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

badges!? [ds9_is_sexy remix 2.0]


The response to post-structuralism at Cranbrook was largely
optimistic, side-stepping the profound pessimism and political
critique that permeates these writers' major works. McCoy used the
architectural theory of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown as a
"stepping stone" to post-structuralism, enabling her to merge the Pop
aestheticization of the American commercial vernacular with
post-structuralism's critique of "fixed meaning." McCoy's preference
for celebration over criticism is echoed in Keedy's comment, "It was
the poetic aspect of Barthes which attracted me, not the Marxist
analysis. After all, we're designers working in a consumer society,
and while Marxism is interesting as an idea, I wouldn't want to put
it into practice."

- ellen lupton & j. abbott miller

http://www.cranbrookdesign.com/gallery/album32

"Badges!? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't
have to show you any stinking badges!!"

- Gold Hat

http://old.kak.ru/images/archive/8/raygun/

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: notes for a hypothetical essay on relocating the aura


Hi Marc,

It will be a happy day when the majority of networked art is *not* about the network itself. That's what I was making fun of here: http://deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/ . I think media can change us if we expose ourselves to it, but I live in out here in the woods. The local paper mill is the technology that most radically effects the lives of my neighbors, or the technology of farming, which hasn't changed much.

I'm suspicious of the assumption that advancements in media inherently and radically redefine and evolutionize every single person on the planet. I dig McLuhan's tenet that media alter sense ratios pan-culturally, but I think it happens to greater and lesser degrees. Like William Gibson's observation that the future has arrived; it's just not evenly distributed. Urban dwellers and 24/7 media junkies can fall into a kind of parochial trap and think that their world is *the* world. This can lead to some pretty tepid, myopic art. It is politically incorrect to lump "the orient," but nobody has a problem talking about "our contemporary culture." As you point out, simply watching someone on television doesn't make them part of "our contemporary culture."

peace,
curt

marc garrett wrote:
In regard to many of us dealing with expanding our way of working when
using technology, and contemporary thought and practises - we have
become controllers of our own creative noise, via a pact of being what
we desired to be. Perhaps we are now too self aware, and need to loosen
our presumptive mind maps so to enable a more 'inner' subjectivity, that
transgresses, expectations of the medium that we are all so well
connected with.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: notes for a hypothetical essay on relocating the aura


Hi marc,

Doh! Hazan actually uses the word "wonder," takes Benjamin to task for celebrating the loss of something that we now miss, and speculates about ways to relocate the aura in non-object art -- and all this in 2001! It makes me feel two things: 1. I'm not so crazy or off-center for re-reading Benjamin this way and trying to explore all this. 2. I'm not as original a thinker as I thought. 3. There's never enough time for reading!

I need to read Hazan's entire essay, but already I take issue with the phrasing of the term "virtual aura." I know she means "an aura which surrounds a 'virtual' non-object space," but the phrase "virtual aura" reads as if she's describing the aura itself as being virtual. Which is a big "duh." It was already "virtual" pre-Benjamin in the era of the art object. Plus I hate the word "virtual." It's so 1989 Jaron Lanier VR goggles techgnosis. I would at least rephrase it as "aura of the virtual."

Physicists will get into endlessly niggling, paradigmatic, largely theoretical details about quantum theory vs. string theory (and receive top dollar grants to do it), because the nuances they are discussing can blow physical stuff up. Sub-atomic physics is "real," not because they "really" know what's going on down there, but because the models and paradigms they construct for what's going on down there are verifiable in terms of whether or not they can be used to blow up "real" (read, "physical") stuff.

Yet we artists (especially those who don't believe in a spiritual realm) have an almost impossible time discussing the nuances of something like "aura," presumably because it's not "real." Which only means it's not physically verifiable. For example, if my paradigm of the aura is more accurate than another artist's paradigm of the aura, and I build an art bomb based on my paradigm, and she builds an art bomb based on her paradigm, there's no "real" way to judge the effectiveness of either art bomb, because neither "really" blows up any physical stuff. [note to MTAA: build a conceptual art project that really blows up physical stuff.]

http://www.banksy.co.uk/indoors/images/flowerchucker.gif

As an aside, I think one of the reasons politically-motivated activist art is so appealing to materialists is that the "accuracy" of its underlying rhetoric is at least (ostensibly) objectively quantifiable in terms of the social impact the art has. Of course, in "reality," its impact is largely unquantifiable, since "social science" is the quintessential oxymoron of our era. But at least you can quantify how many people signed your online petition or voted for your candidate of choice -- similar to counting how many people came to your gallery opening.

