When you go surfclubbin', don't forget your hat.
Posted by Vijay Pattisapu on June 7, 2008 8:05 pm
hipsters != artists
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Then a long metaphor about the art you described so well as "bathroom wall" scrolling.
(T.Whid is echoing your scribbler metaphor over on another thread, comparing the surf clubbers to graffiti artists.)
And now this post from you, dismissing Loshadka, Nasty Nets, Double Happiness, Supercentral, and spiritsurfers, some of whom are defining themselves in relation to 4Chan, et al (embracing what's embraceable and chucking the rest?) as a bunch of non-artist hipsters.
Rhizome is aflame with the fires of angry reaction, these days.
Who's angry? I'm afraid.
I'm afraid that all my time spent working on net art in the 90s/00s is going to be ultimately meaningless, somewhat interesting but ultimately as irrelevant as mail art. So, my "mail art:net art as grafitti art:surf clubs" analogy is just a friendly heads-up to the surf clubbers. Graffiti art was fucking hot in the 80s, but ultimately a minor moment.
Obviously, I hope I'm wrong. Plus, no history revises more often than art history, so even if I'm right for while, I could be wrong eventually :-)
Man. I really need to give it a break. That did not come out the way I meant it at all.
Please disregard.
I guess it will be up to you to decide if your historical portfolio will be ultimately meaningless.
No hard feelings. I like imageboards / surf clubs, and spend quite a bit of time producing and consuming on them, to the extent that I feel that I can write about them with both authentic love and authentic hate. Yet the paradox of surfclubs speaks to a social condition of the artist that predates the Internet:
Much of what's on surf clubs is little more than hipsterdom, obscuring artistic diamonds in the rough. What great art is to be found in these places is, in my opinion, has and does enrich my life.
But great artists manage to find themselves constantly surrounded by hordes of hipsters. I'm sure you all have seen the minor tragedy of a decent artist getting lost in a cloud of fashionable seen-it-alls and entertain-mes, who only swarm the artist because s/he's the latest flavor-of-the-week, only to move on like locusts. Balzac described this truth well in Cousin Bette.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we shouldn't ALWAYS talk about surf clubs as an artistic entity per se. They're a platform, sufficient but not necessary to vector great art.
Maybe we should reshape how we talk about surfclubs: less like a movement with values (Max Herman's "Low Networkism"?), or a commmunity, trend, corporate person, social condition, etc., and more like what it really is a priori: a technology.
What I love about discussion on Rhizome -- or at least the direction that I perceive that it's going -- is that it's one of the few critical spaces where people recognize technologies as (en|dis)abling certain strategies for the artist, and not as the strategies or value-expressions themselves (like some museum critics are wont to do (e.g., "[X] uses social web technologies and therefore embodies postmodern values," etc.)).
Attention to technology qua technology is more responsible to the history of art more broadly, where people don't talk as much about the culture of the Louvre or acrylics per se but talk more about particular artists and art in those broad categories. Sure, the Louvre is interesting and should be discussed, but the highest priority should be the art itself!
I just want to be critically responsible / respectful to the great art and artists on Nasty Nets, #chan, or wherever. I want to discuss and debate with you all in a way that looks more like "[Art work X] is like so" or "[Artist] is like so" instead of "[Museum, technology, or medium that the artist chose] is like so." Let's not let the great artists out there, even if they're anonymous 13-year-olds, to get pulled down by the surrounding trash by a simple epistemic/critical consubstantiation.
Vijay
Shot taken. My post was a bit too bitter, maybe trollish.
Let me elaborate on my old-fashioned distrust of hipsters.
Your comment calls to mind some of the values behind Pop Art's upturning of "high" and "low" art. Against the whole artists-and-museums-are-up-there-and-we're-down-here idea. Tired-hero jazz. I don't think hipsters represent a marginalized "low" at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In Texas, "hipster" is a pejorative used now in precisely where (occasionally along with) people once used the word "carpetbaggers": people that don't really care about what actually goes on in their community because they're such self-important busybodies (today the meaning is more cultural than economic, but the semantic overlap is telling).
