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

submit-art.com


I thought of this one tonight in the shower --

http://submit-it.com is one of those services where you can fill out
a standard form about your web site, and then the service formats
your data multiple ways and submits your site to several different
search engines all at once.

So someone should make http://submit-art.com (the URL is still available).

It would be a service where you fill out a standard form about your
net art, and then the service would format your data and submit your
artwork to multiple art festivals and grant organizations:
transmediale
ars electronica
FILE
ISEA conference
SIGGRAPH
turbulence
etc.

As an added bonus, submit-art.com could partner with this handy
service to offer free, automatically-generated artist statements:
http://playdamage.org/market-o-matic/

Heck, why stop there? The Fluxus Performance Workbook contained
pre-fab conceptual instructions on how to implement your own
performance piece. Why not make a meta-Fluxus Performance Workbook
containing pre-fab meta-instructions on how to implement your own
conceptual performance instructions? Why stop there? Why not
automate the whole thing to generatively output random conceptual art
instructions?

How about a companion site called http://submit-crit.com (the URL is
still available).

Same type of service, except it would submit your critical paper on
new media theory to multiple symposia.

Don't have a paper on new media theory? Not to worry. All that has
been automated too:
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
Just keep hitting refresh until you see something that fits (or let
submit-crit.com hit refresh for you until it sees something that
fits).

Once you build submit-art.com, you can conceive of submit-art.com as
art, and then simply use submit-art.com to submit itself. [cf:
http://www.freemanifesta.org/artists/cloniger.html ]

Boy howdy! This very email is starting to smell like art. Or
meta-meta-meta art. Or something pungent.

enjoy,
curt

[Disclaimer: this email was automatically generated by
http://submit-fart.com (the URL is still available).]

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: BEACON


As long as we're on the subject,

Why is this art:
http://www.nomemory.org/search/
but not this?:
http://google.com

Perhaps a more pertinent question -- is it good/interesting art?

Taking an already existing commercial technology, baldfacedly replicating its exact functionality, and then merely couching it in conceptual para-art text, that seems very 1996. One could argue that by *not* modifying the commercial functionality at all, the artist is focusing on the ordinary and foregrounding implicit and profound aspects that may have initially been overlooked. Perhaps in some instances. But honestly, who hasn't done a google search of their own name and mulled over the implications? Jodi.org was answering interview questions with links to google searches of "aaaaaaaaaaaa" back in 199x. Who hasn't already visited metaspy.com and immediately grasped the noospherical implications?

For my "search engine art" money, I prefer projects that start with live search feeds but are much more provocatively implemented -- the conecpt is integrated into the functionality of the remix; it's not just some conceptual text tacked on.
cf: http://deepyoung.org/current/parse/
(particularly gogolchat and prototype #38)

[In all fairness, the FM local broadcast aspect of the "beacon" project does reconfigure the tech enough to be interesting to me. But as T. Whid pointed out, the public display aspect has already been done, by Google themselves in the recepetion area of their own corporate offices.]

As long as we're on the subject of "search engine art," check google's beta "suggest" function here:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1
(details here: http://labs.google.com/suggest/faq.html )

That thing is cool in and of itself already. But it's a commercial product and not "art," so it's still fair game for some wiley net artist to put a new html interface on it and then write some artist statement lamenting how contemporary mindspace is more focused on "SHArper image" than "SHAkespeare." Personally, I'd rather just read an insightful essay on the matter.

_

alex galloway wrote:

> There have been many projects that use real-time displays of random
> search strings, here are some:
>
> http://www.metaspy.com/
> http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
> http://www.wordtracker.com
> http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/jeevesiq.html
> http://50.lycos.com/
> http://buzz.yahoo.com/
> http://search.store.yahoo.com/OT?
>
> How does Beacon differ from these other sites? more specifically,
> what
> makes it an artwork?
>
> On Jan 5, 2005, at 4:39 AM, Jon Thomson wrote:
>
> > BEACON. A new on-line artwork by Thomson & Craighead, 2005.
> >
> > At 00.00hrs on January 1st 2005 an automated beacon began
> broadcasting
> > on the web at:
> >
> > http://www.automatedbeacon.net
> >
> > The beacon continuously relays selected live web searches as they
> are
> > being made around the world, presenting them back in series and at
> > regular intervals.
> >
> > The beacon has been instigated to act as a silent witness: a
> feedback
> > loop providing a global snapshot of ourselves to ourselves in
> > real-time. As resources become available, �Beacon� will also begin
> > broadcasting an audio version of this signal across the web and as
> a
> > series of short wave radio broadcasts and FM local area broadcasts
> > �time and places to be confirmed. A physical display system is
> also
> > being developed for installation in public spaces, galleries
> > &c.�Please make any enquiries to:
> >
> > info@automatedbeacon.net
> >
> > best wishes,
> > Jon & Alison

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: FW: Questioning the Frame


One of the things I find interesting and useful (although potentially cyclical and self-defeating) from deconstruction is the idea of shifting one's presuppositional critical stance as one proceeds to dialogue with a text. The danger of this approach is that the critic can be very disingenuous and snotty, tear everything down, and bury her attack position(s) under her own shifting critical smokescreen. Such an approach is easy enough and kind of punk, and was useful in its day, but rarely builds or solve or contributes anything. But what if the critic isn't trying to be disingenous? What if she really cares to respond to the text/artwork in a way that most sympathetically (according to her necessarily biased notions of "sympathy") responds to the work itself? She wouldn't always have to write from the same indoctrinated, often irrelevant perspective; she could adapt her critical perspective based on what the work itself was trying to accomplish.

It's not such a difficult or impossible approach. I can hate rap music but write a salient critique of the new Snoop Dog CD based on my understanding of the genre and its goals. And if I critique enough stuff more or less fairly and honestly, and you begin to trust me as a critical voice, you can buy into what I'm saying and weigh it against where you're coming from based on where you know I'm coming from.

But to come from a Socialist perspective as if it's the politically correct critical perspective from which everyone ought to be coming, that's just tired and uninteresting art criticism to me.

_

ryan griffis wrote:

> this reads like so much too-cool-for-school criticism. you can take
> whatever interests you disagree with, slap a label on it -
> particularly
> one that's loaded with the disdain that we seem to have for anything
> "academic" - and dismiss it as insignificant to art, or culture
> period.
> sure there is dogma in just about any ideological position, and some
> don't get beyond what you have to memorize to be part of the "group."
> but you seem to be attacking these things (marxism, feminism, etc )
> as
> ideological, as if you're own relationship to art (and whatever else)
> is somehow outside of ideology! how do you not impose your "critical
> agenda" on work when you look at/criticize/evaluate a work? and
> finding
> tangential relationships in work is, honestly, what makes art
> interesting for me.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: FW: Questioning the Frame


> Sure, an uncritical attack on "techno-formalism" is, well,
> uncritical.
> i don't think "techno-formalism" can, or should be, equated with
> "beauty making" however. You (curt) have, for example, criticized the
> fetishization of certain tendencies in digital art - games, etc.
> while
> i don't care to speak for the writers of the essay, i take their
> attack
> on techno-formalism as an attack on the prioritization of wiz-bang
> technology that lends itself to consumer product promotion (i.e. the
> desire to wire the world with store bought CPUs). i don't think this
> criticism is an attack on aesthetics itself, but an attempt to look
> at
> how aesthetics is "used."

It's hard to tell what they mean by "techno-formalism" because the phrase is used so pejoratively and vaguely. But I'm guessing they are dissing a contingent of the bitforms crowd ( http://bitforms.com/artists.html ) because Dominguez's position includes a critique of artists attempting to make code into salable object. So that would pit them against Casey Reas, Golan Levin, Martin Wattenberg, Mark Napier, and a bunch of people who are using the net in much more culturally-relevant and inventive ways than a denial of service attack on the Mexican government.

I think it's a case of folks getting into the nuances of what they are into, and lumping everything else. Code artists are going to get into the distinction between reactive and generative. Political artists will get into the distinction between anarcho-post-marxist communes and neo-liberal event-based sit-ins. Whatever. It's the moral high-ground and the condescenscion I take issue with. If they really give a rip, let 'em move to Chiapas instead of concerning themselves with white-box curatorial critique.

