No Deferral:
Art and the Algorithm

April 29, 2012

Patterns of association based by content, that feverish mechanism of the algorithm embedded within all online social platforms and products today, has for centuries been grappled with by art and art exhibitions. Curation is a code, and schools of discourse have surfaced and fought textual wars for the consciousness of art particularly during the last century. The possibility of the avant-garde in art has always been proposed by the curatorial association of works, necessitating an institution with which to house or speak of artworks and contain and promote their arguments. This has been done by curators in the field of art as well as by artists themselves, down to the point where a critique of curation itself became a model of production for certain artists. Even institutional critique, a discourse of art that ostensibly strengthened the power of the institution by highlighting its paternal talons, relies on associative, serial works to distinguish a legibility of a whole body. From Benjamin’s Arcades Project to Bataille’s Documents to Dan Graham’s Homes for America to more recent resurgences of associative linguists like Matthew Brannon’s practice, the exploration of inter-relational associations, constellations of ideas and the deferral of meaning into the mix of serialized production is a well traveled terrain in the history of art and the history of curation.

Go on

Recently

April 19, 2012

Daydreaming about the way things really are: a familiar lyric becomes a mantra, as I begin to kiss goodbye that howling beast • Kurt Vonnegut still can predict our present • New York City on my mind, in my heart • Started keeping a notebook, again • Mysticism and epistemology: diving into Michel de Certeau for the first time • And the echo of Silver Springs

Learn to Distinguish Banality

April 17, 2012

Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on “ideas.” Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the “how” above the “what” but do not let it be confused with the “so what.” Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.

Nabokov responding in an interview in Strong Opinions.

Transcription of Mark Lane and William F. Buckley Debate

April 05, 2012

I am unsure exactly what drew me to this exchange between Mark Lane and William F. Buckley Jr., but I returned to it over and over again and finally decided to transcribe the televised discussion. The text-only version of the debate removes some of the layers of rhetoric found in tone and body language and provides a very different document of the event. The debate was over the findings of the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy and aired on Buckley’s Firing Line in 1966, and since viewing it the first time about a year ago it has lingered with me. There remains a ghost from this exchange itself regardless of the theories surrounding the assassination, disregarding the deathbed confessions by Howard E. Hunt or Lane’s basic accusation of Hunt’s involvement in a CIA operation to assassinate President Kennedy in his Plausible Denial. This debate achieves something beyond the desire to decipher the motive and conspirators of the assassination.

Go on

Participation

April 01, 2012

…the specific forms of active reception associated with pop music—and not its contents or noneconomic values—have become the new standard of its culture and industry. We no longer live in a society of spectacle but in one of participation. Active consumption—by so-called “prosumers”—are the bread and butter of contemporary sociability; the specific stubbornness of the fan, the permeability of the barrier between audience and stage—all essential components of the pop music culture of the last fifty years—are now standard staging formats. They are prescribed, they are hegemonic, they are stressful, and they drain energy from precisely those forces and forms of empowerment that pop music is normally thought to support. The musical utopia of economic valuelessness and the concept of a greater, noneconomic value then attach themselves to the logic of virtuosity—as Paolo Virno calls it—as a normative model of production, of labor without work.

–Diedrich Diederichsen in Music—Immateriality—Value

The Unremittent

March 31, 2012

I am currently transcribing the 1966 Firing Line episode which debates the validity of the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. My interest is not in any way an attempt at some truth of the events around the assassination—there are more than plenty who are and have been well equipped to sift through facts and weave together images of possibilities and finitudes. But what is essential to my interest is the circumstance and exchange between Mark Lane, political activist and lawyer, and William F. Buckley Jr.—that is, both the circumstance of absolute skepticism or absolute faith in purported facts as well as the particular exchange of rhetoric, reason and doubt to determine a basis of belief. More to come in the preface to the transcription.

Update: Find post here.

Redesign

March 30, 2012

What started as a slow-moving project has picked up speed and finally has had a bit of design time put into it.  The map-like scrollability of the previous design and layout had a definite conceptual program, but the new UI is without a doubt more simpler and readable.

Here’s to the future.