Tom Moody, OptiDisc, animated GIF.
“The piece is meant to be big, dumb, and iconic, a moving, pulsing symbol of both the promise and failure of technology,” said Tom Moody of Optidisc during Geeks in the Gallery, a detail of which now resides in my masthead. Aesthetically the gif looks just as Moody describes it, the rings klutzy yet mildly hypnotic; though past this, its life as a meme underscores the artist’s excitement and reservations about the web as a medium. Referencing artists such as Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns, without reiterating color field painting or Minimalism, Optidisc speaks as clearly to a tradition of Fine Art painting, as it does regular surfers looking for something “different” for their myspace page.
Update: A great screen capture of Moody’s Gif on Da Kid’s myspace page. Via T. Moody
Tom Moody Biography
Tom Moody is an artist and musician based in New York City. His low-tech art made with simple paint programs, photocopiers, and/or consumer printers has been exhibited at artMovingProjects in New York as well as galleries and museums in the US, UK, and Europe. He is interviewed in the film /8 BIT/, a documentary about “chip” art and music, and his blog (http://tommoody.us), commenced in February 2001, was recommended in the 2005 /Art in America/ article “Art in the Blogosphere.” A CD of his music collaborations with earcon (John Parker) was released last year under the title /Scratch Ambulance/. Most recently his work appeared in “Bitmap: As Good As New” at vertexList Gallery in New York.
Masthead image: Tom Moody, OptiDisc (Fragment), 2008, animated GIF.
