Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology

On Oct 5, 2004, at 4:48 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> A. Giving up on trying to fit net art into high gallery art strictures
> does not inherently imply:
> 1. techno fetishization
> 2. a-politicalization
> 3. abandonment to pure abstraction

No, of course not. However, the "high art" complex has a heavily
conceptual foundation, which is a useful context for moving actual
discussion forward. Also, we must be extremely careful not to reject
the hystorical conversations and work from which our current work
emerges. The gallery is irrelevant, but the art world is not.

> B. Abstract art does not inherently imply:
> 1. Psychedelia
> 2. Impotence

I wasn't making the case that abstract art == psychedelia, but I will
make the case that abstract art is impotent in today's art context. If
anyone disagrees, then enlighten me: what does pure abstraction have to
say? Is it a comment on our fragmented, post-modern times? If so, it's
a half-century-old sentiment. Great art makes the people of its time
uncomfortable – I don't think abstraction has made anyone
uncomfortable for decades. I'd go further and say that formalism hasn't
made anyone uncomfortable in quite some either; representational or
abstract, if all you have going for you is aesthetics, you're not
really saying anything.

> For example, Paul Klee's work is neither psychedelic nor impotent and,
> although no longer contemporary or en vogue, was and is potent and
> relevant. I'd include Stan Brakhage in that category as well.

And yet Klee's work was extremely challenging when it was being
produced; at various times "primitivist," child-like, surrealist,
cubist and transcendentalist, there was a heady conceptual backing to
everything Klee did. All of these artistic movements that he was
influenced by (and exerted influence on) were socially radical, as was
his work (and even the very concept of abstraction, at that point).

Similarly, Brakhage came out of the 1960s, and his desire to bring
pre-verbal consciousness-expanding sublimity to the viewer, through the
manipulation of light and the rejection of narrative and traditional
film production techniques, was extremely provocative and radical.

However, it's no longer 1917 or 1968. Abstraction/formalism is no
longer [surprising/upsetting/challenging], even when it's on the
computerBox. What does formalism have to say today? Lets break it down.
Unlike Brakhage, these folks aren't breaking the means of production to
interesting ends, nor are they saying anything uncomfortable or
challenging. Apps like Flash and Photoshop were designed to make pretty
pictures – making swirling lines and random sounds in Flash is like
making a traditional film in 1968, or painting straight portraits in
1917. Subtle statements can be made, but you contribute nothing to the
global discussion we call "art."

Creating your own tools is more interesting, but when the end result is
the changing Rhizome logo, your hard work is for naught. It's the
equivalent of the straight portrait painter grinding his own paints in
1917 – admirable work for the service of art which has nothing to say.


> C. Overtly political art does not inherently imply:
> 1. potency
> 2. maturity
> 3. proper moral use of art

I never said it did, and anyone who does has an extremely Marxist view
of artmaking. However, I don't understand why someone would make art
which says nothing when there is so much to say.

> D. Generative techiniques in artwork do not inherently imply:
> 1. visual abstraction
> 2. a-conceptualization

I love these rule systems you built! :) But really, I never implied
anything about all "generative art." What I did was to suggest that the
preponderance of "generative art" is [abstract/formal]. In this way,
it's mostly about itself, and how cool it is that it's generating
material, sometimes interactively, sometimes using clever data as
input. In short, most "generative art" doesn't have much impact after
the initial coolness, like browsing Wallpaper* magazine.

> "Classic, clear-cut examples" of net-specific art may make for
> dramatic object lessons, but they don't always make for interesting
> art.

Most certainly. Like the early video moment, sometimes the important
discussion takes place outside the [gallery/museum] system, and the
intersections with galleries are awkward and in many ways unsuccessful.
The point is that it's important not to articulate newmedia as divorced
from the hystorical threads that wove it.

- ben

Hi Ben,

It seems we fundamentally disagree on the importance of art being in dialogue with the contemporary art world. I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time. Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever done.

Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious social change). This is the interesting thing about outsider art and one of the things I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be). Human culture has changed a great deal, but individual humans have been wired pretty much the same for a good while.

If it's alway primarily about "forwarding the canonical dialogue," artmaking can quickly devolve into a chasing after newness, a sort of conceptual fashion show. Collectors as venture capitalists and artists as aspiring CEOs hoping to go public with their newest art venture. Where's the passion in that? What? You say passion's been out of date since Romanticism? Dang.

This quote (which I've posted here before) seems pertinent:

"An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age… It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question."
- g.k. chesterton, 1908

I would remix it this way, "What art a man can [enjoy/receive from/be moved by] depends upon his propensity, not upon the clock or the century."

(But as t. whild has pointed out previously, the quote is almost 100 years out of date, so there you are.)

peace,
curt

_

ben syverson wrote:

I wasn't making the case that abstract art == psychedelia, but I will
make the case that abstract art is impotent in today's art context. If
anyone disagrees, then enlighten me: what does pure abstraction have to
say? Is it a comment on our fragmented, post-modern times? If so, it's
a half-century-old sentiment. Great art makes the people of its time
uncomfortable – I don't think abstraction has made anyone
uncomfortable for decades. I'd go further and say that formalism hasn't
made anyone uncomfortable in quite some either; representational or
abstract, if all you have going for you is aesthetics, you're not
really saying anything.

> For example, Paul Klee's work is neither psychedelic nor impotent and,
> although no longer contemporary or en vogue, was and is potent and
> relevant. I'd include Stan Brakhage in that category as well.

And yet Klee's work was extremely challenging when it was being
produced; at various times "primitivist," child-like, surrealist,
cubist and transcendentalist, there was a heady conceptual backing to
everything Klee did. All of these artistic movements that he was
influenced by (and exerted influence on) were socially radical, as was
his work (and even the very concept of abstraction, at that point).

Similarly, Brakhage came out of the 1960s, and his desire to bring
pre-verbal consciousness-expanding sublimity to the viewer, through the
manipulation of light and the rejection of narrative and traditional
film production techniques, was extremely provocative and radical.

However, it's no longer 1917 or 1968. Abstraction/formalism is no
longer [surprising/upsetting/challenging], even when it's on the
computerBox. What does formalism have to say today? Lets break it down.
Unlike Brakhage, these folks aren't breaking the means of production to
interesting ends, nor are they saying anything uncomfortable or
challenging. Apps like Flash and Photoshop were designed to make pretty
pictures – making swirling lines and random sounds in Flash is like
making a traditional film in 1968, or painting straight portraits in
1917. Subtle statements can be made, but you contribute nothing to the
global discussion we call "art."

Creating your own tools is more interesting, but when the end result is
the changing Rhizome logo, your hard work is for naught. It's the
equivalent of the straight portrait painter grinding his own paints in
1917 – admirable work for the service of art which has nothing to say.


> C. Overtly political art does not inherently imply:
> 1. potency
> 2. maturity
> 3. proper moral use of art

I never said it did, and anyone who does has an extremely Marxist view
of artmaking. However, I don't understand why someone would make art
which says nothing when there is so much to say.

> D. Generative techiniques in artwork do not inherently imply:
> 1. visual abstraction
> 2. a-conceptualization

I love these rule systems you built! :) But really, I never implied
anything about all "generative art." What I did was to suggest that the
preponderance of "generative art" is [abstract/formal]. In this way,
it's mostly about itself, and how cool it is that it's generating
material, sometimes interactively, sometimes using clever data as
input. In short, most "generative art" doesn't have much impact after
the initial coolness, like browsing Wallpaper* magazine.

> "Classic, clear-cut examples" of net-specific art may make for
> dramatic object lessons, but they don't always make for interesting
> art.

Most certainly. Like the early video moment, sometimes the important
discussion takes place outside the [gallery/museum] system, and the
intersections with galleries are awkward and in many ways unsuccessful.
The point is that it's important not to articulate newmedia as divorced
from the hystorical threads that wove it.

- ben

curt, at the risk of delivering a pt-by-pt response rather than an
elegant and coherent essay, I'd like to address a few pts individually
in-line. I apologize in advance for the length, but I promise there'll
be some juicy nuggets sprinkled along the way!

On Oct 5, 2004, at 11:02 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> It seems we fundamentally disagree on the importance of art being in
> dialogue with the contemporary art world.

Our dialogues are already being assimilated into the broader art
context; this discussion we're having is art in dialogue with the
contemporary art world. The dialogue that Beryl Korot, Phyllis
Gershuny, and Ira Schneider fostered in Radical Software (
http://www.radicalsoftware.org ) was not really considered to be part
of the general contemporary art narrative of the time (early 70s), but
the art world has a way of swallowing engaging discussions, even if it
takes a while.

The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of
becoming less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received
with excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion,
newmedia will be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical
mass. To avoid becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the
criticality that's missing by not having a wider recognition &&
discussion in the hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to
critique this work than us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just
don't see that critical discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling
over the terminology and technology, but not much attention paid to the
ideas.

> I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting
> primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time.

Then that truly is a fundamental disagreement, because both of those
artists (and every other major artist in history, almost without
exception) are remembered precisely because they challenged
assumptions, made people uncomfortable, and posed controversial (if
sometimes implicit) questions. I definitely want to avoid personal
statements, but anyone who thinks these or any artists are
[important/interesting] because their work is aesthetically pleasing
has an [incomplete/impoverished] understanding of the hyperthreaded
hystorical context in which the work was produced. All "important" work
is about ideas; even the works of abstractExpressionists and 1970s
minimalists made their own provocative arguments.

> Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the
> work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever
> done.

However, how can you not see Brakhage as emerging from the hyperthreads
running through the 1950s and 1960? Even his last works were products
of a career forged in that climate, although by the 90s, also
interwoven with all the threads in-between… It's not about waves,
it's about the dialogue we as artists participate in by creating work.
If what you do isn't challenging, you're not contributing to that
dialogue.

> Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the
> sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have
> great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious
> social change).

Clearly, and no one disputes this. In fact, perhaps the most potent
works exist on the fringe of that system. However, as the "contemporary
art world" wrestles with how best to absorb us into their discussion,
the problem they're encountering is not how best to fit us into a
gallery, but rather how to [talk/write] about work that doesn't seem to
have anything interesting to say. BUSTED.

> This is the interesting thing about outsider art and one of the things
> I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be).

Let's not get started on "outsider" art, and the offensively
condescending colonial-era mindset that celebrates "virgin" work
unscathed by the evil corrupting influence of the art world dialogue. I
thought we finally vanquished this pathologically naive Modernist
impulse in the 80s. The reality is that, whether we know it or not, we
are all drawing from similar hystorical hyperthreads. Art, advertising
and popular culture are so [inbred/intertwined] that the difference
between the art school graduate and the mythical kid from the projects
is that the art school graduate can *sometimes* put a name to a handful
of the people and movements they draw artistic inspiration from. To
think the net somehow creates the opportunity for more "outside" voices
is to get it exactly wrong. Instead, the net's interconwebness
crossbreeds everything in it (including the artWorld and everything
else) even faster, and even more than in any other media. "Outsider"
art will emerge from this network of insiders known as the "interweb"
about as often as wild feral adults will emerge from Manhattan.

> If it's alway primarily about "forwarding the canonical dialogue,"
> artmaking can quickly devolve into a chasing after newness, a sort of
> conceptual fashion show.

WOAH D00D. It's not about the canon, or the cult of the new; it's about
your work contributing to an ongoing and meaningful discussion. To call
the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a "conceptual
fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual pursuit! If we're
going to go that route, how about you take all of the
diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover," and
I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have anything to
say. ;)


> Collectors as venture capitalists and artists as aspiring CEOs
> hoping to go public with their newest art venture. Where's the
> passion in that? What? You say passion's been out of date since
> Romanticism? Dang.

Passion's always in, baby. To understand the art world, you need to
understand the roles of (in alphaOrder) artists, critics, collectors,
curators and [gallery owners/dealers]. They all have their own
[economic/career] motives, and it's crucial to always remember this, no
matter what they say about it all being about the art. Artists who get
caught up in the economics and career strategies of the art world do so
at the risk of confusing others' motives with their own, and diverting
attention from their own work. See Exhibit A, Jeff Koons, who carefully
engineered his own career, indeed making his celebrity a [focus/aspect]
of his work – however, it backfired when his popularity inevitably
waned (as is the case with any celebrity who doesn't actively reinvent
[him/her]self).

What does that have to do with newmedia? Beats me – the most
interesting newmedia isn't happening on the front page of ArtForum,
it's happening on and off lists like these. Unfortunately, we're just
not engaging in enough critical discussion about that work.

> "An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that
> such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in
> another." - g.k. chesterton, 1908

As charming as Chesterton's plea for the wisdom of the good ole days
is, his comment fails to recognize the evolutionary nature of human
discussion && activity. Today we understand Newtonian physics as the
hystorical context from which Einstein's theory of General Relativity
emerged. Newton's ideas were revolutionary, and extremely insightful,
but on a solar or galactic scale, we now see they don't work as well,
so Einstein proposed General Relativity to explain the discrepancies.
Then scientists discovered that General Relativity doesn't work so well
on the [atomic/subatomic] scale, so Quantum Mechanics was developed as
a parallel model. This isn't to say that we look back at Newton or
Einstein with scorn for being out of date – quite the opposite; each
is crucial for understanding the context and creation of the next.
However, you never see scientists complaining that Quantum Mechanics
and Superstring Theory are too fashionable, and that Newtonian physics
worked fine for Newton so they should work fine for us today.

