We are having some belated discussion of the Great Internet Sleepover and the pros and cons of the "surf clubs" over at Paddy Johnson's blog.
Search Results for: surf club
net art anthology blues
Have been avoiding looking at Rhizome.org's Net Art Anthology because it's always painful to have been deeply involved in a scene and watch the historians get it wrong.
Rhizome is accurate when it describes the purpose of the anthology as
A cynic might say that yes, it's being retold to conform to the sensibilities of curator Michael Connor and his predecessor Lauren Cornell. In their world "Vvork" was an important website, deserving of critical writing, full archiving, and interviews with the founders (some of whom went on to have art world careers, in no small part due to constant plugs by Cornell). The surf club "Nasty Nets," by contrast, is an ugly duckling that still hasn't been treated kindly, as Rhizome acknowledges:
The link goes to the old, error-ridden "Artbase" copy of Nasty Nets, saved in the early '10s by then-conservator Ben Fino-Radin. Apparently his successor has had difficulties cleaning up the saved version, because the launch has been postponed numerous times over the last seven years and is still not completed.
Eventually the Nasty Nets story will be told in depth (in particular its relationship to blogs that came afterward, such as Spirit Surfers) but in the meantime we get some minor blurb writing and flawed archiving from Rhizome.
A small blurry 2007 photo appears of the group, without any caption or other list telling who the members were.
On the main Anthology page the members are given as follows:
By contrast, the Anthology gives a detailed listing of the participants in the Spirit Surfers blog:
This is especially ironic because the premise of Spirit Surfers is a group of spiritual "infomonks" divining wisdom from the web (or something) and its members all use aliases such as "tntet," "states," "INFObeard," "Dtangler," etc.
Whereas Nasty Nets members used their own names, and elsewhere on Rhizome (not linked from the Anthology) can be found a list of the most prolific posters:
Possibly Michael Connor doesn't want his readers to know who the main driving forces behind Nasty Nets were. (In fairness, it's hard to know if this is out of spite or curatorial malpractice.)
Despite subtle favoring of the "Spirit Surfers crowd" over the "Nasty Nets crowd," it can't be said that the former got better archiving treatment.
Rhizome used its "Webrecorder" software to preserve Spirit Surfers (which is still an active website). There is a record of several attempts by someone named lyndsey, but it seems that the most he or she has been able to record is 39 pages. However, the blog itself has 117 pages of posts! Flawed as Nasty Nets' archive may be, at least it goes back to the beginning.
Related: UNAC thoughts
minor edits after posting
UNAC thoughts
Since the mid-'00s have been spending time in UNACs (unanthologized net art communities).
First came Nasty Nets, the ironic "internet surfing club" that Rhizome.org keeps pushing to the end of its "to be documented" priorities list. It's currently scheduled to be anthologized in April but talks about anthologizing the site began in 2013 and far worse projects have been lionized in the meantime.
Then came Dump.fm, a hugely influential idea-incubator that Rhizome never "got" and that suffered when the stock of founder Ryder Ripps dropped on the Rhizome credibility exchange (many say unfairly).
More recently it's been bogchat and chat soup, which are Dump- and IRC-like sites for people who "get it." (Hat tips John Romero and Joel Cook.)
Ripps once tweeted to Rhizome honcho Michael Connor that he, Connor, didn't understand the internet. That's certainly true regarding the net after about 2005, if the contents of the New Museum's Rhizome Net Anthology show are a guide. That show's weighted heavily to a pre-blogging era style of "net art" (Shulgin, MTAA, etc) and has no surf club presence to speak of. Possibly Connor "gets" Facebook and Twitter, which he seems to use and like. But who cares about those?
Joe Milutis Eulogizes Dump.fm
On Hyperallergic, Joe Milutis discusses the recently-deceased website Dump.fm, in an essay titled In Memory of Dump.fm: An Endlessly Collaborative Image Poem.
