Ivan Pope
Since the beginning
Works in Brighton United States of America

BIO
In the place where analogue and digital overlap, that's why you will find me in the kitchen at parties.
Everything is at my site, http://blog.ivanpope.com
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DISCUSSION

Re: The Artist speaking of his Brushes


> Imagine Rule #5 of the Six Rules Towards A New Internet Art.
>
> http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?3236

Eryk strikes again. Personally, being of the anarchist pursuasion, I don't
hold much with rules.
Anyway, these rules are little more than a desire to
a)see the work in isolation:

2. No introduction pages - never apologise, never explain
6. The work stands alone - no CVs, the artist ceases to exist

and b) impose formal constraints on work:

1. No Flash - its too common
3. No more art for the sake of error - its too common
4. Images must be unique to the sitemaker - you will knit your own images
5. Technology is not a subject. The internet is not a subject - these
subjects are simply irrelevant, my dears

If we conform to these 'rules', we get to be 'New Net Art'. Well, of course
everyone is completely free to invent their own movements, groupings,
heresies, parties and sects. But is it art, and more to the point, is it any
good, new, net, art or whatever.

To strip Eryk down to the essense (with apologies for the editing):

Boundaries ... inspired ... "heroic" early net.art
... a homoginization of net.art ... A design aesthetic prevails ... with no
message or point or content.
... we seem mired in ... the trappings of tradition
The new net.art will not appeal to [unbelievers]

... frustration at ... work on the internet ... has started to bore me
... means of provocation to thought
... other artists ... are ... falling into ... traps;
the work I list below is ... merely rampant;

Eryk's posting raises these issues for me:

Surely in all areas of art, most is unimaginative and derivative. Visibly
successful artists will 'inspire' countless copycats. Art becomes what art
is seen to be. It is incredibly hard to break out of this vicious circle.
Why do you think that your list will lead to the production of any art at
all, let alone great art?
Why are you driven to a public declaration of your dissatisfaction with the
state of (digtally based) art? Is this a professional view, or a personal
view? Does it bug you as an art consuming member of the public that there
just isn't enough art about these days (goddam it, when I was a lad ...) or
as an artist who needs to absorb x amount of art a week to survive (just
need to find one more show before friday)?

I find Eryk's rules a bit negative to do any good. Don't do this, don't do
that, don't use this, don't use that. Actually the only positive rule is
'you must use your own images' (which could also be construed as a negative
rule - don't use other people's images). But how radical is this? I mean,
it's Warhol and Duchamp v. every art school ever ...

My view would be that a huge amount of work needs to be produced in order
for the good stuff to emerge. It seems that one of the wonders of the global
art scene is that there is so much going on, so much work towards the
production of art. In this sea swim all art producers, all existing
somewhere in the food chain. This is not a bad thing, it is the driver of
art. Can you imagine a world in which only 'good' art is produced?

I think that one thing
Art-Which-Originates-To-Some-Degree-From-The-Digital-Realm needs is to align
itself more with the long existing and structured non-digital art world. One
of the problems with AWOTSDFTDR is that the tools and the routines are so
seductive, so replete with possibility. The distribution mechanism is so
open, so grateful. The colours are dead sexy. Flash is flashy. Viruses are
nom de la jour. Whatever it might seem from inside Rhizome, almost the
entire world doesn't have a clue how this is all done (and nor do I, come to
that).
Maybe what Eryk is saying is 'Look guys, we're about to be rumbled that we
are in love with our tools but have not managed to rise above them.'

Here's my stab at some rules of thumb for artists who happen to find
themselves working in the digital zone:

Make work with atoms on a regular basis
Don't master your tools, let them confuse you
Aspire to allude to something fundamental to humanity but don't care if
no-one gets it
Let your work slide back and forth between the digital and the analog
Aspire to be exhibited in the greatest of galleries and to win the greatest
of art prizes
Don't be afraid to throw a pot of paint in the eye of your fellow artists

Eryk also said:
>If no one responds to it, I am quitting the list.

Actually, if it wasn't for the few Eryks, I would quit this list.

Does anyone else feel that there is little or no discussion, community,
passion, planning on this (or any other) list?

Cheers,
Ivan

DISCUSSION

Artists on Webcam project


Not sure if this is strictly interesting or even working, but its on now at=

http://www.showstudio.com/projects/wpd/wpd_start.html

Watching Paint Dry
Matthew Collings/Liz Neal/Gavin Turk
Live Now
Three contemporary artists open their studios to a global audience for one =
month only. From 29th July to 23rd August watch Matthew Collings, Liz Neal =
and Gavin Turk at work on their latest projects via the webcams surveilling=
the creation of environments, paintings and sculpture, and their daily com=
ings and goings.

