GENOMICON

Michael Landy, the guy who destroyed all his possessions (He didn’t like them) has made a new thing…

Art Bin – in which people are invited to turn up and chuck all their failed art into this massive bin thing.

Utterly brilliant. I’ve got failed art. I’ve got a LOT of failed art. In fact in one way or other, most of it’s failed. I’ve had two exhibitions so far, and nobody bought a single thing. Idiots.

This is a bit like the thing I’m working on at the moment – time-capsules for all the things you thought might come in handy one day, but never have. I’m making an instructional video etc – which is proving to be a lot more difficult than making the actual thing, and that’s hard enough.

Anyway, Michael Landy’s Art Bin reminds me of these massive fallen-angel/devil/bat things that I once found off the side of Battersea Bridge in London when I was sleeping on Mark’s sofa, and getting drunk all the time.

Mark’s Sofa

Me at the time

The Greeky, where I used to get drunk quite a lot

Those days are gone. Soho has been cleaned up. Mark’s tidied up his living room, I’ve moved to Brighton, New Zealand and Tallinn. I don’t shave or cut my hair that much any more. The weeds have turned into trees, and the trees have grown. It will be autumn soon.

Well Hackaday find it annoying, but I think it’s quite cool in a funny sort of way.

It’s a myspace page for this remarkable looking steampunk sequencer that someone’s made

taken to the typical myspace extreme of total unreadability – but it is quite pretty in a funny sort of way

Which is cool, because I think steampunk is kindof done. It’s turned into a free-ride – that http://makersmarket.com has just started up, and it seems like 1/2 the stuff on it is steampunk – but it’s devolved into a brass-clock-part variant of ash-trays with seashells stuck on them. It needs some sort of extrema to explore. Some geniune functionality or intrinsic value or something.

But anyway – this music machine looks like it could be… that… if you could actually see what was going on, which you can’t, because it’s on myspace… and maybe that’s part of the appeal.

Cool. More Atemporality. It’s live… but it could just as easily be taped, and it looks like a Victorian Moog… everything about it looks old – even FM Radio seems kindof retro now… everything about it looks old, but it’s sampling something that’s happening right now. It exists entirely in the moment.

Apart from the minor detail that you’re watching a recording of it over the web, and the original was made about 3 years ago.

He makes lots of batty things this guy, eg: noise bed

Art that you really can’t live with. A massive musical whoopie-cushion with all the humour taken out of it.

Sounds like an Edward Gorey story: “The Humourless Whoopie Cushion, and other stories”

Bruce Sterling was going on in that last post about Generative Art – how did he put it? Art bleached of human intent?

I’m not so sure – I think that in this case the art shifts from the execution to the interpretation – you can’t take the human out of the art. Like The Beatles on Acid… Sgt Peppers – what came back wasn’t A Trip To Cirrus Minor, but something even more Scouser than anything they’d done before, which was already fairly Scouser. The deeper you go, the closer you get.

Still, whatever, here’s a video of some flies milling about

idiots.

I’m the kindof guy that rescues worms off the pavement, but flies are a pest. They can fuck off back where they came from, which is Australia. That’s where my Sister lives at the moment. She works for Pet-Rescue. This is the bird that sits on her balcony scrounging honey

It’s a bit rowdy actually. If you click it, you’ll see the life-sized version, assuming you have a life-sized screen.

Anyway, for some reason that made me think of that thing that turned up recently where you can make art out of your mouse-movements…

(click for big version)

Which is great – that’s proper art that is, and weirdly, it does look a bit Russian, which is good, because it IS Russian – or… the software that makes it is. The art itself doesn’t really come from anywhere. Mice make it. You can do your own if you download a bit of software onto your (Windows) PC, which I don’t really use that much, so that’s me out*.

Because I use Linux. This is my desktop. If you click it you’ll get the life-sized version. You can pretend you’re me.

(omg, that’s so clever – he managed to get the screen-grab icon into the actual screen-grab! How do you do that? It’s like creating some sort of temporal loop – like having a photograph in a photograph of a photograph)

It’s a photo I took off the side of The Bridge To Nowhere – which is up the river from where I live.

Is that Generative Art?

Yup. All I’ve done is put a frame round it. It’s generative art, and it’s amazing. All of nature is generative art. All of it. Everything under the sun, and beyond. All of the trillion galaxies filled with billions of stars, exploding outwards – all rendered arty farty in the shutter of the beholder’s eye. The floating motes of dust in your living room, the yawning abyss specked with infinity-swallowing black-holes. Rainbows and Unicorns. Fwuffy Wuffy Fowest Cweatures.

You yourself are generative art, milling about willy-nilly like a fly in a fly experiment, knowing not what you do.

It’s ok. You are forgiven, LOL. You are forgiven.

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* actually it does use Linux.

