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.
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.
When you go surfclubbin', don't forget your hat.
Yes Fred,
This is my main critique, and it is an admittedly ethical critique. Eddo Stern or whomever said that the interweb itself is always going to be more interesting than any single, autonomous, discrete piece of "net art." So a tactic of tweaking the overall procedural operations of the web seems like it might matter. DJ Spooky suggests a tactic for avoiding commodification -- a kind of perpetual remix/detournement, so that you swim in the media without ever letting it have the last word (remixing someone else's remix of your remix, publishing a review of your own show, etc). One way or another, to simply submit yourself to what the medium already wants to do is hardly a tactic for modulation or transformation. Those who would namecheck Warhol as some kind of patron saint who absolves and blesses all banal pop churnings are missing his ingenius genius. Pop culture is like the tar baby -- it's tricky to dance with without getting co-opted and rendered impotent. And I'm guessing a lot of artists hitching their wagon to this star could care less.
The potentially useful thing about group photoblogging may be a kind of rapid prototyping model that riffs first and ask theoretically critical questions later (if ever). On the other hand, it could be, like Twitter, that any kind of blogging reduces the scale of your thoughts and output to a series of soundbytes that never gain enough momentum to modulate much of anything (he posted from the Asheville airport between flights). Yes, the modular ease of RSS reblogging affords something, but what? That everyone's art is reducible to a summarizable reblog post? Then we're back in 1997 to the conceptual (or, in this case, animated gif-ceptual) one-liner. Hardly Wagnerian in any sense. Maybe this is what the web wants, but that hardly makes it interesting art. I can watch the web be the web on youTube. I don't need to watch artists using the default web. I can just watch my neighbors use the default web. I'm not advocating a high vs. low dichotomy. I'm advocating critical, ingenious modulation vs. uncritical, banal wanking. Hopefully the former is happening and I'm just missing something.
This is my main critique, and it is an admittedly ethical critique. Eddo Stern or whomever said that the interweb itself is always going to be more interesting than any single, autonomous, discrete piece of "net art." So a tactic of tweaking the overall procedural operations of the web seems like it might matter. DJ Spooky suggests a tactic for avoiding commodification -- a kind of perpetual remix/detournement, so that you swim in the media without ever letting it have the last word (remixing someone else's remix of your remix, publishing a review of your own show, etc). One way or another, to simply submit yourself to what the medium already wants to do is hardly a tactic for modulation or transformation. Those who would namecheck Warhol as some kind of patron saint who absolves and blesses all banal pop churnings are missing his ingenius genius. Pop culture is like the tar baby -- it's tricky to dance with without getting co-opted and rendered impotent. And I'm guessing a lot of artists hitching their wagon to this star could care less.
The potentially useful thing about group photoblogging may be a kind of rapid prototyping model that riffs first and ask theoretically critical questions later (if ever). On the other hand, it could be, like Twitter, that any kind of blogging reduces the scale of your thoughts and output to a series of soundbytes that never gain enough momentum to modulate much of anything (he posted from the Asheville airport between flights). Yes, the modular ease of RSS reblogging affords something, but what? That everyone's art is reducible to a summarizable reblog post? Then we're back in 1997 to the conceptual (or, in this case, animated gif-ceptual) one-liner. Hardly Wagnerian in any sense. Maybe this is what the web wants, but that hardly makes it interesting art. I can watch the web be the web on youTube. I don't need to watch artists using the default web. I can just watch my neighbors use the default web. I'm not advocating a high vs. low dichotomy. I'm advocating critical, ingenious modulation vs. uncritical, banal wanking. Hopefully the former is happening and I'm just missing something.
When you go surfclubbin', don't forget your hat.
Hi Tom,
I'm not proposing a list serv vs. a blog. You can open html posting on a blog as well.
I'm not proposing that individual blog comments be little works of html art. That is actually my critique. I'm proposing that the entire blog become one giant, perpetually reconfigurable work of art. "The straighter and cleaner the better" seems a curious thing for a meme slicer to say.
I'm not making flip comments about nasty nets. I'm comparing Bakhtinian and Saussurean paradigms of language in my analysis of two different structures of online conversation and their relative efficacy to modulate culture.
I'm not disrespecting any artists who participate in surf clubs. I like the work I've seen of Damon and Petra. I appreciate Olia's writing, and I think Marisa is a fun and energetic curator.
