by Paddy Johnson on September 15, 2015
I spent most of Saturday smiling so hard my face hurt. That’s because I milled about the Internet Yami-Ichi for no less than three hours, which is a little like landing in the 150th wing of Internet and discovering there’s a very, very strange party going on. The day long event was actually a giant flea market hosting more than 140 vendors inside Masbeth’s Knockdown Center, a renovated factory space with brick walls, wooden support beams and 40 feet high ceilings. It was a fitting contrast to the vendors wares which were new, disposable and typically useless.
While there, I bought two used passwords for 25 cents a piece, a printout of an old meme I didn’t recognize on office paper for five bucks, two instagram prints printed at a resolution determined by the number of likes it received and plastic five dollar USB drive with animated GIFs on it. I also took home two free badges and a 32 page coffee stained zine filled with Internet slang.
Basically, it’s the best art fair ever. And that’s not just because I was able to buy something. At almost every booth someone was making something driven by their passion for online culture. These are the people who make up the nerdocracy that once ruled the web, and they haven’t gone away. If anything they’ve just gotten weirder. And that’s a very good thing. Highlights after the jump.
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by Corinna Kirsch on August 3, 2015
Back in 2011, when I started interning at Art F City, Paddy was working on the exhibition Graphics Interchange Format for Denison University. Sure, I thought I knew a bit about GIFs, but with the exhibition and its ensuing website, I was thrown into a richly inventive niche culture—and then I realized I was a n00b, and had no idea who most of the artists in the exhibition were. There were, for example, the Spirit Surfers, a “secret society of web-surfing monks.” You’re looking “Blue Willow,” an anonymously posted GIF that comes from their site.
But what is a Spirit Surfer? From the Graphics Interchange Format catalog:
The same year [2008], Kevin Bewersdorf founded Spirit Surfers with Paul Slocum, a group image blog, in which a small number of invited artists post regularly. In contrast to MTAA, a collective that very squarely identifies what they do as art, Bewersdorf considers the posted images neither art nor non-art. But, in a sense the very structure of the Spirit Surfer blog resembles art: all posts are separated into “boons” and “wakes” – or, perhaps, “objects” and “context”. The former are treasures brought back from a day of surfing the net, the latter images, text, or video identifying where the boons come from. Whether or not all posts should be labeled art is, of course, up to Spirit Surfers’s contributors to decide.
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