Granted, the art world doesn't have as linear a narrative, but to rip
artistic [theories/practices] out of their threads of hystorical
context and drop them into the present is to pretend that the
intervening years of discussion and debate never happened. It's willful
intellectual amnesia. We are, after all, talking about Chesterton, so
let's not forget-to-remember that he was a curmudgeonly sometimes
anti-Semite, full time anti-Feminist and an art-school-educated
anti-Artist: "the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts
amateurs." We could [explain/understand] his now-controversial
positions by examining his hystorical context, but by his own
direction, maybe he would rather we ignore his context and take his
creeds of that era at face value.

All of this is the long way of saying that newmedia disregards the
threads which weave it at its own peril. So rather than watch this
FlashFormalism float by and let myself become complicit in my silence,
I solemnly vow to do my part to be a curmudgeon in my own way by
contributing criticism and artwork to the discussion.

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 2:23 AM, bensyverson wrote:

> To understand the art world, you need to understand the roles of (in
> alphaOrder) artists, critics, collectors, curators and [gallery
> owners/dealers].

Whoops <blush> if you really want that sortedAlpha, that should be
"artists, collectors, critics, curators and [gallery owners/dealers]"

Signed,

An imperfect perfectionist

> WOAH D00D. It's not about the canon, or the cult of the new; it's
> about your work contributing to an ongoing and meaningful discussion.
> To call the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a
> "conceptual fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual
> pursuit! If we're going to go that route, how about you take all of
> the diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover,"
> and I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have
> anything to say. ;)

i'll add my own "woah dood" here. confusing sanctioned art world
discussions with intellectual pursuit is a bit of a dishonest trick.
Have you READ any of the well funded art pubs? how much "intellectual
pursuit" did you find there? the art world is not about transparency.

> Passion's always in, baby. To understand the art world, you need to
> understand the roles of (in alphaOrder) artists, critics, collectors,
> curators and [gallery owners/dealers]. They all have their own
> [economic/career] motives, and it's crucial to always remember this,
> no matter what they say about it all being about the art. Artists who
> get caught up in the economics and career strategies of the art world
> do so at the risk of confusing others' motives with their own, and
> diverting attention from their own work. See Exhibit A, Jeff Koons,
> who carefully engineered his own career, indeed making his celebrity a
> [focus/aspect] of his work – however, it backfired when his
> popularity inevitably waned (as is the case with any celebrity who
> doesn't actively reinvent [him/her]self).

Jeff Koons' career waning? OK, so you haven't looked at ArtForum
recently.
ryan

On Wednesday, October 06, 2004, at 08:37AM, bensyverson <[email protected]> wrote:

>The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of
>becoming less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received
>with excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion,
>newmedia will be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical
>mass. To avoid becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the
>criticality that's missing by not having a wider recognition &&
>discussion in the hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to
>critique this work than us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just
>don't see that critical discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling
>over the terminology and technology, but not much attention paid to the
>ideas.

Illustrating fashionable art discourse *will* lead to footnotes. net.art's would-be-social-engagement was trivial, getting some critical *distance* and autonomy is a good next step. R&D rather than R&R.

>All of this is the long way of saying that newmedia disregards the
>threads which weave it at its own peril.

It becomes just the gilt on them at its own peril as well.

>So rather than watch this
>FlashFormalism float by and let myself become complicit in my silence,
>I solemnly vow to do my part to be a curmudgeon in my own way by
>contributing criticism and artwork to the discussion.

Yes. But regarding the art, silence can be a statement, fantasy can be realistic and formalism can have social content and meaning.

- Rob.

On Oct 6, 2004, at 3:35 AM, ryan griffis wrote:

> i'll add my own "woah dood" here. confusing sanctioned art world
> discussions with intellectual pursuit is a bit of a dishonest trick.
> Have you READ any of the well funded art pubs? how much "intellectual
> pursuit" did you find there? the art world is not about transparency.

Who says that's the artistic discussion that matters? Like I mentioned,
the relevant artistic discourses are usually absorbed by the art world
as an economicMachine from the outside. However, this fact does not
render the art world irrelevant to newmedia; it's important to
recognize that among the superstrings that resonate to form "newMedia,"
the artWorld is an important harmonic in that formative vibration,
along with the parallel histories that accompany that
[world/narrative]. You have to be clear about acknowledging that the
economic aspects of the artWorld work in concert, but not always
harmony, with the intellectual threads being spun. ArtForum is a trade
magazine for [collectors/curators/gallery owners] about the art market
– to take it and it similar mags as representative of the whole of
"ContemporaryArt" leaves out the world that critics and artists live
in. In other words, it ignores the intellectual heart of the artWorld,
which is lists like these, conferences like ReadMe, artSchools all
over, and everywhere else discussion is taking place. What I'm saying
is: wake up and realize that this is the "sanctioned art world," so
lets have some real criticalDiscourse.

> Jeff Koons' career waning? OK, so you haven't looked at ArtForum
> recently.

Well, anyway, his biggest contributions to the discussion happened 15
years ago. I don't know how much he impacts the current moment. Maybe
to the economicSide, his culturalCaptialStock is up, but at any rate I
don't hear much discussion about his work in any of the circles I run
in…

- ben

On Wednesday, October 06, 2004, at 02:08AM, bensyverson <[email protected]> wrote:

>I wasn't making the case that abstract art == psychedelia, but I will
>make the case that abstract art is impotent in today's art context. If
>anyone disagrees, then enlighten me: what does pure abstraction have to
>say? Is it a comment on our fragmented, post-modern times? If so, it's
>a half-century-old sentiment. Great art makes the people of its time
>uncomfortable – I don't think abstraction has made anyone
>uncomfortable for decades. I'd go further and say that formalism hasn't
>made anyone uncomfortable in quite some either; representational or
>abstract, if all you have going for you is aesthetics, you're not
>really saying anything.

Pure abstraction is resistant to the dominant mode of criticism (the dreary romanticism of the expanded text), and a semiotised (grammatical, algorithmic, kitsch) culture. It certainly seems to make some people uncomfortable, and not just the plebs who still don't grok it.

In a society where aesthetics has long since triumphed over ethics, aesthetic engagement is social engagement with or without Adorno. Pure aesthetics may find a new space, or at least a new point or angle. The contempt that mediatised govenrments express for Media Studies is telling, it is mirrored in the contempt aestheticised critical regimes hold for aesthetics.

One of the damn things is indeed enough. Break-out is needed to get back in.

- Rob.

If the things you're saying about the stagnation of new media art and
lack of critical discourse are true, then I would have to assume that
this is a US problem because those statements just sound absurd here in
Europe. With all the conferences, workshops and exhibits going on all
over Europe, public interest in new media is at an all time high. New
books are being published, universities are constantly creating new
programs to deal with the various facets of new media and well known
museums are exhibiting more and more new media work. But you can always
find a number of North American participants at the conferences and
workshops here, which makes your statements even less convincing. From
where I'm standing, it looks like there's *a lot* going on both in the
fields of practice and theory.

As far as your statements regarding the abstract go…

When work is based on data that is converted to an abstract
representation, that *is* quite a radical commentary on the state of our
world right now. Today, everything around us is data that makes sense to
some system it was created for. I was at the store yesterday and the
price tag was missing on an item I purchased. I was able to tell the
worker the price, but that had no meaning to her *system*. She couldn't
just say, "OK, add an item to this list at the price of $22.43." She had
to leave the register to go on a hunting expedition to find the barcode.
That little thing that means absolutely nothing to us but everything to
a stores cataloging and register system. So much so that the system
can't do anything without it. So the practice of taking this data, that
has the power to control our lives, and turn it into an abstract
representation that is all about aesthetics and has nothing to do with
the datas intended meaning, becomes very powerfull indeed. It's akin to
the famous photo of a hippy putting a flower into the barrel of a
soldiers rifle, converting the ominous killing machine into an
ornamental vase.

Pall



bensyverson wrote:
> curt, at the risk of delivering a pt-by-pt response rather than an
> elegant and coherent essay, I'd like to address a few pts individually
> in-line. I apologize in advance for the length, but I promise there'll
> be some juicy nuggets sprinkled along the way!
>
> On Oct 5, 2004, at 11:02 PM, curt cloninger wrote:
>
>> It seems we fundamentally disagree on the importance of art being in
>> dialogue with the contemporary art world.
>
>
> Our dialogues are already being assimilated into the broader art
> context; this discussion we're having is art in dialogue with the
> contemporary art world. The dialogue that Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny,
> and Ira Schneider fostered in Radical Software (
> http://www.radicalsoftware.org ) was not really considered to be part of
> the general contemporary art narrative of the time (early 70s), but the
> art world has a way of swallowing engaging discussions, even if it takes
> a while.
>
> The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of becoming
> less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received with
> excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion, newmedia will
> be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical mass. To avoid
> becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the criticality that's
> missing by not having a wider recognition && discussion in the
> hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to critique this work than
> us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just don't see that critical
> discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling over the terminology and
> technology, but not much attention paid to the ideas.
>
>> I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting
>> primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time.
>
>
> Then that truly is a fundamental disagreement, because both of those
> artists (and every other major artist in history, almost without
> exception) are remembered precisely because they challenged assumptions,
> made people uncomfortable, and posed controversial (if sometimes
> implicit) questions. I definitely want to avoid personal statements, but
> anyone who thinks these or any artists are [important/interesting]
> because their work is aesthetically pleasing has an
> [incomplete/impoverished] understanding of the hyperthreaded hystorical
> context in which the work was produced. All "important" work is about
> ideas; even the works of abstractExpressionists and 1970s minimalists
> made their own provocative arguments.
>
>> Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the
>> work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever done.
>
>
> However, how can you not see Brakhage as emerging from the hyperthreads
> running through the 1950s and 1960? Even his last works were products of
> a career forged in that climate, although by the 90s, also interwoven
> with all the threads in-between… It's not about waves, it's about the
> dialogue we as artists participate in by creating work. If what you do
> isn't challenging, you're not contributing to that dialogue.
>
>> Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the
>> sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have
>> great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious
>> social change).
>
>
> Clearly, and no one disputes this. In fact, perhaps the most potent
> works exist on the fringe of that system. However, as the "contemporary
> art world" wrestles with how best to absorb us into their discussion,
> the problem they're encountering is not how best to fit us into a
> gallery, but rather how to [talk/write] about work that doesn't seem to
> have anything interesting to say. BUSTED.
>
>> This is the interesting thing about outsider art and one of the things
>> I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be).
>
>
> Let's not get started on "outsider" art, and the offensively
> condescending colonial-era mindset that celebrates "virgin" work
> unscathed by the evil corrupting influence of the art world dialogue. I
> thought we finally vanquished this pathologically naive Modernist
> impulse in the 80s. The reality is that, whether we know it or not, we
> are all drawing from similar hystorical hyperthreads. Art, advertising
> and popular culture are so [inbred/intertwined] that the difference
> between the art school graduate and the mythical kid from the projects
> is that the art school graduate can *sometimes* put a name to a handful
> of the people and movements they draw artistic inspiration from. To
> think the net somehow creates the opportunity for more "outside" voices
> is to get it exactly wrong. Instead, the net's interconwebness
> crossbreeds everything in it (including the artWorld and everything
> else) even faster, and even more than in any other media. "Outsider" art
> will emerge from this network of insiders known as the "interweb" about
> as often as wild feral adults will emerge from Manhattan.
>
>> If it's alway primarily about "forwarding the canonical dialogue,"
>> artmaking can quickly devolve into a chasing after newness, a sort of
>> conceptual fashion show.
>
>
> WOAH D00D. It's not about the canon, or the cult of the new; it's about
> your work contributing to an ongoing and meaningful discussion. To call
> the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a "conceptual
> fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual pursuit! If we're
> going to go that route, how about you take all of the
> diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover," and
> I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have anything to
> say. ;)
>
>
>> Collectors as venture capitalists and artists as aspiring CEOs
>> hoping to go public with their newest art venture. Where's the
>> passion in that? What? You say passion's been out of date since
>> Romanticism? Dang.
>
>
> Passion's always in, baby. To understand the art world, you need to
> understand the roles of (in alphaOrder) artists, critics, collectors,
> curators and [gallery owners/dealers]. They all have their own
> [economic/career] motives, and it's crucial to always remember this, no
> matter what they say about it all being about the art. Artists who get
> caught up in the economics and career strategies of the art world do so
> at the risk of confusing others' motives with their own, and diverting
> attention from their own work. See Exhibit A, Jeff Koons, who carefully
> engineered his own career, indeed making his celebrity a [focus/aspect]
> of his work – however, it backfired when his popularity inevitably
> waned (as is the case with any celebrity who doesn't actively reinvent
> [him/her]self).
>
> What does that have to do with newmedia? Beats me – the most
> interesting newmedia isn't happening on the front page of ArtForum, it's
> happening on and off lists like these. Unfortunately, we're just not
> engaging in enough critical discussion about that work.
>
>> "An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that
>> such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in
>> another." - g.k. chesterton, 1908
>
>
> As charming as Chesterton's plea for the wisdom of the good ole days is,
> his comment fails to recognize the evolutionary nature of human
> discussion && activity. Today we understand Newtonian physics as the
> hystorical context from which Einstein's theory of General Relativity
> emerged. Newton's ideas were revolutionary, and extremely insightful,
> but on a solar or galactic scale, we now see they don't work as well, so
> Einstein proposed General Relativity to explain the discrepancies. Then
> scientists discovered that General Relativity doesn't work so well on
> the [atomic/subatomic] scale, so Quantum Mechanics was developed as a
> parallel model. This isn't to say that we look back at Newton or
> Einstein with scorn for being out of date – quite the opposite; each is
> crucial for understanding the context and creation of the next. However,
> you never see scientists complaining that Quantum Mechanics and
> Superstring Theory are too fashionable, and that Newtonian physics
> worked fine for Newton so they should work fine for us today.
>
> Granted, the art world doesn't have as linear a narrative, but to rip
> artistic [theories/practices] out of their threads of hystorical context
> and drop them into the present is to pretend that the intervening years
> of discussion and debate never happened. It's willful intellectual
> amnesia. We are, after all, talking about Chesterton, so let's not
> forget-to-remember that he was a curmudgeonly sometimes anti-Semite,
> full time anti-Feminist and an art-school-educated anti-Artist: "the
> artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs." We could
> [explain/understand] his now-controversial positions by examining his
> hystorical context, but by his own direction, maybe he would rather we
> ignore his context and take his creeds of that era at face value.
>
> All of this is the long way of saying that newmedia disregards the
> threads which weave it at its own peril. So rather than watch this
> FlashFormalism float by and let myself become complicit in my silence, I
> solemnly vow to do my part to be a curmudgeon in my own way by
> contributing criticism and artwork to the discussion.
>
> - ben
>
> +
> -> post: [email protected]
> -> questions: [email protected]
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>

