Andrew Venell

On the subject of Google Maps again

Andrew — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:31:50 +0000

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Speaking of artworks exploiting Google Maps, here is a piece that would no doubt have been included in this month’s exhibition had it only existed a little earlier: Google Shoot View, which uses Google Street View as the backdrop for a (plotless and not particularly fun, my favorite kind) first-person shooter game. (The website is currently down, whether due to Kottke-driven traffic, a complaint from Google, or in acknowledgement of the abhorrent nature of the idea, I don’t know.) So now you can stalk your home town with an automatic weapon, as you have no doubt always dreamed in some part of your meager little human heart. What makes this game abhorrent, of course, is not the fact that it exists but the inevitability of its existence. In fact it’s such an obvious idea that it surprises you to learn it didn’t exist already, which is where I would encourage the 0% of my readers who are outrage-prone to direct their outrage.

But to the subject at hand, I’ve often wondered about a kind of predatory flaneurie, a Psychogeography of rage, let’s say, that underlies the appeal of the first-person shooter–the uncanny underside of the desire to map space, no doubt deeply buried in our horrible genes.

At any rate, in this bleak and complicated future in which we keep finding ourselves, I’m not sure which is more outrageous: that a privately-owned driverless car with nine eyes is even now stalking quietly through your neighborhood, capturing images of your street, your house, your car (perhaps you, standing awkwardly with a coffee cup (while military or police drones circle overhead, mapping, surveilling, compiling data for the global War on Everything))–or the fact that there is a video game that (finally) uses that technology to let you wave a virtual gun at your neighbor’s living room.

Dériving An Imaginary City on Art Micro Patronage, December

Andrew — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:38:18 +0000

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As I have failed to mention for days, I curated the December exhibition for Art Micro Patronage, awkwardly entitled “Dériving An Imaginary City: Virtual Psychogeographies” and concerning my ongoing interests in maps, psychogeography, what Guy Debord would-and-would-not like about the future, spatial metaphors for the virtual, &c.

Art Micro Patronage is, of course, the latest experiment in arts funding from The Present Group, as recently highlighted in this ArtInfo article which upsettingly uses the word “rich.” In my secret life I designed the website.

Abandoned shapes

Andrew — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:43:24 +0000

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This is invisible unless you click through. And will look like nothing much at all unless you're using Safari or Chrome.

Of potential interest: 10/18/11

Andrew — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:24:05 +0000

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I Was an Under-Age Semiotician – NYTimes.com
SUPERTYPE! – Comic Book Mastheads
Integrity – Jack Cheng
"Beliefs and actions are like two separate musical tones, each with its own pitch, each repeating at a certain wavelength. Integrity is when the two come together, when beliefs and actions are in total alignment. A certain cosmic vibration occurs — there is resonance."

One of the nicer tributes to Steve Jobs, and an interesting hypothesis as to why the passing of a corporate CEO is so affecting to so many.

"…To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity."
Steve Jobs narrates The Crazy Ones
The Devil on the Door
"Could a painting on a dope dealer’s storefront be the last work of Jean-Michel Basquiat?"

Interesting perspective on the idea of an artist’s estate scrubbing lesser/morally compromised works from his oeuvre. Here is another rhetorical question: Are Basquiat’s art dealers any less culpable in his death than his drug dealers?

du Travail Aliene

Andrew — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:10:05 +0000

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2004-2011

Art Is Not Necessary Here

Andrew — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 20:35:14 +0000

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Edition of 48 white pencils, inscribed. To be used in any space, time or culture where art has ceased to be necessary.

If you would like a pencil mailed to you in advance of the time at which art is no longer necessary, please explain your reasoning here. Fits a standard pencil sharpener. (Though an object of this quality fairly begs to be hand-sharpened in the manner of our forebears, for which the artist recommends David Rees.)

Eleven alarming trendencies of our new future

Andrew — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 01:56:13 +0000

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Of potential interest: 08/23/11

Andrew — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 23:28:47 +0000

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tenbullets.com
How to work (for Tom Sachs)
spin.js
Generates loading animations without images. It’s the small things.
This Is Why We’ll Never Have Innovative E-Books | Wired.com
"So instead of an independent born-digital press, publishing next-generation multimedia novels (or magazines or textbooks or children’s books or cookbooks), Facebook will probably get marginally better iOS apps… We sorely need independent innovation in digital publishing. We need talented people who are willing to try things. Meanwhile, all of the money, attention and technological skill is marching in the opposite direction. Most big media companies with plenty of capital and deep technical talent see few if any reasons to innovate or invest in books."

The selling of Push-Pop Press to Facebook: another of the ways that the big tech companies–Facebook, Google and yeah, Apple–are ultimately stifling innovation (the light, nimble, avant-garde kind), just by virtue of the money they can throw around. If you’re serious about what you’re making, don’t sell your company.
8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | | AlterNet
"How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force… During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt." Etc.
Anatomy of Norbiton
"The Anatomy of Norbiton is a field guide to Norbiton: Ideal City, and a manual of the Failed Life."

"There is no paradigm for this kind of place. Accidental Norbiton is contingent, marginal, superfluous, an ugly necessity; it is like the wires coiled under your desk, behind your bookcases; it is like the suitcases gathering dust under your bed, on top of your wardrobe; an adjunct to living, part of the logistics, the bureaucracy, never what you might call life itself, the movement and centre and focus of which seem to prevail elsewhere… Perfect, then, for a life of accidental failure. Welcome to Norbiton."

A disorientingly thorough exegesis of a vaguely Ballardian(-sounding) shithole outside London. This is what the internet was made for. All places of sufficent size should have a quiet, depressed bureaucrat whose job it is to write things like this.

I will be the sender:

Andrew — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:18:23 +0000

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Epeopke

Andrew — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:22:46 +0000

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