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.
the tyranny of an ideal (1957/2009)
A three-quarter face photograph... suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars, and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined. Almost all three-quarter face photos are ascensional, the face is lifted towars a supernatural light which draws it up and elevates it to the realm of a higher humanity; the candidate reaches the Olympus of elevated feelings, where all political contraditions are solved: peace and war in Algeria, social progress and employers' profits, so-called 'free' religious schools and subsidies from the sugar-beet lobby, the Right and the Left (an opposition always 'superseded'!): all these coexist peacefully in this thoughtful gaze, nobly fixed on the hidden interests of Order."
Roland Barthes, "Photography and Electoral Appeal" from Mythologies, 1957.
Roland Barthes, "Photography and Electoral Appeal" from Mythologies, 1957.

a lyric about an extraordinary creature
The beauty of this creature could only be equalled by
the extent of its paradox only be equalled by
because it wanted two things
opposite and conflicted
It wanted the light, it wanted everything in sight
wanted to dominate or at least to participate
idling in the comfort
of its chair and its slippers
The curiosity of the extraordinary creature
was indeed limited because it could not suffer
the unknown, in any shape or form
at the same time it wanted to look everywhere
Set up in its seat at the top of its tower
the creature revelled in being a spectator
through the glass, what a glorious view
relishing the gift of so much transparence
Relishing the gift of so much transparence
having had absolutely no influence.
(Stereolab, 2004)
the extent of its paradox only be equalled by
because it wanted two things
opposite and conflicted
It wanted the light, it wanted everything in sight
wanted to dominate or at least to participate
idling in the comfort
of its chair and its slippers
The curiosity of the extraordinary creature
was indeed limited because it could not suffer
the unknown, in any shape or form
at the same time it wanted to look everywhere
Set up in its seat at the top of its tower
the creature revelled in being a spectator
through the glass, what a glorious view
relishing the gift of so much transparence
Relishing the gift of so much transparence
having had absolutely no influence.
(Stereolab, 2004)
My Favorite Things (1959/2009) - Oscar Hammerstein + Google
My Favorite "My Favorite Things" (1959/1966/2009) -- Richard Rogers + John Coltrane + Curt Cloninger
http://lab404.com/misc/my_favorite_things_greenwich_village_28may1966.mp3
http://lab404.com/misc/my_favorite_things_tokyo_22july1966.mp3
http://lab404.com/misc/my_favorite_things_greenwich_village_28may1966.mp3
http://lab404.com/misc/my_favorite_things_tokyo_22july1966.mp3