How Long Have You Been Doing the Triangles?

[purejuice]

One of my relatives founded, in the middle 1960s, a commune devoted to the conceptualization, fabrication, and installation of a computer/digital/interactive/psychedelic environment, as they still call it, much like a multi-million-dollar Ecstacy-inspired discotheque. It was heaven.

Over 40 years later, he is a distinguished professor of All That Grooves and still much engaged and very gracious, as a teacher of the young should be, about art school and its denizens.

Privately he wonders why no real art of the caliber he produced in 1967 has been produced with computers. He is the world's expert on the matter, and he is correct.

No pioneering computer art since 1965.

This is part of my MIA rant. She's an art school rocker, of which the world has way too many. I love her clothes, though, and the kind of world music amateurish videos (Galang, I like it) she used to make. In this interview, she does a kind of Art School Dodger bricolage, bitches, with her politics and her Art, making faux-brilliant arty farty "connections" that are entirely diminutive, trivializing, and yet self-aggrandizing. It's an Art School Personality Trope I have been observing for -- let's just say some time.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/apr/22/popandrock1

What's wrong with wannabee rappers is you have to be highly intelligent, and sort of like righteous, like Snoop or Jay-Z, to make the bombast swing. You have to be seriously cool. Uhm, like a gangster. Rap emanates from coolness, it does not create it. Some of the ladies of rap -- like some art school survivors -- are cool. And some are not.

Art school sucks.

Comments

[dcart.livejournal.com]

"My mother used to say, 'Your father's so useless, all he ever gave you was his name!' So I thought OK, then I'm going to use it"

I feel like that line should have got more attention in the piece.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

i wonder if diplo's revelation, that the father was in london and around, prevented hirschberg from going deeper into MIA's, erhm, work of art concerning the vocation, livelihood, and whereabouts of her papa.

[serendipoz.livejournal.com]

Your note on graphic/video work reminded me of Emsh. (He was Carol Emshwiller's husband - she still writes sf.)

Emsh was an sf artist for books and magazines in the 1950s and in the 1960s and 1970s he moved to doing videos - some of which won Siggraph awards.

I'd say that was major work in the field.

How does this differ from your relative?

Meanwhile I rather like Dave McKean's work as well.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

my relative worked with interactivity, computers, light and sound. not video, not graphics, nothing representational or even abstract. you walk into a space and set off light and sound.