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.
Blackness for Sale (2001) - Keith Obadike
Hi Michael,
I'm mostly dissatisfied with the fact that the forums are currently moderated (even if only to temporarily filter out "spam," which implicitly assumes a moderator's ability to distinguish between signal and noise -- a slippery slope down which to head.) The main problem with this moderation is that now there is a significant lag time between posts. It's like talking on a walkie talkie rather than a landline, over. This radically changes the nature of the dialogue that is possible.
Also, if I'm understanding things correctly, there are now 3 ways to follow/contribute -- RSS, the web forums, and email. And they aren't all updated simultaneously.
Also, the discussion here has gone from being on the front page, to being considerately curated and prominently featured in Rhizome Digest, to being something occasionally bookmarked by a staff member at delicious as something they might want to get around to reading some day.
All of these may seem like "minor" "surface" "technical" modifications, with the real "essence" of dialogue still intact, but I'm not a neo-Platonist like that. If matter matters (and it does), these modifications have contributed in no small way the gradual ghetoization of the quality of discussion here. Of course (as always with everything) there are a network of other contributing factors. Yes, I still make my own personal pragmatic use of what's left.
Maybe someone will read all this and cater to my own idiosyncratic desires. My guess is that RAW is a calculated acceptable loss. There are bigger fish to fry and more glamorous games to play. And that's fine. It's the summer -- Henri Bergson has been rewarding my molasses-paced attentions; all sorts of new audio equipment is calling my name from the studio; I'm re-editing the rock opera Tommy according to certain self-imposed obstructions; I'm taking my children camping one-by-one throughout the summer; my wife is dead sexy; my Father loves me; there is raspberry jam in the root cellar. (Stop me before I blog!)
Rock & Roll Ain't No Pollution,
Curt
I'm mostly dissatisfied with the fact that the forums are currently moderated (even if only to temporarily filter out "spam," which implicitly assumes a moderator's ability to distinguish between signal and noise -- a slippery slope down which to head.) The main problem with this moderation is that now there is a significant lag time between posts. It's like talking on a walkie talkie rather than a landline, over. This radically changes the nature of the dialogue that is possible.
Also, if I'm understanding things correctly, there are now 3 ways to follow/contribute -- RSS, the web forums, and email. And they aren't all updated simultaneously.
Also, the discussion here has gone from being on the front page, to being considerately curated and prominently featured in Rhizome Digest, to being something occasionally bookmarked by a staff member at delicious as something they might want to get around to reading some day.
All of these may seem like "minor" "surface" "technical" modifications, with the real "essence" of dialogue still intact, but I'm not a neo-Platonist like that. If matter matters (and it does), these modifications have contributed in no small way the gradual ghetoization of the quality of discussion here. Of course (as always with everything) there are a network of other contributing factors. Yes, I still make my own personal pragmatic use of what's left.
Maybe someone will read all this and cater to my own idiosyncratic desires. My guess is that RAW is a calculated acceptable loss. There are bigger fish to fry and more glamorous games to play. And that's fine. It's the summer -- Henri Bergson has been rewarding my molasses-paced attentions; all sorts of new audio equipment is calling my name from the studio; I'm re-editing the rock opera Tommy according to certain self-imposed obstructions; I'm taking my children camping one-by-one throughout the summer; my wife is dead sexy; my Father loves me; there is raspberry jam in the root cellar. (Stop me before I blog!)
Rock & Roll Ain't No Pollution,
Curt
Blackness for Sale (2001) - Keith Obadike
Hi Franz,
I do think the current interest in "formal" work is a reaction (whether intentional or subliminal, probably both) against an overly politicized/pragmatic/moralizing dialogue that has often (in some circles) surrounded new media art. I agree with you -- it should not be an either/or binary (either overly political/moral or overly pop/vacuous). "Political" is rarely a good term for me, unless I understand it from the perspective of Latour -- politics are shared concerns that humans have which congregate around things in the world. In that sense, a project involving green screen video or a photoshop gradient filter has the potential to touch on shared human concerns. Some of the better formal work is better at making/foregrounding these more conceptual connections while still maintaining its formal/pop/surface sheen grooviness. For my money, the best "formal" work makes this grooviness part of a larger conceptual move (whether regarding art history or capital or networks or human habits or whatever).
