The Rhizome Digest merged into the Rhizome News in November 2008. These pages serve as an archive for 6-years worth of discussions and happenings from when the Digest was simply a plain-text, weekly email.

Subject: RHIZOME DIGEST: 4.22.05
From: digest@rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2005 23:06:03 -0700
Reply-to: digest@rhizome.org
Sender: owner-digest@rhizome.org

RHIZOME DIGEST: April 22, 2005

Content:

+announcement+
1. Trebor: NYC Conference on New Media Education
2. Luci Eyers: [] low-fi update 29 - The New Readymades
3. Jo-Anne Green: RE:WRITING: WRITERS, COMPUTERS AND NETWORKS

+opportunity+
4. Kevin McGarry: Rhizome Seeks Summer Intern to Work on ArtBase Development
5. Kevin McGarry: Rhizome.org Seeks Intern to Work on International,
Scholarly Outreach Program
6. Anuradha Vikram: Call for Proposals: The C4F3 at ISEA2006/ZeroOne

+commentary+
7. Joy Garnett: Open Source Painting

+thread+
8. Jason Van Anden, patrick lichty, ryan griffis>, curt cloninger,
"zanni.org", Plasma Studii, Regina Celia Pinto, Rob Myers, Jason Nelson,
Geert Dekkers: Net Art Market

+commissioned for Rhizome.org+
9. Melinda Rackham: Screenfull.net: THE BOOK

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Rhizome.org 2005 Net Art Commissions

The Rhizome Commissioning Program makes financial support available to
artists for the creation of innovative new media art work via panel-awarded
commissions.

For the 2005 Rhizome Commissions, seven artists were selected to create
artworks relating to the theme of Games:

http://rhizome.org/commissions/2005.rhiz

The Rhizome Commissioning Program is made possible by generous support from
the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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1.

Date: 4.18.05
From: Trebor <trebor AT buffalo.edu>
Subject: NYC Conference on New Media Education

>Share, Share Widely
A Conference on New Media Education

>Friday, May 6th, 11am - 8pm

The Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th street)
New York City

http://conference.newmediaeducation.org -- website

After-Party
Friday, May 6th, 9pm

The Thing
459 W. 19th St
(between 9th and 10th Ave)
New York, NY
10011

Join us for an intensive one day conference about new media education.
Connect with new media researchers and educators, present, discuss, and
exchange syllabi or other public domain materials in a temporary gift
economy zone. Bring your USB memory key and laptop.

The conference will be podcast.
http://podcast.newmediaeducation.org -- podcast

"Share, Share Widely" is organized by the Institute for Distributed
Creativity (iDC) in collaboration with the Office of the Associate Provost
for Instructional Technology and the New Media Lab (The Graduate Center,
City University of New York).

Please RSVP to idc [ AT ] distributedcreativity.org

>Participants:
Josephine Anstey (SUNY at Buffalo), Joline Blais (University of Maine),
Beatriz DaCosta (UC Irvine), Ben Chang (School of the Arts Institute
Chicago), Alison Colman (Ohio University School of Art), Mary Flanagan
(Hunter College, CUNY), Pattie Belle Hastings (Quinnipiac University),
Tiffany Holmes (School of the Arts Institute of Chicago), Jon Ippolito
(Guggenheim Museum and University of Maine), Natalie Jeremijenko (UC San
Diego), Hana Iverson (Temple University), Molly Krause (Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, Harvard University), Patrick Lichty (Intelligent Agent
Magazine), Martin Lucas (Hunter College, CUNY), Colleen Macklin (Parsons
School of Design), Dave Pape (SUNY at Buffalo), Daniel Perlin (Interactive
Telecommunication Program), Andrea Polli (Hunter College, CUNY), Douglas
Repetto (Columbia University), Stephanie Rothenberg (SUNY at Buffalo), Chris
Salter (Concordia University, Montreal), Brooke Singer (SUNY at Purchase),
Liz Slagus (Eyebeam), Thomas Slomka (SUNY at Buffalo), Mark Tribe (Columbia
University), McKenzie Wark (New School), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (The College
of New Jersey).

