't.
And I had a thought about Ashley, who is younger than I am and that really is important, and how once I had a falling out with my friend and six months later, she told me that she had to open the actual AIM application to unblock me because Trillian wasn't letting her do it. Anyway, the moral of the story is that it is all too easy to cut someone off and all too hard and/or inconvenient to let them back in, and also, one shouldn't act in a situation until they have a clear understanding of what the situation actually is. I'm not sure how facebook unblocking works, as the only people I have ever blocked on Facebook are members of Vox Popoli.
Olia Lialina - my boyfriend came back from the war
At the ICA, they were using vintage computers to play this. I think they were running Netscape Navigator. If you really want to, you might be able to run the internet via emulator.
Thomas Ruff - nudes lox22
he finds lo-rez porn images and magnifies them until they become blurry and illegible.
Paul Pfeiffer - john 3:16
found footage of basketball games spliced together.
Pfeiffer said that eternal lief is the promise of digital media. You can tell this is an old work because it's still optimistic.
33,930,694 suns from sunsets from Flickr
She'd download pictures of sunsets, crop around the sun, and put them on a grid. There is one sun and 34 million pictures on Flickr and counting.
In Germany, there's a corporation called Trumpf, while in Italy, they pretend he doesn't exist and instead show playing cards. There, you just learned something cool about Europe that you'd never know about if you were talking to Ashley, who may not have visited Germany at all, although I have no idea why she'd lie to me about having been in Germany. She really doesn't know anything about where I would and wouldn't go if I had access to time travel. Places I would visit: the Paleozoic. The future. Really, any future. That time in which Ashley and I were still friends. Maybe it would eventually compress into a single moment but I can get a lot out of it with time travel. That time the Fitchburg Art Museum had a really cool-sounding exhibit. A few past ArtBeat Somervilles.
I arrived at the ICA even less impressed with those European trip pictures, as we have a fucking Caffe Nero in the fucking Seaport. Sorry, I'm digressing again.
And when Iran thinks of America, they think of Taylor Swift and the Statue of Liberty with some kind of mask on and Hillary Clinton, and Egypt thinks of flags and Israel thinks of the two continents named after Amerigo Vespucci, and Kenya thinks of the Civil War and the united states thinks of Haliaeetus leucocephalus, which are a) migrants from Canada and b) not true eagles at all. I don't know. China thinsk of border collies and Kenya thinks of picture frames and Mexico thinks of the wall and Israel thinks of fences.
Aleksandra Domanović makes sculptures from stacks of 9000 inkjet pages. When she was born, the .yu tld had vanished.
You can't print to the edge with a home inkjet printer, the docent told us. Maybe they're custom made. Maybe they do things differently in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Grosse Fatigue - an attempt to merge the disparate sceientific and religious origin stories of the world into a single narrative.
In the gift shop, there is a book on extinct animals, starting with dickinsonia, which could grow to the size of a small person but would still be as flat as a pancake, were theorized to absorb nutrients with their body and had no known maximum size and would grow until they died, and nobody really knows what they are or if they left any descendants and nobody really knows why they went extinct, and ending with the saddle-backed rodrigues giant tortoise, which became extinct due to human colonization of Mauritius. Opabinia has a clawed proboscis and five eyes. Elephants do not know what they're missing out on. It deliberately left out dinosaurs. although there's an illustration of an ichthyosaur, a plesiosaur, and a pterosaur, which are well-known mesozoic reptiles that get lumped in with dinosaurs. And a dimetrodon, which are closer to mammals than they are to dinosaurs and didn't make it to the mesozoic, but still get lumped in with dinosaurs. In fact, there is an entire tumblr devoted to pointing this out especially when done by people who really should know better.
They do call them pelycosaurs on the Hungarian dinosaur memory cards.
And we lost most of the cool amphibians.
I'm getting sidetracked.
David Maljković (Lj in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian is pronounced like the ly in Hungarian, that is to say, it's a sound that doesn't exist in English and is typically approximated as "y") - New Reproductions
Explores the nature of memory and the history of his native Croatia. He'd print out photographs and tear them apart.
thewayblackmachine
algorithmically generated materials collected from social media (Ferguson), footage of white supremacist violence and police brutality.
Simon Denny - Modded Server-Rack Display with Some Interpretations of David Darchicourt Designs for NSA Defense Intelligence
these images were intended to circulate in secret.
Oliver Laric - the Hunter and his Dog.
Laura Owens - Untitled
Layers images from high art and pop art, including a pixellated image of a cubist painting and the background pattern from a Garfield poster, inverting the hierarchy.
Part the second: Hybrid Bodies - asking questions about what it means to be human in this age of technology.
