curt, at the risk of delivering a pt-by-pt response rather than an
elegant and coherent essay, I'd like to address a few pts individually
in-line. I apologize in advance for the length, but I promise there'll
be some juicy nuggets sprinkled along the way!

On Oct 5, 2004, at 11:02 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> It seems we fundamentally disagree on the importance of art being in
> dialogue with the contemporary art world.

Our dialogues are already being assimilated into the broader art
context; this discussion we're having is art in dialogue with the
contemporary art world. The dialogue that Beryl Korot, Phyllis
Gershuny, and Ira Schneider fostered in Radical Software (
http://www.radicalsoftware.org ) was not really considered to be part
of the general contemporary art narrative of the time (early 70s), but
the art world has a way of swallowing engaging discussions, even if it
takes a while.

The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of
becoming less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received
with excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion,
newmedia will be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical
mass. To avoid becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the
criticality that's missing by not having a wider recognition &&
discussion in the hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to
critique this work than us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just
don't see that critical discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling
over the terminology and technology, but not much attention paid to the
ideas.

> I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting
> primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time.

Then that truly is a fundamental disagreement, because both of those
artists (and every other major artist in history, almost without
exception) are remembered precisely because they challenged
assumptions, made people uncomfortable, and posed controversial (if
sometimes implicit) questions. I definitely want to avoid personal
statements, but anyone who thinks these or any artists are
[important/interesting] because their work is aesthetically pleasing
has an [incomplete/impoverished] understanding of the hyperthreaded
hystorical context in which the work was produced. All "important" work
is about ideas; even the works of abstractExpressionists and 1970s
minimalists made their own provocative arguments.

> Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the
> work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever
> done.

However, how can you not see Brakhage as emerging from the hyperthreads
running through the 1950s and 1960? Even his last works were products
of a career forged in that climate, although by the 90s, also
interwoven with all the threads in-between... It's not about waves,
it's about the dialogue we as artists participate in by creating work.
If what you do isn't challenging, you're not contributing to that
dialogue.

> Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the
> sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have
> great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious
> social change).

Clearly, and no one disputes this. In fact, perhaps the most potent
works exist on the fringe of that system. However, as the "contemporary
art world" wrestles with how best to absorb us into their discussion,
the problem they're encountering is not how best to fit us into a
gallery, but rather how to [talk/write] about work that doesn't seem to
have anything interesting to say. BUSTED.

> This is the interesting thing about outsider art and one of the things
> I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be).

Let's not get started on "outsider" art, and the offensively
condescending colonial-era mindset that celebrates "virgin" work
unscathed by the evil corrupting influence of the art world dialogue. I
thought we finally vanquished this pathologically naive Modernist
impulse in the 80s. The reality is that, whether we know it or not, we
are all drawing from similar hystorical hyperthreads. Art, advertising
and popular culture are so [inbred/intertwined] that the difference
between the art school graduate and the mythical kid from the projects
is that the art school graduate can *sometimes* put a name to a handful
of the people and movements they draw artistic inspiration from. To
think the net somehow creates the opportunity for more "outside" voices
is to get it exactly wrong. Instead, the net's interconwebness
crossbreeds everything in it (including the artWorld and everything
else) even faster, and even more than in any other media. "Outsider"
art will emerge from this network of insiders known as the "interweb"
about as often as wild feral adults will emerge from Manhattan.

> If it's alway primarily about "forwarding the canonical dialogue,"
> artmaking can quickly devolve into a chasing after newness, a sort of
> conceptual fashion show.

WOAH D00D. It's not about the canon, or the cult of the new; it's about
your work contributing to an ongoing and meaningful discussion. To call
the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a "conceptual
fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual pursuit! If we're
going to go that route, how about you take all of the
diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover," and
I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have anything to
say. ;)

> Collectors as venture capitalists and artists as aspiring CEOs
> hoping to go public with their newest art venture. Where's the
> passion in that? What? You say passion's been out of date since
> Romanticism? Dang.

Passion's always in, baby. To understand the art world, you need to
understand the roles of (in alphaOrder) artists, critics, collectors,
curators and [gallery owners/dealers]. They all have their own
[economic/career] motives, and it's crucial to always remember this, no
matter what they say about it all being about the art. Artists who get
caught up in the economics and career strategies of the art world do so
at the risk of confusing others' motives with their own, and diverting
attention from their own work. See Exhibit A, Jeff Koons, who carefully
engineered his own career, indeed making his celebrity a [focus/aspect]
of his work -- however, it backfired when his popularity inevitably
waned (as is the case with any celebrity who doesn't actively reinvent
[him/her]self).

What does that have to do with newmedia? Beats me -- the most
interesting newmedia isn't happening on the front page of ArtForum,
it's happening on and off lists like these. Unfortunately, we're just
not engaging in enough critical discussion about that work.

