Search Results for: surf club

Ed Halter's recent Artforum cover story on Guthrie Lonergan (now offline) discusses the historic context of the Nasty Nets "internet surfing club":

The bulk of Nasty Nets’ activities transpired between 2006 and 2009. The first few of those years also marked, arguably, the cultural apogee of Internet browsing itself, before such pleasures would be challenged by competing activities —- our attentions corralled into mall-like social networks, highwayed over by serial-television bingeing, or processed through a toy box of apps.

What do you mean "our," Mr. Tool of the System? In the same article Halter speaks approvingly of "defaults":

Perhaps Lonergan’s most influential work is his piece Hacking vrs. defaults chart, 2007, a two-column HTML table attempting to parse what he saw as the two main modes of Internet art at the time. The left column, titled “Hacking,” is typified by “Hacking a Nintendo cartridge to make images” (a reference to early work by [Cory] Arcangel, such as Super Mario Clouds, 2002), “Rock & Roll attitude,” and “Sophisticated breaking of technology,” and it is counterposed with “Defaults,” the right-hand column, which offers instead “Using MS Paint to make images,” “Exuberant humility,” and “Semi-naive, regular use of technology.” The chart was received as an aesthetic manifesto of its moment, even read at times as a generational line in the sand.

Jacob Ciocci also fondly references Lonergan's chart in a recent article about the New Hive platform, where he is an invited artist. New Hive encourages semi-naive, regular use of technology by ordinary mortals who want to do creative multi-media art projects without learning the ins and outs of Photoshop, GIMP, Aftereffects, CyberLink PowerDirector, Maya, etc., and is inviting artists who do know how to use these products to do guest, demonstration pages using the New Hive software. (Like many startups, such as Moot's rapidly defunct "canv.as," the idea seems to be providing media rich tools with a social community, which either will or won't take off.)
Artist participation in New Hive inspires a delicate dance of creative skepticism vs compromised sponsorship that in Ciocci's case lacks a point of view in a way that could be called, to be kind, Warholesque. When he says "I love the System, I love thinking inside the box" is he being sarcastic? Since he knows how to make art without New Hive's readymade design and media savvy, would he ever sign up for New Hive account if he hadn't been invited?

Lonergan's chart was posted before the Snowden moment, when you could use the Man's tools without having every move sent back and logged at the corporo-governmental Mother Ship (or at least, you thought you could -- this was before Facebook started blowing privacy seals and laughing in your face). Now "sophisticated breaking of technology" is looking good again, or at least, finding a way to do it that doesn't net you a short prison term.

Paddy Johnson mines a recent "post-internet" exhibition's catalog materials for some nuggets about this non-topic.

First, the conventional wisdom, sort of the half-asleep collector's understanding of the term "post-internet" and the artists it covers, from the curator Domenico Quaranta:

The term was coined by Marisa Olson, adopted by Gene McHugh for his art criticism blog, and popularized by Katja Novitskova’s art book Post Internet Survival Guide and by Artie Vierkant’s essay “The Image Object Post-internet.” Surfing Clubs and VVORK, Seth Price’s Dispersion and e-flux journal, the work of artists such as Cory Arcangel and Oliver Laric have been all influential in the development of post-internet.

That's a lot of unrelated stuff lumped together. Whitney museum curator Christiane Paul, who the same catalog describes as a "post-internet thought leader" despite being the personification of the digital art establishment, questions the Olson mythology and pretty much all the rest of it:

I find the term mostly annoying and don’t believe it will have traction in the long run. The concept of a “post”-scenario has been kicked around for more than a decade. Josephine Berry Slater talked about post-internet art in 2003 in her introduction at a symposium at Tate, and of course Steve Dietz and Sarah Cook have been writing about and curating art “after” new media since 2004.

The fact that I have major issues with the “post” in this terminology aside, I find it interesting that it typically seems to take a decade for these concepts to gain traction. (This was also the case with regard to blogs; the blogosphere took off roughly a decade after blogs, as software, were created.) The term post-medium—as it has been defined by Felix Guattari, then Rosalind Krauss, then Peter Weibel over the past few decades—makes sense to me. Referring to Krauss and Weibel, in particular, we are indeed in an era after medium distinctions (as defined by Clement Greenberg), due to the convergences the digital medium has brought about. Post-medium to me still is best as a term for getting to the core of what post-internet and post-digital tries to grasp, a condition of artistic practice that fuses digital into traditional media.

“Post” is a temporal classifier and temporality is where post-internet and post-digital fail for me. Both terms try to describe a condition that is very real and important; I am by no means debating the condition they outline, but the usefulness of the terms. The internet and the digital are pervasive—not disregarding the fact that there is a digital divide and parts of this world are not connected or digitized—and we are by no means “after” the Internet or the digital. Claiming the latter is similar to stating that we are post-car while being stuck in a massive traffic jam on the highway.

That just about nails it, let's move on. One quibble: blog software appeared around '99, the blogosphere flourished about five years later, then collapsed when everyone moved to Facebook.