–
_______________________________
Pall Thayer
artist/teacher
http://www.this.is/pallit
http://pallit.lhi.is/panse
_______________________________

Hi Ben (and all),

I'll respond point by point to various posts:


ben:
The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of
becoming less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received
with excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion,
newmedia will be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical
mass. To avoid becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the
criticality that's missing by not having a wider recognition &&
discussion in the hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to
critique this work than us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just
don't see that critical discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling
over the terminology and technology, but not much attention paid to the
ideas.

curt:
I agree with Rob and Pall here. There is a way to critically discuss abstraction that may involve engaging in formalistic/graphic design aesthetics that seem outmoded to you. So we can't discuss them because such critical discourse is not currently en vogue? But aren't we the ones (critics, artists, curators) who shape where the critical dialogue is going? If things on the net are becoming more hodge-podged and interbred with pop culture, what's to keep art critics from approaching such pieces as rock music critics or graphic design aesthetes? Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level. MTAA are reinterpreting early conceptual works and recontextualizing them in a hyper-mediated environment. None of this seems intellectually bereft to me, nor does it seem out of bounds or culturally irrelevant. If one current artistic mode is the remix, then we can expect to see earlier aspects of the "art tapestry" show up in the mix as well (whether consciously or unconsciously).



curt:
> I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting
> primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time.

ben:
Then that truly is a fundamental disagreement, because both of those
artists (and every other major artist in history, almost without
exception) are remembered precisely because they challenged
assumptions, made people uncomfortable, and posed controversial (if
sometimes implicit) questions.

curt:
But is the sum of the worth of their art the fact that they were remembered for it? Had they not been remembered, would their art still have value as art? Can it still be appreciated out of the context of its production? There are plenty of artists who have gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists, craftspeople in local artisan subcultures.




ben:
I definitely want to avoid personal
statements, but anyone who thinks these or any artists are
[important/interesting] because their work is aesthetically pleasing
has an [incomplete/impoverished] understanding of the hyperthreaded
hystorical context in which the work was produced. All "important" work
is about ideas; even the works of abstractExpressionists and 1970s
minimalists made their own provocative arguments.

curt:
So you assert. Here are some contrary voices:

"Knowledge and intelligence are puny flippers alongside clairvoyance. Ideas are a dull gas, a rarefied gas. Only when clairvoyance is extinguished do ideas and the blind fish of their waters – the intellectuals – appear. The reason art exists is because its mode of operation does not take the mode of ideas."

- jean dubuffet

"Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. More must happen than simply logically understandable things. Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art. It could then just be logical sentences in a form of a text for instance. Where objects are concerned it's more the sense of an indication or suggestion."

- joseph beuys


"People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. By asking, "what does this mean?" they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things."

- rene magritte

Are they to be understood as Newton to your Einstein? That seems a convenient dismissal without having to actually counter the forcefullness of their positions. I'm hesitant to subscribe to the paradigm of paradigmatic revolutions in art and art criticism. As you concede, art ain't science.




curt:
> Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the
> work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever
> done.

ben:
It's not about waves,
it's about the dialogue we as artists participate in by creating work.
If what you do isn't challenging, you're not contributing to that
dialogue.

curt:
Challenging by whose criteria? As Pall points out, abstraction of data flows can be particularly challenging from several angles beyond just pure abstraction. Here are a few pieces to consider:

http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic angle)
http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)




ben:
As the "contemporary
art world" wrestles with how best to absorb us into their discussion,
the problem they're encountering is not how best to fit us into a
gallery, but rather how to [talk/write] about work that doesn't seem to
have anything interesting to say. BUSTED.

curt:
I'm not sure which critics you're talking about and which artists your talking about here. Anyway, is it the artist's role to give critics "interesting" fodder? What if the artist is diametrically opposed to the contemporary paradigms of materialistic critical discourse? cf: http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/essays/curt.html




ben:
"Outsider"
art will emerge from this network of insiders known as the "interweb"
about as often as wild feral adults will emerge from Manhattan.

curt:
Sweet prose. Well played.





ben:
To call
the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a "conceptual
fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual pursuit! If we're
going to go that route, how about you take all of the
diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover," and
I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have anything to
say. ;)

curt:
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/





ben:
the most
interesting newmedia isn't happening on the front page of ArtForum,
it's happening on and off lists like these. Unfortunately, we're just
not engaging in enough critical discussion about that work.

curt:
I totally agree. But then some work doesn't lend itself well to contemporary critical dicussion. Is the problem with the work, or with contemporary modes of critical discussion? If all you can say of work like http://www.complexification.net is that it's FlashFormalism [insert silence], then I don't know where we go from there.





ben:
It's willful
intellectual amnesia.

curt:
another juicy nugget. excellent.




ben:
We are, after all, talking about Chesterton, so
let's not forget-to-remember that he was a curmudgeonly sometimes
anti-Semite, full time anti-Feminist and an art-school-educated
anti-Artist: "the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts
amateurs."

curt:
And Picasso was a womanizer. And Pollock an alcoholic. And Wagner!

ben:
We could [explain/understand] his now-controversial
positions by examining his hystorical context, but by his own
direction, maybe he would rather we ignore his context and take his
creeds of that era at face value.

curt:
Indeed he would (he might even take issue with you tacking on "of that era"). Either his argument fits into your box ["chesterton is outmoded"], or your argument fits into his ["ben is using a contemporary rhetorical gambit to avoid having to wrestling with the veracity of old ideas by declaring them outmoded"].






rob:
Illustrating fashionable art discourse *will* lead to footnotes. net.art's would-be-social-engagement was trivial, getting some critical *distance* and autonomy is a good next step. R&D rather than R&R.

neil young:
the lasers are in the lab
the old man is dressed in white clothes
everybody says he's mad
no one knows the things that he knows




rob:
Regarding the art, silence can be a statement, fantasy can be realistic and formalism can have social content and meaning.

curt:
Agreed (and so pithily expressed!) Indeed, art is the one realm of human activity where abstraction and formalism can *speak* into the cultural "dialogue." But now it's time to muzzle them and move toward a more didactic coceptualism because… ?



rob:
Pure abstraction is resistant to the dominant mode of criticism (the dreary romanticism of the expanded text), and a semiotised (grammatical, algorithmic, kitsch) culture. It certainly seems to make some people uncomfortable, and not just the plebs who still don't grok it.

In a society where aesthetics has long since triumphed over ethics, aesthetic engagement is social engagement with or without Adorno. Pure aesthetics may find a new space, or at least a new point or angle. The contempt that mediatised govenrments express for Media Studies is telling, it is mirrored in the contempt aestheticised critical regimes hold for aesthetics.

One of the damn things is indeed enough. Break-out is needed to get back in.

curt:
agreed. plus it's so danged pretty! (does this mean I can keep my subscription to wallpaper magazine?)

On 6 Oct 2004, at 08:23, bensyverson wrote:

> All "important" work is about ideas; even the works of
> abstractExpressionists and 1970s minimalists made their own
> provocative arguments.

This is untrue in one very important way: art that is about ideas tends
to the illustrative or unartistic. Art that generates or is steeped in
ideas (aesthetics) is quite a different proposition. As you say it can
make provocative arguments. These may remain provocative decades or
centuries after they are first shown.

Pollock's work isn't about paint any more than Kruger's is about
feminist semiotics or Cezanne's is about apples and crockery. Imagine
looking at Digital Art with this knowledge.

- Rob.

On Oct 6, 2004, at 12:02 AM, curt cloninger wrote:
> Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the
> sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have
> great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious
> social change). This is the interesting thing about outsider art and
> one of the things I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be).
> Human culture has changed a great deal, but individual humans have
> been wired pretty much the same for a good while.

Yup. I don't think its necessarily a given that new media arts can
become less ghetto-ized by being more closely associated with the arts
world as a whole. The art world doesn't seem to be very good at
de-ghettoizing itself.

I think it's profoundly meaningful that MOMA's new admissions fee is
$20 – I have a lot of friends who never ever pay that much money to
get into somewhere unless they're going to see a big-name rock star
like Prince or Morrissey or Nick Cave. I'm sure that the MOMA people
did their market research and decided that the high admissions fee will
work out fine for them, but what does it portend for the ability of
just anybody to spend an afternoon carousing the galleries if they're
not already heavily invested in that world–i.e., they're an artist,
designer, dealer, critic, etc. …

I look at the field of classical music and wonder if fine arts is
heading in that direction. Do you suppose we'll ever see the day when
people in the arts sit around fretting about how to get more young
people into art?

Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
+ + +

On Oct 7, 2004, at 1:43 PM, Francis Hwang wrote:

>
> On Oct 6, 2004, at 12:02 AM, curt cloninger wrote:
>> Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the
>> sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have
>> great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious
>> social change). This is the interesting thing about outsider art and
>> one of the things I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be).
>> Human culture has changed a great deal, but individual humans have
>> been wired pretty much the same for a good while.
>
> Yup. I don't think its necessarily a given that new media arts can
> become less ghetto-ized by being more closely associated with the arts
> world as a whole. The art world doesn't seem to be very good at
> de-ghettoizing itself.

But still, new media is a ghetto within (or perhaps a suburb of) what
could be argued is the ghetto of the art world.

I'm not sure if I buy the art world as ghetto. Exhibits A and B being
Barney and Currin at the Guggenheim. Anecdotally, people whom I know
aren't generally familiar with contemporary art visited these
exhibitions. And there are plenty of other 'blockbuster' exhibitions of
more established names (Picasso, Monet, blah, blah).

But I'm ambivalent, it's hard not to notice that, generally speaking,
contemporary art has a very small footprint in American culture. But is
it because it's a ghetto? Or because it's a shining city on a hill?

>
> I think it's profoundly meaningful that MOMA's new admissions fee is
> $20 – I have a lot of friends who never ever pay that much money to
> get into somewhere unless they're going to see a big-name rock star
> like Prince or Morrissey or Nick Cave. I'm sure that the MOMA people
> did their market research and decided that the high admissions fee
> will work out fine for them, but what does it portend for the ability
> of just anybody to spend an afternoon carousing the galleries if
> they're not already heavily invested in that world–i.e., they're an
> artist, designer, dealer, critic, etc. …
>
> I look at the field of classical music and wonder if fine arts is
> heading in that direction. Do you suppose we'll ever see the day when
> people in the arts sit around fretting about how to get more young
> people into art?

===
<twhid>http://www.mteww.com</twhid>
===

GoodDay,

> curt:
> I agree with Rob and Pall here. There is a way to critically discuss
> abstraction that may involve engaging in formalistic/graphic design
> aesthetics that seem outmoded to you. So we can't discuss them
> because such critical discourse is not currently en vogue? But aren't
> we the ones (critics, artists, curators) who shape where the critical
> dialogue is going?

