FALSE HOPE

PRESIDENT B

I'm in Split, Croatia for the Split Festival of New Film. This is the eleventh season. You might call this, "the little festival that could." It's not as well known as the E.M.A.F or V.I.P.E.R or the other film and media festivals around Europe. Split does have a habit of taking chances. Branko Karabatic, the festival head states that he started the festival with three other friends. They named it the festival of "New Film" as a riff off "Expanded Cinema" ala Gene Youngblood and Exploded Cinema which is a term used in Amsterdam to talk about "Media Art."

FREE IS EASY

August you can stay in town or get out of town either way there’s great things happening.

Check out the Spielgel tent at pier 17 at the south street seaport. It’s a beer hall/performance space that is the hippest ticket in town. I went to see Absinthe but they are also hosting a PS 122 performance series. The best part is you can hag out on the piers with spectacular views. It’s way cool. I even did an Art Dirt Redux about it. http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt/archives/000904.html

Digital media festivals are the coming thing. Tamas Banovich of Postmasters Gallery, the Museum of the Moving Image and Brooklyn Polytech are presenting one that focuses on cellphones called the 4th screen.
The 4th screen http://www.the4thscreen.net/index.php showing of videos at Lincoln Center (Sunday July 30th) was quite exciting. Everyone was impressed by the h264 mpegs that were projected in a 400 seat movie theater. The resolution was remarkable. Raphaele Shirley from [PAM] was there to see how her video “La Chute” looked, a study in red and high wire drops. Two of my Rants were selected for the show, Rich Sucker Rap from 1978 and RANTAPOD _010.

If you make something that is of arbitrary value
buh buhbuh buhbuh buhbuh buhbuh buhbuh buhbuh buh
I wonder
In corporate commodity capitalism,
being an artist is not important
art has no value in the corporate world
What happens if you make an art that has no value.

It’s always a surprise when I check the visitor stats on RANTAPOD http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod . For July 4th & 5th there were visitors from, Oman, Hong Kong, USA, Turkey, Austria, Canada, UK, Denmark, Spain, Italy, India and Finland. For some of the visitors, I can ascertain the reason for their visit. For instance, my rant about the Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide is the most likely reason for the visit from Turkey. Indeed, there is a global subculture of political commentary that ranges from terrorist recruitment sites to street art collectives http://www.woostercollective.com/ .

Probably the best museum show I have ever seen and heard is the DaDa exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. I liked it so much I was inspired and did two Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt Mash-ups. The first one uses the curators audio tour guide and the audio I recorded while Rob Murphy & I walked around the exhibit. I used a cut-up technique and shuffled the “found sound” of the curators comments.