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.
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.
apophatic art
Hi all,
For an oblique explanation of what I've been doing for the last two years, here is my MFA thesis paper:
http://lab404.com/articles/apophatic_art.pdf
Enjoy,
Curt
For an oblique explanation of what I've been doing for the last two years, here is my MFA thesis paper:
http://lab404.com/articles/apophatic_art.pdf
Enjoy,
Curt
Summer Reading Suggestions
As an exercise in meta-macroscopic perspectives:
Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas
Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being
Deleuze's What Is Philosophy? (sorry about the Delueze)
Latour's We Have Never Been Modern
Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas
Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being
Deleuze's What Is Philosophy? (sorry about the Delueze)
Latour's We Have Never Been Modern
What?
It is a bit scary that any advocacy I had for semi-visceral, not-simply-text/conceptual work is memorialized as resulting in youTube. Such dichotomies have a way of perpetuating themselves. It's either neo-fluxus conceptual or pop art cotton candy. It's either tech-net-centric or social network-centric. It's either reBlogging mashups or automous singular net.art.works.
Can something be simultaneously visceral and conceptual? I would hope so. Material (even pixels and code) has its own agency. If meaning is embodied, then these materials all already "mean" something. Anyone dealing intelligently and intrinsically with them is already making "conceptual" work. Do memes have a kind of materiality? Is the noosphere material? If you think they are (in a social sculpture sense), then as an artist (and even as a curator), you better be doing something more clever than simply propogating memes. You better be modulating them or inflecting them or pushing them toward hypertropy or whatever. Otherwise, as has been pointed out here, I can just surf youTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbRom1Rz8OA
Can something be simultaneously visceral and conceptual? I would hope so. Material (even pixels and code) has its own agency. If meaning is embodied, then these materials all already "mean" something. Anyone dealing intelligently and intrinsically with them is already making "conceptual" work. Do memes have a kind of materiality? Is the noosphere material? If you think they are (in a social sculpture sense), then as an artist (and even as a curator), you better be doing something more clever than simply propogating memes. You better be modulating them or inflecting them or pushing them toward hypertropy or whatever. Otherwise, as has been pointed out here, I can just surf youTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbRom1Rz8OA
two performances, an installation, and a talk
Dates:
Fri May 02, 2008 00:00 - Tue Apr 29, 2008
Location:
United States of America
Hi all,
In the next few weeks I am doing these things:
+++++++
1. A PERFORMANCE called:
Pop Mantra #1 (Ghost Horses)
Materials: Radiohead, voice, guitar, black felt, time
I am perpetually performing a short excerpt from a Radiohead song ("we ride tonight / ghost horses") for 3 hours. I will play electric guitar and sing while blindfolded.
When: Friday May 2, 7-10pm
Where: The Pilot Light, Knoxville, Tennessee, US. ( http://www.thepilotlight.com/pdirections.html )
Festival Context: http://www.knoxvillearts.org/transhift08/
Auxiliary Online Prototpyes:
http://deepyoung.org/radio/0193.mp3
http://lab404.com/misc/genesis/blindfold.jpg
+++++++
2. AN INSTALLATION called:
During the Beginning
Materials: light, sound, words, handwriting, code, mouth, ink, water, glass, wood
During The Beginning is a series of installation stations based on Genesis 1:3, "And God said let there be light and there was light." Collectively, these stations perform the impossibility of reducing the creation event to words.
When: May 10-28 (reception May 10, 5-8pm)
Where: The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, US.
Group Exhibition Context: http://meca.edu/GalleriesExhibitions/ICA/CurrentExhibition.aspx
Auxiliary Online Prototpyes:
http://deepyoung.org/current/genesis/
+++++++
3. A PERFORMANCE called:
Pop Mantra #2 (Search and Destroy)
Materials: Iggy Pop and The Stooges, voice, guitar, black felt, time
I am perpetually performing a short excerpt from a Stooges song ("I am the world's forgotten boy / the one who's searching only to destroy") for 5 hours. I will play electric guitar and sing while blindfolded.
When: Friday, May 10, 4-9pm
Where: Congress Street in front of The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, US.
+++++++
4. AN ARTIST TALK about:
During the Beginning
When: Saturday May 24, 2 PM
Where: The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, US.
