Melancholy GIF masterpieces from Laura Brothers. Brothers is just one of the many stellar artists exhibiting technology-inspired work in Synchronicity’s new show, Man, Such As We Know Him, Is A Computer.

Synchronicity, run by Chris Gere and Future Shipwreck’s own Katie Vonderheide, is one of L.A.’s most reliably awesome art galleries. Sadly, they’ve been in limbo for a few months now thanks to jackass East Hollywood landlords raising rents– so this show will be taking place at Mastodon Mesa‘s space in the Pacific Design Center.

Spencer Longo has taken on the task of transforming the gallery’s interior with an all-encompassing cyberdelic installation. Come check it out tomorrow night, January 20th– and get sucked into the net! The show includes work from Rafael Rozendaal, Peter Burr, and Owleyes and a boatload of other rad people. Don’t miss it!

Art, in one very limited sense, is an economy of symbols and materials. In today’s bustling digital marketplace of aesthetics and ideas, Andrew Laumann’s work is like your favorite neighborhood corner store, perpetually well-stocked with Millennial fantasies of absolute power with no responsibility. Punks rocket through a boundless void or drop from trees like overripe fruit, totally prosaic shit like chain-link fences and CD-R cases become symbols of infinity. How to spend this energy? How to use this junk? What kind of feeling can it get us?

The labor of an artist is always bound up in desire, but the wants and needs reflected in Laumann’s paintings, prints, sculptures, and collages seem strangely achievable: getting high, walking through a forest, collecting tokens of good-times-past, refusing to think about death. Yet art is none of these things and while it might make you feel nostalgic or pleasantly fucked-up in an analogous way it’s not about to replace the grand human ventures of exploration and conquest. Laumann’s work is so sublimely satisfying because we want more than the-thing-itself, we want to see it from every angle, experience it from every vantage point, and generally confound that sneaking suspicion that we’ve already done every fun thing that there is to do in this world. Give us little monuments and letters to god and tell us it will always be this great forever.

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That lovable scamp Ben Aqua has teamed up with Mitch Trale, the clever artist-programmer behind the kaleidoscopic virtual reality mind-trip walled.in, to bring us the most terrifying vision of Shaq since Kazaam. You can’t escape him. “Zoom into his teeth” – Ben Aqua.

Via the awesome Ida Lehtonen.

In Internet Therapy, Dump.fm creator Ryder Ripps surreptitiously records a session with his 68-year-old therapist. The ensuing discussion touches on Ripps’ anxieties over living life online and creating intangible products for a limited virtual audience. The therapist awkwardly tries to turn the problem over in his mind, but in the end a wide gulf between his terrestrial world and Ripps’ deeply entrenched cyber existence proves insurmountable.

This piece, presented on the always-awesome DIS Magazine, really strikes a chord with me. I’ve often thought to seek guidance for the uncharted territory of living with the Internet, but to whom should I address these questions? Maybe a peer to peer support group of internet addicts is the answer! Who’s with me? Anyone?

And now, the most recent video work of Hooliganship: a dream team made up of Peter Burr in collaboration with Christopher Doulgeris. Rather then satiating you with the immediacy of a happy, high energy world of good vibes like in their previous video work, this new piece is an atmospheric search that resonates without immediately melting inside of you.

“faketrap” whispers a dark enigmatic tone bordered by fleeting feelings of uneasiness. The air here seems to be thick and Lose Weight Exerciseed with impermanence. Appearances of warmth are merely cameos and it feels like you have the impossible task of finding humanity in a mixed-up digital world. It reminds me of my struggle with trying to cozy up to the Internet while it remains to me, uninterpretable and cold.

Watch the trailer for Hooliganship’s stellar Cartune Xprez 2010 DVD compilation, below, featuring work from a league of fantastic animators and video artists including Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Jacob Ciocci and Clare Rojas. Previous contributors to the Cartune Xprez DVDs include Takeshi Murata, Bruce Bickford and Shana Moulton. So basically these discs are filled with the work of geniuses.

Here’s how it works: you pack as many artists as you can fit into a room, each of them wielding a projector. Then they each project whatever they want, wherever they want. It’s called BYOB, or Bring Your own Beamer. Beamer? You know how the Brits call trucks “lorries” and elevators “lifts”? Well the Germans call projectors “beamers.” Those silly Europeans, what will they think of next!

After the first BYOB in Berlin, the anarchistic romp was repeated in Athens, and again last week in New York City. The New York edition (see photos from the evening over at Rhizome) included Future Shipwreck faves Travess Smalley, Michelle Ceja and Artie Vierkant in a stellar line-up of 25 artists. But as tends to be the case, Los Angeles is about to outdo New York with a BYOB event this week featuring 29 artists! Eat it, big apple!

BYOB L.A. includes beams of light emanating from the minds and machines of rad people such as Eugene Kotlyarenko, Hazel Hill McCarthy III, and Parker Ito. Two net art masterminds, Guthrie Lonergan and Chris Coy (who also has a fun new project going on up at JstChillin), are responsible for assembling the evening’s west coast guest list, and they’ll be participating in the wild light show themselves. Don’t miss it this Friday, November 19th at the USC Gayle and Ed Roski MFA Gallery.

