Google
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, September 6th, 2010 at
10:00 am
When Orpheus’ beloved Eurydice dies, he cajoles his way into the underworld with his musical charms and his lyre. Wanting her but not her shade, he cannot forbear looking back to physically see her and so loses her forever. In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love. Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.
Our narrator remembers that once, with her back turned while facing the Adriatic Sea, a Google Street View car drove by and took a picture of his beloved, who detested being photographed, without her realizing it. Our narrator cherishes this photograph and the entire relationship becomes encapsulated in the screen capture replacing all other experiences and memories. Soon it is not enough. Our narrator cannot imagine that, in a world where everything is recorded, that someone could completely disappear. In daily systematic searches for photographs of the nameless other, Google Street View and Google Earth allow him to move seamlessly through vast detailed three-dimensional space. This extraordinary geographical and social exploration is favored by Google satellite images, user-created 3D renderings of Stonehenge and Machu Picchu and Street View panoramas of favorite vacation spots. As an undifferentiated series of cultural, historical and contemporary symbols float together or follow one another in rapid succession, in a world where Dutch anthropologists discover pre-Socratic fragments on Turkish islands, perhaps we come to wonder as to the significance of anything and the place of tradition and history itself. Unlike Orpheus, our narrator is not seeking for his lost love but for photos of his love, he yearns for records of the relationship not the woman herself or the relationship itself. In the ultimate irony when he returns to the original photograph, it has been removed. By getting as close to possible to the world through technology, has our narrator not unwittingly distanced himself from this world? But maybe even more than a doomed quest, does not this whirlwind tour of an individual’s personal history and the world’s cultural history, this modern tale of loss, retrieval and loss again, expose that the change in our consciousness has preceded the change in our technology?
“Wherever I go, there I am” is the old adage, be it Yogi Berra or the Buddha. The detached gaze of a satellite image or an automatic Street View camera confronts a human consciousness whose ability to seek connectedness and meaning has already been compromised. Contemporary technological tools simultaneously open and close vistas on our inner and outer worlds.
-- ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION FROM "STATE"
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By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
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By
Jacob Gaboury on
Monday, June 21st, 2010 at
10:00 am
Golden Shield Music is a generative composition for eight audio channels. [...] The work is inspired by the Golden Shield Project, sometimes referred to as the 'Great Firewall of China'. [...] Golden Shield Music collects the twelve website’s IP that are most screened by the Golden Shield. Therefore IP numbers are listed in a text file which feeds an automated MIDI polyphonic synthesizer. The latter translates each IP in a single note formed by 4 voices with a specific velocity. Resulting notes are ordered by the amount of pages the Golden Shield obscured for each IP address: the website’s IP obtaining the highest page result on Google.com becomes the first note of the score and the others follow in decreasing order. Data organizes the musical notation, establishing an abstract relationship between Internet information and musical algorithms which sounds harmonious and "handcrafted".
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
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By
Lisa Baldini on
Friday, June 18th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Jeremy Wood's "Mowing the Lawn" Installation View at Tenderpixel
In an era of Google Maps, our first engagements with places are often anticipated by technology. That is, our experience with a place often comes with pre-emptive associations from aerial pictures -- our possible routes predetermined and mapped; personal narratives and exploration are displaced for utility. So, what happens to our individualized explorations in time and space when GPS technology intervenes? This is the inquiry of GPS artist Jeremy Wood’s body of work and his current show “Mowing the Lawn” at Tenderpixel in London.
Jeremy Wood, Lawn 2005 Scale 1:300, 2010
Treating his body like a “geodesic” pencil, his daily routines are documented as lines in space via GPS technology. In turn, Wood’s performative rituals are data visualized as densely packed line drawings and animations. Having spent ten years developing a system for tracking and translating his everyday movements, the resulting pieces are one part drawing, one part diary and one part critique of the technological system’s accuracy/inaccuracy and how that intervention enables/limits our perception of the spatio-temporal.
Jeremy Wood, Nine Years of Mowing, 2010
While his work ranges from tracking large-scale transatlantic flights (Star Flights, 2008) to tracing and superimposing quotes from Melville onto two meridians in London (Meridians, 2005), in his latest show, Wood focuses on documenting the simple act of mowing the lawn in different intervals of time. Here, Wood emphasizes how banal repetition offers “individual narratives that express a freedom of movement generated from an act of garden maintenance”.
What may be more compelling, though, is how a digital trace can bring to the fore the problems of technology. Looking at Lawn 2005 Scale 1:300, we see multiple lines drawn where a house already exists. In Nine Years of Mowing, we see inaccuracies of GPS technology heightened over the course of nine years. While it is true that these processes will constantly be refined and updated, the question to ask here is at what point should we allow their utility to shape our spatio-temporal relationships with the land. Yet, perhaps in true sousveillance fashion, Wood flips the potential for technology to prefigure our perceptions and uses it to document his personal journeys.
