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: RHIZOME_RAW: Where is the Rhizome?


I think one way to make a listserv dangerous is by using it to make actual art rather than as a para-art promotional platform. This is why posts by NN, kandinsky42, mez, Dirk Vekemans, Max Herman, manik, and others have been poet[h]ically appealing to me. They presume that something is happening on the list itself right now, rather than using the list to dialogue about something happening somewhere else.

Here is a perspicacious essay on conceptual software art by Thomas Dreher, translated from German:
http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/NAKSe.html

Here are the accompanying illustrations in pdf form:
http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/NAKSe.pdf (11 Mb)

There amongst examples by Cage, George Brecht, Lewitt, and Debord is a piece I posted to RAW in 2005. Dreher's online essay links to my actual rhizome post, which now takes you to a page saying that the post is archived and you can no longer view it unless you pay to become a member.

http://lyricwiki.org/The_White_Stripes:Little_Cream_Soda ,
Curt

+++++++

pall wrote:

That's a great analogy. I definitely think people should look into
making Rhizome "dangerous" again.

DISCUSSION

Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Where is the Rhizome?


Paraphrasing Frank Zappa on the record industry:

In the 60s, the record executives were a bunch of cigar-chomping old guys saying, "Who knows what'll sell? Jimi Hendrix? Sure, let's give him a try." Then psychedelic music and hard rock got popular and suddenly those executives were replaced by young hip record executives saying, "We can't take a chance on this new music because the kids won't like it... and I know." We were better off with the cigar-chomping old guys.

-

Having said that, it was funny which content some former "superuser" members used to post on the front page. It became a kooky mix of very parochial/low (RAW users basically flaming each other) and very curated/high (new media work in the Whitney Biennial). My general feeling is that such a mix made rhizome less safe and more dangerous (in a good way). The front page of rhizome now is much more well-behaved. It wants to be "a hit," and it "knows" what a hit is.

+++++++++

pall wrote:

As one person that mailed me about this post said, Rhizome has become
an "aggregate-blog" and the sense of it being mostly that isn't that
interesting. Community provided content makes up for a very small
portion of Rhizome's most prominent content. Is it then any wonder
that the community isn't producing interesting content? A lot of the
"reblogged" articles are coming from the same websites, can't we just
stop or reduce the reblogging and have links to those websites?
Perhaps the site would benefit from having more editors that are
allowed to post to the front page. If I recall correctly there used to
be a lot more and they did it on a volunteer basis.

DISCUSSION

Re: Where is the Rhizome?


Hi Pall,

Just like video killed the radio star, ReBlog RSS technology killed Rhizome RAW. So now the rhizome front page is like an aggregate blog -- like http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/ , with RAW being just one of dozens of potential RSS feeds from which to choose. Which leverages the collective power of the interweb blogosphere, but de-promotes and ghetto-izes community dialogue on RAW. I've had the strange experience of posting work on RAW, having it picked up by http://dvblog.org via Michael or Doron, and only then having it appear on the rhizome front page reBlogged from dvblog rather than from RAW.

Having said that, the current Rhizome front page is better curated and more representative of the new media scene at large than it was (and how could it not be, culling from such great, original content blogs as http://we-make-money-not-art.com and so many others), but less representative of the bizarre, almost manhattan-agnostic, ass-backwards net.art scene that was rhizome RAW.

But whatever. I've always approached RAW as a small mailing list of about 20 participants whom I already know anyway and maybe 20 more lurkers. I'm probably deluded, but it works for me to think of it that way.

Why less dialogue on RAW? Some other guesses:
1. We've already argued about all there is to argue about, and we're tired of arguing about the same things.
2. We're all in graduate school swamped with an all too steady diet of Heidegger, Graham Harman, Brian Massumi, Bracha Ettinger, and anthropological field studies on Papua New Guinean bird songs and their relationship to human memory and loss (at least I am).
3. We're all too mesmerized re-shuffling our mySpace friends list (at least I'm not).
4. kandinski42 and nn have left the building.
5. We're all trying to become real-world artists and increase our cachet, and quibbling about the aesthetics of actionScript vs. javaScript on an unmoderated, uncurated, unfiltered, undistributed, un-peer-reviewed, old school online mailing list just ain't cool anymore.
6. Information no longer wants to be free. It now wants to be $25.
7. Doughnuts!
8. Ceramics!
9. The White Stripes!
10. Ubiquitous Computing!

I am now going on a 30 minute run. Then I will accompany my wife and children to Sears to shop for a new washer and dryer. Once I am out of graduate school (summer 2008), I may return to RAW in a more chatty capacity to bore and amaze everyone with these and other banal pieces of information amidst everyone else's announcements of new positions available in Robotic Culture Theory and the latest Bill Viola retrospective. Or I may be writing travel grants to Transmediale and composing generative poetry for the next issue of Cabinet Magazine. One never knows.

Rock & Roll Ain't No Pollution,
Curt

DISCUSSION

The Emily Dickinson Difference Engine


http://deepyoung.org/current/emily/

The Emily Dickinson Difference Engine combines phrases from Emily Dickinson's poetry with found objects. The phrases are called at random from a database and superimposed on different environments. This combination of words and things casts them both in a new light -- revealing the impenetrability of things, the malleability of words, and the feelings that humans associate with things and words.

DISCUSSION

cannonball


Hi all,

http://lab404.com/video/cannonball.mov

This was recorded at the Blockbuster Video grand opening in Daphne,
Alabama, US, on December 6, 1996. The had a video karaoke machine
with a bluescreen, and you could choose your song and they would tape
you and give you a copy of the videotape. I think I might have also
had the option to select "Sci-fi" background or something like that.
The whole process took about five minutes and this was the result.

Some close friends refer to this as the highlight of my artistic
career, and sometimes I am inclined to agree with them.

Enjoy,
Curt