Search Results for: surf club

An attempt at a wikipedia page on the internet surf club phenomenon is mostly wrong, or a joke, particularly in describing it as "net.art" (an older form of internet art, as indicated by the knowing dot placement, a la the dot com era). Am not too interested in a nerd tug of war over language on Wikipedia, so here's a first draft to replace the bare bones text that's there:

A so-called internet Surf Club is a group site (usually a blog) where artists and others link to "surfed" or "surfable" items on the Web and also post some of their own creative work. "Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club" was the first to use the words "surfing club" (ironically) and others on the list below followed the form or adopted the word "club" to sound relevant. Several "clubs" on the list are arguably Net Art 1.0 or "net.art" style websites and not Nasty Nets-style surf clubs. The original clubs were never true clubs but there has been much rancor over the issue of invited membership in the supposedly open and democratic web that still exists outside Facebook-like commercial enclaves. Dump.fm is a real-time image sharing website that has many aspects of a surf club; however, anyone can sign up for Dump. The core surf clubs (Nasty, Double Happiness, Loshadka) are barely active now--their heyday was 2006-2009, which could be called the "surf club era." Arguably the widely-used, configurable tumblr sites made surf clubs obsolete.

Citations to add:

Rhizome Surf Club vs 4Chan discussion

Rhizome Surf Club vs Rhizome discussion

http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2010/05/09/surf-art-continuity/

blog posts at http://www.tommoody.us/?s=surf+club

Addendum: Although Nasty Nets used the phrase "surfing club" the usual shorthand use is "surf club." Titling the Wikipedia page "surfing club" sounds prissy and formal, or mock-formal, at this stage of the discussion.

Afterthought: One thing is fairly certain: the history of surf clubs will not be memorialized on Wikipedia by the original participants, but rather a later generation that misunderstands the "clubs" as a form of "net.art," or adds a faux mystical dimension that absolutely wasn't there at the outset. The web is mostly crap, people. Miracles happen, but attempts to claim an exalted higher plane for "surfing" are bogus--even sardonic attempts.

Update: Many thanks to whomever modified the Wikipedia "Surfing Club" entry, incorporating some ideas and language from this post.

An article in Minneapolis' The Rake titled The New Dada discusses Internet surfing clubs. The writer comes to the scene with a fresh set of eyes (i.e., from outside the circle of usual suspects looking in) and concludes that while much political art post 9/11 is "dull and dry and deadpan and rote," the clubs' brash and chaotic approach might be closer to the spirit of Zurich 1916.

Interestingly he found the clubs via online discussion of the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum. This blog feels a bit vindicated since it was trashed after the panel for being insufficiently respectful of the "sincere" political art that is out there.

A piece of mine was used in the article: the Mark Napier Steven Dutch Remix. It's funny, I've been introduced to Mark Napier several times and he says "I've heard your name somewhere..."

Made some comments over at Paddy's regarding Marcin Ramocki's notes on internet surf "clubs." (Scare quotes used lest some think they are actually clubs, with dues, special beanies, secret handshakes, etc.)

Ramocki's notes were for a recent talk he gave on the topic, and can be read here: [4.5 MB .pdf]

A specialty of the veteran Internet artists who dominate the Rhizome chatboards is a kind of instant dialectical materialism. Whenever a new form ("thesis") comes along, they resist and ridicule it ("antithesis"), then burn rubber to claim they were always already doing it ("synthesis").

This happened with the "8 Bit movement" and now the "surf club movement."

In the latter case, the race to the nebulous center can be seen on this discussion thread. A Rhizomer states that "discourse collapsed" with the "found object gamesmanship" of current practitioners. This statement is challenged. Soon another Rhizomer posits the existence of longstanding camps and claims the current movement has proven them both correct.

I am oversimplifying (conflating the surf clubs with Web 2.0) but that's the general drift of the discussion. Unfortunately you could never follow it because of another tendency of the veteran Rhizomers: the asynchronous verbal pile-on. This is accomplished in part by the tactic of replying to current comments with long arguments appended to earlier comments. An impossible hairball of words accumulates and all thought disappears to an outside observer. (It's also a bit like a Nature Channel show I saw where bees kill an invading Japanese hornet by smothering it with their bodies. Eventually the hornet's body temperature is raised and it cooks to death.)

But seriously, some interesting exchanges can be teased out of the hairball and I plan to post some of them with afterthoughts, in the coming weeks, prior to the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum. I hope to talk about my own work vis a vis Net Art 2.0 but it will be good to have some of these arguments in mind.

Just left this comment for Marisa Olson on Rhizome. The topic was her review of the Double Happiness* blog:

Hi, Marisa,
Good summation of what Dubhap and other surf clubs do ("is chock-a-block with the fruits of inordinately long websurfing sessions: frayed gif mashups, hilarious if sometimes unnerving audio loops, shameless resizes calling for inconsistent page widths, ekphrastic word/image paradoxes, and very often beautiful collages of similar images (graffiti tags, gummi bears, umbrella hats... Google Image Searches are their friend)")
Am curious, though--Why did you never write this kind of formal exegesis about Nasty Nets, on Nasty Nets, as a member of Nasty Nets?
Or, put another way,
Why is it that everyone talks like an 18 year old in the comment sections of the surf club blogs?
Lots of surf clubbers aren't 18 and can write very well. There seems to be an unspoken convention that only "Dude" and "You rule" are appropriate language for comments.
It's OK to have the formal "one-way," print-style writing on Rhizome but it would be nice if it could be the beginning of an equally articulate conversation in comments (or passing between blogs) rather than just drive-by props*.
Best, Tom

*commendations

Update: No response to this other than a joke from someone (not Olson) about the unruly internet.

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/9/let-it-spin/