I’m starting to worry lately that I may never figure out any of those nagging little idiosyncrasies that are always on the tip of my brain. I may never realize why people do the little things that I find so fascinating about them. I’ve been developing a body of artwork that has been investigating the same themes for the last few years and the more work I create the less I feel I’m any closer to making any breakthroughs in my ongoing research. Maybe that’s just what a body of work is. Continuous meditations on a theme that becomes part of a greater conversation about that topic. Maybe it’s just because my art hasn’t had the benefit of an audience since I left school. In my current situation this conversation is with myself. And a conversation with one’s self tends to lead around in circles. This kind of crisis definitely gives an artist greater perspective into and appreciation for, the audiences role in the creation of artwork. And the world at large. If it wasn’t for the people who do things that are annoying, or creepy, or horrible, would the world be such a great place to live? It all goes back to the bittersweet conversation. Would the sweet be as sweet without the bitter? And would the bittersweet be so damn interesting. For a guy that preys on the bittersweet for subject matter I’m inclined to say no.

Wow. It’s been a while since I posted last. It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I feel I should preface this post by saying that I am an analog preservationist. I like the digital revolution, but think that some are way too gung-ho to replace everything with digital technology. I believe that would be detrimental to society. I was thinking this morning about how computer technology has affected the tangibility of the written word…and all that is analog for that matter. My hard drive handed in it’s resignation the other day. It was thankfully the one that holds my operating system and not the one housing my photos and music and such. But what if it had been? At my mom’s house we have all of these boxes just filled with old photos. I have a hard drive…and the hard drive is much less reliable than a box under the kitchen counter…or in a closet…or in a photo album…or where ever you keep your photos. The digital format has not only affected photography (a profession in which the new trend is digital photography over traditional) but the written word as well. As the printed word hurdles headlong toward extinction I wonder if a completely digital world is the best course of action. And what will it do for the concept of nostalgia? Is the nostalgia of photos, books, newspapers, etc in the information being delivered or is it tied more to the tangible object itself? Or is it a combination of the two? I do get those nostalgic feelings when I look back in my collection of digital pictures, but it is nowhere near as intense as the feeling you get when you find photographs in a drawer or a box that you forgot about. Is it the act of finding and rediscovering these things that creates the emotional attachment we have to these objects? There is something to be said for the aging of these tangible objects as well. When photos are old they should look old. When one looks at a picture from the 1970s it looks like something from the 1970s the color is off, it looks earthy, sepia toned almost, there is a haze in the picture that lets the viewer know “hey this is old, that means it’s important”. When I look back at the photos on my computer 10, 20, 30 years from now (provided of course my hard drive doesn’t stop working , and my back ups don’t become corrupted), they will look the same as the day I took them. Something about that doesn’t sit well with me. I want my kids and grandkids to be able to connect with the photos I take in the same way that I connect with those of my parents and grandparents. Those photos, especially the one’s from the 1920s and 30s seemed more like precious objects. I have a photo of my grandfather and his army buddies that is a small photo booth size picture encased in a flimsy metal frame. I hold it very dear to me. The subject matter is very important but what is more important is that I connect with my grandfather (who is no longer with us) every time that I touch this object because that is the common relationship he and I have with this object. The object serves as a link to the past. It is precious. Can digital information accomplish the same thing? Can Walgreens digital prints and photos that don’t age really conjure up the same emotions? Books are the same way. eBooks is a concept I just don’t buy. The importance in passing a book on is having the physical object. It’s about the yellow pages, the dog-eared corners, the creases in the spine, the underlined passages, the intimacy of graphite on paper. All of these things make a book what it is. Magazines are only good for one thing, being in a pile in a doctor’s office, or on the back of the toilet, or on a shelf on a bookcase. I love my collection of Artforums. The arrangement of them on my bookshelf acts as a time line through which I can track the last 4 years of my life. With all of this importance that resides firmly in the act of these “things” being tangible objects how can people go around making claims like “the printed word is dead” or “digital is the wave of the future”? These objects exist because we need them. If we give up these objects do we also forfeit our history? In a purely digital world all is without age, and when all is ageless even nostalgia is obsolete.

Is the meta-narrative something that is still valid in our society today? Part of what post-modern thought implies is that the recent trends have traded one meta, or all encompassing, narrative of society and culture for many local-narratives in which the focus is upon individual experience. Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Gottlieb, Rothko, de Kooning) I think was the last death rattle (at least here in America) of the Idea of a meta narrative. They had embraced this idea of the meta-narrative in their work, which is still referred to as being “heroic”. Their themes are that of redemption, aggression, and the transcendence of the medium, coinciding with the end of a primarily industrial economy in the west. The “hero” has since become an obsolete idea. Not only in the way we look at art but also in our culture. The new primary focus being a highly individualized service based economy fueled by the rise of the web, and now the web 2.0. In this realm of the web 2.0 the meta-narrative is almost non existent, with the advent of the blogosphere, countless social networking sites, file sharing, etc. We no longer exist as one large community, or a single entity, and instead our focus is on that of individual experiences and opinions. Post-modernity rules the internet, and it deconstructs itself as we build upon the ideas and concepts of it. It offers every user a unique and tailored experience. The individual chooses what information to ingest, which information to present, and has full creative control of both. If you don’t want to look at some part of it, you don’t have to. If you choose not to divulge a piece or pieces of information you just don’t offer it. And in doing so individuals have the ability to create themselves as the person they want to be. The walls have all but come down and the histories of geographical areas and cultures become ever-increasingly less important. The web 2.0 has become the country that the last few generations have adopted as their homeland. The internet has become the new meta-narrative and it serves as a canvas on which the children of the digital age paint their own local-narratives onto. It still amazes me that the deeper I dig the more of an argument I can make for the internet as a microcosm of modern society. The scientists are working on cloning and creating life in labs, when the web is so much closer than anyone cares to realize.

Last night I attended an event at Rubber Gloves Recording Studio in Denton. I wasn’t going to go out, but then I recanted at the last minute. The name of said event was “Short Attention Span Theater,” and it is hosted by a friend of mine that works at another local bar. The concept for this “happening” is a simple one, “you call it YouTube,” which is really a catchy phrase. Basically what happens is everyone at the bar writes their YouTube requests on a community sheet of cardstock and the list is compiled into a favorites list. While the list is being compiled music is played, a movie (last night was “Chungking Express,” with subtitles) plays in the background, and the patrons get a chance to converse. After about 20 minutes of scouring YT for the chosen clips, the music fades out and the clips are shown (some highlights included; A profile of the wrestler known as The Ultimate Warrior, “The Hard Gay”, “Jesus Music”, and “Gay Top Gun”). This process is repeated throughout the night as many times as needed. I’m glad I went out. More bars in more cities should have events like this. An exercise in post-modernity does a body good. Even if the participant isn’t aware that they are contributing to a post-modern moment (though I think a few of my fellow patrons might have been in on the joke). It’s just interesting to me and kind of makes me giggle to myself, that here we are building a social network around a social network that is built around a social network (I think I may have lost some people). Online social networks deconstruct the processes of real life social networks and simplify them into units or elements (friends, comments, favorites etc.), a visual language. In that bar last night we were essentially doing the same thing to a social network that social networks do to us. We took the simplification of our own social network (YouTube), simplified it (cardstock with requests) and extrapolated it back out into its original form (socializing at the bar between videos, providing a forum to share videos and meet people). So maybe that’s not as awesome to anyone else as it is to me. But I believe that it’s something that is worth thinking about. We live in a post-modern world and it’s important to take a step back and appreciate that every once in a while. The doors are wide open. The playing field is infinite. And we’re just starting to come into our own. What we were doing at a bar in Denton on a Wednesday night was significant. We weren’t doing it because it was significant. It was significant because we were doing it. Sometimes all you have to do is show up something is bound to happen.

What is Identity? Is it how we see ourselves? Is it how we present ourselves? Or is it how other people see us?. This is an idea I’ve been grappling with over the last few days. This idea that the internet is a place full of people that may or may not (I think that a lot of the time it is the latter) be who they present themselves to be. This morning while waiting for my car to get looked at I was reading an old issue of the New Yorker. The article was “It should happen to you” by Ben McGrath. The article revolves around Stevie Ryan, a struggling actress that made the “Little Loca,” video’s on YouTube. It also talks about some of the other videos on YouTube that have been exposed as being frauds and then the creators enjoy pseudo-fame. Lonelygirl15 , turned out to be the handiwork of filmmakers who saw YouTube as a “new art form”. Has the internet become a new canvas for digital artists to create they’re post-modern theses? I’ve got to say just thinking about students in art schools across the united states concocting elaborate performance pieces based around the mundane existence of a fabricated personality tickles me and makes me giggle. It’s perfect and I’m kicking myself for not thinking about it. What better to deconstruct than culture and social interaction? Breaking down our preconceived notions of truth and reality. I think we may be onto something. Lifelogging, is the name of the game these days and there’s no way to know what reality exists and which realities are manufactured. Manufactured online personalities, it’s fun to say. And, the bottom line here is that there is no room for these budding artists to get to “know” the audience that has made them famous. There is only what the audience thinks about what the artist has put into this digital world. Comments, vote for me, and so on and so forth ad nauseum (a practice I would condemn if I could say that I wasn’t guilty of it myself). Situational narcissism, Andy Warhol was right his 15 minutes of fame prophecy has come true, and our cultures definition of fame has changed drastically (who links you if you google yourself, how many people have watched your YT video, which season of The Real world were you on again, Seattle or Austin?). All it takes is making it onto the main page of YouTube. Whether that be by sheer virtue of your talent as an amateur filmmaker or by the merit that you have the time to vote for yourself every hour of everyday is up to you, the sky is the limit, the world is your oyster. Or, of course, you could apply to be on a reality show (America still likes those right). And as the cameras and screens keep reproducing at exponential rates (which is a whole other conversation about what your laptop and your tv are doing when you’re not around), we will all one day be able to live our lives in the public eye. It’s times like these that I wish Orwell was still around. He’d be so proud of us.