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.
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DISCUSSION

some student work from this semester


Hi all,

Here are some projects from my net art students this semester. (The
student server will be wiped soon for the summer, so the projects
won't be there later.)

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Tina Crain:
http://mmas.unca.edu/~tcrain/network/
[she was contacted by a producer from the Montel Williams show about it]

Egg Syntax:
http://mmas.unca.edu/~jcdavis/network/
http://mmas.unca.edu/~jcdavis/open/

Sara Buchner:
http://mmas.unca.edu/~swbuchne/open/

Jessica Laney:
http://mmas.unca.edu/~jrlaney/closed/

Lydia Roberts:
http://mmas.unca.edu/~lcrobert/closed/
http://mmas.unca.edu/~lcrobert/open/

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The course is here:
http://lab404.com/330/

Curt

DISCUSSION

Breathing in B Flat


http://deepyoung.org/current/breathing/

Breathing in B Flat

Documentation of a live performance. The small figure in the middle
is really there during the performance. All the rest of the figures
were there at one time, just not during the performance. The voice of
the middle figure controls the fade between the two smaller black
figures. The louder the voice of the middle figure, the more opaque
and loud the left black figure. The softer the voice of the middle
figure, the more opaque and loud the right black figure. The voice of
each black figure controls a fade between two big faces each. The
four big faces each sing their own single note (Bb, C, D, and F
respectively). Halfway through the piece, the two black figures and
the four big faces begin a palindromic loop backwards, breathing in
their notes. There are a total of seven audio tracks: one middle
figure, two black figures, and four big faces.

In addition to the documentation of the live performance, there is
also companion audio. The audio sequence begins with the four notes
(Bb, C, D, and F), each sung the length of a single breath. Then
there is a mix of the left voice controlling the fade between two of
the notes. Then there is a mix of the right voice controlling the
fade between the other two notes. Then in the middle there is the
audio of the documented performance in which a single voice controls
the fade between the previous left and right mixes. Then there is a
second right voice mix that was not used in the documented
performance, followed by a second left voice mix also not used in the
documented performance. These are followed by alternate reecordings
which were not used in the documented performance of the four notes,
beginning with F and proceeding to D, C, and finally Bb. This
companion audio deconstructs the live performance, making it easier
to assimilate.

.....

In most considerations of object and subject, light is merely the
vehicle for transmitting the appearance of the surface of the object
to the subject's eye. But light and sound are also things themselves.
Both are matter/energy (in the sense that they are not spirit). Both
are admittedly more ephemeral than flowers or hammers, but not so
ephemeral as to be non-physical.

If 'things' in general have been robbed of their unique and
independent agency by anthro-centric phenomenologists, then sound and
light have been especially robbed of their unique and independent
agency, even by those who claim to speak on behalf of things. Sound
and light have been consigned to the role of mere lackeys,
trafficking messages back and forth between solid objects and
subjective humans. I mean to enlist their aid as creatures of light
and creatures of sound, discovering and releasing the unique agency
of their particular thingness by sculpting these most fleeting and
immaterial of all types of material -- not as mimetic transferers of
solid objects, nor as symbolic signifiers in some visual language
drama; but as stuff, as material, as things which act directly on a
human subject, immediately and in constant flux.

In "Breathing in B Flat", sound and light come from my face because
my face is something in the world that I can control semi-directly.
The performance reveals my face and my voice more as events and less
as solid objects or as tools for use. These creatures of sound and
light gather, and in the event of their gathering, they suggest a
place where humans and God might meet.

Curt

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: is art useless?


Hi Michael,

No offense taken, and I think your warning is a fair one.

There is the possibility that a philosopher's philosophical constructions may actually be more useful than his own particular applications of them. One example with Heidegger is his willingness to consign things other than quaint hammers and shoes to the evil realm of technology. So he reads "modern" technology as commodifying, as translating things from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand. Thus all new technology forces a kind of scientific/Cartesian reduction of things in the world. But McLuhan would say that a hammer is technology as much as a computer. Perhaps Heidegger's philosophical constructions are still robust enough to afford a more nuanced consideration of computers and atom bombs as things; but someone else will have to put his constructions to this test since Heidegger himself never did.

peace,
Curt

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Michael wrote:

Hi Curt
I wasn't being combative or having a tilt at you & I'm
sorry if my rather quick & compressed formulation made
it appear so, nor would I wish to simply dismiss
Heidegger. I quite agree that insight (& indeed
talent) isn't the sole preserve of the righteous,
however defined.
I *do* think there is a particular problem with
Heidegger though -the man was a *member* of the Nazi
party for over 10 years during the commission by the
Nazis of crimes against humanity that were quite
singular in their awfulness.

