Search Results for: surf club

Paddy Johnson's history of animated GIF art continues on Artnet; here is Part Two, covering what Henry Kaye and Corinna Kirsch call the "golden age of social media GIFs" and what I usually call the blogosphere era.* Johnson's essay covers solo and group blogs, pre-Tumblr, and includes so-called surf clubs. (Her generous mentions of my contributions to this madhouse are much appreciated.) Interestingly, she includes Dump.fm in this group, which makes sense in terms of the spirit of collective improvisation even though Dump didn't launch until 2010, when Tumblr was well under way. Its real-time image chat offered a kind of "sped-up Tumblr." And it's still going strong, with several generations of user sensibilities having rapidly cycled through over the last four years.
Another note: according to a Lorna Mills quote in the article, Mills and I were "originally influenced" by Sally McKay to go down the GIF path. McKay gave me valuable instruction and conceptual feedback when I started making my own GIFs but I had already been making "GIF art" consisting of arrangements of found GIFs. See, for example, "Cube tower slideup, by artech-x03, 80 times, an html/internet/curatorial/appropriation piece" from July 2003 and "Hug Emoticon Pyramid," from August 2003, the latter consisting of a found HTML arrangement of found emoticons, copied more or less intact from deviantart.com and represented as an art piece. (In a later post will screencapture those as a single GIF, since I can't rely on newsreaders and other rebloggin' apparatus to translate those patterns reliably now.) Am not suggesting these were radical innovations, but the strategies weren't as familiar then as they are now.

*roughly 2001-2010, when self-hosted blogs thrived prior to the mass movement to Facebook, but you could say surf clubs were 2006-2010.

Am enjoying my solo conversation over in the Rhizome comments, where I put up this second installment in reply to Michael Connor's What's Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?

In the present post, Michael Connor makes a distinction between a Web 1.0 artist as modernist, idealistically seeking the innate language of the web, and post-Web 1.0 as post-modernist "interpreters, transcribers, narrators, curators, and architects." And somehow the increasing commercial sophistication of the web factors into this.

I didn't attend the first (2006) Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel but I was a panelist on the second (2008) version, along with Petra Cortright, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Tim Whidden and Damon Zucconi. ( https://vimeo.com/2183669 ) We were talking about surf clubs and at that point "Web 2.0" wasn't synonymous with Facebook but possibly Blogger and Myspace, which hadn't quite become the perfected advertising funnels social media is now.

Artist blogs were still a bit outside the commercial hurly burly. You weren't as indicted and implicated in the system on a Word Press blog then as you are with a Facebook page now. So there was a relative innocence to the discussion. I would say there was an equal mix of interest in making original content on and for the Web with stepping-outside-the-web-and-looking-askance at it.

I showed my "OptiDisc" GIF and using screenshots, demonstrated how it had been hotlinked on scores of other people's pages (Myspace, Livejournal, YouTube, etc), with the linkers not having any idea of its source other than that it was a "cool graphic." A kind of Calvino-esque invisible city of hotlinkers. I also showed a post from the Double Happiness blog of "rival snack squads," consisting of two very similar collections of multi-racial, mixed-gender, all-young-people cartoon characters used to personify Wise potato chips and the AMC movie chain (without actually being aware of each other). So we had 1.0, post 1.0, and commercialism all balled up in the same presentation. It seemed more innocent and hopeful, though in comparison to later essays admonishing artists to find their places in the "like economy."

Yet at the same time, that 2008 panel coincided with "Internet Week" and a commenter accused the older panelists of aiming their pitches at the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the audience. There were a few. One of them, I think, complimented me on "monetizing" the hotlinking of others by making fine art prints of their thefts, thus profiting from the pirates. I was somewhat dumbstruck, having not considered that aspect at all. (I was just thinking, how can I make the best display of this idea, I swear.)

The point of this reminiscence is to blur the lines of 1.0, post-1.0, and the commercial, which I think artists do, stepping all over curators' and historians' fine distinctions. So there.

