Winking at the Void

http://www.earslap.com/page/otomata.html

https://www.dialupsound.com/

https://youtu.be/IF2v32xCD0Y (slow dialup)

http://www.buttonbass.com/DubstepPianoPage.html

The Yes Men operate by presenting themselves as insiders in order to be invited in, then doing something over-the-top to expose themselves as infiltrators and point out the hypocrisy. It’s a more in-your-face, direct form of the sort of thing Stephen Colbert did on The Daily Show when he adopted the satirical persona of a conservative tv journalist to use the language and views of conservative media against it.  The Yes Men take this to a more confrontational place, more akin to the spectacle of the Situationists, orchestrating events that burst the familiar bubble of conformity and force the witnesses to confront their views from an outsider context.

As for similar artists, I’m not sure if the Guerilla Girls are quite the same thing; I think their works lean more towards art than hacktivism, but they do use the objects of advertising and media, such as billboards, to display their message. Indeed, their works deliberately subverts the visual and text vocabulary of advertisement in a way that feels akin to The Yes Men.

so I’m going against Tumblr protocol and linking with attribution, because this is a really great post by Casey Fiesler, who spoke to our class last time about copyright.

My rewrite of Jorge Luis Borges’ Borges & I.

For my own version of Queneau’s exercises in style, I did a tongue-in-cheek riff on his “modern” filter: tweets.

We had an exercise on the first day of Art 4097: Remix Culture, to remix a piece of Gertrude Stein writing:

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence, and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have streamers and all the curtains have bed linen and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

Naturally, in class I came up with some sort of emo bullshit, which bored me to tears. So as I sit here at the office, I decided to have more fun with it and inject some randomness, and I replaced all the key words with a word from a random word generator. I just used the words from the list it gave me, though I did change the tenses accordingly. This is far more interesting.

In the inside there is preserving, in the outside there is absorbing, in the morning there is minding, in the evening there is memory. In the evening there is memory. In memory anything is frozen, in memory anything is entropy, in memory there is appetite, in memory there is feathering, in memory there is ignorance and entirely mistaken there is gripping. All the reptiles are genuine and all the closeups are alphabetical and all the meat is grinding and all the amuse* is amusing. This makes ink.

I like that a random word generator piece is somehow more internally sensical than what I wrote from my head. Perhaps Gertrude was onto something.