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.
Internet Delivers People (2008) - Ramsay Stirling
Hi Tom,
I'm glad you are talking to me (if not directly, than at least a bit less obliquely). My name is Curt. I don't think we've been properly introduced. I appreciate you taking the time to critique my post. I will endeavor to be less ambitious in my ethical goals, and I will try to write "good, unpompous" discussion board prose. Please let me know how I'm doing. With your insight, patience, and detatched intellectual perspective, I'm sure our online discussions can reach great heights. Thanks for keeping it real and making it fun.
Your Affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape
++++++++++++
Hi Tom,
Above is just one of the many directions our dialogue could go. To me it is largely boring, petty, dramatic, spectacular, and wanky. I don't mind the acrimony and the opposition, but the pissing-contest aspect is pragmatically useless to me.
I'm currently reading de Certeau, Galloway/Thacker, Ken Knabb's Situationist anthology, Wark, Bourriaud, Lunenfeld, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Perloff's "The Futurist Movement," trying to work out a middle ground between tactics and strategies, consumption and production. Hence the post above.
Aspects of this inquiry are related to surf clubs. You have previously defended the value of surf clubs in terms of "semiotics." If you could explain what you understand that to mean, that would be interesting and valuable to me. Saussure, Pierce, Barthes, Chomsky, Bakhtin, Derrida, de Certeau, Eco -- where are you coming from? If you aren't referencing any of these writers, I would like to hear your personal understanding of how surf clubs are semiotic. If you would rather have this conversation "offstage / out of the ring," my email is curt@lab404.com
Best,
Curt
I'm glad you are talking to me (if not directly, than at least a bit less obliquely). My name is Curt. I don't think we've been properly introduced. I appreciate you taking the time to critique my post. I will endeavor to be less ambitious in my ethical goals, and I will try to write "good, unpompous" discussion board prose. Please let me know how I'm doing. With your insight, patience, and detatched intellectual perspective, I'm sure our online discussions can reach great heights. Thanks for keeping it real and making it fun.
Your Affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape
++++++++++++
Hi Tom,
Above is just one of the many directions our dialogue could go. To me it is largely boring, petty, dramatic, spectacular, and wanky. I don't mind the acrimony and the opposition, but the pissing-contest aspect is pragmatically useless to me.
I'm currently reading de Certeau, Galloway/Thacker, Ken Knabb's Situationist anthology, Wark, Bourriaud, Lunenfeld, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Perloff's "The Futurist Movement," trying to work out a middle ground between tactics and strategies, consumption and production. Hence the post above.
Aspects of this inquiry are related to surf clubs. You have previously defended the value of surf clubs in terms of "semiotics." If you could explain what you understand that to mean, that would be interesting and valuable to me. Saussure, Pierce, Barthes, Chomsky, Bakhtin, Derrida, de Certeau, Eco -- where are you coming from? If you aren't referencing any of these writers, I would like to hear your personal understanding of how surf clubs are semiotic. If you would rather have this conversation "offstage / out of the ring," my email is curt@lab404.com
Best,
Curt
Internet Delivers People (2008) - Ramsay Stirling
Thanks Brett.
I've been thinking a lot lately about de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life" and its relative (in)applicability to interweb art. Richard Serra made his original "Television Delivers People" piece in 1973, and de Certeau wrote "The Practice of Everyday Life" in 1980, both times when the one-to-many medium of television pervaded everyone's lives. Perhaps the best one could do then was to become a tactical consumer, creatively reconstituting the "content" delivered via the state-controlled TV "medium." But to take that same "weak" tactical approach on the interweb, a medium that has always been any-to-many, seems a kind of easy cop-out. Yes, there is and always has been a whole lot of commercial detritus floating around online, but is my only option to detourn it at a surface/content level, as if I had no access to the guts of the network, no access to my own means of "content production"? I can make my own http://cnn.com ( it's http://onion.com ). If I choose to wreck my own net art car on the "information superhighway" (however allusively or ironically), this doesn't prove that all net art cars on the highway are doomed to crash. Where is my flying net.art car?
In a recent interview, Cory Arcangel mused why contemporary net art is so interested in comedy (and why youTube has turned into America's Funniest Home Videos). One answer might be that it's easier to be coy, cynical, and cryptically allusive than to bite off the Herculean (and easily ridiculable) task of massively modulating/modifying culture. Cory's own work is more admirably Warholean than the work of most of his delicious.com re-blogging followers. But I have to wonder -- can an army of purposefully a-political, barely discernible, self-referential, online detritus re-hashers somehow magically equal a tactically ingenious, below-the-radar, cultural revolution? Or is this the wrong reactionary model of tactical resistance for a medium that has always afforded non-commercial entities a much greater "strategic" production agency than television?
