Read Stuff | Steve Or Steven Read

Hello. This is information about good stuff that other people did.
(while the posts over here are about my own projects)

New Kittinfish Mountain Album!

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Friday, February 3, 2012 at 6:41 PM in the Read Stuff section

Ambient layers from the past and future are presented to you by Kittinfish Mountain. I personally think it's here now because maybe the world was gonna end this year or perhaps because Walt Disney was theorized by Buckminster Fuller's pet chimp to be the inventor of the modern dog. This album reminds me of the last time I plugged my plastic cotton gin website into my iGenital app and the sparks flew right into the face of space future one. Well I'm not really a music critic so put down your gosh darned Cuisinart ________ Humanoid and enjoy the last days of terra earth firma by listening to this great work of music called Progress in Retrograde. I think my favorite is the final epic track Omnimover Deluxe.

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Jesse Wiedel Stuff

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 6:20 PM in the Read Stuff section

Been meaning to post about the California artist Jesse Wiedel who paints like a madman. Awesome-ness! My brother and I each own a painting of his (the two shown above from 2007). He has shown in many galleries across the US of A. No, his work actually IS the US of A. Lots of beautiful west coast color/light, frantic dreamlike states of wonder and fright, mythologies mashed up, falling on their ass, cultural wastelands shown for half price. My favorite pieces of his are small, quick, flexible, fairly ill, impossibly conceived. The one I purchased (from Show Cave in LA) was from a series about Kris Kristofferson songs. Jesus was a Capricorn, the first painting, is a very famous song of his. Let me give it a try: Kris and presumably Rita Coolidge have been spending lots of time in shitty hotel rooms out west and things are starting to go wrong... Kris has miraculously transformed into the capricorn-jesus-goat-fish but the wine-milk suckled from god Zeus is instead mother's milk painfully provided through the sins of the sexual-devil-monster-mary Rita who is walking on water. Let us now take nourishment from this scene. Formally I love the spatial composition, feeling loosely over-composed, with a beautiful palette and varietal paint handling, what is not to like here? The other painting we got is from a series involving trailer parks, urban decay, bored/crazed meth heads. What is going here? Perhaps the residents are merely practicing martial arts. We don't know. Maybe we don't want to know.

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Reflection Collection

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 6:27 PM in the Read Stuff section

Found a couple photography projects with similarity (and vast difference) to one of my own projects entitled eBayTV so check 'em all out! Sublime, Sublime. Two of these three collected dots were found already connected over at Michael Day's Tumblr.

Laura Splan has a project called Mirror, Mirror from 2010 where she collected photos from eBay which contained mirrors for sale. Her website has a gallery of them, while selected photos have been printed into a book currently on exhibit and for sale through the SFMOMA Shadows$hop project.

Penelope Umbrico's project For Sale/TVs From Craigslist (2009) collects the photography of sellers who were caught using their flash on a blank TV screen. Her rigorous process continues as she exhibits prints while posting them for sale on Craigslist, taking into account the television's original locality and price.

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New Old Gadget Happy Joy Goodness

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 4:56 PM in the Read Stuff section

Jonas Damon has some beautiful tech-minimal designs in particular I love (and purchased one of) his Numbers LED alarm clock. The CRT iPad Enclosure almost makes me want to buy an iPad just for displaying some super slick static.

Yury of Banana Design Labs has placed a miniature fireplace inside a miniature TV. And it costs less than $20. Tell me why you would NOT want to add this to your gadget/art collection?!

Paul of SOFTOFT TECHECH has sired Sir Sampleton ... "A musical instrument app for your iPhone that's simple enough for children, but with enough features to also be useful to musicians and producers." And it costs less than $3. Tell me why you would NOT want to add this to your IPHONEONE?!

Eric of Mini Organ has made a book with MBP and also a sound archive containing nothing but vintage toy electronic instruments!

Michale Molero built a tabletop mini-arcade machine out of a Meggy Jr. System. Found this here at Evil's Lab. Totally inspired! And flattered that he demoed his "Meggycade Jr" unit with my Super Monkey Kong game.

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Some Really Great Augustan Stuff n' Links

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 12:54 PM in the Read Stuff section

Have been spending plenty o' time lately at the Militant Esthetix website which contains the writings and art of Ben Watson and Esther Leslie from the University of Kingdom. DADA, appliances, Situationism, kaiser rolls, Disney, Zappa, Adorno, Zappa ... this is precisely where I've been coming from, this is it.

street mattress submission with bedbugs from greenpoint

A friend, upon eyeballing one of my facebook mobile uploads, suggested that I submit to the Street Mattress project. I was very pleased when they accepted my photo graph which was snapped a few feet away from my front door. This project has been going for nearly a decade I believe and has over 20,000 submitted photos.

