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

Re: Arcangel/Deep/Young Ethereal


Hi Jim,

I'll just respond as I go:

j:
if you deep link to mov content, they pay for the bandwidth, Curt. You *are* getting something
from them that costs *them* money.

so you're getting two things from turbulence that costs them money when you deep link to them:
bandwidth and storage.

therefore you owe them something. And what are they asking? That you link to
http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel . Not to http://turbulence.org .

c:
or that i remove the deep link altogether, which i've done. no bandwidth used now at all.

j:
also, Curt, when I visit http://www.deepyoung.org I note terms such as "Archive", "Permanent
Collection", and "Current Exhibits". "Wild" indeed. Which gives one the impression that part of
the reason you don't want to link to http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel is because you would
prefer it to be seen as a presentation of your site, not turb. And this seems self-serving, as
opposed to having much to do with a desire to "re-contextualizing the piece in a more "natural"
wild environment."

You provide interesting context for the works you link to (which is important), and I enjoy many
of the works in http://www.deepyoung.org , partly because of the context you provide, but Curt,
your project is one in *critical media* (like Paris Connection), *NOT* curatorship. You don't
want to link to http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel because it seems you would like people to
think your site *does* involve curation.

c:
critical media. yes, you get it (whereas jo-anne doesn't, although she does now, maybe?). but if I just come right out and say "this site is not a REAL gallery, it's about critical media," then i've contextualized the site as such, and in so doing, i've defeated the very purpose of the site (which is to cause people to make their own contextualizations). so the site has to read the way it does. hopefully this approach serves the project, and not me personally. my name is nowhere on the site (and several of my artworks and writings appear there uncredited.)

j:
It's critical media, Curt, not
curation. And if you viewed it that way, you wouldn't have the problem you have of not wanting
to acknowledge the real curation and production work.

c:
it's not that i'm trying to avoid crediting turbulence's curatorial efforts. it's that i'm trying to avoid extant contextualization in order to maintain user disorientation. in so doing, i'm often forced to deep link. I don't frame the sites and mask their URLs. A surfer could obviously see the piece resided at turbulence. Edit the URL back to its root, and there they are at turbulence. There's even a link right there on the page I point to that leads straight back to the page turbulence requested me to link.

so far, most artists featured at deep/young have been pleased to have their work presented in such a context. I venture to say that Cory would be pleased too. More of his work is featured elsewhere on the site, and he said he was pleased to have it featured there.

But the point of deep/young is not to violate copyright or force issues of ownership (a la 010101/luther blisset). So I removed the link.

We can still talk about it though, can't we? Or should I have just quietly said, "yes m'aam," and stepped and fetched it?

DISCUSSION

Re: Arcangel/Deep/Young Ethereal


The following excerpt is from an article I wrote a while back at informit.com (whose copyright control i am no doubt violating by reprinting it here):

____________________________________
Web Wilderness Adventure Tours

"Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail,
A smile from a veil, do you think you can tell?"
-Pink Floyd

Once a year I go backpacking in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, preferably in the Joyce Kilmer/ Slickrock Wilderness northeast of Robbinsville. That's where they filmed "Nell", "Last of the Mohicans", and parts of "The Fugitive". After five days and four nights of being explicitly at the mercy of God, the rest of my year in the city always goes better. You could look at the wilderness and say, "This is land wasted." But to say so would be to prove yourself blind.

"Wilderness is an anchor to windward. Knowing it is there, we can also know that we are still a rich nation, tending to our resources as we should -- not a people in despair searching every last nook and cranny of our land for a board of lumber, a barrel of oil, a blade of grass, or a tank of water."
- Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico

Without these yearly wilderness excursions, my house in the city would gradually comes to seem less like a home and more like a cage. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to live in the wilderness. I want to live in the city. But without the wilderness, I wouldn't want to live anywhere much at all.

Is the web any different? If nothing on the web is wild, primal, roaring, torrential, startling, disorienting, or out of control, then what is the rest of the web really worth? Must every last pixel be watermarked? Must every site reinforce somebody's relative net worth? Even in the so-called web design "underground," many designers are still blatantly reinforcing the "brand" of their non-commercial sites. "Did you like my experimental web site? Excellent. Be sure to remember its catchy logo and clever tag line. Why not sign up now for my mailing list while you're at it? And on your way out, don't forget to check out my professional web design portfolio."

