Search Results for: surf club

Some reports and criticism on last week's "Net Aesthetics 2.0" panel:

Paddy Johnson compares the 2006 incarnation of the panel with last week's. Comprehensive notes broken down by theme.

Alex Lane thinks we didn't do a good enough job on the surf clubs and the browser-as-viewing-arena. [pdf] Left a comment about it on his group blog.

There were three panel and surf club related threads in the Rhizome.org comment boards. Am reluctant to link to them as they are unmoderated zoos where people are allowed to type "ZZZZZZZZzzzzzZZZZ" and post jpegs of dead horses. An attempt to explain defaults and group blogs came off more like warthogs scraping tusks than desired but harloholmes' encouraging shout on delicious (about the panel?) was appreciated. Sally has some good thoughts on the threads' underlying chemistry here (in the comments) and here (on her blog with L.M.).

Rhizome has asked the panelists to write follow-ups and mine should be posted soon.

Afterthought to afterthought re: Marcin Ramocki's surf club analysis:

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.

Related, twitter-like statement:

"Vvork proves the futility of originality; it is the artistic equivalent of waterboarding"

Some discussion of the above and another Vvork quip at Paddy's.

In anticipation (dread) of the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel* went back and looked at a series of posts I did on "the blog as delivery system for art" vs "stationary sites that critique the web."

These grew out of a New York Times article in 2004 on the topic of whether Net Art was dead.

The post about the New York Times article (and comments).

A first stab at defining the earliest surf clubs, in 2004: "These largely basement producers handle Net graphics in a painterly or expressionistic way, cocking a half-appreciative, half-horrified eye on all the weird content out there on the Internet. The phenomenon isn't about marketing (yet) but rather thrives within the Net's potlatch or 'gift economy' of upload exchange. Artists put up simple animations made with .GIFs or Flash, with sound or without, as well as appropriate, resize and mutate found .GIFs and jpegs, attacking visual phenomena the way a junglist attacks sound (to make an electronic music analogy). Rebellious defacement and smartass humor trump the tedious academic-cum-Sol LeWittoid pallette of earlier net practice."

Reconfiguration of the "simple MTAA net art diagram" for the age of shovelware.

Follow-up to the above, 2004: "Early Net Art was made by software writers who knew their way around the enabling programs, hence the prevalence of flow charts, clickable steps, etc built into the art. Now, more artists are just working with the tools (image-making, sound-making software) and using the Net as a delivery system. This newer work is less about commenting on, reproducing or 'deconstructing' the tools, or the Net itself--although those concerns do (and should) linger, since proprietary programs are controlling and kind of evil."

Thoughts on the first Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel, in 2006. Written without having attended the panel.

MTAA's thoughts on the first Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel.

From the Rhizome 4chan thread [afterthoughts in brackets]: "My [2004] comments about the blog as delivery system for finished artwork were made pre-YouTube and pre-surf clubs [or pre-Nasty Nets, since arguably Linkoln, jimpunk, et al had a surf club with 544x378 (WebTV)]. Things are potentially much more communal now [because of all the social bookmarking and corporate file-sharing sites]. Though I've never been comfortable with YouTube's 450 pixel scrunch, and now that the Kitchen is doing "gallery artists who use YouTube" (this from Rachel Greene, who seems to have fled her net.art years as fast as her Segway can carry her) I really want to flee, too. 544x378 (WebTV) was about finding things on Google with those dimensions (among other things), not shoehorning things into them..."

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/jun/2/net-aesthetics-20/.

Excerpt of conversation from Paddy Johnson's blog. The topic is surf clubs where artists appropriate/highlight/alter Internet content and what the nature of that activity is. Slight editorial tweaks were made for clarity, grammar.

Kevin // 21 Apr 2008, 3:35 am:

Sites like 4chan and lolcats are businesses. They make no claims to contain profound content — hits are their sole purpose. Somethingawful.com for example, is covered in ads. Contributors make posts like this one (directly quoted):

“Since Grand Theft Auto IV is a hot topic at the moment and by writing about it we’ll get more hits and ad revenue as people search for the latest information about the game on Google, in today’s article…”

Of course the purpose of these sites is to be “a barometer of future trends” because they live by the success and expansion of their market. They treat the web like an object, trading it like iron and corn.

An art website, by contrast, is a gift. An art website is made outside of a market, regardless of trends. It is made at a loss. Instead of connecting users with other users, an art website can connect us with a profound experience.

I agree with [Paddy's] statement “I don’t wholly subscribe to the line of thought that there is no hierarchy on the web.” You have described John Michael’s piece, for example, as “elegant” therefore placing higher value in it. Online art will not be able to contribute much to the larger cultural conversation until we are able to admit that there is a hierarchy on the web — that there are profound experiences to be had online, and that a criteria can be developed to separate the saccharine billboards from the truly beautiful and nourishing work.

tom moody // 21 Apr 2008, 8:28 am:

In defense of 4Chan I have d/led many GIFs from there that I consider startling, if not profound. I don’t often use them because I consider them too “previously authored” or branded. The site has a certain creative anarchy reminiscent of the Church of the Subgenius’ “Bob” graphics in the Church’s heyday.
The web has a leveling effect–it is all the same medium coming through our entrancing little TV screens, so artists and consumers alike can be forgiven for not differentiating a gift from someone’s job.
That said, I still like the old idea of the potlatch or gift economy existing in tandem with all the commercial insanity.

