neonascent

This looks so incredible, and reminds me of the “plants with eyes” music video. The transformation is engrossing, organic, and beautiful.

Recently, Boingboing.com has been covering expositions of the similarities between Todd Goldman’s designs, and what is identified as the source of his “inspiration”. (Boingboing recent post) The examples show a striking resemblance that leave little doubt that Goldman copied aspects from the original.

While there is certainly a case to be made against unfairly profiting from someone else’s work, I am uncomfortable with the tone of the coverage. The poster was Boingboing’s Mark Frauenfelder; an illustrator and writer. I tend to make a rather evaluative distinction between “Art”, “Design”, and “Illustration”, though I realise that for most people the domains are growing less distinguishable. I do believe however that they operate with different agendas, and I identify part of my discomfort with the posts as a sense that these different agendas are being glossed over by indiscriminate use of the terms “artist”, and “designer/illustrator”.

Another point of discomfort for me is the language of these posts, that seemingly conflict with with the bulk of Boingboing’s anti-IP posts. For example, in the most recent post the similarity between works is used to categories Goldman’s work as “potentially stolen”. This is in contrast to criticism of such language by RIAA and MPAA that equates piracy to theft.

The following is text from an email to Mark Frauenfelder, which also mentions another post he made earlier in the day:

I’d like to comment on your ongoing coverage of Todd Goldman’s art, and more recently of a guy that “totally lifted” the style of John Kricfalusi. My general impression from Boingboing is that you are against IP protection that stifles innovation. Every release in Creative Commons is hailed, and every large institution attempting to protect a copyright it holds is criticised.

I think it is setting a dangerous precedent to attack artists for copying material from others. Granted, Todd Goldman is an illustrator who makes money off of these designs, but consider the argument against copyright lobbying of Disney i.e. that for every Disney work they are extending protection on, they are condemning “lost works” to limbo. By attacking a few commercially motivated instances of copying, you are placing yourself in a very contentious position of saying what is allowable in art. The John Kricfalusi rip-off might be highly derivative, but it is an original work. Contemporary art is a dialogue between previous works, and those that come after them; there is no such thing as a divinely inspired artwork that is atomic and totally original. Andy Warhol was strongly centred on mass-production of previously available images. One artist commented on artwork ownership by photographing paintings and signing them.

As a contemporary artist - though I’ve never consciously copied another’s work - it stings me to have this didactic voice casting out heavily derivative artwork *without even acknowledging that this a point of contention*. If you are against the laziness and exploitation of other peoples work for the sake of making money, then explicitly say it. Otherwise your position is ambiguous and it appears you are attacking the similarity of material itself. Also ambiguous is how this position is reconciled with the general attitude towards IP law, as stated above. I’d agree that in many instances the artist whose work is being used are not in a position to contemplate legal proceedings against the so-called “infringer”, and that there may be an unfair exploitation of the work to make money, but when the vast majority of legal copyright manoeuvres seem to be abusing the IP laws, and when these artworks are arguably original enough to guard against such law, it does present a confusion of your position.

What are your views regarding “derivative” or “copied” works? Contribute your thoughts in the comments.

Vogue Italia has a great TSA themed photo shoot viewable via Flash.

The emotional landscape of the shoot presents a really nice picture of TSA “security” and terrorist hysteria versus a vunerable/abused public. Of course there is also the femme fetale interpretation, which I think is a less significant reading for most pics.

A few days ago I blogged a sculpture I had installed for a recent exhibition. The sculpture featured Nazi imagery (red-white banner with black icon) to point out the fascist tendencies of US government “warring against terror”, etc.

I had worried that the use of such imagery was pushing it towards the clichéd and would be considered hyperbolic - although to my mind the comparison is valuable in a media environment where perspective and historical context is as far removed as composed intellectually analysis.

Now, in an interesting twist the New York Times is reporting that neo-Nazis have infiltrated the US Military in Iraq. It seems that in the face of rising ire over the war in Iraq it is getting harder for military recruiters to fill their quotas, and they are no longer maintaining a block on racist and extremist recruits. Neo-Nazis already have an agenda to get into the military, and so are only too happy to be allowed in.