Despite what it may seem, I'm not anti-commercial. Me work web design day job too. Me bring home pelt, make wigwam cozy for Paleface Squaw and Little Brave. I'm just saying that somewhere on the web there should exist a corner, a space, a land where the streets have no names. Part of the fun of backpacking in wilderness areas (as opposed to national forest areas) is that the wilderness trails are poorly marked. This oversight is intentional. It's why you bring a compass and a map. It's part of why you go in the first place. It has to do with being out of control.
_______________________________________

Is Data Diaries truly punk? Is it actually not art (as alex galloway's accompanying statement claims)? Then I do the piece a service by deep linking straight to its heart ( http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/color/date.php?id=1 ), thus bypassing the extant obligatory signage which is actually tangential to the stated purposes of the piece itself, and re-contextualizing the piece in a more "natural" wild environment ( http://www.deepyoung.org/current/hardwired/ ).

I can afford to tag and release like this because I don't live in the zoo. Too bad Cory's keepers wouldn't let his piece come out to play.

Maybe next time. ( perhaps http://www.michelethursz.com/site/RAM/index.html )

as you wish,
Archive Registrar
Deep/Young Ethereal Archive
http://www.deepyoung.org

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
t. wrote:
The fact of the matter is in the extremely small world of
non-profits commissioning this sort of work it's easy to be pegged as
'hard to work with' and never get another penny. 'Ya gots to go along
to get along'.

Working with Creative Time in the past, we've had to sign contracts
that stipulate credits, copyrights, usages and so on. In that case,
to be ethical (and technically legal), I couldn't encourage deep
linking. I prefer everything to be explained up front in a contract,
that way everyone knows where they stand.

Turbulence seems to be professionally run imo, they probably had a
contract with Cory and he knew what he was doing when he signed it
and what (if any) limitations he was putting on his work by signing
it.

DISCUSSION

Re: Arcangel/Deep/Young Ethereal


Cory has already been duly paid and promoted for his work on Data Diaries. What wonderful opportunity are we denying him? You spin like the RIAA.

http://deepyoung.org exists primarily to propogate The Flavor of Incongruity born of The Overzealous Spirit in The Face of Unfathomable Phenomena. I'm sorry that you are denying Data Diaries a wonderful opportunity to be recontextualized in the service of this endeavor.

curt

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>Turbulence exists primarily to support artists. We commission works such as Data Diaries with funds from various foundations. Foundations require that they are credited for the work they support. The artists' success allows Turbulence to raise more money to commission more work. I'm sorry that you are denying Cory a wonderful opportunity.

Jo-Anne

DISCUSSION

Re: Arcangel/Data Diaries


Dear Jo-Anne,

Whereas Deep/Young Ethereal Laboratories endeavor in all aspects,
however subtle, to facilitate a more lively dialogue with the Sundry
Essences of Wonder (so much so that we originally considered linking
Cory's piece as deeply as:
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/movies_color/1.mov ) ,

And whereas the Spirit of your Request seeks to hinder said
facilitation by forcing a Less than Ethereal Contextualization upon
those who avail themselves of our Deep/Young Services,

Our link to Cory's piece has regretfully been removed altogether perforce.

"Now you're the show."
- Jaime Escalante

be seeing you,
Curt Cloninger
Archive Registrar
Deep/Young Ethereal Archive
http://www.deepyoung.org

>Dear Curt,
>
>Please change the link to Cory's work on
>http://www.deepyoung.org/current/hardwired/ to
>http://turbulence.org/Works/arcangel/index.html. The Turbulence/Jerome
>Foundation credits must be present if you wish to include his work in
>your show.
>
>Thank you.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Jo-Anne Green
>Associate Director
>
>Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=us-ascii;
> name="j.o.green.vcf"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Content-Description: Card for Jo-Anne Green
>Content-Disposition: attachment;
> filename="j.o.green.vcf"
>
>Attachment converted: tad:j.o.green.vcf (TEXT/R*ch) (0004E33E)

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Deconstruct the Narrative = Protocolian positioning.


c:
> > This difference in critical approach (dry vs. fly / allusive vs.
> > intuitive) is why I prefer rhizome to thingist.
> >
> > it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing,

d:
>I see what you mean. Sounds like I need to switch to thingist.
>
>Best,
>Dyske

c:
doh! Please don't switch (or at least continue posting to both).
I'm not trying to silence you. I'm not even trying to undermine your
approach. I'm just arguing for the simultaneous legitimacy of a less
than detatched dialectic style.

[although from the passive/agressive vibes emanating from your terse
response, said emo-mojo approach is not so foreign to you after all!]

rock on,
curt