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

Re: Re: Flash formalism?


Doh! It's not my term. Let Ben defend it. I just work here.

Calling out Flash has always seemed a bit overly simplistic to me, what with action scripting and lingo and java all being languages that cause things to move. The relationship between the corporate ownerships of these languages/scripts and the effect that has on their artistic merits seems even more tenuous.

carry on...

Jim wrote:
>So I'm curious about the intended meaning of Ben and Curt's term 'Flash
>formalism'.

DISCUSSION

Re: aGalloway, FlashFormalism and Complexification


Goooood Morning Ben! Shall we?...

Ben:
T H E New Media Art Resource. The one, as in [Gnostic/Matrix]
mythology, as in THE one. You think they didn't consider that? That's
calculated. So if they're going to claim definitiveness, I will hold
them to it. Rhizome and the ArtBase are thus representatives of
newMedia as a whole, and should be approached as such.

curt:
excellent! Also, I don't know whether I mentioned this yet, but I'm the man.

Ben:
How about from a logical perspective? I define abstract as either
non-representational or so obscurely representational as to be
indistinguishable from non-representational. This is a fairly
controversial distinction, but I believe in it. I think squares moving
around the screen randomly is essentially the same as squares moving in
the same manner but driven by stock prices.

curt:
excellent! I define breathing as doubled over wheezing and so extremely out of breath as to not be able to speak. This is a fairly controversisal distinction, but I believe in it. Also, I define that I am the man. That's THE man.

curt:
> But data visualization is inherently abstraction.

ben:
In that case, a book is abstract art, because language is an
abstraction of thought (which may be an abstraction of chemistry &&
physics?). Where do we stop? We get into stonerDiscussionLand.

curt:
Dooood, we've been in stonerDiscussionLand for the last three daze. [cf: http://www.larrycarlson.com for the accompanying screensaver ]

curt:
> The artist is literally abstracting data (from text to animation in
> the first piece and from sound to shapeForm in the second). The
> artists could have abstracted the data any number of ways, but they
> chose to abstract it in very specific ways, not just to achieve
> accurate representation, but to achieve an abstract, aesthetic effect.

ben:
It's an aesthetic effect all right, but it's in no way abstract. Unless
you're going to count sheet music as abstract as well. Of course in one
sense (like language) it is, but as you can see, that's not a very
productive avenue of discussion, is it?

curt:
this piece is abstract and pretty in and of itself [ http://www.bitforms.com/images_ex/watt_napier5.jpg ]. if you disasgree then we disagree.

curt:
> The pieces work not just because they are useful or accurate (indeed,
> neither are terribly useful), but also because they look interesting.

ben:
Now who's using Marxist && scientific terminology? Who gives a fsck if
they're "useful" or "accurate?" That's not at all what makes them
interesting to me.

curt:
yech. me either. we agree.

ben:
What I find fascinating about them is the way that
they pose questions about navigation and representation, and attempt to
answer those questions. They are indeed interesting-looking -- they're
fascinating shapes when you realize how they describe and navigate
concepts and relationships.

curt:
me too! we agree.

ben:
If you stripped away the conceptual
element, and I only had the visuals, I would absolutely disagree that
they were interesting-looking.

curt:
not me! we disagree.

curt:
> Furthermore, the way in which they look interesting is intrinsically
> related to the data they are abstracting, but not merely arbitrarily
> driven by it.

ben:
Exactly! As you say, they are interesting in their way exactly because
of the concepts happening. If the MIDI files in Shape of Song merely
determined the amount to offset transparent squares, my interest
wouldn't hold.

curt:
nor mine! we agree.

curt:
> Regarding carnivore ( http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore ) the genius of
> the piece is precisely that it farms out the last-mile aesthetics to
> "artisans" (if you must) who enjoy and are skillful at visual
> representation.

ben:
You say genius, I say Galloway was making a considered move to maintain
distance from this world of newFormalism while leveraging it to his
advantage. This project allowed him to use the kind of splashy
abstraction that gets people's attention without actually giving up his
Conceptualist membership card.

curt:
Actually, alex is a fan of the sensual. cf: http://www.afsnitp.dk/onoff/Projects/samyninterview.html

curt:
> Galloway tackled the obligatory political concept and coding. The
> political concept (surveilance) was/is very en vogue and thus a
> shoe-in for gallery-ization, but there's nothing terribly sexy about
> that aspect of it to me.

