Software

MARK NAPIER
new software art and prints

Thursday, April 12, 2007
6:30-8:30 pm

bitforms gallery
529 West 20th Street, NYC
(btw. 10th & 11th avenues)

If you live at a relative stone's throw from the Empire State Building, what does the ultimate symbol of capitalism become before your very eyes? How is this place tranformed by digital culture after 9/11?

In the creative mind of Mark Napier, the ESB is a cyclops formed of brick and mortar yet powered by flesh and cicuits. It is a symbol of a crumbling physical power caught in the webs of immateriality forged by software and the net. It is the very essence of the shifting structures of power.

Mark has been at work on this project for about 2 years now. It's interesting and horrific to live with a working artist. There is no reason for him to code the software that created the print for the sites or the actual artwork, yet it's more than just like a disease. He codes because he has to. That's how he builds his sculptures and paints his digital canvases.

I can't comment any further on this show beucause I haven't seen the show installed. Tonight should be as interesting to you as it will be to me.

Please come for the art, but more importantly, come meet the "Mr.

I am having one heck of a time with my upgraded version of Firefox. It runs like molasses with my site and it keeps crashing. Anybody having similar problems?

Title courtesy of Charles Schultz

Now you know what happens when I get my period.

I get totally mysanthropic and the energy that I throw out there comes back in the way of imploding websites, giant zits, stupid rants and cyatic pain with more imploding technology.

It's like I'm Charlie Brown and blogs are my kites. The blogosphere hates me, I hate it back. The problem is that we are both obstinate, opinionated and egotastical and neither of is backing down.

The post "Cry me a river" is gone along with JJ's last post (the one that for some reason made the site implode). Somehow the comments are in the database, so I'll gather those around soon.

I'm just going to say this : I grew up with Charlie Brown and I could totally relate to his losing his temperament a lot of the time along with his stubborness and his seeming inability to back down.

Lucy also had those qualities but the difference between Lucy and Chuck was that Lucy always had control of the ball and she always took it away from him.

When Charles Schultz died, it broke my heart that he did so without giving Chuck the happy ending. Charlie Brown never got to tell the little red haired girl how he felt. Charlie Brown also went out without ever feeling his feet punt just for once against that pig skin.

When it comes to technology companies, especially Google, I take their "benefit to mankind" with a huge boulder of salt; especially with my current experience with GoogleNews. They dropped culturekitchen from their rotation because it was not "newsy" enough. Meanwhile, they go out of their way to include such beacons of truthiness like LifeNews, ScienceDaily and my all time favorite, Men's News Daily.

Seth Finkelstein is the man I read daily for all things truthy about Google. I thought I was paranoid about the run around the search company has been giving me since December --basically, since the site was switched to a new platform. Then I read his post, British national Party and Google News. Real eye-opener in view of the next two kerfuffles involving Google in the last month.

The first one being the alleged "fight for privacy rights" that many netopians claim is what behind Google's fight to not release query information to the Justice Department. Yeah, right. They are fighting for the right to privacy but not of the regular citizen :

My name is Liza, and I ... I ... I am voogle addict.

I went looking the clip where Isaac Mizrahi molests Scarlett Johanson's boobies and for some reason I ended up seeing a bunch of Danish clips and this one caught my eye :

Jens and Anders (sounds like an Ingmar Bergman movie) are spoofing a Backstreet Boys video ... but ... but ... their spoofing a voogled spoof done by two guys only described as two Asian college guys. May I add they are hysterical :

When I said Video Google is going to be, I meant it just because of this. This is one of those baby steps we will need to take to make the web a truly diverse and viable multi-media platform.

What we need now is a non-proprietary, open-source version of Google video widget.

Google Video still is a good start.

When I told Peter Daou I was writing a response to his recent essay on the state of the blogosphere, THE (Broken) TRIANGLE: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness, I was thinking of breaking it down into two parts, one dealing squarely with his idea of triangulation and the other one tackling technology and the netroots. Now I see it would not be enough. We also need to look at the political ideologies and discourses that fire the netroots and how these have an impact on their use, misuse and abuse of internet technologies.

The response then will be a three part essay dealing with the politics, media, technology and the liberal blogosphere.

Part 1 is a quick look at triangulation, how it exists in the blogosphere and how it's counter to building a netroots.

Part 2 starts from the vantage point that how you use technology is affected by ideologies and ideiosyncracies. In this essay I focus on the meanings of "left", "liberal", "progressive" and how their "political activism" or practices are translated into user interaction and interfaces on the net.

Part 3 is but a draft on a proposal on how to bridge the gap between the practices of the netroots and their use of social networking technologies. This in the hope for the advancing a new progressive media.

I love Peter's essays on the phenomenon of the political blogosphere and his insights into the connection between the media and political power. They are thought provoking and insightful. But this concept of "triangulation" has been bothering me for some time now on a gut more than a conceptual level.

It was not until his recent article and my experiences with the NYC 2005 and the Alito hearings that I could put my finger on what's bothering me. It's so simple, and yet it seems that within the liberal political blogosphere, quite difficult to comprehend : nets are not triangles.

So stay tuned. In the meantime (and for background reference) please read the following :

When a blogger grows up : What software and art have taught mea bout the state of the liberal blogosphere

Thanks so much for the invite, Mr. Fundraiser

And follow the link on this own : Another way to put it: the church is an internet and each experience are blogs