"Hipsters" actually embody some of the old hated aristocratic values, or, more properly, their lack of values: lazy, idle, endowed with spare time, fashionable, uncurious, unable to get enthused, unable to get roused even to genuine hatred, and, above all, jaded. Inter alia, these personality changes happen to somebody with too much time-money. (The converse of such a posture, perhaps, is Nietzsche's Dionysian naivete / his catachresis of the Sanskrit word maya).
Often we find that it is the hipsters that are more higher-than-thou and impossible-to-please than the institutions.
( Patrick Lichty discusses the effects of "rhizomatic skipping around" on one's curiosity about the past, in, I think, consonant though undisparaging terms:
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/37548#52314 )
Artists are especially prone to hipsterdom, e.g., examine the Kenny G meme a couple of decades back, where John Zorn, David Schaefer, and others used Kenny G samples to pronounce in no uncertain terms, "OH THIS IS SO DELICIOUSLY LOW!"
Lastly, to be clear, I don't think your art is "hipster"-ish at all, Frederic; it has little or none of that detestable winkingness.
Vijay
having had to choose the lesser evil, I'm with the hipsters
(today)
Do you have to plant pampas grass on your front lawn or something?
This is the evolution I would like to see on rhizome -- an alternate, open-html bulletin board platform that allows full-screen css hacking/hijacking:
cf: http://rhizome.org/object.php?o=2261&m=1000739
also: http://www.sketchzilla.com (rarely safe for work)
Then the multimedia "dialogue" becomes combative, palimpsestic, structural, typographic, iteratively self-undermining, inherently unstable, and I begin to get interested (again).
Hey, Vijay,
Maybe you would like to reconsider this statement:
"What I love about discussion on Rhizome -- or at least the direction that I perceive that it's going -- is that it's one of the few critical spaces where people recognize technologies as (en|dis)abling certain strategies for the artist, and not as the strategies or value-expressions themselves"
in light of some of these epithets/insults? (hipsters, teenage goth nerds, self promotion, graffiti/mail art, "duh what's a surf club?" etc)
It's kind of an interesting dynamic that the art Lauren, Ed, Marisa, and Ceci have been championing on the Rhizome front pages has this Greek chorus (peanut gallery?) of angry old-timers on the Rhizome back pages. Or maybe not so interesting.
I'd rather talk about the material and conceptual differences between an open-html bulletin board environment and a closed-html, off-the-shelf-configured linear blog environment. It seems the latter imposes certain restrictions on the kind of dialogue a group blog can have -- restrictions inherited from text-centric, solo blogging; restrictions that preference a certain kind of linear/hierarchical procession that might be more interestingly superceded or circumvented.
You seem to think I am insulting you personally. I'm really not. I am evidently not as excited about group blogging as you, but I see instances where it could lead to something more interesting.
Peace,
Curt
Tom,
FWIW
My analogy of surf clubs to graffiti art wasn't meant to be an insult; my analogy of net art to mail art wasn't meant as an insult either.
I do have my doubts as to the cultural importance of surf clubs. Obviously not one of the cheerleaders, but not trying to be a particularly loud member of the peanut gallery either. I've been very ambivalent but my thoughts are starting to coalesce.
"Please join us this Friday, June 13, at 6:30pm for a very special event, "An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art." This panel discussion is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to hear how Mail Art evolved into a major artistic movement - from people who helped make it happen! Please scroll down for more information."
(emphasis added)
I"m not making it up:
http://www.centerforbookarts.org/news/2008/06/authentik-and-historikal-panel-on.shtml
The conceptual similarity of Mail Art (MA) to aspects of Dada and Fluxus has led certain members of the MA Network to take up and develop ideas that had made appearances within the framework of these earlier movements. (1) It would be fruitless to try and make an inventory of all such historical developments, the sheer volume of material passing through the MA Network makes this an impossibility.
