BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville (US). His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. By layering, restructuring, hashing, eroding, exhausting, and (dis)splaying language, he causes language to perform itself until its "meaning" has less to do with what it denotes and more to do with how it behaves. His work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Digital Art Museum [DAM] Berlin, L'Instituto de México à Paris, Living Arts of Tulsa, and The Art Gallery of Knoxville.
Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of seven books, most recently "Fresher Styles for Web Designers" (New Riders). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of seven books, most recently "Fresher Styles for Web Designers" (New Riders). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Required Reading
Hi Tom,
I agree with you about this particular piece and its subsequent (re)contextualization(s). Institutionalization wasn't likely to formally disrupt abstract expressionism all that much (discrete paintings meant to be hung on walls can be hung on any walls), but institutionalization often drastically modulates network experiments (as you observe above). The challenge to any "contemporary net artist" who wants to make this move (from net subculture to gallery/museum space) is for her to control the context of this translation/modulation as much as possible. AIDS 3D seems adept at controlling these contextual shifts (indeed, that may be their main strength as artists; but then they are arguably gallery artists more than they are net artists). Sometimes, it seems like a net artist knowns a curator who has a space, and the curator invites the net artist to have a show, and then the net artist is forced to scramble to come up with something to fill the space that is somehow related to their online work. For example (cf: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mriver/tags/loshadka/ or http://www.newrafael.com/broken-self-at-spencer-brownstone-gallery/). Not that there is anything wrong with such scramblings, particularly when the artist is afforded creative control of the translation between online space and gallery space.
In the case you mention above, you'd really have to ask Lauren and Guthrie about their curatorial/artistic relationship involving this piece. Few Rhizome "employees" read these threads (although I imagine it is the job of some beleaguered intern to "just keep an eye on them.") You could always contact Lauren and Guthrie directly and invite them to respond. There is a radical social networking platform known as "Facebook" to which they both belong. It allows you to send a real-time message directly to another user via a user-friendly web application interface. Or there is this pre-web1.0 internet communications platform known as "electronic mail." It is a bit more complicated/fussy, requiring stand-alone application ("client") software, but it still works in a pinch. Who in their right mind could blame them if they choose not to respond?
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
I agree with you about this particular piece and its subsequent (re)contextualization(s). Institutionalization wasn't likely to formally disrupt abstract expressionism all that much (discrete paintings meant to be hung on walls can be hung on any walls), but institutionalization often drastically modulates network experiments (as you observe above). The challenge to any "contemporary net artist" who wants to make this move (from net subculture to gallery/museum space) is for her to control the context of this translation/modulation as much as possible. AIDS 3D seems adept at controlling these contextual shifts (indeed, that may be their main strength as artists; but then they are arguably gallery artists more than they are net artists). Sometimes, it seems like a net artist knowns a curator who has a space, and the curator invites the net artist to have a show, and then the net artist is forced to scramble to come up with something to fill the space that is somehow related to their online work. For example (cf: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mriver/tags/loshadka/ or http://www.newrafael.com/broken-self-at-spencer-brownstone-gallery/). Not that there is anything wrong with such scramblings, particularly when the artist is afforded creative control of the translation between online space and gallery space.
In the case you mention above, you'd really have to ask Lauren and Guthrie about their curatorial/artistic relationship involving this piece. Few Rhizome "employees" read these threads (although I imagine it is the job of some beleaguered intern to "just keep an eye on them.") You could always contact Lauren and Guthrie directly and invite them to respond. There is a radical social networking platform known as "Facebook" to which they both belong. It allows you to send a real-time message directly to another user via a user-friendly web application interface. Or there is this pre-web1.0 internet communications platform known as "electronic mail." It is a bit more complicated/fussy, requiring stand-alone application ("client") software, but it still works in a pinch. Who in their right mind could blame them if they choose not to respond?
