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

real


What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side
by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.
"Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out
handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing
that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time,
not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When
you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It
takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who
break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved
off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very
shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are
Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I suppose you are real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had
not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But
the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years
ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts
for always."
_
_
_

DISCUSSION

Re: Pondering the social sculpture, P1


liza deduces:

If life is creativity and creativity is life, it cannot be sculpted, molded, qualified or quantified. Life and creativity cannot be art because they cannot be curated nor collected. Art is the attempt to apprehend the unattainable. It is a failure that some make it look
more fabulously than others.

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

conceptualism and beuys aside, i think the reason people get all stuck-up on nomenclature (art, creativity, life, objects, anti-art, social dialogue/sculpture) has less to do with media discrepancies/variabilities and more to do with moral opinions of worth. if an artist seeks to attain personal enlightenment through her art, is that a worthy thing? if an artist attempts to apprehend the unattainable, is that a worthy thing? if an artist recontextualizes a social action as art, is that a worthy thing? are social/political actions of any worth to begin with? is rearing a child of any worth? so then is rearing a child art?

more interesting to me lately -- if art falls in the forest, does it make a sound? for every howard finster southern folk artist who gets some limelight and some gallery time, there are thousands of people down here welding funky yard art that only the residents of their particular cove ever see. i have a friend in the midwest who does insane graffiti art on old cars. then he and his friends get together and trash the cars. he takes pictures of this stuff and emails it out to like ten people. one time his friend accidentally punched his hand through a glass window while doing this, and they took pictures of that.

to me, that's cool. it's just normal people making cool stuff. is it performance art, an installation, videography, found objects? they don't care about any of that. they are making cool stuff. It's not the same as raising a kid, which is a beautiful, valuable thing that does require great creativity. but rearing a kid is just doing something along the allotted path of life. To do it well is like fine craftsmanship.

"We have no art," say the Balinese: "we do everything as well as possible."

Which is great, but spray painting a VW bus and then trashing it is not really along the allotted path of life. That's a different kind of "unnecessary" activity that seems more like "art" to me.

I don't have it all figured out, but I will say this: There is so much mediocre crap happening in the net art scene, it's hilarious (or sad). I get these press releases, and visit these sites, and there's just nothing to them. Strip away the theory and the "i'm-in-dialogue-with-this-current-thing-happening," and the work itself is just blank and contrived. If some of these hypermedia artists lost the familiar context of their scene, and just lived out in the middle of the woods somewhere with no one looking on, would they still be driven to make this stuff? really?

It's like all the cool hollywood films that will never get funded because they can't be spun and marketed to a big blockbuster audience. If you only make stuff that will get on somebody's net.art radar, then your stuff is going to be contrived. I dig turux.org because they are just making cool stuff. Does it fit into prescribed new media parameters? Does it qualify as networked? Who cares? Isn't it just tweaking abstract visuals using lingo scripts? Sure, but so what? It's cool.

If following Beuys leads one to make or do cool stuff, wonderful! If following Duchamp leads one to make or do cool stuff, wonderful! But if following those paths leads one to make or do a bunch of contrived, self-referential, scene-dependent, unforgivably uninteresting stuff, alas for one.


EVENT

digital_intercourse


Dates:
Wed Nov 20, 2002 00:00 - Fri Nov 15, 2002

DIGITAL INTERCOURSE

A reading of interactive fiction and poetry

WHO:

Wiresight, Inc., a not-for-profit Digital Arts Foundation

founded by Scott Ambrose Reilly and Mary McBride,

presents authors reading from the following interactive

fiction, electronic literature and poetry pieces:

Scott Rettberg/ . "Kind of Blue" . Serial E-mail

Stephanie Strickland/ . "Vniverse" . E-Poetry

Nick Montfort/ . "Ad Verbum" . Literary Word Puzzle

WHAT:

You may be wondering what exactly electronic literature is ...

... a story sent out in a bunch of bizarre emails?

... a Web site whose workings reveal the lines of poems?

... an elaborate digital puzzle?

You can see and hear some of what it is on Wednesday, November 20 at DIGITAL

INTERCOURSE, when authors will read from and discuss their computer-based

works.

WHERE:

The Remote Lounge-Downstairs

327 Bowery above 2nd Street

New York, NY 10003

212.228.0228

WHEN:

Wednesday, November 20th

7:00 PM- 8:30PM

PRICE: Free!

OTHER:

Nearest Subway Stations:

The 6 at Bleecker

The F at Broadway-Lafayette or 2nd Avenue

The N or R to 8th Street or to Prince Street

For more information:

kendel@wiresight.org

scott@wiresight.org

mary@wiresight.org

This reading is made possible in part by a grant from The Blessing Way Foundation


DISCUSSION

Re: the scott baio litmus test


Once again, you've forgotten the essential quotation marks! These
results are invalid.

"scott baio" vs."your name"

try again.

At 5:51 AM +0000 11/14/02, joseph (yes) wrote:
>Number of results on Google for the keywords scott baio and joseph mcelroy:
>scott baio( 25 800 results) versus joseph mcelroy ( 52 000 results)
>
>Results for joseph franklyn mcelroy (2500 results) loser
>Results for donna mcelroy (40 100 results) winner
>Results for joseph and donna (910 000 results) winner
>Results for joseph and donna mcelroy (10 500 results) loser
>Results for max herman (295 000 results) winner
>
>joseph (cor e form art) + (porat per ance ist)
>frank + lyn - mc + El + roy
>
>go shopping -> http://www.electrichands.com/shopindex.htm
>call me 646 279 2309
>
>
>
>Quoting Curt Cloninger <curt@lab404.com>:
>
> > Dear friends on the rhizome raw list,
> >
> > Hi. It's me, curt.
> >
> > As a competetive American male intuitively seeking a simple and
> > indisputable method of clearly indentifying "winners" (even in
> > non-competetive areas of hazy subjectivity such as contemporary art),
> > I've come up with the Scott Baio Litmus Test.
> >
> > "Who are the GOOD artists?" "who are the BEST artists?" I know I'm
> > not allowed to ask these questions, but they continue to arise. I'm
> > not allowed to answer these questions based on whether an artist's
> > work is actually good or not; because there are lots of artists whose
> > work really sucks, but who nevertheless assure me that they are
> > succeeding as artists. Some of these sucky artists point to their
> > gallery exhibits as proof of success, others point to their
> > recognition in festivals, others to their academic degrees and
> > research, and the more banal point to the amount of money their art
> > has procured from patrons whom they both ridicule and disdain.
> > Surely there must be a less subjective way of measuring success?
> >
> > And there is! Introducing the Scott Baio Litmus Test (hereafter
> > referred to as the SBLT). Contemporary artists can't really be in it
> > for the big money (since only about 3 contemporary artists are making
> > any big money). Too obligatorily cynical to be in it simply for the
> > joys of creation or the mere "fun of it," I figure most contemporary
> > artists are in it for the fame. Well, Scott Baio was pretty famous
> > in his day too. Alas, Scott's day was fleeting and is now 30 years
> > gone. (The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Cf:
> > http://www.neuralust.com/~curt/scott/baio.jpg )
> >
> > Scott's medium was not even the internet, whereas most contemporary
> > artists are all wired and such. So I figure, if in your heyday, and
> > in your own medium, you're not any more famous than Scott Baio, how
> > can you call yourself a success? Hence the SBLT --
> >
> > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> > the SBLT:
> > 1. go to http://www.googlefight.com
> > 2. enter "scott baio" in one field (don't forget the quotation marks).
> > 3. enter "your name" in the other field (where "your name" is your
> > name, and don't forget the quotation marks).
> > 4. submit and observe the results.
> > 5. if scott wins, shrink your head, keep on self-pimpin', and try
> > again in a couple of years.
> > 6. if you win (and your name is not something generic like "jennifer
> > smith"), congratulations, you are a successful contemporary artist.
> > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> >
> >
> > Hopefully, this simple test will put to rest once and for all any
> > sticky issues of aesthetic value, artistic worth, and ugly
> > accusations of outright suckiness.
> >
> > your friend,
> > curt
> >
> > _
> > _
> > _
> > + KNORRRRRRR
> > -> post: list@rhizome.org
> > -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> > -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> > -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> > +
> > Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> > Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php