You seem kind of defensive. Is your operative mojo to lump everyone who disagrees with you into the same pile and then dismiss them categorically? I don't represent any sort of faction or camp. I'm not out to steal your fifteen minutes. I'm just some dude from North Carolina talking about media.
Respectfully,
Curt
I'm not proposing a list serv vs. a blog. You can open html posting on a blog as well.
I'm not proposing that individual blog comments be little works of html art. That is actually my critique. I'm proposing that the entire blog become one giant, perpetually reconfigurable work of art. "The straighter and cleaner the better" seems a curious thing for a meme slicer to say.
I'm not making flip comments about nasty nets. I'm comparing Bakhtinian and Saussurean paradigms of language in my analysis of two different structures of online conversation and their relative efficacy to modulate culture.
I'm not disrespecting any artists who participate in surf clubs. I like the work I've seen of Damon and Petra. I appreciate Olia's writing, and I think Marisa is a fun and energetic curator.
You seem kind of defensive. Is your operative mojo to lump everyone who disagrees with you into the same pile and then dismiss them categorically? I don't represent any sort of faction or camp. I'm not out to steal your fifteen minutes. I'm just some dude from North Carolina talking about media.
Respectfully,
Curt
When you go surfclubbin', don't forget your hat.
Hi Damon,
I'm not interested in open-ness for any sort of ethical, "open source" reason. And I'm not idealizing dreamless from a purely nostalgic perspective. I'm simply proposing another kind of collaborative dialogue that treats html as more than mere plumbing, and incorporates it into the dialogue. As is, group photo-blogging seems more like a meta-art conversation than a collaborative art project. Allowing users to tweak the html shifts the medium closer toward a kind of collaborative/performative art project. Again, it's not an either or.
Did you participate in the ascii chaos forums on dreamless? Does such an environment seem potentially interesting to you now (given the lack of specialized knowledge now necessary to participate in such a forum, and the amount of artists now able to bring de-stablizing media to the table)? My problem with dreamless was that it was a group of graphic designers more interested in displaying their ds9 skillz than in developing an interesting conceptual dialogue. My problem with most old school net artists is that they were more interested in conceptual one-liners than in engaging with the materials of the medium.
A list of who I'd invite (off the top of my head):
http://oculart.com
http://tex-server.org
http://www.bam-b.com
http://jimpunk.com
http://www.subculture.com
http://www.beflix.com
http://www.grrrr.net
http://www.destroyevil.com
http://dream7.com
http://www.titler.com
http://www.tinkin.com
http://www.jimmyjoeroche.com
http://www.theblowupmedia.com
and my man http://www.coldbacon.com
Best,
Curt
I'm not interested in open-ness for any sort of ethical, "open source" reason. And I'm not idealizing dreamless from a purely nostalgic perspective. I'm simply proposing another kind of collaborative dialogue that treats html as more than mere plumbing, and incorporates it into the dialogue. As is, group photo-blogging seems more like a meta-art conversation than a collaborative art project. Allowing users to tweak the html shifts the medium closer toward a kind of collaborative/performative art project. Again, it's not an either or.
Did you participate in the ascii chaos forums on dreamless? Does such an environment seem potentially interesting to you now (given the lack of specialized knowledge now necessary to participate in such a forum, and the amount of artists now able to bring de-stablizing media to the table)? My problem with dreamless was that it was a group of graphic designers more interested in displaying their ds9 skillz than in developing an interesting conceptual dialogue. My problem with most old school net artists is that they were more interested in conceptual one-liners than in engaging with the materials of the medium.
A list of who I'd invite (off the top of my head):
http://oculart.com
http://tex-server.org
http://www.bam-b.com
http://jimpunk.com
http://www.subculture.com
http://www.beflix.com
http://www.grrrr.net
http://www.destroyevil.com
http://dream7.com
http://www.titler.com
http://www.tinkin.com
http://www.jimmyjoeroche.com
http://www.theblowupmedia.com
and my man http://www.coldbacon.com
Best,
Curt
When you go surfclubbin', don't forget your hat.
Nerd Note: the rhizome bulletin board software totally erased my style sheet call in the post above, since it is set to not allow such code to be posted. Had it allowed the code (as active html), the entire look of this web page would have been altered. The edited code can be seen here:
http://lab404.com/misc/the_css_call.txt
http://lab404.com/misc/the_css_call.txt