Ask Anyone Anything
Two interviews with Autechre! One is an AAA (Ask Autechre Anything) on a message board that digs into lots of technical detail about their work, and the other is a walkthrough of their new EP, “L-event.”
Art Criticism in the Age of Yelp:
In a writing style that picks up on both the casualness and directness of reviews on Yelp, Droitcour manages to avoid many of the pitfalls of art reviewing, those traits (convoluted sentences, overly grand claims, reliance on jargon) that have led to the many essays putting art criticism to death.... Droitcour's use of language is not just an attempt to make his reviews accessible or to participate in Yelp culture: it's meant to inflate certain propensities of Yelp syntax in order to point out both the absurdities of value creation through art criticism, as well as the evasiveness of a lot of writing about art.
Examining the politics of Google autocomplete:
Autocompletions are “linguistic prosthesis”: they mediate between our thoughts and how we express these thought in (written) language. So do related searches, or the suggestion “Did you mean … ?” But of all the mediations by algorithms, the mediation by autocompletion algorithms acts in a particularly powerful way because it doesn’t correct us afterwards. It intervenes before we have completed formulating our thoughts in writing. Before we hit ENTER.
The Children’s Museum of Tacoma switched from charging admissions to a “pay what you want” model. Attendance tripled and membership subscriptions doubled.
It’s not Net Art, it’s Net Art: An installation that consists of an inflatable pavillion full of layered nets, all wobbling as visitors climb through it.
The Giphoscope is a hand-cranked analog animated GIF player.