Keyword: post-panels internet

Rhizome.org has a follow-up to the post aesthetic or post internet panel mentioned earlier, and I contributed my specialty of what Sally McKay once called "lashing out like a wounded animal." (Hey that's a reflex and we can't always control it.)

Another commenter, João Enxuto, raises some interesting points while topping yours truly in the "kids get off my lawn" area:

While I appreciate the attempt to find something true and interesting in the postinternet debates and some hope among its supposed practitioners, it has become an increasingly difficult proposition when faced with the realities outlined in the very pieces cited in this article (Mute and 24/7).

"Now there are numerous pressures for individuals to reimagine and refigure themselves as being of the same consistency and values as the dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively." (Crary, 99)

Full-immersion and brand ubiquity represent the triumph of neoliberal capitalism over artistic autonomy - the author claims as much. But collectivism should not be confused with ubiquitous authorship. The Web 2.0 free-market has only flourished under such generous neologisms.

If the postinternet eludes a critical position it may be that its youthful practitioners are too immersed in the ostensible object of critique. Fish can't see water.

Under the unsparing weight of neoliberalism, debt, and privatization, an increased level of autonomy should be demanded by individual artists, not eradicated. The internet may hold some promise for future collective practices but it is also the horizon of market accumulation, manufactured desires, and forced obsolescence. The postinternet is now, admittedly, becoming outmoded. It will be superseded by another neologism, possibly from the hive mind of post-Millenials, which will have all of us, regardless of age, struggling to not be an old.

In the New Museum's 2008 Net Aesthetics panel it was easier to defend what we were then calling Web 2.0 because it was still the tail end of the relatively commerce-free blogosphere era.
I wouldn't condescend to say that millennials can't see the water they are swimming in, but can vouch that the water has gotten more polluted since the days of defending surf clubs against vintage net.art scolds.

All of these appeared on Paddy Johnson's blog. The first was addressed to Paddy and the second two to one of her editors:

on AFC at The L Magazine: What New Aesthetic? 5 days ago

[...] Hopefully what's "shining through" my notes isn't that Bridle isn't "one of us" (whoever us is) but that he's hodgepodging together critique and puffery into one of those "new and improved" commercial fairytales. (Learn to love the digital world, no matter how incompetent or intrusive it may be.) It's funny that Rob Myers is still complaining about surf clubs after all these years. Those were heterogeneous, improvisational affairs and made no claims to tie it all together the way Bridle's tumblr and lectures do.

on Okay, So Who’s Gonna Run Rhizome? 6 days ago [possibly the worst blog headline ever written. Strunk & White curl into a ball --TM]

Another possibility is the New Museum rethinks its relationship with a vaguely-defined "net art" platform and either spins it off as a tech booster site or consolidates the Artbase as a relatively low-cost collection of new media art.
Because one person has been running Rhizome for seven years it's more of a series of habits than an institution at this point. What is Rhizome? It's an art collection, but it's never been clear whether it was curated or something like an unvetted artist slide registry. It's a magazine-like blog, which wavers between attempts at criticism and straight-up press releases, and will never have any real teeth as the "house publication" of a museum. And it's a place that organizes lectures, projects such as "7 artists/7 technologists," and the occasional show. Most of this has been decided in a fairly autocratic manner: instead of a people-powered, crowd-sourced "rhizomatic" model, Rhizome for the last several years has been closer to, say, China under Mao.
Now that the cult of personality is ending, and given the vagueness of the charter at this point, why keep the thing?
This post asks the wrong question.

on “C.R.E.A.M.” at Art Micro-Patronage, Now in Excessive Detail! 6 days ago

Rhizome's notion of "taking a GIF offline so the collector can have it locally" isn't a viable business model or a particularly good way of educating people about this ill-defined term "net art."
That's what Ben Fino-Radin (who works for Rhizome) and 0-Day were "fighting" about on Twitter--none of which is not explained here. Fino-Radin said he couldn't support 0-Day because their program is rooted in a "diss" -- that is, criticism of his employer.
The entire controversy is glossed over here as "the Armory fuss last year."

Update: Minor editorial tweak.