Search Results for: surf club

Last night at 0-Day Art's presentation at Eyebeam, the term "net art" was bandied about as if we all knew what it was.
It could be something practiced by one of 13, or possibly 14 types of actors. (See discussion with Duncan Alexander on whether the "wtf is a net artist" list is a catalog or a shrug.)

It could also mean something different depending on when it occurred, for example:

The Josephine Bosma era (early web through the Dotcom crash). Any artist interviewed by Josephine Bosma. The heyday of Steve Dietz at the Walker Art Center, or Dia Foundation's attempt at an online gallery.

The Blogosphere era (roughly 2001 - 2007). Rhizome transitions from a ListServ to a blog. Eyebeam Reblog (now kaput). Surf clubs. YTMND and 4Chan thrive as non-blog sites. Rise of Delicious and Flickr. Livejournal, MySpace collectivize the blog model, leading to:

The Social Media era (2007 to the present). Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Various attempts to make networking on these giant sites "performative." Trolling and friending as bullshit relational aesthetics. The economy of liking. "Aggregation" beyond the dreams of Borges.

(hat tip Lindsay Howard for Josephine Bosma link.)

Update: Add YouTube to the blogosphere era - guess it has to go somewhere. But did anyone call themselves YouTube artists the way some people (actually) tried to call themselves twitter artists? Seems like that was more of a media creation-slash-museum misfire, a la the Guggenheim's non-paradigm shifting YouTube show.

Update 2: Since I already had net art being slung around in the Duncan convo I decided it needed to be bandied about in this post.

After the surf club experiments jstchillin seems retrograde. Several "gallery art" structures are imported to the web: (i) curators (whose names are constantly mentioned); (ii) a schedule of exhibitions (one week instead of a month); (iii) the curators control the schedule and who is invited. Reasserting authority in this manner after the comparative looseness of letting invitees post whenever and whatever they wanted isn't softened just because you call the site "just chilling." In fact, calling a site of such obvious structured workaholism "chillin" seems disingenuous, and colors how the viewer perceives the work. Some of the projects are laid-back goofs but others certainly aren't (caution: sign-in required). This is not to say there isn't interesting work on the site, only that the spin was never convincing.

"Spirit Surfers" has the same problem--every post is supposed to be a joke about New Age consciousness via web consumption. By contrast, "Nasty Nets" and "Dump.fm" work because they wed unpretentious names with unpretentious practices (which may in fact be quite laborious--they can sneak up on you).

Commented in Paddy's discussion of vanished reblog archives: it's not just "preserving the database" but tracking changes to post URLs & CSS.

...Rhizome has changed several times the way posts are organized and named --when you go from, say, a numbered post to having the word "reblog" in the url to removing the word "reblog" and assigning a content tag "reblog" to those old posts, links break and commands to "redirect" to the old links have to be written. You could go post by post and do this but usually programmers try to find a way to automate the process, so inevitably content gets lost. It's still in the database, but invisible to anyone using the site. Also, sites change their CSS design and information specific to the original post is lost that way, too. (E.g., removing a date stamp or a comment link by making it invisible in the CSS script.) Eventually you end up needing massive detective work to find posts (using Google's cache, other blogs, etc) and can never fully reconstruct a site as readers originally saw it.

Made belated response to commenter's "formalist net art about itself" in Paddy's "clubs to affinity" discussion.

...the surf club activities described in the Marcin Ramocki essay linked to above don't really constitute "formalist net art about itself," anymore than the science of linguistics is only concerned with the interplay of signs. There is always a connection to, and a concern about, the world these signs represent. When a web 2.0 artist talks, jokes, or makes art about art (or politiics or science) expressed in internet terms--i.e., reduced to jpegs and YouTubes--a comparison to the underlying "signifieds" of physical reality and history--their original meanings--is usually part of the equation. Not always, but with the better work.

Convo we're having about Rhizome.org Relaunch Bugs. A commenter says it's "a tad mean spirited" to publicly point out broken links. It's been a month now and it was supposed to be a week; some people care.

tommoody | Sat, Jan 22nd, 2011 2:12 p.m.
Hi, Nick,
[...] Some bugs:
The reblog posts are now tagged as "reblog archive" but archived as "editorial"--this breaks incoming links.
Here are a handful of links from my site and elsewhere that no longer work:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/reblog.php/1853/ (announcing Marisa Olson's "The GIF Show")*
http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/reblog.php/2299/* (Marisa reblogged my Time Lapse Molecule 2 .gif - the post still exists but the URL to my site is gone from the post so it appears Marisa made the GIF. Here is the current location: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/jul/19/time-lapse-molecule-2/)
http://www.rhizome.org/events/gifshow/*
I will look on my blogs and see what else may be broken.
Best, Tom

root | Tue, Jan 25th, 2011 1:48 p.m.
Hey Tom,
I'm working on fixing old linkbacks, and other bugs as well. Hopefully we'll have all the kinks work out in a week or so.
Thanks for your patience everyone!
Nick

