I’ll be back in Dingburg territory this weekend, presenting a short illustrated monologue as part of the DIRT series at Links Hall, Chicago. Would love to see you there.

I gave a presentation today to HCI Researchers at my University in which I tried to explain how designers and artists are taught to create and iterate. The scientists picked up on the potential problems as quickly as we artists do from the inside. View my slideshow here.

I’ve been really enjoying Waldrop’s book The Dream Machine, which is in part a story of influential researcher Joseph Licklider, but also an account of the whole story of American computing research from SAGE to the modern personal computer.

The book mentions a 1972 film produced to explain Arpanet (the military-funded predecessor to the Internet), and I found it online. The film was produced to display at an event in D.C. where computing researchers from the military, private and educational sectors were invited to see Arpanet in action for the first time.

Interestingly, the film ends with the now-familiar vision of moving to a paper-less society, and the apparently big-thinking Licklider gets the last word by imagining that we ought to get on thinking about social problems instead of technical ones:

The processing and distribution technology and the storage technology are gonna make it possible to get over onto a new technological base for intellectual efforts before our ponderous social processes will let us. I think more people oughta get in there and think about the social processes.

Shades of today’s TED talks, or perhaps some of the fringier current HCI research…or perhaps Social Informatics. Such rhetoric is also familiar to Neoliberalism and its roots in what Fred Turner calls the “New Communalists.” I’m still curious about the various ways in which technical and social heuristics are intertwined in computing history (and not wholly satsified by Turner’s account).

You can catch the last 8 minutes or so of this here. Includes some familiar rhetoric from today’s ebook craze.

Selected reference books behind one of my favorite workspaces on campus:

• Mottoes
• Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
• Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology
• World Ephemeris for the 20th Century
• Satanism Today
• Encyclopedia of Human Behavior
• Encyclopedia of Creativity
• Encyclopedia of Ethics
• Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics
• Encyclopedia of Bioethics
• Dictionary of Asian Philosophies
• American Women and Religion
• Last Words
• Utah Newspapers, Traces of Her Past

For some time now, as I’ve fallen deeper into the academic side of the fine art industries, I’ve struggled to understand the peculiar divide between art in the university and art in the commercial market.

Here’s the best way I can summarize this divide these days:

The more prestigious an academic institution one works for, the more likely recognition of one’s art research is subject to market forces, rather than to peer review.

This is probably not news to anyone, but for me it’s the simplest way of describing a wide-ranging problem. Why is this the case, and why is it a problem?

First, this is the case because academic institutions appoint and promote professors in a comparable way to the appointment of professors in other fields - based on excellence of work, as determined through demonstrated public recognition.

The larger the scale of recognition for artists, the more likely the generating engine for that recognition has little to do with the academic world. Features in prestigious magazines, curated group exhibitions, commissions and the like are more bound up with commercial gallery sales than with anything like academic peer-review. (This is not a complaint, mind you - more on that in a minute.)

The most prestigious academic institutions require artists who have received great recognition in these areas. Such artists have likely spent much less time in the academic side of art, as their work required long labor in the commercial world. If they land in an academic job, they are likely to feel somewhat alien, and rightly so. Everyone else around them has risen to their position through very different structures of recognition.

For the record, I have nothing against a profit-driven market for fine art. We owe a great deal of new knowledge and experience to such markets. This market doesn’t support everything that I expect from art - not even close - and it does seem to best serve the wealthy. But in the end, this market benefits a broader range of people than do many other luxury markets.

However, there is a problem in how success in this market translates to academic expertise, especially for institutions that lay any claim to faculty governance or to the stewardship of knowledge through research. Here’s how I see it.

Thanks to the hard work of my predecessors, art professors are viewed as colleagues by their peers - on matters of promotion, curriculum, and recognition of excellence. In fact, as colleagues most art professors come with very little experience in how judgment of value happens in a peer-review based model of knowledge production.