Mariko Mori'd dress as a cyborg on the Tokyo subway and passengers would take notice and become part of the art as well. Although it looks like the people around her are making efforts not to notice her.
Lee Bul - Vanish (Jade)
his cyborgs are all without organs and/or limbs, so they aren't quite perfect.
Pamela Rosencranz - Bow Human
a human figure crouched beneath a metallic emergency blanket. They're meant to reduce heat loss and have the bonus perk of flashing in the sun and being useful as a signaler.
Gregory Edwards - Human Being
Anicka Yi -
love and loss are human emotions.
Rigged
hyperreal CG models.
Saving Money With Subcontractors.
He'd 3D print a model of a FedEx employee and then put them in a box of packing peanuts that also look like heads. I had to go on to Instagram to find this picture. Everything else and every description
I saw people taking notes with a pencil and wish I thought of that.
Graft and Ash
you sit in a exercise machine meant to encourage physical activity in a sedentary office job.
Safe Conduct
in an airport security checkpoint, banal yet embodying all the pervasiveness of surveillance, political warfare, and scare tactics, a man watches body parts go through the x-ray machine and removes his own body parts, set to a rendition of Ravel's Bolero.
Part the Third: Virtual Worlds
Tron 4 (grün Pantone 375)
Tron is a movie. Tron is a Geramn hacker who mysteriously disappeared one day in 1998 and was found dead by apparent suicide.
AnnLee Colours: Anywhere Out of the World
One Million Kingdoms
Annlee walks amongst a barren cgi lunar landscape, transfixed by her own solitude, lip-syncing the recording of Neil Armstrong's lunar landing, harsh and broken by static, as if she were speaking from somewhere hundreds of thousands of miles away. Annlee is a cartoon character who owns herself.
uses Texas Instruments drawing software from 1990 to create lo res black and white paintings and then enlarges them and silkskreens them by hand.
A sun with no shadow - explores ways the US military employs gaming technology, training them for combat on accurately simulated landscapes.
Cat - cats are the most viewed images and videos on the internet. In this sculpture, a hologram of a cat's head rotates around a sculpted body and occasionally meows at you. Antoine Catala is almost the most perfect name for the artist, as it contains the word "cat" but does not quite convey feline passive-agression. I'm not sure what the Occitan equivalent of Ashley is. I'm pretty sure the French equivalent is Ashléexqmtstgrxxs. The consonant cluster at the end is silent. If they even have one, that is. Genderless names ,or even names that don't clearly indicate gender, are banned in some countries.
Noriko. It's inspired by the giant holographic face advertisements in Blade Runner and is very lo-tech.
Super Landscape no 1.
He wanted something that would be meme-able. The woman with pink hair thought that was the greatest thing. She told me about how she was at the Peabody Essex Museum and there's a sealed-up room filled with balloons and there's a shot of Mario standing on a question mark block floating in a blue void and he calls it "totally fucked" and one day, I'm going to take a screenshot of a rom hack of naked mario walking down the end of level staircase and call it a homage to Marcel Duchamp.
I want to see that exhibit.
I told her about a topic on Select Button's forum that I thought I'd have to go on the internet archive to find.
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=4304
Oh! Here it is. Try it yourself. It might work with something equally basic, like The Legend of Zelda but don't bother with Super Mario Bros. 3 and definitely don't bother with Super Mario World and don't even think about trying this on Vagrant Story. Changing the filesize breaks the rom and turns it into a metaphor for the internet.
Sometimes it will lock up or the emulator will crash or Mario will get stuck on invisible blocks but otherwise they're playable.
There's a virtual reality experience but you needed a ticket which didn't cost any money but did involve a long wait, so I didn't get to see it.
Part the Fourth - States of Surveillance - while the internet came to us with a promise of democracy and togetherness, it's still used as a tool for misinformation and control. Democracy is vanishing in Cambodia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.
RAVEN-2 in Corona Borealis
I'm not sure where the satellite is or if it can be seen, or if one of those stars is Gemma or Nusakan. The docent said that maybe that's the intent.
The internet seems like a liminal space everywhere and in no place but it's still made out of physical stuff: amplifiers, transoceanic fiberoptic cables, switches, satellites, landing stations.
Lockdown Archive - a digital slideshow of photographs taken during the manhunt for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the lockdown. People say that with gun control, people will just build bombs or flamethrows. And maybe that's true, but they still only killed two people with their bombs.
Surface tension - the eye uses infrared sensors to watch us. With multiple people, it can get confused.
Mothers Under Surveillance - footage of a nursing home and live footage from the gallery.