From Stewart Home's, THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE - CHAPTER 14
http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/preneoass.htm
I apologize if I insulted you, though I don't feel that I did, and I certainly didn't intend to. I don't think either of us feels that you are somehow representative of surf clubs here; by calling attention to the horde of mediocres there I don't feel that I'm referring to you at all. My "hipster" remarks went too far, I guess. Most of what I write here I end up regretting the next morning. So it goes.
My remark about Rhizome stands. There are personal flames, sure, but that ain't where the meat is. I'm sure you've seen as much serious discussion about structure and aesthetics on this board, if not more, than much hanky-panky. I miss the hanky-panky that we had here some years ago, but hey, I like it now too. I don't know art much, and none of my shit has ever gets accepted by galleries, critics, or anything syndicated, but I'm trying my fucking best to stay with the program here.
There's shit, sure, but there's sugar. You see it.
To reiterate my posts above, when I say "fuck surfclubs," I'm not trying to troll or insult people; I feel like I'm saying "fuck the Louvre" -- I just want to reorient the emphasis of discussion. I don't hypnotize myself with Marshall McLuhan so much that I can't separate the wheat from the chaff, instead lying down in the wheat fields chanting "Dude, it's all, like, a field."
Criticism, as you know, comes from the Greek kritikos, separation (the Proto-Indo-European root of which, incidentally, also lands us with words like "discrimination," "science," "shit," which all involve various kinds of separation). There is art with worth and art that is worthless. Do you think that every last post on imageboards has the same value? Of course not. It's more interesting to look at how different people use that technology in different ways. Why look at everyone the same way because they chose acrylic paints?
I don't equate you with surf clubs, and I don't equate the occasional flames with the overall tenor and direction of Rhizome's discussion. Trees vs. forests.
My misguided blab about "hipsters" was a long-winded way of saying -- there's a lot of bullshit out there, so let's get specific about artists and art pieces.
Please don't pit Lauren, Ed, Marisa, and Ceci against us. I don't know any of them. I rarely look at the front page of Rhizome.org. I've never been to New York. I don't care about the New Museum. I like Net Art, and that's why I'm here. Rhizome's listserv was called RAW for a reason: it ain't Rhizome. It's a mess, and maybe that's why we keep coming back. There should be multiple registers.
RE: your remark (epithets?) about "angry old-timers" and "Greek chorus / peanut gallery": I don't think I'm so old as to be irrelevant to this or any discussion. I'm 23, and I've been an active poster at Rhizome since I was 17.
(There go my chances of ever being read again, if there were any to begin with.)
Vijay
If there is some kind of untelevized revolution going on there, maybe it's the fact that nobody gives a fuck about their medium. Yesterday this kind of behavior was shared in IRC / DC++ / P2P chatrooms, then it was danboorus, then chans / rapidshit forums, and who knows what next. The mods gave 7chan cancer and 4chan diabetes (until some slick Web 2.0 shmuck came along and resurrected 4chan into an effete reflection of its former self). Everyone agreed. Time to move on.
even in the latter one can configure the template but I guess you mean to antagonize the completely customised with the completely industrialized...
anyway, made me think of the supercentral wiki "edit this page" experiment
did anyone discuss the outcome of that experiment yet ?
I really liked editing it and being edited by whoever when it was hot
then they put this password thing and it shrivelled and died
weird way to end it all, I thought
Wikis let you edit the "content" of anyone else's "text," which is a start because then the board becomes a single collaborative "piece" rather than a sequence of discrete autonomous posts.
Incidentally, last semester one of my net art students did this piece using "wiki-esque" technology:
http://www.skytyne.net/Real/
I thought it was pretty clever as conceptual net.art one-liners go.
