Oddball media crit--laying siege to academia's ivory tower from pop culture's gutter
A single joke tweet dropped pharma giant Eli Lilly's stock value by $15,000,000,000. Inside the aesthetics and strategies of Parafiction: the hoax as activist art.
Content warnings for: discussion of anti-queer violence, chemical spills, medical oppression, corporate malevolence.
AI art is here. How the hell are artists actually supposed to respond? If proposed answers all feel like dead ends, maybe it's time to look beyond art: to politics.
Throw out the science fictions about intelligent robots. To understand AI art we don't need to get lost in press release fantasies, we need to understand the century-old art that paved the way for Dall-E.
NFT boosters try to claim the Blockchain is for every kind of artist. But what practices lie off the edge of the cryptoart map?
As celebrities sell out to NFT schemes, mutual hostility with the skeptics boils over. How can we keep our heads as cryptoart now achieves a seemingly impossible level of corniness?
Art and automation's merger long predates cryptoart's use of procedural generation.
You'll never hear NFT sellers talk seriously about that history, though, cause it reveals not just NFT art's contradictions, but also its cynical laziness.
NFT art is bad for the environment, and bad for artists, but critics and supporters of NFT art are both missing a key fact: it's also just bad art. Whether Beeple or Bugmeyer, it's time the stars of the NFT revolution experienced some real art criticism.
Chorby Short is an adorable frog girl who is also sometimes a witch. Or perhaps, she's just some data in a game taking the internet by storm called Blaseball. Or perhaps, she's a new example of an idea from an 1853 Herman Melville story. Or perhaps, she's all this and more?
Classic anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena could get a new lease on life if released serially in the present day... but Netflix and its many competitors aren't in the business of preserving or selling art. What do we lose when our media history becomes #Content?
Remember Universal Paperclips, that clicker game? Remember turning the human race into paperclips? Ok, so, what if you just... didn't? What would that choice tell us about game design, agency, artificial intelligence, and people?
Let's talk about the buildings in BLAME!, demons, and postmodernism.
Cyberpunk is dead. Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! is its bloating corpse. We're just living in it.
This is very much a Part 1.
This is the one where I'm really pessimistic about web art.
It won't be. Let's talk about that.
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| Pictured: John Egbert |
What do we want the author of My Immortal to be?
In the future, we hang out. Hang out with me as I read Jon Bois's epic sci fi hypercomic 17776 for the first time and discover the power of duration art, the stress of immortality, and the fact that everything continues to basically be Homestuck.
Sense8 is dead. But all the pieces were there for it to be revolutionary. I don't even have a good summary for this article I'm just fucking pissed that we had all these pieces in place and still for some reason it didn't come together, and I'm left with this multi-part series that I wrote most of before the show was cancelled so like what the fuck. Here's some bewildered rambling about tech history I guess.
We live in an era defined by the Epic Streaming Show and Netflix. But is the Netflix hit Sense8 the precursor to an even stranger and more brilliant kind of hypermedia storytelling still to come?
Three years ago I wrote an academic article about Twitch Plays Pokemon. The article was never published anywhere, but despite that blow to its notability TPP continued on, and is still going three years later. This week, I take a look at this article, which in many ways is a predecessor to my Reload the Canons! series, and comment on what I got right, what I got wrong, and how the issues surrounding TPP have shifted and changed over the past three years.
Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.