Yes, and that's exactly the point. So if you find aesthetic discussions
titillating ("ooh, more brown!" … "too many boxes!"), by all means,
keepOnRawxin'InTheFreeWorld. I'm just trying to publicly raise the
issue of whether this is how we want to let newMedia come to be
defined. If it nM does become pigeon-holed as nice-looking clickable
data pictures, I won't be a part of it, and neither will a lot of
people who are currently engaged with this discussion. It's great that
you bring up graphicDsign, because one needs only to look at your local
graphicDsign [college/department] to see the Jihad that's being waged
on ideas there. Kids arrive in graphicDsign classes expecting to
receive training in industry-standard applications and be kept
up-to-date on industry design trends, so that they may graduate with
sufficient "mastery" to be employable as designers directly out of
college. The expectation is that you can be trained as a Dsigner just
like you can be trained as a XeroxMechanic. Given the radical artistic,
conceptual and social hystorical hyperthreads that make up the
area-of-activity we delineate (for economic reasons) as "graphicDsign,"
I find myself dismayed that the graduates of these programs are more
excited about software upgrades than the ideas they're working with.

And this is your model for how you want to talk about nM? Does anyone
else have a problem with this?


> If things on the net are becoming more hodge-podged and interbred with
> pop culture, what's to keep art critics from approaching such pieces
> as rock music critics or graphic design aesthetes?

You miss the point that this interbreeding affects the critics as well,
so that our artCritics can approach work not from "defined"
perspectives (like that of a rock-onlyCritic, art-onlyCritic,
Dsign-only enthusiast), but from a perspective that realizes how much
everything bleeds together. So an artCritic approaching a piece as a
rockCritic is simply being fatuous in [his/her] disregard for the
dynamics which come to form creative "pieces" in our world.


> Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his
> instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level.

Sure, but Casey's praxis is grounded in broader artEducational and
artwarePopulism concepts, and is anything but design for design's sake.

> None of this seems intellectually bereft to me, nor does it seem out
> of bounds or culturally irrelevant. If one current artistic mode is
> the remix, then we can expect to see earlier aspects of the "art
> tapestry" show up in the mix as well (whether consciously or
> unconsciously).

Of course – to be flip, that's all part of the blender we call life.
In liken, the system I put in place on criticalartware.net, those
partially digested chunks present themselves as part of hyperConnextive
informationSuperTrails. The piece I'm missing is how to understand this
pureFormalist newMedia in relation to those hyperChunks. Pall gave us
the "TMI" model, but I don't think that's adequate to fuel or sustain
this much discussion. If there is more intellectual life to
FlashFormalism, someone please fill me in!

> curt:
> But is the sum of the worth of their art the fact that they were
> remembered for it? Had they not been remembered, would their art
> still have value as art? Can it still be appreciated out of the
> context of its production? There are plenty of artists who have
> gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a
> pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists,
> craftspeople in local artisan subcultures.

Yeah, and they all weave their own beautiful life narratives. However,
out of convenience, we don't attempt to talk about Every Single Artist
Who Ever Lived, so we tend to focus on the ones who ignited our
imaginations by doing things differently, and challenging the
assumptions of the day. Those are the people we remember and discuss.
No one wants to downplay the importance of an artisan who lived in 1825
and passed the traditional weaving style from one generation to
another. However, it's facetious to suggest that [he/she] individually
deserves the same amount of time in our discussion as Sol LeWitt, for
example.

Further, I take special exception to your implication that
pre-Impressionist artists (ie, ALL art before the 19th century?) didn't
"pioneer" anything of note, and are remembered for their "craft and
invention." In reality, pre-Impressionist art is chock full of
conceptualism, scandals, controversy and vigorous intellectual debate.
They may all just look like Jesus paintings to you, but back then, even
small formal differences were considered astonishing. Perspective was a
ground-shakingly radical idea at one point. Paintings and sculptures
had the raw visceral power that movies tend to claim today; they moved
women to faint, men to kill, and artists to be ex-communicated. The
idea that you would lump this group with craftspeople and artisans
demonstrates a ghastly mischaracterization of artHystory.

> curt:
> So you assert. Here are some contrary voices:

Have you ever heard of "anti-marketing marketing?" This is the strategy
where you position yourself as against the system in order to catch the
anti-marketing demographic in your audience. Take for example the
Sprite ad campaigns of the past few years, which for the most part
position themselves as beyond the hype – the message is "drink
whatever you want to! Just obey your thirst!"

Same deal here. After (and during) the 1960s, people were growing tired
of an art world crowded with "hippies," over-expressiveness,
politicization and didactics. Minimalism was a knee-jerk reaction to
that time, and many artists saw themselves as antiConcept, antiArt,
antiCriticism. How embarrassing it must have been for them to be so
hungrily swallowed and digested by the conceptual artCriticism machine
they seemed to dislike so much.

I won't bother to address each artist, as this could go on forever, but
each of the artists you mention raised important questions and sparked
immense debate, even if their work did most of the speaking. It's
ludicrous to suggest they weren't engaged in the intellectual
discussions of their times.

> Challenging by whose criteria? As Pall points out, abstraction of
> data flows can be particularly challenging from several angles beyond
> just pure abstraction. Here are a few pieces to consider:

Okay, lets consider them.

> http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)

This is a fantastic tongue-in-cheek piece from my perspective, but it
is absolutely not abstract, nonConceptual, or formalist. This work
engages with many debates, from ontological cartography and the
problems with attempting to map concepts, to the struggle for
interfaces to navigate such a multiVerse of meaning. criticalartware
has a somewhat similar navigational system that allows a fixed-2D
mapping of the relationships between all of our nodes:
http://www.criticalartware.net/lib/liken/interfaces/nodemap/

> http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic
> angle)

And you present yet another [navigational/cartographic] interface work
which is neither abstract, nonConceptual or formalist. "The Shape of
Song" is a fascinating way to [visualize/navigate] the patterns of
music, and clearly has much to say.

> http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)

All of Radical Software Group's work, or Carnivore in particular?
Carnivore is a particularly bad choice for you to hold up as an
[abstract/nonConceptual/formalist] posterChild. Carnivore as a
[project/platform] has a clear political and conceptual message about
government and surveillance, and as it does nothing on its own, is
indeed almost 100% conceptual – before you can see or hear anything,
you have to use a "client" to interpret the network data. These clients
range from the conceptual to the pure formalist, but I'm not sure you
can pin that on RSG – after all, Carnivore is a complete conceptual
artWork even without any clients, but the clients depend completely on
Carnivore both conceptually and technically.

> curt:
> I'm not sure which critics you're talking about and which artists your
> talking about here. Anyway, is it the artist's role to give critics
> "interesting" fodder?

Are you joking or not? Regardless, its the artist's role to make work
which she is interested in, but it is her peer's role to provide
criticism, discussion, debate, community and inspiration. I'd like to
see more criticism and debate happening in our community.

> Sweet prose. Well played.

Thank my mother the Buddhist CyberRhetorician. ;)

> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/

I can only play amateurCritic to your URIs for so long, Cloninger! :)
Briefly looking at the above URI, I can't discern whether or not the
authors of a couple of these pieces are being ironically retarditaire
or if they are straightforward creative expressions. A few of them are
fully situated in an artWorld context, some are by well-known artists.
Clearly all of them draw from the globalVisualCultureMashup, and none
of them are "outsiders."

> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/

Some (well, really all) of these pieces are strikingly beautiful, but
like candy bars, after the sweet taste, I'm left hungry for substance.
None of the works [upset/surprised/confused/challenged] me sufficiently
for me to remember them. That's my personal experience, but I'm
suggesting that there are others who are unsatisfied with this
FlashFormalism.

> I totally agree. But then some work doesn't lend itself well to
> contemporary critical dicussion. Is the problem with the work, or
> with contemporary modes of critical discussion?

You keep suggesting that contemporary critical discussion is somehow at
fault for not "getting" the real work happening, when in reality, this
is contemporary critical discourse right here on this list. If the
people on this list respond to the work in silence, I would suggest
that they aren't significantly affected by it, and I think that is
indeed a problem with the work.

> If all you can say of work like http://www.complexification.net is
> that it's FlashFormalism [insert silence], then I don't know where we
> go from there.

It may be a fine distinction, but while I love the complexification.net
work as astonishingly gorgeous [images/applets], I would hesitate to
discuss the pieces in an art context. They are unmistakably powerful
demonstrations of the power of a systemsApproach to artMaking, so
certain people may find them shocking, and perhaps that's enough to
entertain some discussion of them in an art context. Maybe they're
inspirational enough that we don't need to even question their
relevance. However, I can't imagine anybody from this list being very
intellectually stimulated by these works; anyone with a passing
familiarity with newMedia (or computerHystory) has seen bales full of
work like this (albeit not always as beautiful).

If it isn't FlashFormalism, what does it have to say? Lets compare it
to some very similar works. What about Doug James' animation of 3,600
chairs stacked up and then colliding and deforming when knocked down? (
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/play.html?pg=3 and
http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/bdtree/etheater/ ) Here is a
rule-based system that is producing a jaw-dropping and aesthetically
astonishing feat, to the service of nothing but itself, just like
complexification.net. What about Massive, Weta Digital's crowd
simulation software ( http://www.massivesoftware.com/ )?

I pose the question back to this community: if you're bored enough to
be reading so far, is the complexification.net work intellectually
stimulating? If it isn't, should we bother talking about it, and if so,
why exactly?


> Agreed (and so pithily expressed!) Indeed, art is the one realm of
> human activity where abstraction and formalism can *speak* into the
> cultural "dialogue." But now it's time to muzzle them and move toward
> a more didactic coceptualism because… ?

Wake up – no one's muzzling them – they just have nothing to say! I
just want everyone to realize the path that newMedia is on, namely the
screensaverization of our field. If anyone here is interested in real
ideas, we need to get criticality back, and start raising a ruckus
about all this technoPositivism and intellectually bankrupt
abstraction!

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 3:27 PM, ryan griffis wrote:

> What is this "real criticalDiscourse" that you feel is lacking in the
> art world? i'm not being antagonistic to "art about ideas" - what
> isn't about ideas?

Well, I think all art is about ideas, regardless of its creators
intentions, just as I think all art tells a political story as well.
The issue I'm raising is whether this FlashFormalism is about the ideas
we find interesting, and if the discussion around it is critical
enough. You put me in a tricky position; I don't want to call anyone
out individually, because it's not about individual artworks, it's
about the tone of the discussion.

One problem with this kind of work is that by masking or disavowing its
[ideas/politics], it becomes susceptible to projection. So people like
me will look at it and say "wow, in a time of war, in a US election
year, with a shadowGov (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1850236.stm ) doing
gawdKnowsWhat, with corporations worldWide gaining power and influence
at alarming rates, with oppressive software patent policies threatening
developers, with an artWorld eagerly looking to us for the
nextBigThing, THIS person has decided to generate random colors based
on mouse location in FlashMX, to the delight of Macromedia. Sounds like
a gigantic THUMBS UP to the status quo."

Granted, I'm an ass. That doesn't change the fact that "no statement"
is in fact one of the most telling.


> But i'm reading this looking for the stakes - what's (y)our investment
> in any of this?

My investment is a decade of engaging with the web. I'd like to see
newMedia thrive, and to do that we need to breed our own critical
voices rather than wait for the artWorld to supply them. The discourse
I do see isn't very critical. I see a lot of show+tell.

> If you're saying that ReadMe, Rhizome, etc are where this
> work/activity is being done, is your criticism about larger inclusion?
> What is it you think people should be talking/writing about that they
> aren't?

No, we have enough inclusion. There are no barriers beyond the
digitalDivide that prevent anyone from engagingWith && contributingTo
newMedia. The problem is that as a community, we don't understand where
we came from, and we're not very concerned with where we're going.

> But this talk about "the current moment" sounds an awful lot like the
> telecommunications industry.

Interesting – what would you prefer?

> If Koons was producing his paintings via cell phone or bluetooth
> enabled art, would he be more relevant to the discussion?

At the moment, according to this crowd, unfortunately yes – but if we
were a little more critical, I would think it would be a resounding NO.

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 2:30 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> This is untrue in one very important way: art that is about ideas
> tends to the illustrative or unartistic. Art that generates or is
> steeped in ideas (aesthetics) is quite a different proposition. As you
> say it can make provocative arguments. These may remain provocative
> decades or centuries after they are first shown.

I absolutely agree (except for the part about art about ideas tending
towards the unartistic). I'm not suggesting that art must be *about*
ideas (although there's plenty of good work that's about ideas), but
that art should at least *have* ideas or at least be the product of
intellectual pursuit.

> Pollock's work isn't about paint any more than Kruger's is about
> feminist semiotics or Cezanne's is about apples and crockery.

This business, I'm not so sure about…

- ben

On Oct 6, 2004, at 7:54 PM, bensyverson wrote:

>
> I pose the question back to this community: if you're bored enough to
> be reading so far, is the complexification.net work intellectually
> stimulating?

not to me.


> If it isn't, should we bother talking about it, and if so, why exactly?

There is nothing to talk about. It's not formally, conceptually or
aesthetically groundbreaking. It's pleasant. Even from a purely formal
graphic design angle it's not very progressive: how is it any different
from the screensaver on my Mac or the visualizer on my iTunes?

It's cool that a lot of it seems to be OSS.




===
<twhid>http://www.mteww.com</twhid>
===

sorry, but i need to add:

On Oct 7, 2004, at 3:17 PM, t.whid wrote:

>
>>
>> I pose the question back to this community: if you're bored enough to
>> be reading so far, is the complexification.net work intellectually
>> stimulating?

