curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Discussions (1122) Opportunities (4) Events (17) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology [was : they must not be very bright]


Hi Ben,

I think we're talking about several different things.

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

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

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.

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

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

I guess when I say "ghetoization," I'm not attaching the "techno-masturbatory/self-reflexive" implications that Manovich does in his chapter. I hope to avoid those extremes as well. Ironically, by trying to "make a place" for net.art in the contemporary art world canon, critics and theorists are forced place inordinate emphasis on what net.art "uniquely is and is not" in relation to old media. Consequently, gallery showings of net.art can tend to over-emphasize technological/formal distinctions of the work while under-emphasizing its aesthetic or conceptual merits. "Classic, clear-cut examples" of net-specific art may make for dramatic object lessons, but they don't always make for interesting art.

I mean "ghetoization" to imply, "net art outside the gallery structure, not making a whole lot of cash, not too concernet with making a place for itself, having fun." Outsider net.art may still be as political or conceptual as you like. It may even be highly popular. It's just more in dialogue with the audience of the network itself and less overtly in dialogue with the audience of the gallery. It's not trying to solve the curatorial challenges of its own historical dissemenation.

peace,
curt

_
_

curt cloninger wrote:

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

ben syverson wrote:

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

DISCUSSION

Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology [was : they must not be very bright]


Hi Liza,

I'm part of a group [ http://www.themap.org ] here in Asheville, NC, trying to promote "media arts awareness," whatever that is. So far our main vehicle of promotion has been monthly screenings of experimental short films. So to broaden the spectrum, I recently gave this presentation on generative art [ http://www.lab404.com/ghost ]. It was initially set to happen at the Fine Arts Theater downtown where they have been showing the short films, but the owner of the theatre refused to host it because, in his own words, "there's no money in interactivity." Which is hilarious now that the gaming industry makes 3 times more money than Hollywood, but anyway. So it finally wound up happening at the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, which was a good fit.

It was a Bring Your Own Laptop event, so that people could experience the haptic reactivity of the pieces themselves. (We had to "borrow" the wireless network of the neighboring retail shop, but that's another story.) For those who didn't bring their laptops, I explained to them that what they were seeing projected on the wall was NOT the art. They were seeing a once-removed mediated version of the art. They were watching me interact with the art (in the case of the reactive pieces). Or they were watching me manually refresh the generative pieces. There is a world of difference between "jamming on" the "instruments" at http://www.pianographique.com , and watching the projected output of someone else jamming on those instruments.

In any presentation like this, the "eureka" moments of audience revelation come not with the first run of the generative work, but with the second run. For instance, I showed the postmodernism generator [ http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern ] and began to explain about the dada software engine on which it was based and the database of discrete textual elements from which it drew, but when I hit refresh and the second iteration of text appeared on the wall, that's when they experientially "got it." Until some experience reveals the difference between a generative piece and a linear animation piece, the difference is lost. The best way to help users/patrons/co-participants/etc. experience these differences is not always apparent. It won't always happen in an hour-long talk. Which is why I linked the works, passed out the URL, and encouraged people to re-visit the works and explore them after the talk. Sometimes it takes fifteen minutes of personal interaction with one of these pieces, of "pushing at its edges" to appreciate the limitlessness of the generative piece versus the stasis of a mere linear animation. As the Strokes observe, "the end has no end."

Prior to giving my talk on generative art, I was interviewed about the talk by the technology editor of the local paper. In the process, I showed him one of lia's gorgeous reactive pieces and suggested he might get a better sense of the work if he moved the mouse himself. He nodded, looked at me, and then stared at the mouse as if it was a piece of unknown alien hardware. He never did grab the mouse, but kept writing and asking questions. He had intellectually understood the concept of what was happening, and assumed that was good enough for his purposes. You might say he flipped through the Fluxus Performance Workbook, but never showed up for the Happening.

