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March 30, 2005
LicenseMusic.com
Thanks to IT Conversations, I just found a website that may fulfill all of the criteria from my last post on the need for an easy online music licensing system. Right now, I'm listening to a conversation on the Future of Music with Gerd Leonhard and David Kusek, the authors of a new book called, coincidentally, The Future of Music.Leonhard runs LicenseMusic.com. According to their about page:
LicenseMusic.com was founded in 1996 in San Francisco and quickly became the default destination for the online licensing of pre-cleared library and production music.Now, "pre-cleared library and production music" are not exactly the popular sample sources that makers of mashups and remixes want to access. However, again according to their about page, they are about to release a new version of the site which will include the following services:
I especially like the sound of the "unique automated negotiating tool" for determining prices for licensing from the "major artists" and "chart hits". This could be exactly what's need to open up the Long Tail of licensing. I'll keep an eye on it when it comes online and report back on how well it works.
- * An online marketplace for music of all genres for any licensing application.
- * Instant licensing of pre-cleared tracks via a licensing matrix incorporating tens of thousands of deal variations.
- * A sophisticated music search engine providing almost limitless search options and automatic prompts to assist users in locating, hearing and storing tracks.
- * A Subscription Service, providing unlimited flat-fee access to over 20,000 tracks of pre-cleared music.
- * Over 100,000 major artist recordings and 10,000 chart hits, negotiable online using a unique automated negotiating tool.
- * A virtual music licensing "office" providing filing, project planning, track search, streaming, downloading, negotiating, transactional and email functionalities.
Tagged: licensing, royalties, LicenseMusic.com, sampling, Remix Culture
Posted by Greg at 4:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 29, 2005
Business Idea: Digitized Rights Management
Summary: We need a unified web-based system for clearing samples and paying royalties on cover versions. Such a system, if it was highly user friendly, both for the licensor and the licensee, would result in the legitimization of a greater portion of the growing "Remix Culture" and, therefore, more money for rights holders, more freedom for creative artists, and more open availability of so-called 'derivative works'.
I recently posted about the new "digital parlour music" being made both by emerging stars such as Keren Ann and Benjamin Biolay and by friends of mine (for example, Amy Sue and Chris Anderson) and other real people. Along with the tide of home recording technology, the aesthetics of sampling -- what is more and more being called "Remix Culture" -- has risen as well.
From Mashups to the popularity of the Creative Commons, Remix Culture (applied to everything from music and the visual arts to software to architecture) seems to be the cultural and, specifically, musical word of the minute. It was the theme of this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in all but name; Wired recently ran a cover story called "Sample the Future" which included a copy of a CD with a collection of songs made under a Creative Commons license. It is simply everywhere.
The rise of the digital home music studio brought Remix Culture to the masses. As Richard Koman put it in an introduction to a recent interview with the father of Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig:
What do you get when you mix P2P, inexpensive digital input devices, open source software, easy editing tools, and reasonably affordable bandwidth? Potentially, you get what Lawrence Lessig calls remix culture: a rich, diverse outpouring of creativity based on creativity.One of the things that my friends discovered in making and releasing songs of theirs that include samples (Chris's "RU Alone") or are covers (Amy's version of "I'm On Fire") is that going the legal route of clearing the samples or getting permission for the cover version is extremely onerous. Even though the Harry Fox Agency (along with BMI the main entity in charge of licensing) recently added an online system for purchasing a mechanical license there are still a large number of obstacles for the license-seeker and lost opportunities for economic efficiencies.
The difficulties facing a person trying to clear a sample (rather than record a cover version) include the need to obtain both a "mechanical license" (via Harry Fox or BMI) as well as permission from the owner of the recording's master, the lack of a unified search between Harry Fox and BMI and the difference between the two companies' policies and pricing, and, most importantly, the prohibitive cost involved in actually purchasing all the appropriate licenses, especially for small independent artists who will likely never see a dime from their work. Creative Commons was developed to deal with these issues, but it does so only on the copyright holder's side. CC allows artists to make their work available for participation in Remix Culture, but it does nothing to make it easier for remixers to legitimately use the enormous library of music licensed under the existing regime or for license holders in this regime to monetize any of the illegal Long Tail use of their music by independent artists who can't afford the steep fees.
