June 2012

You may have read about the new TLDs (Top Level Domains) that are in the process of being created to add new extensions for future websites. So in addition to dot com, dot org, etc, we will have dot food and dot car. Below is a list of applicants for the Dot Art (.art) domain; registration has closed so one of these will be picked. Paddy Johnson thinks we should support E-flux in its application because they've promised to plow the money they make from .art back into the community through foundations and grants. I'm skeptical about having an established art player in charge of "art," as seen in the comment I posted on her blog, also reproduced below.

The applicant list for art, as provided by ICANN:

ART .ART REGISTRY INC. KY - - John Kane Jkane1@afilias.info 1-1013-98331
ART Dadotart, Inc. US Yes - Joshua Wattles josh@deviantart.com 1-1097-20833
ART Aremi Group S.A. LU - - Mr. Brian Winterfeldt bwinterfeldt@steptoe.com 1-1844-98392
ART Top Level Domain Holdings Limited VG - - Mr. Antony Van Couvering tas.minds.machines@gmail.com 1-927-15036
ART Baxter Tigers, LLC US - - Daniel Schindler baxtertigers@donuts.co 1-1344-70608
ART UK Creative Ideas Limited IM - - Mr. Christopher John Glancy cglancy@whitecase.com 1-1211-27884
ART Merchant Law Group LLP CA - - Mr. Brendon James Ralfe bralfe@merchantlaw.com 1-875-17602
ART Uniregistry, Corp. KY - - Bret Alan Samuel Fausett bret@internet.pro 1-855-66616
ART EFLUX.ART, LLC US Yes - Mr. Anton Vidokle avidokle@e-flux.com 1-1675-51302
ART Top Level Design, LLC US - - Mr. Raymond King raymondking@gmail.com 1-1086-100

It cost $185,000 just to apply for .art. The losers forfeit the money. Here's my comment on Paddy's blog:

This plan has the potential to remove the heartbreak, uncertainty, and awe of a question that has long plagued artists and especially the public: "Is it art?"
"I may not know much about art but I know what's on the .art domain."
"Yeah it's just a urinal but I saw it on .art so what are ya gonna do?"
The internet eliminated gatekeepers, at least it was starting to, and now E-Flux wants to be the uber-gatekeeper for "art."
E-Flux completely accepts, and is trying to sell us on, the hype that the net is about to undergo a paradigm shift based on these new domains and that people will change their search habits to, say, only look on .food for something to eat or on .car for wheels.* To win its application it tries to scare us that the philistines will take over art if we don't rally for E-flux.
The beauty of art on the net is it's spread around sites like .fm, .com, even .biz. E-Flux has the potential with this scheme to be a new Facebook of art (in the sense of "you have to be on it to play"). It is already Facebook-like in its maintenance of an exclusive mailing list.
.art under E-Flux also has the worrisome potential to become a place of knee-jerk left orthodoxy: trolls, wingnuts, and future urinal-appropriators need not apply.
What are the alternatives? One of the above-mentioned business entities wins .art, turning it into a tacky, profit-oriented no-go zone for anyone with a creative bone, and art continues to thrive in a decentralized way.

*That is one scenario but it has its critics (scroll down to "The new TLDs might be moot in practice.")

Update: Deviantart.com would be an interesting choice because its large community of creatives thrives despite near-invisibility to the theory-driven art world represented by E-flux. Its winning would be noteworthy because it would mean a web-based art culture bested one rooted in a gallery-based power structure (evidenced by E-flux's closely-held mailing list of curators, museum directors, critics, etc.).

Another recommended post by Tim Bavlnka reminisces about camgirl/camboy culture of the early '00s and how it stacks up against the twitter/facebook era. He calls it the "Everything/Nothing" scene, a term I hadn't heard, which seems to encompass everything from camgirls coding their own sites to people talking about nothing in particular on early blog hosts such as Livejournal. I did a post about the scene in '07, Cindy Sherman vs T Shirt Ninjas, using some old campics for a semi-cheeky comparison of self-published internet role-playing with Sherman's film trope re-enactment. As I tried to articulate in another post:

One afterthought on Cindy Sherman vs Webcammers: the comparison made the most sense in the earlier days of cams, when bandwidth and the "state of the art" limited the cammer to a series of still photos. Most of the journalistic focus in say, the late '90s, was on privacy issues and the pics were treated as straightforward documentary "slices of life" rather than what they also were--a string of self-composed photos placing form and content demands on the cammer. A series of fictions that may or may not have related to someone's actual life, and in the case of "sex worker" camming were home-run small businesses. Thus you had playacting, dressing up, and adventurous camera angles just to keep viewers interested, and the record of these performances was a series of individual photos that could be collected, separated from the main stream, passed around the net, etc. The difference between this and Sherman's untitled film stills was just a matter of highbrow vs lowbrow intent, a vastly different collector apparatus, and no critics willing to furrow their brows over the cammers. Some might say that's all the difference in the world but I think the gap is pretty small. In the age of MySpace intro videos Sherman's relevance fades because of the time element. Now instead of postModern tableaux vivants we have basement cinema that refers to other cinema.

Dump.fm is interesting because it revived both real-time chat and self-shot webcamming as an expressive tool. It's different from the Everything/Nothing scene because it happens at poetry slam speed and there is no time or space for long ruminative posts. Despite my moaning about publicity photos camming can be an art and some do it very well.

Tim Bavlnka's PBS’s Problematic Representation of GIFs, Culture, and Art gives a close reading of that awful PBS segment on animated GIFs a while back. He's especially good on how the show packages so-called cinemagraphs as a more advanced form of expression, over the lowly GIFs whose file extension they share.

The final segment of the video deals with cinemagraphs. These are quickly established in contrast to GIFs, and it makes me angry. I find many of the statements made by these creators to be somewhat deluded in order to serve their own established personas. Kevin Burg states that “I think there’s opportunities in this kind of hybrid medium to show people something they’ve never seen before. We have these moments that can just exist forever.” There are a few things going on here. First, Burg is quick to mention that their work is a hybrid medium, not the lowly and pathetic GIF. This connects to the statements above about how their work is more closely related to photography than to something else. Not only that, but the music of the video changes to a somber and serious piece. It established this form of GIF as more auteured and separate than those wacky GIF makers we saw previously.

Bavlnka also develops an idea I tossed out in the post Hair GIFs and the Male Gaze:

Like the gaze of the privilege of patriarchy, the camera’s gaze enforces a system of power over women. This is an important point to bring up due to some of the statements of the artist involved. Beck states “It’s so voyeuristic. You look but you feel like you should look away, but then you can watch it, and then you can watch it some more and it’s like ooooh.” This is an oddly placed bit in the discussion and forces a sexualized perspective at the consumption of their own work. Voyeurism is that system of power that [theorist Laura] Mulvey is talking about, where the audience watches over the powerlessness of women and engage in the powerfulness of men. Moody adds “you’re supposed to be staring at her” and thus enforcing power over her. Beck seems somewhat oblivious to this connotation, which I find a bit troubling. They capture forever a moment of a sexualized woman, and she becomes powerless in her GIF form, forever victim to the gaze of the viewer. Its associations with the fashion industry just seems to perpetrate the power of gaze over models and the enforcement of beauty and aesthetics over women because of it.

But as I noted, the joke's on them because cinemagraphs are too unintentionally ludicrous to be particularly erotic.

more jifs / gatekeepers