My man Mikhail Bakhtin understands language as a series of "utterances" which end when one person stops talking and the next person starts talking. Such an understanding of language shifts the emphasis from Saussurean signifier/signified system couplings to more holistic, embodied units of utteranace -- units that are highly dependent on contextual structures. From an embodied, Bakhtinian understanding of language, the radicality of a group blog will always be limited, because the back and forth utterances are still highly formalized and structured. Admittedly, they are more radically structured than reading a book. But to me they are still less radically structured than talking face to face with someone in a pub over a pint. All the focus in such structured group blog dilaogues is on the "sign" content. And if all you are doing is reblogging/retagging source content from the lowest common denominator memes on the web, then you wind up further churning the mire without attempting to modulate or inflect it (all that much). Such surfing/swimming/riffing/churning may be fun, but there are surely more provocative, agency-infused ways in which to tweak.
The problem with a wiki is still that the editable part is limited to "content" rather than the structure of the entire web page. Photoshop tennis ( http://layertennis.com ) gets more interesting to me, because the dialogue leaves the realm of mere curatorial reframing/retitling and enters the realm of formal, material, media collaboration (albeit predetermined by the constraints of Adobe Inc.). Still, you begin to head toward a more holistic "multimedia" kind of "'dialogue." What we were doing here ( http://rhizome.org/object.php?o=2261&m=1000739 ) was expanding the context of the dialogue further to encompass the entire web page, from browser edge to browser edge. Yes, we were taking screenshots and remixing each other's images in photoshop/illustrator. Yes, we were riffing off of each others text comments and titles. But we were also restyling the entire structure of the web page that housed the discussion thread -- controlling its layout, color scheme, hierarchy, typography. The entire thread became a wall-to-wall collaborative, perpetually mutating utterance.
Technically, you simply create an external style sheet that modifies the thread (cf: http://lab404.com/misc/1.css ), store it on your own server somewhere, and then call that style sheet into the page of the thread by posting it in your text comment window [like so:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://lab404.com/misc/1.css"/>
Such calls are supposed to appear in the "head" of an html document, but they will work in the body as well. So a single post hijacks the layout of the entire thread (background image, rules, type, color, and all). Then each subsequent person overwrites part of the next person's style sheet. Some commands remain, others are replaced. Ultimately the thread literally crashes under the weight of its own hypertrophied code (plus all the embedded midi, mp3, and quicktime files, etc.).
All that is required is for the moderator of any blog or bulletin board to turn off the default disabling of html tags in a post and allow them. It is a shift away from the operative mechanism of the discrete, textual blog post and toward a more holistic, collaborative, visual form of communication. The dialogue can still retain a flavor of the curatorial remix (depending on the source images one chooses), but it becomes more of a hy[per/brid] conversation rather than merely a meta-conversation.
Of course, it can be both, neither, something else entirely, or 82 other things. Put it through the ringer. Let it grow holes like socks. It may begin to matter.
Best,
Curt
http://lab404.com/misc/the_css_call.txt
well done
i was actually a member of dreamless (http://rhizome.org/object.php?o=2261&m=1000739) way back when this wasn't documentation and i would like to ask how much of this idealization of so-called "open" environments is the result of a kind-of nostalgia?
...which is to say, i believe the structuring of these group blogs are based on conscious decisions which aren't ignorant of the history of said systems.
[for clarification: the way the supercentral wiki is structured is in such a way that a user can alter the entire structure of the webpage(s). but as to whether or not this constitutes a kind of "openness"... i personally would rather not have such illusions.]
I'm not interested in open-ness for any sort of ethical, "open source" reason. And I'm not idealizing dreamless from a purely nostalgic perspective. I'm simply proposing another kind of collaborative dialogue that treats html as more than mere plumbing, and incorporates it into the dialogue. As is, group photo-blogging seems more like a meta-art conversation than a collaborative art project. Allowing users to tweak the html shifts the medium closer toward a kind of collaborative/performative art project. Again, it's not an either or.
Did you participate in the ascii chaos forums on dreamless? Does such an environment seem potentially interesting to you now (given the lack of specialized knowledge now necessary to participate in such a forum, and the amount of artists now able to bring de-stablizing media to the table)? My problem with dreamless was that it was a group of graphic designers more interested in displaying their ds9 skillz than in developing an interesting conceptual dialogue. My problem with most old school net artists is that they were more interested in conceptual one-liners than in engaging with the materials of the medium.