In these difficulties lies the seed of a profitable, maybe even transformative, business. This busines would construct a web front end for both BMI and Harry Fox's libraries. The website would need to be highly user friendly. It should feel as much like the iTunes Music Store as possible and as little like a complex legal transaction. Next, the business would have to convince Harry Fox and BMI to put in place a much more fine grained pricing structure than their outmoded current division into manufacturing more or less than 2500 units. This structure could resemble the variety of available Creative Commons licenses in that it would depend on the specific use to which the licensor was going to put the sample. Further, in order to be available for samples (rather than simply cover versions), the business would need to co-ordinate with record labels to unify "master licenses" with "mechanical licenses" (if not legally then at least practically so that it would be invisible to the consumer) in order to provide one-stop shopping for musicians looking to use samples in their work. Again, there should be variable pricing for the master licenses portion of the price based on the demand for the specific sample (if a piece of music was popular amongst remixers, it could demand a higher fee, but music that has never brought in any royalties might be made to do so if it was easily available and cheap enough).
The payoff for accomplishing all of these difficult things (both for the business and the copyright holders and record labels) would be that some portion of the illegal sampling ecosystem would come into the light and be monetized. Just as the iTunes Music Store brought part of the illegal file sharing market into legitimacy, creating an entirely new revenue stream for labels and bands in the process, this new business would would attract the ethical remixers for whom the only obstacles preventing them from paying for their samples are price and difficulty. We may be headed for a utopia where all culture is easily and freely available to all for creative use, but until we get there, there is a great deal of money to be made making the current badly broken system work better.
Tagged: royalties, licensing, music, Harry Fox, BMI, Creative Commons, business idea, Long Tail
Posted by Greg at 3:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 25, 2005
Is Clear Channel A Monopoly?
There was an interesting post a couple of days ago over at The Technology Liberation Front on The Radio "Monopoly" Myth. You hear so much discussion of the dangers of media consolidation, much of it with a Chicken Little-ish tone, that it's refreshing to see any argument on the other side, even if that argument happens to be tragically misguided.
Here's his argument: the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) (the sum of the square of the market shares of each individual firm in the market) rates the consolidation of any market on a scale from zero to 10,000. It is a major benchmark that the FCC and the DOJ use to gauge antitrust violations and to approve mergers. Because of the very large total number of radio stations in this country, the HHI for radio is very low: either 462 based on revenue or 92 based on the raw number of firms. This is on a scale where the normal range is 1000 (normal market concentration) to 2000 (high concentration verging on antitrust). Therefore, despite their large number of stations, Clear Channel can't possibly be a monopoly since they control such a small fraction of the total industry's revenue or stations.
So my question is: What happens when you limit the pool to large urban markets? I bet these market percentages go way up and even push the numbers necessary for monopoly status. For example, according to Journalism.org, Clear Channel's 1194 stations (which is more than the next seven competitors combined, by the way, including both Viacom subsidiaries, Infinity and Citadel) are spread throughout about 180 markets making for more than six stations in each market. What do you want to bet that these 180 markets include at least the 100 largest media markets in America? Can you even name six radio stations in your market? What about if you don't include public radio? When you look at it this way, even though Clear Channel doesn't literally own a monopoly share of all radio stations, it starts to look very much like they have a monopoly share of the actual market, of ears if not frequencies. But isn't that the metric that really matters?
In regards to the HHI based on revenue, I don't think that it's to Clear Channel's credit that they've managed to put such dreadful and unpopular programming on their stations that, despite their monopoly shares of most urban markets, they still can't manage to make any money. It's interestinng that, when looked at this way, the HHI, which at first glance seemed to clear Clear Channel of the cloud of monopolist accusations, now starts to look like a snapshot of exactly the way the company has destroyed the radio industry: they own all the big stations but they somehow have managed to drive away the audience and therefore eliminate all the revnues. This seems like a somewhat strange fact to bring up on their behalf.
