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: onCelestialEvent (creation)


Lewis says of http://www.systemsoular.com/LifeProgram

"simplistic slick crap. the actionscript equivalent of a greeting card."

++++++++++++

Last week, in an offlist correspondence, M. Turner says of
http://www.redsmoke.com/TIOTR/

"There's a 13 year old kid who makes tons of Yahoo greeting cards
who's far more charming, witty, and original."

++++++++++++

It seems once linear web animation is barred passage through the
official "interactive" net art door, it is most conveniently disposed
of in the "shallow greeting card" dis bin.

Also, you can't make net art that looks slick. It can look like some
housewife's 1996 personal home page, but it can't look slick.

DISCUSSION

Re: RE: RHIZOME_RARE: New Steps - at NY Digital Salon


chris wrote:
"It seems to me that any curator who wishes to include web-based work in an exhibition should assume the same risk that the person who created the work did: to learn to live with and accept the potential ephemerality of the work, and even to take some responsibility to keep the work alive (assuming the work is not intentionally temporary). In the same way that traditional-media artists and curators take a certain responsibility for the handling and archiving of actual physical artworks, so should we internet artists and curators be conscious of (and responsible for) the fragility and availability of internet-based artworks. And what about when links fail? As we say on the internet, c'est la vie."

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Then the institution's job after the show should be to play webmaster, maintaining links, weeding out broken links, etc. Rhizome pays someone to do this for the artbase (less weeding out the broken links). The URL of one of my linked objects in the artbase recently changed, I contacted rhizome, and they changed the link to it on their site. If institutions (brick & mortar or otherwise) are unwilling to pay someone to play webmaster, then their onlne exhibits will wind up linkrotted and seem like last year's news. If the exhibit was about ephemerality, maybe this makes sense. But if the exhibit was about any other theme, those online exhibits either need to be actively maintained as archives or removed.

I recently lost a link at http://www.deepyoung.org/permanent/dolor/ which formerly led to http://www.knology.net/~carlos/redneck.htm Fortunately, I was able to remedy the situation thanks to archive.org. I simply changed the link to this:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021015131654/http://www.knology.net/~carlos/redneck.htm
The accompanying images weren't archived (a grave loss to us all, since JD8 is the best conceptual artist since Cold Bacon), but at least the text remained, which was enough for the purposes of the exhibit.

Another point I would make is that, if galleries continue to prefer offline CD-ROM exhibition of sites, this practice encourages discrete, self-contained works and discourages more sprawling networked pieces. PlotFracture ( http://www.lab404.com/plotfracture/ ) was recently featured in some online show/zine. The curator/editor wanted me to send the piece to her as a zipped email attachment. I told her she really didn't want me to do this, since the piece is 125 MB and growing. Plus it links off-site or cross-site about as much as it links to itself. She understood and agreed to simply link to it rather than locally host it.

Teaching undergraduates, I can recognize my students who surf regularly, use IRC, post to bulletin boards; and the ones who merely use email and visit espn.com for the sports scores. The students into net culture "get" networked art much more intuitively than the nominal net users, and their work on the whole is much more clever ( a personal favorite: http://mmas.unca.edu/~alsides/373/IAInstitutesite/ ). In the same way, curators that have never uploaded anything via ftp, who don't have high speed net access, who spend less than 3 hours a day online, they just aren't going to get net art (or its apropos curation) as well as they fancy.


DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: dream7 piece


> What I am against is an orthodoxy that is nothing to
> do with the concrete discussion of the merits of a
> particular work but which measures things against a
> particular technical or conceptual yardstick

I totally agree. This type of formalist critique (is it net-centric? what expected statements does it make [man/machine, telepresence, surveilance, political protest]? is it reactive, autogenerative, non-linear?) is like connect the dots for lazy art critics. Props to marc garrettt for posting what I'm reading as the only truly incisive crit of this piece thus far. Everybody is talking about their own grids and filters and agendas, and nobody is engaging with the piece to see the terms on which it attempts to communicate itself. Is it lack of ability to engage with an art object as anything other than a conceptual signifier? Is it a dearth of vocabulary with which to describe an appropriately concise aesthetic reaction?

It's like critiquing Monet's water lily pond painting and saying, "well, it's a bit blurry. You can't really see the objects clearly. Perhaps he should better acquaint himself with Photoshop's 'unsharp mask' filter."

This particular dream7 piece may well suck, but pointing out how it doesn't fit through your genre grid is a shorthand way of telling me nothing much.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: dream7 piece


t:
more conceptual or gallery or museum oriented work doesn't mean less cool-ass design/visual/punk-tude (or whatev you wanna call it) work that can fit, it's an ever expanding sphere of stuff.

c:
I totally agree.

t:
but, curt's args have worked on me a bit. i really want to bring this stuff all together, hopefully MTAA will be bringing some projects out soon that can combine visual concerns with a conceptual framework.

c:
cool. y'all's White Stripes piece has a dear place in my heart. As I wrote to m. river, Jack White's Lesley amp tone on Hello Operator is so discrete and unsustained, it's the perfect audio source for y'all's particuar hack.

t:
it can be brought together (as i think curt does in practice, but his rhetoric seems to be different).

c:
my rhetoric is rhetorical. we aim above the mark in order to hit the mark. I preach conceptual awareness/intention to the eye candy ds9r doodz crowd. And we will all gloriously collide in the wilderness of shining rocks.

http://www.lab404.com/plotfracture/sop/