Rob Ray

Woo hoo! "I Love Resets" won the CRITICAL GLITCH ARTWARE CATEGORY at BLOCKPARTY and NOTACON 2010.

I Love Resets is the performance video game created and used by I Love Presets, a multimedia performance trio of Jason Soliday, Jon Satrom, and I.

Here's a youtube clip of the I LOVE RESETS game used during one of our performances. More stuff over at the I Love Presets youtube channel.

hey... wait a second! We're ALL winners!!! I still feel like Bruce Jenner though!

I'm very psyched to announce that I'm Drunken Boat's new art editor! I have some tasty selections lined up for Drunken Boat 12 coming out this Fall!

I made a new video influenced by some thoughts I jotted down while at Jose Esteban Muñoz's recent lecture on queer futurity and his book Cruising Utopia at RPI.

I'm psyched criticalartware will be screening Interior Decorating, Sex and Death at BLOCKPARTY, the largest running North American demoparty, and at the NOTACON 2010 art and technology conference. You can also check it out below or over at my vimeo page.

I had many thoughts about the first half Schwabsky's "Scattered Threads" review of the 2010 Whitney Biennial in The Nation. I'll see if I can summarize them in a way that gets my point across. As a warning, this probably won't be pretty.

I'll sit on this Schwabsky quote as I think it is what he intended as the climax of the article or at least the climax of the point I was most interested in.

"My argument is not with Sinclair's commitment to document realities that most of us find hard to face even in pictures, let alone in person. Rather, it is with the curators' inability to articulate their exhibition in a way that establishes a dialectic between the aesthetic and topical aspects of contemporary art. The threads Jewell spoke of in 1932 remain scattered. "

So, now allow me the pleasures of reckless extrapolation and reduction. It seems he is griping about entering the show hoping to hang his hat on something but instead is left just as confused, or more confused, about the world than when he came in. I could insert some sort of quick quip here and be done but I'm trying to do that less these days.

Schwabsky sets up his complaint by suggesting the question "What's the point of the Biennial?” and then answers it for us by looking at Jewell's historical enthusiasm for the show as a means to quickly put one's mind, finger, and/or dollar, on "contemporary art." By having a large regularly occurring group show, "scattered threads are woven into a single strand and a broad survey of the field becomes possible." Schwabsky then, in a move reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote sharpening his knives before pursuit of the Roadrunner, compares the purview of the Biennial curator in 1932 (select the artists) to the purview of the Biennial curator today (select the work) in order to define Bonami and Carrion-Murayari's job for us.

Schwabsky uses the word "dialectic" to define what he wanted from the show - a word leaving me wanting more detail. But I'll take a guess. With phrases like “unbridgeable gap,” “scant coherence,” and “the show’s two poles” it seems Schwabsky upset about not getting a “DJ set” of art where the hooks and melodies of great songs are made even more amazing by those in-between bits the DJ is stewing into things you can't identify but are deeply moved by, or at least dancing your ass off to. "Wow this is great, I have no idea what I'm listening to but it is awesome and my friends and I are all dancing to it. Hey wait a minute! I think hear that new Thom Yorke song!" And then you leave the club having experienced something unique and amazing. You find out that music has a name (insert electronic music genre name here.) You'll be telling your other friends about it; and they will get hip to it; and all will be right with the world. Even your hangover is going to be awesome. On the flipside, it is then easy to register the "it all sounded the same" complaint against this type of smooth in-key creativity.

But I don't think this sort of experience, or even a rejection of it, was on Bonami and Carrion-Murayari’s radar. I think the lack of a "x is really big this year" vision ("'Back to drawing' is really big this year." or "Utopias and neon are really big this year.") was explicit but not intentional. It seemed the focus was on timeliness and the inherent ball of confusion that surrounds a word like that in the year 2010.

I find that aspect of their curation pretty refreshing, but it doesn’t leave people with much to talk about at the bar. Artists and art writers are particularly susceptible to the unpleasant taste and odor of this type of confusion. "I Didn't Know What to Make of It" isn’t such a great coffee table book title.

