By
Jacob Gaboury on
Friday, August 6th, 2010 at
11:00 am
Tanner America is critical satire in the form of a Tumblr blog. The site is updated several times a week with "snapshot" style images and brief accompanying captions. Each image depicts a moment from the daily lives of the Tanner family of Colorado Springs, CO: the kids' science projects, camping trips, remodeling the house, purchases from Home Depot, and their neighbor Linda. The images are purposefully mundane and would be of little interest to anyone outside the Tanner's immediate family and friends.
What makes the images satire is the fact that they are clearly, intentionally fabricated. Each image has been noticeably photoshopped in such a way that it becomes an implicit critique. In many ways they resemble JOGGING-style sculptures or performance, as the strange juxtaposition of objects announces itself as fabricated and implies some form of intentionality, some form of critique.
The clearest commentary would seem to be a general critique of white, middle class, heterosexual Middle America. The Tanner's lives are dull, they have too many kids, they are uncritical and indulge in consumerist behavior, they watch Fox News, their Facebook page lists their political views as "Tea Party", etc. In a way Tanner America is poking fun at the suburbs, at the concept of "normal, everyday Americans," and in doing so reinforcing the kind of snide elitism that the Tanners would no doubt accuse "us" of, if they were real.
At the same time there is another critique, not of the values and lives of people like the Tanners, but the way they use the Internet and what it means to them. Taking a look at the default Tumblr theme the Tanners "chose" to use it seems grossly mismatched with the style and tone of the images and captions they post. It looks like a McSweeny's book cover, all minimalist design and Helvetica font. The cultural implications of the design seem completely absent from the Tanner's actual blog, as though it was chosen because it simply "looked nice," or it was a default that they simply never changed. It brings to mind Olia Lialina's series of essays on the vernacular web, but while she is trying to identify the kind of early everyday uses of the web that have been lost or forgotten, Tanner America seems to point to a contemporary vernacular that is not especially informed or interested. It doesn't necessarily understand how to use the technology it has, nor does it make conscious decisions about the aesthetic or brand it is trying to produce. The demographic depicted on Tanner America seems to point to a kind of Parent Web, for lack of a better term - the Web for people who have come to use and even rely on it, but for whom the technology is an afterthought. Like many parents of a certain generation out there, one could imagine the Tanners being deeply concerned about computer viruses, getting overpriced tech support at Best Buy or emailing photo attachments that have not been resized. Perhaps it is best to read Tanner America not as a critique of that vernacular use, but of the assumption that we all use these technologies in the same way.
Rumblr is a new web application that allows users to pit Tumblr blogs against one another by placing randomly selected images from two or more blogs in juxtaposition with one another. Users then select the preferred image and after a certain number have been judged a winner is declared. The site launched in alpha about a month ago alongside TUMBLR_WRS, a party held at Home Sweet Home in New York City.
The site capitalizes on the decontextualization and random juxtaposition of images that Tumblr is known for and attempts to objectively judge the taste of users and the quality of sites through a competition or brawl. This random selection often produces unexpected, odd, and beautiful combinations which are frequently screencapped and placed back on Tumblr. These same screencapped images might then appear as standalone images in yet another Rumblr battle, producing a kind of Russian Doll effect.
Rumblr in still in beta and the site's producer, Benjamin Lotan is hoping to add additional features that quantify and visualize user's decisions in new ways, such as producing average color gradients based on the images selected. Check out the site to pit your favorite Tumblrs against each other.
Each week or so, Computers Club introduce a new work by an artist. Many of the Computer Clubbers have helped to define the current crop of internet-based art influenced by Larry Cuba and Tron-style computer graphics, such as Laura Brothers, Nicholas Sassoon, and Elna Frederick.
Internet Archaeology is a site devoted to the recovery of graphic artifacts found within earlier internet culture. (Think Olia Lialina's A Vernacular Web.) Their Guest Galleries section features original work using images culled from the collection by Tabor Robak, Krist Wood, Jacob Broms Engblom, Daniel Leyva, Emma Balkind, and Nasdaq 5000. My favorite piece so far is Robak's Heaven, which I posted to Rhizome not too long ago.
Run by Bay Area-based artists Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito, JstChillin's "Serial Chillers in Paradise" series is quite ambitious -- for a full year, they're knocking out a new work, in the form of a solo site, by an artist every two weeks, with an accompanying essay by Denny and Ito.
Like software, the curatorial project NETMARES & NETDREAMS signal the progression of their exhibitions through versioning. The exhibition "2.2" went live last summer, and it is loosely based on beach iconography, with a gloss of dark surrealism. A sense of the ominous pervades throughout, from Harm van den Dorpel's dizzying montage of palm trees to Michael Guidetti's loop of a rippling, virtual ocean.
Now closed, Club Internet's fall exhibition "Dissociation" was entertainingly cryptic, as I discussed in a previous post to Rhizome. Of the included works in the show, Harm van den Dorpel's Ethereal Others received the most airplay, but Christopher Pappas' RADIUS (CIRCULAR) and Ola Vasiljeva's Joan Miró were also quite intriguing.
Why + Wherefore-ians Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist presented two installments, one complete and one in process, of their series "7 x 7" this year - the first invited 7 publications to curate 7 shows, and the second invited 7 curators to put together 7 shows. The results are varied and unique - ranging from a gallery of Flickr photos tagged "emoticon" (by I Heart Photograph) to a selection of mp3s in which the narrator describes the visual details of an item, such as a photo or a website (by VVORK) to artworks made in Photoshop (by Josh Kline). Rhizome was a participant as well, with "The Long Gallery" curated by Brian Droitcour, a collection of works that exceeded the browser's frame horizontally.
By
John Michael Boling on
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at
10:00 am
(RE)MAKE Tutorial is a multimedia piece entirely based on popular, free and available web found elements: a software for image retouching, an online music listening platform, and a picture found on internet.
Photography or video? This work appears as a “work in progress”, an accidental proposition, similar to a tutorial through its assembling process. (RE)MAKE Tutorial is a low tech adaptation which revisits one of the most traumatizing Hollywood’s cinema production: JAWS. The motionless sea is brought back to life thanks to the simple Photoshop selection tool.
