Broadly abstraction refers to taking an idea or feeling and breaking it apart in some way (trasnsposition, superimposition, fragmentation, inversion, mirroring,, substitution) - at some point it becomes something else - something totally abstract. It has its own logic apart from its real world counterpart - it is pure, pure pure.

I said:

“this is tame and “abstract” only in the sense that it is geometric.”

In that sense I’m saying the intitial feeling (excitement? Joy? Mystery?) is tame (meaning tepid, attenuated and without real feeling) and the geometry ( a white cube reference to gallery/interior space?)is a lame idea on par with Coke drinking polar bears but not as interesting as the geico caveman commercials.

That the work is geometric, i argue, does not make it “abstract” in the sense that abstraction embodies or “expresses” some meaning.

If one weere to come up with a definition of the difference between art and design one might say design is is EMPTY of meaning (PURE design).

I dont see any other way to logicly separate art and design.

And its a false distinction to boot.

I asked for my own reasons. Yeah it wasn’t clear – I thought putting abstract in quotes would turn it into artspeak with all connotations and denotations. It didn’t and it doesn’t.
But there is a difference between “I don’t understand” and “I am confused” it’s a nuanced contextual dealio.

Anyways (that’s another possible snark word, different from the more formal “in any case”) its all about nuance in tonality. This work doen’t have the right nuance for a number of reasons.

But lets look at your Gif animations Tom. Lots of folks have been making gif animations for a long time. Yours are starting to get interesting. They aren’t “convoluted” in the sense that the process is pretty simple to a tech dork. You may go through a convoluted process, but the idea of taking an image down to bitmap dithering is not new, in fact “old hat”. From reading your blog I detect no sense of a Corey Arcangel’s charming “anybody could do this” sort of off the cuff attitude (you said convoluted). In fact, the charm of this sort fo lof-fi work is arrived at by the sense that it is off the cuff – no matter how hard it was to arrive at.

In the same way this work comes across as contrived, overworked and commercial. The video just makes it worse.

Finally, art is entertainment, interactive, therapeutic, moral or otherwise. I don’t care what people say.

Keep the fresh links coming, I really enjoy them.

As for the Fresh Links, I don’t know that there are going to be fewer of them necessarily, but they definitely will be managed differently. Certainly, you’re not the only person who’s not interested in what I happen to be looking at during the day, so within a months time there will be separate RSS feed, and better content management system for these links, so they aren’t quite so intrusive. I’m actually writing the same amount I was before though, so it’s not like these links come at the expense of what I might be writing, but rather document a different aspect of what I do.

also, i’m glad to hear that there will be fewer ‘fresh links!’. too many of those seem like an impoverished form of content, like i’m hanging around watching someone else surf the web.