>Respondents:
Stanley Aronowitz (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC, and MICA)
Trebor Scholz (SUNY at Buffalo)

>Concept/Production:
Trebor Scholz (Institute for Distributed Creativity)

>Remote Contributors (see Media Blog):
Saul Albert (University of Openess), Richard Barbrook (Westminster
University, London), Susan Collins (Slade School, London), Eugene I.
Dairianathan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Brian Goldfarb
(UC San Diego), Alex Halavais (SUNY at Buffalo), Jeff Knowlton (UC San
Diego), Paul Benedict Lincoln (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore),
Geert Lovink (Hogeschool van Amsterdam/ University of Amsterdam), Nathan
Martin (Carnegie Mellon University), Kevin McCauley (City Varsity,
University of Cape Town/University of Stellenbosch, South Africa), Jason
Noland (University of Toronto), Ricardo Rosas (Comum Lab, Sao Paulo,
Brazil), Joel Slayton (San Jose State University), Paul Vanouse (SUNY at
Buffalo)

>Interviews Leading Up To Conference:
(as part of WebCamTalk 1.0)
Megan Boler (University of Toronto), Joline Blais (University of Maine),
Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology), Lily Diaz (University of
Art and Design, Helsinki), Elizabeth Goodman (San Francisco Art Institute),
William Grishold (UC San Diego), Lisa Gye (Swinburne University), John
Hopkins (Neoscenes.net), Jon Ippolito (Guggenheim Museum, University of
Maine), Adriene Jenik (UC San Diego), Molly Krause (Harvard University),
Patrick Lichty (Intelligent Agent Magazine), Wolfgang Münch (LASALLE_SIA,
Singapore), Anna Munster (University of New South Wales, Sydney), Eduardo
Navas (UC San Diego), Randall Packer (American University, Washington),
Simon Penny (UC Irvine), Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz), Christoph Spehr
(Berlin), Ricardo Miranda Zuniga (The College of New Jersey)

http://newmediaeducation.org -- WebCamTalk 1.0
http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ -- iDC List Archives

>Conference Advisory Committee:
Stephen Brier (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC)
Richard Maxwell (Queens College, CUNY)

>Acknowledgments:
Many thanks to Nikolina Knezevic (visiting scholar at New School University,
intern at the Institute for Distributed Creativity).

>Introduction:
Over the past ten years new-media art programs have been started at
universities. Departments are shaped, many positions in this field open up
and student interest is massive. In China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and
Thailand enormous developments will take place in the next few years in "new
media" art education. At the same time technologists, artists and educators
acknowledge a crisis mode: from Germany to Canada, Finland, Ireland,
Australia, Taiwan and Singapore to the United States and beyond. But so far,
at least in the United States there has been surprisingly little public
debate about education in new-media art.

Many educators point to a widespread tension between vocational training and
a solid critical education. There is no stable "new media industry" for
which a static skill set would prepare the graduate for his or her
professional future in today's post-dotcom era. Between Futurist narratives
of progress with all their techno-optimism and the technophobia often
encountered in more traditional narratives-- how do we educate students to
be equally familiar with technical concepts, theory, history, and art?

How can new media theory be activated as a wake-up call for students leading
to radical change? Which educational structure proves more effective:
cross-disciplinary, theme-based research groups or media-based departments?
Does the current new media art curriculum allow for play, failure, and
experiment? How can we introduce free software into the new media classroom
when businesses still hardly make use of open source or free software? How
can we break out of the self-contained university lab? What are examples of
meaningful connections between media production in the university and
cultural institutions as well as technology businesses? How can we introduce
politics into the new media lab?

Between imagined flat hierarchies and the traditional models of top-down
education, participants will give examples based on their experiences that
offer a middle-ground between these extremes. Further questions address
anti-intellectualism in the classroom and the high demands on educators in
this area in which technology and theory have few precedents and change
rapidly. In response to this-- several distributed learning tools will be
presented that link up new-media educators to share code, theory, and art in
real time.

-Vocational training versus solid critical education

-Open Source Software, open access, open content, technologies of sharing

-Edblogging, blogsperiments

-Creation of meaningful connections between art, theory, technology, and
history

-Education of politics, politics in education

-Shaping of core curriculum without fear of experiments and failure

-Distributed learning tools: empowering for the knowledge commons
(organizing academic knowledge and connecting new media educators)

-Intellectual property issues in academia

-Diversity in the new media art classroom

-Use of wifi devices to connect people on campus and in the classroom

-Uses of social software in the classroom (wikis, and weblogs, voice over
IP, del.icio.us, IM, and Flickr)

-Battles over the wireless commons

-Models for connecting university labs with outside institutions and
non-profit organizations.