tommoody | Wed, Feb 23rd, 2011 10:14 a.m.
Hi, Nick,
It's been almost a month and the above links still aren't working. Paddy Johnson noticed some other errors and mentioned them on her twitter, specifically that the "Rhizome exhibition archives now almost all lead to dead links": http://rhizome.org/exhibitions/?page=3
The page above includes the "Professional Surfer" exhibit, which Brad Troemel and others have claimed as an example of the institutionalization of surf clubs. Right now that exhibit can't be found anywhere on Rhizome:
http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php*
So it's impossible to prove Troemel correct or incorrect unless someone made a screenshot or probes the haze of collective memory via interviews with people who might have witnessed the page.
We went through this a couple of years ago and you did get the redirects fixed fairly promptly. I will continue to note broken links here.
Best, Tom

michaelszpakowski | Wed, Feb 23rd, 2011 11:08 a.m.
Why do this in public? - I'm sure it's all in good faith but it comes over as a tad mean sprited [sic].
michael

tommoody | Wed, Feb 23rd, 2011 11:33 a.m.
Michael, it's a public website and a public record, and these links aren't being fixed. If someone follows a link from my blog and it doesn't work, it's easier to "get the word out" via blog posts than email everyone who might have ever read my blog and been annoyed by link rot.
Also, this is the second round of broken links we've had to deal with in a couple of years. See http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2009/12/19/fundraisers-afc-and-rhizome/ Sorry if my peevishness about that comes off to you as mean-spirited.
Correction to above: Troemel's claim of museum support for surf clubs was based on certain of their members being included in the "Unmonumental" show in 2008. (See http://fourninetyone.com/2011/01/06/fromclubstoaffinity/ - but beware that [the essay] has many inaccuracies, as Michael Manning and others have noted.) Troemel may not have been aware of the "Professional Surfer" exhibit in January 2007, since he is claiming the clubs had "underdog" status at that time. In any case, it would be good to have the record of what actually happened restored as soon as possible. (This stuff is still being argued about.)

Here's just a sampling of other broken links to Rhizome content, from my Digital Media Tree blog (I searched "Rhizome" to generate this list and will continue to add to it from my current blog and other sources):

http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=3860*
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=26212*
http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=3616*
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz/?thread=24996&page=1#47095*
http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz/?id=2463*
http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=1853*
http://rhizome.org/events/net_aesthetics_2_0/*
http://www.rhizome.com/fp.rhiz?id=1416*
http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz/?id=898*
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=19080&page=1#36375* (changed at some point to http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/19080, which works, but please note HTML formatting errors are breaking almost every link on the page now)
http://www.rhizome.com/fp.rhiz?id=666*
http://www.newmuseum.org/now_cur_RhizomeArtBase101.htm
http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz/?×tamp=20050518*
http://www.rhizome.org/rsg/*

Eventually my own links will break--although so far ten years of blogging has managed to be preserved with no redirects, thanks to Jim, Barry, and Ed--but I'm not a public institution.

*Update, March 10, 2011: Am using this post to test links - some of them are working now, and this Archive Page restores some missing content. Links mentioned in the post above that have been fixed (am adding to this - work in progress):

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/apr/29/gifs-galore-and-more/

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/jul/19/time-lapse-molecule-2/ (but my reblogged GIF still appears to be Marisa's)

http://archive.rhizome.org:8080/exhibition/gifshow/

http://rhizome.org/events/net_aesthetics_2_0/

http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php has been semi-fixed - it takes you to the Time Shares page and from there you click on a link to the Professional Surfer exhibit page

http://www.rhizome.org/rsg/ now redirects to the RSG (Radical Software Group) homepage

The links above without asterisks are still broken.

Update, March 24, 2011: Post announcing the Rhizome Archive (with my feedback)

Update, July 2011: The links listed above have all been fixed by Rhizome (thanks!) with the exception of one New Museum link. I added asterisks to all the posts listed above where the links were fixed.

Exhibition of animated GIFs curated by Paddy Johnson. Johnson's essay limns an intriguing parallel universe to the now-familiar net art history posted by her former intern Karen Archey. (Funny how the grand timelines lately seem to culminate in paintfx.biz and Jon Rafman.) Archey's essay is all about assimilation of the internet into institutional art world practice; whereas Johnson has chosen a medium that has proven particularly resistant to the museum/gallery Borg.

Alert readers may have noticed that this is the second show called "Graphics Interchange Format"--Laurel Ptak organized one three years ago in Brooklyn, which I missed but read about on Rhizome.org:

Some of the artists are among the net's gif stars and others made their first gifs for the show--they were all commissioned on three days' notice by Ptak and are being sold in unlimited editions (accompanied by a personalized note from the artist) for $20, instigating "gif shop" puns across the net art blogosphere.

Never really got the premise of that show--like, GIF slam? Three days' notice?

By contrast, the GIFs in Paddy Johnson's were years in the making, or at least, it took years for them to be recognized. Just BS-ing around here, can't really comment objectively because am in the latter show but wasn't in the former. Most documentation of Ptak's show has disappeared, so the only people we know were in both shows are Petra Cortright and M. River (who is in Johnson's show as one-half of MTAA). If you were in both, drop me a line and will add your name. At the time of Ptak's show, tumblr was just getting going and most of the GIF discussion centered around surf clubs. One such collective appears in Johnson's show (those "spirit" guys); of more recent vintage, and not a club exactly because anyone, even Brad Troemel, can join, dump.fm is represented by a "daily hall of fame" consisting of the day's most "fav"-ed posts. There you have the GIF world: the exalted platonic vs the vote-hungry mundane.