K.’s posterous

K.’s posterous

K.  //  A linky diarist.

 
Apr 14 / 2:22pm

At least there's underwear

From the Chronicle:

A recent study in the Journal of Marketing Communications found that men with beards were deemed more credible than those who were clean-shaven. The study showed participants pictures of men endorsing certain products. In some photos, the men were clean-shaven. In others, the same men had beards. Participants thought the men with beards had greater expertise and were significantly more trustworthy when they were endorsing products like cell phones and toothpaste.

But, oddly, men with beards were slightly less effective than smooth-cheeked fellows in underwear advertisements. Apparently we don't want Zach Galifianakis selling us boxers.

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Apr 3 / 1:17pm

Marianne Vitale, Patron

From the Whitney Biennial:

“Welcome to the future of Neutralism,” Marianne Vitale declares at the beginning of her video Patron. Staring directly into the camera, Vitale orders her audience to stand up, open their mouths wide, recite tongue-twisting rhymes, and “spit at the ceiling.” While insisting on compliance with her videotaped instructions, Vitale’s performance parodies authoritarian posturing, especially when her abusive demands border on the surreal (“imagine your feet soaking in gopher urine”) and her monologue evolves into a poetic flight of mean-spirited aphorisms. Vitale’s tone recalls the rhetoric of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Futurism, whose members wrote breathless manifestos calling for radical change. While Vitale’s philosophy of “Neutralism,” which she never defines, may be grounded in a sense of irony, her direct address nonetheless retains something of the historical avant-garde’s conviction of art’s ability to jar viewers into action.

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Apr 2 / 10:41am

Haunted, at the Guggenheim

Exhibition at the Guggenheim explores photography and appropriated imagery from the 60s, the Pictures artists, and beyond.

If you want to subject your eye and brain to a stimulating exercise in frustration, see “Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Next read the show’s catalog. Then try to fit them together in a cohesive way.

You probably won’t succeed. This show traces photography, photo appropriation and their offshoots, from stalwarts like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg to newbies like Sara VanDerBeek and Nate Lowman. The catalog, on the other hand, barely makes it past the Pictures artists of the 1980s who helped appropriation — the use of existing images — achieve its current prominence. The book’s four main essays take lots of wonderful detours — into Beckett, Throbbing Gristle, 9/11 photographs, Civil War battlefield photography — and continually invoke Roland Barthes. They read like a series of often interesting papers delivered at a symposium but ignore more than half the artists in the show, mostly the younger ones.

   
Click here to download:
Haunted_at_the_Guggenheim.zip (123 KB)

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Apr 2 / 10:26am

The Data Diaries

From the introduction to Cory Arcangel's Data Diaries

Lots of artists talk about memory. But for artists working with computers, memory has a very specific technical definition. If ever computers had a subconscious, this is it. Cory describes it as "watching your computer suffocate and yell at the same time." They look like digital dreams--the pure shapes and tones of real computer memory. Each video documents a new day, and each day the computer offers us a new set of memories.

But the greatest thing about Cory's net art is that he's not a net artist. He never was and never will be. If net art was cinema, then Jodi would be Godard--fresh, formalist and punk-rock to the core. Entropy8zuper! would be Tarkovsky--lush, magical and complex. Etoy would be Verhoeven--hyper modern, sexy and a tad fascistic. And this leaves Cory, playing in the rec room with his Pixelvision camcorder--all dirt-style, geekcore, and what we like.

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Apr 1 / 8:43am

iPad love

Andrew Leonard:

Apple is currently sitting on a market capitalization of $215 billion dollars! That is the third biggest market cap of any American company, behind only Exxon and Microsoft -- two corporations that will never, ever be the beneficiaries of the kind of loving media attention that Apple now enjoys. Entertainment and media companies are falling over themselves in their eagerness to design specialized apps that will take advantage of the iPad's crisp graphics and supposedly sublime interface. The New York Times' David Pogue cannot contain his excitement at the thought of Hulu-delivered TV shows free on his laptop. Netflix will stream to the iPad, free for any existing subscriber. And so on. Steve Jobs has managed to capture the attention of the entire world's population of people whose livelihood depends on generating profit from the delivery of content. That's just remarkable.

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Mar 24 / 8:06pm

Stickney impact crater

2008 close-up of Martian moon Phobos, featuring the Stickney impact crater.

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Mar 24 / 9:06am

Burroughs

from Columbia University "Naked Lunch: The First 50 Years" Exhibit.


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Mar 18 / 7:34am

How to blog

Jorn Barger's guidelines for bloggers:

My intent for weblogs in 1997 was to make the web as a whole more transparent, via a sort of "mesh network," where each weblog amplifies just those signals (or links) its author likes best. 1998-1999 was for me the Golden Age of Weblogs, when the following principles were widely understood:

1. A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

4. Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it's not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you.

5. You can always improve on the author's own page title, when describing a link. (At least make sure your description is full enough that readers will recognize any pages they've already visited, without having to visit them again.)

6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)

7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of "moving upstream."

8. Warn about "gotchas" -- weird formatting, multipage stories, extra-long files, etc. Don't camouflage the main link among unneeded (or poorly labeled) auxiliary links.

9. Pick some favorite authors or celebrities and create a Google News feed that tracks new mentions of them, so other fans can follow them via your weblog.

10. Re-post your favorite links from time to time, for people who missed them the first time.


 

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Mar 17 / 11:32am

Why I like Google Reader Play

Play is a new twist on Google Reader. Sign in with your Google account and Play shows you a slide show of random things that have been recommended in Google Reader. Clicking a star or a "like" tag gives Play some information to further customize your speed browsing experience.

As long as it keeps its novelty value, Play will join a small group of sites I follow that present endless streams of dissociated content: Google Reader itself (or any overloaded RSS feed); Tumblr Wire; Livejournal Aqua; Stumbleupon; and Twitter. From any of these I get to experience life, or at least the internet, as a cut-up, as a river of information which recontextualizes itself on the fly. I find it refreshing, even liberating, revealing as it does a multivocal internet where competing scraps of information undermine a narrative dominated by a few authorities. A new and unintentional reality emerges out of the caterwauling, and I feel like I'm interrogating the internet directly, much like Burroughs interrogated a text through the cut-up method.

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