Best of the Web 2008! Contributor’s Choice, Part One of Six

by Art Fag City on January 5, 2009 Events

justin-kemp
Justin Kemp, Pseudoevent, 2008, Screengrab AFC

Feeling that last year’s edition of The Best of the Web suffered from the discontinuation The Year in the Internet, a collection of web links I regularly drew from put together by a group savvy Internet users, I decided to host my own Contributor’s Choice version here.  I’ll likely be stealing a few links from them later on in the week for my own list — a point my contributors will undoubtedly love given that I requested they not duplicate each other’s links — but I guess that’s just tough luck.   The following series will feature the links of two contributors per post (unless indicated otherwise), and include the following invites:

Liam McEneaney comedian, citizen

Camille Paloque-Bergès, PHD candidate and Teaching Assistant in Information Science and Communication at the Laboratoire Paragraphe

Kevin Bewersdorf, artist

John Michael Boling, internet user / artist / jmb

Magda Sawon, Owner of Postmasters Gallery New York

Kari Altmann, artist

Ceci Moss, Rhizome Senior Editor and Blogger

Tom Moody, artist

Javier Morales, artist

Marcin Ramocki, Artist/filmmaker

Jon Williams, Free software developer

Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Video, MoMA

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
=================================================

First up: Liam McEneaney and Camille Paloque-Bergès!

liammceneaney

Liam McEneaney – comedian, citizen

  • http://james.nerdiphythesoul.com/bennyhillifier/ – This site will allow you to enter any YouTube video code, and it will strip the soundtrack and replace it with the song “Yakety Sax” – the Benny Hill closing chase theme. Almost everything goes better with Yakety Sax.
  • http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=37 – All Songs Considered, the musical podcast companion to the NPR show All Things Considered. They offer for download full-length, CD-quality concerts by artists like Tom Waits, Radiohead, The Ting Tings, The Raconteurs, and many more favorites
  • http://www.wonderglen.com – a fully realized parody website (from former Colbert/Daily Show head writer Ben Karlin), that takes you into the Intranet of a terrible small-time production company. Its spin-off websites are just as inspired and detailed.
  • thecomicscomic.com– a blogger/journalist who decided that standup comedy deserves the kind of in-depth coverage that other artforms receive. While it has its limitations, I find it one of the best blogs of its kind out there.

camillepaloqueberges

Camille Paloque-Bergès, PHD candidate and Teaching Assistant in Information Science and Communication at the Laboratoire Paragraphe

  • Abdandoned But Not Forgotten: Sun Microsystems: this website documents the exploration of abandoned places. This one is particularly interesting because the building already has an aura of ruins while its materiality is so trivial except for the amateur of technology (80s Sun Microsystems premises in Los Altos, CA).
  • Macrochan.org: this emerged in 2008 as an open repository for macro-related pictures usually originating on the *chan forums. You can find here all the variations on macro themes that circulate through the nasty web. Among my favorite are One Free Internet (if your post is a big win you get one) and Picture Not Related.
  • Hotprisonpals.com: “We all love to drool over our keyboards, while looking at the hot and sexy prisoners, fantasizing about how hot these lovely guys are ” What more can I say ? Oh yes, Joel Holmberg reminded of this. The texts written by the prisoners are really worth reading too. On a French note, I am also really touched by the photos and texts on perdudevue-org.net that has people looking for old acquaintances.
  • Speaking of: jlhmbrg’s Yahoo Questions (I guess you can check his Answers too) are a good dive into the opinionated web and vernacular wisdom of the Internet. Great for any0ne interested in self-reference and informal metadiscourses.
  • Olia Lialina’s and Dragan Espenschied’s twin blogs at Contemporary Home Computing explore the semantic fields of computer metaphors. Olia critiques excessive analogies between computers and other technologies, while Dragan explores images taken from the computer world and applied to “real-life” situation. This website almost died in 2008 but Olia’s recent comeback on her blog makes me think that they still have that “Under Construction” vibe going on.
  • French mad scientists represent: A Virtual Space Time Travel Machine, “A Gateway between art and science with more than 2680 still pictures and animations”. Quite old ; this should be archived before we lose it.
  • Testing print material with a digital print-on-demand online service, a graphic design workshop project: Dear Lulu.
  • Last minute 11th link: the Dawson Crying photobombing (probably by the Digg community ?) is a very good example to why searchability as artifact as well as a strategic or tactical act has become so interesting in the past few years, and also to how everyday users inventiveness is an endless influence for making the net playful and critical (this is obviously a playful example that also has a critical side to it as it teaches about information manipulation techniques) and to be reminded that these resources are “out there” before all.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: