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

Wikipedia Art


Not that the artist's intention need have anything to do with how a critic interprets the piece, but here is Scott Kildall's stated intention for the piece:

++++++++++++++++++++

"The results of this project/intervention (or what I would now prefer to call an "experiment") is that we have discovered certain facets about the Wikipedia community. The aims of the endeavor were not to posit anti-Wikipedia stance, but rather to elicit a response in the form of a conceptual intervention. The fundamental tension between democracy and authority is a kernel of contradiction that was one key idea behind the project.

Performative art on Wikipedia itself was quickly deemed inappropriate by the gatekeepers. Nathaniel and myself were hoping, but not expecting, that we would be able to succeed through its very nature of self-referentiality: that it was an artistic project that could be sanctioned by Wikipedia in that it pointed out a discrepancy in the production of knowledge.

Apparently not so. We're still left with the issues that something on Wikipedia which is stated becomes "true," essentially (re)writing histories. This also manifests itself in the negative space of Wikipedia: what is not included is also not worthy. The fabric has many holes: Joseph Grigely, for example, doesn't have a Wikipedia entry but Marlith, a type V demon race in Dungeons and Dragons does ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilith )

The primary revelation that sticks with me is the culture of the gatekeepers. What I saw was a distinctly non-academic culture with a tilt towards a very young (16-25) demographic. Since Wikipedia is *the* source of encyclopedic knowledge, this could very well explain an over-emphasis on Wikipedia covering popular culture. Even with the success of the Wikipedia project, which I applaud in many ways, the mechanisms for inclusion and exclusion seem like they could use some reworking."

- Scott Kindall (posted on 2/17/09 to The List of the Institute for Distributed Creativity)

++++++++++++++++++++

DISCUSSION

Wikipedia Art


Hi Tom,

In a sense you're right, but isn't that the way all canonicity works? How is "non-intellectual" Brooklyn underground gallery canonicity qualitatively superior to "intellectual" academic press canonicity? How is a consensus at artfagcity qualitatively superior to a consensus at rhizome (or at iDC or nettime, where dialogue is also happening about this piece)? Warning: You will have to engage your intellect to properly consider these questions.

Whether or not this piece intended to raise these issues regarding the inherent subjectivity of canonicity and authority, it has effectively raised them. The wikipedians are right that the piece doesn't belong in their encyclopedia, but they are deluded into thinking that they are achieving some sort of clinical objectivity via rational consensus (or that any such objectivity could ever be achieved).

+++++++++++++++

de Certeau has this to say about belief -- it used to be that people believed in something because they had subjectively evaluated the quality of that something and decided to believe in it. Spectacular media changed all that. Now people believe in something because a critical mass of other people have been convinced into believing that same something.

Here's how it works in the "objective" news media. CNN can't do a gossip story on Britney Spears, because such a story is not newsworthy. But The National Inquirer can do a gossip story on Britney Spears, the Inquirer story can generate public interest, and CNN can then do a story on the media buzz generated by the Inquirer story. The CNN story is essentially still just a gossip story on Britney Spears, but it has been legitimized because it is no longer a story that CNN itself believes to be newsworthy; it is now a story on what CNN believes to be a critical mass of other people who believe the story to be newsworthy.

The same phenomenon is unfolding now regarding the "discussion" surrounding this piece. If the piece itself is not newsworthy, the discussion surrounding the piece will soon become newsworthy. Whether or not the piece or the discussion every becomes "artworthy" is something that I think Paddy is right to question. Is the immediate removal and subsequent viral discussion of this piece something that the artists intended and implanted into the piece as a self-undermining, self-perpetuating aspect of the piece itself? If so, it's kind of ingenious. Just a personal guess, but I don't think they meant it to play out this way (but of course it hasn't fully played out yet, so who knows). The amount of time spent on the logo design seems to indicate that they at least hoped for some kind of more permanent home within the wikipedia structure, and that the dialogue they hoped to engender would occur there on wikipedia itself. Instead, a nugget of dialogue happened there, and the rest is happening now outside of wikipedia on the rest of the interweb (or on the still self-referential and very insular "net art" interweb). We are "policing" the "art-worthiness" of the piece here at rhizome the same way the wikipedians were policing its "encyclopedia-worthiness" there at wikipedia.