A list of who I'd invite (off the top of my head):
http://oculart.com
http://tex-server.org
http://www.bam-b.com
http://jimpunk.com
http://www.subculture.com
http://www.beflix.com
http://www.grrrr.net
http://www.destroyevil.com
http://dream7.com
http://www.titler.com
http://www.tinkin.com
http://www.jimmyjoeroche.com
http://www.theblowupmedia.com
and my man http://www.coldbacon.com
Best,
Curt
I'm also not saying it is from a purely nostalgic perspective... but that certainly is a reality on some level when talking about something from that point of the internet's development and the state of net art at that time (and specifically with the case of dreamless).
yes, i did participate in them. (but i was 14 then, so the level of criticality i had at the time is probably up for debate :)
what is maybe interesting in the case of graphic designers is their value of clarity in communication and the kind of excesses that occurred there when presented with such a format? they are certainly engaged with the material realities of communication, in any event.
to damon: i'd rather talk about the fact that your homepage is white
why did you choose white ? why are all the surfclubs white ?
IT SUCKS!
Yes, Bakhtin provides a good model for the wiki, as opposed to surfclub's opportunities for individualism at the post level: each person can "solo" at will within the overall percussion of the thread, as opposed to the nonterritorialized anonymity of the wiki.
Yet I don't quite understand how Saussurean language is somehow the other side of a dialectic here, since it seems to me that Saussurean signif(ier|ied) dynamics occur in both of these cases, and, for that matter, most of the communication on the Internet. Detournment is a rhetorical strategy, and it does not by that fact change or even necessarily refer to linguistic constraints or substructures.
Vijay
I participated in a ListServ vs Blogs debate on empyre a while back. Uggh. I hate ListServs with emails that fill up my inbox and have to be flushed. Many people from empyre came over to my blog and we had a fun email-less conversation. (This is when I still had comments.)
I don't think comments need to be little works of art with user-customizable html. This is just plumbing. The straighter and cleaner the better.
I am very bullish on Nasty Nets and my posts there. I appreciated the sustained critical attention that Marcin Ramocki paid to those efforts and don't care too much for flip comments by people who are only surfing the surfers.
The members of these "clubs" are serious artists in their own right, and should be accorded respect.
I'm not proposing a list serv vs. a blog. You can open html posting on a blog as well.
I'm not proposing that individual blog comments be little works of html art. That is actually my critique. I'm proposing that the entire blog become one giant, perpetually reconfigurable work of art. "The straighter and cleaner the better" seems a curious thing for a meme slicer to say.
I'm not making flip comments about nasty nets. I'm comparing Bakhtinian and Saussurean paradigms of language in my analysis of two different structures of online conversation and their relative efficacy to modulate culture.
I'm not disrespecting any artists who participate in surf clubs. I like the work I've seen of Damon and Petra. I appreciate Olia's writing, and I think Marisa is a fun and energetic curator.
You seem kind of defensive. Is your operative mojo to lump everyone who disagrees with you into the same pile and then dismiss them categorically? I don't represent any sort of faction or camp. I'm not out to steal your fifteen minutes. I'm just some dude from North Carolina talking about media.
Respectfully,
Curt
it is ONLY decontextualizing nothing else
swap decontextualizing with flattening.
yes, of course, brilliant idea and that's what I was hoping for with 2balles
never happened though
because it is contrary to the very essence of blogging which is simply put "hit and run"
why would one bother to implement a CMS (blogging or other) whose purpose is the automation of what people find tiresome about html/css AND THEN reintroduce the tiresome bit with the "perpetually reconfigurable" ?
why not, instead, just get rid of the CMS and "perpetually reconfigure" by hand (so to speak) ?
that is much more rational
the only question which is more aptly resolved by a CMS is that of the archives
and, possibly, the RSS
but, hey,
FUCK ARCHIVES!