With no "really big this year" in play, it is easy and fun to postulate the inclusion of Nina Berman and Stephanie Sinclair’s work as some sort of coup plotted by "the real" to put the mustache on the Mona Lisa. Strangely, Schwabsky takes this bait, chews on it a while and then spits it out as his bridge to his “there’s no dialectic here” statement.

After my second visit to the Biennial, I felt Bonami and Carrion-Murayari were definitely crafting something very specific and complicated. I'm not so into the word "dialectic." I just think of it as them being on the hook to curate the show —to work with the individual artists and artworks in the crafting of an “art Voltron” with an energy that exists in cohabitation with, but also unique to, each single artwork and viewer in the show. I could feel that energy. I haven't been able to fully understand and classify all the complexities of it but I could feel it and it felt coherent. It just might take me a while to put my finger on it's nuances. And Obama, Facebook, the commodification of dissent, nostalgification of Generation X, and a whole mess of other 2010 things are in that hopper. It is odd becuase many of the individual works didn't do it for me, but I liked the overall energy and complexities of the show.

I have no deadline to summarize what I think about the show, so some slow thinking on its complexities is a luxury I can afford and also a luxury I actually find luxurious. I suppose that puts me in the “I actually like not knowing what to make of it” camp. 

Monolake is one of my favorite musicians. It's been a few years since I've heard Plumbicon (it came out around 2005 and was quite a burner at the time). It just re-crossed my path today after a 12 hour programming session. Nothing could possibly sound better right now. This Youtube version is pretty crusty sounding compared to a high bit rate mp3 but it does a decent job introducing the track if you haven't heard it before. If you dig it, he has a ton of stuff on Beatport for purchase.

So it looks Firefox 3.6.x has added another "Full Screen" shortcut.

Fullscreen (previously and still triggerable via the F11 key)can now be triggered by hitting Cmd+Shift+F. This steps on the often used Firefox Web Developer Toolbar's "Display Element Information" shortcut which is also Cmd+Shift+F.

I wonder if they added it becuase Google Chrome uses Cmd+Shift+F for fullscreen mode? Anyway. There's a workaround.

Firefox offers no native way to modify keyboard shortcuts but you can change them by

1) installing the "keyconfig" xpi.

2) restarting the browser

3) Go to "Tools | Keyconfig... (it's down near the bottom of the list.)

4) Change or delete the Full Screen = Cmd+Shift+F shortcut

The ausgang.spring.10 issue is up! Some great stories in response to the QUESTION SETS!

Jill Adams, Angelo, Steve Badgett, Vanessa Berry, Dr. Paul Cekan, Juliayn Coleman, Lawrence Gatt, Juliayn Gilbert-Davis, Dan Gleason, Matt Hanner, Bob Hooker, Harold Jeffries, Phoebe Kessler, Karl Larsson, Wayne Lovan, Rob Ray, Ivan Riascos, Deborah Stratman, Amy Theobald, Dan S. Wang, Mike Wolf, The Mysterious X.

GET LOST! is a commision I'm working on for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival taking place in the Cumbria, Lancashire UK.

The pieces are coming together!

Get Lost! turns people into “disorienteers” misguiding themselves through Grizedale Forest as they try to "lose their way" using tools they would normally use to "find their way."

Disorienteers can search for a take-home Get Lost! kit (or can download a "build-you-own" kit) and create their own adventures.

"I Love Presets, the multimedia spaz-lab of Chicago artists Jon Satrom, Jason Soliday & Rob Ray, celebrates how technology can revolutionize video art, but, paradoxically, revels in how limited some of that technology is. Their live performances and YouTube videos capture a pixelated meltdown in which rather low-rent digital animation and imagery—including those animated GIFs that used to flicker across your Geocities page back in 1998—intersects with glitchy, static-ridden music. They even claim to incorporate computer viruses into the mix. Here, Satrom and Soliday (w/ Ray over the internet) will perform and also host a workshop, offering some clues as to what makes their gleefully destructive works tick."
--Starlight Cinema: Performance And Workshop By I Love Presets
A/V Club; The Onion: 2009.12.03
http://tinyurl.com/yauum5x

I created a new piece called The Space Between Two Lines for the Reanimation Library's "solo" show at Charles Goldman's GRIDSPACE in Brooklyn, NY.