An artist can earn a deserved and prestigious place of recognition within the art world without ever having to discursively articulate her relation to other artists or ideas, living or dead. Through manual expertise, intellectual curiosity, and savvy attention to demand, an artist can work her way up through all manner of coveted residencies, awards and exhibitions, without even needing to identify a home discipline. This is only right, I wouldn’t want to see this go away, for art has no need for the mechanisms of disciplinary academic review.

Conversely, peer-reviewed artistic achievement - through conference presentations, certain granting agencies, visiting lectures, certain curatorial models, and publication - won’t hold any particular weight in the commercial art market. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But when these two domains of recognition are conflated in review of art professors, we end up with people asked to do things they aren’t qualified to do. The conflation of these domains also contributes to a non-specific vocabulary for evaluation of student work, curricular goals and programmatic priorities.

I’m having trouble thinking of a good analogy. The best one I can give is unfortunately from dog shows - you can’t judge the working breeds using the standards of the sporting breeds. Sure, they’re all dogs, but they perform in very different ways.

Some time ago in the 20th century - and others have told this story - artists managed to convince universities that the sort of knowledge produced through deft manipulation of material form could be evaluated and judged. The MFA was born, recognized as a terminal degree, and artists started getting tenure.

It’s time now to make some clearer distinctions and descriptions of how art researchers are and aren’t like other university workers. We may even have multiple classes of art researchers at this point (as in psychology or other fields). These need to be somewhat protected from one another, expectations made clearer, the interface between a market-driven field and a review-driven field smoothed in the interest of communication, fairness, and value. This is especially true during a time of such limited economic resources.

I should add here that from a labor perspective there are far more pressing issues than the one I describe. I suspect that many to most instructors of art at the college level are not even employed full-time, so this whole dynamic only dimly affects them - except in their ability to move into a full-time position as desired in the current system.

Also, of course, instructors in academic institutions that privilege teaching over research are less affected by the dynamic I describe. (For that matter, I’m not even sure how much longer we’ll see artists in research university settings.)

Lastly, in fine art education I’m not sure there exists an ecosystem of knowledge and value at work - there may be multiple pyramids rather than a single structure of ascending value and prestige. So this point I’m trying to make may only affect a small number of people. But as long as research universities are such centers of science, industry, and the military, I’d like to see art’s role clarified in the interest of maintaining a relevant role.

from Dore's illustration of Dante's Limbo

Grasping at some definition in the amorphous time of family holiday visits. A few shapes emerge in the mist:

Status updates are not so different from how postcards once functioned. (This I decided after reading Rina Piccolo’s piece on postcards in the wonderful Syncopated anthology.)

In Avatar, a non-cybernetic mercenary army fights a cybernetic national amy. We’re supposed to side with the latter, which also wins.

I never noticed before that Aimee Mann is in The Big Lebowski - she plays the nihilist’s nine-toed girlfriend.

The fury/flurry of smartphones in recent consumer electronics has been omnipresent and consuming. Yet I’ve seen almost no hype around service plans, which seem to be steadily rising in cost. As far as I can tell, everyone with a smartphone is now likely paying around $850 a year for the service, and probably a lot more. What were they spending this money on three years ago?

On New Year’s Day my non-betting friend Zuppa bet money on a horse named Zippy, a long shot, and won.

Walking out of Best Buy with a new computer to set up for my in-laws. Coming the other way, an old stooped-over guy waving a glass coffee pot at the blue-shirts.

Used VHS copy of Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution for six bucks! Score.

Everywhere I turn these days - the work of David Mindell.

It’s hard to look a stranger in the eye when he displays detailed knowledge of your recent medical history (in the context of visiting a relative’s church).

Unabomber survivor Gelertner once wrote that software is to hardware what the musical score is to the musical instrument (or something like that).

My friends Stephanie and Nathan, in love and in life.

The Christmas holiday as we know it is a celebration of life - this we do through getting together with blood relatives, the people wherein our lives begin and grow. It’s meant to be the best day of the year, the time when the stuff we really live for is most present. It’s an assertion of life against the coldness of winter and the short dark day of solstice. In the Christian form, there’s even a birth in the mix, a miracle birth of a deity in human form, no less.