ben:
Nor to me. I find Galloway's work to have a fairly repellent tension
between Hipsterism, Careerism and Hackerism. The thin concepts that do
make their way into his work are, as you describe, unrelated to the
ulterior motives that drive it. But they are indeed an easy sell to
overEager galleries and institutions.

curt:
but I'm not dissing Alex, nor would I define him as a careerrist. RSG is a collective, and they are the ones credited with the work. Furthermore, Alex is sharing Carnivore's gallery/festival recognition with all the people who wrote the modules. Carnivore is more like R&D than a gambit for net.art fame (an amusing notion in and of itself). If anything, alex will be remembered first and foremost as a new media theorist and educator. Alex, would you consider yourself a careerrist net.artist?

curt:
> [Incidentally, Galloway also hired Takeshi Hamada (
> http://www.hamada-takeshi.com/ ) to design the carnivore logo. Hamada
> is the same designer who designed the rhizome logo you so flippantly
> dissed.]

ben:
You're right -- I didn't spend enough time examining the Rhizome logo.
Let's look at it together! Hmm. I see lines. No, let's dig deeper!
Lines, as in linearity, as in 1-dimensionality, as in locked in a
to-and-fro proto-Flatland hell (AbbottStyle). Deeper still! Okay, I see
a hub and spoke, suggesting centrality, unification, Modernism. Deeper
still! Wait, they seem to be different colors, so there must be
multiple elements coming together in the same place! Like a city, which
grows rapidly before calcifying into stone. Deeper still! What's that?
You say these lines aren't simply random, but based on some... data?
What kind of data? Oh, 11 herbs and spices, eh? Well, a secret's a
secret -- I'll take your word that the lines are based on Something!
What's that? You want a final analysis?

It seems that this "Rhizome" is some sort of unified location for...
Modernist secretDataPictures?

There. I've just given the logo more thought than most Rhizomers
probably [have/would care to]. Is there something deeper I should be
"getting," or am I just not appreciating it enough somehow?

curt:
You're evaluating it by the wrong criteria. It's a logo, which is a graphic design element used for branding a corporation. In corporate america, you're logo can't change every time you use it or you've defeated your own purpose (although now you've got animated avatars like the Xingular logo that do change a bit, but that's off topic). So Rhizome's logo is intentionally anti-logo. What we are supposed to remember about it is that it's not the same, which is a cool way to [de/anti/un]-brand a net art resource called rhizome. So as generative art, it's not much, but as a logo, it's right clever.

<dead horse>

curt:
> You say, "whether or not they agree." They categorically disagree,
> and that's my point. You may assimilate them into your current
> historical paradigm to your own intellectual satisfaction, but if they
> were here today, they wouldn't go so quietly.

ben:
I hate to say this, but if we start relying on the artists to interpret
their own work, intellectual discourse in the art community will
largely wither and die. Do you believe everything Warhol told you about
his work? Of course not, you look at the work and you draw your own
conclusions.

curt:
they are not interpreting their own work. It has nothing to do with their work. They are admirable human beings convincingly exerting their personal opinions about art and life, and their opinions disagree with your opinions.

</dead horse>

> Brian Eno:
> Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.

ben:
Breaking news: subscribing to Rhizome is NOT withdrawal in disgust, but
rather fullOn engagement. If you really want to withdraw from the
artWorld in disgust, unsubscribe and truly disEngage.

curt:
must I unsubscribe? say it ain't so! Can't I just lurk, occasionally dropping the cryptic science and every now and then getting into the odd three day "dialogue" with my home slice BEN SYVERSON? I'd like to think so!

curt:
> cf: http://www.rhizome.org/print.rhiz?7261 (a summary of my position
> regarding contemporary new media criticism).

ben:
yesYes, although I do find it rather curious to craft such a critique
of criticism, when the piece is obviously part of that same critical
discussion.

curt:
what's even more curious is that I wrote that piece over two years ago on THIS VERY LIST! Hmmmmmmm.

ben:
> http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/interAggregate/
> index.php

This piece doesn't interest me, and to be honest, I don't really like
looking at it. But let's skip past that.

curt:
twist my arm.

ben:
To pose a question that "Plasma Studii" raised, how much of your
analysis is the kind of critical rhetoric you so despise, and how much
do you really get out of the work?

