MAT DRYHURST

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[matdryhurst]

1) Lists aren't going away, we just need to make them more interesting. Lists are only reductive if written poorly. I can think of a number of journalists who have owned the long form article, who is going to be the first to own the list?

2) Lists are sticking around because of their convenience. They are fast to write, fast to read and most importantly fast to share. Publications can rack up as many page impressions as items on a list - the attention economics are compelling, and as with any major economic shift the art form must (and will) adapt to accomodate that reality.

3) There will be a time soon where designers and writers decide to re-imagine the list. I've been sketching possibilities for lists that unravel and complexify from click to click to satisfy the casual browser and thirsty reader. It will be done, but first we have to respect the list as a contemporary fixture and build from that conclusion. 

4) Lists only increase the value of long form journalism. Like online educational breakthroughs that arguably increase the value of in-person elite schools while threatening the security of the mediocre institution, the success of lists raises questions about the mediocrity of short form posts lazily culled from tweets to satisfy the 24 hour content cycle. These posts communicate nothing but the desire to be First!, whereas reductive or not, the brevity of lists inherently require the author to assert an opinion or choice.

5) Lists provoke conversation, which provides a compelling feedback loop. I'm turning my website into a combination of lists and comments, which has the double convenience of providing a faster and more succinct format for me to communicate ideas. I usually have a lot to say on the topics I choose to raise, however don't have the time to write long pieces that only a few people may read. Want complexity? Comment and I will respond - that system ensures that the details that unfurl from the list are tailored to those who are paying attention, which is far more efficient and engaging for everyone. Is that a clue as to where list design should go?

6) In the spirit of ongoing conversation, lists allow for the author to append new points and ideas to the article without breaking the format - quite like I am doing here. If I have any other thoughts on lists in the coming weeks, or perhaps you bring up a great point in the comments, I may add it as another list item for people to enjoy on their lunch break in the hallowed modern tradition :)

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[matdryhurst]

Holly Herndon - Movement

Really proud to finally release the video I directed for Holly Herndon in collaboration with Tolleson Design, Lighting Magician Eric Haines, Editor David Riley and performers Pei Ling Kao and Nathan Ng. Read about it in the press at: Pitchfork, NPR, Motherboard, FACT, Dummy, XLR8R and Consequence of Sound.

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UP SF

Happy to report that the first UP: San Francisco was a great success, after months of hard work with our partners at Intersection for the Arts and the 5M Project. Thousands of people attended over the course of the day to learn about the replicable urban projects prototyped at GAFFTA and catch music and live visual code from some of the best resident DJ's and code artists in the Bay, and live performers Afrikan Sciences and Ryan Alexander, Aaron David Ross and Andrew Benson, andMark Fell, visiting from the UK. Big thanks to everyone involved, with a special mention to Barry Threw, Stephanie Sheriff, Jacob Heule and Cullen Miller for their work in transforming the Minna Tunnel into a (code compliant) audio/visual park filled with 2,000 square feet of fresh sod :) Here is what Wired, the SF Chronicle and Shareable had to say about the day. UP London next, once we've had a protein shake or two.

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'Collusion' w/ Holly Herndon & Reza Negarestani

I'm proud to post the video of our recent collaboration with Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani (author of Cyclonopedia, and the upcoming book 'The Mortiloquist') for 23Five's Activating the Medium Festival at the Lab. The festival's theme this year, curated by Andrea Williams, was around Professor Timothy Morton's concept of 'Dark Ecology' , which in short articulates an ironic and horrific complicity with impending ecological catastrophe that unites all living and non living things as uncanny actors in events that are 'already written'.

This theme seemed like the perfect opportunity to collaborate with Reza, whose work on 'petro-politics' and 'telluric conspiracy' in Cyclonopedia has been inspiring both of us for years, and greatly compliments Morton's own work on Object Oriented awareness and Ecological myth-twisting. In long skype calls and email exchanges with Reza, a central theme of conspiracy and 'the psychotically mundane' began to emerge. That is, that accentuating mundane aspects of the performative environment to their psychotic extreme would in some ways increase temporal environmental awareness and hopefully provoke a potent sense of threat, complicity and the uncanny in audience members.

This was a lofty objective that took a lot of late night conversations to try and satisfy. On Reza's recommendation, we visited the work of film director Larry Cohen, and attempted to restrict our plans from drifting into 'sublime' or 'fantastical' territories, which could in some part work against our intention of implicating audience members in the here-and-now, and work against Morton's insistence on 'the mesh', or a new understanding of seeing the living and non living as unequivocally one and the same.

This distinction led us to concentrate on the immediate performance environment, rather than fetishize 'environmental' source material. We focused on the cell phone. The bottle you are drinking out of.The sentient protocols of attendance and respect. The mundane aspects we targeted were:

- The stage photographers. We had a remote observer trigger a loud camera sample for every time a stage photographer snapped a picture, with the intention of creating an uncertainty within the photographer as to whether they were disrupting or contributing to the performance.

- Cell phones. Cell phones of select friends were called throughout the performance, again attempting to invoke this concern of disruption of protocol. These elements were reconciled when the same ring tones appeared within the composition. Holly performed live feedback with her iPhone to further implicate the device.