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org
it looks like the visual data was corrupted by a virus. Looking at the source code shows a schematic of a bomb.
CybeRoberta and Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll, have cameras in their eyes, and we can see the gallery as they see it.
Evidence LockerL Control Room - she'd wear a bright red trenchcoat and compile security footage of herself.
gfwlist - a monolith spits out a ream of encrypted website addresses blocked in the People's Republic of China.
Autonomy Cube - On the other hand, there's a working TOR that allows the ICA to be a bubble free from censorship and datamining.
Rabih Mroué - The Fall of a Hair
Seven images of gunmen pointing their weapon at the photographers, protestors during the initial stages of the Syrian Civil War, some of whom were killed. What distinguishes Syria from other Arab countries, is that in Syria, there are no journalists, and the only way to know what's going on is to go through the Syrian official news agency or through the protestors images uploaded onto the internet. He obviously chose the latter.
While we do not have as pervasive government censorship, we do have corporate censorship.
Part the Fifth - Performing the Self - the development of social media
Celia Hampton would paint various people she met on a site where you could meet strangers via webcam as they exposed themselves and performed various lewd acts.
Juliana is a trans woman artist.
There was a video with glitching out clips of Family Matters and the premise is that black culture is American culture.
I had green curry with calamari from Siam Bistro. I'll try their larb eventually but I can't say no to lunch prices.
burning question: earlier this month, Breit Bart and the Daily Stormer targeted students for something to do with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and there's a comment on Breit Bart saying that there should be more school shootings. Do you think Nikolas Cruz read that post too?
A woman wore patterned pants and combat boots and a pendant of stone and a pendant of a six-petaled flower. She had a pin on her bag that said ARTIST and a pin of Linda Belcher's face.
A woman had a malachite pendant, or some kind of green stone that wasn't jade.
A man had blue hair and a white beard. A woman had green hair, a woman had blue in her hair.
One of the docents had spiderwebs shaved into the side of her January sky blue hair.
A woman had pink hair. According to her boyfriend's shirt, she's the sign of the Gigas.
I met a dog who looked like she was part shih tzu and I met a bearded collie who would prefer it to be 5 degrees out and his owner who likes it hot and said that an unseasonably warm february afternoon is the best compromise.
Duke looks very androgynous but he has a masculine name and voice.
Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 (the year the World Wide Web was introduced, as well as the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Tiān'ānmén Square protests happened, as they point out ) to today (Black Lives Matter, the election of Donald Trump, the debates about net neutrality, metoo).
These may not be safe for work.
Part the First: Networks and Circulation - a sea change in information flow and the ubiquity of cameras.
Gretchen Bender - American Flag: taken from a broadcast as it dissolves in a transition.
Dara Birnbaum - Computer Assisted Drawings: Proposal for Sony Corporation.
Nam June Paik - Internet Dream
envisioning the internet as something that would foster genuine connectivity and understanding between diverse groups.
It kinda didn't.
I had a thought about the death of AIM and how I stopped using it in 2009 because everyone else moved on and how AIM was suffering from walled garden syndrome, and eventually, AIM stopped working for me until I updated and the update looked really dodgy so I didn't.
And I had a thought about Ashley, who is younger than I am and that really is important, and how once I had a falling out with my friend and six months later, she told me that she had to open the actual AIM application to unblock me because Trillian wasn't letting her do it. Anyway, the moral of the story is that it is all too easy to cut someone off and all too hard and/or inconvenient to let them back in, and also, one shouldn't act in a situation until they have a clear understanding of what the situation actually is. I'm not sure how facebook unblocking works, as the only people I have ever blocked on Facebook are members of Vox Popoli.
Olia Lialina - my boyfriend came back from the war
At the ICA, they were using vintage computers to play this. I think they were running Netscape Navigator. If you really want to, you might be able to run the internet via emulator.
Thomas Ruff - nudes lox22
he finds lo-rez porn images and magnifies them until they become blurry and illegible.
Paul Pfeiffer - john 3:16
found footage of basketball games spliced together.
Pfeiffer said that eternal lief is the promise of digital media. You can tell this is an old work because it's still optimistic.
33,930,694 suns from sunsets from Flickr
She'd download pictures of sunsets, crop around the sun, and put them on a grid. There is one sun and 34 million pictures on Flickr and counting.
In Germany, there's a corporation called Trumpf, while in Italy, they pretend he doesn't exist and instead show playing cards. There, you just learned something cool about Europe that you'd never know about if you were talking to Ashley, who may not have visited Germany at all, although I have no idea why she'd lie to me about having been in Germany. She really doesn't know anything about where I would and wouldn't go if I had access to time travel. Places I would visit: the Paleozoic. The future. Really, any future. That time in which Ashley and I were still friends. Maybe it would eventually compress into a single moment but I can get a lot out of it with time travel. That time the Fitchburg Art Museum had a really cool-sounding exhibit. A few past ArtBeat Somervilles.
