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.

There has been a lot of talk swirling around the blogs lately (or maybe I’m just catching up with it now) about online dating sites and love in general. Or maybe I’ve just noticed it more lately. As human beings we all just want to find that one relationship that defines us. Where everything is easy and there’s no work involved because you’re just both so relieved to have one another. The kind of relationship that Salt and Pepper have (the spices not the 80’s supergroup). Salt and Pepper are your two friends that won’t stop making kissy faces at each other even though you’ve told them to stop it and that it makes you uncomfortable. They’ve been together for years but they still call each other by their pet names and say things like “no, you’re the greatest”. You never (ok, so I don’t want to say never because of the internet blog grammar Illuminati) but you seldom ever find one and not the other. You would never see a table with just salt and no pepper and you would never find “tubular” salt packets without the mini-packets of pepper close by. They never leave each others side. We’ve all have (or have had) friends like this. I guess when we become

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I decided to uproot my blogger and join the fine folks here at WordPress…one of the designers I work with is bidding on a project which requires the addition of a blog for patients of heart transplants…I did some research and decided to migrate. Not that I was really that attached to the blogger but I had just gotten everything set up like I like it. But just like an apartment by the time you really get comfortable in one place, you find something better. My next move will be to my own domain justin-strickland.com and that should be coming up soon. Until then keep watching for posts…and maybe I’ll get a comment…one can only hope

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I was thinking about the internet dating schemes that have seemed to become so popular these days with 8 million kinds of compatibility and so on and so forth.Match.com, Eharmony.com, and I got to thinking. I believe that the match.coms and the eharmony.coms of the world could pose a much more sinister threat and be much more corrosive to society as a whole. Online dating sites may not even be the whole problem. social networks (Myspace, Facebook), MMORPG’s (Everquest, World of Warcraft). Do all of these things trivialize the benefit of real face to face interaction? I mean for all the good that they do and I have heard of people finding real happiness with another human being on the internet, they kind of take the guess work out of what we call “romance”. They are the fast food of the dating world, and could they do to human interaction what

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Heart of Darkness
Vernon Fisher
Sep 7 - Oct 7, 2007

Opening Reception
For the Artist
Friday, Sep 7
6:00 - 8:00 pmDUNN AND BROWN CONTEMPORARY 5020 Tracy Street Dallas TX 75205

Vernon Fisher has another show up at the Dunn and Brown Contemporary, and always it’s really good. I Studied under this guy at UNT and to this day it still blows me away how fresh and relevant his work is. The way he takes these disparate elements and marries them together using composition and juxtaposition still really speaks to me. Of course I may be biased seeing as though I build images in a very similar way but this guy is really at the top of his game and never ceases to amaze me if you’re in Dallas it’s worth a look-see.