This is a great Rothko quote: "The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point."

I remember going to hear the Kronos quartet when I was a junior in college. I was a Christian, but I wasn't really living it, and I didn't go looking for a spiritual experience. I actually wanted to hear their version of "Purple Haze" live. Right before the break, they played Arvo Part's "Fratres." I began weeping uncontrollably, and I couldn't speak (physical manifestations of something "really" happening spiritually). I was with friends from our groovy college radio station, and with my girlfriend. All during the break, I tried to shake it off, but I couldn't stop crying and I couldn't speak. It was an experience of spiritual conviction. It presaged a change in my life.

I don't need this experience to be objectively validated, psychologically reinterpreted, or explained away in order that someone else's world view may remain intact. The CIA did not pay me to cry. Nor do I want to be a minimalist Russian Orthodox composer. Nor do I want my art to make people cry. Still, as an artist, having had such experiences, and knowing what art is capable of, it makes not want to settlle.

you gotta go for what you know / make everybody see,
curt

marc garrett wrote:

"What had been forfeited in this process, were the 'aura' and the
authority of the object, scarred, yet also embellished with the patina
of time and prismatic with the marks of human endeavour. It was the aura
that contained within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.
Even though for Benjamin, the loss of the aura meant the loss of the
original, the transformation or liberation of the art object to the
ordinary represented a gain. For Benjamin, what had then replaced the
original at that time was the illusion of the moving image, and the
duplication of the photograph. For post-modern society, it has become
the digital image. While Benjamin celebrated the magical aura that had
been forfeited as a liberating phenomenon, one cannot help but speculate
whether there is still a need for a space of wonder or enchantment in a
technological world. Perhaps society still craves such a space, now more
than ever, and seeks it in extraordinary places, such as in the museum.
If so, then can this lost aura be compensated for or reconstituted in
any way in a virtual environment in a networked society?" The Virtual
Aura - Is There Space for Enchantment in a Technological World? Susan
Hazan. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2001/papers/hazan/hazan.html

In his book Real Presences/ Is There Anything In What We Say? George
Steiner says "The aura is of an otherness, an awe-fullness whose source
is felt as the Maker. And it is a transcendental source not just in
music but in other arts too, although they seem to be less adequately
underwritten by the sacred. Rationality dictates that this is no more
than presupposition. It is clearly a wager; the postulate cannot be proven.

DISCUSSION

if the earth were a sandwich


http://zefrank.com/sandwich/

Ze Frank is my favorite outsider.net.artist, and this project finds
him at the top of his game. Few people play the network as well as
Ze. He's been video blogging like a madman (
http://zefrank.com/theshow/ ) since March 17, 2006, and has built up
a large (only he knows how large) and dedicated community around
his semi-daily broadcasts. This project arose out of that community.
It even has its own insipid theme song.

You wish only your cyber-geography project were this meme-tastic.

respect,
curt

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: notes for a hypothetical essay on relocating the aura


Hi Marc,

I agree that the aura is ultimately nebulous. That's what makes it aura instead of "psychic affectivity" or "relational aesthetic." In a way, this is why I take issue a bit with Alexis saying that I want to create a "religious object." I think I know what she means, but that's too confining a definition. If my didactic agenda is to create a codified "religious" object, then I'll never court the aura.

I don't want to co-opt the aura or limit it (not that I could do that anyway). I just want to figure out ways my own art can better court it. Ultimately, this will be discovered experientially in the making.

I'll leave off Badiou and Benjamin and return to the philosophers of my youth:

"Don't need no woman, I won't take me no wife
I got the rock and roll and that'll be my life
No page in history baby -- that, I don't need
I just want to make some eardrums bleed"
- Spinal Tap

"This is it / This is mystical shit"
- King Missile

peace,
curt

marc garrett wrote:

There is no obvious demographic to refer to, in respect of tracing its
where abouts, especially when we are still not actually sure what an
aura is, and on who's terms do we appreciate it or see it on? Because,
you can be sure that once someone or certain people, decide that they
have, or they know whereit is and who has it, they will pitchup their
own flag. Put a patent on it and sell it, Just like the (disgusting)
claiming of 'our', 'humanities' and the world's, genetic code - we will
be faced with more ugly and (empty) people, trying to make a quick and
expensive buck by selling us back our own auras. And in a way, this is
my perspective and argument, in regard to anyone trying to pitch up a
flag and claiming cultural or spirtual agency over something as
(presently) untouchable as an 'aura'.