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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DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

DISCUSSION

Required Reading


Hi Tom,

I agree with you about this particular piece and its subsequent (re)contextualization(s). Institutionalization wasn't likely to formally disrupt abstract expressionism all that much (discrete paintings meant to be hung on walls can be hung on any walls), but institutionalization often drastically modulates network experiments (as you observe above). The challenge to any "contemporary net artist" who wants to make this move (from net subculture to gallery/museum space) is for her to control the context of this translation/modulation as much as possible. AIDS 3D seems adept at controlling these contextual shifts (indeed, that may be their main strength as artists; but then they are arguably gallery artists more than they are net artists). Sometimes, it seems like a net artist knowns a curator who has a space, and the curator invites the net artist to have a show, and then the net artist is forced to scramble to come up with something to fill the space that is somehow related to their online work. For example (cf: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mriver/tags/loshadka/ or http://www.newrafael.com/broken-self-at-spencer-brownstone-gallery/). Not that there is anything wrong with such scramblings, particularly when the artist is afforded creative control of the translation between online space and gallery space.

In the case you mention above, you'd really have to ask Lauren and Guthrie about their curatorial/artistic relationship involving this piece. Few Rhizome "employees" read these threads (although I imagine it is the job of some beleaguered intern to "just keep an eye on them.") You could always contact Lauren and Guthrie directly and invite them to respond. There is a radical social networking platform known as "Facebook" to which they both belong. It allows you to send a real-time message directly to another user via a user-friendly web application interface. Or there is this pre-web1.0 internet communications platform known as "electronic mail." It is a bit more complicated/fussy, requiring stand-alone application ("client") software, but it still works in a pinch. Who in their right mind could blame them if they choose not to respond?

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape