G. Barber

Went to an in conversation with George Barber who's exhibition alongside Jaygo Bloom opened today at the DCA (entitled The Long Commute/Arcade), a video artist who has worked in low-fi, narrative and found footage.

ABSENCE OF SATAN, 1985, 600"
Art Video by George Barber

Here's some chat in no particular order;

Within Barber's artistic peers there was a general unacknowledged embarrassment about class and status, an attempt to hide ones identity, hence why artists began to look at the materialistic nature of the changing world and commodity and kitsch art became prevalent, artists were representing the world with a British art school sensibility

The freshness to be found in the work of Barber

Barthes - Death of the Author

5mins is about the maximum you can retain a viewers attention for, unless they're a lover of video work in which they may stay at most for 11mins

Birth of Channel 4

SHOUTING MATCH, 2004, 11'10" (Extract)

NEoN Fest

This week the NEoN festival got under way in Dundee, a digital arts festival. It seems relatively unknown by the student body of Dundee but nonetheless it seems pretty spectacular in its conception. I only heard about some of it's activities through a friend because over the past four years it would seem I have become immune to the power of the poster because of their interchangeable nature on the streets of the D and assume that every new poster put up is probably for some hell-hole night club, that's threshold would never be stepped across by my chubby wee feet. I went to the NEoN salon called Digital Curator hosted by Sarah Cook, a curator based in Newcastle and Clive Gillman, the director of the DCA. It was a nice set up, very informal and some really interesting conversations went on amongst the small group of individuals who attended.

Here's some chat in no particular order;

Cease to become victims of our circumstance

Manovich - Language of New Media - made and distributed within the media

elite/elitism - race/racism (the former something integral to a person/the latter something negative and not desired)

Raphael Danke

Andrew Keen - The Cult of the Amateur

The evolution of the video artwork, artists stopped putting edits within their pieces, so the viewer felt as though they had seen the whole piece

Truth is secular

Our digital identities, paramount to be able to filter

Terror of accumulation of knowledge, filtering and learning just what is useful

value of what resides in an object

Better to have a complex identity, than an identity complex

Does new media make you a creator?

People are aligning themselves towards media art practice now

The difference between contemporary art and new media art - contemporary art = art about art - new media art = commenting on the medium and the emerging of media art

We make money not art

VVORK

Irational

Martin Wattenberg

Lucy Lippard - Six Years

The way of thinking and how that has transpired in technology, imagine if an African has designed Microsoft?

digital space (blogging, tweeting, flickring) = digital space, like curating but essentially it is not the same

The somewhat curatorial activity of the blogger = taste making - taxonomizing everything

Digital vs. Analogue

We need a technological history of art

Anne Marie Schleiner

(we were there for four hours, hence the length)