I agree with Coco's position (stated in the map article) that art needs to about humans rather than technology. But her critique of new media mapping is overly convenient and facile. To abstract data and display it on a macro or micro level is hardly equivalent to the using a map on CNN or in a pentagon war room. She sees the visual surface of the media and makes a seemingly profound insight (no photographs of people = no interest in idividuals). But she's missing the poetic implications of the procedural nuances of new media mapping. There is a big difference between a real-time generated data map or an interactive/scalable data map vs. a time-shifted video power point map on a newscast. A real-time generated map is all about time. An interactive map is all about giving the power to the people (cf: http://theyrule.org ). In addition, new media mapping allows cross-media transformations that are ripe with political critical implications and tactical potential. But there's this built-in bias against the aesthetic of the object. If the new media map has the appearance of graphic design or something built on a grid-based system, then immediately they all cry foul and trot out the scarlet "M" (modernism) and the scarlet "F" (formalism). But it's a shallow/surface, old-media-based critique, rooted in a kind of "media studies" when "media" meant "television news." It ingnores the importance of how these artworks function and focuses on what they look like.

As far as their critique of galleries (in the metamute article), it's less a case of curatorial bias against tactical media, and simply a case of inherent media differences. For instance, how far can we really push the network to a state of hypertrophy until it becomes malleable enough for us to make it what we want? To a point, and then simple restrictions of bandwidth and technology (not to mention man-made extra-technical rules and laws) come into play. Perhaps this is too overtly McLuhanesque, but I find that media come with built-in, inherent limitations. These media limitations may have political implications (what doesn't?), but fiber-optic cable in and of itself doesn't have a sinister agenda. A white-box gallery has limits. So why try to fit everything in a gallery? Why even bemoan the fact that it won't fit? A city-wide protest march won't fit in a gallery (except as an archived, media-translated event). And why should it? Why perform theatre in a gallery? Why show a film in a gallery? (There may be legitimate reasons for both.) More to the point, why have a computer in a gallery set up with denial of service attack software connected to a corrput government? If the tactic is to shut down the government's server, then why wait for some gallery patron to walk by, read the artist statement, and decide whether or not to click "send?" That's pretentious and stupid. The click need not come from an elite gallery patron to have its effect. The click just needs to come from a bunch of different online machines (connectivity and ownership are "preferenced." for shame!), and once the software starts running, it's all automated. To try to present such a "hacktivist" event in a gallery setting may even be exploitive. It's using the cause of "disenfranchised" people as conceptual currency for the artist.

> art that uses
> open source tech is practicing politics differently than work
> dependent
> on licensed software/hardware.

This is such a bogey I'm amazed it continues to get the mindshare it does. After I showed some of my work at FILE this year I was asked if it was "open source." It's HTML and JavaScript and gifs and jpegs. I used BBEdit to write the code, I used a Fuji camera to take some of the pictures, I used Google to find some of the pictures, I used Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady to prepare the pictures, I used a Macintosh OS to support the software, I used a WebStar modem to upload it all via a Charter Cable ISP, and I hosted it on a Unix box leased by Media Temple. Uh yeah, I guess it's "open source." You want open source art? http://www.sculpture.org.uk/image/504816331403

> form carries as much weight as subject
> matter. and, if you believe, as i do, that all work is already
> political, it's about the politics practiced, not whether it is
> political at all that is up for criticism.

By the same argument, all art is religious. All art is about the senses, all art is conceptual, all art is about marital relationships, all art is about migratory bird patterns. The question is, need all art always be viewed and preferenced and criticized and evaluated through a political grid? It's the very thing that is so annoying about legalistic Christians. Every artwork is initially, primarily, and inordinately evaluated on whether it's "orthodox," regardless of what context the art itself might be trying to establish. It's the exact same thing that's so annoying about Marxists, Materialists, Feminists, Anti-Globalization Activists, etc. Really, who gives a shit whether http://turux.org was made using open-source Java or proprietary Macromedia Director? Care if you like, but it's almost totally tangential to the purpose of that artwork. You're imposing you're critical agenda on the artwork. Barthes and Derrida say this is OK/inevitable/happening anyway, but they've yet to convince me that such carte blanche agenda-imposition makes for pertinent, insightful art criticism.