Apparently, the New York edition got so crazy, it caused a power outage. This could be a great opportunity to find yourself in a completely dark room full of foxy art nerds, don’t pass it up!

Tobias Madison‘s carefully composed installation pieces transport you to a quiet and mysterious place, where the alienation of technology and the warmth of nature entangle. Giant swirling, digital abstractions invite you into a pastel void, before houseplants pull you back into a realm of familiarity— only to reveal the splatters of paint upon their leaves that render them eerie floral taxidermies. Bamboo shoots soak, sinister, in tanks of gorgeously opaque Vitamin Water. Compact discs melt down the depthless darkness of a scanner’s surface, a prescient dream of optical media’s slow motion death scene. It’s strangely sorrowful, the morbid mood Madison’s colorful constructions exude… and yet something pulls me toward these spaces. I want to sit in these stark surroundings for hours, maybe days.

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Turbo Props, an installation at the Institute of Social Hypocrisy in Paris. Curated by Oliver Laric and featuring a prop video game console, tropical plants splatter-painted by Tobias Madison, and a printable monument to the late, dearly missed “.yu” domain extension by Aleksandra Domanovic, among other fine art pieces. The ISH makes a point of noting that they “asked Oliver Laric if he could spend one night with his installation. He agreed.”

A couple years ago my friend Billy hit a deer driving back to Eugene on one of Oregon’s winding two-lane highways. Always an opportunist, Billy put the doe carcass in his pick-up and took it home, where he skinned and gutted the animal in the side yard between his house and the sorority next door. He made venison chili, but the head was left over, and for months he kept the last evidence of his crime wrapped in a plastic bag in the communal freezer.

This is everyone’s favorite story about Billy; it takes a truly audacious person to turn a tragedy into dinner. And roadkill reclamation has a way of satisfying our morbid curiosity with death and collision—without the ethical implications of rubbernecking at car wrecks or attending human funerals a la Harold and Maude.

The California Roadkill Observation System provides another ethical framework for gawking at roadkill. In the name of science, university researchers and volunteers out of my home town, Davis, California, have been fanatically photographing steamrolled animals in and around the Central Valley. The research will apparently be used to design better highways in the future that would decrease the real-life, recurring episodes of Car vs. Wild (as in the Discovery show, the man and his invention usually prevail over “the wild.” Though everyone loseWeight Exercises when a deer goes through a windshield.)

In its current manifestation, however, the Observation System is most useful as an access point to hundreds of categorized images of dead animals splayed heroically across the state highways. While there are certainly an abundance of gross-out roadkill photo albums online (enough to be spoofed in Nigel Grimmer‘s Roadkill Family Album), this one is uniquely thorough and unapologetic. Better roadside landscaping may be the reason behind the images, but the camera is clearly focused on the animal–the carnage often lining up with the rule of thirds. Which leads the online viewer to wonder: Why is it necessary for the data in this research project to be publicly accessible? When I compulsively visit the “Mammal (large)” section of the “Roadkill Photo Gallery,” will it actually influence whether or not I run over more of my large animal friends in the future?

The photos are stark obituaries for the deceased fauna. In human obituaries, one reads about the mundane hobbies of the dead and wonders in private how it all ended. In roadkill photos, the death scene is our only access to the animal’s life, while everything that came before remains a mystery.

“Both deer had been dead about one week, the first one probably an older kill and the 2nd within one week,” says one entry. “What was curious was that they went all the way down to the lake before dying near each other. Normally deer would avoid another dead deer.”

More photos after the jump; you can’t look but you can’t look away.

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Distortion: why does it rule? Back in 1936, Walter Benjamin famously theorized that our desire to have the work of art, that thing of mysterious origin and affecting beauty up close, to bring it into our comfortable private space on our own terms we are only too happy to accept the reproduction. The fact that this pretty much always entails a disruption of its original (some might say “pure”) form is a necessary compromise in this never-ending pursuit of personal aesthetic fulfillment. Most of us would gladly take a low-resolution jpeg of Justin Bieber into our home before the artist himself. Though imperfect, static, and two-dimensional it’s just a lot more manageable.

Artists like Cédric Fargues take delight in this kind of degeneration. If what we can get from the original source is always kind of fucked up from the start, why not fuck it up in a way that’s pleasing to our sensibilities? He uses Photoshop (or some analogous image editing software) in the same way psych bands use guitar effects pedals: not as a substitute for authenticity, but as an enhancement, as a style. His works fluctuate between too-pristine garden ornaments and melting, swirling celebrity portraits, all of which are suspended over a stoic digital dreamscape. If words can’t express what you’re feeling how about a virtual flowa?

Destroy all icons. Arrange your environment with utter precision and then launch it into the infinite isolation of space. If we can’t have everything we desire, at least we have the wonderfully off-putting simulated realities of Cédric Fargues.

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