DISCUSSION

Re: most artists are hackers, whereas hackers are godlike


> > noble reasons. I am sorry, but I refuse to see hacking as a pursuit we
> > should be putting on the same pedestal (or higher, in one person's view)
> > as artistic creation. It just ain't so!
>
> You can't ``try'' hacking any more than you can ``try'' theoretical
> physics. ... As for artistic creation, ugh, when I survey the
> non-economic arts it is difficult to see anything but ineffectual
> wankers desperate for poorly concealed self-aggrandizement, pissing
> from the tops of their self-errected pedestals, endlessly turning,
> trying to keep the latest political wind at their backs.
>
> On a good day with a brolly I'm more generous and see them as a
> mostly harmless, if parasitic, marketing arm for the people who
> do the real work.
>
> --
> Julian Assange

OK, fair enough, good swipe at artists. And nicely done, to get hacking on a
par with theoretical physics.
But remind me, why do hackers hack then?

Surely hackers hack in the world, but from a self justified theoretical
position. Generally they are only acknowledged within the hacker community
itself. If _success_ and reward comes, it tends to come by abandoning to
some degree the initial theoretical position and jumping in bed with a non
hacker community. At which point, this success will be derided by those who
remain _pure_. The craft itself will move endlessly on. There will be heroes
and villains, and new generations of hackers coming along to scale new
heights. And all the time, the outside world just thinks they are a bunch of
self justifying wankers.
Bit like the art world, really.

Cheers,
Ivan

DISCUSSION

Re: grassroots


>
> Good to hear from you (or see your text).
> Those ol' throbber kittens. My most favorite song of theirs is...
>
> Something came over me...but I don't know what it was :-)
>
Oh yes, oh yes Third and Final Annual Report, I spent a year or so crashing
out to that, it induced such spooked dreams. Later I became a great fan of
The Leather Nun, as sort of Swedish Throbbing Gristle tribute band :). I
used their '48 hours to live' in my foundation graduation show on an endless
loop. 'Sitting resting in a chair, getting a sun tan, 48 hours to live'.
Drove everyone scatty. Lovely. Oh, memories. Cheers, Ivan

DISCUSSION

Re: chinese musak always sets me free


----- Original Message -----
From: Curt Cloninger <curt@lab404.com>

> Last night the fam and I ate at a Chinese restaurant, and as usual, I
> was unable to keep from concentrating in minute detail on the
> background music, however insipid. ...> Then the musak got weirder. It
entered an extended medley phase.
> The medley began with Jennifer Warnes' "I Know a Heartache When I See
> One," but then it proceeded into ... And since the music was all
> re-recorded in the same Chinese musak style, the differences in genre
> were no longer audibly apparent.

> All this got me thinking about the wack-wack-wacky world of
> contemporary art criticism. Do we accept certain art because of the
> way it's presented, its production value, the genre-awareness of its
> accompanying statement, its context? Do we dismiss other work as
> non-art because it doesn't jump through our expected art hoops?

> Are we missing the true "melody" of the art?

Wow. Firstly, do you take notes during these meals? I often have trains of
thought like that, but its all gone in the morning :-).
Secondly, yes, of course. I mean, everyone who ever said 'that's not art,
I/my kid/my dog could do that', is essentially lacking knowledge of the
context that we use to convert stuff into art. It might be interesting,
though futile, to compile a schematic of the cues that we use to identify
and convert 'stuff' to art. The most obvious being 'its in a gallery'.
That said (and here I retreat to dangerous ground), I can't really see that
it's helpful. I mean, yes, of course we stop hearing the melody when we are
about five, and we realise that in order to survive in this well dodgy world
we are going to have to construct some strategies to survive. So we start to
learn to recognise that things are presented, produced, contextualised. We
start to read those surrounding meta texts very quickly and we use them to
say what we have to say to get what we want. Of course, this doesn't only
apply to art, and it applies just as much to anyone who professes no
knowledge or interest in art - they still have to recognise the signs, so
they can avoid liking the stuff.
And underneath it all, the melody plays on.
Well, call me an old situationist, but I believe this 'we have made
ourselves what we are and have to be what we are'. We are not naturally able
to listen to music or to see art. We have learned how to do this. We might
go mad if we could see it. And, in Nausea, a novel that I have recently
returned to for precisely this thing, 'the nausea' is the authentic.
Roquentin keeps seeing the world as it 'really' is (he hears the melody?)
and by god it scares him. Sartre's theme is that we won't live
authentically, that we run from the authentic.

So, if you can see the melody in art, is this a nice experience?

Cheers,
Ivan