June 2008

An earlier post talked about the Web as "consumer's medium."

Characterizing it that way is sacrilege to the tech community gospel that TV and radio are "one way, passive" media while the Net is active and productive. But even old Rhizome.org hand Alexander Galloway talks in his book Protocol about how seductive roaming among hyperlinks is. (From his tone he seems more disposed to transgressive disruption of same in the manner of old school net artists jodi.org.)

Other artists encountering this flowing, sensational, “fascinating” (in the Baudrillardian sense) environment view it as a *success* of the post-dot com era, creating an inexhaustible pool of potential subject matter.

The best differentiation I've seen of late 90s Net Art and the present bunch: the former was interested in the mechanics of the network and made art about that. "What is a hyperlink and can we mess with that?" "What are the social implications of networks?" etc. The latter crew views the Net as a "medium that works across media" (Damon Zucconi's phrase) so that artists are dealing with the Net and its status as a medium but also all the content it touches (video, music, digital painting, photography, and emerging hybrid forms). The goals are larger and more ambitious but also more difficult.

The old Modernist ideal of working through past art to arrive at your own becomes especially troublesome within this suddenly exponentially expanded field.

The blog VVork exemplifies a new type of art "statement" based on endless, voracious consumption that has the (perhaps unintended) consequence of making the quest for originality seem silly. The curators scour the net for examples of conceptual-style art that is readily documentable in the form of photos and short video clips. Most of the accompanying one or two sentence explanations are lifted off the artists’ sites. They are posting several hundred artworks a year in this fashion. They consume and we watch over their shoulders. They don’t alter anything, they don’t editorialize, and their comment feature is rarely used. As “fellow consumers” we have to decide if the consumables have value.

The bloggers and surf clubs discussed at the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel follow a similar model. But instead of stoically re-creating the art world online, they are opening themselves to a galaxy of experience that could potentially be considered art, while at the same time subversively slipping in their own content.

Some of the first generation Internet artists have knickers in twists about the term "Net Art 2.0" for online art in the era of blogging, YouTube, and social bookmarking.

"Art cannot be versioned!" cries one. "It doesn't really communicate anything except a suggestion that Net Art 2.0 is in some way an improvement over Net Art 1.0," wails another.

But... but... Historians do make value distinctions among movements. Monet's and Seurat's Impressionism benefited from increased understanding of optics and color theory, improving on the stale classicism of their peer William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Renaissance perspective leapfrogged over the crude schema learned in Gothic form books. Greek statuary grew more lifelike than Cycladic totems, and so on.

The first generation of Internet art consisted of a small inner circle furtively communicating on ListServs, doing online versions of Douglas Huebler style conceptualism, spouting Frankfurt School quotes at each other, and boasting about their programming skills. The current generation is trying to wrap its collective head around an ungovernable explosion of online content and doesn't have time to worry about grabbing history by the neck in the way of those earlier, frightened scolds.* The present movement is bigger, broader, more porous, and more generous. It uses "defaults" unashamedly, taking advantage of improved media platforms and increased bandwidth. With greater interconnection and connections to the world outside the art world, new hybrid forms are blossoming.

But... but... As far as naming this better, happier moment, "Net Art 2.0" can only be ironic. How often is a software upgrade a real advance over the prior version? Usually it's just minor tweaks because capitalism demands new models coming off the assembly line each fall.

Whereas the difference between first and second gen Net Art is more in the nature of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. More on this as we go.

*Eloquent descriptions have been made of the new work but until the present post they have lacked a movement-aware, defensive tone. The present post is the result of being put on a panel where mad dogs were expected to fight (we didn't) and a couple of horrible subsequent weeks trying to reason with the squawking on the Rhizome discussion boards. (Surf clubs called "teenage goth nerds," bloggers compared to George Bush because they aren't open source enough, etc. One member of the old guard offered this helpful suggestion--not an actual quote but how I translate it: "Net Art 2.0 makes me sound dated, but I like 'post-Net Art,' which you makes you sound late getting on the bus.")

"In France I'm an auteur, in Germany I'm a filmmaker, in the U.K. I'm a horror director, in the U.S....I'm a bum."
--John Carpenter