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

Set 2: The Picture Pack


The second set of Synesthetic Bubble Gum Cards is now available:
http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/picture/

Porting the pictures of:
masaru shichinohe
hieronymus bosch
donald roller wilson
william blake
rene magritte
arthur rackham

Previous and Forthcoming Sets may be gotten at:
http://computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/

peace,
curt

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Unique Visits


hi dyske,

i did this project last year:
http://lab404.com/data/

which led to this fallout:
http://lab404.com/misc/obits/

also, check web-wide comparative traffic ratings (least to most visited):
3,861,449 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=dyske.com
2,345,992 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=mteww.com
903,833 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=playdamage.org
707,768 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=lab404.com
431,201 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?urlez.org
295,983 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=potatoland.org
241,314 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=rhizome.org
239.340 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=jodi.org
148,995 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=praystation.com
57,789 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=sfmoma.org
51,156 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=zefrank.com
31,075 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=k10k.net
1,066 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=homestarrunner.com
5 http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=google.com

kooky.

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

Dyske wrote:

Oddly, I had just written an essay about Website traffic a day before. I was
fascinated by the fact that no one seems to have a clear picture of how web
traffic is distributed along the percentile of all websites. For instance,
if you get 50 visitors a day, what percentile are you in? Is your site
above, below, or around the average?

When you hear that some sites like Instapundit.com are getting over 80,000
visitors a day, you think that your site which is getting, say, 100 visitors
a day seems to be very low in the ranks. Well, you are not. According to my
study, 100 visitors a day would place you around the top 35 percentile. So,
you wonder, when does it jump from 100 to 80,000? You can see it on my
graph. It happens around top 1 percentile. Compared to what happens once you
reach that top 1 percentile, any increase in visitors before that is
miniscule. I conclude that this is how fame works. The vest majority of us
are nobody. The difference between the top 2 percentile and the very bottom
percentile is negligible compared to the popularity of the top 1 percentile.

Here is my essay:

http://www.dyske.com/default.asp?view_idx9

Dyske


DISCUSSION

Re: New Media Education and Its Discontent


Hi Marisa, Trebor, and all,

To associate anti-intellectualism with slack seems to me an
oversimplification. There is diligence and slack; and there is
intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. I have students who are
diligent anti-intellectuals. Their new media artwork is clever,
intriguing, and well-crafted; but their verbal and written
justifications and critiques are often inarticulate and "intuitive"
at best. Then I have students who are slack intellectuals. They are
very articulate and their critiques are often allusive and
historically-aware, but they aren't very creative with the media and
they lack the diligence to polish and refine their projects.

Regarding the theory/production dichotomy, I find it infinitely
easier to teach theory to students who already have creative
production skills than to teach creative production skills to
students who already have knowledge of theory.

Trebor, implicit in your argument is the assumption that
intellectualism is diametrically opposed to conservatism and
apoliticalism. Need your students adopt your personal emphases in
order to be certified as rightly educated? Can one be a
non-intellectual without being anti-intellectual? Can one be a
non-intellectual without being a xenophobe? Is intellectualism a
prerequisite for making interesting new media art? If anything, one
could argue that intellectualism often leads contemporary artists to
paralyzing self-consciousness and the straight jacket of requisite
hyper-contextualization.

I can lament the over-emphasis on student's evaluations in US
academic hiring structures. I can lament the fact that *kids today*
are slack, or that they don't read, or that they are more into
Madonna's "Hollywood" video than they are into Walter Benjamin's
fascinating prose. But such is the challenge of inspiring
undergraduate students in the US in 2003. The onus is on me as the
teacher. I find it more effective to riff off of Madonna (
http://www.theory.org.uk/madonna.htm ) than to force some dichotomy
between what students are into and what I deem they should be into.
There's still plenty of conflict and dialogue to be enjoyed.

By way of disclosure, here is our departmental catalog:
http://www.unca.edu/catalog/ist.html#MMAS

peace,
curt

Marisa Olson wrote:

> hi, all. trebor scholz posted this interesting piece to the sarai
> reader list. thought some here might be interested...
>
> i'm particularly interested in the discussion of "the apparent
> tension between teaching theory and
> production." it does seem (given my own experiences as a perpetual
> phd student) that so many of the programs have this polarized,
> alienating curricular dichotomy going and i have found myself
> frustrated at the lack of middle ground. when i was in the uk, it
> impressed me that art practice programs had theoretical research
> components built into their degrees, whereas the two are so separated
> in the US. in the context of the media arts, there seems to be a bit
> more of an impetus to "present" both, but my sense is that many of
> the people steering the programs are doing so under the mark of
> intimidation by the so-called "new" media and, also--more
> importantly, that there is a general lack of synthesis between
> criticism/theory and practice. so that courses will focus on the
> "right" new media readings, and possibly introducing critical theory
> vets (jameson, baudrillard, foucault, etc.) in this light, but
> without engaging with an application of those ideas to a reading of
> any real art work. and, on the other hand, there are nuts & bolts
> practice courses that (perhaps sprouting out of the
> anti-intellectualism scholz mentions) snub theory as divorced from
> their engagement with director or perl, and focus simply on
> production.
>
> the rapid development of the technologies (hard and soft) associated
> with "new media" is a bittersweet thing. book production timelines do
> not jive with software upgrades. this we know. but, still, it would
> be great if the "production" (and hiring!) of scholars equally
> engaged in practice and criticism (not that i don't seem criticism as
> a sort of practice, and vice-versa!) and comfortable merging the two
> would catch up to the work.
>
> my two cents...
> ~marisa
>
>Date: Sat, 04 Oct 2003 16:41:17 -0400
>From: trebor scholz <treborscholz@earthlink.net>
>To: Sarai List <reader-list@sarai.net>
>
>
>New Media Education and Its Discontent
>
>"S