When I was thinking about what to add to this list 06, I sent an email off to artist Rick Silva and collector, curator, photographer and art blogger extraordinaire Barry Hoggard asking what they liked in art in 06. Both sent lists of work I loved as well as shows that I wish I had seen. Enjoy.

One of my favorite works in 06 was Rick’s Recap. Here is a list of some of Rick’s favorites for the year.

cassini - saturn’s rings
spike lee - when the levees broke - a requiem in 4 parts
matmos - the rose has teeth in the mouth of the beast
pleix -birds
john kilduff - let’s paint tv
media archeology: software cinema festival - houston, texas
cai guo qiang at site santa fe
james turrell’s ‘meeting’ at ps1 at around 10 degrees farenheit right before they close for the night
john hodgeman - areas of my expertise
drawing restraint 1-9 at sfmoma
gazira babeli - secondlife code performer
radar at denver art museum

In Dangling Between the Real Thing and the Sign in The Window, James and Barry curated a group of artists who I felt held the mirror to 06. It was funny, dystopic and experimental. I hope, in 07, they will do it again. Here are some of Barry’s highlights for the year.

Susan Dessel’s bodies from our show
videos of Robert Boyd
Jeremy Eilers sculptures
Klara Liden Bodies of Society 2006
New Charles Goldman sculpture
This 9/11 show
Heather Rowe’s sculpture
Jacques Louis Vidal’s videos

Barry adds at the end of his list “I saw a lot of painting I liked too.” permanent link to this post

Nerdz Rising 06
Cory Archangel at Team
Jessica Ciocci at Foxy Production
Michael Bell-Smith at Foxy Production
Paul Slocum at Vertex List
Tom Moody at Artmoving Projects
Jennifer & Kevin McCoy at Postmasters

Straight up Net Art
UNIVERSAL ACID
punk rock 101
Toni Burlap
With Elements of Web 2.0
Weather Gauge
Tracking Transience
Oil Standard, Greasemonkey conversion of US Dollars to Barrels of Oil
DVblogH4ck
www.pulp.href
<$BlogPageTitle$>
Lambs In Ascension
Tracking Transience
deptofnetworkperformance
Midnight
My Digital Pog Page

Some Other Good Stuff (Lots of MOMA for some reason)
Dada at MOMA
“…But I was Cool”, Jerry Gant, Robert Pruitt and Dread Scott at Aljira
Lee Walton at Conflux
Noah Lyon at 33 Bond Street
Herzog & de Meuron at MOMA
Douglas Gordon at MOMA
8 Bit at MOMA
On and Off at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig Inc.
The Downtown Show at The Grey Art Gallery

Update: (aka oh, yeah)
Strange Powers at Creative Time
permanent link to this post

The Long Campaign

A computer driven, dual channel, video of a MTAA rock, scissor, paper game. Software selects chance game play and keeps the accumulated score forever. permanent link to this post

…a late Merry Christmas or an early Happy New Year to all.

And now, by popular demand (of one MTAA fan), here are a few leftover AIOTD’s from 06 for you to snack on.

Power of Love and Hate - a dual portrait of MTAA listing (off the cuff) all the things they love and hate using overlapping dialogue.

Believing (In the Morning) - a dual portrait of MTAA enthusiastically using morning beauty products.

Clocking In - a computer driven video in which MTAA chimes the hours by beating an alarm clock with bats.

I think we have some more 06 AIOTDs sitting around. We’ll post them if they show up permanent link to this post

Cory Arcangel is probably the hippest person I know. If he’s linking to Brooklyn Bounce videos from his del.icio.us feed, perhaps BIG house music is ready for a comeback? I have to admit, listening to Get Ready To Bounce really made me want to dance; more than current dance music.

Maybe jungle will come back with it? ;-)

Or maybe I’m just a nostalgic old geezer.

Merry Christmas! permanent link to this post

It seems particularly apt that I simply copy and paste this post from We Make Money Not Art…

---

Last May, i blogged about Plagiarismo, an exhibition that tried to demonstrate that the appropriation and re-formulation of other artists’ ideas is an essential component of culture.

Vuk Cosic - who’s having a solo exhibition at the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana- wrote me then that he was putting together a show called CTRL-C on a similar subject. The show has just opened at the galerija Simulaker in Slovenia. Here’s the gist:

From Duchamp and Benjamin to Beuys the art of the previous century has asked the question of copying and multiplying as a legitimate artistic practice. The advent of the internet has dramatically placed the digital original and digital copy in the very center of artistic but also economic frictions.

Mere simplicity of making copies is socially not perceived as a liberating tool for artistic creation but is turning out to be the main point of conflict between economic interests and those of societies at large. Traditionalists fighting for Intellectual Property are trying to pull the giants from under our feet.

The CTRL-C show is presenting projects exclusively focused on the artistic relevance of the digital copy. Exhibited works are using the language of the non-original to express a very concrete critique of the circumstances in the world of art and in the society. All works in the show have provided their authors with a measure of scandal and a bigger measure of fame:

In September 1997, Vuk Ćosić made an almost perfect copy of the website of Documenta X before it was taken down by the organisers of the famous contemporary art show. The artist saw his act as an “expression of a rebellion against the art system and the return of art from a gallery into reality.”

Epilogue: The copy found its way into relevant “kunst.historisch” literature and is still accessible on the author’s internet server. Being a legitimate and conceptual work it has been exhibited many times, also at the Venice Bienale in 2001.

In 1997, 0100101110101101.ORG made a series of clones of well-known net.art projects (hell.com, art teleportacia, Jodi) as a digital monument to the principles upon which the Internet runs. “The belief that information must be free,” explained at the time Renato, 0100101110101101.ORG spokesman, “is a tribute to the way in which a very good computer or a valid program works: binary numbers move in accordance with the most logic, direct and necessary way to do their complex function. What is a computer if not something that benefits by the free flow of information? Copyright is boring.”

Epilogue: The three copies are still accessible on the authors’ server. Nowadays they are known for their numerous net.art projects, acknowledged by the public and the media.

In 1999, Rtmark – The Yes Men altered the website of the World Trade Organization and made it very similar to the original. They received invitations to symposia (no one’s going to forget their talk and little demo at the Textiles of the Future conference in Tampere), where they presented the identity of GATT as they understood it.


Yes Men stunts in Salzburg and Tampere

Epilogue: The authors belong to the group of the most recognizable names of the New Media scene. A documentary has been made about their work (also available on google video btw.)

During the exhibition of Fluxus in 2005, Gordan Karabogdan and Nikica Klobučar snatched a few of Beuys’ videos, copied them at their home and returned the “originals” without anyone noticing it. They even produced free copies and the media comprehended this deed as a criminal act.

Epilogue: The work, called Enigma of an object, ended with an act of handing over the copied films and entire documentation to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka.

Thanks Vuk for the information and translations! permanent link to this post

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is:
His Excellency T.Whid the Loquacious of Molton St Anywhere

Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title… permanent link to this post

This post may be helpful for artists and other creatives that need to automate the launching of digital video files using QuickTime on the Mac OS.

MTAA is in a group show in January and we’re showing a simple digital video loop. The goal was to automate the launching of the video full screen and looping when the computer starts up. The strategy was to use an AppleScript as a login item to achieve this.

The straightforward way to do this is to create a script that tells QuickTime to open the file, play it full screen and loop by pointing to the explicit path of the file on disk, e.g bootdisk:path:to:foo.mov. The problem with this is that if the file is moved QuickTime can’t open it. To make it more error-proof I wanted to make one application package with the video inside it. This allows there to be one file that can be moved to any Mac and double-clicked to start the video playing with all the properties I need.

After a bit of research and trial-and-error I think I came up with a decent solution.

I should note here that you can set QuickTime movies to play full screen on launch in the Movie Properties/Presentation panel of QuickTime Pro, but I couldn’t find a way to tell it to always loop so I took the approach below. If there is a way to tell a QuickTime movie to loop on launch then I wasted a bunch of time ;-) On the other hand, for a video that QuickTime can play but isn’t wrapped in the QuickTime container (like a straight-up MPEG4) this is probably the only way to do it.

Regardless, this is what I did:

First, in Script Editor (/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor), I created a new script and saved it as an ‘application bundle’ (making sure to uncheck ‘Startup Screen’). This created an application package — basically, a special folder — almost every OS X application is this format. By control-clicking this application in the Finder, I selected ‘Show Package Contents’ in the contextual menu. This opened a new Finder window with a folder called ‘Contents.’ Inside Contents was a folder called ‘Resources’ (and some other files). I copied my video file into the Resources folder.

Back to Script Editor, I typed a script very similar to this:

--set path to video file
set _f to ((path to me) as string) ¬
	& "Contents:Resources:foo.mov"

-- open and play it
tell application "QuickTime Player"
	launch
	activate
	stop every movie
	close every movie saving no
	try
		my play_movie(_f)
	on error
		(* in case the file has been 
		moved or deleted for some reason *)
		choose file with prompt ¬
			"File not found! Please locate it:"
		set _f to result
		my play_movie(_f)
	end try
end tell

on play_movie(_file)
	tell application "QuickTime Player"
		open _file
		tell movie 1
			(*
			you can put any properties you
			need in here
			*)
			set looping to true
			present scale screen
		end tell
	end tell
end play_movie

Note: this script doesn’t work when run from Script Editor. It needs to be saved and launched by double-clicking the application bundle.

In the end, I have a little app that contains my video, is easily copied from computer to computer and can be set as a login item so it launches automatically when the computer starts. For a bonus, it’s easy to replace the icon by replacing the file applet.icns in the Resources folder in the application bundle. I used CocoThumbX to create a new icns file.

Another tip: if you need to edit the script a bit, you should go into the bundle and open the main.scpt file in the [app bundle]:Contents:Resources:Scripts folder instead of editing the actual app bundle file. If your video file is large, it takes a long time to save the script when you’re editing the bundle as opposed to the script on it’s own. permanent link to this post

$250 to the Rhizome benefit gets you a MTAA print of iPhil
Yup. That’s right. For supporting a new media not for profit, you can own an MTAA work that does not need to be plugged in. Wild. permanent link to this post

The other night M.River and I attended Dorkbot with presentations by (among others) Rick Silva and Marisa Olson.

M.River snapped this pic of me, Marisa, Tom Moody and Rick Silva:



Special bonus, more studio tests:
permanent link to this post

Saw fellow camp Creative Capital 06 alum Jane Marsching last night. Her project is up. Check it.

Climate Commons - a networked conversation about climate change, sustainability, and the Arctic developed by Jane D. Marsching with Matthew Shanley from November 27 2006 - February 28, 2007.

climate-commons.net

Also, if you’re in Boston, Jane’s show “Arctic Listening Post” is at the ICA from December 10, 2006 - March 11, 2007.

Update: Here is Holland Cotter’s NTY review of the shows up at the ICA with a mention of Jane’s project. permanent link to this post

Not!

For some reason or another we never find our way to Miami Beach for the December art fairs. This is probably a good thing for those that might otherwise catch a startlingly bright glimpse of our NTSC-illegal-white bodies burning like phosphorous on the beach.

Hoping everyone has fun. permanent link to this post