Columbia st antiques.jpg

Columbia st antiques.jpg
Originally uploaded by lovers v haters

Found an awesome antique shop on Columbia street in Cambridge. Bought an old ladies magazine from the 50's. Hooray!

Facebook does it *AGAIN*

Okay, in my rational mind, the one over-educated in the school of 1-3rd wave feminisms, pop culture, and marketing, I know that Facebook doesn't really know how much I weigh, and how much weight I gained since moving to Cambridge, where I subsist off pub food and carb-y beer. But it's really, really, really hard not to believe that their ad-targeting is configured by spying on me as I lay on my back trying to zip up my old size 6 okay size 7 jeans.

I mean, everyone whose FB profile says "female" gets these ads, right? It's not just me, right?

You can get with this, or you can get with that

The "Make John McCain Exciting" Challenge vs. Oliver Laric's "Touch My Body" Challenge.

Don't make me choose! Who's going to mash them up together?!

A proper picture of Shana, my moped

For all my friends and family at home who haven't seen her before, this is my moped. I named her Shana, chiefly after the drummer/guitarist of Jem and the Holograms. In fact, I name most of my important stuff after characters from that show. My computer's name is Jetta, and my last big project was code-named Pizzazz. (Both Misfits.) The show had a HUGE impact on me.

Shana is a 1988 Tomos Bullet A-3. She's currently in the shop having her carb cleaned, petcock and valves looked at. Also, the exhaust pipe is coming off, which, as Noah informs me, is messing with the compression. I love her still...

A totally indulgent & self-referential work that I've been wanting to do for some time

I finally, after talking about it for so long, wrote the block of code that can interpret XML files to control various video parameters in Processing (thank you, proXML library for being so handy). Jonny and I had this convo about a year or so ago, discussing how rad it would be if an art object was somehow conscious of how popular/valuable it was, and was then able to react accordingly. If it wasn't doing so well, it would spruce itself up to get your attention. Conversely, if it was doing extremely well, it could flaunt it. This would be an exercise of pure cynicism in the face of "net.art" and its convoluted market, and would explore the tension between the facets of a networked art object that are participatory (or require active participation from the viewer) and those that are autonomous to the object itself (i.e. its aesthetic).

I will post some vids or other visual proof-of-existence once there's more to look at; I've been using a boring-looking video to do my testing. But, now that the engine is up and running, I can start populating it with beautiful images. Also, I have to think about the indices I'd call upon to continually test the object's value. Last year, Maegh (a Marxist scholar who studies art movements through a socialist lens) and I started thinking about what a Mei Moses index for net.art would look like. This is a difficult question, because the object in itself, by definition, exists in a place that is accessible at all times by anyone. In a traditional art market, collectors pay for an object that is a stand in for the artist's "genius" and non-alienated labor. But in net.art, the prospect of ownership gets nullified (although the genius+non-alienated labor combo is still there); the net.art object requires a shift/reorganization of the market forces.

I'm still on the fence about how to quantify such an object's worth, though. I guess the clearest indicator is whether or not the artist has gained the stamp of approval from the various cultural institutions. But is there more than that?

BTDubs, I just had a dream in which a novel was written about Olia Lialina. I saw a commercial for it on TV, and jumped up to go buy it. Then I woke up, sat down at the computer, and for some reason, my code started working... Creepy!

MySpace asks the hard-hitting questions

Q:


I love targeted advertising! Enjoy this jewel... (and who are those green people?)

...thus spake Momus

Momus has this amazing blog called Click Opera that I read so regularly it's made its way to my Netvibes. Today's post is about the seemingly recent dearth of new bukkake porn (is that redundant: bukkake+porn?) that has made the spring dry after a good wet twenty years, and he makes the following analogy:

"A Kafka short story describes how leopards broke into the temple and drank the holy wine. They did it again the following year, and before long it became part of the ceremony."

I <3 you, Momus.