You're thoughtful reply was anything but boring and brought up many
good points that I hope to respond to/reply to/comment on…

>
> not to me.
>
>
>> If it isn't, should we bother talking about it, and if so, why
>> exactly?
>
> There is nothing to talk about. It's not formally, conceptually or
> aesthetically groundbreaking. It's pleasant. Even from a purely formal
> graphic design angle it's not very progressive: how is it any
> different from the screensaver on my Mac or the visualizer on my
> iTunes?

I should have typed:

How is it different from my screensaver or visualizer other than it
uses much more tasteful colors?

>
> It's cool that a lot of it seems to be OSS.


===
<twhid>http://www.mteww.com</twhid>
===

On 7 Oct 2004, at 03:57, bensyverson wrote:

> I absolutely agree (except for the part about art about ideas tending
> towards the unartistic). I'm not suggesting that art must be *about*
> ideas (although there's plenty of good work that's about ideas), but
> that art should at least *have* ideas or at least be the product of
> intellectual pursuit.

In order for art to have ideas, for it to be critically interesting, it
must have some degree of autonomy and it must be problematic for
criticism (and language), of which it is the object. Critics (as we are
being here), must look at it and curse the artists' name because they
can see that there's something there, but they're going to have to
work out what it is rather than reel off
DeleuzeGuattariBaudrillardDerrida and go to bed early.

This is not the difficult art argument. This is the good art argument.
;-)

There are definite ideas in Flash formalism, and it is a definite
social product, more so than the dreary new media weekend marxism of
politically engaged net.art. The fact that FF defeats our critical
language yet is striking, engaging, is healthy for all concerned.

Imagine a world in which formal, algorithmic, visual art was realistic,
necessary, even urgent. Now work back from that world to our own.

Think of the impressionists, their tube paint and the new railroad
network that took them from Paris to the nearby scenery they painted.
Of the abstract expressionists, artificial mediums and individualism.
Form follows function. Art has a social function. Cue jokes about
recursion and currying.

These pseudo-chaotic structures and seemingly ordered systems are our
lives rendered for us to see, the space we live in (or that is dictated
to us). This is how it is. This is keeping it real. The mapping is
defensible. Don't shoot the messengers. ;-)

>> Pollock's work isn't about paint any more than Kruger's is about
>> feminist semiotics or Cezanne's is about apples and crockery.
>
> This business, I'm not so sure about…

It'll grow on ya. ;-)

- Rob.

On 7 Oct 2004, at 00:54, bensyverson wrote:

> So if you find aesthetic discussions titillating ("ooh, more brown!"
> … "too many boxes!"), by all means, keepOnRawxin'InTheFreeWorld.

There's a difference between abstraction, aesthetics, and vacuous
prettiness. Critic beware. :-)

> I'm just trying to publicly raise the issue of whether this is how we
> want to let newMedia come to be defined. If it nM does become
> pigeon-holed as nice-looking clickable data pictures, I won't be a
> part of it, and neither will a lot of people who are currently engaged
> with this discussion.

Well nor will I but I don't think that's the issue here. Demanding
pre-existent cultural/critical/textual import of digital art is
demanding that it normalise itself with the entrenched values of the
academic/commerical artworlds. Illustration is not the opposite of
insignificance.

> Given the radical artistic, conceptual and social hystorical
> hyperthreads that make up the area-of-activity we delineate (for
> economic reasons) as "graphicDsign," I find myself dismayed that the
> graduates of these programs are more excited about software upgrades
> than the ideas they're working with.

Feed them "Emigre". ;-)

> Of course – to be flip, that's all part of the blender we call life.
> In liken, the system I put in place on criticalartware.net, those
> partially digested chunks present themselves as part of
> hyperConnextive informationSuperTrails. The piece I'm missing is how
> to understand this pureFormalist newMedia in relation to those
> hyperChunks. Pall gave us the "TMI" model, but I don't think that's
> adequate to fuel or sustain this much discussion. If there is more
> intellectual life to FlashFormalism, someone please fill me in!

Inasmuchas it is not simply illustrating and confirming the
unreflective critical demands of cultural studies departments, ff is
potentially more critical than anything that simply mirrors
pre-existent "critical" virtues.

We may have work to do if our language is not sufficient for the task.
That would be exciting for a critic, surely?

> Have you ever heard of "anti-marketing marketing?" This is the
> strategy where you position yourself as against the system in order to
> catch the anti-marketing demographic in your audience. Take for
> example the Sprite ad campaigns of the past few years, which for the
> most part position themselves as beyond the hype – the message is
> "drink whatever you want to! Just obey your thirst!"

All those early conceptual art pieces, just words and ideas, are highly
collectible now. ;-)

> I'd like to see more criticism and debate happening in our community.

Definitely.

> If anyone here is interested in real ideas, we need to get
> criticality back, and start raising a ruckus about all this
> technoPositivism and intellectually bankrupt abstraction!

I'm more concerned about asserting the supremacy of entrenched
critical/artworld values and textuality over digital art. There *is*
something there, or if there isn't, it's failure on terms that aren't
fully captured by a signification/prettiness opposition.

- Rob.

On Oct 7, 2004, at 3:07 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> In order for art to have ideas, for it to be critically interesting,
> it must have some degree of autonomy and it must be problematic for
> criticism (and language), of which it is the object.

Sure, it must be problematic, and not just for critics. So what makes
you think FlashFormalism is problematic? The only thing problematic
about it is that it's not problematic whatsoever!

> Critics (as we are being here), must look at it and curse the artists'
> name because they can see that there's something there, but they're
> going to have to work out what it is rather than reel off
> DeleuzeGuattariBaudrillardDerrida and go to bed early.

Exactly. Yet there's no reason to curse the names of FlashFormalists.
The work is so MindNumbingly boring that I can barely remember their
names.

> There are definite ideas in Flash formalism, and it is a definite
> social product, more so than the dreary new media weekend marxism of
> politically engaged net.art. The fact that FF defeats our critical
> language yet is striking, engaging, is healthy for all concerned.

The assertation that FlashFormalism is striking and engaging is almost
rivals curtCloninger's riDONCulous suggestion that "outsider art" will
reinvigorate newMedia. FlashFormalism defeats our critical language?
Yes, in much the same way that cottonCandy defeats critical discourse
by being irrelevant.

> Imagine a world in which formal, algorithmic, visual art was
> realistic, necessary, even urgent. Now work back from that world to
> our own.

Ok, here I go.

…

That was an interesting trip, but meanwhile, back on planetEarth,
FlashFormalism is anything but necessary and urgent.

> Think of the impressionists, their tube paint and the new railroad
> network that took them from Paris to the nearby scenery they painted.

That's an interesting way to look at it – I look at Impressionist work
and see a radical protest at the dawn of the machine age. If you think
their work was a joyful expression of how wonderful it was to take the
train and paint flowers, you're missing the only thing in those
paintings of interest to me. What I admire about them is the furiously
angry assault on the blackened industrial wastelands their cities had
become – so angry that even their brushstrokes rebelled against being
used as fully representational marks (like they were in the
assemblyLine of quick-cash portrait painting).

The impressionists were not formalists.

> Of the abstract expressionists, artificial mediums and individualism.
> Form follows function.

The AbExers were not formalists either.


> These pseudo-chaotic structures and seemingly ordered systems are our
> lives rendered for us to see, the space we live in (or that is
> dictated to us). This is how it is. This is keeping it real. The
> mapping is defensible.

That's about half of an idea, but not nearly enough to warrant the
fullScale rejection of intellectual discourse and conceptualism. The
important thing to keep in mind is that all art is conceptual, whether
you like it or not, because it "happens" in the brain. If no one will
step up to the plate and talk about this art, it's because not very
much is happening in anyone's brain as they ingest it.

> It'll grow on ya. ;-)

Hopefully some of deesMemes will grow on you too :)

- ben

On Oct 7, 2004, at 3:29 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> There's a difference between abstraction, aesthetics, and vacuous
> prettiness. Critic beware. :-)

Yes, but no one will flesh out for me why FlashFormalism isn't vacuous
prettiness. I'm eager to know. We've heard the TooMuchInformation!
explanation, but to me it rings hollow. Bueller?

> Demanding pre-existent cultural/critical/textual import of digital art
> is demanding that it normalise itself with the entrenched values of
> the academic/commerical artworlds. Illustration is not the opposite of
> insignificance.

Read more closely – I'm not trying to import newMedia into the
"pre-existent" criticalModels used in contempArt, I'm trying to point
out that there's NO critical discourse happening around this work, and
I'm publicly asking why. I suspect the reason that FlashFormalism is
totally impossible to discuss is because, as t.whid points out, there's
nothing to discuss. It's oaklandStyle – no there there.

> Feed them "Emigre". ;-)

They're too busy kerning ad copy for Starbucks at $100/hr to sit down
and read about the [implications/hystories/theories] of typefaces…

> Inasmuchas it is not simply illustrating and confirming the
> unreflective critical demands of cultural studies departments, ff is
> potentially more critical than anything that simply mirrors
> pre-existent "critical" virtues.

I think you may have just taken the Ridonculous Award from curt. Fuck
cultural studies. I'm asking this group, this meeting of the minds,
what is [critical/challenging/progressive] about FlashFormalism, and
the sound you hear is the deafening silence of apatheticShrugs.

> We may have work to do if our language is not sufficient for the task.
> That would be exciting for a critic, surely?

This is devastatingly depressing. There are so many discussions that
have been woven together to form newMedia, and now you want to pretend
not to see them and start over with new language. As if the cybernetics
discussion in the earlyVideo moment isn't still relevant. As if the
hypertext discussion of the earlyHypermedia moment isn't still
relevant. As if "interactivity" and "cybernetics" are unrelated, and
unrelated to what's happening now. This is one of the main reasons I
built liken into criticalartware.net; from the very beginning we wanted
to be sure that we were connecting with and expanding upon existing
discussions that were directly relevant to the discussion of newMedia.

Make up your own language if you like – have fun reinventing the wheel
and calling it something else. I'll keep working hard to
[continue/reexamine/revive/extend] the discussions you're so eager to
cast off.

> There *is* something there, or if there isn't, it's failure on terms
> that aren't fully captured by a signification/prettiness opposition.

I'm waiting…

…Bueller?

- ben

Hi Ben,

one more round…

ben:
So if you find aesthetic discussions
titillating ("ooh, more brown!" … "too many boxes!"), by all means,
keepOnRawxin'InTheFreeWorld. I'm just trying to publicly raise the
issue of whether this is how we want to let newMedia come to be
defined. If it nM does become pigeon-holed as nice-looking clickable
data pictures, I won't be a part of it, and neither will a lot of
people who are currently engaged with this discussion. It's great that
you bring up graphicDsign, because one needs only to look at your local
graphicDsign [college/department] to see the Jihad that's being waged
on ideas there. Kids arrive in graphicDsign classes expecting to
receive training in industry-standard applications and be kept
up-to-date on industry design trends, so that they may graduate with
sufficient "mastery" to be employable as designers directly out of
college. The expectation is that you can be trained as a Dsigner just
like you can be trained as a XeroxMechanic. Given the radical artistic,
conceptual and social hystorical hyperthreads that make up the
area-of-activity we delineate (for economic reasons) as "graphicDsign,"
I find myself dismayed that the graduates of these programs are more
excited about software upgrades than the ideas they're working with.

And this is your model for how you want to talk about nM? Does anyone
else have a problem with this?

curt:
you're arguing with a straw man. You're describing bad graphic design education, but not all graphic design education is bad. Graphic design has a rich history of interesting artistic discussion. Kandinsky, Klee, Albers, Le Corbusier, Charles & Ray Eames, Tufte, Bruce Mau, Tibor Kalman, Stefan Sagmeister.I'd even include McLuhan and John Maeda in there. You're trying to drive a wedge between formalism and conceptualism that seems artificial. Could brown squares somehow embody a concept? Of course. Anyway, it's not an either/or. There are plenty of different kinds of new media art. Abstraction is just one aspect. Last time I checked, New media art was not in danger of being hijacked by graphic designers. If anything the scene could use a bit more craft.



curt:
> Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his
> instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level.

ben:
Sure, but Casey's praxis is grounded in broader artEducational and
artwarePopulism concepts, and is anything but design for design's sake.

curt:
I'm not advocating design for desisgn's sake. You seemed to be dismissing Casey's work as FlashFormalism. I was pointing out that it's not. Are you agreeing with me?



ben:
out of convenience, we don't attempt to talk about Every Single Artist
Who Ever Lived, so we tend to focus on the ones who ignited our
imaginations by doing things differently, and challenging the
assumptions of the day. Those are the people we remember and discuss.

curt:
In art history class those are the artists we discuss. But on contemporary art bulletin boards we may discuss all sorts of off-the-radar contemporaries making all sorts of art for all sorts of reasons, many of whom will never be remembered, nor do they care to be remembered, nor are they making art in hopes of being remembered. Such are the joys of a contemporary art scene.



ben:
Further, I take special exception to your implication that
pre-Impressionist artists (ie, ALL art before the 19th century?) didn't
"pioneer" anything of note, and are remembered for their "craft and
invention."

curt:
hyperbolic rhetoric. I said, "There are plenty of artists who have gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists, craftspeople in local artisan subcultures."

