Resist Today: art blog (with a lowercase a)

Have you seen the super nice line work in Dave Kinsey’s new work? His imagery has really evolved over the last two years. Here’s the new:

Dennis has quite a bit of still photography about film on his site. The soft, messy and beautiful timelapse pieces caught my eye over at I *heart* photograph.

Great collages and a nice site too!

Downloading music and movies is still kind of a mystery for a lot of people; rightfully so — it’s kinda nerdy still. Torrent files are small files that describe big files like music, movies, TV shows, programs and games. And porn.

Once you download a torrent and drag and drop it into a bit torrent program the bigger files start to download. Bittorrent takes these big files and breaks them down into lots of tiny parts, so as you are downloading tiny parts of The Matrix in HD you’re also sharing (uploading) those bits with other people. The more everyone shares the faster everyone downloads. File sharing utopia!

So, here’s the fuckin’ short version:

1. Download torrents (small file) from The Pirate Bay
2. Drag and drop torrents into Transmission for Mac to download and share big files
3. Watch your downloaded movies with VLC for Mac

Your first test should be for Steal this film from The Pirate Bay. Consider it homework for learning how to share.

Go steal this and watch it! Steal this film is an excellent and thoughtful documentary about sharing files, ideas, images and culture. Half way thru I decided to start taking notes; you should too. Write them down them come back here later and post your thoughts. I’d love to hear what other artists are thinking about some of these ideas:

• Artists and authors used to sell these containers of their work; paintings on canvas, written or printed words bound; digital containers are really easy to share and that’s a good thing for culture, but what does it change about artists or artmaking? The nature of these very separate roles as creator and audience are changing.
• Does the idea of giving away copies of your work have to compete with our ideas of making a living? How do our means of making an income adapt to this shift in distribution?
• Isn’t giving your work away for sharing and (free) distribution a good thing for artists? Our work will become more culturally accessible and important.
• Computers are making everything easier to copy and access and people like that; so why is the corporate trend is to make that harder?
• Sharing is a basic social need; technology makes that super easy — and we like easy.
• People who want to prevent copying are preventing the spread of culture; yet they’re contributing to it and want you to watch. That seems a little “have your cake and eat it too” right? You can watch this in this environment under these rules, but if you want it another way then to hell with you!

More thoughts on this very soon…

Josh and I first met at USF in Tampa; we had an electronic media class taught by Hasan Elahi. Hasan was always doing pretty interesting things; submerging working TVs and monitors in liquids, creating interesting video loops, traveling the world to see a lot of art; and we got along pretty well. (Although my slacker tendencies rightfully pissed him off a few times during critiques; he didn’t go easy on folks, but I respected that.)

Josh and I learned a good deal in his classes; not about technical things, but about ideas, how to transform something that everyone is doing into something that’s special, with a unique point of view. Hasan left USF around the same time Josh graduated and I stopped going. I’ll always remember his bootlegged videos of William Kentridge’s animations from various film festivals. Damn, I wish I had copies of those now, they were like nothing I had ever seen before.

Yesterday Hasan was on the Colbert Report talking about his web project that tracks his every move. He wears a GPS device that posts his location to his site, he shoots photos of every meal he eats, every airport he travels thru, every toilet he uses; he also posts various receipts for things. All of this started as a reaction to being detailed and questioned shortly after September 11th. Here’s the short version:

(better quality video here: http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=167606)

Hasan also likes doing crazy things with his hair; I like the new look.

So I was on The Pirate Bay the other day looking for some new music. I was looking for some live or freestyle Mos Def tracks, but I came across Yah Mos Def instead.

Yah Mos Def (aka The YMD) are two vegan guys from Philly who mix punk/hip hop flows with beats, screamy lyrics, distorted levels, short loops and some super raw energy into this ball of lo-fi fire! This shit will burn ya! I hated it at first listen, but now I’m totally hooked. I got my first copy via torrent but was later happy to buy the mp3s from Amazon.

Here’s a taste:

And here’s a good review of the album.

Josh and I are always talking about how we can be more transparent with Resist Today, with art making, with our processes, with our images. So the other day we decided to start documenting our processes more; that turned into a larger discussion about opening up our art process. So we’re trying something new: anyone can download the layered Photoshop file of our latest digital collage piece, as well as high-res source photos we shot specifically for the piece. We’re hoping to have some dialogue with other artists about the future of digital image making and sharing.

Go download, remix and share our art. If you create something amazing, send us a copy. We’ll pick from the best of the lot and work out some details about doing an edition of prints for Resist Today, but that’s just another side project. The focus of this is to spark a discussion about sharing images as well as some kind of experiment in transparency.

We’re curious where it may lead us, but it seems like something visual artists should start to embrace, so here goes.

66 seriously good polariods (that never existed!) by Julien Pacaud

These struck me as really interesting; fragments of elements from the same scene, but arranged differently in 2d space. Nice site too