> "An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that
> such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in
> another." - g.k. chesterton, 1908

As charming as Chesterton's plea for the wisdom of the good ole days
is, his comment fails to recognize the evolutionary nature of human
discussion && activity. Today we understand Newtonian physics as the
hystorical context from which Einstein's theory of General Relativity
emerged. Newton's ideas were revolutionary, and extremely insightful,
but on a solar or galactic scale, we now see they don't work as well,
so Einstein proposed General Relativity to explain the discrepancies.
Then scientists discovered that General Relativity doesn't work so well
on the [atomic/subatomic] scale, so Quantum Mechanics was developed as
a parallel model. This isn't to say that we look back at Newton or
Einstein with scorn for being out of date -- quite the opposite; each
is crucial for understanding the context and creation of the next.
However, you never see scientists complaining that Quantum Mechanics
and Superstring Theory are too fashionable, and that Newtonian physics
worked fine for Newton so they should work fine for us today.

Granted, the art world doesn't have as linear a narrative, but to rip
artistic [theories/practices] out of their threads of hystorical
context and drop them into the present is to pretend that the
intervening years of discussion and debate never happened. It's willful
intellectual amnesia. We are, after all, talking about Chesterton, so
let's not forget-to-remember that he was a curmudgeonly sometimes
anti-Semite, full time anti-Feminist and an art-school-educated
anti-Artist: "the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts
amateurs." We could [explain/understand] his now-controversial
positions by examining his hystorical context, but by his own
direction, maybe he would rather we ignore his context and take his
creeds of that era at face value.

All of this is the long way of saying that newmedia disregards the
threads which weave it at its own peril. So rather than watch this
FlashFormalism float by and let myself become complicit in my silence,
I solemnly vow to do my part to be a curmudgeon in my own way by
contributing criticism and artwork to the discussion.

- ben

On Oct 5, 2004, at 4:48 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> A. Giving up on trying to fit net art into high gallery art strictures
> does not inherently imply:
> 1. techno fetishization
> 2. a-politicalization
> 3. abandonment to pure abstraction

No, of course not. However, the "high art" complex has a heavily
conceptual foundation, which is a useful context for moving actual
discussion forward. Also, we must be extremely careful not to reject
the hystorical conversations and work from which our current work
emerges. The gallery is irrelevant, but the art world is not.

> B. Abstract art does not inherently imply:
> 1. Psychedelia
> 2. Impotence

I wasn't making the case that abstract art == psychedelia, but I will
make the case that abstract art is impotent in today's art context. If
anyone disagrees, then enlighten me: what does pure abstraction have to
say? Is it a comment on our fragmented, post-modern times? If so, it's
a half-century-old sentiment. Great art makes the people of its time
uncomfortable -- I don't think abstraction has made anyone
uncomfortable for decades. I'd go further and say that formalism hasn't
made anyone uncomfortable in quite some either; representational or
abstract, if all you have going for you is aesthetics, you're not
really saying anything.

> For example, Paul Klee's work is neither psychedelic nor impotent and,
> although no longer contemporary or en vogue, was and is potent and
> relevant. I'd include Stan Brakhage in that category as well.

And yet Klee's work was extremely challenging when it was being
produced; at various times "primitivist," child-like, surrealist,
cubist and transcendentalist, there was a heady conceptual backing to
everything Klee did. All of these artistic movements that he was
influenced by (and exerted influence on) were socially radical, as was
his work (and even the very concept of abstraction, at that point).

Similarly, Brakhage came out of the 1960s, and his desire to bring
pre-verbal consciousness-expanding sublimity to the viewer, through the
manipulation of light and the rejection of narrative and traditional
film production techniques, was extremely provocative and radical.

However, it's no longer 1917 or 1968. Abstraction/formalism is no
longer [surprising/upsetting/challenging], even when it's on the
computerBox. What does formalism have to say today? Lets break it down.
Unlike Brakhage, these folks aren't breaking the means of production to
interesting ends, nor are they saying anything uncomfortable or
challenging. Apps like Flash and Photoshop were designed to make pretty
pictures -- making swirling lines and random sounds in Flash is like
making a traditional film in 1968, or painting straight portraits in
1917. Subtle statements can be made, but you contribute nothing to the
global discussion we call "art."

Creating your own tools is more interesting, but when the end result is
the changing Rhizome logo, your hard work is for naught. It's the
equivalent of the straight portrait painter grinding his own paints in
1917 -- admirable work for the service of art which has nothing to say.

> C. Overtly political art does not inherently imply:
> 1. potency
> 2. maturity
> 3. proper moral use of art

I never said it did, and anyone who does has an extremely Marxist view
of artmaking. However, I don't understand why someone would make art
which says nothing when there is so much to say.