"plenty" is a far stretch from "all."



ben:
I won't bother to address each artist [dubuffet, magritte, beuys] , as this could go on forever, but each of the artists you mention raised important questions and sparked
immense debate, even if their work did most of the speaking. It's
ludicrous to suggest they weren't engaged in the intellectual
discussions of their times.

curt:
you miss my point. I'm not saying they weren't important in their time. I'm saying they are still important now and they disagree with your assertion that all good art is about ideas.



ben:
> http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)
This is a fantastic tongue-in-cheek piece from my perspective, but it
is absolutely not abstract, nonConceptual, or formalist.

> http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic
> angle)
And you present yet another [navigational/cartographic] interface work
which is neither abstract, nonConceptual or formalist.

> http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)
Carnivore is a particularly bad choice for you to hold up as an
[abstract/nonConceptual/formalist] posterChild. Carnivore as a
[project/platform] has a clear political and conceptual message about
government and surveillance, and as it does nothing on its own, is
indeed almost 100% conceptual – before you can see or hear anything,
you have to use a "client" to interpret the network data. These clients
range from the conceptual to the pure formalist, but I'm not sure you
can pin that on RSG – after all, Carnivore is a complete conceptual
artWork even without any clients, but the clients depend completely on
Carnivore both conceptually and technically.

curt:
I mention the above pieces particularly because they are *not* purely abstract. I'm illustrating the fact that new media can successfully combine elements of visual abstraction with concept. It's not an either/or. Evidently we agree here.



ben:
> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/

I can only play amateurCritic to your URIs for so long, Cloninger! :)
Briefly looking at the above URI, I can't discern whether or not the
authors of a couple of these pieces are being ironically retarditaire
or if they are straightforward creative expressions. A few of them are
fully situated in an artWorld context, some are by well-known artists.
Clearly all of them draw from the globalVisualCultureMashup, and none
of them are "outsiders."

curt:
not in a stric art brut sense. That would be impossible. But they are outsiders to the net art scene.



ben:
> http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/

Some (well, really all) of these pieces are strikingly beautiful, but
like candy bars, after the sweet taste, I'm left hungry for substance.
None of the works [upset/surprised/confused/challenged] me sufficiently
for me to remember them. That's my personal experience, but I'm
suggesting that there are others who are unsatisfied with this
FlashFormalism.

curt:
it can't all be Debussey. Sometimes a modicum of t.rex is required.
"My name is bubblegum
I live for moon and sun
Young and so much fun
Life has just begun."
- Sonic Youth
Is it art? Whatever.



ben:
You keep suggesting that contemporary critical discussion is somehow at
fault for not "getting" the real work happening, when in reality, this
is contemporary critical discourse right here on this list. If the
people on this list respond to the work in silence, I would suggest
that they aren't significantly affected by it, and I think that is
indeed a problem with the work.

curt:
the people on this list respond to in-depth critical analysis of most any piece of new media artwork with inordinate silence. it's the nature of the list.



Ben:
It may be a fine distinction, but while I love the complexification.net
work as astonishingly gorgeous [images/applets], I would hesitate to
discuss the pieces in an art context. They are unmistakably powerful
demonstrations of the power of a systemsApproach to artMaking, so
certain people may find them shocking, and perhaps that's enough to
entertain some discussion of them in an art context. Maybe they're
inspirational enough that we don't need to even question their
relevance. However, I can't imagine anybody from this list being very
intellectually stimulated by these works; anyone with a passing
familiarity with newMedia (or computerHystory) has seen bales full of
work like this (albeit not always as beautiful).

curt:
A pox on your shocking, challenging, intellectually stimulating critera, Ben Syverson! There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.



ben:
Wake up – no one's muzzling [the contemporary abstractionists] – they just have nothing to say!

John Cage:
I have nothing to say and I am saying it.



Ben:
The
important thing to keep in mind is that all art is conceptual, whether
you like it or not, because it "happens" in the brain. If no one will
step up to the plate and talk about this art, it's because not very
much is happening in anyone's brain as they ingest it.

Curt:
I couldn't disagree more. Art and music have the unique (dare I say "sacred") capacity to bypass the brain/mind and speak viscerally and non-textually to the core of us (spirit). If you don't get this (and few Marxist-influenced critics do), then you won't get art that does. Art is not an argument.

I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees.

On 7 Oct 2004, at 22:26, bensyverson wrote:

> On Oct 7, 2004, at 3:29 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
>> There's a difference between abstraction, aesthetics, and vacuous
>> prettiness. Critic beware. :-)
>
> Yes, but no one will flesh out for me why FlashFormalism isn't vacuous
> prettiness. I'm eager to know. We've heard the TooMuchInformation!
> explanation, but to me it rings hollow. Bueller?

It isn't vacuous prettiness because it is realistic. It is descriptive
of contemporary experience. That experience is aesthetic and systemic,
yet chaotic for the individual. This is not an age where it's possible
to paint on ceilings or floors.

An obviously acute social commentary or deconstructive narrative would
not be realistic. It would be a fantasy of critical engagement and
import, a mere illustration or placebo.

FF is realistic to the social conditions of its production. As I say,
don't shoot the messenger.

> Read more closely – I'm not trying to import newMedia into the
> "pre-existent" criticalModels used in contempArt, I'm trying to point
> out that there's NO critical discourse happening around this work,

Possibly that's because the discourse is happening within the work.

>> Feed them "Emigre". ;-)
>
> They're too busy kerning ad copy for Starbucks at $100/hr to sit down
> and read about the [implications/hystories/theories] of typefaces…

Ew. :-(

> I think you may have just taken the Ridonculous Award from curt.

Cool. I'll hang it next to my bowling low score certificate. ;-)

> Fuck cultural studies. I'm asking this group, this meeting of the
> minds, what is [critical/challenging/progressive] about
> FlashFormalism,

However the examples you give and the language you use indicates
certain pre-existent (and commonly held) ideas about what to be
critical/challenging/progressive is. That is, the challenge must be one
we can join, rather than one directed at us, and must be renderable in
language.

> This is devastatingly depressing. There are so many discussions that
> have been woven together to form newMedia,

Discussions in the work or around the work?

> and now you want to pretend not to see them and start over with new
> language.

Beware of confusing the discourse around the work with the discourse in
the work (the discourse of the work).

> As if the cybernetics discussion in the earlyVideo moment isn't still
> relevant.

It's very relevant because it is exactly the kind of socially engaged
formalism that it is important not to be aspect-blind to in FF.

> As if the hypertext discussion of the earlyHypermedia moment isn't
> still relevant. As if "interactivity" and "cybernetics" are unrelated,
> and unrelated to what's happening now. This is one of the main reasons
> I built liken into criticalartware.net; from the very beginning we
> wanted to be sure that we were connecting with and expanding upon
> existing discussions that were directly relevant to the discussion of
> newMedia.

Which is great, but slots very easily into the academic/commercial
artworld. It's engages in existing discussions rather than revealing
gaps in the language of that discussion.

> Make up your own language if you like – have fun reinventing the
> wheel and calling it something else. I'll keep working hard to
> [continue/reexamine/revive/extend] the discussions you're so eager to
> cast off.

I'm not suggesting we cast off history, far from it. I'm suggesting
that we look at history to recover a current of resistance to the
unreflective textual formalism of a criticism that FF is obviously
anathema to.

- Rob.

Ben,

Are you suggesting that design is a natural talent? That critical,
historical, contextual discussion doesn't happen in an academic
environment in graphic design? That concept is not an issue in this type
of curriculum? This seems a bit biased or naive.

I agree that too often schools are under funded, and I certainly don't
defend "processing" students using outdated software because after all,
they are the customer, but to blanket state that that a "designer" can
not be trained… Obviously, they are not going to be masters without
experience, but then there doesn't seem to be a demand or pay for
"masters."

As to New Media, perhaps what we should be talking about is what an
ideal environment might be to allow an artist to experiment and thrive
-within an academic setting if they choose. The conversation is there,
but I don't think you are listening.

The silence that you hear is everyone wondering why you don't know
-based on your statements- that not EVERY Flash piece is intended to be
purely -> pretty, and if it conveys meaning/intent/criticality and it's
ALSO pretty…hummm maybe that can be discussed as part of a built-in
generics (like word processing software that only knows X number of
words)…and not necessarily an insipid artist.

>Read more closely – I'm not trying to import newMedia into the
>"pre-existent" criticalModels used in contempArt
++++
> There are so many discussions that
>have been woven together to form newMedia, and now you want to pretend
>not to see them and start over with new language.

Can we say …flip flop?

I keep running into an old argument that in order art to be accepted as
art it needs to be engaging on some level and that it is successful if
it is understood. According to some who have weighed in on this topic,
Abstract art fails this test, but when I consider generative programs
and their extended explanations, I feel the same way and even consider
it an abstract! It's that abstractness that IS engaging. AND another
one…if the concept has to be explained or it's not understood, then it
doesn't fit the criteria as successful either. I do have a bias about
that for sure…so I might not be remotely interested in a work that
captures other people's work, generates multiple images, or creates an
online "society," but you can still tell me why you "like" it, and I
won't shut you down.

Jean

OH, and want your Web site redesigned?

—–Original Message—–
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of bensyverson said:

Yes, and that's exactly the point. So if you find aesthetic discussions
titillating ("ooh, more brown!" … "too many boxes!"), by all means,
keepOnRawxin'InTheFreeWorld. I'm just trying to publicly raise the
issue of whether this is how we want to let newMedia come to be
defined. If it nM does become pigeon-holed as nice-looking clickable
data pictures, I won't be a part of it, and neither will a lot of
people who are currently engaged with this discussion. It's great that
you bring up graphicDsign, because one needs only to look at your local
graphicDsign [college/department] to see the Jihad that's being waged
on ideas there. Kids arrive in graphicDsign classes expecting to
receive training in industry-standard applications and be kept
up-to-date on industry design trends, so that they may graduate with
sufficient "mastery" to be employable as designers directly out of
college. The expectation is that you can be trained as a Dsigner just
like you can be trained as a XeroxMechanic. Given the radical artistic,
conceptual and social hystorical hyperthreads that make up the
area-of-activity we delineate (for economic reasons) as "graphicDsign,"
I find myself dismayed that the graduates of these programs are more
excited about software upgrades than the ideas they're working with.

And this is your model for how you want to talk about nM? Does anyone
else have a problem with this?

On 7 Oct 2004, at 21:53, bensyverson wrote:

> That's an interesting way to look at it – I look at Impressionist
> work and see a radical protest at the dawn of the machine age. If you
> think their work was a joyful expression of how wonderful it was to
> take the train and paint flowers, you're missing the only thing in
> those paintings of interest to me.

Yet they did paint flowers (well, fields). Without the technology of
the train, tube paint, and state-sponsored colour theory we would not
have those images. If this is the extent of it then it is problematic
contrasted with…

> What I admire about them is the furiously angry assault on the
> blackened industrial wastelands their cities had become – so angry
> that even their brushstrokes rebelled against being used as fully
> representational marks (like they were in the assemblyLine of
> quick-cash portrait painting).

…the fact that these often politically active yet bourgeois artists
were urbanites during the industrial revolution and political unrest in
France. To look at the Impressionists as mere formalists or prettifiers
is indeed a mistake of chocolate box proportions.

When chocolate boxes have LCD screens printed on them, will those
screens show FF?

>> Of the abstract expressionists, artificial mediums and individualism.
>> Form follows function.
>
> The AbExers were not formalists either.

Absolutely. Yet they made forms. Ones that the unreflective can hang in
their living rooms. A Pollock or a Rothko in the flesh is a
breathtaking, powerful aesthetic experience. This doesn't mean that the
work doesn't have or effectively communicate ideas. Far from it, the
form allows the work to perform (fnarr) its function. And those forms,
and that function, were informed (fnarr) by the ideology and technology
of the day.

>> These pseudo-chaotic structures and seemingly ordered systems are our
>> lives rendered for us to see, the space we live in (or that is
>> dictated to us). This is how it is. This is keeping it real. The
>> mapping is defensible.
>
> That's about half of an idea, but not nearly enough to warrant the
> fullScale rejection of intellectual discourse and conceptualism.

Nonono. I'm not rejecting discourse or conceptualism. I am asking for
it to be generated rather than illustrated or applied.

> The important thing to keep in mind is that all art is conceptual,
> whether you like it or not,

I collect Art & Language monographs… :-)

> because it "happens" in the brain. If no one will step up to the plate
> and talk about this art, it's because not very much is happening in
> anyone's brain as they ingest it.

Possibly not. And very possibly it is minor. But it may be realistic,
or necessary. And it is historically precedented.

>> It'll grow on ya. ;-)
>
> Hopefully some of deesMemes will grow on you too :)

This is the best thread for ages. :-)

- Rob.

On Oct 7, 2004, at 4:59 PM, curt cloninger wrote:

> You're describing bad graphic design education, but not all graphic
> design education is bad.