Tagged: Clear Channel, radio, consolidation, HHI, Technology Liberation Front
Posted by Greg at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Chris's del.icio.us Script for Net News Wire
I've mentioned Net News Wire 2.0, my RSS reader of choice, here a number of times before (most recently here, and in my original review). In that original review, I discussed the possibility of NNW replacing Safari as my browser of choice. One of the things standing in the way of this happening was NNW's lack of bookmarks, and, more pertinently, bookmarklets, such as one allowing you to post a page to del.icio.us.
Well, my Music For Dozens cohort, Chris Anderson, recently posted his Apple Script for posting the current displayed web page to del.icio.us to both his blog and NNW's script section of their site. I've found that using the Script, especially in combination with Tinker Tool to assign a hotkey to the script (I'm using cmd+0), I now only go over in to Safari about a third of the time to follow links I find in NNW (Flash and general media conent still work better there). One more step closer to living in an RSS reader/browser hybrid. Now, all we need is bookmarks and we'll be too close to call. . .
Tagged: Net News Wirte, RSS, reader, syndication, Apple, Script
Posted by Greg at 3:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
The New Digital Parlour Music
As part of what seems to be "March is Keren Ann Month" in the national music media (NPR, NYT Fashion, the Boston Globe, and even Pitchfork), the NY Times ran a story by Jon Pareles this Sunday on the rise of Home Studios (Home Sweet Studio). In addition to Keren Ann, the piece mentioned artists ranging from Moby to Mice Parade, Bruce Springsteen to Aesop Rock and what virtues recording at home had brought to their work. The theory seems to be that "working in solitude can nurture more eccentric, more private songs," the studio becoming "a sanctuary: part sandbox, part confessional."
I found two aspects of this piece striking. First of all, isn't this old news? Moby's Play came out in 1999, was made at home, and was the biggest record in the world for a long time. By this point, just about everyone I know has a home studio. Granted, I live in Portland where there's more than one musician for every six people, but still it seems like the ever-falling price of home recording equipment and the ever-easier integration of that equipment with the computer has made home studios mandatory for anyone with even the slightest interest in making music themselves. The reality of the artists they talked about in the piece, going off to do multi-thousand dollar days in the studio to give songs a final polish, sill seems far removed from both the limitations and the immediacy of the home studio work I see around me.
The thing Pareles got right, though, is the musical aesthetic. Rock bands, hip-hop and 'R and B' groups, country, just about every other type of popular music is communal and social in its prouction. Music is rarely the sentiment of one person confessed to no one in particular. Even when it seems to be, as in the work of certain song writers whose work gets described as 'confessional' (Bright Eyes, whose star is burning even brighter than Keren Ann's and in the same firmament, comes to mind) there is always either a narrative distance as in the novelist's art, or an emotive distance as in the ironist's.
The domestic privacy that swaddles this new home studio environment, on the other hand, allows for a truly confessional music, music not intended to be heard by anyone in particular and, often, not actually heard by anyone at all. The tools of the trade tend to be drum machines, samplers, and sequencers along with acoustic guitars and quiet, often whispered, vocals. Rather than sampling vintage or contemporary popular music (the unit of meaning in the communal music venues where sampling-based music was born, like dance and hip-hop clubs), this new private music tends to sample sounds found in the home: pets' purrs, dishes' clanks, doors' slams, etc. The vocals, and other sounds that "move air", are only as loud as is natural in a small bedroom.
Current recording-based pop (Beyonce's Crazy in Love is a paradigmatic example) is almost pefectly public. It is all extroversion, from the sample of soul horns to the dance beats and the shout-outs and the shout-alongs. But before the era of recording, music was played in the home. People performed actual works of musical "literature" on the piano for their own enjoyment and on occasions when communal listening was called for. This new Private Music, while made with technological tools derived from the suite of systems created to make song's like Crazy In Love, is a return to the spirit of parlor music, music made for a small group of intimate acquaintances or, more simply, just for the music's maker herself to pass the time.
