Rhizome invited a few of our collaborators to submit a few of their favorite links of 2014. These are published as part of Rhizome Today, a series of "ephemeral" blog posts. This post will be taken offline on January 1, 2015.
Image from panthermodern.org (Room 6)
Kari Altmann:
- Emily Jones. Just everything here, highlights including: Birds of Syria and First Water to Tripoli. http://emilyjones.info
- AG Studios. This is like the 15th registered account of AG Studios, who consistently make the most infectious and spirited calypso and soca remixes. Have fun finding all 800 online. https://soundcloud.com/agstudiosvi-1
- Cargo Club. Sometimes this is a little too one-liner for me, but a lot of great moments and overall theme. cargoclub.tumblr.com
- Forever Traxx. Your old friend Roland X is now making some of the most saccharin audio files. https://soundcloud.com/forevertraxx
- Norman Orro for Panther Modern. http://panthermodern.org/roomsix.html
- Bangs 8 Youtube Channel - Ya boy Bangs is still going. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOiVPIlIL0rdLzYyd3tNO-w
- Maluca: MALUFICA IS BACK. Check her in the new Future Brown video too. https://soundcloud.com/maluca-mala
- Sicko Mobb - Fiesta Remix. This track is everything you want and want to remix. For a while the ad at the front was about polar bear extinction. Video art forthcoming…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAigszDtXK
- MC Bin Laden - Bololo Haha. Perfect intro to MC Bin Laden’s repertoire, if you don’t know him yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwEm-rU5sAE#t=168
- Ayesha Siddiqi. https://twitter.com/pushinghoops+follow
Kari Altmann is an American artist and winner of the Prix Net Art Award of Distinction in 2014. Her work can be found at http://karialtmann.com/.
Iona Whittaker:
But does it float? Somebody showed me this, and I’ve been back to explore it further. I think a lot about putting words to art as a way somehow to create more life around the experience. This site simply pairs images with quotes. The approach behind BDIF is brave, inviting, imaginative and unassuming, embracing chance and the eyes and minds of an unseen audience. Sometimes it floats, sometimes it doesn’t – for me, but perhaps it would for somebody else. I also like the name. butdoesitfloat.com
- A video made by Dan Fox based on a talk he gave at The Kitchen. As co-Editor for Frieze magazine, Fox wonders about his audiences – starting with the first he ever had, his parents – and accompanies it with an apt collage of retro footage. vimeo.com/86106247
- Nobody can deny that this has been a massive year for Instagram. Go to This is Now for a live flow of images from different cities based on their geo-tags. now.jit.su
Iona Whittaker is an art critic and an editor at Rhizome and Randian.
Samantha Culp:
- During the peak of the Hong Kong protests this fall (and especially the few weeks I was in town, wandering the occupation sites and in dialogue with old friends, artists, and activists from the years I lived in HK), I was glued to the Reddit livestream which was a source of constant and fairly reliable updates. To be honest, I had never really before understood the Reddit phenomenon, but this period made its utility clear and powerful. https://www.reddit.com/live/tnc30xhiiqom
- Mesh-networking communication app Firechat (https://opengarden.com/firechat) was invaluable to protesters I spoke to, as 3G/Wifi signals were never *blocked* for the protest area but were indeed so overloaded they could not be reliably used.
- Other favorite resources, particularly for the non-Chinese-literate, included artist/activist/urban farmer Michael Leung's Instagram (http://instagram.com/studio_leung) which had a close focus on micro-aspects of the movement such as the guerrilla gardens of Admiralty; the Twitter street portraiture of NYT reporter Chris Buckley (https://twitter.com/chubailiang), which occasionally approached Bill Cunningham brilliance in documenting ephemeral things such as protester fashion; the Facebook groups "Translators for dialogue in HK" (https://www.facebook.com/hktranslators/), run by volunteers to translate Chinese articles and statements into English, and "Umbrella Movement Visual Archives & Research Collective" (https://www.facebook.com/umbrellaarchive), which is the large-scale collaborative project to document and preserve the art, visual culture and creative activism of the protest movement (full disclosure, one collaborating institution is Videotage, of which I am a board member). There were also slower and more insightful analyses from my friends at The Civic Beat (https://twitter.com/theCivicBeat), An Xiao Mina (https://twitter.com/anxiaostudio) and Jason Li (https://twitter.com/jasonli), on the challenges and possibilities of hashtags uniting IRL and online protest (http://dismagazine.com/blog/67287/how-the-umbrella-revolution-meme-hurt-the-movement-in-hong-kong/, https://medium.com/the-civic-beat/hashtagging-the-streets-7fb8ca777076). I know that many more sustained considerations of the movement, its meaning as both a historical moment and an ongoing thread of Hong Kong/Greater Chinese society, are forthcoming, particularly from the realms of art and cultural criticism. But in the meantime, Carol Yinghua Lu's essay is a very good start: "We Can See Each Other On WeChat" http://blog.frieze.com/we-can-see-each-other-on-wechat/
- For a sort of collective scrapbooking (or sticker-trading?) exercise from all the cool postinternet kids, I have really enjoyed the Facebook group project "Archival Aesthetics: Environment and Object" (https://www.facebook.com/ArchivalAesthetics), spearheaded by Reese Riley and now taken up by the equally cool Berlin kids at 032c (http://032c.com/topic/archival-aesthetics/). Artist-collected stock images of the industrial uncanny/sublime, before they are converted into actual "art pieces" on Tumblr/Dis/elsewhere. I particularly love the "Aqua Aesthetics" group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/264312657112494/) because it coincides with my personal interest in what I have been calling "Critical Fluids"(http://criticalfluids.tumblr.com/) and researching for the past few years.
- One of the all-star contributors to the "Archival Aesthetics" groups is of course Shanghai-based artist and friend Kim Laughton, whose Taobao-Media project has been going on for 2 years now and is composed exclusively of unaltered images plucked from the wilds of Taobao (China's Ebay-meets-Amazon emporium of anything that can be purchased, ranging from houses to baby animals and everything in between). Chinese production and consumption revealed as Dada-ist social realism. http://taobao-media.tumblr.com
- For other design fictions that are ultimately not that fictional, I wanted to highlight the "link" through which I purchased and downloaded the new William Gibson novel The Peripheral to my old-school Kindle. Once you read the book (which I do recommend, because duh), you can see how even the act of downloading/reading it digitally feels like a transmedia addendum to the experience, even moreso than in other Gibson books. http://www.amazon.com/Peripheral-William-Gibson-ebook/dp/B00INIXKV2/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=
- One of my favorite music discoveries this year is Claude Larson's 1982 album "Digital Landscape" (http://spookcityusa.blogspot.com/2014/04/memory-expansion.html), which one mp3-blogspotter (those still exist!) introduces with: "if you're into eighties music approximating a jungle cruise through yr CPU's hard drive, then this will be right up yr alley". Yes, there is a song called, "Springtime in Silicon Valley", which I feel like Mel Brooks would appreciate.
Samantha Culp is a writer, curator, and producer based between Shanghai and Los Angeles. She is a partner in the new art agency Paloma Powers.