Hello All!
“Lady Gaga has assigned herself the role of monster’s cheerleader. She says, ‘Be the monster! I love your monster!’”
[Did Gag-a visit the AFH Monster Collective? Will check the IPs & let you know! - Thanks, John Guider!]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123229360&sc=emaf
John Guider sent this link to an NPR story about the musician’s new marketing campaign. Sound familiar? From experience, I can say that one of the tests a Lead Artist in a dimensional production performs constantly, especially in a project with a relatively long timeline, is a scan of what the early dimensionists called “echoes” occurring in the media domain. Another example is here:
http://www.monstercasserole.com/
A young Brooklyn designer named Morgan Schweitzer launched a blog recently called Monster Cassarole/Art for Humans, which focuses primarily on good Lo-brow work by his favorite illustrators and artists. I sent an email over the holidays, requesting he change the name, but he didn’t and after a brief recess, has started posting again. I’ll update in due course.
More interesting to me is the reach the various AFH vehicles have enjoyed in a number of sectors in the media domain [especially political], through a variety of tactics, ranging from Tweet-based saturation campaigns, direct confrontations [as in ARTSTAR, and “THERE’S NO ART IN HELL”] and the usual derivations, as stealthy visitors appropriate “lil nuggets” from narratives and art/media sequences projected into the media system through our 2.0 mechanisms and other means. Because it is common practice to “sample” or appropriate content and generate context without reference among the new practitioners of “culture production,” one never or rarely really can know exactly how directly derivative any extractions may be. Culture memes are, in a sense, like money - fungible. I quit caring about this systematically a long time ago, about the time watermarking sort of went the way of music industry encryption tactics - neither has disappeared, and fairly regularly the corporate-consumer portable art police [Shepard Fairey’s case, for instance] make a high-profile case to make a traffic stop [the global creative industry hemorrhage continues unabated]. Still, the facts of digital content migration are what they are.
As for my views on artist give and take, reference the AFH FAQ. If I discover a clear instance of theft, an egregious plagiarism, I will not hesitate to act. But I am still devoted to old-school web, open-source ideals, where applicable, and where the usages are not for profit. In that moral code, no one should steal to replace the free exercise of imagination or to rob another innovator’s innovation for personal gain [e.g., Bill Gates]. In other words, the artistic ideal - as ancient as studio practice, dating beyond Michelangelo remains the ethical standard. Artist integrity is not now and never has been a punchline. It’s a function of mutual respect. The greedheads haven’t ruined that feature of the artist society at all - despite extreme and relentless exertions of force and the instruments thereof!
Advancing art is our job. Stealing a gift and pawning it at market as one’s own property is verboten - not just in art, but anywhere in civil society. That’s as old as Moses. Using publicly projected technical advances, when they appear in a kind of code, is totally Otay, [right? - or so the meme goes], unless you are operating in any field other than art - restricted use is a recent, and primarily corporate. Try stealing Microsoft code and selling it. A bit of a tangent…but not really. I’m at the stage of claiming value, not for me, but for the dimensional aesthetic. More significantly, the shared or commonwealth value attaching to dimensional perceptual evolution pertains directly to real problems confronting everybody - in valuing humanity, natural persons, over artificial persons and the system of global dominance they are designed to promote and enforce. What’s not anywhere being confronted in corporate media is the distinguishing characteristics of commonwealth and corporate concerns over value and appropriation. The survival of real individuals, their families and communities - as opposed by corporate persons, their employees and managers/owners and artificial communities, often monopolistic - is fundamentally what’s at stake here.
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I’m currently working towards completion for the last two AFH Tumblr blogs [Transthesis & Proposals]; the Tumblr blog array will serve as the sample works for Monster Collective artists committing to project development for the collective objectives, as outlined in the proposal for this year’s production [blogs, chronicling your work/evolution/ideas]… Woohoo, I’m almost done with mine! I always love to get my contributions out of the way first, then work with everybody else [who wants help] on theirs. In the course of developing these dimensional texts, I believe I’ve generated a proof for the medium, that I plan to expound on soon. I recently described the action as a new form, similar or related to the illuminated manuscript, but I’m also thinking the form relates to ancient transmission modes that could be characterized as bardic, or close to the ancient Celtic iteration.
I’ll post a blog with the relevant links in the next week or so. If you’d like to follow the progression in realtime, the links are active on the AFH nexus site, and regular updates are posted on the AFH Blog, AFH Myspace Blog and AFH Facebook site.
The AFH Wiki has been launched and I’ve posted some basic stuff, including the dimensionist syllabus/curriculum. The AFH/MC swag line is getting closer to going live. I’ve been posting some of the designs across the network, mining responses. I decided after being accepted to the EGS doctoral program, and making plans to move to NYC, that I would wait to set up shop til we make that move, probably to Brooklyn. I feel a lot better establishing the brick n mortar business for MC in NYC, rather than LA, for logistical, cultural and economic reasons. Anyone interested in those, feel free to drop me an email. The same applies to the other AFH Ning projects, and some related areas I plan to integrate into these productions, namely store and calendar/event operations.
It’s a transition time for me on several levels, so I appreciate the collective’s forbearance, as I fluidly respond to a media/art complex that is in a profound state of flux, not just in LA or NYC, but across the globe. It really is an amazing time to be alive. We are witnessing a vast and epic drama, as the massive multinational corporate powers play their endgame to wrest power from the nation state, and minimize the effects of local representation and accountability on the economic sector, but more generally on the interests [social, political and business] of the few over the billions of us who share the planet with them and everything else.