Note: It is one of the great ironies of this post-whatever age that technologies and social systems are rapidly falling into place to make this Private Music public in a big way. The explosion of the popularity of blogs have illustrated the interest we posses in the intimate details of other peoples lives and, potentially, in their thoughts and creations.
Tagged: music, home, recording, digital, Keren, Ann
Posted by Greg at 4:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 18, 2005
The Tiniest of Hacks
The scale of this idea really couldn't be a whole lot smaller, but since I know there's a couple of you out there who have recently started using (or recently bought: good for you) Net News Wire 2.0b, I thought I'd go ahead with it anyway:
Hitting 'tab' cycles your focus between the three panes of the main NNW window: the subscription list pane, the items and tabs pane, and the content pane. Here's what's useful about it: When you click on a link from a post in the content pane of a News Item, NNW will open the link as your rightmost tab and jump the content pane to it if you've got that preference selected. I don't keep that preference selected because I like to use open tabs as a kind of standing "to read" list that I return when I have some free time. Usually, after clicking, I want to keep my News Items in the content pane so I can just hit the 'up arrow' when I'm ready to read the next Item. Anyway, even though I've got my preferences set to just open the link in the background, NNW still shifts my focus to the new page (without displaying it), the result being that the 'up arrow' no longer moves me to the next News Item. For awhile, I was having to mouse over to click on the next Item, until I found that if I just hit 'tab' twice in quick succession, the focus would be back where it belonged and I could 'up arrow' again happily.
As I say, this 'hack' couldn't be smaller in scale, but it's made me happier since, in reading upwards of 100 items a day, I probably click through 20 or 30 times, so it makes for just that many fewer times I have to take my hands off the keyboard. Also, like any good hack that undoes a user interface bug (of whatever scale) it goes just that little bit further to syncing my brain with the program, so my 'flow' with it is never interupted, and the amount of time I have to spend on the task at hand goes down a bit -- here it's by just enough that I can notice it with satisfaction.
Tagged: NetNewsWire, hack, rss, reader, syndication
Posted by Greg at 5:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 16, 2005
Ganson's Dancing Machines
Sometime in January, I saw an excellent episode of PBS's Nova: Science Now. It had a story about Mirror Neurons (which we use to respond to other people's facial expressions), a profile of an MIT AI guy who obsessively -- and hopelessly, according to his girlfriend -- tries to schedule his own life down to the second, a piece about sand dunes that sing in the wind, and a tiny little clip about an artist that makes moving sculptures.
The clip started on a closeup of a wishbone walking across a white ground. It had a teetering sauntering gait and was attached to a metal armature. After a series of close ups of rotating flywheels and oscillating springs, the camera pulled back to reveal the entire contraption. At first glance it looked like the wishbone was pulling a gigantic Rube Goldberg device more than five times its height made up of spindly bicycle wheels. After watching it for a moment I realized, that the machine was, in fact, generating the motion, pushing the little bone along and causing its teeter and saunter.
The film and sculpture both turned out to be by an artist named Arthur Ganson; the particular piece on display was called Machine With Wishbone. Ganson is both a brilliant machinist and an eloquent poet of motion, especially walking. He tends to use large and complex mechanisms to produce naturalistic, often human-like motion in small organic or mundane objects. The baroquely intricate workings of his handmade contraptions are as beautiful in their absurd and artificial complexity as the resultant organic motions are in their simplicity and familiarity. This combination makes for a compelling result every time, avoiding the common trap of art that uses the organic/machinic juxtaposition to take sides.
Ganson neither laments the dominance of the thoughtless machine over the living soul nor celebrates the augmentation of the mortal body by omnipotent technology. Instead he sets the two to dancing together, as partners.
Tagged: Arthur, Ganson, mechanic, kinetic, sculpture, art
Posted by Greg at 12:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 14, 2005
The Launch of Podshow.com and Why Social Networking Sites are the Wall Marts of the Long Tail
On today's Daily Source Code, Adam Curry announced a new venture, Podshow.com that he is undertaking with Ron Bloom to "bring together the elements to create a marketplace" for Podcasting. He listed these: making it easier to find Podcasts through search and directories, enabling monetization through convincing big Madison Avenue types of the value of narrowcast advertising, and lowering barriers to entry for content creation by anyone.
I think these are all the right ideas, hip to the best current thinking in these areas like the Long Tail, etc. Something occurred to me in looking at the crappy temporary pre-launch page they put up (crufty with advertising-speak: buzzwords and catchphrases, and confusing non-compliant design): The big movers of the folksonomic/tagging/new whatever, Flickr and del.icio.us, have raised the bar for useability of site design. Both of those sites do complicated things that are hard to explain to people who haven't used the sites. It is a virtue of their implementation that "you really have to use it to get it" is both so often said of these sites and so true. What they do can't be reduced to buzzwords or a satisfying one sentence marketing statement. With podshow.com, and so many other sites, on the other hand, I think that if you didn't already know what they were about when you got there, you would have no way of figuring it out from the site and no chance of figuring out how to use the site itself.
Right now, this is not such a big deal because we're talking about a parking page. But soon, when they launch their service, they better have a design of equivalent quality to del.icio.us and Flickr, one that is both self-explanatory and a pleasure to use. I guess what I'm realizing is that the excellence of these sites' designs may not just be a happy coincidence, but a necessity of operating in the Long Tail. Since, in Long Tail territory, people are following whims and whisps of their own taste, wandering around laterally to find new things that they might like and new people whose taste they trust, rather than searching for a specific pre-known thing, the "stores" have to be much more responsive to their desires, making it simple and obvious for them to navigate in whatever direction occurs to them at any moment.
Take the totally dominant sell-your-own-music site CD Baby as a example. Try to find At Dusk on CD Baby. It's easy. You just type the name into their search field and you get good results. But then try to navigate from there to any other semi-similar band, Menomena for example. It is next to impossible to do just by clicking on links even though we're in the same scene in the same city and, in fact, know each other a little bit.
The key to this kind of navigation is social networking. You don't want to browse other bands in the same genre or in the same region, you want to see what bands other people who like At Dusk also like. It's just like the real world: the best way to find out about music is to talk to people who you already have something in common with musically (say that you run into at a show or in a record store) and then explore what else they like that you might not know about yet. On the other end, everyone has a friend or two who they trust for music refrences, who is always listening to new things and has taste similar enough to your own that their recommendations will have a pretty high hit rate. The more people you find like this the more good music you'll find.
Sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr do a lot to encourage these kinds of interations. They're always pushing you down the Long Tail towards things you don't know about yet but might like rather than up to the most popular items that you already have an opinion on but that get bought the most.
I can't think of a medium that is more ripe for this kind of treatment than podcasting. It has the social networking element already built in by its relation to blogging and there really isn't anything narrower than the Tap Dancing News on openpodcast.org or any of the 6 items in the ipodder.org subdirectory for "wine".
I don't know if it's going to be podshow.com, but sometime soon, someone is going to build a great social networking site for podcasting and that's going to be the ballgame.
Tagged: podcasting, social, networking, del.icio.us, flickr, tagging, folksonomy, adam, curry, podshow.com
Posted by Greg at 4:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 11, 2005
Art or Not?
In a recent post, I mentioned the popular series of Rate-my-X sites that followed the popularity of Hot-or-Not. A fun new one is Art-or-Not? on which you can grade people's art on a scale from one to ten and submit your own work to be graded. It's like the artistic communities that have arisen on Flickr, but with more negativity.
Tagged: art-or-not, art, rating, sites, Hot-or-Not
Posted by Greg at 2:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2005
Making URLs Smaller
My house and bandmate has a problem. Oftentimes, when I send him interesting links that happen to have long URLs, for some reason his Hotmail account splits up the link, ending the part it sends to the browser at some arbitrary point (I think the point has to do with where Mail.app was displaying a line break when I sent the email).
Recently I found a solution to this problem: TinyUrl.com. They take your long, crappy URLs and parse them into something simple, like "http://tinturl.com/6". That kind of thing won't cause a line break. Hotmail won't freak out. They've got a bunch of other smart uses for the thing on their homepage, but I liked this one because it solved a problem I'd encountered that I never thought would be solved.
Tagged: tiny, url, Hotmail, useful, web
Posted by Greg at 2:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 9, 2005
Flickr Fixr
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned an interesting use of Flickr photosets that I'd seen. Having seen how cool that was, I went over to Flickr to try to set up some photosets of my own, only to discover that their slick JavaScript interface didn't work for me. It didn't even load. Instead it gave me some kind of strange error message that I had the wrong version of Safari.
Yesterday, their tech support got back to me to ask if I used any "special plugins or extensions" with Safari. I told them that I use PithHelmet, but not much else. Almost immediately they told me:
PithHelmet could be the problem. i've added a fix to our code here to try and work around your version number and ignore it. this code will be deployed later today.And by the end of last night it was working perfectly. I just wanted to post this here because I always appreciate good tech support and I thought it was cool that, because of my whining, all of Flickr now works with PithHelmet.
Also, with the technical problems sorted out and with my new digital camera, I've started using Flickr again more heavily. I'd used it in the past to setup my (semi-defunct) Portland art moblog, but now I set up a profile and am running the RSS feed of my uploaded photos on the sidebar here and am going to see what else interesting I can find to do with it. I'll keep you posted.
Tagged: Flickr, photography, tech, support, RSS, PithHelmet
Posted by Greg at 3:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Adarwal My Long-Lost Kin
It's both disturbing and heartening to come across someone who's independently come up with an idea that you thought was your own. There's reassurance. You're not crazy; it's not just you. But there's also disappointment. This thing that'd come into your head is not something wholly new in the world; it's been done before.
Neil Adarwal makes paintings of shirts. They're compelling in the way they give frumpy personality and solid form to such easily un-noticed everyday objects. There's a magic to the drawing of folds of cloth that permeates art history, from Fra Angelico all the way through Dutch still life and Matisse, and Adarwal here masters it with a matter-of-fact flatness that retains some of the graphic power of the modern masters while injecting a playful sense of individuality and personal biography (especially with titles such as "To fieldtrips" and "If we're meeting in the square" for the bright stiped-orange one).
About a year ago, I started a still life of a pile of shirts that were sitting on the back of my chair. The shirts sat there for about four months while I worked(drastically limitting my wardrobe). It started on one sheet of paper and grew from there. When I reached the edge of the first sheet, I just grabbed another (each sheet is about 12 by 24 inches, making the whole thing around four by eight feet). Four months later I had twelve sheets and I wasn't quite done. One thing lead to another and I stopped, putting the thing up on my wall, without filling in all of the details, without actually finishing it.
The point is, having spent four months looking at shirts draped over things, I can tell you that I see them much the same way Adarwal does. I've lived in the little folds whose identity he captures with such simplicity and clarity. I've experienced the stretching of space into which the long cascading of sleeves pulls you, and which makes Adarwal's chair backs, or whatever the armatures are holding up his shirts, so long and stilt-like.
Anyway, it's a strange experience to realize that you share your eyes with someone you've never met and that they beat you to something you never thought you'd even get anyone else to really understand.
Tagged: art, drawing, shirt, still, life, Adarwal
Posted by Greg at 2:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 7, 2005
Invisibilia
A World of Invisibilia seems to be an ongoing series of drawings/photos by Greg from The Man Who Fell Asleep, a strange site featuring "animations. pictures. words. sentences. banal observations. clumsy satire. fictional interviews. poetic license."
What he does is take various photgraphs of people from different sources (snapshots, portraits, the web) and then draw out one of the figures, replacing them with a simplified, somewhat charicatured line drawings. He explains himself thusly,
Maybe the pictures illustrate the idea that we all want to remove ourselves from life, and replace ourselves with fictional, self-created versions of ourself. We want to fictionalise our own existence, and impose order and narrative where there is none.What I like about them is the way the flatness of the drawings seem to stand out from the photographic background, vibrating with an almost three dimensional depth. They remind me of stereographs in which the depth always looks like a series of planes stacked in front of each other (like painted theatrical flats), rather than a continuous recession.
