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.
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DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Defining Digital Art


Christopher Fahey wrote:

>I do like the fact that the Amoda page [
>http://www.amoda.org/about/digitalart.php ]
>specifically includes a breakdown of how there *can* be several ways of
>talking about and/or making "digital art".

I agree that their multiple analysis approach is novel, but such
inclusiveness may cause more problems than it solves. When a
definition encourages a piece of music to be considered digital art
when it's stored on a CD, but not considered digital art when it's
stored on a cassette, then that definition is focusing on
distinctions that are not useful at best, and diverting at worst.

They're coming at it from a "digital culture" angle. I get more out
of folks coming at it from a media analysis angle. The latter
approach (although more exclusive) seems more likely to lead to the
production of thoughtful, media-aware art. The former approach
(although more inclusive) seems more likely to lead to George Lucas
winning the Golden Nica for digital excellence.

My problem is more with the term "digital art" in the first place.
It seems too broad and hodge-podge to be of much critical use. As
such, amoda's broad definition probably suits the term perfectly.

Personally, thinking of myself as a "digital artist" doesn't really
inform my artistic approach or practice in any interesting ways.
Whereas thinking of myself as an internet artist or a new media
artist or a computer-based artist or a multimedia artist or a
non-linear author or an abstract graphic designer or a creator of
unfinished multi-user compositions or a meme propagation technician
or a d.i.y. curator -- these paradigms are much more fruitful for me
to consider.

peace,
curt

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DISCUSSION

Re: Defining Digital Art


Hi Chris,

To me, that definition of "digital art" is too broad to be useful.
According to that definition, a CD of Steve Reich's "Music for 18
Musicians" is digital art, but a cassette tape of the same album is
not. "The Seven Samurai" on digital TV is digital art, but the same
movie projected by an analog film projector is not.

The technical means of storage and transference are relevant as media
distinguishers only to the extent that they effect the inherent
nature of the work itself. In the above examples, all "digital" does
is make those works a bit more readily transferable and (debatably) a
bit more hi-res.

One could argue that almost everything produced today in the first
world has been "touched" somewhere along the way by the digital
process. Terms of definition such as "digital art" are meant to
single out certain things at the exclusion of other things for the
purpose of more precise understanding. "Digital" fails as an
adjective in this regard, because it almost always means more than
what people want it to mean. "Interactive" fails for similar
reasons. People fall into using "new media" because it can basically
be defined any way you like, since it semiotically means nothing (new
as compared to old, starting when exactly?).

peace,
curt
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++++++++++++++

Christopher Fahey wrote:

> I like this:
>
> http://www.amoda.org/about/digitalart.php
>
> -Cf
>
> [christopher eli fahey]

DISCUSSION

strung [boy_girl remix]


O God
High in your fields above earth
Come and be real for us
You with your mind
Oh yes you are
Beautifully fine

O girl
Electric witch you are
Limp in society's ditch you are
Visually fine
Oh yes you are
But mentally dying

O boy
Just like a boat you are
Sunk but somehow you float you do
Mentally weak
Oh yes you are
But so much you speak

- dr. bolan, 1971

http://www.oculart.com/thetreble
http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/vns.html
http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Ss/0120601/jcusak1.jpg

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DISCUSSION

towards a more ambient art


Hi everybody on the rhizome list,

I'm taking a break from mowing my property. It's an acre and most of
it is pretty hilly. I'm halfway done.

I'm always thinking about craft vis concept, design vis idea,
implementation vis plan. If it was all idea, designers would be out
of a job. What a designer does is implement an idea craftily and
skillfully, so that the way in which the initial idea is encoded
enhances/embodies/enlivens/substantiates the idea.

I've been thinking about this experiment a lot:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/0,8542,981741,00.html

The experiment itself is much more interesting and successful to me
than any of the individual pieces of art used in the experiment.

It's easy to dismiss the homeowners in the experiment as philistine,
but I think that's too convenient.

I think most people expect there to be some
implementation/craft/design involved in art. Indeed, that is the
"art" of art. It's not that people necessarily want a physical
object, although perhaps that's how most people often express their
disappointment in concept-centric art ("there's NO THING to it").

