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

During the Beginning


Thanks Marc,

The table animation is generative code in Processing. The actual applet is here:
http://deepyoung.org/current/genesis/genesis_31/

The font is based on my own handwriting.

I put the source words from the Genesis 1:3 (and, god, said, let, there, be, light, was) into a prototype animation system and watched for other hybrid words to arise as they were collaged. Then I replaced the source words with the resultant hybrid words and watched for the next generation of hybrid words to arise. The final animation is pulling pseudo-randomly from a set of 35 words:

//outer ring underlay
String wordsa1[] = {
" goat goat ",
"bless bless",
"louse louse",
"swirl swirl",
"feign feign",
" glue glue ",
" go go ",
};

//outer ring overlay
String wordsm1[] = {
"sound sound",
"cloud cloud",
"faust faust",
"death death",
" land land ",
" egad egad ",
" get get ",
};

//inner ring underlay
String wordsb1[] = {
"thigh thigh",
"fight fight",
" lend lend ",
" base base ",
" wean wean ",
" food food ",
" oath oath ",
};

//inner ring overlay
String wordsn1[] = {
"squid squid",
"guest guest",
"beast beast",
" sand sand ",
" bent bent ",
" coat coat ",
" bee bee ",
};

//center underlay
String wordsc1[] = {
"least least",
"agent agent",
"solid solid",
" wood wood ",
" beet beet ",
" glee glee ",
" void void ",
};

//center overlay
String wordsp1[] = {
" less less ",
"lease lease",
"legal legal",
" band band ",
" here here ",
" fast fast ",
" gold gold ",
};

So words are used by the author of Genesis to describe the enunciation event that created everything, and then I massage those words to create other words that describe a curious range of created things and states. More interestingly, the generative animation itself is a kind of perpetual event that slips between abstract baroque line and denotative semiotic signifier. I'm after a kind of phenomenology of language -- an embodied confounding/unsaying.

Peace,
Curt

EVENT

During the Beginning


Dates:
Sat May 24, 2008 00:00 - Tue Jul 01, 2008

Location:
United States of America

Durning the Beginning is a series of installation stations based on Genesis 1:3, "And God said let there be light and there was light." Collectively, these stations perform the impossibility of reducing the creation event to words.

documentation and source media at http://deepyoung.org/current/genesis/


DISCUSSION

When you go surfclubbin', don't forget your hat.


You keep bowing out Tom, and yet you're still here. I think we need a moderated hierarchical structure at RAW (you know, to protect the weak and defenseless), and you seem like the perfect moderator for us. You're balanced, fair, never one to forward your own agenda, always willing to receive constructive feedback from others, well-connected, on-the-ground, not one to easily take offense, never trolling or factious, full of humor and perspective, a wise old head and yet still "with-it," theoretically enlightened, and most importantly, a strong man with a tender heart for the weaker sex. We should just turn RAW into a blog, and then you could post the lead articles and we could add our subordinate comments (and occasional animated gifs). Then you could parse through them and choose which ones to allow and which ones to delete (we trust your correct perspective). That would be a great 2.0 use of the network. Plus it would look good on your C/V.

I venture to say that most of the acrimonious churn here recently has been largely in response to your polemic rhetoric. The agenda you are forwarding ("net art 2.0" as a version reset) is largely unconvincing. It's not that the work being made by "surf club" participants is uninteresting. Much of it is actually quite funky and invigorating. It may even be the next "big thing" (check local listings for details). But you're not really talking about the work itself much (and I would like to talk more about the particulars of the work). You are pushing for the work to be accepted as more historically radical than I think it is. And anyway, time and more perspicacious heads will decide all that. So I disagree with you now. To quote the eloquent sophist Thurston Moore, "I can understand it, but I don't recommend it."

For me, the value of RAW is that you can (often) proceed dialogically until you come to the crux of your disagreements. Nobody is ever fully persuaded. Nobody is objectively declared the winner. But just understanding the crux of my disagreements with various people has been of great advantage to my own practice. This is why I characterize the recent threads as solipsistic. You've got the attention (ire) of a large group of folks here (many of them very intelligent and most of them who aren't a part of your parochial scene). But instead of using them to figure something out for yourself, you just want to win. Even as purely spectacular flame wars go, it's not all that entertaining. You can win on your own blog or at your dealer's gallery. This is an unmoderated international art forum (one of the few left standing, oddly enough). If you mean to colonize it, then I have (yet more) problems with your vision of the radical future network.

As You Wish,
Curt

DISCUSSION

epic net art


Hi Tom,

When you say Duchamp is more relevant than Broodthaers to 2.0 practice (whatever 2.0 practice is), that is a potentially interesting assertion, but I'd like to know which aspects of Duchamp -- the full trajectory of his life's practice, his writing, his painting, his chess, the large glass, the green book, the readymades, the fountain as institutional critique, his cross-dressing, his correspondence with Joseph Cornell? I don't read your blog. I don't live in your city. If we are to have a discussion, it will have to happen here. From my brief encounters with you in this forum this summer (you've still only indirectly addressed me), it seems like you are none too interested in the possibility of a dialogue that might lead to a place neither of us have been yet.

I mentioned Broodthaers because he seems very relevant to a kind of art making that is not just "finding," but collecting, re-taxonomizing, re-contextualizing, and re-distributing along alternate/disruptive axes. Contemporary heirs might be http://mjt.org , Haim Steinbach, and Fred Wilson. It is not necessarily curator as artist (surface time), but archivist as artist (deep[er] time). The art lies in the implicit connections drawn between the things. I make a go of it at http://deepyoung.org In 2002, Ann-Marie Schleiner called it "filter feeding" ( http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_curation_schleiner.html ). Thus I mention Broodthaers.

Regarding "epic" terminology, I like "Wagnerian" (alluding to Packer/Jordan's "Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality"). Wagner's own term is "Gesamtkunstwerk." Yael's "World of Awe" would also top of my list. And http://titler.com

Regarding "political art," I think it is an easy straw-man term to attack. It is a tough term to defend, because one thinks of something like Keinholz's http://www.artchive.com/artchive/k/kienholz/war_memorial.jpg , which is not doing much for me. Instead of "political," I would offer "rigorous, purposeful, work that matters." I understand that certain formal experiments can contain implicit cultural critiques (as did Judd). When you begin dealing rigorously with material, then it's always going to matter. Play can also be part of it. It seems simplistic to pit pop art against political art. The best pop art is always going to have some aspect of cultural criticism.

Best,
Curt

EVENT

Pop Mantra


Dates:
Sat May 10, 2008 00:00 - Mon Jun 30, 2008

Location:
United States of America

Pop Mantra is a series of performances where I perpetually perform a short excerpt from a different pop song for several hours.

audio/video and photo documentation at http://lab404.com/video/pop/