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

Re: Re: Re: Re: notes for a hypothetical essay on relocating the aura


Hi Eric,

I had a similar experience when an earlier build of Safari no longer supported tiling animated gifs. A lot of http://playdamage.org was suddenly tweaked. They've since fixed the problem, but it got me thinking and I wrote this article:
http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No2_radical_cloninger.html

When it comes to those who output ephemera (which is basically all that graphic designers have done since the mid-1800s), then the aura has to be embedded in locus #2 -- In the perpetually enacted and iterated act/stance/position. I stream therefore I am.

peace,
curt

Eric Dymond wrote:

I was going back on
> older networked art and thought, " how dependent these works are on
> the browser acting as interpreter ". Then I felt humbled, what if all
> our works are rendered outside of the environment: Netscape 3-7 (which
> altars my own work in so many ways www.edymond.com/door1.htm), fall
> apart. The original doorway renders well in most browsers, but fails
> in Safari. Jodi suffers an ignoble fate during the browser wars. Where
> then is the aura? I hope it still exists now, whereas I felt
> ambivalent I am now concerned. Well at least... *I am engaged*. Could
> i be ceding to the other side , evil though it might be?

DISCUSSION

Re: e-show: LINK-A. POLICIES OF AFFECTIVITY, AESTHETICS OF BIOPOWER


CURATORIAL STATEMENT :

[english translation:]

Although affectivity is still a "perturbing enigma", it appears to act as the first link for human interaction or more like the link that precedes (link A, first or primary link) all of the others in this function; i.e. before professional, economical, political, identity links or those that are generated by ludic affinities. Probably the set of psychic representations of the drives, affectivity is the departure point in the generation of all sociability.

["affectivity" is the first thing that happens to you, before your thinking has a chance to really kick in.]

Affectivity is a bodily experience that occurs between the individual and the pre-individual and is certainly the part of psychism that most actively makes the organism become a body. It is undoubtedly located in an area somewhere between culture and biology, and thus the generation of affections may only be understood in a complex, sometimes opposed dynamic between nature and culture.

Affectivity points towards the virtuality of the world, its potential of being for the subject, for its own existence, by indicating to him/ her that it is not a complete part of reality. It requires a permanent excess or exteriorisation of the individual, which must go beyond him/herself, proven by all of his/her inclinations for the others in the world or for things, by his/her propensity to love. It is a primordial point of connection between the outside and the inside, between individuality and sociability. Affective syntony, shared affection, is the elementary basis for real interaction between people. There is a profound dependency between affectivity and interactivity, in the depth of what "being in touch" means.
Regardless of the relationship or dependency of affectivity on body chemistry, there is no doubt that affectivity is an aesthetic link, it is the link that is generated with the world, its objects, environments and beings through the emotions on the world, of the feelings that are produced by affecting and being affected by it.

["affectivity" happens between your body and what's outside of your body.]

Perhaps this is why affectivity situates aesthetics so obviously in a prepolitical place (and thus what is probably its immense revolutionary potential). Thus, to propose an analysis of affective meetings is to try to impact on the basis of the political, even on what precedes the forms of organisation that represent ethics.

[tweaking a person's "affection" is a nifty way to tweak her subsequent thinking.]

Despite the fact that the sphere of affection is still one of the least
studied fields in the behavioural sciences, the various contributions made in recent decades have opened up a very important gap by acknowledging, at least, the role of affectivity in the production of meaning and significance, by virtue of which this relationship is proving to be particularly relevant, for example, in developing the new educational theories, in which confirmation of the impossible separation between cognition and affectivity nowadays conforms one of its most essential methodological nuclei.

["affectivity" be reprazentin'. yo!]

Of course, the intrinsic relationship between affectivity and aesthetic
experience means that many of the manifestations of artistic creation seem to be the most interesting ways to approach the problems that affect the sphere of human affection in contemporary society. Active development of research on this relationship could be able to reveal the connections and interrelations between aesthetics and biopolitics, demonstrating, perhaps and in the last instance, that the politics of affectivity and of its production, management and handling are actually aesthetics of contemporary biopower.

[since art tweaks a person's "affectiion," art is a nifty way to tweak her subsequent thinking.]

This project intends to take one step in this direction. In order to do so, the following texts intend to present, basically, approximations to the problems that arise regarding the affective nature of biopolitical production, and the processes of desensitisation and automatism imposed by cybertime. The artistic proposals that have been selected, on the other hand, evoke a whole range of references related to the desires for personal contact and affection through the networks, their forms that are often camouflaged by deceit or fiction, or their narrative forms. We will also include allusions to the warm sincerity of the amateur affective imaginaries that are proliferating with increasing strength in the Internet, and the cold disaffection that characterises the casual meetings between people in the areas of transit of major cities and, of course, the subtle borders, which are often very blurred, between care and control, affectivity and submission.

[this is a show with different kinds of internet art and some catalog essays about how art tweaks a person's "affection" and thus her subsequent thinking.]

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: notes for a hypothetical essay on relocating the aura


I love the idea of a commitment to ambivalence.

It goes back to my locus #3 -- locating the aura in the boundaries of context. It's also quite Debordian. Disorientation as a pre-requisite for self-reorientation. Less "smash the state" and more "disrupt the spectacle." http://lab404.com/misc/debord_refutation_of_all.jpg

In all fairness to Badiou, his use of "abstraction" has a kind of specialized philosophical meaning. I read it as something akin to "universal applicability." He's not necessarily talking about formalistic abstraction vs. formalistic realism.

ryan griffis wrote:

> But, Brecht, whom
> Manik thankfully brought up, i think, found a space between
> abstraction and realism-as-subject matter. Brecht's position was a
> "committed" one, but one that was committed to ambivalence,
> engagement and complexity as political.


DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: notes for a hypothetical essay on relocating the aura


Hi Eric,

I don't mean "magic" as in "sleight of hand." I mean "magic" as in "mystical/spiritual." "Magic" is not a word I would choose (it has pejorative connotations). Simply put, I believe in a real spirit realm. "Real spirit" is not oxymoronic to me. I believe the best art traffics in this realm -- not exclusively, but to a substantial degree. Furthermore, it traffics in this realm regardless of whether or not the artist or the audience intellectually believes in this realm.

Eric Dymond wrote:

> Like Alexis I feel that aura=magic. And any good magician will tell
> you that the magic exists in the eye of the beholder. "Fool the eye"
> is the term, and no good magician belives in magic.