I also agree that a lot of nuanced dialogue about these aspects (relationships between the conceptual and the formal) is lost here at the site/nexus/community/blog formerly known as rhizome (and now known as "rhizome at the new museum"). I asked the powers that be at the time, "How can you have a rhizome AT a central physical node?" A lot of the problems are simply structural. The mechanics of a "social network" implicitly color/skew/(enforce?) the kind of dialogue that occurs at that network. The list that was Rhizome RAW has been effectively, pragmatically, technologically ghetoized. Whether this was an intentional curatiorial decision or not, the result is that the kind of non-binary, critically nuanced dialogue you are proposing hasn't happened here in a long time. Something like it happens in the commissioned articles that appear on the Rhizome front page, but of course an article is a one-to-many broadcast and not a many-to-many dialogue. True, "the community" is "invited" to respond to such articles, but as one would respond to a post at someone else's blog -- the main article is the meat and the responses are add-on, supplemental tags (one-liners, if you will). It's easy enough to make one-liner net art, but it's a lot more difficult to tweet one-liner art theory (although it sounds like a promising "concept" for somebody's one-liner net art project). From an "interactive design" perspective, there is a big difference between technically allowing the possibility of a dialogue that might accidentally happen (if everyone is patient and willing enough to wait until the posts are moderated, to dig through the submenus, etc.); and purposefully promoting/enabling/fostering such dialogue.
Which means that currently such dialogues happen elsewhere. The problem is, many of the other English-speaking lists are overtly "political." I really like the CRUMB list, but it is purposefully skewed toward curating. I admire what Trebor is doing at iDC, but it is very much skewed toward pragmatic social change. Empyre is skewed the same way. And nettime is moderated in a way I never could get used to. Rhizome seems like it could be the place to have more "art-centric" (or practicing artist-centric) dialogue, but there is an implicitly hierarchical structure here at this point. Again, I'm not pointing fingers or attempting to analyze culturally or economically why this has happened. But the current technological and interactive design armature at rhizome is much less pragmatically rhizomatic than it used to be. Ironic, since this is the 2.0 era of RSS and social networking. But circuit-bending a Speak & Spell is more freaky than pushing buttons on a digital synth, the clueless record executives who gave Captain Beefheart a record deal were more radical than the hip record executives who gave Nine Inch Nails a record deal, and (perhaps) an old-school mailing list is more conducive to fruitful discussion than a moderated blog.
and just for fun:
http://lab404.com/rhizome/ (2003)
http://www.iwannabeonrhizome.org (2008)
Best,
Curt
I do think the current interest in "formal" work is a reaction (whether intentional or subliminal, probably both) against an overly politicized/pragmatic/moralizing dialogue that has often (in some circles) surrounded new media art. I agree with you -- it should not be an either/or binary (either overly political/moral or overly pop/vacuous). "Political" is rarely a good term for me, unless I understand it from the perspective of Latour -- politics are shared concerns that humans have which congregate around things in the world. In that sense, a project involving green screen video or a photoshop gradient filter has the potential to touch on shared human concerns. Some of the better formal work is better at making/foregrounding these more conceptual connections while still maintaining its formal/pop/surface sheen grooviness. For my money, the best "formal" work makes this grooviness part of a larger conceptual move (whether regarding art history or capital or networks or human habits or whatever).
I also agree that a lot of nuanced dialogue about these aspects (relationships between the conceptual and the formal) is lost here at the site/nexus/community/blog formerly known as rhizome (and now known as "rhizome at the new museum"). I asked the powers that be at the time, "How can you have a rhizome AT a central physical node?" A lot of the problems are simply structural. The mechanics of a "social network" implicitly color/skew/(enforce?) the kind of dialogue that occurs at that network. The list that was Rhizome RAW has been effectively, pragmatically, technologically ghetoized. Whether this was an intentional curatiorial decision or not, the result is that the kind of non-binary, critically nuanced dialogue you are proposing hasn't happened here in a long time. Something like it happens in the commissioned articles that appear on the Rhizome front page, but of course an article is a one-to-many broadcast and not a many-to-many dialogue. True, "the community" is "invited" to respond to such articles, but as one would respond to a post at someone else's blog -- the main article is the meat and the responses are add-on, supplemental tags (one-liners, if you will). It's easy enough to make one-liner net art, but it's a lot more difficult to tweet one-liner art theory (although it sounds like a promising "concept" for somebody's one-liner net art project). From an "interactive design" perspective, there is a big difference between technically allowing the possibility of a dialogue that might accidentally happen (if everyone is patient and willing enough to wait until the posts are moderated, to dig through the submenus, etc.); and purposefully promoting/enabling/fostering such dialogue.