that's not my complaint
my complaints about blogs is that they are "de rigueur", that they are everywhere and that there very form is normative (or normalizing). blogs produce conformity, that's how they caught on so fast: you could easily do exactly what all the others were doing
catch: you are really no different from all the other bloggers
This is my main critique, and it is an admittedly ethical critique. Eddo Stern or whomever said that the interweb itself is always going to be more interesting than any single, autonomous, discrete piece of "net art." So a tactic of tweaking the overall procedural operations of the web seems like it might matter. DJ Spooky suggests a tactic for avoiding commodification -- a kind of perpetual remix/detournement, so that you swim in the media without ever letting it have the last word (remixing someone else's remix of your remix, publishing a review of your own show, etc). One way or another, to simply submit yourself to what the medium already wants to do is hardly a tactic for modulation or transformation. Those who would namecheck Warhol as some kind of patron saint who absolves and blesses all banal pop churnings are missing his ingenius genius. Pop culture is like the tar baby -- it's tricky to dance with without getting co-opted and rendered impotent. And I'm guessing a lot of artists hitching their wagon to this star could care less.
The potentially useful thing about group photoblogging may be a kind of rapid prototyping model that riffs first and ask theoretically critical questions later (if ever). On the other hand, it could be, like Twitter, that any kind of blogging reduces the scale of your thoughts and output to a series of soundbytes that never gain enough momentum to modulate much of anything (he posted from the Asheville airport between flights). Yes, the modular ease of RSS reblogging affords something, but what? That everyone's art is reducible to a summarizable reblog post? Then we're back in 1997 to the conceptual (or, in this case, animated gif-ceptual) one-liner. Hardly Wagnerian in any sense. Maybe this is what the web wants, but that hardly makes it interesting art. I can watch the web be the web on youTube. I don't need to watch artists using the default web. I can just watch my neighbors use the default web. I'm not advocating a high vs. low dichotomy. I'm advocating critical, ingenious modulation vs. uncritical, banal wanking. Hopefully the former is happening and I'm just missing something.
"...the interweb itself is always going to be more interesting than any single, autonomous, discrete piece of 'net art.'"
So what? The world will always be more interesting than any piece of art. Was "most" the goal at Lascaux?
2.
"...riffs first and ask theoretically critical questions later (if ever)."
Isn't this the typical case, though? Math works with theoretical principles a priori. Aesthetics works with theory (if ever) a posteriori. Hence the logical gap we call the Muses, Genius, Providence, Grace, Saraswati, et al.
Sol LeWitt may have politely knocked ahead of time every time (he had to sell his wares to the residents), but others may break and enter.
Vijay
it is ONLY decontextualizing nothing else
it is recontextualizing it with whatever surrounds it in the blog, plus what you say about it via captioning or commentary.
Saying a blog is "like all the other blogs" because it's a blog is like saying a book is "like all other books" because it's a book. It's just a convention, it works well for some people.
Linear plus hyperlinks is not the same as linear.
Vijay, I'm continuing to enjoy your reports from the other cyberspace:
Also pledging allegiance to surfclubs, or anything, is exactly what gets a body /facepalmed and b&.
If there is some kind of untelevized revolution going on there, maybe it's the fact that nobody gives a fuck about their medium. Yesterday this kind of behavior was shared in IRC / DC++ / P2P chatrooms, then it was danboorus, then chans / rapidshit forums, and who knows what next. The mods gave 7chan cancer and 4chan diabetes (until some slick Web 2.0 shmuck came along and resurrected 4chan into an effete reflection of its former self). Everyone agreed. Time to move on.
In worrying about the surfclubs and how they are displacing his own movement, T.Whid is thinking in ten year cycles--what you are describing here is happening in days, I think.
I'm not worrying about surf clubs replacing 'my movement.' Actually, they seem to be practicing the rigorous definition of net art that I use. If anything, they're carrying the 'movement' forward.
My problem (if you can call it that) is that it is a very specific genre but seems to be the only thing happening in the field. I just wish there was a larger ecosystem of net art.
BTW,
Loshadka is doing, er, um, something at OTO (MTAA's studio) this friday!