Like most people, I can’t wait for smellovision to finally arrive, although even at its best I imagine it will be a profoundly unpleasant experience.

I like the idea though – of a sort of camera that not only records vision (bi-focally, 360 degrees) but also does sound, smell, movement… etc etc. An full-spectrum sensory recorder. A detachable head. Again.

So anyway, this thing turned up recently which isn’t a smellovision machine, but a very photogenic way of measuring smell components

And maybe if you can do that, it’s possible to push it back the other way and actually create the smells.

Ok. A long shot.

It reminds me of something though… can’t quite put my finger on it.

Something it’s not though… but could have been is the Damien Hirst thing that is now safe and sound on the surface of Mars

And is now definitely worth more than the cost of the sending it there in the first place – which was only a million quid or something.

It’s a bit of a shame that it didn’t phone home… but… its value probably always was going to be something other than scientific. It’s a story thing.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009) – Caleb Larsen

I think this is not just quite good art… but possibly great art.

It’s a little black box that sits there – and it’s wired up to the web, and once a week it sells itself on Ebay (Link to screengrab, because the actual ebay link will probably change)

In the last 12 hours or so, the bidding price has gone from 2.5k to 4.5k… and 15% of every sale goes back to the artist. The person who buys it gets to keep it for a week, then it sells itself again – if they want it for another week, they have to buy it again. If they unplug it, they get to keep it forever, but it destroys the point of it, and everyone thinks they’re a wanker.

I think it’s great art because the shape, and the name, and what it does, are unrelenting… it’s an unrelenting mirror on darker slants on the human condition… selling itself again and again. And it has a 7 day week.

I once worked in this meat-packing factory on a conveyor belt handling 20kg frozen slabs. There was this old guy at the other end of a conveyor belt from me who was like a machine – strong as fuck and unstoppable… and I had to keep up, and couldn’t. It was quite frightening. This black box reminds me of him – an unstoppable self-selling machine. It should be ugly, but it’s not. It’s just blank. Like a midget one of those 2001 A Space Odyssey things.

A while back I mentioned this thing about story being used to sell things with no intrinsic value... this is a really cool example of that. It has hardly any aesthetic value (unless you’re into platonic solids or that thing on the cover of Led Zep’s Presence)… It’s pure story – but it’s actually quite a good story.

It’s also an interesting experiment to see how long it lasts… whether people will keep paying for it. How many people keep paying for it… how the price fluctuates. It’s like the million dollar home page, but instead of a million pixels, there’s just one black 3D one.

I quite like the way it’s a black cube as well – because art galleries are more often than not, white cubes. It’s like the opposite of the space that it’s sold from – but nastily incisive distillate of the whole point of the space that it sits in. To sell our culture over and over and over. It’s like the dark side of the force.

Cheers to Alex, for pointing it out :)

Scary stop-motion animation. Reminds me of the eye-hand monster off Pan’s Labyrinth.

via

From the wonderful Hacked Gadgets

Like most people, I am absolutely terrified of fractals.

They’re The Devil’s Venn Diagrams. They’re the black dot in the sky in the moment that you realise it’s actually a hole. They suck you in, fascinated with the detail – until they pole-axe you with a blade of ashen horror – when you realise that you’re looking at something… big. Too big. So big that it can engulf the whole planet, the whole universe just by yawning and stretching – you’re not even there/here. You’re already part of the pattern. You are one of those little spirals. The Devil is in the details.

So anyway… they were containable enough when confined to two dimensions – they only trap you if you specifically invited them in…

… but then this turned up:

OMFG, no… that’s too much. And it’s too late – now it’s awake.

You really ought to take a look at the site though – like all truly great sites it looks like it was made about 10 years ago… you can click through to massive versions of the pictures. A-Mazing.

Still… Brrr

Like a Geiger frieze or that thing on the wall at Satan’s apartment in Devil’s Advocate with Keanu Reeves in it, and that one with the pointy nose who’s quite pretty actually, although she did go a bit mad at the end.

This is what I was talking about when I went on about Terrifying Psychic Leakage with reference to European Religious Decor during the Baroque period… similar to the way electric charge concentrates at points and corners… every point and corner has grotesque detail extruding from it.

Mind you – the Catholic Church always has had a nice angle on Satanic art – everything from this:

to

to

Oh no. You don’t fool me. Not for a second.

he

Genius

(fae)

A proper artist apparently : Walter Wick. Really good art, like really good hallucinations generally, is quite often instantly recogniseable… a distillation of something you already know. Really, really good art annoys the sort of people I hate. The only way to improve it from there is to make it really, really big.

I don’t think this needs that though. It’s hits closer by being made out of actual toys.

We used to do this when we were kids. Make flimsy castles then use other toys to knock them over. And lo, I have become Nickwit, destroyer of worlds.

ok, ok, it might not actually be proper art – it might just be someone taking the piss… but who’s to know?