I'm critical of heavy reliance on artist statements because they often provide an easy short-cut which excuses the artist from having to properly "embody" her concept into her artwork. Curatorially, I think the best way to get someone to appreciate the difference between generative artwork and mere linear animation is not to explain that generative work is made dynamically in real-time by algorithmic computation blah-blah-blah, but to direct the user to interface with the generative/reactive piece in such a way that she is led to "experience" the difference.

This commission [ http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/ ] is successful to me because it uses core code as a "control" to make apparent the "variable" of code-influenced visual aesthetics. It doesn't just explain how different programmer/artists have different coding styles, it "shows" a visceral example of those different styles. (In this respect, it's more interesting to me than CODeDOC [ http://www.whitney.org/artport/commissions/codedoc/ ], which foregrounds the nuances of coding as a problem-solving art in and of itself, and backgrounds the aesthetic nuances of the code-generated work. But then I never thought programming in and of itself was all that sexy.)

The job of new media apologetics falls to curators like Christiane Paul, but also to artist/educators like Casey Reas, whose processing project with Ben Fry [ http://processing.org ] is a big step in the right direction. Some high-minded artists and critics may be above such entry-level "popularization," but unless somebody is willing to take the time to preach to someone other than the choir, we are left with academic research and a micro-scene mutual admiration society. (Our micro-scene is paradoxically "world wide," but it's no less micro- for all that. Visitor logs don't lie.)

If generative art is difficult to understand as a medium, add network or installation aspects into the mix, and it gets even more challenging to teach, let alone sell. (My students and I visited http://www.bitforms.com in class yesterday, and they immediately noticed that Mark's first three pieces [ http://www.bitforms.com/artist_napier.html ] didn't have a "purchase" button.)

Is transparent/opensource artist blogging the answer? It depends on how well one writes and thinks (and on how many people read your blog). Josh Davis used to give away his .fla files at http://praystation.com (and won the prix ars award for giving them away more than for the actual files themselves). Jared Tarbell continues the "opensource" .fla tradition at http://www.levitated.net/daily/ Heck, just viewsource at any dhtml-based net.art site, and there you are.

To play devil's advocate, do we need to solve the problem of "net.art ghettoization?" What if net art is inherently ephemeral and outside of the white box and takes a fair amount of one-on-one 'puter time commitment to appreciate and will only be a footnote in the art history books? net.art started in a spirit of anarchic, outsider fun. Might we best be proceeding in a spirit of anarchic, outsider fun? I merely pose the question.

peace,
curt

---

Liza Sabater wrote:

Think of the museum, the gallery, the academy, the audience and "the
market" as corporations as well. If you buy into the belief that art
is about the object and not the process, then a lot of the onus of
making an art "object" out of what is basically electricity, falls unto
you as well. So you find yourself in a situation in which you've just
built from the ground up a meta-software that makes more software that
is then what we call "software art", but nobody --not even your peers--
now about it because you've been focused on showing the final object
and not the process. And because you've spent all that time on the art
as object motif, your work --because it moves on a screen-- is still
being seen by the audience immediately outside of the net/software art
clique as animation or video because, you know, it moves. You can't
blame them. If you do not distinguish what you do from the "proven" art
forms, why should people understand what your work is about?

I truly believe that focusing on the conversations your art and art
process can create is the only way to not just push your work forward,
but to bring to light the artform you so lovingly/madly/cluelessly
pursue.


DISCUSSION

Re: Re: XP service pack 2


We use a large vibrating egg."

_

Rob wrote:

I'm a Safari user [ducks and heads for cover].

- Rob.

On Monday, October 04, 2004, at 01:40PM, Pall Thayer <palli@pallit.lhi.is> wrote:

>So bear in mind that unless you find a
>way to make this work in all browsers, I, along with a growing number of
>Linux users, am not going to have the pleasure of seeing your work.

DISCUSSION

Re: NET ART NEWS: all rhizomers in one


the next step is to have each image link to that person's rhizome bio page.
_

> all rhizomers in one - portrait gallery
> http://www.artknowledge.net/trashconnection/gallery/img.html