And someone with herpes isn't always contagious. It's impossible to
ignore the fact that graphicDsign has exploded from a niche industry
into an army of pixelPushers, and equally impossible to ignore the
assemblyLine pedagogy that produces them.

> Last time I checked, New media art was not in danger of being hijacked
> by graphic designers. If anything the scene could use a bit more
> craft.

Without railing on anyone in particular, all that's needed is to take a
quick stroll over to the artBase. While there's a lot of great work in
there, a lot of it is graphic design with an artist's statement. Sadly,
a lot of the statements could be interchangeable. PersonX is "dealing
with a sense of place" whereas PersonY is "addressing the body" yet
both works are clicky color boxes in Flash.

> curt:
> I'm not advocating design for desisgn's sake. You seemed to be
> dismissing Casey's work as FlashFormalism. I was pointing out that
> it's not. Are you agreeing with me?

Huh? When was I dismissing Casey's work?

> In art history class those are the artists we discuss. But on
> contemporary art bulletin boards we may discuss all sorts of
> off-the-radar contemporaries making all sorts of art for all sorts of
> reasons, many of whom will never be remembered, nor do they care to be
> remembered, nor are they making art in hopes of being remembered.
> Such are the joys of a contemporary art scene.

Okay. Back to FlashArtisans.

> you miss my point. I'm not saying they weren't important in their
> time. I'm saying they are still important now and they disagree with
> your assertion that all good art is about ideas.

Whether or not they agree, their art is intellectually engaging,
whereas FlashFormalism is (to me) not. Regardless of the artists' spin
on their work, it can all be situated in an intellectual debate of
their time. I'm waiting to see if FlashFormalism can say the same
thing.

> I mention the above pieces particularly because they are *not* purely
> abstract. I'm illustrating the fact that new media can successfully
> combine elements of visual abstraction with concept. It's not an
> either/or. Evidently we agree here.

Not really – none of those pieces utilize visual abstraction. Every
pixel in the first two pieces is procedural and representative,
actually. What we agree on is that abstraction isn't incompatible with
concept. What we don't agree on is the idea that interesting art can be
antiConcept.

> not in a stric art brut sense. That would be impossible. But they
> are outsiders to the net art scene.

Wow. Okay. It's a good thing you're there to discover them and allow
their pathetic voices to be heard, then! I wonder what fresh insights
they'll have from the outside!


> the people on this list respond to in-depth critical analysis of most
> any piece of new media artwork with inordinate silence. it's the
> nature of the list.

Sounds like a cool community, glad I joined. Anyone want a change?

> A pox on your shocking, challenging, intellectually stimulating
> critera, Ben Syverson! There are more things in heaven and earth than
> are dreamt of in your philosophy.

You're right. That's what this list is for, right? No one here is
interested in the art world, right? Let's all sit around not discussing
work, since it should be exempt from criticality.

> I couldn't disagree more. Art and music have the unique (dare I say
> "sacred") capacity to bypass the brain/mind and speak viscerally and
> non-textually to the core of us (spirit). If you don't get this (and
> few Marxist-influenced critics do), then you won't get art that does.
> Art is not an argument.

What's all this Marxist bullShizer you keep pulling? No one here is
talking about art as production – I'm just trying to poke the corpse
of Rhizome to see if it's dead or just sleeping.

- ben

On Oct 7, 2004, at 5:25 PM, Rob Myers wrote:

> It isn't vacuous prettiness because it is realistic. It is descriptive
> of contemporary experience. That experience is aesthetic and systemic,
> yet chaotic for the individual.

Oh really? Because that sounds like a cop-out of morbidly obese
proportions to me. Either that or I'm missing out on "contemporary
experience." My experience is nowhere near that aesthetically dazzling
or dissociated. Is this experience something you need a $6000/month
[live/work] loft in Manhattan and a steady diet of cocaine to
understand? Because looking at the work, I don't get anything out of
it.

> This is not an age where it's possible to paint on ceilings or floors.

???

> An obviously acute social commentary or deconstructive narrative would
> not be realistic. It would be a fantasy of critical engagement and
> import, a mere illustration or placebo.

What a bitterlyCyncial notion: don't bother even saying anything,
because it doesn't matter and it won't change anything? Say that to
Michael Moore's face. Say it to Picasso. Say it to any artist who has
seen the impact their work has had. I'd say with the net, the
possibilities for critical engagement and import are multiplied – look
at how much of an impact bloggers are having in this election. Sure,
that's a political example, but it shows you the power of your chosen
medium, no matter how willing you are to make excuses for not engaging
it.

> Possibly that's because the discourse is happening within the work.

Really? I'm squinting now. Is it too small to read or something?
Because as I mentioned before, the work isn't having any discussion
that involves me.

> However the examples you give and the language you use indicates
> certain pre-existent (and commonly held) ideas about what to be
> critical/challenging/progressive is. That is, the challenge must be
> one we can join, rather than one directed at us, and must be
> renderable in language.

No – forget language. If you can intrigue me without language, go for
it. FlashFormalism does not intrigue me. You seem to think that it
doesn't matter. "Not intrigued? Not challenged? Who cares! Art has many
purposes! Plus, there's a hidden discourse in the work you can't see!
No, don't worry about what that discourse is!" I'm being an ass, but
seriously: what is the point of this list if not to move the discussion
of newMedia forward? And if follows, that if that is indeed the purpose
of the list, how can we do that if we can't engage with the work? And
if we can't engage with the work, is it because we don't understand it,
or that it isn't of interest? And how can we even begin to understand
the work if some of us are unwilling to look at it critically?

> Beware of confusing the discourse around the work with the discourse
> in the work (the discourse of the work).

Sure, art is intimately intertwined with the discussion surrounding it.
In fact, artWorks [can/do] further this discussion, just as the
discussion bears the fruit of artWorks. It's a living system. The
problem comes when the discussion stops moving. Then the artWork has no
lifeSupport.

> It's very relevant because it is exactly the kind of socially engaged
> formalism that it is important not to be aspect-blind to in FF.

The earlyVideo moment was a time when, for the first time ever, artists
had access to the tools of television production. In an already radical
time, video became a weaponLike tool for shortCircuiting expectations.
The very idea of seeing alternative media on a television screen was
challenging, and spawned a vigorous intellectual debate. Most of the
work was not formalist, although some of it indeed was. The formalist
work of the time tended to be steeped in the ideas of
consciousnessExpansion as outlined by geneYoungblood in Expanded Cinema
and hands-on lectures, R. Buckminster Fuller in various texts and
lectures, and others. In this way, the formalist work of that
hystorical timeond was among the most conceptual. It's also important
to note that at the time, there were no off-the-shelf tools for
abstractVisual creation – there was no equivalent to Flash. So artists
(like danSandin, philMorton, davidBeck, georgeBrown,
paikNamJune/shuyaAbe, steveRutt/billEtra and others) had to build their
own tools, and the output and operation of each idiosyncratic tool was
totally different.

This is in stark contrast to the endless waves of clickable transparent
cubes and lines that spring forth from Macromedia Flash plug-ins. If
you can show me how FlashFormalism connects to the hyperthread of
cybernetics, I'd love to see it. Or, if you can simply show me
satisfactorily how FlashFormalism is "socially engaged," I'd love to
see that.

> Which is great, but slots very easily into the academic/commercial
> artworld. It's engages in existing discussions rather than revealing
> gaps in the language of that discussion.

The appropriate response to gaps in the road is to fill them and keep
the discussion rolling, not to tear down the whole bridge and
disconnect the shores. (Boy, that was a metaphorFull!)

> I'm not suggesting we cast off history, far from it. I'm suggesting
> that we look at history to recover a current of resistance to the
> unreflective textual formalism of a criticism that FF is obviously
> anathema to.

What a masterful turnabout on the fact that it is FlashFormalism, not
critical discourse, which is unreflective.

- ben

very interesting, if seemingly-not-getting-anywhere, discussion. is
there any other kind? ;)
in terms of the FF aesthetic that's being bandied about, i was just
thinking that it's very strange to suggest that it has nothing to
offer. Certainly it represents some aspect of a larger social imaginary
that can be mined critically for all kinds of things in terms of the
politics of aesthetics and desire. i may not find it very interesting
beyond design as work, but the interesting project for a critic, and
what i look for in critical writing, is to discuss and question what
aesthetic choices are about in a larger sense. A couple of years ago,
there was an article on the flash aesthetic
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick"6 The work discussed isn't
that interesting for me, but the implications found in it (how it
relates, connects, reflects to larger phenomena) is. This may be the
kind of criticism that many here despise (seems like i got into this
with curt at some point? maybe not.), but it's what i'm interested in
and find important. Reality TV is the most vapid and boring thing i've
ever seen, and i like televised bowling, but i've read some pretty
interesting criticism of it that i feel i learned something beyond the
shows from. same thing with blogs.
the FF aesthetic has also had a huge impact on the larger field of
aesthetics, from painting to advertising.
just a couple of thoughts…
ryan

On Oct 7, 2004, at 5:30 PM, jm Haefner wrote:

> Are you suggesting that design is a natural talent?

Uhh, no.

> That critical, historical, contextual discussion doesn't happen in an
> academic environment in graphic design? That concept is not an issue
> in this type of curriculum? This seems a bit biased or naive.

I'm biased by experience – they don't happen enough. If you have any
doubts, walk into a graphic design firm and ask the interns who they're
reading or why they want to design.

> Obviously, they are not going to be masters without experience, but
> then there doesn't seem to be a demand or pay for "masters."

Mastery is an illusion.

> The conversation is there, but I don't think you are listening.

Oh? <crickets chirping> There's plenty of critical discourse about
newMedia happening, it's just not taking place on this list. It should.

> The silence that you hear is everyone wondering why you don't know
> -based on your statements- that not EVERY Flash piece is intended to
> be purely -> pretty, and if it conveys meaning/intent/criticality and
> it's ALSO pretty…hummm maybe that can be discussed as part of a
> built-in generics (like word processing software that only knows X
> number of words)…and not necessarily an insipid artist.

I have no issue with pretty work that has brains. My issue is with the
glut of pretty work with nothing to say. Which is not to say that I
don't like it – some of it is nice as a diversion, much like reading
Wallpaper, ArtForum, or watching trashTV. I just think it's weird how
little it's challenged, particularly when I see a lot of work being
posted that's critical in other ways….

> >Read more closely – I'm not trying to import newMedia into the
> >"pre-existent" criticalModels used in contempArt
>
> ++++
>
> > There are so many discussions that
> >have been woven together to form newMedia, and now you want to pretend
> >not to see them and start over with new language.
>
> Can we say …flip flop?

HA! Speaking of importing language from suspect sources, you just did a
File>Import on the Republican propaganda machine… If you would, as I
mentioned, read more closely, you'll see I have no interest in adhering
to the conventional critical models (models being ways of understanding
hystory), but rather would like to connect newMedia to the many
hystorical superStrings from which it is woven. Some of these myriad
parallel hystories are not commonly [recognized by/incorporated into]
the contempArt system && narrative. What I'm suggesting is that we
recognize these threads && understand their discussions, as they are
deeply influential && formative to the current context of newMedia.

> I keep running into an old argument that in order art to be accepted
> as art it needs to be engaging on some level and that it is successful
> if it is understood.

You can never "understand" anyone or anything – it's such a final
word. You can only hope to spark debate, open discussion, shock
someone, confuse someone, delight someone.

> It's that abstractness that IS engaging.

Really? If I can ask in my most sincere and un-confrontational voice,
what exactly is it about it that is engaging? Is it a visceral thing?
What are the feelings you go through as you view it? Is it some kind of
rush, or maybe a soothing calm? I'm most curious to know.

> AND another one…if the concept has to be explained or it's not
> understood, then it doesn't fit the criteria as successful either.

Nah, there's too much work out there that leans on a concept too
heavily to the detriment of the work. You run into problems when you
start blaming your audience for not "understanding" your work. However,
if your audience flat-out doesn't care about your work….

> I do have a bias about that for sure…so I might not be remotely
> interested in a work that captures other people's work, generates
> multiple images, or creates an online "society," but you can still
> tell me why you "like" it, and I won't shut you down.

I'm not shutting anyone down – people just seem to be pretty irked by
my questions about why there isn't more critical discussion about
FlashFormalism here. I'm all for MORE discussion.

> OH, and want your Web site redesigned?

Nah, I like the suspense. Besides, I've got a few sites I have to get
operational first. I'll be sure to post the links!

- ben

Response as prompted by:

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of bensyverson
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2004 7:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: RHIZOME_RAW: Thinking of art, transparency and social
technology
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ben,
OK…how about if you help define what you mean by FlashFormalism? If we
are talking about how Flash defines the use of color, form etc, I don't
know how far that discussion will go without sounding pedantic -unless
we talk about the tool producing a generic look, its limitations, etc
(but there are other lists that do that too).

Unfortunately, when you talk about Web design for economy, there is
little choice when it comes to subject or content, and metaphor is more
or less trite (lashings anyone?). Therefore, I'm more likely to approach
a discussion of Flash Web design from utilitarian point of view.