curt:
I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. It's not my favorite job, but somebody's got to do it because the trees can't speak for themselves. In my most forthcoming confessional tone, I hostly derived those insights from the piece itself. With other peices of lesser aesthetic merit, I may have had to conjure up something to impose on them (which would have been fair game according to some but critically disingenuous to me). But not with this piece.

ben:
I'm fairly attuned to all of the
fields of interest that you raise, but when I look at this piece, I can
only get to a few of these concepts, and only when I really push
myself. And afterwards I have the dirty feeling that intellectually, I
just squeezed blood from a stone, and I might as well have been looking
at a Hallmark card or a block of wood. It's like an artSchool exercise:
write the artist's statement for the blackVelvet dolphinPainting. Lest
this get into a personal quibble over what two people get from a single
work, let me ask you this: if, as a hypothetical viewer, I'm not moved
or impressed enough by a piece to give it even a few minutes of
thought, will you really blame me?

curt:
sure I'll blame you. "Shame on you, Mr. President!" Laurie Anderson talks about giving memorized concerts in French and then going out on the streets of Paris with great confidence as a bi-linguist only to realize that she doesn't speak a word of French. I've always liked that story. Anyay, where were we?

Ben:
Can you really point the finger at me for not "grokking" it, and accuse
me of intellectualSnobbery for asking why I see so many things like it?

curt:
You're seeing things that are superficially like it and lumping them all together.

ben:
How did cCloninger find out about my artSchool
brainwashing, anyway? That fox is always one step ahead...

curt:
http://playdamage.org/58.html

ben:
I'm simply
making a small point about the overAbundance of FlashFormalism, and
raising the issue of why there isn't more critical thought and
discourse around it. You (and others) seem to agree that more critical
engagement is desirable. So what, in precise terms, are we disagreeing
about?

curt:
If this is your small point, I can't wait to see your large point.

ben:
Besides, you say "masturbation" like its a dirty and shameful word, but
when I think about it, there is no better word to describe art!
* Both are immensely pleasurable (unless you have "issues" as they call
them)
* Both are frowned upon in society (except by the enlightened few) --
even though *everybody* does it
* Both have no "productive" purpose, yet, oddly, seem to stimulate
those in production.
* Both can take place in public, alone, in pairs, in groups, or with
lubrication (see matthewBarney)
* Both can be either invigoratingly expressive and sensual, or
depressingly uninspired.
* Both are necessary and fascinating
* It's always weird when someone tries to teach you how to do either.

All art is masturbation. Although not necessarily vice versa. ;)

woody allen:
Don't knock masturbation; it's sex with someone I love.

hip hop don't stop,
the artist formerly known as el hombre

DISCUSSION

d/y ethereal radio broadcast #7: the hero killed the clown


http://deepyoung.org/radio/

-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was niether
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology


Hi Ben,

It seems like at this point you're grapsing at things about which to be contrary. I think you're best tactic for sparking dialogue is to get into the work piece by piece, preferably with as little hyperbole as possible. The works in ArtBase are easy targets. Not to dis the ArtBase, but it seeks to be fairly inclusive, and nobody is really looking to it as the be all end all archive of contemporary new media art. Let's look at the three pieces I mentioned, since each is more or less canonized (as much as any net.art work can be at this stage).

You say that the Shape of Song ( http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html ) and textarc ( http://www.textarc.org/ ) don't utilize visual abstraction, that every pixel is procedural and representational. Perhaps from a technical coding perspective. But data visualization is inherently abstraction. The artist is literally abstracting data (from text to animation in the first piece and from sound to shapeForm in the second). The artists could have abstracted the data any number of ways, but they chose to abstract it in very specific ways, not just to achieve accurate representation, but to achieve an abstract, aesthetic effect. These pieces are examples of abstract visualization working in tandem with meaningful data mapping. The pieces work not just because they are useful or accurate (indeed, neither are terribly useful), but also because they look interesting. Not SOLELY because they look interesting, but they do look interesting and intentionally so. Furthermore, the way in which they look interesting is intrinsically related to the data they are abstracting, but not merely arbitrarily driven by it. Each coder's "hand/eye/craft/aesthetic intent" is imposed on the way the their output looks (in the case of Shape of Song) and moves/reacts (in the case of TextArc). This is part of the art.