I arrived at the ICA even less impressed with those European trip pictures, as we have a fucking Caffe Nero in the fucking Seaport. Sorry, I'm digressing again.
And when Iran thinks of America, they think of Taylor Swift and the Statue of Liberty with some kind of mask on and Hillary Clinton, and Egypt thinks of flags and Israel thinks of the two continents named after Amerigo Vespucci, and Kenya thinks of the Civil War and the united states thinks of Haliaeetus leucocephalus, which are a) migrants from Canada and b) not true eagles at all. I don't know. China thinsk of border collies and Kenya thinks of picture frames and Mexico thinks of the wall and Israel thinks of fences.
Aleksandra Domanović makes sculptures from stacks of 9000 inkjet pages. When she was born, the .yu tld had vanished.
You can't print to the edge with a home inkjet printer, the docent told us. Maybe they're custom made. Maybe they do things differently in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Grosse Fatigue - an attempt to merge the disparate sceientific and religious origin stories of the world into a single narrative.
In the gift shop, there is a book on extinct animals, starting with dickinsonia, which could grow to the size of a small person but would still be as flat as a pancake, were theorized to absorb nutrients with their body and had no known maximum size and would grow until they died, and nobody really knows what they are or if they left any descendants and nobody really knows why they went extinct, and ending with the saddle-backed rodrigues giant tortoise, which became extinct due to human colonization of Mauritius. Opabinia has a clawed proboscis and five eyes. Elephants do not know what they're missing out on. It deliberately left out dinosaurs. although there's an illustration of an ichthyosaur, a plesiosaur, and a pterosaur, which are well-known mesozoic reptiles that get lumped in with dinosaurs. And a dimetrodon, which are closer to mammals than they are to dinosaurs and didn't make it to the mesozoic, but still get lumped in with dinosaurs. In fact, there is an entire tumblr devoted to pointing this out especially when done by people who really should know better.
They do call them pelycosaurs on the Hungarian dinosaur memory cards.
And we lost most of the cool amphibians.
I'm getting sidetracked.
David Maljković (Lj in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian is pronounced like the ly in Hungarian, that is to say, it's a sound that doesn't exist in English and is typically approximated as "y") - New Reproductions
Explores the nature of memory and the history of his native Croatia. He'd print out photographs and tear them apart.
thewayblackmachine
algorithmically generated materials collected from social media (Ferguson), footage of white supremacist violence and police brutality.
Simon Denny - Modded Server-Rack Display with Some Interpretations of David Darchicourt Designs for NSA Defense Intelligence
these images were intended to circulate in secret.
Oliver Laric - the Hunter and his Dog.
Laura Owens - Untitled
Layers images from high art and pop art, including a pixellated image of a cubist painting and the background pattern from a Garfield poster, inverting the hierarchy.
Part the second: Hybrid Bodies - asking questions about what it means to be human in this age of technology.
Mariko Mori'd dress as a cyborg on the Tokyo subway and passengers would take notice and become part of the art as well. Although it looks like the people around her are making efforts not to notice her.
Lee Bul - Vanish (Jade)
his cyborgs are all without organs and/or limbs, so they aren't quite perfect.
Pamela Rosencranz - Bow Human
a human figure crouched beneath a metallic emergency blanket. They're meant to reduce heat loss and have the bonus perk of flashing in the sun and being useful as a signaler.
Gregory Edwards - Human Being
Anicka Yi -
love and loss are human emotions.
Rigged
hyperreal CG models.
Saving Money With Subcontractors.
He'd 3D print a model of a FedEx employee and then put them in a box of packing peanuts that also look like heads. I had to go on to Instagram to find this picture. Everything else and every description
I saw people taking notes with a pencil and wish I thought of that.
Graft and Ash
you sit in a exercise machine meant to encourage physical activity in a sedentary office job.
Safe Conduct
in an airport security checkpoint, banal yet embodying all the pervasiveness of surveillance, political warfare, and scare tactics, a man watches body parts go through the x-ray machine and removes his own body parts, set to a rendition of Ravel's Bolero.
Part the Third: Virtual Worlds
Tron 4 (grün Pantone 375)
Tron is a movie. Tron is a Geramn hacker who mysteriously disappeared one day in 1998 and was found dead by apparent suicide.
