Dennis Hollingsworth

Handshaking

Thanksgiving occurs only once a year here in the States, but gratitude is lifelong. I would like to take the time at the beginning of this year to say thanks to my fellow bloggers who have kept in touch, the recent handshaking online.

-With Steve LaRose, who noted the gene trail of "3 Blogging Hollingsworths": Neil, Harold and yours truley.

-With "cousin" Harold, who echoed my Dec. 1st 2006 cut n' paste post "Risk, Faith" featuring Kirk Varnedoe's thoughts about abstraction, personal vision and modernity. Those thoughts caught much attention, prompting a few emails and favorable mentions from freinds here in ChinaTown LA.

-With Brent Hallard, who was kind to float a recent close up of my red monad field for Tokyo and beyond --good tidings, that. I'm looking forward to meeting up with him this spring and see his world behind his blog.

-With Dean Terry's Metaverse class' MFA opening at UT Dallas. Dean has a film, "Subdivided" that will air on Dallas' PBS station KERA on January 3rd!

-With Chris Jager's adventurous business venture, "SlideRoom". It's a web service for portfolio submission and review, virtual slide sheets in the house. I put a tag ad up for him in the sidebar.

I changed up to digital fotos in 2003 when we started to move eastward towards Spain. A slide or transparancy has tons of more information than what we normally take in a jpeg (640x480 being the normal setting), but over time, I don't think it will matter so much. What will matter is to take a variety of images in different conditions, to provide fodder for whatever technical framework we will require in the future. Sure, a catalog production will need the rich image density that transparancies provide... but I don't think coffe table books will be a significant feature in our future.

I especially like the prospect of streamlining the various bureacracies that SlideRoom promises (I hate the application processes whether it be for grants or public art or faculty applications or whatnot. With all the information in the web, I wonder why an applicant has to submit anything at all?

Good luck Chris, I'm rooting for you!

-With Tom Moody, who was kind to post a pocket exegesis on me a few months back. We have shaken hands several times over, and I appreciate his ability to range across media genre free of the hunkered territoriality that sometime afflicts artworld denizens. I especially like how he can appreciate that blogging is a medium in and of itself:

I'm surprised that more artists don't use their weblogs as real workspaces for their art; most that I've seen are in the classic mold of a place to write, link, and gossip- journal-like spaces. What I don't see often enough are webloggers who mine their past posts, reflect on where they've been and where they are now, connect dots, and build a corpus of work. Am I missing others who are doing this?

And why wouldn't blogging be another genre, given the range of expressiveness and wide... and free... dissemination? (I sense the prospect of anxiety our there already, once artists begin to grasp this idea. Comodification --and thus compensation-- can work itself out, it always has in the past. What has to happen first is the establishment of value.)

UPDATE:

-With Chris Ashley!

Chris is another blogger I should shake hands with in this post... especially but not exclusively since I had mis-attributed his words in Tom Moody's handshake:

Hi Dennis,

In your new year's handshake I read the following,
which you attributed to Tom Moody:

"I'm surprised that more artists don't use their
weblogs as real workspaces for their art; most that
I've seen are in the classic mold of a place to write,
link, and gossip- journal-like spaces. What I don't
see often enough are webloggers who mine their past
posts, reflect on where they've been and where they
are now, connect dots, and build a corpus of work. Am
I missing others who are doing this?"

I thought this sounded very familiar. I thought this
sounded like me! So with a little search I confirmed-
yes, the quote above is me, not Tom- it was a comment
on his weblog by me that he was quoting and responding
to:

http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/29051/

It was weird to read something I was sure I'd said-
these ideas are things I've harped on a lot- but had
to confirm it to make sure it was me.

Cheers, and Happy New Year.

Chris

Yes! It is you, Chris.... my most heartfelt apologies! Chris Ashley is probably the premier artist who is vigorously working the potential of blogging as an art form: writing, sketching from traditional media to HTML code, photography... all excellent, dense and deep.

UPDATE II:

-With Bill Gusky too! Bill has an excellent blog wherein he too commented on the Varnedoe blurb mentioned above.

By the way... while clicking around Bill's blog, I found an enterprise called Voice Over To Go, a voice acting service for people who don't like the sound of their own voice... like yours truly perhaps. It sounds fun and smart. And I suspect that the proprietor, Eric Gusky is Bill's brother, too. Very Cool.

Posted by Dennis at January 1, 2007 3:50 PM