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

about punk rock


i'll tell you about punk rock. punk rock is a word used by
dilitantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the
energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and
the minds of young men who give what they have to it, and give
everything they have to it. and it's a term that based on contempt.
it's a term that's based in fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and
everything that's rotten about rock and roll. i don't know johnny
rotten, but i'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he
does as sigmund freud did. you see, what sounds to you like a big
load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius:
myself. and that music is so powerful that it's quite beyond my
control, and when i'm in the grips of it, i don't feel pleasure and i
don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. do you understand
what i'm talking about? have you ever felt like that, when you just
couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either?

- iggy pop

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DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

about net art


Hi everybody on the rhizome list,

Here are some thoughts about net art.

I'm teaching this course on it:
http://www.lab404.com/373/

It's less of a history course and more of a studio course.

You can see that most of what people think of as net art I've lumped
under "network." That comprises 1/4 of the class. The rest is about
narrative more or less.

I use Manovich's "open/closed interactivity" distinction because I
find it instructive. Everything is interactive, so "interactive" is
a useless term in and of itself. Everything is probably also
narrative depending on your definition.

It seems unless something is labeled as a movement and
self-consciously referenced to some prior 20th century art movement,
it gets taken less seriously. So nn gets to ride in on the
situationists, jodi on the dadaists, tactical media artists come in
under the fluxus rubric, etc.

With that in mind (and for no other reason, since the works stand
regardless), let me try to map some heretofore mostly ignored net/web
work to 20th century art movements.

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

1. Under "linear comics / animation," under the "not comics" section,
is work that might be dismissed as "screen art" or "experimental
design." Unless something is non-linear, folks reflexively dismiss
it as "non-new media." Conceptualism is the given, hence few folks
groove on visual aesthetics anymore. But there is a lo-res web art
aesthetic that low bandwidth limitations have birthed. It's a kind
of visual minimalism that suggests the use of iterative symbolism,
but moves beyond early-amerika-esqe code poetry and attempts
something more visual/painterly. Geoff Lillemon's
http://www.oculart.com is a prime example. Tie it in to Freudian
surrealism. Heck, tie it in to Bosch's triptychs. Whatever you need.

True, put it on a CD-ROM and it doesn't lose anything. But how long
will the "put it on a CD-ROM" test remain a criterion for the
"legality" of net art? Who would make such thin shockwave files for
a ROM anyway? The internet is driving more than just identity
spoofing and selling immaterial concepts on ebay. The network (with
its bandwidth restrictions and multimedia capacity) is driving a new
minimalistic visual narrative aesthetic. 14K modems led to art so
minimalistic it could only be conceptual. But need we remain there?
cable modems are leading to this.

2. Under "open interactivity," under the "generative software"
section, levin and reas get props because they've got the programming
chops (and they do), but at the end of the day, lia (
http://www.turux.org etc.) is the one who most rocks my world. Lingo
may be less sexy because it's less "from scratch," but experience the
results. lia's has been a neurotically thorough exploration of
reactive visual aesthetics (pacing, spacing, texture, line), and she
shows no signs of letting up. Map it to Breton's surrealistic
automatism where the machine is the automaton. Map it to Pollock
where the machine is the gravity. Whatever you need. Again, it
doesn't lose anything when transferred to a CD-ROM. Again, so what?

3. Under "network," under the "outsider art" section, and this is
probably my biggest beef. The web let anyone be an artist, several
eastern europeans decided they would use it to be artists back in the
day, and now there's still this residual manifesto-politico /
wacko-anarcho vibe that somehow legitimizes something as net art.
Meanwhile, there are people from all over the world "unharmed by
artistic culture" (to use Dubuffet's slamming phrase) cranking out
stuff that more than qualifies as interesting/valuable net art. A
prime example is http://www.zefrank.com . (Several "graphic
designers" qualify as well).

I did this project a while back ( http://www.lab404.com/data/ ) where
I had known entities from all over net culture submit their browser
histories and their visitor logs. Many wily net artists and new
media pundits were represented, but guess whose logs revealed the
most site traffic? ze frank's.