I've been thinking a lot lately about de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life" and its relative (in)applicability to interweb art. Richard Serra made his original "Television Delivers People" piece in 1973, and de Certeau wrote "The Practice of Everyday Life" in 1980, both times when the one-to-many medium of television pervaded everyone's lives. Perhaps the best one could do then was to become a tactical consumer, creatively reconstituting the "content" delivered via the state-controlled TV "medium." But to take that same "weak" tactical approach on the interweb, a medium that has always been any-to-many, seems a kind of easy cop-out. Yes, there is and always has been a whole lot of commercial detritus floating around online, but is my only option to detourn it at a surface/content level, as if I had no access to the guts of the network, no access to my own means of "content production"? I can make my own http://cnn.com ( it's http://onion.com ). If I choose to wreck my own net art car on the "information superhighway" (however allusively or ironically), this doesn't prove that all net art cars on the highway are doomed to crash. Where is my flying net.art car?
In a recent interview, Cory Arcangel mused why contemporary net art is so interested in comedy (and why youTube has turned into America's Funniest Home Videos). One answer might be that it's easier to be coy, cynical, and cryptically allusive than to bite off the Herculean (and easily ridiculable) task of massively modulating/modifying culture. Cory's own work is more admirably Warholean than the work of most of his delicious.com re-blogging followers. But I have to wonder -- can an army of purposefully a-political, barely discernible, self-referential, online detritus re-hashers somehow magically equal a tactically ingenious, below-the-radar, cultural revolution? Or is this the wrong reactionary model of tactical resistance for a medium that has always afforded non-commercial entities a much greater "strategic" production agency than television?
INVISIBLE CURSOR.COM (2008) - Rafael Rozendaal
This piece works exactly the way the artist wants it to work, within the confines of the .swf file, as determined by the design parameters of Adobe Inc., as handled by the plug-in of your browser software. Move the cursor off of the .swf file, and the cursor re-appears. Right-clicking on the .swf file results in the uber-conceptual Flash interface menu. Quite precious. Hardly Brechtian.
Compare that to interface design experiments that exile your mouse button altogether:
http://dontclick.it/
Compare that to earlier Netochka Nezvanova .mov pieces that eroded your browser frame and began eating away at your desktop image.
Compare that to painstation hardware ( http://www.painstation.de/ ) that shreds your physical hand ( http://www.fursr.com/furyoureyesonly/?show=Hall_of_Pain ).
Compare that to Piotr Szyhalski "The Chest Piece" (more or less archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20021015053433/www.mcad.edu/home/faculty/szyhalski/spl/title.html ), where you induce mind-numbing/healing functions by assigning extraordinary powers to the "Memory of Black" via the quasi-medical technique of palming.
I want invisiblehand.org, a net art piece that uses a combination of language, networks, animation, imagery, conceptual framing, and mind control to cause my right hand to disappear.
And speak of the devil:
http://invisiblehand.org
Where is my hand?
Compare that to interface design experiments that exile your mouse button altogether:
http://dontclick.it/
Compare that to earlier Netochka Nezvanova .mov pieces that eroded your browser frame and began eating away at your desktop image.
Compare that to painstation hardware ( http://www.painstation.de/ ) that shreds your physical hand ( http://www.fursr.com/furyoureyesonly/?show=Hall_of_Pain ).
Compare that to Piotr Szyhalski "The Chest Piece" (more or less archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20021015053433/www.mcad.edu/home/faculty/szyhalski/spl/title.html ), where you induce mind-numbing/healing functions by assigning extraordinary powers to the "Memory of Black" via the quasi-medical technique of palming.
I want invisiblehand.org, a net art piece that uses a combination of language, networks, animation, imagery, conceptual framing, and mind control to cause my right hand to disappear.
And speak of the devil:
http://invisiblehand.org
Where is my hand?
Twitter Art is Dead, Long Live Twitter Art!
Hi Jon,
This is a good example of how "2.0" net artists who use corporately created social networking tools (aka "surface level content templates") to overtly (or even subtly) critique said networks are always going to be "subject" to the corporate control of the institutions in charge of those networks. The recent "Pirates of the Amazon" project is a similar example (although it is seems more ingeniously conceived than this twitter example, because it didn't rely on Amazon's hardware/software/system, and thus Amazon had to resort to the external legal system to shut it down). An earlier example is Keith Obadike's Blackness on sale at eBay. The "aw shucks," cluetrain-manifesto-inspired, neo-corporate-cuddly speak used on the Twitter suspended site page ( http://twitter.com/suspended ) is telling. They are not offended, legally threatened, or even critiqued. They are comfortably in control of their own spin as they endearingly eradicate every trace of the project.
This is the conundrum of critical art in the era of corporately commodified social networking. How does a tactical media artist hack a corporate service (like mySpace) that is alread purposefully left open to be user-configured? Either we have arrived at open source utopia and we simply need to begin using these networks as they afford, like all the other happy users; or the agency of our radical protests have been rendered irrelevant because the corporations have decided to let the people eat cake (provided we eat cake in their approved way). Any further protestations simply seem like sour grapes (or, in this case, spam). "We gave you twitter for free, why are you munging up (y)our utopic network?" "We gave you reasonably priced access to Amazon's DVD database, what are you bitching about now?"
