ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Re: dot.com implosion killed net art?
> The dot.com was a toin-coss in order to generate energy.
> Net.art is for the most part a complete and total failure.
> There is no recollection of a single intelligent use of
> computers in the past decade. Isn't that sad?
if that is really how you feel, it's sad for you.
also, success and failure, in matters of art and life, are ambiguous.
there's winning and losing, but which is which is sometimes confusing.
ja
http://vispo.com
> Net.art is for the most part a complete and total failure.
> There is no recollection of a single intelligent use of
> computers in the past decade. Isn't that sad?
if that is really how you feel, it's sad for you.
also, success and failure, in matters of art and life, are ambiguous.
there's winning and losing, but which is which is sometimes confusing.
ja
http://vispo.com
Re: netVerse
> http://netverse.andresc.net
> Please have a go.
>
> Thanx!
> Andre SC
Hi Andre,
Thanks for that! A *very* big fridge door that easily fits on the monitor.
Greetings to you in South Africa from Canada.
ja
http://vispo.com
> Please have a go.
>
> Thanx!
> Andre SC
Hi Andre,
Thanks for that! A *very* big fridge door that easily fits on the monitor.
Greetings to you in South Africa from Canada.
ja
http://vispo.com
Re: Re: Re: dot.com implosion killed net art?
> As far as your statement on the lack of an economy of the art
> object where net art is concerned it might be interesting to
> look at conceptual art and early performance work as a way to
> understand how they were brought into the major art institutions
> and what was gained and lost in the process. i think there is an
> uneasy alliance that happens here. If we are talking conceptual
> and performance of the 60's and 70's (as an example) much of the
> work resisted the aesthetics, politics and economics of the
> modenist art museums, but found itself being absorbed into those
> same institutions eventually anyway. Artists were able to
> support themselves and the genre gained widespread acceptence as
> "Art", yet much of the original point of these works was hidden
> or lost and replaced with an institutional narrative. It is now
> possible, for instance, to open an art book and see Kosuth's One
> and Three Chairs discussed with a formalist vocabulary. I think
> I may have taken this off in anot!
> her direction. Sorry. It would be nice to see more written
> along the lines that you have laid out here.
Well, one thing that can be said for the galleries is that they are in advance of the publishers, for the most part, concerning net art and the digital more broadly. I'm basically a writer and fled with gratitude to the Net when the Web opened up. Because I had little company in the sort of art where I live. Because I also work with the visual and publishing such material is difficult for publishers. And expensive. Because I also am a programmer and audio guy and can attempt to put it together. Because I can publish my work as well as I have the skill to do on the Web at relatively little financial cost. Because books in Canada have a hard time getting outside Canada or having more than 300 copies printed whereas the Net is widely international. Because neither Borges nor Burroughs could have been Canadian writers. Because the other artists I'm interested in tend to be interested in the Net and their work is on it, often. Because it's possible to take poetry in directions on the Web that poetry has rarely suffered. Because it still thrills me occassionally. Because we are creating a world wide web of art and ideas accessible to increasingly large portions of the world and we have the opportunity to make that worthwhile for people now and perhaps for the future. Because my daddy taught me there's nothing better for the world than communication between people where before there was ignorance and fear of the other and the unknown. Because we need to learn how to feel and think with this technological extension of our voice and writings and cognitive abilities so we can create something other than grasping, poking claws with it. Because computers should expand our humanity, not simply diminish it. Because I like books but my work usually doesn't fit well inside of them. Because, as a writer, my focus is on publishing, mainly, rather than performance or installation, etc.
It seems that net art has typically had more involvement from visual artists than from writers though, of course, it tends to turn visual artists toward writing and writers toward some involvement with the visual. But publishers aren't quite sure what to make of digital literary art if couldn't fit in a book. And will remain that way while they focus singly on print.
If net art is 'out of fashion' in media art/visual arts now, perhaps the writers are still in some sort of process of exploration of it. Perhaps the net is more frequently apt for writers than for visual artists. In that there are all sorts of visual arts that don't fit on the screen well or at all, whereas the screen is more accomodating to wide ranges of approaches to writing. Computers are language/logic machines. They are implicated in language down to the machine language and theoretical level (computer science students study a course sometimes called 'language and the theory of computation').