I guess outsider art is outsider art by definition, so what am I
bitching about anyway? Tie it in to Art Brut, and you open up the
"net art canon" to all sorts of whimsical, fun, and refreshingly
un-reflexive, un-scene-aware work.

Art Brut designates "works executed by persons unharmed by artistic
culture, in which mimesis, in contrast to what happens in the case of
intellectuals, has little or no part at all. Consequently, the
authors draw their inspiration (themes, materials, the means of
transposition, rhythm, different styles of writing, etc.) from their
resources and not from the cliches of classical or fashionable art."
- Jean Dubuffet

The net is the perfect many-to-many medium to allow such work to
surface from the backwoods, and yet a good portion of the people
reading this email all live on the same island.

All that to say, we're probably a lot closer to finding the next net
art Howard Finster than we are to finding the next net art Cezanne.
(All that stands in the way of the nascent folk.net.art curator is
those danged Angelfire pop-up windows!)

Finally, not as an artist or even a critic, but as a patron/surfer of
net art, I move for more net art about something other than net art,
technology, computers, networks, surveilance, corporations, and ebay.

More Dubuffet, because I just can't get enough:
"Art speaks to everyone. We should not try to isolate it. To cut it
from its roots, from its sources. Everyone should speak about it
freely and give his opinion! And first of all the writers who know
how to express themselves. Beware of the specialists!"

check out the hook while my dj revolves it,
curt
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DISCUSSION

echo ed.


http://www.casperelectronics.com/
http://e.hjem.wanadoo.dk/deus/super.html
http://www.english.uga.edu/~wblake/SONGS/24/AG_NursesSong.ram
http://www.lab404.com/misc/1_23_03.jpg

through all the tumult and the strife / i hear the music ringing
it finds an echo in my soul / how can I keep from singing?
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DISCUSSION

dutch cove has a posse (funny_riddle remix)


Zhivago once fled with his lover to the interminable snow plains
across the barren landscape of revolutionary Russia. Reaching a place
that most resembled the center of nowhere, they stopped. The
Bolshevik police followed on their heels, moving at a different
speed, chasing a desire that escaped their comprehension. They
knocked at the door, asking, what is your agenda, what are you
plotting against us, what do you plan to do here? Live, he answered,
just live. If understood slowly, this is not the fatality of
hopelessness or a sign of passive acquiescence in the face of an
obscene demand. And if it is an insurrection, it is not the
insurrection proclaimed loudly on the center stage of capital cities
whose success is measured by how many times the police beats it to
the ground. Knowing when to disappear, it does not ask to be
represented. Although there are many who live it today, outside the
speed of the media spectacle, their names would only be invoked in
vain, as the idols of yet another manifesto thrown on the rubble-heap
of history.

Dialectics never died. It lives every time another tired exhibit of
the relics of dada or situationism opens at the houses of culture
across the world. It lives when the hackers who haunt the net repeat
the slogans and gestures of the dead and then congratulate themselves
when they are finally inducted into the halls of power of the Venice
Biennale or Ars Electronica. It lives when the theorists and
cartographers of new deterritorialized flows of desire sell their
interests by entering a classroom to become functionaries of the
empire of production, offering packaged knowledge to students who
eagerly produce whatever stupidity is asked of them in exchange for
the general equivalent of a grade. It lives when the
anti-globalization 'multitude' faithfully ascend to the stage of
negation to recite their memorized roles, proudly displaying the
garments of an ideology that long ago betrayed its exhaustion.
Dialectics consumes the desire of life as it beats its wings against
the limits of the impossible. As Tzara once said, dialectics kills -
it lives by producing corpses, which lie strewn across an empty field
where the wind has ceased to blow. The field only reveals its own
folly and despair; and victory is the illusion of philosophers and
fools.

- duna maver (2002)

http://www.abcd-artbrut.org
http://www.neuralust.com/~curt/sop/
http://www.neuralust.com/~curt/fall/
http://www.playdamage.org/38.html
http://www.superseventies.com/sl_thankgodimacountryboy.html
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