It seems like for such a project to succeed (and to me, mere canonization in parochial net art circles as yet another conceptual/tactical one-liner doesn't count as "success"), it needs to somehow be more widely distributed. Either a bunch of people employ these bots at the same time, or there is some kind of purposeful residual trace built into the life-cycle of the project, something to live on beyond a few screen shots, blog posts, and discussion board dialogues.
Either that or abandon situationist "tactical media" paradigms altogether and move towards something akin to De Certeau's "user as tactical consumer." But that is a longer essay.
Best,
Curt
This is a good example of how "2.0" net artists who use corporately created social networking tools (aka "surface level content templates") to overtly (or even subtly) critique said networks are always going to be "subject" to the corporate control of the institutions in charge of those networks. The recent "Pirates of the Amazon" project is a similar example (although it is seems more ingeniously conceived than this twitter example, because it didn't rely on Amazon's hardware/software/system, and thus Amazon had to resort to the external legal system to shut it down). An earlier example is Keith Obadike's Blackness on sale at eBay. The "aw shucks," cluetrain-manifesto-inspired, neo-corporate-cuddly speak used on the Twitter suspended site page ( http://twitter.com/suspended ) is telling. They are not offended, legally threatened, or even critiqued. They are comfortably in control of their own spin as they endearingly eradicate every trace of the project.
This is the conundrum of critical art in the era of corporately commodified social networking. How does a tactical media artist hack a corporate service (like mySpace) that is alread purposefully left open to be user-configured? Either we have arrived at open source utopia and we simply need to begin using these networks as they afford, like all the other happy users; or the agency of our radical protests have been rendered irrelevant because the corporations have decided to let the people eat cake (provided we eat cake in their approved way). Any further protestations simply seem like sour grapes (or, in this case, spam). "We gave you twitter for free, why are you munging up (y)our utopic network?" "We gave you reasonably priced access to Amazon's DVD database, what are you bitching about now?"
It seems like for such a project to succeed (and to me, mere canonization in parochial net art circles as yet another conceptual/tactical one-liner doesn't count as "success"), it needs to somehow be more widely distributed. Either a bunch of people employ these bots at the same time, or there is some kind of purposeful residual trace built into the life-cycle of the project, something to live on beyond a few screen shots, blog posts, and discussion board dialogues.
Either that or abandon situationist "tactical media" paradigms altogether and move towards something akin to De Certeau's "user as tactical consumer." But that is a longer essay.
Best,
Curt
My New Book
Hi all,
My most recent book just came out:
http://www.amazon.com/Fresher-Styles-Web-Designers-Underground/dp/0321562690/
The companion site for the book is here:
http://lab404.com/fresher/
The book is more about design than art, but aspects of it are related to some of the dialogues we have had here about the interweb.
Here are some people and organizations mentioned in the book:
Arcangel, Cory
The Art Gallery of Knoxville
Baldessari, John
Beardsley, Aubrey
Beck
Bjork
blingee.com
Borges, Jorge Luis
Byrne, David
Cage, John
Carroll, Lewis
Creative Time
Debatty, Regine
Dickinson, Emily
Drucker, Johanna
Eno, Brian
Fella, Edward
Fischerspooner
Galerie Eva Presenhuber
The Good, The Bad, and The Queen
Gorey, Edward
Grosse, Katharina
Kay, Alan
Kent, Corita
Kremers, Marc
Lang, Robert J.
Latour, Bruno
Lialina, Olia
Love and Rockets
Mau, Bruce
Minogue, Kylie
Morris, William
Moscoso, Victor
Mountford, Joy
The New Museum
Patterson, James
Radiohead
Venturi, Robert
The Walker Art Center
Weiner, Lawrence
Weingart, Wolfgang
Best,
Curt
My most recent book just came out:
http://www.amazon.com/Fresher-Styles-Web-Designers-Underground/dp/0321562690/
The companion site for the book is here:
http://lab404.com/fresher/
The book is more about design than art, but aspects of it are related to some of the dialogues we have had here about the interweb.
Here are some people and organizations mentioned in the book:
Arcangel, Cory
The Art Gallery of Knoxville
Baldessari, John
Beardsley, Aubrey
Beck
Bjork
blingee.com
Borges, Jorge Luis
Byrne, David
Cage, John
Carroll, Lewis
Creative Time
Debatty, Regine
Dickinson, Emily
Drucker, Johanna
Eno, Brian
Fella, Edward
Fischerspooner
Galerie Eva Presenhuber
The Good, The Bad, and The Queen
Gorey, Edward
Grosse, Katharina
Kay, Alan
Kent, Corita
Kremers, Marc
Lang, Robert J.
Latour, Bruno
Lialina, Olia
Love and Rockets
Mau, Bruce
Minogue, Kylie
Morris, William
Moscoso, Victor
Mountford, Joy
The New Museum
Patterson, James
Radiohead
Venturi, Robert
The Walker Art Center
Weiner, Lawrence
Weingart, Wolfgang
Best,
Curt