PS I prefer “leveling” to “flattening” after Thomas Friedman stunk up the joint with his Flat Earth theory.

Art Fag City // 21 Apr 2008, 9:09 am:

Well not everything comes in at the same level — I think everything on those sites [4Chan, etc] appears at the same level which is different. It’s like going to a yard sale - some people love sorting through the junk for the good stuff, others don’t find it so interesting and prefer more presorting to have been done.

I’m uncomfortable saying that everything we see is leveled because so many of the web tools we have seem to have been made in an effort to help users create hierarchy. The fundamental difference here from traditional media seems primarily in the search functions themselves, which keep the hierarchy defined by the user. One of the concerns this panel discussed was the need to keep as much of this ability in our own hands. It seems to me that this is particularly important to artists who don’t need someone sorting through material for them first to tell them whether it’s worth their time.

Kevin // 21 Apr 2008, 1:30 pm:

[Re:] Tom’s defense of 4Chan — by saving some gifs from 4Chan and not others, you admit that the web has a definite hierarchy by admitting that some gifs are better than others. Using the same raw gif material, certain authors have subtly constructed a more “startling” work to your taste, thereby bringing an area of potency to the web (a hierarchy, the opposite of leveling).

Physical artworks are also all constructed of the same medium — molecules. Just because all physical artworks are constructed of molecules does not mean that all physical artworks are leveled. Some artists arrange molecules better than others. Some net artists arrange non-physical information better than others.

The web is like a desert. The peaks and valleys of quality are not very apparent. From a distance the desert seems flat, but it is actually this vast low frequency wave of mediocrity. The slightest rustle in the wave is what we have to watch for carefully if we want to have those profound experiences.

tom moody // 21 Apr 2008, 2:31 pm:

Re: hierarchies–-as Paddy suggests, anything with a registration requirement automatically creates insiders and outsiders. Even in potlatch economies some people have more to give away.

By “leveling” I was talking about the medium-–how everything from a tinkertoy construction to the Sistine ceiling becomes a 72 dpi image on your browser.

Not saying rustles in waves can’t be detected in this arena, only that it’s hard and people need a better idea of how to go about it.

This is where the [photo of a giant cell phone smashing into a car] is a good example:
Did the artist get punked by a corporation? Is he punking us? Does the photo need some additional level of transformation to be art? Is the surf club the same as a white cube frame so that even corporate crap becomes art? Does everything on such a site have to be art? Does it have to be good art? Should one always be able to differentiate between good, crap, and work in process? etc

Art fair or comic con?

Related, Damon's comment on his posting of the cell phone photo on Nasty Nets. I had asked elsewhere "whether a photo of a giant cell phone smashing into a car was (a) art or (b) good art." Damon said:

To be more specific: it was whether or not a staged photograph of a giant cellphone smashing into a car masquerading as a amateur photo of a “natural event” but functioning as a viral advertisement (and maybe hence “insult to injury”) was (a) art or (b) good art.

I’d be reluctant to pick either choice.. but I think Joel’s notion of “watered-down content” is something worth more consideration…

Nasty Nets has released a DVD/DVDROM hybrid disc with support from Rhizome.org. The release event/DVD premiere is Friday Apr 4 at the NY Underground Film Festival.

For clarification Nasty Nets was a web surfing club, currently inactive except for "special events" such as yesterday's April Fools posting explosion.
Surf club has been misinterpreted in the media as "swapping cool links and calling it art" but it was a bit more than that.
It's not primarily film or video (web mechanics and mores were rather more the focus) so the NY Underground Film Festival event is kind of a translation exercise.
How to take a multi-user, multi-level, multi-media, cross-temporal, collective, interactive, art-made-alone-to-be-consumed-by-others-alone experience and turn it into a linear, meat space/meet space, sitting-politely-and-quietly-in-a-theatre-and-passively-communally-reacting kind of experience.

So it's a program of videos by the site's users, including most of the ones on the Joel Holmberg-edited video on the DVD, plus many others.
Thanks to Marisa Olson for organizing this event--I'm proud to be included with this group of work.

As for my own contribution, it's one of my occasional "anti-videos" (if that's even possible to make). "Hoedown" is a rather hyperactive/aggressive techno song I did. It didn't need visuals so I screen captured some B3verly H1llbillies footage off YouTube and assigned a small universe of "shots" to different musical motifs.

Thus,

Jed doing this weird high stepping dance across the floor of the mansion (verse)
A poodle on hind legs spinning around (chorus)
(repeat verse/Jed)
(repeat chorus/poodle)
Ellie picking up the poodle four times (bridge)
Granny dancing (drum break)
(repeat chorus/poodle--audience attention flags--not "cool")
(repeat verse/Jed--what is this obsession with Jed Clampett? his dancing is really spastic/funny)

Update: post edited for length, tone