curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

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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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Twitter Art is Dead, Long Live Twitter Art!


Thanks jon,

My favorite of those projects is http://ipretended.tumblr.com/
It reminds me of http://www.turbulence.org/Works/dynamo/

Algorithms that modulate visuals (whether "figurative" or "abstract") are somewhat interesting.
Algorithms that modulate and mashup text language with visuals are more interesting.
Algorithms that modulate and mashup text language with visuals where both text and visual sources are derived from a kind of living, real-time, networked, online, noospheric meme culture are even more interesting.
If you can frame those mashups in an minimal/iconic comic book context that strongly suggests a specific kind of direct/literal reading, even better (and more cognitively jarring).

We human "viewers" are always going to try to "make sense of" / "decode" whatever absurdities are placed before us. That's what we do. We treat whatever "writing" (Derrida's term) that has been placed before us as if it has some sort of communicative intention, as if it "intends/means" to "share/uncover/reveal" some sort of hidden metaphysical secret, as if it is sent to us by some intentional, singular, other human authorial presence.

So the Eliza effect (generative code that seems like it's human) causes us to question the importance of the "sending" human author. But this difference (human/puter) has been a common theme of code-centric inquiry since at least Turing.

Far more interesting/novel than merely "'puters seeming human" is when generative code is applied to a collective online "consciousness" of texts and images that actually are derived from real humans (albeit an amalgam of humans, heavily mediated, tending toward the least common denominator). Then the generative code acts like some sort of brute force Freudian analyst, tricking out uncanny combinations of words and things, not psychoanalyzing any single individual as much as collectively schizo-analyzing contemporary human culture (or at least the drossy/dreggy manifestations of contemporary human culture that drift along the surface of the contemporary pop net). The title "I Pretend" plays into this Freudian "reading" quite well. Such work goes beyond mere dada absurdity and on toward a kind of real-time aleatoric analysis of collective human subconscious. Yes, the results are "disturbing" to say the least. Freud would call them "unheimlich" (uncanny, literally un-home-like). We are always already not in Kansas anymore.

Best,
Curt

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