Buying Individuals, Data Collections and Online Ads

From the great article A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That's Watching Your Every Click, published in The Atlantic by Communications professor Joesph Turow.

Two Mediums, One Story: Damien Hirst Does the Art World One Spot at a Time

Damien Hirst's International art world invasion continued on January 12th 2012 with 331 of his spot paintings on display-and-sell missions in every Gagosian gallery world-wide (that's 11 - three in New York, two in London, and one each in Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills).

Two fantastic art critics similarly discuss this cruelly banal cultural phenomenon through two different mediums  - Peter Schjeldahl covered it in this week's New Yorker with his article Spot On and Hennesy Youngman propagated his thoughts via YouTube.

(Hennesy the younger art critic will be talking at Concordia U. in Montreal next week thursday 26th. for an event called What Does It Mean, And What Can You Do About It? )

Moïse Apporte les Nouvelles Tables de la Loi: Google Books And The Ten Commandments

This image is from the google book Musée Religieux ou Choix des plus beaux tableaux inspirés par l'histoire sainte aux peintres les plus célèbres; first tome, published in 1836 by Hivert Libraire in Paris by "Etienne Achille Réveil, un ecclésiastiques du clergé de Paris".* The actual book is part of the Oxford University's history library collection.

Pursuing its mission to archive everything for everything to be accessible to everyone, in Google Books Google scanned library collections for printed knowledge to be preserved and made more available to more people and over more time. The resulting scans, the google books, generally look like books but simultaneously aren't simple visual reproductions of books either. And while the possible affects of this venture on knowledge are unsure, what is certain is that these digital formats are new vessels of knowledge; new mediums that necessarily carry new messages.

Sometimes these virtual books' new messages are very clear and this particular Musée Religieux google book is one such extraordinary example. As the scan above shows, the Google employee's hands covered with pink mini-finger condoms caught scanning chapter 52 reminds us of the mediation that occurs between the book and the google book (or even the physical labor that any medium necessitates to carry its idea). This meta-narration was created during the scanning/mediating gesture and is only present in the new platform. The original book from 1836 never intended to suggest such a notion, nor does the present-day copy in Oxford Library.

Even more amazingly these fingers were caught while scanning "Moïse Apporte les nouvelles tables de la loi" (Moses brings the new tablets of law). According to the first testament Moses spent 80 days and nights to get these tablets (and their message) to his people (the etching on the left side of the fingers represents Moses telling his people where to place the heavy tablets). He had to climb and descend the Mount Sinai, survive up there, wait for God to communicate and inscribe the principles in stone and all this twice, because after having gotten really upset at his brother's pagan ways he smashed the first two tablets. However all this activity is said to have resulted in the 10 commandments which set some the fundamental ethical principles of Judaism and Christianity.

Relative to Moses' approach, Google seems to have something slightly more efficient happening (although not tested on the long-run), but makes one wonder: are google books and the knowledge that they make available today's stone tablets and commandments? are Google employees today's prophets? And of course are those Moses' fingers?

* which more or less translates as Religious Museum or Choice of the most beautiful paintings inspired by the history of saints to the most celebrated painters, by Etienne Achille Réveil, an ecclesiastic from the clergy of Paris. For more of those fingers go to http://books.google.ca/books?id=pDwGAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&redir_esc=y#v=twopage&q&f=false

Love: The Medium is the Message

A System: The Internet of Things

Sometimes it's nice to hear someone with a British accent make something you depend on, and willingly love to additively contribute to, check, and waste time on every day sound somewhat part of a contained and logical system progressively but surely making the planet (and humans) "smarter."

Add to that a little pyramidal graph - the DIKW - and tada you already feel better about facebook stalking, twitter indulging, emotional blogging, compulsive googling, paparazzi-like clicking, sensational YouTube marathons, apps-holic desktops and boredom caused by reading anything without an illustration more than two paragraphs long:

Renouvellement Technologique

En début de semaine je suis allée au Apple Store pour mettre en place mon nouvellement acquis ipad. Entre technologie trop grosse pour être sortie banalement (tel le téléphone portable) et accessoire trop gadget pour me servir sérieusement (tel l'ordi), je reste perplexe à son utilité. L'Apple Store n'a pas était une expérience particulièrement déterminante sur le sujet non plus puisque, tel mon 'génie' me l'a démontré mon ipad n'est finalement qu'une extension secondaire de Violette (mon ordinateur), un statut et une fonction inférieurs qui ne l'empêche pas d'en devenir la cause du crash redouté - tel que l'apparition de l'icône des documents avec le terrifiant '?' sur mon écran au retour du Store me l'a montrée. 

À cela la difficulté de copier/coller/importer des images (pour documents ou pour des posts de blog), le besoin de manipulations innombrables et répétées pour coordonner les contacts gmail à outlook et la batterie qui se décharge à vitesse éclair, c'est frustrant. Et pourtant depuis la venue de cet écran-planche je m'en sert tout le temps. Google Maps à gogo, visionnement de films et de videos rapide et longue durée, échange d'email facile me font oublier la pollution en Chine causé par les milliards d'ipad produit presto pour répondre à un besoin non-existant et le fait que dans 6 mois un ipad plus indépendant et sans phobie d'images remplacera le mien. 

Finalement comme cette vidéo (trouvé sur uvmann) le montre, tels la disquette et le palm pilot, dans 10 mois l'ipad sera une frivolité symbolique de notre consommation de nouveautés renouvelables à l'infini mieux:

Twitter: An Insignificance Awareness Engine?

While this video is quite funny, I think thinking about this idea in relation to social web networks more generally would be as interesting as this is (somewhat) funny. Till then:

Hell No? The New Museum's latest use of 'we'

"Hell No!" was taken in March 2010 in Williamsburg, NYC

The New Museum opened its latest show Free tuesday night. It's hard to judge an exhibition during an art opening, mostly because it's a party and not a time to look at a new hanging (interestingly the after-party is the only part of the night that suggests the true purpose of such gatherings). Anyways, because of that I wouldn't judge the curating but I will judge the curatorial statement.

Inspired by “ Dispersion” (2001–), an essay by artist Seth Price, the show brings together works that tackle "the increased dispersion of culture, by examining how its circulation and reception has changed across mediums from print, to video, and to the web. In light of the way we now experience political events and pop culture, Price offers a new description of public space and questions the viability of public art as we understand it."

So Free is about the increasingly free-flowing circulation of information in 'our' day and age, its implications and how it has affected 'our' relation to and in public space. While this is definitely a theme worth an exhibition (and many more), there's a disconcerting use of all-encompassing words - such as we, culture, pubic space, dispersion, information - that dilute these complicated realities into smooth processes and make the art/show difficult to take seriously.

The most obvious of these vacuous uses is of the term 'we'.

Who is 'we'? Is it the artists' and New Museum staff's class and generation? People born between the Oil Crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall, with high degrees, a certain creative edge and all living in NYC (12 out of 21 of the artists) or at least a Western metropole (all artists)? If that is the case, then yes that 'we' does have a different way of exchanging information and experiencing the public realm, otherwise the 'we' must be nuanced - put more bluntly exchanged for "the New Museum's target audience." It isn't a question of how the 'we' excludes those who do not own a computer, do not speak English or are living under the level of poverty but rather considering the people who are part of the Western 'popular culture' and 'public space' are not necessarily following youtube trends, responding to Yahoo! answers, staying updated on their urban landscape via Google Maps and socializing on chatroulette.

In a way the use of 'we' illustrates the paradox of the net art community: they make claims and believe they are asking questions on the  popular while dialoguing only with a niche of people who aren't part of the popular.

If this is what defines an avant-garde I think the show would have been better off reconciling the popular this avant-gardism claims to embody with the popular of the 'we' the museum says it wants to explore.

This video accompanies this post just because it's web related, and it sums the both very popular (we've all seen at least one of these) and very exclusiveness (who has seen all of them) of 'web' culture.