Tom Moody

(Tom Moody, Rotating Smile, courtesy of tommoody.us)

New Yorker Tom Moody has made an art out of networking, literally. In a historically unprecedented gesture, Moody exhibited his blog as a performance work onto the gallery walls of ArtMovingProjects in Brooklyn. BLOG is one of the many projects that the "low-tech" artist, dj, musician, and critic has been involved with.

This week I spoke with Moody about new media art and how to be a painter without paint.

What was your first computer?
I had a Macintosh SE that I used from 1988 to about 2000.

How/when did you start making "low-tech" art?
When I moved back to NY in 1995 my first day job was at a large computer maker. It was a low paid job with a lot of "down time" so I started making work using the Paint program on my PC. I showed that work in NY galleries in the late '90s and got pretty good response. I still consider myself a painter but stopped using actual paint around 1998.

How/when did you start viewing your blog as an art tool?

When I started making original pieces for the blog, such as drawings and animated GIFs.


What does it mean for you to post art on your blog?

It is one of many means artists have for "getting ideas out there." I haven't stopped making objects (such as collages of printed-out digital imagery) and I still show work in gallery and museum spaces.


How do you see new media impacting the art world? the art market?

I did a series of posts on the theme of "New Media vs Artists with Computers."
I feel new media is a subculture with its own set of values, players, and assumptions that are separate and apart from the art world subculture. New media is more concerned with art world validation and approval than the art world is anxious about becoming technologically obsolescent. I think new media needs to worry less about the validation and the art world needs to worry more about the obsolescence.
For the last five years or so I have been working in the gray or crossover zone between these fields, which has been somewhat awkward but to me is the most interesting place to be working. Computers and networking aren't going away!