I've read some of Kosuth's writing. He's a strong writer. He said the concrete poets were stupid about language. He isn't a visual poet but a visual artist of conceptual art. Which is to say he isn't so much interested in the 'shadows on the wall' as the concepts that eddy mysteriously among the shadows. And it seems, reading his writing, that he is/was also rather formidably Marxist. But my whole knowledge of his work is within the last eight years, so I'm not sure what has been lost in the process you describe. I have read his collection of writings Art After Philosophy and After, but it's been a while. Does he condemn formalism of some type?
ja
http://vispo.com
> object where net art is concerned it might be interesting to
> look at conceptual art and early performance work as a way to
> understand how they were brought into the major art institutions
> and what was gained and lost in the process. i think there is an
> uneasy alliance that happens here. If we are talking conceptual
> and performance of the 60's and 70's (as an example) much of the
> work resisted the aesthetics, politics and economics of the
> modenist art museums, but found itself being absorbed into those
> same institutions eventually anyway. Artists were able to
> support themselves and the genre gained widespread acceptence as
> "Art", yet much of the original point of these works was hidden
> or lost and replaced with an institutional narrative. It is now
> possible, for instance, to open an art book and see Kosuth's One
> and Three Chairs discussed with a formalist vocabulary. I think
> I may have taken this off in anot!
> her direction. Sorry. It would be nice to see more written
> along the lines that you have laid out here.
Well, one thing that can be said for the galleries is that they are in advance of the publishers, for the most part, concerning net art and the digital more broadly. I'm basically a writer and fled with gratitude to the Net when the Web opened up. Because I had little company in the sort of art where I live. Because I also work with the visual and publishing such material is difficult for publishers. And expensive. Because I also am a programmer and audio guy and can attempt to put it together. Because I can publish my work as well as I have the skill to do on the Web at relatively little financial cost. Because books in Canada have a hard time getting outside Canada or having more than 300 copies printed whereas the Net is widely international. Because neither Borges nor Burroughs could have been Canadian writers. Because the other artists I'm interested in tend to be interested in the Net and their work is on it, often. Because it's possible to take poetry in directions on the Web that poetry has rarely suffered. Because it still thrills me occassionally. Because we are creating a world wide web of art and ideas accessible to increasingly large portions of the world and we have the opportunity to make that worthwhile for people now and perhaps for the future. Because my daddy taught me there's nothing better for the world than communication between people where before there was ignorance and fear of the other and the unknown. Because we need to learn how to feel and think with this technological extension of our voice and writings and cognitive abilities so we can create something other than grasping, poking claws with it. Because computers should expand our humanity, not simply diminish it. Because I like books but my work usually doesn't fit well inside of them. Because, as a writer, my focus is on publishing, mainly, rather than performance or installation, etc.
It seems that net art has typically had more involvement from visual artists than from writers though, of course, it tends to turn visual artists toward writing and writers toward some involvement with the visual. But publishers aren't quite sure what to make of digital literary art if couldn't fit in a book. And will remain that way while they focus singly on print.
If net art is 'out of fashion' in media art/visual arts now, perhaps the writers are still in some sort of process of exploration of it. Perhaps the net is more frequently apt for writers than for visual artists. In that there are all sorts of visual arts that don't fit on the screen well or at all, whereas the screen is more accomodating to wide ranges of approaches to writing. Computers are language/logic machines. They are implicated in language down to the machine language and theoretical level (computer science students study a course sometimes called 'language and the theory of computation').
I've read some of Kosuth's writing. He's a strong writer. He said the concrete poets were stupid about language. He isn't a visual poet but a visual artist of conceptual art. Which is to say he isn't so much interested in the 'shadows on the wall' as the concepts that eddy mysteriously among the shadows. And it seems, reading his writing, that he is/was also rather formidably Marxist. But my whole knowledge of his work is within the last eight years, so I'm not sure what has been lost in the process you describe. I have read his collection of writings Art After Philosophy and After, but it's been a while. Does he condemn formalism of some type?
ja
http://vispo.com
Re: dot.com implosion killed net art?
i wonder how economic factors affect art in different places. for instance,
in large cities, where everything is so expensive, i wonder if the 'value'
(in the broadest sense) of something like net art is more inflected with
economic associations than in smaller places. if an art does not or cannot
establish an explicit economy of the art object and, further, the economic
culture (dot com industry in this case) tanks, people in larger cities may
find the art increasingly difficult to fund even indirectly, and this
diminishment in the economic value of the whole activity results in less
involvement all round in the art. which brings about also not simply a
diminishment in the economic 'value' of the activity but a subjective change
in the perceived 'value' of the art or activity.
