Twittervore

This is the first minute or so of the Twitter-based video I'm working on. As noted earlier, the pictures were harvested from PingWire which presents images hosted by three sites serving tweeters. I pulled a couple thousand pictures of cooking, eating, and sometimes growing food from the constant image stream over the course of a few weeks in July.

The soundtrack was generated by an iPhone app called Bloom, which was designed by ambient sound guru Brian Eno and programmer and musician Peter Chilvers. The app costs four bucks, but that's considerably less than I'd have to pay Eno for his services.

I jacked the iPhone into a laptop running Audacity and recorded about 22 minutes of digitally generated ambient drones, gongs and chimes, which I next imported into video editing software along with the pictures. Aside from editing out some noise and reorienting a few sideways pictures, the pictures and sound are as they were when I got them. The video presents what the Internet and my iPhone churned out while I was paying attention.

I'm starting to really get off on the whole mashup of found image/found sound and future-cheesy technology. Maybe I should run it on a stack of Commodore monitors.

Elrod review

My review of Jeff Elrod is online at Glasstire. His small show of post-digital abstractions is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Image above is Portrait (2003) from the Texas Gallery Web site.

Google art

Last May when the Google "Street View" camera passed down Sampsonia Way on Pittsburgh's North Side, an ad hoc collective of artists and neighborhood people (organized by Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley) put on a show. A small band marched by. Runners appeared to finish a marathon. A garage band practiced. In a garage, naturally. The project is titled Street with a View, and its effects can be seen if you do a Google map search for addresses on Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh and click on the street view option to get a panoramic picture of that address. Not every frame represents an intervention, which just makes the whole idea more appealing to me. Like an Easter egg hunt.

The Mattress Factory, which is located at 500 Sampsonia Way, was one of the participating sponsors, but so was Doug's Market, a neighborhood corner store. As was Google.

I ran across an image from the Google art intervention this morning over on Gizmodo, but others, including the marching band picture, have shown up elsewhere on the Web since the images went live back in November. Here are a few screen captures I made of the Easter eggs I found before visiting the Street with a View site.


That's the picture at Gizmodo that got me interested.

Creepy chicken sculpture by Nicholas Lampert.



I pasted the two above together to show the Love Laser and its evident effects. The artist's name is Ian Charnas.

The Langly High School Band marches past the Mattress Factory.

Another paste job, this time to get some perspective on the bed sheet rope she's holding.

Names of participants, background information and a couple of videos can be found at the Street with a View Web site.

link (via Gizmodo)

Proof I'm weird

I visited And/Or Gallery in Dallas this afternoon to take notes for a review I'm working on. It's a show of Net-based art plus some hacker stuff that exhibits just the the right amount of edge without giving in to snarkiness. One of the artists in the show, Olia Lialina, has a Web site here with her partner Dragan Espenschied. Since the mid 1990s, she's been making Web-based artworks that have something of the awareness of material semiotics you find in the works of really good sculptors. Only here, the awareness is applied to the niceties of HTML code and low-grade digital graphics, not plastic, stone, rubber, etc.

My plans to work on a second review were crushed, however, when I found the gallery closed. In fact, all the business owners in the neighborhood met with the mayor this afternoon. So lots of places were closed. Foiled by community development.

Back home, I sliced a passel of homemade bacon, fried it up, and schlepped it to the Spot down on the square to share with Friday happy hour friends. That I took a mess of bacon to a bar this evening is proof that I'm weird. Nobody hauls bacon to a bar.

My friends liked the bacon, and I'll visit the gallery tomorrow. I hear the mayor has the day off.

Phone videos

Last night we attended an opening for a show ("Real Time")at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art -- curated by a couple of friends of mine, John Pomara and Dean Terry. Okay, I'm stretching to call Dean a friend, but we have worked together and he and I have engaged in friendly conversations from time to time. (John and Dean teach at UT-Dallas, where I once worked as a painting teacher.) The premise of their show is projections of camera phone videos by a number of artists and art collectives in the area -- videos which are refreshed daily in short snippets they're calling microart. Uber-techno-guy that he is, Dean has set up a Web site for the show here.

The opening was rather odd. They charged admission, for one thing -- Joan Davidow, the director is working hard to raise big dollars for the joint's new building, but jeeze, a sawbuck to drink art wine, groove to a DJ's turntable tunes and nibble from a fruit plate struck me as a PR mistake.

On the other hand, I'm inclined to think that the show itself will evolve into a really interesting event. Any exhibit that includes Ludwig Schwarz singing "Time after Time" to his cat holds promise for seriously whacked future antics.

Here's an excerpt from Dean's curatorial statement: "Microart is about accepting and exhibiting (mostly) failure rather than (mostly) success. It is about the composite and sequential effect of a large number of small bits that create a stream rather than fewer, individual substantive statements. And its about honesty and directness of the process. Individual posts may be disposable, like most cultural productions in consumer society, but the goal is that the cumulative effect is not."

Some ifs:

If you're reasonably competent and if you hang around long enough, you run into certain sweet ironies like the fact that I was the first art teacher of Kirstin Macy, one of the artists in John and Dean's show.

If anybody wants to participate in "Real Time," Dean said there will be a portal for video donations on the show's Web site. When I checked just now, I didn't see anything that looked to me like a way to contribute. But I've missed things like that before.

If you visit Dean's personal site (linked above), be sure to check out his documentary "Subdivided." It ran last fall on KERA, the Dallas PBS affiliate, and I was quite impressed. We're going to get him out here to Commerce to lecture soon as we can.

Dimensions Vary

Guess I ought to write something since my friend Morse linked to me. So here goes…

The art car/car art magnetic sign painting project is on hold while I try to figure out what’s what with sign contractors and plastic transparencies. While I have every confidence that there is a solution, I have no idea what the solution will be at present.

My colleague Josie’s show opened this week with a pile o’ smiles and not a little weirdness. Says I to another colleague: “This is some deeply weird shit.” Replied she: “How deep? How weird?” Well, there's a motion-activated tinker-toy-like contraption that makes tiny Frederick Remington cowpokes bounce and dance on dowel rods to begin with. The artist in question is Max Kazemzadeh. Also in the show is a designer named Danielle Aubert whose Microsoft Excel drawings look considerably more beautiful than anything I've made in that medium. And then there's Anne Eastman whose videos are lovely, but whose photo, Foucault's Furniture, is a current object of my desire, even if it's not part of the show.

There’s a somewhat unsatisfactory Web cam for the show here, but be warned that it's dark and unresponsive unless the gallery is open. Look for it to update mostly between 1:00 and 5:00 p.m. (CST) weekdays. That I've arranged to have Andy Holtin's cardboard surveillance cameras Webcast -- via a tiny wireless device and via the support of a phalanx of nerds who found it "interesting" -- makes me feel like I'm part of the project myself. At least tonight it does.