The medium is the people: A tribute to our ever dwindling attention span.

I remember the internet. I remember stealing my aunt's dial-up connection, and remember surfing the net for the first time from 4pm to 7am, almost passing out. I remember looking things up. I remember when Mcdonald's barely had a website, and Pepsi started posting quictime movies of just random stuff. I remember that when you used to look things up, you used any search engine you wanted. I remember Alta Vista, Starting Point, Hotbot, Metacrawler, Lycos and Netscape. I remember looking something up, and not finding it.

It used to be, that when you looked something up, like a favourite actor or something, you'd wind up at a "fan page". Some individual, was paying big money, an insane amount of it, probably, to gather anonymous visitors who would watch random pictures and read factoids here and there. Various scans of magazine covers, quotes from articles, and links to other sites of people with the same interests. Having a "guestbook" was the killer-app back then, and a form with submit button was consider "Pimpin'". It was a lot like looking through a kid's collage book with cutouts scotch-taped or glued, with big pink letters, and of course, the proverbial email-me icon.

It used to be, that you would wind up on pages that were collections of links to various websites, whether for excellence in design (see "proper" HTML coding, or the coveted and now despised "FRAMES".

Eventually, came the free hosting, (geocities, xoom, theglobe.net) with gems for videos.. no more than one, of course, as you could easily pop your free 5 megabytes of hosting. Space was scarce, and content often had to be pulled. This was before we even spoke of exceeding this thing we would come to call "bandwith", the online equivalent of petroleum and gasoline.

Then came indexing services, Yahoo was surfed partially by searching and by categories, like a phonebook. TECHNOLOGY > SOFTWARE > WINZIP, then a few links to prominent sites, 30% of them already dead. Then the wonderful DMOZ project, which people still pretty much don't know about, and whose utility not dwindles in comparison to the hulking services that are made available to us. Oh, and remember "Top 5% of the web"?


I don't know "POINT" is, and I'm not about to read up now, but I couldn't even find the original top 5% logo. Everyone use to have it. There was even a spoof called "Bottom 5%". I used to go to this great website called the "TOTAL SHIT" homepage, which bestowed the award through a collection of links to the most laughable attempts at websites with ultra-rude comments before it was ever in style (i.e., today).

But the net, as we know it today, generates traffic from hype. It is what's popular that gets attention. It is what is featured that gets noticed (YouTube). Information, today, is transmitted not by the net itself, not by the product, but by the people. The medium is the people, as there is no more a powerful tool today than the Forwarded message, the sent link, the digged website, the "check this out". With services like Facebook, it is what is spoken about that gets noticed. Forget about long winded artticles: it's gotta be 10 seconds, or at least the first 10 seconds that'll have you watching the rest. It's gotta be the best. The best "evar". It's got to be something that you've never seen before.

The blog.

The tinyest regurgitation, the puddles of verbal puke, the writing on the fun-wall, the super-wall. The author is dead. The reporter is dead. It is the people who drive information, as we pay close attention to the absurd, to the water that can now catch on fire, to the evolution of dance. To the things, that brighten our days for a mere few minutes.

We tear movies out of the big screen, we rip albums and scatter song and sound, we are the kings of all media, the termites of the art world.

We are truly falling asleep, as we fling information towards one another. "Have you seen it?", "Ya someone sent me that". Exciting, isn't it. sooooooo god damn exciting.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ding, ding! New Mail! Oh good, I could use a cup of "wow" right now. Whatever happened to Robin Williams, and the Carpe Diem that brought tears to our eyes? (do you have a copy? :) ) Truly, the day seems more and more unattainable. Our mailboxes, a collection of used syringes that we all share by the dayload. Even I, who does not sit in an office, can see this.

How will I make my life exciting. Give me something good. Something real. Can you do that? Maybe I should do that. That's probably the problem.

--- end of blog ---

And since I should embed my own two cents, I just wanna say that this video is visually and audibly culmination of most of what I love and aspire to accomplish as an artist.. which, really, kinda breaks my heart in a "someone did what I wanted to do" kind of way.. but it's just perfect. And perhaps, this might be fuel for how "strange" I am (I don't believe this, but my entourage seems to). I have it in high-rez .mov, and it's given me more hope than a lot of the art I've seen in the last 5 years. How I gushed, and ordered the the CD.