IF/THEN
A Book Review of “Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses” by Jussi Parikka (Peter Lang Books, 2007, 327 pages) by Joseph Nechvatal

{loop:file = get-random-executable-file;
if first-line-of-file = then goto loop;
prepend virus to file;}

Maria Joao and I took a short trip to the MET today. Its always been one of my favorite places in New York City. For the most part just paintings and sculptures. I think the Dan Flavin piece was the only thing plugged in. We went primarily to see the Neo Rauch "PARA" show.

Die Fuge (The Fugue/The Gap), 2007

It's been asked why Rhizome, and for that matter a lot of listservs for that matter, have dropped in the degree of content during the present decade. There are a few lists out there that still have a lot of content, traffic, but in general, Pall Thayer's observation that listserv traffic has dropped considerably, at first glance, appears to be true.

Duchamp, A Biography by Calvin Tompkins, published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1996

A frequent critique of the Venice Biennale is its organization into national pavilions. As a legacy of the first Biennale of 1895, when nations were young, naive, and given to a prideful beating of their imperial wings, the idea of identifying particular art with a particular country and then competing for the best of show, a Golden Lion, might have once seemed appropriate. It now seems wholly anachronistic. In our current climate of globalization, of multi-national corporations and commissions funding large exhibitions in far flung territories, of curators and artists hopping from one project and one continent to another, segregation according to nationality appears somewhat fusty and quaint.

I have been using StumbleUpon for a little while now and it has been an enjoyable education for me. I have found various fascinating, cultural ideas and interesting links which I would not have discovered if I had remained using the same, usual channels for research.

The Parallax View
by Slavoj Zizek (MIT Press)
Reviewed by Frederic Jameson

update
In regards to the upcoming "Automatic Update" exhibition at the MoMA NY, there seems to be a great deal of question about a number of issues. These are; the re-writing of history,the relevance of net-based art, the perception of popular culture, and the role of the New Media movement/ Genre in the contemporary scene. What seems to be a key dialectic about the state of New Media as force in contemporary art derives from two poles; one from the MoMA colophon about the Automatic Update show; The dot-com era infused media art with a heady energy. Hackers,programmers, and tinkerer-revisionists from North America, Europe, and Asia developed a vision of art drawn from the technology of recent decades. Robotic pets, PDAs, and the virtual worlds on the Internet provoked artists to make works with user-activated components and lo-res, game-boy screens. Now that "new media" excitement has waned, an exhibition that illuminates the period is timely. Automatic Update is the first reassessment of its kind, reflecting the artists ambivalence to art, revealed through the ludicrous, comical, and absurd use of the latest technologies. [1]

Príamo Lozada died June 13th at 7:30 pm during the preparation of the Mexican Pavillion in Venice. Apparantly he accidentally fell out of a 3rd story window of the building and later died in a hospital in Mestre near Venice.

Lozada was the visionary curator of the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City.

The Summer of Love show at the Whitney Museum is great fun. It’s full of experiences – walk-in and peer-in rooms and boxes, kinetic sculptures, video and film, album and underground newspaper covers, photos of celebs and jes folks, and even some painting and sculpture. Coming from the Tate Liverpool, the show’s strategy is to represent visual culture rather than high art. That’s cool. You can almost hear the music and taste the drugs…