Christmas, therefore, is liturgical - even in its secular form. In liturgy, people agree to perform some set of actions by a predetermined schedule, for the purposes of re-experiencing their base principles. In America, for example, the Fourth of July is a liturgical form, as is the Super Bowl (for better or for worse). And so Christmas is a liturgical act - a regular, collective act of celebrating life.

We all know how liturgies can ring true or ring hollow for people. When the Season’s celebration of life is presented as compulsory, easy, and even natural, those for whom death is more evident on this day might be forgiven for hurrying the day along, even dreading it.

I’m thinking about all this for many reasons tonight, but chiefly because of the people in my life who have lost much this year. My loved ones have lost loved ones. People I love have lost their jobs, their homes, their reasons for pushing through. People I love are missing their loved ones, badly.

So Christmas can ring hollow as a corporate celebration of life in these circumstances. Cynicism is so easy for me, especially in defense of others. I’m looking for another way tonight. Collective rituals can be good, I don’t want to see these things go away.

All I can think of is this - that liturgy intended solely to affirm the positive or provoke warm emotion is at best a limited ritual, and at worst a lie. The most powerful and rich liturgies, the most valuable ones, are meaningful because of what they push for when there’s no feeling at all. Ritual shouldn’t be meaningless for those who can’t feel the intended emotions - ritual should instead find its meaning in the lack of those emotions. The loss of faith, the loss of reasons for hope, is the REASON for the ritual. The liturgy is where the people push back, humbly moving their bodies in hope that their hearts will follow.

This is what I’ll be thinking about tomorrow. I’ll be searching through the carols I know for what song could express the good of the light while it is still yet dark.

I’ll be doing this because I want to think on Christmas about the life I want to fight for against the darkness. I want to celebrate Christmas not because I feel all sorts of good things about life, but because I want to push back, with others, against the night, against death.

[This post indebted to theologian James K. Smith.]

Anticipation of an immanent holiday visit, and rediscovery of an item lost in last summer’s house move, prompted these thoughts on difficult family relationships and accidental art reception.

The following item could well have served my previous post summarizing a summer of flux through found objects:

What you see here are two parts of a little artist’s book by Jonathan Monk. It’s essentially an artwork, one of my favorites, and one of the very few that I own. The piece consists of a folded message detailing a place and time, and also an envelope in which to mail the piece to an intended person. The assumption here is that the recipient of this artwork can expect to find either the artist Monk or the person from whom she received the letter on that place at that time - in this case, at the Eiffel Tower at noon on October 30, 2008. Here’s what it looks like unfolded, in pristine form:

I love this little thing, for some reasons I admit are wholly subjective and others I’d try to convince you about. So when, in the process of moving, I found it disassembled and used as a coaster/sketchpad by my mother-in-law, I was - well, I was pretty pissed. By the time I found it, there was really no reason to call her attention to the infraction. Despite the fact that she really had to have gone way out of her way to use this artwork as scrap paper, I could never have expected her to understand what this thing was, and she was trying to help.

Besides serving as a catalyst to my usual selfish judgments of others, the object now serves as a funny little interruption of my aesthetic pleasure. Here an artist sought to orchestrate a willful, intentional, if arbitrary social encounter across space and time. Instead, like a kite caught in some power lines, the work ended up channeling other information from a different source. The sender and recipient of this added information were less arbitrary, the object more so.

It’s not the first time this has happened. A few years ago, the same relative paid us a visit and, somehow missing some soap while taking a shower, grabbed and used an artwork by Anne Beffel instead.

Anne had cast a series of soap bars labelled “I’m Sorry,” and distributed them for free at the World Financial Center in 2002. I chose to try and preserve the object as a poetic catalyst, rather than subject it to ritual washing and eventual disappearance. Instead, it got used just enough to remind me of the things that drive me nuts about my in-laws.

Of course, the artwork was the better for it - this hardly needs saying.