My brother did gived me a link to Peter Mendelsund and his Jacket Mechanical blog. Wonderful book cover designer. And look - MIA's new shitfuck MAYA album/cover didn't just simultaneously ripoff 69% of 'web 2.0' artists, it ripped him. Oh well. Anybody who designs "War and Peace" jackets is a friend of mine.

Just LUV this 787 Cliparts piece made by web 2.0 artist Oliver Laric. Its a few years old now (a lifetime in net years) but I hadn't seen it in awhile and well its fast and just great and you might like it too? Loops beautifully too.

I like this web art work 69% more than any other: Ying Yangerz by Milton Melvin Croissant III (yes his real name). He told me: "it's just christian rock/folk and death metal teens caught in the struggle for balance. one of the bands is called Morbid Anal Fog!"

[UPDATE: I like Ying Yangerz 86% more than any other web art work ever made.]

A video by AIDS-3D called Forever Heat Death which has been stuck like a broken record in my head ever since seeing it. Stuck like a dirty CD. Awesome. (made a video around the same time which coincidentally visits similar future pasts simultaneously)

Just released is a new musically performative electronic art object by Tristan Perich called 1-bit Symphony. Buy 1t n0w!

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Circulating Brion Gysin + William Burroughs

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 7:04 PM in the Read Stuff section

These are collaborative works by Brion Gysin & William Burroughs that are currently being shown at the New Museum. Pieces such as these, and related 'cut up' methodologies used by Gysin and Burroughs, have been influential to me since at least my teen years. Another influence has been Tom Moody and with precision (as always) he takes issue here and here with some questionable critique aimed at Gysin's work and influence. I've heard nothing but incredible things about this show and am going to see it later this week.

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Some July Linx

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Monday, July 12, 2010 at 7:21 PM in the Read Stuff section

Way behind in adding new links to stuff here. W.H.O.O.P.S. The original intent of this 'read stuff' section was based on some sort of theory along the lines of "a link is worth only as much as the love put into making it". In practice of course this takes time/energy. In any event I'll now stop talking and start linking... since we're behind lets do a little batch:

Mark Essen has a couple new video games out: NIDHOGG and Cream Wolf (playable thru adult swim). CREAM WOLF!

Here is a wonderful looking proposal by Rouverius for a video game clock in an EMS Peggy Clock Contest. It didn't win, but I dig it!

Incredible software intensive videos on vimeo and youtube by Paulo R. C. Barros. The illusionary animation flows like software instruction...

Experience the universe in 1.5-D or even 4-D through the "Aether Transmission" comic series on Is This Tomorrow.

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Hat Tip to HTTP

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 11:32 PM in the Read Stuff section

HTTP (yes, I need to post something new here)

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@JurgenTrautwein

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Friday, January 22, 2010 at 1:05 AM in the Read Stuff section

Jurgen (jtwine) has perhaps the most relevant posts on twitter.
And his page is beautiful.
Other artists there post stuff to #twitterart?
The little twitter bird logo scares the fuck out of me so I can't say much on that.
However I will say that Jurgen Trautwein makes lots of goodness.
Much of it is on the web here and here for starters.
The drawings! And photography. Music.
He handles black better than most.
Not that he can't handle white.
Or color.
He lives in San Francisco.

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Millie Niss @ Spork World

Posted by Steve Or Steven Read on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 3:55 AM in the Read Stuff section

I am sorry to report that a couple weeks ago Millie Niss, a superb, 36 year old electronic artist and (often Oulipian) poet from the Buffalo NY area, departed from this earth. However her Spork World lives on. I never met or talked with her, and to be honest was only vaguely familiar with her work until recently. Just wanted to shout out to the NET that I feel she left us with some really great stuff! For instance the Regex Haiku Generator is some of the most wonderfully succinct programmatic poetry I've seen. As with many of her online works, an Adobe Flash application is employed with a rare sense of outrageous straightforwardness. Functionally inviting yet often confounding in effect...

As one can discover, many of her creations are not as playful as these. Some are rather intense, dynamic, unrelenting. Speaking for myself only, I feel her oeuvre is like a breath of fresh air in certain spheres of the media arts where swift, pack-minded fashion and technical cleverness/materiality have often reigned. Millie went beyond.

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