The problem with capitalism is that it devalues everything except that which can be turned into a commodity. What happens if you don't want to be bought and sold or you don't want to buy and sell? Then what? The world is not only barter and trade. It's a mistake to see it that way.

You heard it first. MP3 You first it heard. MP3 Heard you first it. MP3 First heard it you. MP3 Or something like that. MP3 This is it. MP3 First it heard you. MP3 The first DaDa@MoMA Mashup.
MP3

The copyright debate is an absurd debate for emerging or the average artist. Only "A" list artists and their handlers worry about copyright and illegal copying. It's actually a 20th century obsession first laid out by Walter Benjamin in his essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. What's strange and new about digital networks is how the information flows and changes. Some of the most advanced information theorists of the 1960's talked about equating information decay with the second law of thermodynamics that talks about entropy. This new century is about information. The question is how does an artist gain support when they produce information? Is information collectible?

As one of the first artists to start working on the internet I’m acutely aware of how the online environment-language-discourse-semiology is evolving. People are beginning to talk about Web 2.0 as the next wave of the net.

Meta tagging is a key issue as more information is created for or migrates to the web. Meta-CC just went on line at: http://meta-cc.net/faq-new.php . Perpetual Art Machine offers a slightly different take on tagging; http://perpetualartmachine.com. My own piece RANTAPOD, http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod has a rudimentory, evolving internal tagging system as well.

This is an updated riff off The society of the spectacle by Guy Debord. Consumers become marketing data in the ebb and flow of information systems. I edited this by separating all the spoken phrases and the rearranging them. I also created groupings of rythmic patterns based on drumming and drumrolls. I can see with this piece that even though I've shuffled all the bits of the performance, the meaning still comes through. The next steps are to train myself to perform so that in the post production process the material is rich. I'm also creating a rudimentary language system of tics and patterns. All of this leads to a databased performance work that can be generated by an algorithm.

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People mistake art for artifice and they mistake information for truth.

The revue written by Judith Rofenberg and Trebor Scultz talks about the "absence of beauty" at the Whitney Biennial and how there is a general malaise or laziness in the current art discourse. This rant happens to address the same issues.

The good news just keeps on coming I may turn into a preacher. ;-)

NYFA (The New York Foundation for the Arts) has an interesting online magazine called NYFA Current.
http://nyfa.org

Their magazine features refreshingly straight talk about art and artists’ projects. Short, sweet and eminently readable, they asked me to write a piece for their Rants & Raves section.
http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=476&fid=6&sid=17 the piece will only be up for two weeks.

Taxonomy is everywhere.

This past week, I did two Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt interviews,that indicate a new discourse of sorts for the digital art arena. One was with Marc Garret of http://www.furtherfield.org and the other with [PAM] http://perpetualartmachine.com

Garret talks about node London, a media arts festival that was de-centralized and non-hierarchical and [PAM] talks about video art folksonomy. Things are getting interesting when you look at the steve.museum http://www.steve.museum as well.

I started RANTAPOD as a continuation of my concerns with performance and especially performance using the digital networks. I did quite a bit of Performance Art in the 1970’s. Performance Art is different from Theater. It comes from a different tradition. The processes of conventional art such as painting and sculpture inspire performance art. The notion of performance art is that the creative activities, the steps along the way to making an object, are as revealing as the final product/object. Indeed, for the artist the process is more important than the final product. Performance art reveals the process.

John Lennon had it right; Television is the opiate of the masses.