I was watching Pulp Fiction the other night, and it occured to me
that, as with "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (or Hamlet for that
matter), much of the "art" of Pulp Fiction is in the dialogue that
occurs "in between" the "plot" of the film. The plot is just a
vehicle for some quirky dialogue and interesting acting. Indeed, all
of Shakespeare's plots were already well known. His invention was
not in the plots, but in the art/craft of playwriting implementation.
Just as Hitchcock's genius was not in plot construction or even
script writing (neither of which he did), but in the craft of film
directing.

So the Cliff's Notes to "Merchant of Venice" are by no means
"Merchant of Venice" itself. Because the art of that play is not
merely in a summary of it, but in the implementation of it. Yet with
so much object-incidental contemporary conceptual art, all we get are
the Cliff's Notes. Cage's 4'33'' or Sherry Levine's "After Walker
Evans" -- those are Cliff's Note pieces. I don't need to experience
those pieces to "get them" entirely. The Cliff's Notes explanation
of the pieces will wholly suffice.

Note that I am NOT dissing pieces like "printer tree" (
http://www.endnode.net/install.html ) or "listening post" (
http://www.earstudio.com/projects/listeningpost.html ). Both of
those pieces, although obviously conceptual, are not "merely"
conceptual. I can read about those project and see photographs and
quicktime videos of those installation spaces, but until I experience
the installations in person, I am not getting the full effect of the
art. There is "art" in the implementation of these concepts.

I don't want to impose rules on what is right and what is wrong
concerning the concept <-----> implementation continuum. But I will
say (for the billionth time) that I find art on the extreme "concept"
side of the spectrum particularly flat, pedantic, didactic, and
boring. Like reading Cliff's Notes.

Another disadvantage of Cliff's Notes-type art (and this becomes
evident in the above Guardian experiment) is that it doesn't wear
very well. I'm not going to re-read the Cliff's Notes to "Merchant
of Venice" for pleasure. Once I get it, I get it. Which is why
highly conceptual "Cliff's Notes" art works better in a gallery (or
in the footnotes of an academic essay) than in one's living
environment. In a gallery, you can cruise around, get the punch
line, feel enlightened, and leave. But in your home, you have to sit
and stare at a half sheep in formaldahyde, or an unmade bed, or the
lights switching on and off, or whatever it is.

When thinking of art, I always fall back on audio production
analogies, since that is the art I learned first. Cliff's Notes art
is like bubblegum pop music. It's like the Backstreet Boys. Chew it
up and spit it out. There's no depth to the production. There's no
craft in the production. It's enough to get the voices up front and
out there, and then a tried and true production formula will carry
the rest. And this approach works well in the highly structured,
insular, commercial environment of pop radio. Just as Cliff's Notes
art works well in the highly structured, insular, commercial
environment of the contemporary gallery or the festival installation
space. But such bubblegum/Cliff's Notes products don't wear too well
"in real life." "Stranded-on-a-desert-island-with-only-three-things"
items they ain't.

Not that everything has to be Tolstoy. But when so few things even
attempt to be Tolstoy and so many things are content to be Bazooka
Joe Bubble Gum Cartoons, it gets kind of boring for ye olde art
patron. The Cliff's Notes artist would say, "I'm just echoing the
meaninglessness and frivolity of our post-modern culture." Well why
on earth would you want to do that? If I'm already drowning in
banality, why do I need more of it?

So it's like there are two extremes -- either the art is stupid and
frivolous and craftless and pissing into the void, or it's all
overboard political and tactical. The former is a silly punch line;
the latter is a moral object lesson. Neither are currently doing it
for me.

Here are some marginally applicable quotations:

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening
attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as
ignorable as it is interesting." - Brian Eno, 1978

"A lot of people listen to music and they're really just listening to
a voice with music in the background. I've never really listened to
that. I've just listened to everything - the guitars and the whole
lot." - Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, 1992

"Boring Sidney, Boring. Exterminate! Exterminate!"
- John Lydon in "Sid and Nancy"

"I think you're rationalizing this whole thing into something you did
on purpose. I think we're stuck with a very stupid and a very dismal
looking album. This is depressing. This is something you wear around
your arm, you don't put this on your f***ing turntable."

- David St. Hubbins in Spinal Tap re: the album cover to "Smell the Glove"

back to mowing,
curt

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DISCUSSION

trans europe express [atom_heart remix]


http://lab404.com/misc/trans.mp3

the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely i have a delightful inheritance.

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