Seth Price is an artist, writer and musician born in 1973 in Jerusalem. Price’s Poem has been printed in black soy ink on fine paper using a digital mimeograph. With the original constellations of thoughts known only to the artist, the disassociated words and phrases cascade down the page into a disquieting poem. Price made these notes to himself in 2006 and later used them in a self-published book the same year titled Notes on this Show. You experience the same feed of information as many others in your chat room but in completely different geographical locations, states of being, times of day and you can do as you please behind the screen and project a voice into the box requesting songs (PLZ MORE JB!) or expressing joy about the beat drop (*dances and throws off t-shirt* Plurnt RN tbh).Seth Price’s edition, Poem, presents a scanned page from one of the artist’s notebooks. For example live streaming of online DJ ‘concerts’ via internet radio, tinychat, or Ustream with the added component of the virtual (yet very real) audience in the form of live chat box is a perfect example of public but private experiences with an art form. Additionally the public yet private experiential component of participating (which all do) on the internet is changing how we consider art and creation. If the internet can be a medium, and a gallery for art that exists within its space then Price says that these works of art function as an ephemeral public art, an interactive piece that can be modified internally (by the creator or moderator or the intern with a login and password) and externally (shrinking a window or zooming in on your browser). As web-design students this may seem more fit for a philosophy class or an art theory course, however if we are to design and contribute to this stream of ideas, and in use it as a medium for expression and communication, it is valuable to at least consider some of the ideas that Price touches on.
Similar to the Tao, we are called to experience the internet and not just any experience but a private experience with a stream of consciousness that exists externally for a multitude of people. The revolutionary medium/transit system that the reading continually hints or literally spells out is the internet: ephemeral yet omnipresent, holding all information yet continually fragmented and contradictory-the Taoist poem of the 21 st centaury. He unpacks several somewhat dense thoughts on the epistemological workings that support different readings of ‘conceptual’ art, the mediums and transit waves of that artistic ‘data’ travels through, and then zones in on an exploration of the increasing dispersion of those works of conceptual art through new mediums of perceptive access. There is definitely timeliness about this reading in context of the technology we have been learning in class, and all of us have probably been living and adjusting to. However sharing my opinion isn’t very useful/interesting/informative.
I know this isn’t meant it be a book review of someone’s work who is probably one hundred times smarter than you, but I do want to say that I really enjoyed the reading it, shared it with my friends, and brought it up at a holiday party. When a reading has pictures you know it’s going to be some quality literature.