An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.

“Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman’s war,” he wrote. “It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and ‘cleansed.’ “

• Link to New York Times article

It’s edging closer to my next birthday, and I feel that in my old age it is a good idea to have my affairs in order. Starting at the end, I’m going to make sure my spirit lives on in a witty epitaph for myself. I will endevour to come up with a good epitaph every week, and with pot-luck style selection if I die during that week, I take it to the grave! Of course if I think of a naff one for one week, I’ll have to try extra hard not to do anything fatal until I can think of a better one.

I’ve written a PHP script to help visualize, and they are auto-magically created.

This (highly political) sculpture was exhibited in the “Ground Floor” exhibition, Kudos. Two things I’ve wanted to do: engage in the gallery space itself, rather than just place things on a plinth within it, and work with the emotively charged black-white-red nazi style symbolism - I got my wish! Painting the walls was extremely liberating.

The installation consists of a stand holding two 100w klaxons, with painted wall banners on either side. The klaxons broadcast the sounds of war (bombs, air-raids, etc), with an underfloor sub-woofer providing deep rumbles.

Here is some (perhaps obvious) explanation:

Using Nazi imagery to point out the hypocracy of a War for Peace, and the fascism that’s been justified to “secure the country”. Dove with olive branch is biblical (i.e. very culturally specific) symbol for peace, and the nature of the War on Terror as a religious war (Bush initially described it as a “Crusade”) is tacit.

…Enduring Freedom is of course the name of US operations in Afghanistan.

Political support badges were also made, with two slogans, both of which involve some semantic/oxymoronic conflict.

There is always the danger of being too clichéd when dealing with political issues in art. I don’t want people to think that the Nazi imagery is in any way flagerant or gratuitous. During the Nuremberg trials Hermann Goering explained the power of the governement over the people through an uncomfortably familiar scenario:

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

I think it’s important to realise that when such insubstantial rhetoric as an undefinable and unwinnable War on Terror is used to justify incursions into human rights, they are by no means intended to be temporary.

• War broadcast sounds MP3 (5.58mb)
• Link to Flickr set

Via we make money not art:
A robotic painter that creates images using interesting Colour-as-pheromone behavioural programming.

I recently had an idea of a project called (something along the lines of) iPollock, using a robotic painter to produce similar Abstract Expressionist paintings. The twist was that instead of using batteries, it would be powered via a model-aeroplane-engine-based generator fuelled by hard liquour.

(I suppose it’s possible we could add greater verisimilitude to the project in v2.0 by creating another robot called the iKrasner, that iPollock periodically whacks with a specially designed appendage.)

Image Fatigue, The Australian: “In a culture saturated with visual images and increasingly cynical about their manipulation, photography is losing its status as an art form, writes Sebastian Smee.“

Sebastian Smee makes a daring attack at photography as a contemporary artform. For the sake of my photography artist friends, and to see if he had a point, I was compelled to take a look.

Smee suggests that photography is losing its positioning as an artform for two reasons. The first is an apparent saturation of images in our society:

Photography has finally become just another way of making images. So easy is it to produce these images that our culture has reached saturation point. Just think of all the wedding photos, baby photos, holiday snaps, news photos, fashion shots, forays into art, scientific photos, police records, studio portraits, passport photos and party snaps that come into existence every day of the year, all across the globe.

In short, I think this is bunk. Guy Debord has presented a compellingly convincing account of modern society completely consisting of the “spectacle” in the form of abstracted images. The very existence of so many genres of photography speaks of both the power and directed and mediated use they hold in our world. It seems all to obvious that in a world of images, the only way to express anything is also through images. Subverting our perspective of the world based on our acceptance of these images just seems all the more possible.

The second is based solely on Smee’s definition of Art. I’m not sure if he attempts to obscure his endeavour to authoratively define Art - it certainly doesn’t work. There is indeed so much argument over what art is, that it is ludicrous to try and slip his own definition in and base the rest of the article on it.