Even his reflections way after the time were marked
by, to put it at its most charitable, an insensitivity
that is quite breathtaking (his comparison of the
Holocaust with the mechanisation of agriculture).
So what I find difficult to accept is that there was
no connection *at some level* between the actions &
the thought ( because if there *isn't* that connection
*at some level* in a philosopher between 'say' & 'do'
then their work is either meaningless or cant) of
someone as smart as Heidegger clearly was. And that to
me is troubling. I'm absolutely *not* arguing that
everything he said is simply tainted & should be
rejected tout court as a sort of contagion; only that
a degree of caution is required. Therefore I guess I
feel that if I see a discussion of Heidegger that
doesn't at least once reference this pretty salient
feature of his life, I feel obliged to point it out,
on a kind of health warning principle.
best
michael

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: is art useless?


Hi Michael,

Not to be flip either, but that seems a convenient excuse to dismiss his writing carte blanche without weighing the merit of what he has to say. Althusser strangled his wife. Pollock was a drunk. Marx was a bum (and a Marxist!). Heck, Kierkeggard was a freaking *Christian* (for God's sake). Heidegger's involvement with the Nazi party seems less like an elephant and more like a bogey (depending on your particular flavor of literary criticism and how much it depends on the author's personal biography).

I think Geert is right. Especially with Heidegger, a close reading is necessary (and surely in German would be even better). Especially in his later writings, he's coming to understand that denotative prose isn't the best tool to use to elucidate a project of re-examining the received and calcified presumptions of language. So his language gets necessarily more poetic, and the event of reading it is all part of his overall project.

Admittedly, Heidegger is particularly keen on how a person actually lives daily in the world. He's a big proponent of doing rather than saying (which makes him useful to anyone who thinks art is a way of doing that explores realms in which words fall short). So the claims of his particular philosophy do invite a closer examination of his own personal way of being in the world than someone like Derrida. To me Heidegger's membership in the Nazi part illustrates not so much that Heidegger's philosophy is wrong or leads to wrong ways of doing, but that it takes more than a philosophy (right, wrong, or otherwise) or an art practice (paradigm advancing, politically engaged, or otherwise) to empower one to act ethically in the world.

Respect,
Curt

++++++++++

michael wrote:
Hi all
I really mean to be neither flip nor glib, but my big
problem with Heidegger is that fact that he was a
Nazi.
Kind of elephant in the roomish really :)
michael

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: is art useless?


Hi Eric,

There are thinkers like Deleuze and after him Brian Massumi and Bruno Latour trying to think of ways in which art (and humans) might be different in a networked world. But they've all read their Heidegger and are in dialogue with him. Heidegger raises meta-philosophical questions that are still relevant. For instance: how novel is any system of ontological knowing that derives from an inherited way of being in the world which makes implicit assumptions about 'being' that have yet to be purposefully considered? Descartes says, 'I think therefore I am, and that's a pretty novel deduction,' and Heidegger replies, 'Seems like a fresh idea, but you're already making implicit medieval assumptions about what thinking and being even are.' You can construct new ontologies until the cows come home, but unless you've realized some new way of being in the world, and have considered at length what it means to create ontologies from this new place in the world, then you're not breaking with the past. You're simply carrying the past forward unawares.

To take just one example, a regular coke can in my world *at all* effects my world much more radically than a coke can embedded with a smart chip tied into a network. A reading of Heidegger suggests we should spend some time wrestling with what a 'thing' even is before we launch headlong into trying to figure out what a 'smart thing' is.

If Heidegger's understanding and treatment of "technology" needs some upgrading, it is properly done in dialogue with the specifics of what he claimed, not with a dismissive wave of the 21st Century reset button, which throws any useful suspicion he might have afforded us out with the bath water. [That last sentence mixes no less than four metaphors. Yes!]

Duchamp said, 'the function of art is to question art' (I'm probably paraphrasing or misattributing altogether). Might the function of art be to question the whole project of ontological knowing? If such is the case, art is likely to perpetually evade your constructed systems of ontological knowing (whether they are based on Leibniz or Vannevar Bush or Berners-Lee or Bigfoot). Such evasion is one of the functions of art.

Curt

P.S. http://www.slanderous.org/curt.jpg indicates you think I'm http://www.curtcloninger.com . That is my uncle. We have the same name.

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eric dymond wrote:

..The thread has quoted Habermas, and other thinkers from the last millenium as if they carried weight in a described ontology that is friendly to machines and humans alike. They couldn't forsee the machinic world computer mediated knowledge exists in. So what do we have then?
Well, I'd prefer looking to Steve Pepper and Tim Berner Lee rather than Benjamin or Habermas, or any other Euro thinker from the non-networked millenium we left behind. We could quote dead philosphers and seera of the past.
That is not the best route to travel to understand how the word "ART" would survive in this millenium.
From a strictly ontological appraoch, something like "web art" or "painting" can be accomodated, there is room for qualification and quntification. But "ART", I do know a little bit about Information and Document theory and practice. From this small hill on the new media landscape the word "ART" is now just an adverb that connotes intent.
I tried setting up Ontopia Navigator to accomodate the word "ART" and failed to generate anything worthwhile. Of course the failure could be mine, but I think it has more to do with the way we now organize knowledge.