> D. Generative techiniques in artwork do not inherently imply:
> 1. visual abstraction
> 2. a-conceptualization

I love these rule systems you built! :) But really, I never implied
anything about all "generative art." What I did was to suggest that the
preponderance of "generative art" is [abstract/formal]. In this way,
it's mostly about itself, and how cool it is that it's generating
material, sometimes interactively, sometimes using clever data as
input. In short, most "generative art" doesn't have much impact after
the initial coolness, like browsing Wallpaper* magazine.

> "Classic, clear-cut examples" of net-specific art may make for
> dramatic object lessons, but they don't always make for interesting
> art.

Most certainly. Like the early video moment, sometimes the important
discussion takes place outside the [gallery/museum] system, and the
intersections with galleries are awkward and in many ways unsuccessful.
The point is that it's important not to articulate newmedia as divorced
from the hystorical threads that wove it.

- ben

On Oct 5, 2004, at 2:06 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> To play devil's advocate, do we need to solve the problem of "net.art
> ghettoization?"

This was the question Lev Manovich raised two years ago in "New Media
from Borges to HTML" (
http://www.nothing.org/netart_101/readings/manovich.htm ) when he said
"new media field is facing a danger of becoming a ghetto whose
participants would be united by their fetishism of latest computer
technology, rather than by any deeper conceptual, ideological or
aesthetic issues... I personally do think that the existence of a
separate new media field now and in the future makes very good sense,
but it does require a justification."

(As a side note, this comment became the inspiration for the creation
of http://www.newmediaghetto.org )

Personally, I find the danger palpable. Looking through the ArtBase,
you can see the unbounded techNewPositivism -- implicit and overt --
expressed in much of the work. I call it FlashFormalism, although it's
not limited to a particular authoring package; it's an attitude present
in any work which is more concerned with "interactivity" (I prefer the
term "cybernetics"), meaningless data wrangling, or pure formalism than
contributing to the larger discussion. Sometimes these works take
information as input to generate essentially abstract visual or
auditory patterns, pretending that using a news headline feed instead
of a random number generator makes the work more interesting. In fact,
one such work is displayed like a badge on the lapel of Rhizome.org --
the spiky logo which allegedly changes based on some hidden (and
probably more meaningful) data. The fact is that the logo is purely
formal, and the underlying data is totally irrelevant to the real goal
of the piece: pretty changing colors.

The term "generative art" has gained currency lately as a way of
legitimizing these activities, but the output created by so much of
this "generative art" is inscrutably abstract. Unfortunately,
abstraction no longer has the powerful political and conceptual weight
it had at the end of the 19th century, so we are left with pretty
sounds and pictures that are entirely impotent. In today's political
climate, I find that particularly unforgivable.

If the newmedia community as a whole doesn't move faster towards
criticality, discourse and evolution, it risks the same fate
psychedelia suffered by standing still and going from a powerful
political medium in the 60s to an exhausted juvenile cliche in the 70s.

- ben

On Oct 5, 2004, at 2:11 AM, Liza Sabater wrote:

> Whether it is a wiki or a blog, I am talking about bringing social
> technologies into artists sites. And not just the tech but the
> practices of communication as well. We need to make your sites as
> dynamic as your art process.

I wholeheartedly agree, and this was one of our main
[concerns/objectives] when criticalartware began to design liken, our
current connexionEngine and discoursePlatform. Using liken, these
discussions automagically [intertwine/crossbreed] based on group
navigational patterns. Soon, with the addition of personalized RSS
feeds, users will be able to customize their subscriptions & level of
involvement so that they can stay engaged with any
[topics/words/"authors"] they're interested in. Thus, the ability for
multiple communities to exist inside the multiverse of liken is also a
design objective, although in liken it's hard not to get drawn to every
corner of the universe by following incidental [linkages/pathways]. And
in liken, every time you click a link, you are changing the
relationships between the nodes around you, and building new pathways.

In this way, liken can serve simultaneously as a communicative outlet
(ie [messageBoard/wiki (ours are likis)]), research tool and source of
inspiration. By acting in a similar way to a humanBrain (making
sumTimes outlandish connexions based on simple similarities), and
because it will automatically link any text you put into it, liken
serves as rich soil for creative life.

- ben

I think it was the rhetorical "any postmodern thoughts on this" that
somehow inspired me (in a drunken state) to [remix/respond] to that
post. Although I certainly did not intend it to read as hostile (or
even satire). I'm just as confused as you -- although confusion is one
of my favorite states...

- ben

On Oct 3, 2004, at 5:16 AM, Michael Szpakowski wrote:

> Ben
> I don't understand what it is about this set of
> responses ( rather than, say, any of the others,
> earlier) that incenses you so much.
> There are things in the world that are worth railing
> against with every satirical tool in the toolbox and
> then there are rather thoughtful responses to
> questionnaires.
> Why this hostility?
> michael