As I continue doing Art Dirt Redux I realize how different and advanced the series is. All art works bring realizations. As a working artist part of the work is to focus on the process and through that focus understand what you are doing. It’s odd because art making, the creative process is by its nature partially unconscious. That’s why it is different from say, computer programming or a manufacturing procedure. With any procedural process one expects a specific outcome. There are no surprises and no realizations. With art it's different. You engage in the process to be surprised by the outcome. Art Dirt Redux is sound art. It’s influences are Musique Concrete and early conceptual art documentation works such as Robert Morris’ piece, Sculpture With The Sound Of Its Own Making.

Podcasting in iTunes 4.9

via Six Apart:

Our co-founder Mena Trott is attending the D: All Things Digital conference, where she just sent word that Steve Jobs did a demo of iTunes 4.9. The big news is, the new version of the popular music management app beloved by iPod owners will feature integrated support for podcasting. Current plans call for podcasts to be free downloads: Users will submit their podcasts and Apple will be hand-picking the content it makes available to iTunes users.

Back in December we asked members of the thingist mailing list to suggest names for the new thing.platform. Here are the results:

(The winner was Postmistress Magda Sawon with post.thing.net and she's still waiting for her prize.)

?ru.thing.net
[x].thing.net
404.thing.net
a.thing.net
a6v92oq.thing.net
abstract.thing.net
ambient.thing.net
ante.thing.net
any.thing.net
are_those_your_real_teeth.thing.net

Fuel for a creative nation

The Creative Archive is a BBC led initiative to provide access to public service audio and video archives in a way that allows the British public to find, share, watch, listen and re-use the archive as a fuel for their own creative endeavours. In other words, you can rip, mix and share the BBC.

How?

The Creative Archive is a product of this exciting era of digital media and the internet. It's possible because of innovations in technology and content licensing, along with editorial vision. However, it remains a challenging and complex project with many unknowns. To help us understand the best way to deliver the Creative Archive, we have decided to start with a pilot project.

NET ART DEAD!

Mark Tribe has called it in the press release for inSite_05:

Although artists continue to work online in ever greater numbers, net art as a movement is now over. But to say that the net is just another medium along with video, painting, installation, etc. would be misleading. The net is both a medium and a platform, a set of tools for art-making and a distribution channel for reaching people. The net can still enable artists to reach a global audience without the assistance of art world institutions. Equally important, it can enable artists to reach audiences that never set foot in a gallery, museum or performance space. M.T. (* title from ‘Tijuana for Dummies’ by Hiperboreal)"

Slub will do a live-coding performance at Curating, Immateriality, Systems: A conference on curating digital media. Tate Modern, London, 4 June 2005

A walk along the Hudson River Park on Sunday, May 22, 2005.

Nina Katchadourian at Sara Meltzer Gallery presents The Genealogy of the Supermarket and Other New Works and while the main piece was impressive and funny in the end it did little more than cue up The Clash in my mental iPod. Rather than being "lost in the supermarket" Katchadourian takes the American fascination with geneology to its consumerist limit by making a family tree out of familiar and not so familiar brands. Good idea nicely articulated (I now know the familial relationship between Aunt Jemima and Mr. Clean) but she left me feeling, as a one-liner, it could have been done more economically.

From the website:

KURATOR.ORG investigates new ideas around curating in the context of 'immateriality' and 'network systems'. It asks: If the assumption is made that traditional curating follows a centralised network model, then what is the position of the curator within a distributed network model?

The project is a recognition of the fact that art and culture in general is increasingly dealing with communication and information systems. It examines curatorial practice that takes into account the transformative nature of digital objects and systems, as well as production processes that are dynamic, collaborative and distributed. The idea of the 'system' is particularly important in this context in that it not only refers to the physical site of curatorial production, the computer and the network, but also to the technical and conceptual properties of what constitutes the curatorial object and the 'operating system' of art.

Kindred Spirits, 1849
Asher B. Durand
Property of Wal-Mart

The New York Public Library recently sold an icon of American landscape painting, Kindred Spirits (1849) by Asher B. Durand, to Wal-Mart