Paddy's criteria for the piece's failure is curiously similar to Karl Popper's critique of logical positivism ( cf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism#Karl_Popper.27s_objection [wikipedia reference pun intended]). Paddy implies that the piece has to somehow be falsifiable. There has to be some criteria by which to assess its failure. Is the piece purposefully attempting to get kicked off wikipedia and be spread as a meme (in other words, is the subsequent discussion about the piece the actual goal of the piece)? Fine, but then that intention should somehow be implicit in the text of the original wikipedia post, in the title of the piece, in the logo, etc. Otherwise, the piece fails. It's like having to call your shots in pool. If you accidentally sink a ball in the side pocket when you were aiming for the corner pocket, then you didn't really sink it.

Personally, that seems a strange criteria to apply to internet art, where unexpected propogations are par for the course. Whether or not the piece was "intellectual" enough to have purposefully engendered all this "intellectual" dialogue, it may at least prove conceptually porous enough to have absorbed it. At least the subsequent dialogue is about language and the consensual mechanisms of truth (grrr), and not about white cube gallery culture (yawn).

prrr,
Curt


DISCUSSION

Response to "New Media Artists vs Artists With Computers"


Hi Tom,

I'm sorry I abused you with my language. I will try to be nicer.

The reason I feel such ownership of the Rhizome discussion forum is that it is actually my blog.

Welcome,
Curt

DISCUSSION

WikiPedia as Art?


Hi Patrick,

I'd add Douglas Rushkoff to the wiki-art canon:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/851

Below are some thoughts from a recent interview I gave that seem relevant, particularly regarding the "discreteness" of the art object. Benjamin pinpointed the decay of the "original" auratic art object. Fluxus, Cage, and Kaprow challenged the primacy of any single instantiation of the art object, replacing it with open-ended instructions that led to an infinite number of variable instantiations. (Theater and "classical" western musical notation had already done this, they just didn't realize it. No two performances of "The Tempest" are ever exactly alike.) My practice has led me to question the "discreteness" of an art "work." Perhaps "canonizability" or "recognizability" or "attributability" are better terms.

+++++++++++++++

I am currently interested (from a critical and artistic perspective) in online meme dispersal, microcosmic and macrocosmic ways of modulating culture, hijacking specific google search terms, web surfing as a form of subjective narration, marketing/mind-control, and invisibility via hyper-saturation. Alex Galloway suggests that the destruction of the network is already inherent and dormant in its own architecture. The way to achieve this collapse is via hypertrophy -- pushing the network beyond what it is capable of sustaining. To me, this suggests establishing thousands of mySpace, Twitter, youTube, and delicious accounts, and pummeling the network with rigorously purposeful, (de/re)contextualized media -- to play the entire network as one huge, nefarious instrument. What is sacrificed in the ability to subtly control any single piece of media is made up for by the accumulation of massive agency. This is a dangerous proposition.

I'm proposing a form of resistant/tactical media, but one not afraid to co-opt and implement corporate consumer strategies. It is simultaneously subversive and overt. It is fluid enough to have discrete manifestations in offline galleries, to take on non-"new media" forms, to assume the form of critical essays, books, and talks. It is basically a project of ongoing, widely-dispersed, inflected language...

If, as an artist, I "play" the entire network as my instrument, then I don't have to wait for some art organization to curate my "work," because my work is an ongoing performance of the network. If I can hijack google and cause it to display the images and links I want for the key words that I choose to appropriate, then I blur the line between performance, marketing, and mind-control. I am no longer trying to drive people to my discrete piece of online art work, as contextualized and labeled by an online arts organization. The search results that people get when they do a key word search at google is itself my art performance...

It gets even more interesting from the perspective of an academic researcher and writer. What is the value of online listserv and bulletin board dialogue compared to having a peer-reviewed article published in an offline academic journal? What is the value of talking to a bunch of commercial web designers about web design praxis compared to talking to a few academics and curators about net art theory? For that matter, what is the value of teaching a bunch of students how to make art compared to making art myself? The good news is, I don't have to commit to just one approach.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

I would add that un-canonizability is not limited to wikimeda. The person who first rickrolled, or the person who posted the first screenshots that eventually led to "all your base are belong to us," -- these people are not simply anonymous by preference; they are historically undocumented and journalistically unknown. These moves could be considered "The Practice of Everyday Life" Online. They already have their own agency. To classify them as "art" arguably limits their original agency by sequestering and quarantining them.

I am interested in where your research leads on this topic. I'm particularly interested in the (pre-net) historical precedences you choose to track. de Certeau, Debord, and even McLuhan seem useful in this regard. Was May '68 the most (un)spectacular art performance of the 20th Century? Is it Debord's "piece?" Does it matter?

Best,
Curt