So as I head into a week or so of co-existence with people who love me dearly, but whom I sometimes struggle to connect with, I’ll take with me these memories of objects thwarted by life with others. In both cases, I was saddened and alarmed by the gap these harmless and naive infractions illuminated. In both cases, the original object and my enjoyment of it is the better for it. I’m still mad and sad to have lost these things in the state I wanted them in - but I can see the rightness of it.

And I’ll add, as one last infraction, an account of my own act of accidental reception. If I had evidence, I’d tell you about the time I accidentally flooded Christoph Büchel’s first show in the U.S., and shut down Maccarone for a day. (I’m really sorry for ruining your day, Michelle.) Instead, here’s the back cover of the only Stanley Brouwn book I own.

As you can see, I once set this beautiful little artwork down in coffee on my messy desk. The rest of the book is spotless - white paper, no pictures, black text. In keeping with Brouwn’s work, all the materiality and specifics are brought by the viewer; reading the book, the viewer has conjured in her mind a series of lengths of raw material. It’s a poem composed of copper pipe and rope and brick.

And now, coffee - liquid, out-of-control, and destined for my body - thwarted temporarily by art.

I didn’t save many objects from childhood, but my Mother did box up some toys that she thought my kids might want someday. Turns out, I did in fact spawn, and now some objects I haven’t seen in decades are kicking around underfoot.

Among these is a little die-cast 1:64 scale van (I would have called it  a “Matchbox Car” as a kid, committing what trademark owners refer to as genericide.) I have no recollection of obtaining this thing. The side is emblazoned “Super Van” and I probably thought it was Superman’s van.  I remember being very fond of the large windows, and I believe the design probably found its way into some of my drawing.

Looking at it today, I’m pretty certain the DC comic book hero would have had nothing to do with this vehicle, which features a large round bed in the center of the passenger compartment. So I googled around a little - and what an odd story I found.

Turns out that this little toy is a replica of Vandora the Super Van, a custom van created for the 1977 film  Supervan. The movie revolves around an annual road race for custom vans called the Freakout. (Also featured is a wet T-shirt contest, in which the actual Charles Bukowski can be seen hugging a contestant.)

The film’s star is the van, which is billed as a solar-powered vehicle. Some corporate types apparently covet this vehicle, though I haven’t seen the film and so I can’t tell you why. Someone has edited a montage of this gem of the seventies:

The more interesting thing to me is the van’s provenance - apparently it started off as the Love Machine, created by famous customizer George Barris (creator of the television Batmobile and other amazing cars). The only account of the Love Machine I can find is in a Google-scanned version of Popular Science, in which we see a caption and image that portrays the vehicle as designed for “playboys.” Clearly, bedding is the idea here - though with the glass I imagine one would have to park in the woods to get any sort of privacy.

Barris remade The Love Machine as Super Van for the movie; a disco ball replaced the chandelier, we see some exterior color changes, the addition of an 8-track player and headphones, and a bit more angularity in general. From internet footage, my favorite thing about the vehicle is the split-screen effect of the windshield viewed from inside. The vertical division down the front turns the road into a Rorschach image.

from Love Machine (1971) to Super Van (1977)

And then there is simply the amazing evolution of a dream car from a space of sexual leisure to a space of fantasized energy conservation and technological progress. Fantastic. “Who stole my sexual revolution?” Um, yeah, the electric car took it.

Vandora seems to be alive and well - for sale actually - and in good restored shape. I’m tempted to put the little toy on ebay but it’s not really worth it, and I like the idea of the van’s all-purpose passenger compartment continuing to transform in the imaginations of little brains.

image of designer George Barris and Vandora from Barris.com

The nice folks over at Vague Terrain, one of my favorite blogs, have kindly opened up their ranks to the likes of me. I’ll be posting periodically over there as well for the time being. The first series I proposed to them was on the Standard Test Subjects of computer graphics research - something that ought to be known outside of academic research, as part of our collective media history. For the first installment, I took a VERY brief look at the infamous “Lena” image, a cropped Playboy centerfold shot that has been used for years as a subject for demonstrating new digital imaging techniques. One could write plenty on that crazy story, the gender politics at work. For now, I’m just looking to make the story more known.