••• Goodfello Project: is a sort of sculpture made of data and suspended by web. In this instance; my work, content, context and social dimension, becomes findable trackable searchable, leaving a digital history.
Art should be a weapon against the ever willing chorus of intellectuals saying calming words about whatever injustice they determine benign or altruistic. Should it be that one not trust the evidence of ones eyes? Watching the destruction and the misery and the death brought by man upon nature, how are we to pretend that our imaginations are better off distracted than engaged. Art is pivotal. An artist’s position, above all is as a social servant, for one to betray the people’s history in favor of the elite’s is as criminal and mundane as when politicians do it.
Art is either a resistance to, or a total servant, of power. Artists fabricate collective social mythologies, how we perceive our mythos and see ourselves in regards to our heros does a great deal to form our behavioral beings. Therefore, artists either make media for the dominant institutions of the day, or against them. An artist is a powerful tool to possess; however, once bought, he is probably frozen, bound to repetition.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I paint, draw and photograph stories of human suffering. Its what I can’t get away from. I’m not going to try and make sense out of it now, but thats how it is for me. I’m like that. I am also trying to develop a conceptual dimension to my work which is born of my fascination with science and the arting of nature from the microbial dimension to the metaphysical.
Q: WHY would you do such a thing?
> because making a site like this is like letting people touch and use the things I make. And that is a totally radical. Like, here play with this… Before you had to buy the thing to play with it, or visit me, or go to a gallery or a theater or dumpster dive, or whatever. Now you can connect to it.. to me.
> now I feel that my work changes a great deal because it is all the time available, or being published. The feeling of exclusion has all of a sudden become one of inclusion. That is so with the media I consume, it is now included in my body of work as meta-data as my process is published.
I also figure that digitizing all this information and networking it will be useful for my children when they look up information about who they were before they were.
Q: PRIVACY?
There are issues. But having a net presence is not the same as living in a glass house. The fact that I choose to connect certain information about me or, in particular, the work I produce, is one thing; being able to “get to know me” through the fact that I am present in the network is another. Is it possible to be an intensely private and ambiguous person and have ones work accessible in human history’s most public and readily accessible network? Yes. Ones identity in the network is just that, however transparent ones owner decides to be, is relative.
> Feeding art to the net will make the both more useful and available. More fun, less boring. And easier for the spooks to spook on.. Freedoms undreamt of by earlier generations of tyrants or orthodoxies are bound to raise eyebrows. Anyway, fuck it, privacy is over.. if you can’t watch yourself on a TV, you don’t exist. So, the anarchist way into the tube is via a stream… in my case a LifeStream.
Q: WHAT is the process?
In the first phase: upload and organize the various art elements being developed. Once the work is linked up and networked it should become translucent and enable make various possible interactions: updates, tagging, commenting, re-mixing, distribution, exhibition and so on. Simultaneously, publish, comment on, and cross-reference the media I consume in order to create another meta dimension to the work I produce.
I would like to plan the art in the network, plan it with communication tools; conceive and design with the network, to make things that are native to a network of things.
The work should assume a speculative position, so that it is always developing and accumulating data and experience.
Q: What is this thing supposed to do? Like, how is its behavior designed?
“if you can’t google it, it doesn’t exist…“ Yeah, not only that: but if I can’t google, I usually can’t find it. When your work is available to the network, it becomes, findable, searchable, trackable, plan-able, and recyclable. If we are to imagine the future, we must conceive of a time when all our activities are such. That definitely creates another layer or level or dimension or more to our existence, which may enable a better modality for human activity. An augmented or augmentable reality.
Since its digital the work can be tracked and has a unique identity at every stage of its development it is always leaving behind a trail of history which becomes a valuable pool of meta data. Its this information that becomes useful, searchable, sharable as it goes beyond the physical existence of the work.
Such behavior could could cause the artwork to emerge. It could be like growing art, and the database of its growth process could become the valuable artifice which serve to generate new work. Open sourcing the creative process so that it becomes more useful and meaningful.
Furthermore, the work should not be manufactured until it is purchased, it should not come into physical existence until someone demands it. By clicking on it, or subscribing to it, or fabricating it.
Q:
The more we stay out of the web, the more dangerous the web becomes. If we have some level of technical proficiency concerning the systems that govern our functions and our rights, we may consider that we will enable a more democratic and fair environment. The best way to gain an understanding of any technicity is to involve ones’ self, to immerse ones’ self. If more people are active in designing the systems of communication and governance that sustain human existence we will assure better qualities of life and greater access to self determinative expressions. On a species wide level, greater connectivity and intractability for individuals and groups will ensure more variety, a major contributing characteristic of survival. If done so transparently, such systems of connectivity will enable effective technologies of peer review and transparent intractability will enable greater reliability and lessen the danger of compromised systems.
Like scientific peer reviews, we must count on like individuals to seek each other out.
As a content generator ones social responsibility obligates one to seek out the most effective modes of exhibition and distribution
Q: Can you ever say that a project like this is “done”?
No bigger declarations. what I can say is that everything is permanent beta. there are no promises other than to maintain the effort as far as possible.
DATASETS
>BLOG I gave my blog a name: its called speculative things, in homage to “a world where the networked value of the information that permeates us becomes more important that any particular expression of that information.”
pictures are a way of making a tapestry to trip on
> PHOTOSETS I am trying to connect the net with my physical environment. I use an SD card in my portable digital camera that communicates with enabled WiFi networks and is programed to upload certain photos that I choose to distribute in sequence with no editing and in perpetuity. This constitutes a new layer of connectivity for me and my camera, we can share a stream sort of “live and direct” pictures coming from prior to any processing or major edit. It is a very neo-Cartier-Bresson kinda ‘everything is about the ‘moment’ or the “click.”
My photosets are reports, critiques, allegory.. at best. Otherwise, equally cool and a lot less classy: voyeurism.. which is also a good way to go. The thing to do is to not regret the option you choose.
you think: “who are we really?”
> PORTRAITS
What enables the choices people make? I like to travel deep with people to get their picture, I want drama, and mystery.. I need pursuit!
Taking pictures of the people I know is my way of honoring them, including them in my memory of Terabytes which I will carry with me and pass on. Think about the number of photographs you have of your grandparents or your great grandparents.. not so many. What will be the case for our great grandchildren; they will have the option of downloading the entire contents of our brains and interacting with holograms of us, able to have cognitive conversations.. if not the real thing, and then some.