Neither an art-world-ish “internet surf club” nor a monetized zeitgeist sump pump, dump seemed to harken back to a pre-1997 internet era, when it was possible to imagine that the users you met online were a small enough cohort to seem communitarian, but not large enough to merely replicate the social structures and hierarchies of the world at large.
Milutis' treatment of the site as a poetic language is appreciated:
Weird fragments, heavy dithering, pieces of images or text floating without context. Inaction gifs as opposed to reaction gifs. The quasi-syntactical combinations of these crappy objects were only possible if participants were more interested in treating the combinations like a language — one for which they would both have to amass the vocabulary and then be willing to speak with it. The rapidity of these combinations allowed for the unexpected, as if Breton’s automatic writing had finally found its imagistic counterpart.
Milutis avoids the political in discussing the Rene Abythe GIF below, except in the sense of dump-vs-tumblr politics and dump's intriguing disconnections with the rest of the world ("real" or online). For the record, it depicts Hillary Clinton's "pointing to the right and the red" logo crudely morphing into the Outback Steakhouse logo. (Electors asked Where's the Beef and gave us Trump.) The geek joke is that that the red arrow, when compressed, becomes a jagged outline resembling that familiar outdoors-y mountain range, helpfully rotated so we can see it.
follower privilege, access privilege, and other things to be bitter about
Someone sent me an obnoxious quote from an obnoxious essay on post-internet art:
While early new media art communities were built on ethics of openness and collaboration, surf clubs and platform-based practices prosper on the nepotism [sic] and influence of online and regional friendships. In 2014, the internet is not so democratic and neither is the art world. Privileges of access to the art world come through unlikely cross-platform friendships with critics, academic blogger meritocracy, and follower-populism. Artists with higher follower counts become aesthetic opinion leaders, soft-capitalizing on the attention of the right gallerists, art lovers, art students, and New Yorkers. To base your art practice around any one platform is to submit yourself to the social hierarchies created by impressions of influence and popularity with the communities you build and engage with.
The author is Jennifer Chan. The quote was in a book, which students are reading. Depressing. Let's take it line by line:
While early new media art communities were built on ethics of openness and collaboration, surf clubs and platform-based practices prosper on the nepotism* and influence of online and regional friendships.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. The dynamic content of blogging software platforms opened up "net practice" from the old days of fixed html pages dependent on collections of hyperlinks for traffic. Suddenly hyperlinks could be generated "on the fly" and conversations could happen right on the page under discussion (instead of through a guestbook or related BBS).
In 2014, the internet is not so democratic and neither is the art world. Privileges of access to the art world come through unlikely cross-platform friendships with critics, academic blogger meritocracy, and follower-populism. Artists with higher follower counts become aesthetic opinion leaders, soft-capitalizing on the attention of the right gallerists, art lovers, art students, and New Yorkers.
Authority based on "higher follower counts" is a completely different concept from authority based on personal contacts. Chan thoughtlessly mashes them together here.
To base your art practice around any one platform is to submit yourself to the social hierarchies created by impressions of influence and popularity with the communities you build and engage with.
"Blogosphere" sites that are self-hosted (which includes '06-'08 surf clubs) didn't partake of the centralized, mass-control structures of a commercial platform such as Tumblr or Facebook. Chan is voluntarily operating in a far more restrictive environment while projecting her hierarchies and elitism onto surf clubs she never participated in.
As an artist friend noted, Chan "pushes privilege shaming to such an extent that we're supposed to feel bad about being friends with other artists." Resentment is raised to a statement of high principle.
Rhizome.org has archived at least one of the surf clubs from the mid-'00s (Nasty Nets) but has never publicly announced it, or had symposia where some of Chan's revisionism could be cleared up. She was in school when all that was going on and is just fabricating theories about the era (or borrowing her bad ideas from Brad Troemel, who also wasn't there).
*nepotism means giving jobs to your relatives -- I think "cronyism" is the word she means to use here