whereas in smaller places, where it's sometimes more possible to do things
that aren't necessarily funded (if anything at all is to be done), the
economic state of the art is not as influential. and people in smaller
places can mistake the influence of economic imperative in larger cities for
shallow, fickle fashion-mindedness whereas it's mostly people going where
there are at least a few dollars to pay the rent and get paid for work in
places that are outrageously expensive and, even at the best of times,
artists have to spend more time paying the rent than making art.
and, in smaller places, the big city collectors, curators, publishers,
patrons and gallerists etc are more or less out of reach anyway, ie, that
'economy' is 'irrelevant' to getting on with things, is no help. and,
similarly, in the big cities, notions of the value of art that are not
predicated on some sort of pseudo economic market value are insupportable by
the above logic.
or am i all wet on this?
also, compare the 'economy' of visual art with literary art. ezra pound once
remarked 'It's true there's no money in poetry. But, then, there's no poetry
in money, either." the ragged 'economy' of poetry trades in things like
teaching positions and who publishes your work and who writes about it, not
at all in the monetary worth of the work itself, because everybody is
penniless in that regard.
ja
http://vispo.com
in large cities, where everything is so expensive, i wonder if the 'value'
(in the broadest sense) of something like net art is more inflected with
economic associations than in smaller places. if an art does not or cannot
establish an explicit economy of the art object and, further, the economic
culture (dot com industry in this case) tanks, people in larger cities may
find the art increasingly difficult to fund even indirectly, and this
diminishment in the economic value of the whole activity results in less
involvement all round in the art. which brings about also not simply a
diminishment in the economic 'value' of the activity but a subjective change
in the perceived 'value' of the art or activity.
whereas in smaller places, where it's sometimes more possible to do things
that aren't necessarily funded (if anything at all is to be done), the
economic state of the art is not as influential. and people in smaller
places can mistake the influence of economic imperative in larger cities for
shallow, fickle fashion-mindedness whereas it's mostly people going where
there are at least a few dollars to pay the rent and get paid for work in
places that are outrageously expensive and, even at the best of times,
artists have to spend more time paying the rent than making art.
and, in smaller places, the big city collectors, curators, publishers,
patrons and gallerists etc are more or less out of reach anyway, ie, that
'economy' is 'irrelevant' to getting on with things, is no help. and,
similarly, in the big cities, notions of the value of art that are not
predicated on some sort of pseudo economic market value are insupportable by
the above logic.
or am i all wet on this?
also, compare the 'economy' of visual art with literary art. ezra pound once
remarked 'It's true there's no money in poetry. But, then, there's no poetry
in money, either." the ragged 'economy' of poetry trades in things like
teaching positions and who publishes your work and who writes about it, not
at all in the monetary worth of the work itself, because everybody is
penniless in that regard.
ja
http://vispo.com
RE: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: dot.com implosion killed net art?
> IMHO, the important question
> is whether or not net art will be *relevant* in the future. By
> relevant I mean, relevant to collectors, art-thinkers, other artists,
> curators, gallerists, etc etc. After all, isn't that what people mean
> when they speculate whether or not a certain art form/medium/technique
> is 'dead?'
>
> IMHO, mail art is more-or-less irrelevant. I don't want that to happen
> to net art.
Here is something I wrote in 1998 about the relation of Web art and mail
art:
http://vispo.com/guests/ClementePadin/ClementeIntroToOptionsOfMailArt.html ;
this is an introduction to an essay called "The Options of Mail Art" by the
Uruguyan poet, mail artist and net artist Clemente Padin who is still active
in these arts. Or, rather, is still active in what is happening now, which,
for some, is a mixture of both mail art and net art. In his essay, Padin
argues against accepting the notion that what is relevant and what isn't is
decided by collectors, curators, gallerists, etc.
ja
http://vispo.com
> is whether or not net art will be *relevant* in the future. By
> relevant I mean, relevant to collectors, art-thinkers, other artists,
> curators, gallerists, etc etc. After all, isn't that what people mean
> when they speculate whether or not a certain art form/medium/technique
> is 'dead?'
>
> IMHO, mail art is more-or-less irrelevant. I don't want that to happen
> to net art.
Here is something I wrote in 1998 about the relation of Web art and mail
art:
http://vispo.com/guests/ClementePadin/ClementeIntroToOptionsOfMailArt.html ;
this is an introduction to an essay called "The Options of Mail Art" by the
Uruguyan poet, mail artist and net artist Clemente Padin who is still active
in these arts. Or, rather, is still active in what is happening now, which,
for some, is a mixture of both mail art and net art. In his essay, Padin
argues against accepting the notion that what is relevant and what isn't is
decided by collectors, curators, gallerists, etc.
ja
http://vispo.com