Regarding carnivore ( http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore ) the genius of the piece is precisely that it farms out the last-mile aesthetics to "artisans" (if you must) who enjoy and are skillful at visual representation. Galloway tackled the obligatory political concept and coding. The political concept (surveilance) was/is very en vogue and thus a shoe-in for gallery-ization, but there's nothing terribly sexy about that aspect of it to me. The codidng took some doing, but it was basically just a reappropriation of government code already written. The real genius of the piece is twofold:
1. It takes brilliant advantage of the online community. It's true net art, not just because it runs on the network (again, an obligatory requirement), but because it optimizes the collaborative aspects of the networked community in its ongoing production.
2. In so clearly bifurcating the concept (backend) and the visual aesthetics (front end) it uses its literal, technical form as a meta-phor to foreground the split in art criticism between concept and visual aesthetics (the same split we've been dancing around for the last two days in these posts). The project then goes on to unite these two aspects into a single work, thus showing that the two aren't really diametrically opposed, but that they drive and complement each other and are "apiece."

It's easy to look at Carnivore and get excited about the politcal aspects of surveilance. But that's the easy surface read of the project. You said earlier that RSG's part in the piece was concepetual. A facile critique. Their genius in the piece was to orchesetrate an outsourcing of the generic conceptual to the idiosynchratic abstract. And Alex's marketing genius in the whole project was to make it "about surveilance," when it's really not about surveilance at all (it only tracks traffic on a local network that has given it permission to do so). But the surveilance angle got it into the galleries. [Incidentally, Galloway also hired Takeshi Hamada ( http://www.hamada-takeshi.com/ ) to design the carnivore logo. Hamada is the same designer who designed the rhizome logo you so flippantly dissed.] Because it's not an either/or.

curt:
> you miss my point. I'm not saying [dubuffet, magritte, beuys] weren't important in their
> time. I'm saying they are still important now and they disagree with
> your assertion that all good art is about ideas.

ben:
Whether or not they agree, their art is intellectually engaging,
whereas FlashFormalism is (to me) not. Regardless of the artists' spin
on their work, it can all be situated in an intellectual debate of
their time. I'm waiting to see if FlashFormalism can say the same
thing.

curt:
argh! you're not hearing me. I'm not talking about whether you personally like FlashFormalism. I'm not talking about whether you personally like the work of these artists. You say, "whether or not they agree." They categorically disagree, and that's my point. You may assimilate them into your current historical paradigm to your own intellectual satisfaction, but if they were here today, they wouldn't go so quietly. They were working from a perspective that art is beyond idea. Their words and their work disagree with your stated position.

ben:
You're right. That's what this list is for, right? No one here is
interested in the art world, right? Let's all sit around not discussing
work, since it should be exempt from criticality.

Brian Eno:
Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.

curt:
OK. You've sufficiently goaded me to critically discuss http://www.complexification.net a bit (I've got some free time). But the piece I'll reference is admittedly not a "critic friendly" piece. That doesn't mean it's not a great piece. cf: http://www.rhizome.org/print.rhiz?7261 (a summary of my position regarding contemporary new media criticism).

http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/interAggregate/index.php

It owes an intentional debt to Pollock not only in its palette but in its application and process. Pollock was not a "chance operations" artist, but was very deliberate in his execution. His process was an admixture of chaos and craft, and part of that craft lay in how much chaos to allow into the work, when to allow it in, and how to allow it in. Similarly, Tarbell is not using Flash (as t. whid rightly observes), but Processing which compiles into Java, and then he's going behind and hand-tweaking the compiled java. The piece is generative, but not without Tarbell's particular, intentional visaul aesthetic, not just in the final output, but in the real-time "playing out" of the piece. Whereas Pollock's "hand" in real-time painting led to the production of a static final painting, Tarbell removes this process one step further. Tarbell's "hand" in real-time coding leads to the software's "hand" in real-time "painting," which in turn leads to the output of the static piece. In Pollock's case, the final piece shows evidence of Pollock's energetic "performance," that is, his painting of the piece. In Tarbell's case, the performance (the software's "drawing" of the art) *is* the actual piece. This generative "playing out" in turn shows evindence of Tarbell's coding "performance" which occurs off stage, but which is nevertheless observable by viewing the intentionally open source code.