Check it out...
The context is a big deal with hypermedia, the context on the net is something we need to create each time we activate links. A context is like a journey, and just available for this journey, because it's not an ended form.
We are talking about defaults--a premise of the defaults "movement" is you use the technology that's there. Search engines will find your words. A blog is "good enough" for communication. (Certainly better than email, fixed pages that have to be hand coded--who has time for that when most practice is slipped into the cracks of office work?--and, I would say, WIKIs where changes are hard to follow.)
This idea that every utterance on the web is supposed to be an original moment that bends space, time, and mammalian communication is, as Damon Zucconi said above, a utopian assumption or illusion ("that surrounds the structure of communications online: sovereignty, decentralization, non-hierarchical and what-have-you").
The people arguing against blogs or group blogs on this page have a tendency to make blog users sound like sheep when in fact many know what they are doing and why.
Yes. The same applies to surfclubs. Your mention of time for the creative act as stolen from office work makes sense. I think this idea plugs in well to talking about de Certeau on how in the practice of everyday life we have to hedge on the larger structures, the strategies, and instead usefully confine ourselves to tactics. We were talking about this somewhere at http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/37290 ...
YES! -- please!, everyone!, stop focusing and talking about surf clubs!! The individual work of some of the surfers involved is more interesting and more worth analyzing. I'm mystified why "surf clubs" get all the attention -- and I'm the one who invented the stupid term.
And perhaps you should add this after your "hipsters != artists"...... "NERDS != ARTISTS"
...perhaps we should remove the relational operator and just say "nerds are not artists" :-P
(^ imagine all this said in friendly, jokey way)
"-- and I'm the one who invented the stupid term."
So it's YOU we have to blame!
if ( nerd || hipster && artist ) {
output = art;
}
:-)
Though I must admit the following statement usually evaluates to "true":
(nerd && artist) > (hipster && artist)
why did you choose white ? why are all the surfclubs white ?
IT SUCKS!"
Now this is interesting!!
Nasty Nets is/was made white to maintain the default aesthetic of the web (black text, white background, blue links, 12 point Times New Roman), to blend into the web and look very bland, refreshingly humble yet depressing, plain but aware of its blogness. (Though this style is a bit of a throwback to 1.0, I'd say most blogs are white background and black text by default... I like that this is what things look like if you do not specify any style or CSS definitions... A style made by doing nothing.)
I'd say Damon uses white because he is playing with the concept of a "normal", formal artist's website. (??)
I know a lot of people complain about white backgrounds on screens being incredibly bright and abrasive to eyes.
On my own pages, I use light blue -- almost sky blue -- (also used on the side bar on Nasty Nets, btw) -- for similar reasons to the above, but also referencing both amateur homepages (GeoCities to myspace) and corporate/office design (pastel colored letter paper) -- I like the opposition between these two associations. I also came to the conclusion that light blue is probably the most neutral of all colors -- even more so than white, black, and grey, which have been appropriated by slick minimal design (iPods and sports cars etc). Light blue is just universally ignored, it is not sexy in any way -- orange and yellow are too bright, green is too lush, purple and red are too sexy. It is also the color of the sky, so we see it more often than any other color. (Why I want to achieve this effect is because it ties in with my work.)
I'd guess that your comment is more aimed at visual aesthetics, which I'm less familiar with, and so less comfortable talking about -- Would love to hear your thoughts on background colors!, I see a lot of what I'd call "gold" on pleine-peau.com.
writing in forums makes me anxious, i've never done it -- i have this weird fear that everything im writing will be interpreted as sarcastic ??
i'm going to email you a million questions about your website, i actually wrote a short paragraph about it a couple days ago
The more a "default" interface triggers one's memory of the interfaces in which one was first exposed to computers and the Internet, the less that interface is actually "default" and instead quaint, given the amount that interfaces -- defaults included -- have changed over the years (Lialina's essay, for example, shows how defaults have changed / are changing, like from Geocities sites to MySpace pages ...).