AnnLee Colours: Anywhere Out of the World
One Million Kingdoms
Annlee walks amongst a barren cgi lunar landscape, transfixed by her own solitude, lip-syncing the recording of Neil Armstrong's lunar landing, harsh and broken by static, as if she were speaking from somewhere hundreds of thousands of miles away. Annlee is a cartoon character who owns herself.
uses Texas Instruments drawing software from 1990 to create lo res black and white paintings and then enlarges them and silkskreens them by hand.
A sun with no shadow - explores ways the US military employs gaming technology, training them for combat on accurately simulated landscapes.
Cat - cats are the most viewed images and videos on the internet. In this sculpture, a hologram of a cat's head rotates around a sculpted body and occasionally meows at you. Antoine Catala is almost the most perfect name for the artist, as it contains the word "cat" but does not quite convey feline passive-agression. I'm not sure what the Occitan equivalent of Ashley is. I'm pretty sure the French equivalent is Ashléexqmtstgrxxs. The consonant cluster at the end is silent. If they even have one, that is. Genderless names ,or even names that don't clearly indicate gender, are banned in some countries.
Noriko. It's inspired by the giant holographic face advertisements in Blade Runner and is very lo-tech.
Super Landscape no 1.
He wanted something that would be meme-able. The woman with pink hair thought that was the greatest thing. She told me about how she was at the Peabody Essex Museum and there's a sealed-up room filled with balloons and there's a shot of Mario standing on a question mark block floating in a blue void and he calls it "totally fucked" and one day, I'm going to take a screenshot of a rom hack of naked mario walking down the end of level staircase and call it a homage to Marcel Duchamp.
I want to see that exhibit.
I told her about a topic on Select Button's forum that I thought I'd have to go on the internet archive to find.
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=4304
Oh! Here it is. Try it yourself. It might work with something equally basic, like The Legend of Zelda but don't bother with Super Mario Bros. 3 and definitely don't bother with Super Mario World and don't even think about trying this on Vagrant Story. Changing the filesize breaks the rom and turns it into a metaphor for the internet.
Sometimes it will lock up or the emulator will crash or Mario will get stuck on invisible blocks but otherwise they're playable.
There's a virtual reality experience but you needed a ticket which didn't cost any money but did involve a long wait, so I didn't get to see it.
Part the Fourth - States of Surveillance - while the internet came to us with a promise of democracy and togetherness, it's still used as a tool for misinformation and control. Democracy is vanishing in Cambodia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.
RAVEN-2 in Corona Borealis
I'm not sure where the satellite is or if it can be seen, or if one of those stars is Gemma or Nusakan. The docent said that maybe that's the intent.
The internet seems like a liminal space everywhere and in no place but it's still made out of physical stuff: amplifiers, transoceanic fiberoptic cables, switches, satellites, landing stations.
Lockdown Archive - a digital slideshow of photographs taken during the manhunt for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the lockdown. People say that with gun control, people will just build bombs or flamethrows. And maybe that's true, but they still only killed two people with their bombs.
Surface tension - the eye uses infrared sensors to watch us. With multiple people, it can get confused.
Mothers Under Surveillance - footage of a nursing home and live footage from the gallery.
wwwwwwwww.jodi.org
it looks like the visual data was corrupted by a virus. Looking at the source code shows a schematic of a bomb.
CybeRoberta and Tillie, the Telerobotic Doll, have cameras in their eyes, and we can see the gallery as they see it.
Evidence LockerL Control Room - she'd wear a bright red trenchcoat and compile security footage of herself.
gfwlist - a monolith spits out a ream of encrypted website addresses blocked in the People's Republic of China.
Autonomy Cube - On the other hand, there's a working TOR that allows the ICA to be a bubble free from censorship and datamining.
Rabih Mroué - The Fall of a Hair
Seven images of gunmen pointing their weapon at the photographers, protestors during the initial stages of the Syrian Civil War, some of whom were killed. What distinguishes Syria from other Arab countries, is that in Syria, there are no journalists, and the only way to know what's going on is to go through the Syrian official news agency or through the protestors images uploaded onto the internet. He obviously chose the latter.
While we do not have as pervasive government censorship, we do have corporate censorship.
Part the Fifth - Performing the Self - the development of social media
Celia Hampton would paint various people she met on a site where you could meet strangers via webcam as they exposed themselves and performed various lewd acts.
Juliana is a trans woman artist.
There was a video with glitching out clips of Family Matters and the premise is that black culture is American culture.
I had green curry with calamari from Siam Bistro. I'll try their larb eventually but I can't say no to lunch prices.
burning question: earlier this month, Breit Bart and the Daily Stormer targeted students for something to do with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and there's a comment on Breit Bart saying that there should be more school shootings. Do you think Nikolas Cruz read that post too?
