Greg Smith – Serial Consign & Vague Terrain

Greg Smith’s regularly updated blog Serial Consign is a diving board for a diverse range of topics, philosophical musings revolving around electronic culture, its history and its key movers. The excellent posts often contain very good overviews of projects with cross-referencing to related works, avoiding the common ’list-of links’ blogology we often encounter in these time constrained days. Some of the highlights include interviews with the likes of Santiago Ortiz who is well known for his elegant info visualisations and musician/DJ Jan Jalinek aka Farben of loop-finding fame.

Another project Greg is involved with is Vague Terrain, which he co-edits with Neil Wiernik. It’s a ‘journal of online digital arts published quarterly that promotes a wide variety of digital art, audio and theory.’ Past issues have dealt with stuff we love, Minimalism, Generative art and Digital Detritus (Glitch). The most recent installment deals with sampling culture and includes ColorScheme a moving “spectral painting” composed of textures sampled from Hollywood cinema by Jeremy Rotsztain

‘In the history of visual arts, color has been used psychologically in expressionism, emotionally in impressionism, physiologically in optical art, and symbolically in medieval painting. ColorScheme places a lens over Hollywood cinema, inviting the audience to recognize it applications and uses of color.’

Vague Terrain is currently assisting in the programming of the X Avant festival in Toronto in September. Judging by the content promoted at VT we can be sure this is a good thing.