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

Not To Be (d/y ethereal radio #107)


http://deepyoung.org/radio/

The places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences. What can be seen designates what is no longer there: "you *see*, here there used to be...," but it can no longer be seen. Demonstratives indicate the invisible identities of the visible; it is the very definition of a place, in fact, that it is composed by these series of displacements and effects among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these moving layers. (de Certeau, 1927~1980~2009)
http://lakelure.com/inn.php

DISCUSSION

Response to "New Media Artists vs Artists With Computers"


Tom,

We've read what you've written. Have you read what we've written? Above, we have posted nuanced distinctions and historical delineations to augment your oversimplified dichotomy. Now it's your turn to read what we have written and respond. It's called a conversation. But you are bent on talking at us rather than dialoguing with us (or ignoring us altogether in a heroic attempt to engage Ceci, the hierarchical "head" of this thread. Why don't you just send her an email?). Guthrie's dichotomy is a provocative oversimplification. It is meant to get a dialogue going rather than to fix a canon. That dialogue is happening here. I think Guthrie's claim that "artists with computers" are "Being and critiquing The People by using the tools made by The Man" is intriguing but problematic. It poses a question regarding tactical media praxis that seems worth exploring. We are currently exploring it at other less polemic online lists and at the library. We will further explore it in Buenos Aires at the end of the month ( http://medialab-prado.es/article/programa_del_seminario_inclusiva-net_netart_segunda_epoca_la_evolucion_de_la_creacion_artistica_en_el_sistema-red ).

There are several ways to approach the fact that your artwork has little pragmatic agency to change anything:
1. Retreat to a claim of formalism and say art was never meant to alter anything culturally. Live in a hermetic gallery culture.
2. Retreat to nihilistic postmodernism and claim nothing can be changed. Do it with a chuckle and call it irony.
3. Claim you are changing things subtly and imperceptibly by staying low and off the radar, being ingenious, cryptic, absurd, etc.

#3 is the most interesting to me. I see "artists with computers" who are doing this (sometimes accidentally). I think Kevin Bewersdorf is close with something like http://www.maximumsorrow.com/writing/spiritsurfing.html . It is not quite as funny, but seems similar in tone with Warhol's A to B and back again. That is a compliment.

+++++++

What is the point of writing, theory, and dialogue? Is the point of writing to come to some kind of closure, fix a canon, and arrive at an end? Or is the point to open things up, problematize them, and bring ways of being into the world that have not yet happened or even been conceived -- to arrive at a what-if/what's-next?

Oversimplifying and mis-characterizing a dichotomy between 1.0 and 2.0 artists creates a rift between two groups. It is a rift that keeps the latter group from inheriting and evolving practices and moves developed by the first group. It forces the second group to reinvent the wheel, all the while patting themselves on the back for the radicality (or accidental nochalance) of their "new" wheel. You are a curious mouthpiece for the artists you perpetually name check and implicitly claim to represent.

Curt


DISCUSSION

Response to "New Media Artists vs Artists With Computers"


Hi Tom,

Don't give up on Rhizome yet. Its love is like bad medicine, but (if you will forgive me a personal observation) bad medicine may be just what you need. And we need you, occasionally condescending to visit us here where you regularly admonish us that our uncivilized environment is no place for the more hierarchically moderated forms of online dialogue to which you are accustomed. I also like the way you almost talk to me, but never directly. It reminds me of John McCain in the presidential debates.

[flash=425,344]http://www.youtube.com/v/skCV2L0c6K0&hl=en&fs=1[/flash]

Keep coming back. It works if you work it.

Curt