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

On Tour


Hi Nikola,

My Uncle and I have the same name. It's not a very common name. He is an actor who performs monologues at Christian churches (he is actually very good). He owns curtcloninger.com. When someone does a google search for me, the first thing they see is his site. It is my lot in life to be mistaken for him (and vice versa).

Here is some (good) press about my "Traffic Report" project in which you participated:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/21/business/compressed-data-don-t-mourn-yet-these-obits-were-only-designs.html (mirrored here: http://lab404.com/misc/obits ). Here is a relevant excerpt: "Professional duties can collide with underground pursuits online: 'There's just one Web.'"

I am not telling you how to respond to your situation. But it is at least an interesting opportunity for you to modulate the situation online. You say Rhizome will always be stronger on the search engines. Maybe not. Here is a recent project proposal (that didn't get funded by Rhizome): http://lab404.com/xanadu_hijack/ . It involves the use of collective agency to hijack the word "Xanadu" online. Perhaps this approach could be combined with other approaches and applied to your current situation.

Language, control, historical canonicity, popular opinion, mediation of value, institutional strategies vs. individual tactics, local scales vs. global scales, legal vs. technological agency, the inordinate power of google, the public dialogue that is happening here vs. the back-channel dialogue that is happening via facebook/skype/email, new media artist as self-critic/archivist/historian -- these issues might be "useful" enough to justify a few more emails in my own precious inbox.

Technologies To The People,
Curt

DISCUSSION

On Tour


Hi Nikola,

I respect Lauren and Ceci. I don't know Brian that well, but thus far his dealings with me personally have been upright. But your experience is obviously different than mine.

I was never on staff at Rhizome. They have just paid me to perform various functions from time to time (unfortunately not as kinky as it sounds).

Peace,
Curt

DISCUSSION

Blackness for Sale (2001) - Keith Obadike


Thanks Nick,

I appreciate the work that you do. We have never been the most thankful community, so your job is pretty thankless.

I understand your decision regarding the spamming, but of course pragmatic decisions are never culturally or politically neutral in terms of how they play out in the world. One solution might be to somehow eliminate anonymous (or quick pseudonymous or mult-nonymous) posting. I've never noticed that these discussions have benefitted much from sock-puppet identities or inconsistent identities. So perhaps the filtering could happen at the registration level, rather than at the level of every individual post. That would still preserve the real-time nature of the discussions, which seems important.

Best,
Curt

DISCUSSION

On Tour


I'll write some about Nikola.

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

Here are some Nikola links:

writin':
http://www.nakituminayashi.com/buythisbook/

flashin':
http://godotiswaitingfor.me/

URL buyin' / site stattin':
http://www.tosic.com/usage/

gettin' interview:
http://www.onequestioninterview.com/2007/09/nikola-tosic.html

doin' interview:
http://tosic.com/tracky-birthday-interview/

nikola curatin' me:
http://x.nekada.com/programs/r+d/cdrom/001/
http://educational-sticker.com/2002.02.24.standard.htm

me curatin' nikola:
http://lab404.com/data/tosic.html
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/14599/
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/15515/

if only this were still online:
http://tosic.com/document_photos/

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

One of my favorite Nikola pieces is a fluxus-like instruction called something like "run." Similar to Yoko Ono's instruction piece "fly" (the instructions of which are "fly"), except with "run," you are really meant to do it. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, in the middle of a sentence, whenever you feel like it, immediately stop what you are doing and start running. Just run in some direction until you feel like stopping, could be for ten miles or for three minutes. Do this as often as necessary.

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

Talking to Josephine Bosma, there is a difference between art criticism and art history, although it's hard to do the former properly without being somewhat informed by the latter. With early net art, art history is tricky, because "being there physically" doesn't necessarily make the historian any more privy to the history of the work, since the work is often happening online across borders.

For my money, historically, Nikola Tosic could be considered the godfather of what I might call Rhizome-endorsed (circa-2008) one-liner formalism. You know, the thing where you make a low res animation, buy a single URL for it, don't have an artist statement for it, and just let it be what it is. This behavior eventually leads to "neen" (how Miltos Manetas gets the credit for something that was happening four years prior to 2003 is surely related to something having to do with "the art world" [whatever that is]). Neen popularizes folks like Rafael Rozendaal and Angelo Plessas, which leads (in at least one way) to the contemporary "surf club" [f]rat pack. So to write about Nikola and imply that his work bears some marginal resemblence to the work of someone like Damon Zucconi is to get the whole history completely backwards.

I have always thought of Nikola's work as a kind of outsider.net.art ( cf: http://deepyoung.org/permanent/outsider/ ), but I include Arturo Herrera and Harrell Fletcher in that category, so this doesn't mean that Nikola doesn't know what he's doing. Nikola was at the Fabrica lab in Milan for some time, so he's hardly a parochial figure. But he happens to live around Belgrade (sometimes). And I happen to live around Asheville, North Carolina, US. And neither of us happen to live (or care to live) in New York or London. Yet you won't discover that much about my net art from visiting Asheville, although I'm sure you could make some tenuous connections if hard-pressed.

Josephine Bosma is writing what one hopes will be an accurate history of first-wave net art. Who will take the (scatalogical) time to write an accurate history of second-wave, dys-konceptual net art that includes somebody other than Cory Arcangel? Who will take the (even more scatalogical) time to fact-check such a history?

I am the Lorax / I speak for the trees,
Curt


DISCUSSION

Blackness for Sale (2001) - Keith Obadike


http://lab404.com/misc/hangingonastar.mp3

Hi Ceci,

It seems to me more a matter of decreased moderation, increased prominence, and increased ease of use. When I post, I need to see a confirmation that I've posted instead of just being returned to the thread as if I haven't posted. Better yet, I need to see my post immediately appear. The front page is well-curated and directed. I don't think an Empyre approach for the discussions is the thing. That just further extends a hierarchical structure (and duplicates an existing model).

Personally, I think the discussions should be uber-easy to use, uber-unmoderated, and uber-prominent. This is an obvious risk that most institutions are unwilling to take, a bit like featuring unmoderated inmate poetry in the asylum newsletter. It will increase both the signal and the noise; their ratios will fluctuate, but at least people will be posting again. Maybe the noise will become more interesting than the signal. Whatever the case, it will be the antithesis of hierarchical moderation and curation. Is it possible to curate a space that is purposefully left uncurated? Will senators ever vote to decrease their own salaries? Are you willing to let it devolve and grow holes like socks? Perhaps even open up html/css posting capabilities so that threads could be purposefully visually hijacked and formally restructured. "How can you kill me; I'm already dead."

Best,
Curt

Ceci wrote:
In response to discussion - I've been thinking about that a lot, and I've noticed that the younger artists involved with Rhizome rarely contribute to the board. I would like to change that. I think part of it has to do with the way conversation happens online today. All of us have accounts on facebook, twitter, myspace, etc. Our conversations happen even more informally than they have in the past, and are distributed widely across numerous platforms. When Rhizome first began in the 1990s, this was not the environment it inhabited, and I think that produced a different platform for conversation. I've brought up the idea of starting something like empyre here, by inviting a group of people to discuss a specific subject over a set period of time, in order to focus the attention of participants and to establish a thoughtful, oriented conversation. I'm interested in hosting more discussion on the boards again and I am opening to hearing your suggestions in order to make that happen.