Search Results for: surf club

Artist Saul Chernick kicks off Paddy Johnson's IMG MGMT series with jpegs of Death: historical engravings of skeletal zombies visiting--and feeling up--hapless Everymen and -Women, plus lavish exploded view anatomical illustrations. (At least one of these images graces the opening montage of Dario Argento's recent gorebath Mother of Tears, a movie more people will probably see on the Internet than on the big screen or DVD. In a sense the Argento montage is a juiced up, sexed up, set-to-music version of what Chernick has done.)

The premise of the IMG MGMT series (as in image management), which this blog will be participating in soon, involves artists curating images off the Net, either because they routinely do that in their work or simply because more artists are exposed to or otherwise glom onto this material with the effect that it slowly seeps into their work (or doesn't). In a sense We Are All Surf Clubs now, which is one thing that might be upsetting the conceptualist geeks who populate the Rhizome chatboards--"what makes us special if everyone can do this?"

The second installment of IMG MGMT is from Spirit Surfers co-founder Kevin Bewersdorf, who seems on a mission to find an ironic sacred in the dead, materialist Internet. The spirit surfers call themselves infomonks and offer up art content as "boons" to the viewer. The title of the IMG MGMT post is "Stock Photography Watermarks as the Presence of God." Images of praying or touching hands all bear the ubiquitous numerical watermark of the stock photo site where Bewersdorf found them--an insignia he cheekily equates to a religious talisman, thus indicting the dogma-like aspects of the corporate world's copyright-worship.

The Chernick and the Bewersdorf posts are similar in the following ways:

1. Both are collections.
2. Both are presented as a top-to-bottom visual list.
3. Both are not the artist's "normal" work. That is, both artists exhibit "made" things, although as a surf club member/co-founder Bewersdorf is involved with "finding" as art.
4. Both have explanatory text.
5. Both deal with depictions of the sacred or otherworldly.

It is probably too early to draw conclusions from this but what the hell. The internet is a dead machine environment, a lifeless series of protocols experienced through little screens and tiny speakers. Beginning with Tron's "religion of the User" and William Gibson's voodoo gods haunting Cyberspace (in the Neuromancer books), artists have attempted to invest this domain-of-domains with qualities of the spiritual. It is almost an imperative.

Two artists who are having none of this are jimpunk and Damon Zucconi.

Jimpunk is an anarchist obsessed with American Media Shit (or American Shit Media). Here are some links to recent posts from Triptych.tv, his blog with Linkoln and Mr. Tamale:

doc.wrt #2 (this one pulls up something different every time you click it)
On Summer ≈ ∞
▤ off spring
[▭] paint:n6
☞
pink flamingo
Re
★
CrystalBeastTopazTigersunflower.mov

Many of these are Jitterized or otherwise scrambled media quotations, reiterating America's insane hold on global culture. They are not "icons," however, but de-iconized by adding/subtracting visual information, layering and adding harsh buzzing noises. This is no info-monastery, more like a nihilist party scene from an '80s film that runs 24/7.

Damon Zucconi has curated a selection of works at Club Internet (click the wand thing in the upper left corner to change images) that are more phenomenological/fluxoid than spiritual. He scours the net for embedded media "moments" involving some kind of fleeting or half-perceived event, for example:

--"wait--what were those guys doing in that building we just passed? were those racing helmets? space helmets? aim the camera that way, try to focus"
--image of chair brightens and darkens
--camera zooms from pedestrian view to outer space
--scene from 12 Angry Men with added lens flares
--flashlight view of spooky cavern montage--things almost come into full view
--viewer rotates illegible 3D logo
--long distance views of billboards (?)
--rotating bladelike CAD objects
--microphone scrapes tree bark
--found photos with animated smoke, mist, etc

In other words, click a link and stuff happens (or not). Zucconi's taste tends to the arch and the slight but one appreciates the hands off, distanced, wtf? quality of much of this work. One exception to the lack of a religious theme in this group is James Whipple's vocoderized graphics demo where the droning language of a corporate instruction video acquires the uplifting cadences of a sung liturgy.

From Paddy Johnson's notes on the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum:

Group surf clubs are discussed at length – communication about what’s art and what’s not on these sites isn’t deemed to be an issue for the artists though Tom Moody admits the issue is confusing. Surf clubs demonstrate that artists use their “art head” when surfing. Moody asks, How do you stand out? Do I care? Do I stop people from putting it into contexts I didn’t intend?

Something I posted two days before the panel:

Some 20th Century writers complained that reality (in a hypercharged mediated environment) was outstripping their ability to spin fiction.

Artists, too, have to compete with real world content far more captivating than anything they could come up with, which the Internet effectively gathers all in one place (sneezing Pandas, etc). Two possible responses are (1) to continually rise above it through aesthetic and conceptual framing and posturing or (2) to disappear into it and trust the viewer to ultimately sort out what's going on. The Web is a consumer's medium, not a producer's, so the artist is inexorably led to consumption as a "practice." The degree of criticality can only be inferred, not implied.

At the end of the panel Q&A, an art dealer who specializes in computer-based and new media art, who was sitting in the audience, made this comment to the "surf club" artists who had been showing our work for the preceding hour or so:

"I haven't seen anything new here--it's just things we already know like the 'the found object' and 'the collage.'"

So much for inferred criticality. We are off to a bad start here.

Post to be doused with kerosene and torched while chanting in tongues:

You keep bowing out Tom, and yet you're still here. I think we need a moderated hierarchical structure at RAW (you know, to protect the weak and defenseless), and you seem like the perfect moderator for us. You're balanced, fair, never one to forward your own agenda, always willing to receive constructive feedback from others, well-connected, on-the-ground, not one to easily take offense, never trolling or factious, full of humor and perspective, a wise old head and yet still "with-it," theoretically enlightened, and most importantly, a strong man with a tender heart for the weaker sex. We should just turn RAW into a blog, and then you could post the lead articles and we could add our subordinate comments (and occasional animated gifs). Then you could parse through them and choose which ones to allow and which ones to delete (we trust your correct perspective). That would be a great 2.0 use of the network. Plus it would look good on your C/V.

I venture to say that most of the acrimonious churn here recently has been largely in response to your polemic rhetoric. The agenda you are forwarding ("net art 2.0" as a version reset) is largely unconvincing. It's not that the work being made by "surf club" participants is uninteresting. Much of it is actually quite funky and invigorating. It may even be the next "big thing" (check local listings for details). But you're not really talking about the work itself much (and I would like to talk more about the particulars of the work). You are pushing for the work to be accepted as more historically radical than I think it is. And anyway, time and more perspicacious heads will decide all that. So I disagree with you now. To quote the eloquent sophist Thurston Moore, "I can understand it, but I don't recommend it."

For me, the value of RAW is that you can (often) proceed dialogically until you come to the crux of your disagreements. Nobody is ever fully persuaded. Nobody is objectively declared the winner. But just understanding the crux of my disagreements with various people has been of great advantage to my own practice. This is why I characterize the recent threads as solipsistic. You've got the attention (ire) of a large group of folks here (many of them very intelligent and most of them who aren't a part of your parochial scene). But instead of using them to figure something out for yourself, you just want to win. Even as purely spectacular flame wars go, it's not all that entertaining. You can win on your own blog or at your dealer's gallery. This is an unmoderated international art forum (one of the few left standing, oddly enough). If you mean to colonize it, then I have (yet more) problems with your vision of the radical future network.

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.")