Literally No Place

Hello baby dolls, it’s the final boss of vocal fry here. Daniel Felstead’s glossy Julia Fox avatar is back. Last time she took on Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. Now she takes us on a journey into the AI utopian versus AI doomer cyberwarfare bedlam, exploring the stakes, fears, and hopes of all sides. Will AI bring about the post-scarcity society that Marx envisioned, allowing us all to live in labor-less luxury, or will it quite literally extinguish the human race?

Literally No Place, brand new video(art) essay by Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung

Anatomy of an AI System

“At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed.”

[read the whole paper here]

Art without Education

As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism. For emerging artists and curators there is an ever-increasing number of well-intentioned programs that essentially indoctrinate them into becoming content providers for an art system whose values and welfare are wholly defined by its own logic of supply and demand.

Anton Vidokle, Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art, 2013

Post Artists

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“I like to think of the artists who are creating in these spaces, myself included, as “Post Artists.” We publish our art in the form of posts, but we’re also creating work that could be considered “after” traditional interpretations of art. And while it’s become something of an art world cliché to be “post-” something, we are living in an age that is quick to label things “post-”. This title attempts to reclaim that word with some humor. The state of Post Art is open to roughly 34 percent of the world. And the content that is being created in the space ranges from popular culture GIFs to ’net art to porn, and everything in between.”

On Coffee Houses, Salons, and the Post Arts, by Man Bartlett on Hyperallergic.

You’re doing it wrong

Art Fag City just published an anonymous (of course!) essay named What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan. This is a refreshing reading, indeed. The only problem is that art people who are not familiar with Internet Culture simply won’t get it…

you can find it here

You, the World and I

You, the World and I: new video work by Jon Rafman. A voice over essay about love, memory, photography, technology, and our experience of the world.

“In this modern day Orphean tale, an anonymous narrator also desperately searches for a lost love. Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.” (full statement here).

[p.s. this is another work that will be shown in Maps and Legends, my forthcoming exhibition during FotoGrafia Festival. Come and have a look if you’re in Rome from September 23th to October 24th]

Ubiquitous Minicinema

Required reading: Ubiquitous Minicinema, a great article by Olia Lialina. GIF by Stephanie Davidson…

Lady Gaga’s outfits part II

After the first, fabulous essay on “Lady Gaga and Modern Architecture“, Flavorwire publishes a great sequel of the Gaga’s Outfit Research: “Deconstructing Lady Gaga’s VMA Ensembles“. Arithmetic fashion?

The Nine Eyes of Google Street View

This is a must-read. Artist Jon Rafman has written a wonderful essay on Google Street View for Art Fag City:

“One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.”