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.
Thanks Brian.
see also Keith White's "The Killer App: Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate Revolution" (1995):
http://zooid.org/~vid/txt/decon_wired.html
And this excerpt below from my essay here ( http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption.pdf ):
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Institutional Production of the "Interactive Subject"
The problem is, not all forms of web 2.0 "interactivity" are inherently "tactical." Put another way, mere "use" does not automatically constitute "resistance."
Is using off-the-shelf corporate software to create a "unique/personal" MySpace page a way of subverting the institutions of mass media production, or is it simply one more example of these institutions using the myth of "originality" to assimilate and amass a demographic market of "unique" individuals? Artists who use these templates have to be particularly wily if they hope to keep from being assimilated and rendered "tactically" impotent.
How do you hack/resist a platform that already allows (indeed, invites) you to customize it? Either we have arrived at an open source utopia and we simply need to keep using these social networking tools appreciatively in the ways that they afford; or the agency of our radical "resistance" has been rendered irrelevant because the corporations have decided to let the people eat cake (provided we eat their particular brand of interactive cake).
The agency that de Certeau's consumer enacted to tactically reassemble the one-to-many media broadcasted to her in 1980 is being increasingly usurped by institutionally recommended (and protocologically enforced) modes of interactive behavior. Once the consumer mistakes these institutional "suggestions" for the exercises of her own tactical agency, she fails to exercise that actual agency. With so many "customizable options" available, how can she "resist?"
In a fleeting moment of insight, Billy Joel sings, "I got remote control and a color TV / I don't change channels so they must change me." The corollary may actually be more accurate. The more I change channels, the more they change me. I sacrifice my "resistant" agency at the altar of trivial difference. The danger of MySpace and YouTube is not the threat that they may wind up archiving and owning all the "content" I produce, or that they are currently getting rich off the content I produce, but that they control the parameters within which I produce "my original" content.
"Production" turns out to be an amorphous term. It begs the question "production of what?" Now that "consumers" have become "content producers," we should be asking ourselves, Who are the meta-producers? Who produces the contexts surrounding "creative" prosumer production? Who produces the tools that suggest the proper "way" in which amateur's are to produce? These meta-producers are no longer producing "content." Or rather, their "content" is the production of an "interactive" human subject -- a subject who feels autonomous, empowered, and creative; but who may have difficulty enacting any pragmatic agency. This transition from spectacularized consumption to spectacularized production is insidious.
The placebo effect of web 2.0 "empowerment" is at least as problematic as the original one-to-many TV effect of disenfranchisement. At least in 1980 there was a suspicion that something needed to be resisted.
see also Keith White's "The Killer App: Wired Magazine, Voice of the Corporate Revolution" (1995):
http://zooid.org/~vid/txt/decon_wired.html
And this excerpt below from my essay here ( http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption.pdf ):
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Institutional Production of the "Interactive Subject"
The problem is, not all forms of web 2.0 "interactivity" are inherently "tactical." Put another way, mere "use" does not automatically constitute "resistance."
Is using off-the-shelf corporate software to create a "unique/personal" MySpace page a way of subverting the institutions of mass media production, or is it simply one more example of these institutions using the myth of "originality" to assimilate and amass a demographic market of "unique" individuals? Artists who use these templates have to be particularly wily if they hope to keep from being assimilated and rendered "tactically" impotent.
How do you hack/resist a platform that already allows (indeed, invites) you to customize it? Either we have arrived at an open source utopia and we simply need to keep using these social networking tools appreciatively in the ways that they afford; or the agency of our radical "resistance" has been rendered irrelevant because the corporations have decided to let the people eat cake (provided we eat their particular brand of interactive cake).
The agency that de Certeau's consumer enacted to tactically reassemble the one-to-many media broadcasted to her in 1980 is being increasingly usurped by institutionally recommended (and protocologically enforced) modes of interactive behavior. Once the consumer mistakes these institutional "suggestions" for the exercises of her own tactical agency, she fails to exercise that actual agency. With so many "customizable options" available, how can she "resist?"
In a fleeting moment of insight, Billy Joel sings, "I got remote control and a color TV / I don't change channels so they must change me." The corollary may actually be more accurate. The more I change channels, the more they change me. I sacrifice my "resistant" agency at the altar of trivial difference. The danger of MySpace and YouTube is not the threat that they may wind up archiving and owning all the "content" I produce, or that they are currently getting rich off the content I produce, but that they control the parameters within which I produce "my original" content.
"Production" turns out to be an amorphous term. It begs the question "production of what?" Now that "consumers" have become "content producers," we should be asking ourselves, Who are the meta-producers? Who produces the contexts surrounding "creative" prosumer production? Who produces the tools that suggest the proper "way" in which amateur's are to produce? These meta-producers are no longer producing "content." Or rather, their "content" is the production of an "interactive" human subject -- a subject who feels autonomous, empowered, and creative; but who may have difficulty enacting any pragmatic agency. This transition from spectacularized consumption to spectacularized production is insidious.
The placebo effect of web 2.0 "empowerment" is at least as problematic as the original one-to-many TV effect of disenfranchisement. At least in 1980 there was a suspicion that something needed to be resisted.
"In Rainbows" In Rainbows (2007/2009) - Radiohead + Google
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=red
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=orange
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=yellow
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=green
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=teal
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=blue
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=purple
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=pink
--
(archive: http://deepyoung.org/current/google/ )
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=orange
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=yellow
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=green
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=teal
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=blue
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=purple
http://images.google.com/images?q=%22in+rainbows%22&imgcolor=pink
--
(archive: http://deepyoung.org/current/google/ )