10.05.06 Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs.
While Internet population has already started asking if Web 2.0 is getting boring because of all its services and plugins, net artists keep exploring all the alternatives offered by blogs as text generators. With Abe & Mo Sing the Blogs, Abe Linkoln and Marisa Olson shuffle the well known Japanese karaoke phenomenon with the blog global trend 'singing' some posts from their favorite blogs. Their art project, featured at Whitney Museum's Artport, is a sort of concept album where Linkoln and Olson record mp3 whose lyrics are the re-blogged posts. You can have an hardcore version of Breakfast Drug by übermorgen as well as Olson's a cappella interpretation of 'Fuking Hate Horses', passing through the post punk appropriation handled by Linkoln or the genre research made by Olson. The questions raised or addressed by this project are different. If it is true that blogs have been credited as 'voice of the people', is it possible to channel these streams of consciousness into genres, as it happens with literature or music? Another question: who is the author? When Abe and MO re-blog a post, they choose what they read, that matches with them and they feel like their own, but that belongs to others and has been translated an decontextualized. Maybe the world 'network', if meant as community, as a group of people able to influence each other and share common paranoia and idiosyncrasies, is an answer to these questions. What is certain is that Abe & MO exploitation of the blog format (see also Universal Acid) belongs to web ontology.
Valentina Culatti