On June 19th artist Jeremy Wood will hold a talk at Tenderpixel. "Mowing the Lawn" closes on June 22nd.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
[Source: Arc Projects Flickr]
A beautifully crafted set of four tea towels sporting a series of authentic search engine results returned to a user when the criteria, 'Please Help Me', 'Is Anybody there?', 'Please listen to me' and, 'Can you hear me?' were entered into the search field, while using Google in Netscape 4.7 on Mac OS 9.2 or Netscape 6 on Windows 98.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM ARTIST'S SITE
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By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, April 9th, 2010 at
2:00 pm
A while back, I made a web page which paired Kurt Cobain's suicide letter with Google Ads (google ads are generated from the text of the page they appear on). It was up for a while but after getting digged google decided to remove the ads from the page. I took some screen shots while it was up and below are two examples of what it looked like. Also below are the checks that google sent me!
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
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By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at
11:00 am
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By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at
10:00 am
I fabricated a selection of "sculptures" designed by anonymous users of Google SketchUp, a free 3-D modeling program. Designed as a simple and easy-to-use version of CAD software, SketchUp has garnered a growing following of amateur designers who use it to model virtually everything from common household items to fantasy architectural designs. These digital designs can be uploaded to a freely-accessible database to “share” with other SketchUp users in their own projects.
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
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By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, February 8th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Each code represents a visual enryption of a search on 'Aram Bartholl' in a specific language on Google.
A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person's name at Google.
A large number of people can be found by name on Google today. Everyone who is working on a computer and uses the internet regularly can be found on Google. Even people who don't use computers can be found sometimes because their names appear in 'old' media (i.e. books) on the net.
'Egosurfing' is a popular way for a user to find out what websites and information Google returns on his/her name search.
How many hits does Google show on my name? Am I popular? Do I want to be found at all? Who writes about me? What do people find out about me when they google my name? Am I in concurrence to other persons with the same name? Do I rely on the results Google shows me on a person's name? In which way do I relate to someone which I only known by Google results?
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
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By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Danny Snelson, Testimony
Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" centers around faith in the power of the keyword to unlock its bottomless treasure chest and put the right answer in one window. Years have passed since the company's ranking algorithm outpaced the approach of human navigators filing information into channels -- an approach that Yahoo has been trying to keep alive by farming the digital labor to users themselves. But even as search algorithms make dinosaurs of the Dewey decimal and other brain-powered systems, it might be worth considering the benefits of staying open to a plurality of variously scaled methods.
These issues converge in Danny Snelson's work as a writer, editor, and archivist. His titles increasingly overlap in the internet's library without walls--an environment that often embodies the Foucauldian idea that "one never archives without editorial frames and 'writerly' narratives (or designs)," as Snelson put it in an email. As an archivist, he has made substantial efforts to preserve endangered cultural artifacts -- making them universally accessible and useful, you might say -- on behalf of PennSound, an audio archive specializing in recorded poetry, and UbuWeb, where, at the suggestion of founder Kenneth Goldsmith, he scanned out-of-print titles and reformatted them as PDFs for free distribution via the site's /ubu channel. The PennSounds and UbuWebs of the internet undertake preservation projects that small presses and recording labels can't touch due to financial reasons, thus ensuring that experimental work will continue to reach audiences in years to come. Distribution networks like these matter in an environment where the internet (for those without access to academic libraries, at least) is often the first and last stop for research -- a realization that impelled Goldsmith to formulate a radical ontology in the title of his 2005 essay, "If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist."
Endless Nameless for sale at Dispatch
The copyright struggles of the last decade give archivists of Snelson's generation reason to be wary of the legal and political ramifications of distributed networks -- perhaps more so than people like Goldsmith, who first encountered the internet in its early, utopian days with fully formed ideas about the limits of print publishing. This, in part, is why Snelson balances his expansion of searchable online catalogues with the creation of hermetic archives. One of these is a site devoted to digitizing Marshall McLuhan's legacy; the link to it is passed hand-to-hand, and the site is coded with a robots.txt file blocking search engines and the unfavorable copyright attention they might bring. Then there is Endless Nameless, a collaboration with James Hoff under the brand of No Input Books. Hoff and Snelson fill hard drives with downloaded avant-garde content and sell them, iTunes-like, for $0.99 per GB. Materials are sorted in folders with the names of the publishers, labels, and galleries that first brought them to the public--a decision intended, Snelson writes, to preserve "the material production history that often gets lost in digital distribution." The list of folder titles ranges from Ace Books to Zone Books (along with a few dozen numerical titles), adding up to approximately four terabytes, a number that, in Snelson's estimation, exceeds the data hosted on UbuWeb. For each Endless Nameless customer, the folders are selected randomly to fit the desired amount of memory. The hard drive's discrete physical form makes it easy to keep it off the grid.
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By
John Michael Boling on
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at
10:00 am
"Life-size posters of Google Street View images removed from the internet and pasted in same location in the physical world. Monuments to spaces and moments that no longer exist."
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By
Brian Droitcour on
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at
10:00 am
Image: From Jon Rafman's Google Street Views
Brian Droitcour is a writer, curator, and Russian-to-English translator. From 2002 to
2007 he lived in Moscow, where he covered art for The Moscow Times and
Artchronika, a Russian monthly magazine. In 2008 he moved to New York,
where he started working for Rhizome, first as curatorial fellow, then
as staff writer. As a translator he's worked on several exhibition
catalogues and art anthologies.
Jon Rafman's Google Street Views and the accompanying essay he wrote for Art Fag City's IMG MGMT series are sure to get several well-deserved mentions in end-of-the-year lists. Tom Moody on Google Street Views: "Jon Rafman's gathering of images from Google Street Views isn't really collecting at all but solid, groundbreaking journalism. Obviously untold hours were spent perusing this recent-but-everyday tool for images in very specific, focused categories. Photos that look like art photos, photos of mishaps, photos showing the success and failure of Google's face-blurring software, photos that show class issues in a supposedly 'universal' product (the down and out are more likely to be photographed unsympathetically than the up and in). As much as one hates to see more attention paid to the monopoly that aspires to put the happy face on Big Brother, this is worthwhile, thoughtful research." Kool-Aid Man in Second Life is a distorted twin to Google Street Views, another set of screen captures singling out accidental beauty and quirks of surveillance, only this time in a fantasy world that lets Rafman personify his searching gaze in a pitcher of fruit drink.
кремль.рф (kremlin.rf) won't go live until early next year, but the Russian presidential administration's new Cyrillic URL already made waves last month, when Russia became the first country to register top-level domains in a non-Latin script. (Egypt came next with Arabic domains.) Web-related assumptions and anxieties quickly surfaced. Complaints that it will erect "digital borders" displayed ignorance that the Latin alphabet is already a barrier to internet use among people who don't know it or use it in their primary language. Meanwhile, the tightly controlled domain-registration process has tried to prevent cybersquatting by giving government agencies and big corporations preferential treatment, and a team of linguists has been filtering potentially profane or offensive language--creating a model for what "internet reform" might look like if it's ever implemented in the West.
Image: Getty stock image via CTRL+W33D
Some web sites I look at every day: Gmail, YouTube, and CTRL + W33D. Careful, that link is "NSFW"! Michael Magnan for BUTT: "Since February 2009, anonymous Tumblr’s D.R., I.L., B.A., K.K., and J.G. have been collectively assembling a seemingly endless archive of hilarious, perverted and inebriated found images and video under the pseudonym CTRL + W33D. A mission statement addressed to one of the later-joining members classified its intentions as being a “totally NSFW…experiment in Anarchy and AIDS and Being High.” For those of you growing up gay 3.0 on the internet, this visual morgue should help satiate your constant jones for getting lost in a matrix of google image search depravity."
Image: Screen capture from the Sexy News
Michael Jackson's death in June brought one of those moments when the whole internet seemed to be focused on the same thing at the same time. Would-be town criers marked his passage in Facebook status updates, as though trying to broadcast the news to their network before anyone heard it on TV. All sorts of Jackson tributes emerged in the following weeks--including a special edition of The Sexy News, a series by YouTube user nihontenjin where wobbly machinima figures narrate current events in computer-generated Japanese (or stilted English). In the June 26 episode, an animation of Jackson circa 1989 bids farewell to his "fan," anchorwomen parrot real-world media banalities ("I can't believe it!"), and an angel reminds Michael that he sold Neverland to buy a little house in heaven as behind a text box with Matthew: 19:24 ("And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."). It's the best Michael Jackson tribute of the year. (Honorable mention goes to Claude Closky's Michael Jackson.)
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at
10:00 am
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By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, October 5th, 2009 at
12:00 pm
While combing through the tables and displays set up by artists, book publishers, periodicals, small press bookstores, non profit arts organizations, collectives and presses who participated in the NY Art Book Fair over the weekend, I could not help but recall this past summer's No Soul For Sale festival. Both events succeeded in fostering a feel good environment, while also serving as an inspiring reminder of the number of independent, DIY initiatives out there.
I managed to take some photos yesterday, below. Even if I had camped out in P.S.1 for the entire fair, I would not have been able to see everything. Perhaps the subheader for this post should be "Incomplete Highlights" or "Some Stuff I Saw." As always, if readers want to share information or link to projects I missed, please do so in the comments section.
Artist Amy Prior playing the record from the book/record set Slumber Party she produced with Lucky Dragons at the JUNCTURE booth. Slumber Party is "a book and music about sleep - from dozing to waking. Made during an economic crisis, 'Slumber Party' imagines the ultimate easy escape; it is really only during sleep that nothing can get bought or sold."
Close up of the Slumber Party book.
Two prints from Brett Ian Balogh's A Noospheric Atlas of the United States on view at the free103point9 booth. The work aims to "map the hertzian space created by the United States' mass media broadcast stations."
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By
Ceci Moss on
Friday, August 14th, 2009 at
2:00 pm
Art Fag City's IMG MGMT series is on a roll! This week they posted "The Nine Eyes of Google Street View" by Jon Rafman, a meditative photo essay on Google Street View, culled from the artist's personal collection of screen captures. See below for a teaser, full essay here.
One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.
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By
John Michael Boling on
Monday, June 15th, 2009 at
1:30 pm
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By
John Michael Boling on
Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at
3:00 pm
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