Search Results for: surf club

Viva Failed Web Illustration

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Have been reading the Timothy Alan Liu book Rob Myers recommended, The Laws of Cool. Especially liked the discussion of the history of typefaces and design as they made the jump from print to the web. The book features a good, if matter-of-fact, discussion of JODI, as well.

This blog confesses it has a hard time finding its place in Liu's scheme for some of the reasons Rob mentioned in his post on the artwork here (thanks--much appreciated): "...it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0."

Alan Liu assumes everything is about "cool" and eventually even the "uncool" gets absorbed into the "cool." That is, the computerized workplace and playplace is an all-encompassing seductive experience measured in "cool," whether it's the Ars Electronica avant garde or designers creating Facebook apps.

I'm interested in seeing software and web tools made problematic through the investment of time and labor all out of proportion to their intended function. Examples would be hand-shading a gradient instead of just writing parameters for it, or hand-rendering animation frames without any use of onion-skinning or digitally generated transition frames. This is an artist stance of "doing the difficult thing" which does not make an easy jump to the web.

The labor and use of "historical" art techniques is not always conspicuous in the finished product (that is, my artwork), so Rob's vouching for it is appreciated.

A post on Rob a few years ago and some examples of his online artwork are here. We have an ongoing disagreement over whether the surf clubs "add anything" to the images they recycle.

Update: Don't know where that "Timothy" came from. Most uncool.

L.M. Sums Up the Last Three Years of Good Web Art

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Lorna Mills (aka L.M. from the Sally McKay and L.M. blog) is teaching a net art class and has published her class notes. It is a mix of syllabus, lesson plan, and how-to with much editorializing and distinction-making about the current scene of surf clubs, web art 2.0, or what have you.

Rather than embrace the Web Establishment with links to textbook examples of net art, Mills is marching off into the great uncharted and taking impressionable minds with her.

Subjects covered are things yours truly has been going on about for years and were only barely adequately covered at the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panels and subsequent discussions with Rhizome chatboard naysayers. Collections, arranging GIFs on pages, using tables, distorting GIFs, YouTube hacking, hackers vs defaults, Nasty Nets, Double Happiness, Chris Ashley, Loshadka, Petra Cortright. The good stuff.

Double Happiness at vertexList

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double happiness 1

double happiness 2

double happiness 3

Their installation in a group show called "New Blood." The DVD cases are Nigerian and Thai cinema, mostly. One video was still rendering when I arrived so I didn't get a shot of it (just the default JVC screen with colored spheres). The snack station features a working refrigerator and microwave and gallerygoers were heating mini-pizzas (also note Hydrox cookie bag--there's a story involving Warren Buffett and the reviving of the brand after he received a letter from the group--they may be heroes). The scatter-orgy successfully translates the maxed-out, unrepressed, multiple-overlapping-media vibe of the group's blog. Taste and restraint are concepts they have no use for, making them the most lifelike of the surf clubs.

Note: two members of Double Happiness will give a presentation about the grocery store C-Town (Town-Town-Town...) in connection with this year's Conflux Festival. Details at the link.

Another note: barely visible in the top photo is a laptop "eating" slices of actual pizza, which may or may not remain for the duration of the exhibit.

More on Net Concrète

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Comment from TH re the net concrète post:

"that net concrete thing just gets at that some people arent surfing
some of the time, they're skating... on net concrete"

Good point. The enemies of the surf clubs seized on that word "surf," with its connotations of couch potatoes holding a TV remote, to attack the work on the group websites as passive and mindless.

We all know that skating, on the other hand, carved into and "drew" the urban landscape, illuminating America's largely invisible architecture of schoolyards, plazas, and backyard swimming pools as a "massive cement playground of unlimited potential," as Craig Stecyk III wrote in the Dogtown articles. The group blogs similarly intervene into the largely unapprehended Net in an active, quasi-architectural way. Not through dismantling the code but through cogent choices and alterations of subject matter from the great "out there."

Net concrète

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Net concrète might be a way to describe the work of artists who sample the greater sludgepile of internet content. Using the wikipedia-simple definition of musique concrète as practiced by Pierre Schaffer and applying it to the art of the surf club artists (a breed that becomes logy and sluggish after a spatiotemporal environmental event known as "graduation," but here goes anyway):

1) [Schaffer] developed the concept of including any and all sounds in the musical vocabulary. At first he concentrated on working with sounds other than those produced by traditional musical instruments, removing them from their original context. Later on, he found it was possible to remove the familiarity of musical instrument sounds and abstract them further by techniques such as removing the attack of the recorded sound.

2) He was among the first to manipulate recorded sound in the way that it could be used in conjunction with other such sounds in the making of a musical piece. This could be thought of as a precursor to contemporary sampling practices.

3) Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of play (in his terms, jeu) in the creation of music. Schaeffer's idea of jeu comes from the French verb jouer, which carries the same double meaning as the English verb play: 'to enjoy oneself by interacting with one's surroundings', as well as 'to operate a musical instrument'. This notion is the core of musique concrète.

Keep these criteria in mind and look at this page of examples culled by Marcin Ramocki from the Nasty Nets blog. While it's true that each post has a specific and sometimes quite literal satiric intent there is a sense of randomness of a quasi-oceanic environment being dipped into and splashed about. The difficulty of trying to explain this art to the dry, very dry, resentful people who hang around the Rhizome chatboards is they can't hear the music. They expended much effort to prove that all this quotation had been a function of Net Art all along and there was "nothing new here." But the sampling of Nasty Nets, et al wasn't just for analytical or statistical purposes, there was an invisible tune everyone was riffing on. Fortunately some people got that.