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.
Re: when Google has achieved the net art masterpiece, what are the artists to do?
Hey Tim,
I just read your article and haven't been following the subsequent dialogue, so if I say something someone's already said before, just chalk it up to the fact that I'm a dumb lazy redneck.
Yoshi Sodeoka did an front-end interface to the google search querry stream here:
http://www.whitney.org/artport/gatepages/february02.shtml
He's adding a personal fascination with lo-fi interfaces to the data stream, which I think brings something to the raw data stream. So you can dig the piece on two levels. I think it's cooler than the carnivore model (although I like other things about carnivore like its open invitation for collaboration).
Then you've got Valery Grancher's lame ass "search art" ( http://www.nomemory.org/search/index2.html ), which is just a thin conceptual gimmick added to somebody else's tech. It brings very little to what you can already do at google and represents all I loathe about conceptual net art.
Then there are the following novel uses of google's database that aren't calling themselves "art," but could be considered art given the right bullshit artist statement:
http://www.googlism.com/
http://www.googlefight.com/
http://www.googlewhack.com/
It seems the "art" of database art lies in the cleverness of the interface paradigm, which makes database artists akin to information architects. Examples:
http://www.textarc.org/
http://manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm
In experimental web design circles, I'm observing a trend toward hand illustration. When everybody can use 3dsMax, then how do you distinguish yourself from the crowd? You return to actual craft, a hand moving a pencil across a piece of paper.
Likewise, in net art, you're asking a pertinent question -- when all is about tech, and corporations have the tech, what's left? Some might then say what's left is to conceptually recontextualization the existing tech. But if you mean to approach conceptualism minimistically, you rightly observe that there's not much to add to google's live querry.
I think the best net art is still narrative in some way, and personal. The work to which I'm referring is what you're calling web art, but that doesn't demean it any to me.
Why is Beuys work more interesting than his contemporaries'? He was making art that was personal to him, he was using physical materials that meant something to him. His purpose was not to get notariety or to be novel. He wasn't even trying to "tell humans what humans were thinking about, obsessing over, loving, hating." As I read it, he was trying to convey his personal vision of a righter world in order to help bring that world about.
I'd like to see more net art that's personal and exploratory and idiosynchratic. Less artists sitting around trying to come up with a novel artistic concept as if they were developing a winning business plan for a new tech startup or brainstorming the creation of the next boy band supergroup. It doesn't have to be the next new thing. It just has to engage.
I just read your article and haven't been following the subsequent dialogue, so if I say something someone's already said before, just chalk it up to the fact that I'm a dumb lazy redneck.
Yoshi Sodeoka did an front-end interface to the google search querry stream here:
http://www.whitney.org/artport/gatepages/february02.shtml
He's adding a personal fascination with lo-fi interfaces to the data stream, which I think brings something to the raw data stream. So you can dig the piece on two levels. I think it's cooler than the carnivore model (although I like other things about carnivore like its open invitation for collaboration).
Then you've got Valery Grancher's lame ass "search art" ( http://www.nomemory.org/search/index2.html ), which is just a thin conceptual gimmick added to somebody else's tech. It brings very little to what you can already do at google and represents all I loathe about conceptual net art.
Then there are the following novel uses of google's database that aren't calling themselves "art," but could be considered art given the right bullshit artist statement:
http://www.googlism.com/
http://www.googlefight.com/
http://www.googlewhack.com/
It seems the "art" of database art lies in the cleverness of the interface paradigm, which makes database artists akin to information architects. Examples:
http://www.textarc.org/
http://manovich.net/cinema_future/toc.htm
In experimental web design circles, I'm observing a trend toward hand illustration. When everybody can use 3dsMax, then how do you distinguish yourself from the crowd? You return to actual craft, a hand moving a pencil across a piece of paper.
Likewise, in net art, you're asking a pertinent question -- when all is about tech, and corporations have the tech, what's left? Some might then say what's left is to conceptually recontextualization the existing tech. But if you mean to approach conceptualism minimistically, you rightly observe that there's not much to add to google's live querry.