(via Robot Wisdom)
Tagged: drawing, photogrpahy, Invisibilia, rotoscope, art
Posted by Greg at 4:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Painter Working From Hot-or-Not Photos
Most likely, you've used Hot-or-Not, the strangely hypnotizing site that lets you rate the attractiveness of strangers and, if you choose, be rated in turn. A couple of years back it spawned a whole universe of copycats from Rate-my-Kitten to Rate-my-Poo and thus spent its flame in a brief flash of being the thing-of-the-moment.
Unlike the silliness of some of the copycat sites, Hot-or-Not remains compelling. The painter John Angelbeck captures some of what makes it so in his watercolors based on uploaded Hot-or-Not images, about which he says,
Each photograph submitted to the site was transformed from a household photo to a digital mating call, available to the world. I am intrigued by how each of these self-conscious images was chosen specifically for this purpose and how that purpose dictated what is found in each of them.
As always with artist statements, Angelbeck does not seem to get, or at least is not willing to say, what makes his work successful. What makes these images effective "digital mating calls" is also exactly what makes them pointed and often touching portraits: the way they capture the subject's world, a common one, which we also inhabit, while also picking out particular details that make the person specific and their humanity poignant. The velcro Addidas sandals or the 3.5 inch diskette on an otherwise bare carpet. The Insane Clown Posse flyer and google-eyed alien drawings on a background wall. While the commonalities of pose and mood of facial expressions may tell us something about the sociological fact of how people (or at least teen girls) try to best-represent themselves, it is these details that prick at our feelings bringing life to these distant and digitally-mediated self-portraits.
Anglebeck has no presence on the web that I can find. I discovered his work through New American Paintings, a jurried publication of contemporary painting by region.
Tagged: Hot-or-Not, art, watercolor, contemporary, Angelbeck, painting, rate
Posted by Greg at 3:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 5, 2005
Demand's Photgraphy
Thomas Demand is a mid-career German artist who re-creates scenes from real-life and from photographs using cut colored construction paper. MoMA is currently putting on a retrospective of his work (NY Times article). Demand's work, the above picture of a Florida vote-counting station, one of an airport security checkpoint and another of a hotel bathroom where a German politician was found dead, reproduces and deepens the chilly distance found in newspaper photos of passion-filled events, removing not only their humanity (there are no human figures in any of Demand's images that I've seen), but their actual physicality as well, rendering them, literally, into objects instead of people or places on which emotional meaning could adhere.
Although Demand's reconstructions are apparently accomplished at full-scale, they have some of the pleasures of miniaturization, of reducing the real with all its detail and incomprehensibility into a schematic which feels both easily understood and an agent of potential further understanding (think of the uses to which models are usually put in architectual planning, et al, as well as the resonance of the word "reconstruction" in the Unsolved Mysteries sense).
More about Demand here, more about the retrospective on MoMA's site, and the MeFi post that lead me there.
Tagged: art, sculpture, photography, contemporary, Thomas Demand, MoMA, German
Posted by Greg at 1:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Review: Accident Hash Podcast
As I promised in a previous post, I've been listening to a number of podcasts from the Association of Music Podcasting. AMP is an alliance of various music podcasters who are working together to make a library of "pod safe" songs bands have given them permission to play. It's a nice effort to both provide legal music for people looking to make their own music podcasts and a great outlet for independent bands trying to promote themselves however they can. Once I've gotten a feel for each podcast, I'll post reviews here. The first one follows.
Podcast: Accident Hash
Genre: various types of alternative rock-based pop
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/accidenthash
Host: C.C. Chapman
Most Recent Episode: Hash #8: Quick Like A Bunny
C.C. Chapman hails from Boston and focuses on "New England Independent music". Chapman has a frank and friendly tone and his descriptions of the music he plays are apt and honest. Describing music in words without recourse to technical terms or overly specific and obscure genre names is challenging and Chapman does a good job of it: S.G. Ladd's song "Smiles" does sound exactly like "Counting Crows meets John Mayer meets Third Eye Blind" and "coffee shop pop" tells you pretty much everything you need to know about John Hoskinson's "Uncharacteristic".