So it ain't just FlashFormalism, Ben. It's "speaking" about art history; about new media's relation to art history; about the nature of time-shiftedness and instruction giving; about the balance between chaos and control; about the continuum of performance, meta-performance (literally "script writing"), and object; about the relationship between process and visual aesthetics; about the relationship between code, hand, line, and dance; about the ability of software-based media to evince an idiosynchratic personal style. Plus it looks so danged pretty. And the beauty of it (literally) is, you don't have to grok the above insights to get something out of the piece.

And you're not grocking those things (or you're doing an award-winning job at playing devil's advocate) because you've been conditioned to look for something heavy, political, important, groundbreaking, and immediately dialogue-able. (When intellectual stimulation leads to mental masturbation, call us. Our trained professionals are standing by.) If it's pretty and subtle and anti-sublime, it must not be saying anything. And if it happens to show some superficial resemblance to a screen saver, Egad! Out with the bathwater it goes.

ben:
What's all this Marxist bullShizer you keep pulling? No one here is
talking about art as production.

curt:
No, but you're implicitly approaching art as material and humans as material. There's seems to be little room for the spiritual in the assumptions of your critical perspective. But then spirit went out with Romanticism, so you're off the hook there.

It's so elegant. So intelligent.

respectfully,
curt

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology


Hi Ben,

one more round...

ben:
So if you find aesthetic discussions
titillating ("ooh, more brown!" ... "too many boxes!"), by all means,
keepOnRawxin'InTheFreeWorld. I'm just trying to publicly raise the
issue of whether this is how we want to let newMedia come to be
defined. If it nM does become pigeon-holed as nice-looking clickable
data pictures, I won't be a part of it, and neither will a lot of
people who are currently engaged with this discussion. It's great that
you bring up graphicDsign, because one needs only to look at your local
graphicDsign [college/department] to see the Jihad that's being waged
on ideas there. Kids arrive in graphicDsign classes expecting to
receive training in industry-standard applications and be kept
up-to-date on industry design trends, so that they may graduate with
sufficient "mastery" to be employable as designers directly out of
college. The expectation is that you can be trained as a Dsigner just
like you can be trained as a XeroxMechanic. Given the radical artistic,
conceptual and social hystorical hyperthreads that make up the
area-of-activity we delineate (for economic reasons) as "graphicDsign,"
I find myself dismayed that the graduates of these programs are more
excited about software upgrades than the ideas they're working with.

And this is your model for how you want to talk about nM? Does anyone
else have a problem with this?

curt:
you're arguing with a straw man. You're describing bad graphic design education, but not all graphic design education is bad. Graphic design has a rich history of interesting artistic discussion. Kandinsky, Klee, Albers, Le Corbusier, Charles & Ray Eames, Tufte, Bruce Mau, Tibor Kalman, Stefan Sagmeister.I'd even include McLuhan and John Maeda in there. You're trying to drive a wedge between formalism and conceptualism that seems artificial. Could brown squares somehow embody a concept? Of course. Anyway, it's not an either/or. There are plenty of different kinds of new media art. Abstraction is just one aspect. Last time I checked, New media art was not in danger of being hijacked by graphic designers. If anything the scene could use a bit more craft.

curt:
> Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his
> instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level.

ben:
Sure, but Casey's praxis is grounded in broader artEducational and
artwarePopulism concepts, and is anything but design for design's sake.

curt:
I'm not advocating design for desisgn's sake. You seemed to be dismissing Casey's work as FlashFormalism. I was pointing out that it's not. Are you agreeing with me?

ben:
out of convenience, we don't attempt to talk about Every Single Artist
Who Ever Lived, so we tend to focus on the ones who ignited our
imaginations by doing things differently, and challenging the
assumptions of the day. Those are the people we remember and discuss.

curt:
In art history class those are the artists we discuss. But on contemporary art bulletin boards we may discuss all sorts of off-the-radar contemporaries making all sorts of art for all sorts of reasons, many of whom will never be remembered, nor do they care to be remembered, nor are they making art in hopes of being remembered. Such are the joys of a contemporary art scene.

ben:
Further, I take special exception to your implication that
pre-Impressionist artists (ie, ALL art before the 19th century?) didn't
"pioneer" anything of note, and are remembered for their "craft and
invention."

curt:
hyperbolic rhetoric. I said, "There are plenty of artists who have gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists, craftspeople in local artisan subcultures."