- Dormant instruments. This aspect was not as apparent as we would have liked, but we planted laptops amidst other performers instruments to play timed samples that complimented and clashed with the performance. We thought that this mesh of 'diegetic/non-diegetic' would heighten awareness of objects within the environment, however the sound levels made it difficult to discern their contribution. I maintain that this concept could be explored a great deal more though.

- Applause. This was probably the most profound and successful 'deception' of the piece, where the audience was invited to applaud, only for that very applause to be played back to them to signal the rhythmic finale. The audience was notably uncertain whether to applaud at the actual end of the piece. We hoped that this exposed the mechanics of the performative environment, and also worked to implicate each audience member in the conspiracy. We felt that this also represented the most clear indicator of our greater narrative, in which roles had been pre-established for each audience member and performed dutifully and unwittingly - an homage in some sense to both Reza and Timothy Morton's interest in predestined events and our complicity with them.

We attempted to generate a conspiracy from these mundane elements as a means to brand them, in a sense. We thought that by crafting uncanny scenarios around routine and mundane aspects of performance, we might somehow succeed in invoking similar environmental awareness in an audience member at a future performance, planting a seed of doubt the next time one applauds, or unexpectedly hears a cell phone go off in an inappropriate place. Overall, we were thrilled with how the performance went, and would like to extend the narrative to further performances in future. Any feedback would be really interesting! we are going to release a recording of the piece soon.  

[matdryhurst]

Art School : Credit where it is due

Credit: Daniel Clowes for the cartoon.

For the last year or so I have taken an intense interest in the future of higher education, informed in part by my own uncertainty as to whether to take the plunge into post graduate study. Many intuit that something must change, with student debt eclipsing credit card debt in the United Statesand our ability to communicate knowledge and insight across networks developing at a rate matched only by our willingness to receive such information remotely. I narrowed my focus on art school, because:

I have studied the arts and trust my judgment on the matter.

Unlike many fields, pursuing an education in the arts does not require access to expensive facilities.

Art related degrees currently represent awful return on investment for students looking to enter the workforce and pay back their college debt.

As Paul Graham pointed out recently, akin to programmers, arguably most of the best artists are to be found outside the academy.

Unlike most industries, there is a massive gulf between work being validated within art colleges, and work gaining market success outside of the academy.

So over the course of the year I talked to a lot of people. I spoke to practicing artists, art students, alumni, faculty and professionals, trying to develop a sense of what they feel art school ought to be, and what positive and negative things they had to say about their own arts education. Here is a summarized account of what I found:

What Art School is good for:

Connections

This was by far the most frequent response. Art is a social sport, and many acknowledged that access to a community of peers that would eventually disperse throughout the world was a positive aspect of the art school experience. Interestingly, this feedback was often more quantitative than qualitative, as in "it got me lots of contacts around the world" more so than "it got me lots of contacts around the world whose work I admire".

Access to reputable artists, and feedback from those artists.

Many are savvy to the reality that one's art practice has little chance of thriving without validation from those who themselves have received such validation from the art industry. Getting to work with such people and gain insight and exposure for your own work is a big plus for attending art school.

Time to focus.

Being able to dedicate 100% of your time to your arts practice is a validating and transformative time for many. With the ebb and flow of creative inspiration and output, it is hard to amass significant progress in your work without committing a great deal of time and energy to the process. Art school facilitates this, and student loans serve as a means to postpone financial concerns/pressures for the duration of study.

Learning to be critical

Many claim that art school curricula and culture helped them to look at the world and the work of others in a critical capacity. These critical and theoretic aspects afford artists the ability to communicate the value and relevance of their work, supported by intellectual concepts of critical theorists, philosophers and political radicals.

Art School Criticisms

Art School does not bring you acclaim in the actual art world

Despite a large number of acclaimed artists holding arts degrees, not one person claimed that art school in-itself helped them to gain acclaim in the world of art. Jane Chafin's excellent article on post graduate arts education points out that of the top 50 living artists ranked by the artfacts algorithm, only 11 have a post graduate education in the arts.

Art School is far too expensive for little financial return

Art degrees cost as much as other degrees, however the unemployment rate for arts graduates is second worst only to that of architects. Consistent with this information, the three worst private schools for student debt in the country are all art schools.

Art Schools only hire art school graduates

I wish I could find more data on this point, but from experience and accounts from art school faculty, art schools only hire faculty with advanced arts degrees(with a few anomalous exceptions). Now having already established that the majority of successful artists do not have such degrees, this would clearly indicate that the best people to learn and receive criticism from are to be found outside of art school.

Art Schools will not hire you even if you are an art school graduate

Competition for scarce art school positions is fierce, and nobody in their right mind leaves a stable job in arts faculty once appointed. This reality also bodes poorly for the relevance of art school faculty teachings, given that the arts are inherently dependent on time and shifting paradigms and perspectives. 

[matdryhurst]

Recorded live with live streaming a/v from the www. Thanks to Nihar, Josh, Jason, Sean, Alexandra, Sarah & Andreas @ Haceteria Thanks to Alex Jones and DARPA for contributing material. Super happy with how this turned out :)

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BODY live in London

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Immortalized on Google Maps

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At least for the next few years anyway..

The google maps camera caught me during a break at work (and also during my awkward balding period!). It's worth taking a look around the scene, as there are quite a few stories told, including what appears to be a strung out lady in sunglasses, a drug deal and a police arrest. The street is about 150 metres long.