As you might guess from these descriptions, however, Accident Hash's greatest failing is the somewhat vanilla choice of music. One of the most potentially exciting things about music podcasting is that since the selection is limited to independent bands and since there are really no commercial forces of any kind, it could be an outlet for some truly experimental and exciting music that wouldn't find advocates in other formats. Granted, a lot of people like pop music as a style and I'm one of them, but there has to be music out there that is "pop" in sound without coming quite so close to specific styles (and at time, even specific songs) as the bands on Accident Hash have a tendency to do. The Benjamins' "Again," for example, is pretty close to the Pixies' "Gigantic," maybe even litigate-ably so. Buttonhead's "Easy: The Girlfriend Song" could be a 311 song, but without quite reaching the level of vocal quality and melodic sophistication that band so habitually achieves.
Not to be entirely negative here on the music, there are a couple of standout tracks, as well. Lonesome Jack, which Chapman describes as "Irish bar pop", play a kind of chaotic and exciting too-many-things-happening-at-once mix of ska, pop punk, and Irish music that has a giddy and infectious energy. Utenzil provides a refreshing change from the generally very slickly produced tracks on this podcast with a simple bit of "basement electronica" that has a catchy one line melody and goes on exactly not too long. Even John Hoskinson's "Uncharacteristic," which I mentioned above as being comfortably "coffee shop" reaches, in its best moments, for the heights of Nick Drake or, in a different direction, Dan Bern.
With the simplicity and clarity of his presentation, Chapman has the potential to make a really compelling show out of Accident Hash if only he'd be more willing to stray somewhat further from the stylistic territory of mainstream radio. I'll stay subscribed for a couple more episodes at least, but if the musical selection starts sounding a little less like what I can already get on my FM dial (even if, here, it is coming from local independent bands), then Accident Hash would have, in me, a new permanent listener.
Tagged: music, podcast, review, New England, Accident Hash
Posted by Greg at 5:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 3, 2005
The Real McCoys
Husband and wife artist team Jennifer and Kevin McCoy make brilliant combination movie-sculptures. They set up a series of little sets with miniatures and models, arrange lipstick cameras on each of the sets, and then rig up a computer system to edit between them with the proper timing to create short films, which are projected in the gallery.
[Some samples of their work, including video] They seem obsessed with movies, television and their watching. They have a whole series of works that reproduce scenes from movies and show the couple themselves watching them from theatre seats ("Our Second Date," on the page I just linked, features a very inventive re-creation of a scene from a Goddard film). Horror Chase, though not a miniature piece, loops a scene from Evil Dead in a way that makes it both spookier and more intimate somehow.
Interestingly, they've posted a bunch of Flickr photosets with images of various of their installations and other pieces. That's the first use I've seen of Flickr by a mainstream artist.
Tagged: McCoy, miniature, film, Robot Film, art, installation,
Posted by Greg at 1:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 2, 2005
Brickfilms
Brickfilms are stop-motion animated movies made with LEGOs, especially LEGO figures. They're also called "LEGO Movies". I hadn't heard of them until about an hour ago and though I'm totally not surprised that they exist, I am pretty entertained. So, here are some links to get you started:
- brickfilms.com
- a homepage of sorts
- All of the Dead
- an hysterical silent-era style zombie movie featuring "some vague semblance of a plot in which explorers discover an ancient thingy which makes the dead rise from their graves, followed by random violence and intertextual references."
- Sven Central
- one of the more serious directors, with a kind of Tarantino-Kill-Bill-esque style and high production values. Check out especially his Bloody Snow. It is (not) surprising how many Brick Films feature extreme violence. He also has a strong link section (but I can't link to it properly because of his frame-based site) to other Brick Films; it's under Filmtips.
- A Peculiar Event
- A contest run by the people at Brickfilm.com. A good place to see a broad cross-section of the movies.
- iStop Motion
- from Boinx Software, a program for making stop motion animation using your iSight or other digital video or still camera. It lets you superimpose the live camera image with the previous frame and records directly to Quicktime.
Anyone else got any good ones?
Tagged: Brickfilm, stop motion, animation, LEGO, LEGO movies
Posted by Greg at 2:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
