infobong.com

Arthouse has blog art on display! I checked out their current show, "New American Talent: The Eighteenth Exhibition," yesterday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised by a video installation. Siebren Versteeg's CC consists of a video monitor looping talking heads from CNN and Headline News, while closed captions scroll on below. The captions don't quite fit the visuals, however. Rather than detailing political events and world affairs, they describe more prosaic material, the stuff of daily life. The description card said that the piece pulls text from Weblogs around the 'net, then randomly displays them on screen.

I wondered if there was a political element to the piece, privileging the experience of ordinary people over the rich and powerful. In a paper I wrote last semester on Weblogs, I noted how self-conciously political 'zine editors attempted to challenge the mass media by writing on personal topics In his book "Zines Stephen Duncombe uses the example of Jen Payne, who writes about her life in a Connecticut town - standard fare for persons of blog online journals. Duncombe explains, “Whereas the rule of thumb regarding publication in the mainstream media is ‘man bites dog’ – that is, what is considered newsworthy is what is out of the ordinary – what Jen and many other writers of perzine honor is the opposite: the everyday.” I wondered if Versteeg had a similar project in mind with "CC."

I thought the rest of the show was quite good, but I didn't take good notes, unfortunately, so I'm not able to relate the other paintings and photographs that struck me.