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
Required Reading
Hi Jesse,
re: cloning, my uncle and I have the same name. He is http://curtcloninger.com . It's not like being named mike jones, because we aren't legion, we are just two. ego surfing at google is fun.
Yes, of course the use of web art/images/text is different than the use of pre-web art/image/text. But "difference" is not like a binary on and off, where something is either altogether different or altogether the same. (Here I borrow from Derrida; I will spare you the theoretical details). Something would have to be extremely radical and novel for it to be completely and altogether different than anything else. A sewing machine, an umbrella, and a dissecting table are all similar/different.
Plus, I would hardly say that the web after 2000 is unimaginably incomparable to the web prior to 2000. Or that the net/web from 1968 - 2000 is unimaginably incomparable to all sorts of things prior to 1968 (Gysin/Burroughs, Kaprow, Bush's Memex, Borges' fiction). technically, nastynets is similar to 4chan which is similar to dreamless.org which is similar to livejournal friend groups circa 1997. I do think RSS-ability matters, but I won't go into why here. For my money, the interesting differences are not really in the technology. I am more interested in a new willingness to embrace corporate-generated pop culture detritus (net.tritus) as a lingua franca for gleeful/unethical word/image-play. And even this move is not without historical precedent.
As one who researches and writes about the aporias of performed language, dump.fm and spirit surfers are of particular interest to me. (As the next new art_scene rising up from Williamsburg to take Chelsea by storm, I could not be any less interested.) And to my detriment, I am still inexplicably interested in this ridiculous, derelict, abandoned, ghetoized, rhizome community discussion area. "rhizome_RAW, I wish I knew how to quit you."
re: Tom Moody not directly addressing me, I was mistaken. I see that he did directly address me a couple of times there at the beginning before he gave up on me. I have never felt that not liking someone was a reason to stop talking to them. I didn't particularly like Tim Whidden in 1998, but I kept talking to him and now we are lovers. It just goes to show you.
From The Bowels of Rock and Roll, I remain,
the
/
the
re: cloning, my uncle and I have the same name. He is http://curtcloninger.com . It's not like being named mike jones, because we aren't legion, we are just two. ego surfing at google is fun.
Yes, of course the use of web art/images/text is different than the use of pre-web art/image/text. But "difference" is not like a binary on and off, where something is either altogether different or altogether the same. (Here I borrow from Derrida; I will spare you the theoretical details). Something would have to be extremely radical and novel for it to be completely and altogether different than anything else. A sewing machine, an umbrella, and a dissecting table are all similar/different.
Plus, I would hardly say that the web after 2000 is unimaginably incomparable to the web prior to 2000. Or that the net/web from 1968 - 2000 is unimaginably incomparable to all sorts of things prior to 1968 (Gysin/Burroughs, Kaprow, Bush's Memex, Borges' fiction). technically, nastynets is similar to 4chan which is similar to dreamless.org which is similar to livejournal friend groups circa 1997. I do think RSS-ability matters, but I won't go into why here. For my money, the interesting differences are not really in the technology. I am more interested in a new willingness to embrace corporate-generated pop culture detritus (net.tritus) as a lingua franca for gleeful/unethical word/image-play. And even this move is not without historical precedent.
As one who researches and writes about the aporias of performed language, dump.fm and spirit surfers are of particular interest to me. (As the next new art_scene rising up from Williamsburg to take Chelsea by storm, I could not be any less interested.) And to my detriment, I am still inexplicably interested in this ridiculous, derelict, abandoned, ghetoized, rhizome community discussion area. "rhizome_RAW, I wish I knew how to quit you."
re: Tom Moody not directly addressing me, I was mistaken. I see that he did directly address me a couple of times there at the beginning before he gave up on me. I have never felt that not liking someone was a reason to stop talking to them. I didn't particularly like Tim Whidden in 1998, but I kept talking to him and now we are lovers. It just goes to show you.
From The Bowels of Rock and Roll, I remain,
the
/the