Now this is interesting!! "
it is fundamental. and it deserves its own thread but unfortunately I see that while I spent the whole day in a meeting at a call center you've already nested deep into the subject. so, let's jump
guthrie: sure, nasty nets white as a statement works and I understand your reasoning (btw I never saw it white because I have a default value on my browser as light grey for situations where people don't have a body bgcolor: that should be fixed, but, hey, it's a very common error I can tell you)
I also used white for http://pleine-peau.com/BOARD because it's a piece against all that is on white background
whe I did http://bruit-direct.org I had to make a big effort to make it readable because, after all, it's there to sell records, it's NNA (not net art) and, biy, was that hard
and, sure, damon's whole site is white because he wants everything to be unintrusive and clear and easily findable and, to me, it looks like he's wearing a 'brick coat' to just blend into the scenery. it's conformism or the easy option out of a choice and it is NNA (not net art)
my comment is not about visual aesthetics, it is about the political stance you take when choosing that color
... I always though of pleine-peau as dark red!
http://www.reticular.info/
http://www.reticular.info/index.php?n=Work.Olympic
http://www.damonzucconi.com/index.php?n=Work.Repeater
http://proto.reticular.info/files/repeater/
let's use this array of web safe color descriptions to try to get somewhere:
"aliceblue", "antiquewhite", "aqua", "aquamarine", "azure", "beige", "bisque", "black", "blanchedalmond", "blue", "blueviolet", "brown", "burlywood", "cadetblue", "chartreuse", "chocolate", "coral", "cornflowerblue", "cornsilk", "crimson", "cyan", "darkblue", "darkcyan", "darkgoldenrod", "darkgray", "darkgreen", "darkkhaki", "darkmagenta", "darkolivegreen", "darkorange", "darkorchid", "darkred", "darksalmon", "darkseagreen", "darkslateblue", "darkslategray", "darkturquoise", "darkviolet", "deeppink", "deepskyblue", "dimgray", "dodgerblue", "firebrick", "floralwhite", "forestgreen", "fuchsia", "gainsboro", "ghostwhite", "gold", "goldenrod", "gray", "green", "greenyellow", "honeydew", "hotpink", "indianred", "indigo", "ivory", "khaki", "lavender", "lavenderblush", "lawngreen", "lemonchiffon", "lightblue", "lightcoral", "lightcyan", "lightgoldenrodyellow", "lightgreen", "lightgrey", "lightpink", "lightsalmon", "lightseagreen", "lightskyblue", "lightslategray", "lightsteelblue", "lightyellow", "lime", "limegreen", "linen", "magenta", "maroon", "mediumaquamarine", "mediumblue", "mediumorchid", "mediumpurple", "mediumseagreen", "mediumslateblue", "mediumspringgreen", "mediumturquoise", "mediumvioletred", "midnightblue", "mintcream", "mistyrose", "moccasin", "navajowhite", "navy", "oldlace", "olive", "olivedrab", "orange", "orangered", "orchid", "palegoldenrod", "palegreen", "paleturquoise", "palevioletred", "papayawhip", "peachpuff", "peru", "pink", "plum", "powderblue", "purple", "red", "rosybrown", "royalblue", "saddlebrown", "salmon", "sandybrown", "seagreen", "seashell", "sienna", "silver", "skyblue", "slateblue", "slategray", "snow", "springgreen", "steelblue", "tan", "teal", "thistle", "tomato", "turquoise", "violet", "wheat", "white", "whitesmoke", "yellow", "yellowgreen"
pshhhhh.... sooooo 2002.
midnightblue = roberta flak
salmon = matisse
dodgerblue = speaks for itself
and don't just say "firebrick", say "firebrick red". you have to say them together like that. or it doesn't sound 1/2 as cool. come on. stay with me.
-cb
but by avoiding what you perceive as "aesthetic" you then risk to be experienced as socially, let's say, common
as for the best combination for eyesight it is 00FF00 on 000000
as seen here http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
and I can't tell you how many lines of cobol i've written on that kind of terminal... millions ?