"plenty" is a far stretch from "all."

ben:
I won't bother to address each artist [dubuffet, magritte, beuys] , as this could go on forever, but each of the artists you mention raised important questions and sparked
immense debate, even if their work did most of the speaking. It's
ludicrous to suggest they weren't engaged in the intellectual
discussions of their times.

curt:
you miss my point. I'm not saying they weren't important in their time. I'm saying they are still important now and they disagree with your assertion that all good art is about ideas.

ben:
> http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)
This is a fantastic tongue-in-cheek piece from my perspective, but it
is absolutely not abstract, nonConceptual, or formalist.

> http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic
> angle)
And you present yet another [navigational/cartographic] interface work
which is neither abstract, nonConceptual or formalist.

> http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)
Carnivore is a particularly bad choice for you to hold up as an
[abstract/nonConceptual/formalist] posterChild. Carnivore as a
[project/platform] has a clear political and conceptual message about
government and surveillance, and as it does nothing on its own, is
indeed almost 100% conceptual -- before you can see or hear anything,
you have to use a "client" to interpret the network data. These clients
range from the conceptual to the pure formalist, but I'm not sure you
can pin that on RSG -- after all, Carnivore is a complete conceptual
artWork even without any clients, but the clients depend completely on
Carnivore both conceptually and technically.

curt:
I mention the above pieces particularly because they are *not* purely abstract. I'm illustrating the fact that new media can successfully combine elements of visual abstraction with concept. It's not an either/or. Evidently we agree here.

ben:
> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/

I can only play amateurCritic to your URIs for so long, Cloninger! :)
Briefly looking at the above URI, I can't discern whether or not the
authors of a couple of these pieces are being ironically retarditaire
or if they are straightforward creative expressions. A few of them are
fully situated in an artWorld context, some are by well-known artists.
Clearly all of them draw from the globalVisualCultureMashup, and none
of them are "outsiders."

curt:
not in a stric art brut sense. That would be impossible. But they are outsiders to the net art scene.

ben:
> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/

Some (well, really all) of these pieces are strikingly beautiful, but
like candy bars, after the sweet taste, I'm left hungry for substance.
None of the works [upset/surprised/confused/challenged] me sufficiently
for me to remember them. That's my personal experience, but I'm
suggesting that there are others who are unsatisfied with this
FlashFormalism.

curt:
it can't all be Debussey. Sometimes a modicum of t.rex is required.
"My name is bubblegum
I live for moon and sun
Young and so much fun
Life has just begun."
- Sonic Youth
Is it art? Whatever.

ben:
You keep suggesting that contemporary critical discussion is somehow at
fault for not "getting" the real work happening, when in reality, this
is contemporary critical discourse right here on this list. If the
people on this list respond to the work in silence, I would suggest
that they aren't significantly affected by it, and I think that is
indeed a problem with the work.

curt:
the people on this list respond to in-depth critical analysis of most any piece of new media artwork with inordinate silence. it's the nature of the list.

Ben:
It may be a fine distinction, but while I love the complexification.net
work as astonishingly gorgeous [images/applets], I would hesitate to
discuss the pieces in an art context. They are unmistakably powerful
demonstrations of the power of a systemsApproach to artMaking, so
certain people may find them shocking, and perhaps that's enough to
entertain some discussion of them in an art context. Maybe they're
inspirational enough that we don't need to even question their
relevance. However, I can't imagine anybody from this list being very
intellectually stimulated by these works; anyone with a passing
familiarity with newMedia (or computerHystory) has seen bales full of
work like this (albeit not always as beautiful).

curt:
A pox on your shocking, challenging, intellectually stimulating critera, Ben Syverson! There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

ben:
Wake up -- no one's muzzling [the contemporary abstractionists] -- they just have nothing to say!

John Cage:
I have nothing to say and I am saying it.

Ben:
The
important thing to keep in mind is that all art is conceptual, whether
you like it or not, because it "happens" in the brain. If no one will
step up to the plate and talk about this art, it's because not very
much is happening in anyone's brain as they ingest it.

Curt:
I couldn't disagree more. Art and music have the unique (dare I say "sacred") capacity to bypass the brain/mind and speak viscerally and non-textually to the core of us (spirit). If you don't get this (and few Marxist-influenced critics do), then you won't get art that does. Art is not an argument.

I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.