I'm totally geeked to be included in a mighty roster of artists and writers asked by The Reanimation Library to respond to one of the most intriguing books in its collection: The Rand Corporation's 1955 classic, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

Each response fills one of GRIDSPACE's cubicles, with one spot reserved for the book itself. The also show features work by Anita Allyn, Jen Bervin, Christian Hawkey, Jen Hofer, Denise Iris, Tom Jennings, Katarina Jerinic, and David Levine.

Here's some photos and a brief description of my new piece.

Come on out Sunday if you can!

Opening is Sunday Feb 28th, 2010 4-6PM
The show is on view through March 2010

GRIDSPACE [map]
112 Rogers Avenue.
Brooklyn, NY

Greetings!

The Winter 2009 issue of Ausgang is out! And I'm in it! Yay! The topics for this issue are family and space. A letter I wrote to DARPA regarding some of my recent research appears in the Space section.

There is also a lot of great stuff up there! Here's the full list of contributors.

Alberto Aguilar, Brianna Bakke, Jennifer Bastian, Mary Walling Blackburn, Jen Blair, Janina Ciezadlo, Lindsay Chastain, Salem Collo-Julin, Anthony Elms, Angeline Evans, Marc Fischer, Melinda Fries,  Lawrence Gatt, Dan Gleason, Justin Goh, Camilla Ha, Kevin Hamilton, Matt Hanner, Mary Hughes, Lem Huntington, Julie Jewelz, John King, Andrea Merkz,  Nicholas O'Brien, Rob Ray, Ivan Riascos, Zena Sakowski, Deborah Stratman, Melissa Sullivan, Luke Tauber, Jessica Westbrook

In the absence of flying today, I made a mix!

Fretting the Hyperbolic Plane - 74 mins 192kbps 103mb
("Right Click, Save As..." to download)

------ Tracklist -----
Oxia - Sun Step
Steve Bug - Swallowed Too Much Bass feat Paris The Black Fu (Joris Voorn Remix)
MyMy - Everybody's Talkin
John Tejada - Torque
Todd Bodine, Daniel.fx - 7 Eleven
Gideon - Traffic Jam
Andy Book - Nemesis
Gideon - You Will be Judged
Aldo Cadiz - Indigenous
Mild Bang - Evolet (Alex Young Remix)
Paco Osuna - Looking for V2
Steve Lawler - Hocus Pocus (Radio Slave's Mole People Mix)
Detroit Grand Pubahs - Dr. Bootygrabber (Samuel L. Session Remix)
Rave Brothers - Samim (Audio Junkies Remix)
Baldo - Between Lines
Dantron Eeprom - Face Control
Obando - Bounty Bass
DJ Sodeyama - Stay To Gether
Pilas - Night Is
Dataworx - Control

Enjoy! It is a bit wonky in places. But... So am I.

Fretting the Hyperbolic Plane - 74 mins 192kbps 103mb
("Right Click, Save As..." to download)

Some great pics of Florida from the late 1800's (sorry it's a pdf.). I lived in Florida for 8 years and after leaving I've found there is something about it that is really hard to shake loose of.

Florida is filled with real-estate and family entertainment tycoons always trying to make it out as some whitewashed hellhole it isn't. It's actually a really damn spooky place! I think that's what I like about it so much. It's also still a place you could actually be killed in your own backyard. Some coral snake, black bear, or alligator you've been screwing over with your septic tank runoff could decide "Today's the day I'm going to bite that asshole."

A pretty awesome cartoon from 1953 called "A is for Atom" over on archive.org

"It was little wonder the first thought was a weapon!"

Woop! The other day I found a Flavorpill review of Ahbyezyana - an installation I created with Deborah Stratman and shown at VONZWECK Gallery in Chicago.