vox.shiftingplanes.org

Started messing with Ubuntu for a piece I am doing. The show install is in a week, so I am kinda cutting it close but I really do need to get back to some sorda linux distro. Ubuntu seems to be all the rage, so I am jumping on the bandwagon so to speak.

Quick tech note: Compiling C code can be a bit annoying at first on this platform. In the great tradition of OSX (which doesn’t include a C compiler period) the folk at Cannonical give you gcc without any of the libraries:) grrrr!  (SOLUTION: <apt-get update> followed by <apt-get install build-essential>)

other then the above annoyence a smooth ride so far

OK, so I bitched about the art market before. I think this is my dose of reality. Some really funny writing.  Whatever is going on right now in the art world is way too confusing to summarize but apparently on the critics’ side it’s a full fledged existential crisis. Serves them right those evil spirited evil evil (underpaid) evil evil evil (dedicated) still evil evil (every once in a while very knowledgeable) evil beings …well actually art critics are OK, now theater critics… That’s another story!

I just stumbled upon “Jumping in Art Museums”. Now that’s enthusiasm!

yeah! This made my day!

http://www.youtube.com/v/Ph2BNo6hm0Q

some of the comparisons are a bit to liner in my humble opinion. but really MB is riding the same wave as M. I wish he would embrace the pop nature of what he is doing instead of talking in circles

What Would Wagner Do?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btkM7gkoLjY

This is like a modern day Gesamtkunstwerk. I am completely blown awa-a-a-ay.

Had to do a bit of applescripting lately for a show. Basically wanted a movie to pop up as soon as gallery people turned on my computer. I used QTplayer Pro and the following script.
http://www.b1t-m0nkey.com/code/playMov.scpt

Stick this in login items and you have a video playing automatically. Throw some scheduling stuff in there and gallery people never have to touch the computer. And that’s the way we want it!

For someone who still has issues with definite and indefinite articles in English this WAS a real undertaking <– read: bad applescript joke.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/13/AR2007071301730_pf.html

Kind of a fun rip on the series! I have read the six volumes so far and indeed it’s a very fun escape. Good literature it’s not, but hey… most movies I watch are pure crap.

As someone producing for a niche market I definitely feel sympathetic to my literary brethren. They kinda got hit the hardest by the “digital age” and cinema before that. Mass market success does not equal quality but its a damn hard thing to talk about without feelings of regret…

So I was doing some art reading. Hopping from blog to blog and trying to get my bookmarks in order.  Came across this article in The Art Newspaper.

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article01.asp?id=681

The author, Jane Kallir, talks about the disproportionate influence of collectors on the artworld. Having just come back from China, the new hottest art market, I would have to agree with most of her points (well… basically the article is  descriptive in nature.)  Artists have always made their work in relation to the market (the church, the wealthy patrons, etc) but the whole process has sped up in the past few decades and art auctions definitely don’t help the situation.

What I think has happened is that artists don’t have enough time to develop and when faced with a robust market and the fact that they are considered “emerging” for only so long they start grabbing onto certain artworld tropes/trends purely on the visual level (big photo=good, big photo+nudity=even better) without understanding “why” they emerged in the first place.

Gotta talk with a few art historian friends. Maybe they can put some historical perspective on the crazy race happening around me …

Here’s a link to class I taught last year on CSS+HTML.

http://sweb.uky.edu/~dstra2/class/web_class.html

I am not particularly in love with the layout part of the CSS. It’s not intuitive and the whole “absolute” and “relative” business is a complete mess… but, we live in an imperfect world and often have to cope with lotsa questionable tech (like DVD format, sorry couldn’t resist.)

I think I explain “absolute positioning” in a pretty reasonable way. Check it out, if y’all have time/desire. TIP: I put a lot of comments in the html code.