Search Results for: protocol

1979 magazine cover from www.computerhistory.org via cpb

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.

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.

Just received a press release from an established alternative space art gallery that has decided to go paperless--as in, no more printed announcements or PR. Instead of saying "we can't afford it anymore" they said they are "going green." The announcement comes in a PDF with green letters and a logo of yes, a leaf. Someone at the institution missed their calling--he or she should be doing public relations for one of the big corporations.

How else could it be spun?

"We have decided to stop paying money to the postal service, which is subsidized by a fascist regime in the US."
"We believe in AT&T and want to use its 'pipes' for all our communications."
"We believe more use of electrons will move the US closer to tapping its valuable coal resources and keeping industry local."
etc.

Evidently they are not reading Ed Halter at Rhizome and haven't learned about the rematerialization of art.

[This page apologized to Halter for trolling him on this issue but finds that's it's too rich a subject not to exploit. There are solid economic reasons why society is "dematerializing" by going paperless and moving former physical activities online. The reason for making physical objects, sending out cards on nice paper stock, and moving into a white cube display environment at this point has to be because you like it (or feel you have something to say that can't be said on a website), not because you are being compelled to by some inexplicable reverse zeitgeist or because you want to scratch the lotto card and be the one out of a million artists who "makes it." On the Rhizome thread* Halter says his word "rematerialization" is descriptive and shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of anything. But he made his argument for it rather well, ironically or not, and this page anticipates its embrace by those seeking to position new media art within a market. At the end of the thread Yves Bernard, one of the curators of "Holy Fire" (the show about selling new media work under discussion), says "Moreover, this immaterial -> material drift is much more than a side-effect: it is just a part of a much larger trend: software is driving the material world, now generating objects and atoms as well as processes, interactions and communications."]

See also: "Protocol" discussion.

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/1/the-rematerialization-of-art/

Just as Nasty Nets, a premiere Net Art 2.0 site, is in the process of winding down or metamorphosing into the next stage of The Alien [or not --ed.], comes artist and blogger Twhid with this post quoting language from an Israeli Net Art show. This could be a working definition of Net Art, or what we're now calling Net Art 1.0:

--the visualization of data
--open-code access and connectivity
--hacking and online voyeurism involving critiques of authorities and economic powers
--the creation of online behavioral codes and the negotiation of cyberspace from various perspectives

Much of this sounds dated and quaint when vast legions of creative people have found comfortable homes in Rupert Murdoch's MySpace. What is still relevant, using Nasty Nets and some of the other surf club blogs as examples?

I'll throw these out:
1. Camille Paloque-Berges owns "visualization of data" in a Web 2.o sense. She has an exquisite eye for scientific charts and online graphics and appropriates them for her various blogs (here's one, where I got the above image). But often stripped of context and presented as Dada, a la Francis Picabia's pointless machines. Or heightened (enlarged, cropped) to be contemplated for their pure aesthetics. Or interspersed with rank kitsch. The functionality of these confections is also occasionally considered so it's not pure nihilism.

2. Open code access. Everyone still supports this is in principal but as Alex Galloway has pointed out even the rhizomatic web has its protocols. And often people just accept proprietary systems (e.g., Windows) because it's the language of the workplace, where serious surfing, er, online research, gets done by many. Or use YouTube and MySpace because they are a way for creatives to talk--until the Man shuts you down.

3. Hacking. See hacking vs defaults discussion on Guthrie Lonergan's and my blogs. Rhizome/NewMu should have consulted this in picking the "Unmonumental" show!

4. "Online voyeurism involving critiques of authorities and economic powers." This is grant-ese. We'd have to know what it means to grok it in a 2.0 sense. The best critiques of authorities lately have come from political blogs but that has nothing to do with Net Art.

5. "The creation of online behavioral codes and the negotiation of cyberspace from various perspectives." This is where Lonergan and the other surf bloggers shine. Chat room anomalies; confessionals on MySpace; recycled vernacular photography and video; interesting error messages on corporate sites. Somehow I don't think this is what the Israeli exhibition had in mind, but I could be wrong.

6. And then there's this texturemappingpalooza of Borna's--a weird, wonderful, sardonic use of browser space for computerphilic/phobic art, communicated via blog. Where does this fit in the dry scheme of Net Art 1.0? Nowhere, I'd say.