Here we go with his idea of art: First it must involve the required amount of effort to produce. If it doesn’t take sufficient artistry to create, then it isn’t art. This is often heard as the “My five year old nephew could do that” argument.

According to this way of seeing, it turned out that not all that much artistry did need to be involved in the making of a great photograph. It was in the nature of the medium to be interesting, if we would just let it.

I’d like to point out that there are many who would believe we can all be artists and - due to their unjaded capacity to wonder at the world - perhaps especially children. Likewise, Andy Warhol and his Popart posse has certainly engaged with ease-of-creation along with level of artistic input through mass-production and mass-appropriation, and managed to come out on top of the “What is Art?” debate.

His second Rule of Art is implicit in the argument against photographs/snapshots of the everyday as art.

A certain eye could be brought to the process of selection, certainly, but even there the random and the arbitrary could be just as fertile ground as the carefully composed, the congested with meaning. But of course, the mind easily tires of randomness.

…Which, I’d venture, is why our minds are urged to find meaning in the apparently meaningless. And so he doesn’t like this. For him, art must present a solid, concrete meaning and signification. He states the following as a question, but I’d suggest your reading would be more accurate to his intent if read it as a statement:

What is art, after all, but a dream of significance, of some things mattering more than others, a concentration and distillation of the great, formless everything that surrounds us into something more meaningful?

This certainly sounds like he wants art to present some kind of Grand Narrative, explicating those essential and important parts of existence for our appreciative understanding.

I sense that these two criticisms are connected, at least in the type of art that they discount. I would suggest there is value in an art that presents everything as meaningful: The whole world as necessary and interesting and worthy of awe. Just because it is impractical in our daily drudge to constantly boggle at the beauty of light interacting through your office window, or the swirls in your morning coffee, or the shear amazingness of existence, doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.

I have a strong feeling though that Smee’s insistence that photography has lost it’s former magic, stems from a personal issue with the modern photographic process. He uses the notion of photography’s “medium’s inherent aptitudes, its original, fragile relation to reality” many times in his article, mostly to say that contemporary artists are failing to take advantage of them, but never manages to go further into what these are… at all. What is obvious from his closing is what will break this fragile relationship:

[Of the work of the few contemporary photogs he likes] The liberties they take can be breathtaking: artificial staging, deliberate obscuring and ghostly distortion of the image. But somehow (primarily by resisting the siren call of digital manipulation) they manage to hang on to photography’s precarious connection to reality.

And so we see: He doesn’t like digital editing. Of course there are philosophical issues with the ability to completely “falsify” an image, but these have been entrenched in photographic theory for much longer than the existence of our present day digital technologies. There are also issues, emphasised by Smee’s insistence on artistic effort in photographic production, on the ease of duplication of digital technology, against which I would point again to Warhol. In my mind, this distrust of digitisation is tantamount to “When I were a lad, photographs could be trusted”.

While I will ambivalently confess to liking art that says something, I’m happy to accept this in the form of an expression of wonder, or even a self-reflexive engagement with art discourse. Of course now we enter a completely different world, and one that Smee doesn’t even begin to touch on: the difference between Art, and what the commercial art world will call Art for the sake of attracting an audience. It may very well be that, as Smee insists, photography is loosing its hold on the second.

Haruka is the Official Illustrator for our Dirty Suzie project. She is also the artist responsible for the 100 Hugs project.

I managed to grab this (slightly photoshopped) picture of Haruka at the end of a Kabuki photoshoot she was doing for Blessi. She was just removing her makeup when I stopped her for this (hopefully not too clichéd) split identity look.

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a program for mixing sound and video snippets taken from any (music) video source into a new audio-visual experience, based on any audio input, and in realtime. The promo video gives the best summary of what it does and how, and also has an example of the software being used. This is fab, and hopefully the software will soon be released (as GPL for open-source developement) so we can all have a go!