Perhaps a discussion of the work in the ArtBase is in order, as I assume
people are putting their work up to be critiqued, if not, then archived?


Perhaps refreshing the purpose of ArtBase seems reasonable, because the
selection criteria pretty much define what you seem to be talking about
-but the work does not always seem to hold up to that standard in my
view (also what you intimate). When these works are selected, there are
no reviews by those selecting the work, only an artist statement and bio
produced by the artist. It then stands to reason, that work selected
might not be all the selection criteria say it is.

I suppose you are near correct in that there seem to be few interns
reading -tho some time back, I caught one of mine (yup, on the job)
reading The Age of Spiritual Machines.



Jean

Hi Ben,

It seems like at this point you're grapsing at things about which to be contrary. I think you're best tactic for sparking dialogue is to get into the work piece by piece, preferably with as little hyperbole as possible. The works in ArtBase are easy targets. Not to dis the ArtBase, but it seeks to be fairly inclusive, and nobody is really looking to it as the be all end all archive of contemporary new media art. Let's look at the three pieces I mentioned, since each is more or less canonized (as much as any net.art work can be at this stage).

You say that the Shape of Song ( http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html ) and textarc ( http://www.textarc.org/ ) don't utilize visual abstraction, that every pixel is procedural and representational. Perhaps from a technical coding perspective. But data visualization is inherently abstraction. The artist is literally abstracting data (from text to animation in the first piece and from sound to shapeForm in the second). The artists could have abstracted the data any number of ways, but they chose to abstract it in very specific ways, not just to achieve accurate representation, but to achieve an abstract, aesthetic effect. These pieces are examples of abstract visualization working in tandem with meaningful data mapping. The pieces work not just because they are useful or accurate (indeed, neither are terribly useful), but also because they look interesting. Not SOLELY because they look interesting, but they do look interesting and intentionally so. Furthermore, the way in which they look interesting is intrinsically related to the data they are abstracting, but not merely arbitrarily driven by it. Each coder's "hand/eye/craft/aesthetic intent" is imposed on the way the their output looks (in the case of Shape of Song) and moves/reacts (in the case of TextArc). This is part of the art.

Regarding carnivore ( http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore ) the genius of the piece is precisely that it farms out the last-mile aesthetics to "artisans" (if you must) who enjoy and are skillful at visual representation. Galloway tackled the obligatory political concept and coding. The political concept (surveilance) was/is very en vogue and thus a shoe-in for gallery-ization, but there's nothing terribly sexy about that aspect of it to me. The codidng took some doing, but it was basically just a reappropriation of government code already written. The real genius of the piece is twofold:
1. It takes brilliant advantage of the online community. It's true net art, not just because it runs on the network (again, an obligatory requirement), but because it optimizes the collaborative aspects of the networked community in its ongoing production.
2. In so clearly bifurcating the concept (backend) and the visual aesthetics (front end) it uses its literal, technical form as a meta-phor to foreground the split in art criticism between concept and visual aesthetics (the same split we've been dancing around for the last two days in these posts). The project then goes on to unite these two aspects into a single work, thus showing that the two aren't really diametrically opposed, but that they drive and complement each other and are "apiece."

It's easy to look at Carnivore and get excited about the politcal aspects of surveilance. But that's the easy surface read of the project. You said earlier that RSG's part in the piece was concepetual. A facile critique. Their genius in the piece was to orchesetrate an outsourcing of the generic conceptual to the idiosynchratic abstract. And Alex's marketing genius in the whole project was to make it "about surveilance," when it's really not about surveilance at all (it only tracks traffic on a local network that has given it permission to do so). But the surveilance angle got it into the galleries. [Incidentally, Galloway also hired Takeshi Hamada ( http://www.hamada-takeshi.com/ ) to design the carnivore logo. Hamada is the same designer who designed the rhizome logo you so flippantly dissed.] Because it's not an either/or.



curt:
> you miss my point. I'm not saying [dubuffet, magritte, beuys] weren't important in their
> time. I'm saying they are still important now and they disagree with
> your assertion that all good art is about ideas.

ben:
Whether or not they agree, their art is intellectually engaging,
whereas FlashFormalism is (to me) not. Regardless of the artists' spin
on their work, it can all be situated in an intellectual debate of
their time. I'm waiting to see if FlashFormalism can say the same
thing.

curt:
argh! you're not hearing me. I'm not talking about whether you personally like FlashFormalism. I'm not talking about whether you personally like the work of these artists. You say, "whether or not they agree." They categorically disagree, and that's my point. You may assimilate them into your current historical paradigm to your own intellectual satisfaction, but if they were here today, they wouldn't go so quietly. They were working from a perspective that art is beyond idea. Their words and their work disagree with your stated position.


ben:
You're right. That's what this list is for, right? No one here is
interested in the art world, right? Let's all sit around not discussing
work, since it should be exempt from criticality.

Brian Eno:
Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.

curt:
OK. You've sufficiently goaded me to critically discuss http://www.complexification.net a bit (I've got some free time). But the piece I'll reference is admittedly not a "critic friendly" piece. That doesn't mean it's not a great piece. cf: http://www.rhizome.org/print.rhiz?7261 (a summary of my position regarding contemporary new media criticism).

http://www.complexification.net/gallery/machines/interAggregate/index.php

It owes an intentional debt to Pollock not only in its palette but in its application and process. Pollock was not a "chance operations" artist, but was very deliberate in his execution. His process was an admixture of chaos and craft, and part of that craft lay in how much chaos to allow into the work, when to allow it in, and how to allow it in. Similarly, Tarbell is not using Flash (as t. whid rightly observes), but Processing which compiles into Java, and then he's going behind and hand-tweaking the compiled java. The piece is generative, but not without Tarbell's particular, intentional visaul aesthetic, not just in the final output, but in the real-time "playing out" of the piece. Whereas Pollock's "hand" in real-time painting led to the production of a static final painting, Tarbell removes this process one step further. Tarbell's "hand" in real-time coding leads to the software's "hand" in real-time "painting," which in turn leads to the output of the static piece. In Pollock's case, the final piece shows evidence of Pollock's energetic "performance," that is, his painting of the piece. In Tarbell's case, the performance (the software's "drawing" of the art) *is* the actual piece. This generative "playing out" in turn shows evindence of Tarbell's coding "performance" which occurs off stage, but which is nevertheless observable by viewing the intentionally open source code.

So it ain't just FlashFormalism, Ben. It's "speaking" about art history; about new media's relation to art history; about the nature of time-shiftedness and instruction giving; about the balance between chaos and control; about the continuum of performance, meta-performance (literally "script writing"), and object; about the relationship between process and visual aesthetics; about the relationship between code, hand, line, and dance; about the ability of software-based media to evince an idiosynchratic personal style. Plus it looks so danged pretty. And the beauty of it (literally) is, you don't have to grok the above insights to get something out of the piece.

And you're not grocking those things (or you're doing an award-winning job at playing devil's advocate) because you've been conditioned to look for something heavy, political, important, groundbreaking, and immediately dialogue-able. (When intellectual stimulation leads to mental masturbation, call us. Our trained professionals are standing by.) If it's pretty and subtle and anti-sublime, it must not be saying anything. And if it happens to show some superficial resemblance to a screen saver, Egad! Out with the bathwater it goes.


ben:
What's all this Marxist bullShizer you keep pulling? No one here is
talking about art as production.

curt:
No, but you're implicitly approaching art as material and humans as material. There's seems to be little room for the spiritual in the assumptions of your critical perspective. But then spirit went out with Romanticism, so you're off the hook there.

It's so elegant. So intelligent.

respectfully,
curt

On Oct 7, 2004, at 7:15 PM, ryan griffis wrote:

> very interesting, if seemingly-not-getting-anywhere, discussion. is
> there any other kind? ;)

Heh, indeed. I'm quickly reaching a point where I've said what I want
to say, and RAW can do with it what it will. I'm not really cut out for
criticism. Makes me anxious to get back to work. :) It's been
enjoyable, though!

> in terms of the FF aesthetic that's being bandied about, i was just
> thinking that it's very strange to suggest that it has nothing to
> offer. Certainly it represents some aspect of a larger social
> imaginary that can be mined critically for all kinds of things in
> terms of the politics of aesthetics and desire.

That's a vGood point – I have been taking the approach of critiquing
the work itself, but perhaps a more productive approach would be to
critique the broader cultural phenomenon.

> This may be the kind of criticism that many here despise (seems like i
> got into this with curt at some point? maybe not.), but it's what i'm
> interested in and find important.

If we do get into critiquing the broader phenomenon, this will get
messy, because as I mentioned before, it seems to be a massive ThumbsUp
to the statusQuo, and as you mention, engages the politics of desire –
and more specifically in my opinion, demonstrates a slavish
entrancement with the sumptuousness of consumption and eCommerce. To my
eyes, it reads as anything but critical to these forces and utterly
complicit in the suffering they inflict.

- ben

On Oct 7, 2004, at 8:30 PM, jm Haefner wrote:

> I don't know how far that discussion will go without sounding pedantic
>

On 8 Oct 2004, at 00:56, bensyverson wrote:

> On Oct 7, 2004, at 5:25 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
>
>> It isn't vacuous prettiness because it is realistic. It is
>> descriptive of contemporary experience. That experience is aesthetic
>> and systemic, yet chaotic for the individual.
>
> Oh really? Because that sounds like a cop-out of morbidly obese
> proportions to me. Either that or I'm missing out on "contemporary
> experience." My experience is nowhere near that aesthetically dazzling
> or dissociated. Is this experience something you need a $6000/month
> [live/work] loft in Manhattan and a steady diet of cocaine to
> understand? Because looking at the work, I don't get anything out of
> it.

I've never been anywhere near Manhattan. Politically, socially,
artefactually, this is an age where aesthetics have trumped ethics and
how.

>> An obviously acute social commentary or deconstructive narrative
>> would not be realistic. It would be a fantasy of critical engagement
>> and import, a mere illustration or placebo.
>
> What a bitterlyCyncial notion: don't bother even saying anything,
> because it doesn't matter and it won't change anything?

No. Say it in a way that will have an effect, not in a way that the
in-crowd can stroke their chins to.

> I'd say with the net, the possibilities for critical engagement and
> import are multiplied – look at how much of an impact bloggers are
> having in this election. Sure, that's a political example, but it
> shows you the power of your chosen medium, no matter how willing you
> are to make excuses for not engaging it.

Blogs are a good example.

>> Possibly that's because the discourse is happening within the work.
>
> Really? I'm squinting now. Is it too small to read or something?
> Because as I mentioned before, the work isn't having any discussion
> that involves me.

Try holding it upside down. :-)

> And how can we even begin to understand the work if some of us are
> unwilling to look at it critically?

How can we even begin to understand the work if some of us won't look
at our critical ideas critically?

>> It's very relevant because it is exactly the kind of socially engaged
>> formalism that it is important not to be aspect-blind to in FF.
>
> The earlyVideo moment was a time when, for the first time ever,
> artists had access to the tools of television production.

This sounds an awful lot like playing with technology. ;-)

> In an already radical time, video became a weaponLike tool for
> shortCircuiting expectations. The very idea of seeing alternative
> media on a television screen was challenging, and spawned a vigorous
> intellectual debate. Most of the work was not formalist, although some
> of it indeed was. The formalist work of the time tended to be steeped
> in the ideas of consciousnessExpansion as outlined by geneYoungblood
> in Expanded Cinema and hands-on lectures, R. Buckminster Fuller in
> various texts and lectures, and others. In this way, the formalist
> work of that hystorical timeond was among the most conceptual. It's
> also important to note that at the time, there were no off-the-shelf
> tools for abstractVisual creation – there was no equivalent to Flash.
> So artists (like danSandin, philMorton, davidBeck, georgeBrown,
> paikNamJune/shuyaAbe, steveRutt/billEtra and others) had to build
> their own tools, and the output and operation of each idiosyncratic
> tool was totally different.

They didn't build their own video cameras or recorders though. The
blurry and|or pixellated limitations of the available base technology
became associated with the work made using it. Kinda like with Flash.

> This is in stark contrast to the endless waves of clickable
> transparent cubes and lines that spring forth from Macromedia Flash
> plug-ins. If you can show me how FlashFormalism connects to the
> hyperthread of cybernetics, I'd love to see it. Or, if you can simply
> show me satisfactorily how FlashFormalism is "socially engaged," I'd
> love to see that.

I'm going to write a longer piece, but I'm certainly not claiming it's
committed art or anything.

>> Which is great, but slots very easily into the academic/commercial
>> artworld. It's engages in existing discussions rather than revealing
>> gaps in the language of that discussion.
>
> The appropriate response to gaps in the road is to fill them and keep
> the discussion rolling, not to tear down the whole bridge and
> disconnect the shores. (Boy, that was a metaphorFull!)

Or to erect a roadblock. :-)

>> I'm not suggesting we cast off history, far from it. I'm suggesting
>> that we look at history to recover a current of resistance to the
>> unreflective textual formalism of a criticism that FF is obviously
>> anathema to.
>
> What a masterful turnabout on the fact that it is FlashFormalism, not
> critical discourse, which is unreflective.

The messenger is now mostly lead. ;-)

- Rob.