Which means that currently such dialogues happen elsewhere. The problem is, many of the other English-speaking lists are overtly "political." I really like the CRUMB list, but it is purposefully skewed toward curating. I admire what Trebor is doing at iDC, but it is very much skewed toward pragmatic social change. Empyre is skewed the same way. And nettime is moderated in a way I never could get used to. Rhizome seems like it could be the place to have more "art-centric" (or practicing artist-centric) dialogue, but there is an implicitly hierarchical structure here at this point. Again, I'm not pointing fingers or attempting to analyze culturally or economically why this has happened. But the current technological and interactive design armature at rhizome is much less pragmatically rhizomatic than it used to be. Ironic, since this is the 2.0 era of RSS and social networking. But circuit-bending a Speak & Spell is more freaky than pushing buttons on a digital synth, the clueless record executives who gave Captain Beefheart a record deal were more radical than the hip record executives who gave Nine Inch Nails a record deal, and (perhaps) an old-school mailing list is more conducive to fruitful discussion than a moderated blog.
and just for fun:
http://lab404.com/rhizome/ (2003)
http://www.iwannabeonrhizome.org (2008)
Best,
Curt
Blackness for Sale (2001) - Keith Obadike
Hi Max,
I think it's always fair to ask "if this is being included, what is being excluded, and why?" I do think there is a bit of curatorial bootstrapping, like putting new artists in a group show with established artists in order to increase the reputation of the new artists. So when John Michael posts some one-liner project that his friend made last week and that post is followed by an already "canonized" piece, and both projects appear with "canonical" dates in parentheses after the project titles, then yes, we are implicitly supposed to see a relationship between the two pieces and value the one-liner piece more by association. Still, you've got to have a lot of faith that Rhizome's editorial blog activity is going to matter that much to art historians in 20 years to be bothered by such stuff.
Fortunately, that's not all that's happening with the editorial posts. Ceci and John Michael are going back and forth topically. One "serves" a piece, and then associations and connotations based on that piece are riffed on throughout that day. So the "blackness for sale" piece appears in the context of a bunch of eBay art pieces. This blogging process seems fun to me, because I like art (and curation) that foregrounds the invisible connections between things (les liens invisibles, if you will). I'm often less interested in the pieces themselves than in the implicit connections that are gradually constructed between the pieces.
An observation -- a lot of JMB and Ceci's connections are "formal;" that is, they are based on similarities of form in the work. This to me is a hallmark of a new kind of net art curating (if not necessarily a new kind of net art making). Not to say that there aren't also other connections made based on process, topic, and concept. But there is (what seems to me) an inordinate emphasis on form. This is neither good nor bad.
Another observation -- the Rhizome staff is and always has been just people. They hardly represent "the man." If "we" (non-Rhizome staff) want to conduct similar dialogues about recent work, we can do it here in the discussion forums. (That is, we could do it, if the forums weren't moderated and time-lagged so as to render them useless to any time-sensetive forms of dialogue[!!!]) But anyone could easily "pitch" a piece of work here and invite others to free-associate with other work based on topic, form, or any other criteria.
Best,
Curt
I think it's always fair to ask "if this is being included, what is being excluded, and why?" I do think there is a bit of curatorial bootstrapping, like putting new artists in a group show with established artists in order to increase the reputation of the new artists. So when John Michael posts some one-liner project that his friend made last week and that post is followed by an already "canonized" piece, and both projects appear with "canonical" dates in parentheses after the project titles, then yes, we are implicitly supposed to see a relationship between the two pieces and value the one-liner piece more by association. Still, you've got to have a lot of faith that Rhizome's editorial blog activity is going to matter that much to art historians in 20 years to be bothered by such stuff.
Fortunately, that's not all that's happening with the editorial posts. Ceci and John Michael are going back and forth topically. One "serves" a piece, and then associations and connotations based on that piece are riffed on throughout that day. So the "blackness for sale" piece appears in the context of a bunch of eBay art pieces. This blogging process seems fun to me, because I like art (and curation) that foregrounds the invisible connections between things (les liens invisibles, if you will). I'm often less interested in the pieces themselves than in the implicit connections that are gradually constructed between the pieces.
An observation -- a lot of JMB and Ceci's connections are "formal;" that is, they are based on similarities of form in the work. This to me is a hallmark of a new kind of net art curating (if not necessarily a new kind of net art making). Not to say that there aren't also other connections made based on process, topic, and concept. But there is (what seems to me) an inordinate emphasis on form. This is neither good nor bad.
Another observation -- the Rhizome staff is and always has been just people. They hardly represent "the man." If "we" (non-Rhizome staff) want to conduct similar dialogues about recent work, we can do it here in the discussion forums. (That is, we could do it, if the forums weren't moderated and time-lagged so as to render them useless to any time-sensetive forms of dialogue[!!!]) But anyone could easily "pitch" a piece of work here and invite others to free-associate with other work based on topic, form, or any other criteria.
Best,
Curt
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