+++++++
Best,
Curt
In the next few weeks I am doing these things:
+++++++
1. A PERFORMANCE called:
Pop Mantra #1 (Ghost Horses)
Materials: Radiohead, voice, guitar, black felt, time
I am perpetually performing a short excerpt from a Radiohead song ("we ride tonight / ghost horses") for 3 hours. I will play electric guitar and sing while blindfolded.
When: Friday May 2, 7-10pm
Where: The Pilot Light, Knoxville, Tennessee, US. ( http://www.thepilotlight.com/pdirections.html )
Festival Context: http://www.knoxvillearts.org/transhift08/
Auxiliary Online Prototpyes:
http://deepyoung.org/radio/0193.mp3
http://lab404.com/misc/genesis/blindfold.jpg
+++++++
2. AN INSTALLATION called:
During the Beginning
Materials: light, sound, words, handwriting, code, mouth, ink, water, glass, wood
During The Beginning is a series of installation stations based on Genesis 1:3, "And God said let there be light and there was light." Collectively, these stations perform the impossibility of reducing the creation event to words.
When: May 10-28 (reception May 10, 5-8pm)
Where: The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, US.
Group Exhibition Context: http://meca.edu/GalleriesExhibitions/ICA/CurrentExhibition.aspx
Auxiliary Online Prototpyes:
http://deepyoung.org/current/genesis/
+++++++
3. A PERFORMANCE called:
Pop Mantra #2 (Search and Destroy)
Materials: Iggy Pop and The Stooges, voice, guitar, black felt, time
I am perpetually performing a short excerpt from a Stooges song ("I am the world's forgotten boy / the one who's searching only to destroy") for 5 hours. I will play electric guitar and sing while blindfolded.
When: Friday, May 10, 4-9pm
Where: Congress Street in front of The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, US.
+++++++
4. AN ARTIST TALK about:
During the Beginning
When: Saturday May 24, 2 PM
Where: The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine, US.
+++++++
Best,
Curt
A Non-Manifesto for the Summer of 2008
Hi Michael,
Of course you are right -- good work can be made on any topic, and avoiding a trendy topic does not necessarily guarantee good work. I'm just being curmudgeonly and polemical. With all of the topics in the world to explore, and with all of the people making work, it amazes me how many people fall into the same topical ruts. One might argue that this is because these are the issues that are truly important, the issues that matter to all of us; but I'm not so sure. Maybe these are just the issues that matter to a 28 year old art school graduate living in Brooklyn. And maybe these issues don't even matter to her, it's just that they seem to matter to the curators and critics she reads and so these topics get incestuously self-reinforced until they rise to the top of some arbitrary pile that represents the hermetic nature of the new media community more than it represents anything that actually matters.
I think if someone's research and studio practice lead them to explore these topics, well and good. Because by the time they arrive at these topics they will understand why they have, and their work will be there. The problem is when people's curiosity and inquiry is driven by the desire to come up with a project that seems 'culturally relevant' (whose culture [or humanstic meta-culture]? relevant to whom? as determined by whom?). It is a very over-determined way of making work that leads to work I want to see less of this summer (in my culture from my perspective as determined by me).
Curt
Of course you are right -- good work can be made on any topic, and avoiding a trendy topic does not necessarily guarantee good work. I'm just being curmudgeonly and polemical. With all of the topics in the world to explore, and with all of the people making work, it amazes me how many people fall into the same topical ruts. One might argue that this is because these are the issues that are truly important, the issues that matter to all of us; but I'm not so sure. Maybe these are just the issues that matter to a 28 year old art school graduate living in Brooklyn. And maybe these issues don't even matter to her, it's just that they seem to matter to the curators and critics she reads and so these topics get incestuously self-reinforced until they rise to the top of some arbitrary pile that represents the hermetic nature of the new media community more than it represents anything that actually matters.
I think if someone's research and studio practice lead them to explore these topics, well and good. Because by the time they arrive at these topics they will understand why they have, and their work will be there. The problem is when people's curiosity and inquiry is driven by the desire to come up with a project that seems 'culturally relevant' (whose culture [or humanstic meta-culture]? relevant to whom? as determined by whom?). It is a very over-determined way of making work that leads to work I want to see less of this summer (in my culture from my perspective as determined by me).
Curt