I think the best net art is still narrative in some way, and personal. The work to which I'm referring is what you're calling web art, but that doesn't demean it any to me.
Why is Beuys work more interesting than his contemporaries'? He was making art that was personal to him, he was using physical materials that meant something to him. His purpose was not to get notariety or to be novel. He wasn't even trying to "tell humans what humans were thinking about, obsessing over, loving, hating." As I read it, he was trying to convey his personal vision of a righter world in order to help bring that world about.
I'd like to see more net art that's personal and exploratory and idiosynchratic. Less artists sitting around trying to come up with a novel artistic concept as if they were developing a winning business plan for a new tech startup or brainstorming the creation of the next boy band supergroup. It doesn't have to be the next new thing. It just has to engage.
i kiss you [cornucopia_remix]
GLORY be to God for dappled things --
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
- rev. hopkins (1876)
http://lab404.com/misc/i_believe.mp3
_
_
_
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
- rev. hopkins (1876)
http://lab404.com/misc/i_believe.mp3
_
_
_
Re: ze troll, she can still cook, ne?
Joseph,
Homette is a body-hater. she's a post-human gnostic. Gnostics
thought the body was corrupt, and either were very promiscuous
(because it didn't matter what you did with your body since it was
base) or very ascetic (because they wanted to subdue the body
themselves in order to escape it).
Christianity teaches redemption of the body. Indeed, we will have
new and glorified bodies hereafter (they'll be radically changed, but
"bodies" they will be). So you've got spirit, soul, and body, with
the body as the caboose. The idea is not to severe the body from the
whole package, but to yield the body to God and thereby have him
redeem it. Christ came in the flesh, and that incarnation was a
redemptive act, a buying back. Our bodies are subject to the fall
and are decaying, so God uses them to humble us, to remind us of our
dependence on him.
So the body is a great equalizer. You may think you're omniscient
and omnipresent, but you're actually sitting in some physical
location typing into a machine. You are most likely wearing clothes.
Online, you can pretend whatever you like, but at the end of the day,
you've still got to feed your face, go to the bathroom, sleep, etc.
Your body isn't all of you, but it is 1/3 of you, and the other 2/3
is all enmeshed with it. Victory then is not to escape the body.
You can't escape it, nor were you meant to. You can pretend real
hard that you have escaped it, but then you've got to expend all this
effort maintaining the illusion.
So you'll never call anybody into human accountability online if they
choose to deny it, because their body ain't "there." This
disembodied game is fun to play, but in the end, their spirit dwells
in their body somewhere. You can lift your skinny fists like
antennas to heaven, but it's still heaven, and they're still your
skinny fists. (Unless you're a demon, in which case you are indeed
disembodied, but now you have a whole host of other problems to deal
with.)
Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. The path of her secret
knowledge leads me to become some sort of Nietzschean superhero,
gallantly defying the confines of community, one against the world,
meticulously psycho-analyzing every last thing to death, with the
"truth" of my position made evident by my accurate assessment of
other's faults and motives, the adamance of my assertions, and the
sheer persistence of my posts. I must be ever deflecting and never
receiving. I get to be anti-occidental, debasing, and humorless to
boot. Above all, I'm obliged to not care about you one whit.
And all of this must happen on a mediated network of machines. I
need guard my real world identity in these online communities, lest
it be discovered that I actually work at McDonald's, or don't work at
all, or anything else that would equate me with the rest of the human
family. I need play down the merit of such real world
accountability. Thus I can present myself virtually virtuous [an
easy enough thing] without ever having to make my whole self (body,
soul, and spirit, 24/7) virtuous [a much more sticky proposition]. I
have to keep posting, not to win or be thought right (because I
already think I'm right and don't need anyone to declare me right),
but to "exist" in the ethereal way that I fancy. And yet back at my
body the blood keeps pumping.
Shelly Duvall: This man is God. He's God!
Woody Allen: Mmm-hmm. Oh look, there's God right now coming out of
the men's room.
hip hop don't stop,
curt
>Quoting "-IID42 Kandinskij @27+" <death@zaphod.terminal.org>:
>
> > I am neither a slave, nor a slave to others,
> > nor does this COMMUNITY that you speak of EXIST.
>
>
>The more cynical you become the more a slave of yourself you become. You
>should destroy the fortress you have built.
>
>joseph (cor e form art) + (porat per ance ist)
>frank + lyn - mc + El + roy
>
>go shopping -> http://www.electrichands.com/shopindex.htm
>call me 646 279 2309
>
>SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER CUPCAKEKALEIDOSCOPE - send email to
>CupcakeKleidoscope-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Homette is a body-hater. she's a post-human gnostic. Gnostics
thought the body was corrupt, and either were very promiscuous
(because it didn't matter what you did with your body since it was
base) or very ascetic (because they wanted to subdue the body
themselves in order to escape it).
Christianity teaches redemption of the body. Indeed, we will have
new and glorified bodies hereafter (they'll be radically changed, but
"bodies" they will be). So you've got spirit, soul, and body, with
the body as the caboose. The idea is not to severe the body from the
whole package, but to yield the body to God and thereby have him
redeem it. Christ came in the flesh, and that incarnation was a
redemptive act, a buying back. Our bodies are subject to the fall
and are decaying, so God uses them to humble us, to remind us of our
dependence on him.
So the body is a great equalizer. You may think you're omniscient
and omnipresent, but you're actually sitting in some physical
location typing into a machine. You are most likely wearing clothes.
Online, you can pretend whatever you like, but at the end of the day,
you've still got to feed your face, go to the bathroom, sleep, etc.
Your body isn't all of you, but it is 1/3 of you, and the other 2/3
is all enmeshed with it. Victory then is not to escape the body.
You can't escape it, nor were you meant to. You can pretend real
hard that you have escaped it, but then you've got to expend all this
effort maintaining the illusion.
So you'll never call anybody into human accountability online if they
choose to deny it, because their body ain't "there." This
disembodied game is fun to play, but in the end, their spirit dwells
in their body somewhere. You can lift your skinny fists like
antennas to heaven, but it's still heaven, and they're still your
skinny fists. (Unless you're a demon, in which case you are indeed
disembodied, but now you have a whole host of other problems to deal
with.)
Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. The path of her secret
knowledge leads me to become some sort of Nietzschean superhero,
gallantly defying the confines of community, one against the world,
meticulously psycho-analyzing every last thing to death, with the
"truth" of my position made evident by my accurate assessment of
other's faults and motives, the adamance of my assertions, and the
sheer persistence of my posts. I must be ever deflecting and never
receiving. I get to be anti-occidental, debasing, and humorless to
boot. Above all, I'm obliged to not care about you one whit.
And all of this must happen on a mediated network of machines. I
need guard my real world identity in these online communities, lest
it be discovered that I actually work at McDonald's, or don't work at
all, or anything else that would equate me with the rest of the human
family. I need play down the merit of such real world
accountability. Thus I can present myself virtually virtuous [an
easy enough thing] without ever having to make my whole self (body,
soul, and spirit, 24/7) virtuous [a much more sticky proposition]. I
have to keep posting, not to win or be thought right (because I
already think I'm right and don't need anyone to declare me right),
but to "exist" in the ethereal way that I fancy. And yet back at my
body the blood keeps pumping.
Shelly Duvall: This man is God. He's God!
Woody Allen: Mmm-hmm. Oh look, there's God right now coming out of
the men's room.
hip hop don't stop,
curt
>Quoting "-IID42 Kandinskij @27+" <death@zaphod.terminal.org>:
>
> > I am neither a slave, nor a slave to others,
> > nor does this COMMUNITY that you speak of EXIST.
>
>
>The more cynical you become the more a slave of yourself you become. You
>should destroy the fortress you have built.
>
>joseph (cor e form art) + (porat per ance ist)
>frank + lyn - mc + El + roy
>
>go shopping -> http://www.electrichands.com/shopindex.htm
>call me 646 279 2309
>
>SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER CUPCAKEKALEIDOSCOPE - send email to
>CupcakeKleidoscope-subscribe@yahoogroups.com