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

Generative ? Algorithmic ?


It seems like "generative" is coming at the art from the "output" angle (something "got generated," implicitly by a means other than the mere "hand" of the human artist); whereas "algorithmic" is coming at the art from the "input" angle (some algorithm was involved in an artistic process).

I think you could have a generative system that wasn't algorithmic -- it could involve analog variables in "nature" that weren't based on a set algorithm. Some fluxus instruction pieces and experimental 20th century audio compositions are "generative," but I wouldn't call them "algorithmic." Burroughs'/Gysin's cut-ups are arguable generative without being algorithmic.

Also, I think you could have an algorithmic piece that wasn't generative. You could simply use a static algorithm without any variable input as part of your artistic process, and it would produce consistent/predictable output that wasn't "generative." It would still be "algorithmic," because an algorithm is just an algorithm.

Note, computers aren't needed to make either "kind' of art. Note, Cage's use of "aleatoric" might be more specific and useful (and speak of the devil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music ).

If you were drawing a venn diagram of the two "kinds" of art (generative and algorithmic), the circles would share a common area, but each circle would also have areas that weren't in common.

Just my thoughts about what it seems like the terms (should) mean, not really related to how they have been used historically by artists/curators/critics. Some artists are very invested in the term "generative," so they can chime in and add their opinions if they are reading.

Generally WIkipedia is not the best resource for the nuances of contemporary art (but a wonderful resource, as Jon Ippolito noted recently, for fan fiction minutiae and obscure underground rock bands).

DISCUSSION

On Networked Equality


Thanks Brian. That clarifies what you are asking. It is useful to boil things down from the vague "political" to the more specific "idea of the internet as an equal socioeconomic field."

As you point out in your article, even people making net art in 1995 (Heath, Daniel, and others) weren't naive enough to buy into the Wired utopia of the net as an equal socioeconomic field. McLuhan says that's what artists do -- they are harbingers and pioneers for everyone else; artists figure out what new media are actually good for and how they pragmatically/culturally work. This exploratory function always implies criticality.

You also suggest that the reason artists aren't currently debunking the myth of networked socioeconomic equality is because we are more used to the net as a normal medium, so artists are asking different questions. Yes. Critiquing that myth is a move that has already been made. Not that the same move can't be made again and again (people are still making interesting work derived from the topical/canonical dead horses of telepresence, non-linear poetry, post-human cyborgism, artificial intelligence, surveilance, etc.), but the same moves can't be made again in the same blunt/epic/heroic ways. You can't put a urinal in a gallery again without some sort of remix/irony/twist. So everything gets more subtle, and also more derivative.

Regarding more specific contemporary examples of art that criticizes the myth of socioeconomic equality on the net, I think the Jeff Crouse proposal you cite ( http://www.jeffcrouse.info/news/crowded-rhizome-proposal/ ) is a fine example of just such criticality; with the caveat that it is necessarily less epic/heroic/all-encompassing/blunt than Andujar's "Technology For The People." Michael Mandiberg's "Mechanical Turk" proposal this year touches on a similar topic ( http://www.mandiberg.com/tag/mechanical-turk/ ). Aaron Koblin's "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" is another example ( http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com ). Here is a funny and related Ze Frank "piece" ( http://www.buzzfeed.com/zefrank/hardtimes-outsource-13 ). All of these pieces critique the "idea of the internet as an equal socioeconomic field," while doing several other things besides. And if any of these pieces succeed as "good" art, one reason is because they aren't reducible to simply being "about" a topic.

That "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" piece does succeed. The title is right clever. The source song is about Victorian technology enabling a quaint one-to-one Colonial intimacy, which then gets Kafkaesquely modulated into a curious and unsettling swarm/hive of emergent post-colonial utterance(s). (As noted in the artist statement, the source song is also the first song used in computer voice synthesis experiments and it was sung by HAL as he regressed toward his "infancy" in 2001.) The "Bicycle Built for Two Thousand" piece works as an "aesthetically" intriguing/beautiful/sad/strange piece of experimental composing (visually/notationally and interactively as well as sonically), and in a way that is not unrelated to its border-crossing "topic." The piece is "about" the Tower of Babel, about globalization and imperialism, about the irreducible/untranslatable/unprogrammable aspects of human affect, about the line between pure affective enunciation and the encoded "meaning" of language, and ultimately about the loss of personal intimacy. But the piece succeeds as good art not simply because it is obligatorily "about" all these topics (otherwise this post would be art). Listening to the piece actually makes me feel confused, sad, and slightly terrified in ways related to all of these topics.

DISCUSSION

On Networked Equality


Hi Brian,

It seems a false or forced dichotomy to talk about political art vs. formal art. If artists describe themselves in these ways, then they kind of skew critics into interpreting their work along these lines; but at least since phenomenological art (and probably prior), formal moves have had "political" implications. Deleuze/Guattari talk about content and expression each having their own formal qualities. It's not like expression is always conveying content, or that content is always the source material of expression. It's always been more complicated and refracting.

So maybe any formal work that is totally devoid of any socio-political implications is just bad art, and any political work that is totally devoid of any formal or aesthetic implications is just bad art. Or, more likely, such work is "badly described" art or "badly contextualized" art, because it is almost impossible to make formal art without some "cultural" implications or political art without some "aesthetic" implications. The sooner all artists get this, the more interesting, subtle, affective, and relevant everyone's art will be.

To answer your question, some of the recent proposals for the Rhizome commission that I read fall into the category of bad, overtly "political" art. It's like the artists are specifically obliged to begin with some "hot topic" at the intersection of technology and politics, rather than starting with their studio practice and letting it lead into whatever topic areas it leads (hot, passe, banal, medieval, indifferent).

I missed the panel you're talking about, so maybe I'm missing your point, but don't most of this year's Rhizome jury awardee projects touch on "political" topics?:
http://rhizome.org/commissions/

Here I argue that Kevin Bewersdorf's work is "political":
http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption.pdf
But you've got to read the whole article to understand why this is so.

Best,
Curt