A network of new media educators will be formed as result of this
conference.
http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc -- join mailing list

-------------------------------------------------
Institute for Distributed Creativity
http://distributedcreativity.org/

The Graduate Center, CUNY
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/

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Rhizome is now offering organizational subscriptions, memberships
purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions allow
participants of an institution to access Rhizome's services without
having to purchase individual memberships. (Rhizome is also offering
subsidized memberships to qualifying institutions in poor or excluded
communities.) Please visit http://rhizome.org/info/org.php for more
information or contact Kevin McGarry at Kevin AT Rhizome.org or Rachel Greene
at Rachel AT Rhizome.org.

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2.

Date: 4.20.05
From: Luci Eyers <giraffe AT easynet.co.uk>
Subject: [] low-fi update 29 - The New Readymades

[] low-fi update 29

[] low-fi selection: The New Readymades (2005)
This low-fi list explores the relationship of net based art projects to
the conceptual concerns and parameters of the readymade.
[] http://www.low-fi.org.uk/?session=lowfi_list&lid=19

[] The Found Tapes Exhibition [Harsmedia, Harold Schellinx]
A project that was inspired by Zoë Irvine's "Magnetic Migration Music"
project. HarS collects cassette tape wherever he goes and posts them to
his website.
[] http://www.harsmedia.com/Chronson/FT/index.html

[] The Mashin' of the Christ [Negativland]
A video response to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Negativland
took fragments of the film and blended them with other Hollywood
depictions of Christ to create their own ³not-for-public-viewing²
collaged version of his last moments.
[] http://www.negativland.com/mashin/

[] On Kawara Generator [Darrel O'Pry]
An automated, simulated, distributed version of On Kawara's laborious
'Today Series' paintings.
[] http://onkawara.thing.net/

[] Foundphotos [10Eastern (Rich Vogel)]
Foundphotos displays photos found during searches through open P2P
networks. Readymade or theft?
[] http://www.10eastern.com/foundphotos/

[] 1 year performance video [MTAA]
This piece continues M.River and T.Whid's series of Updates, described
as, "re-sounding seminal performance art from the 60s and 70s in part
by replacing human processes with computer processes."
[] http://turbulence.org/Works/1year/

[] DocumentaX [Vuk Cosic]
After DocumentaX closed, the website was set to shut down. Emails were
sent, many mailing lists informed: enjoy before it's gone, they said.
The site closed, but not before Vuk Cosic copied it. Page for page. And
it's still up. It was the slightest of acts--he simply mirrored it.
[] http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/dx/

[] David Still [David Still]
David Still invites you to send an email to anyone you want, as if you
were David Still. His site provides the form and the identity. If this
is a readymade, then what's being appropriated is David Still's
identity.
[] http://davidstill.org/

[] My Boyfriend Came Back from the War [abe linkoln]
Abe Linkoln's blog version of this now classic (or classicized) piece
of net.art 'My Boyfriend Came Back from the War' picks up and amplifies
the harmonies between Olia Lialina's original work (1996) and blogs.
[] http://myboyfriendcamebackfromthewar.blogspot.com/


[] SUBMITTING PROJECTS TO LOW-FI - new and archived.
Artists are welcome to submit info on new projects to the database -
please use the submission form on low-fi locator. We are working on a
system to incorporate information on 'dead' or archived projects so if
you want to submit an earlier defunct net art project please send us a
screenshot as well [if you have one], preferably .jpg or .gif to
low-fi AT low-fi.org.uk

[] LOW-FI
[] http://www.low-fi.org.uk
[] net art locator

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Rhizome Member-curated Exhibits

http://rhizome.org/art/member-curated/

View online exhibits Rhizome members have curated from works in the ArtBase,
or learn how to create your own exhibit.

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3.

Date: 4.21.05
From: Jo-Anne Green <jo AT turbulence.org>
Subject: RE:WRITING: WRITERS, COMPUTERS AND NETWORKS

RE:WRITING: WRITERS, COMPUTERS AND NETWORKS

Within the digital arts there are also letters: works by writers who explore
the possibilities of texts controlled by computational processes, or who
write in ways that take the network as a medium. Four writers will read from
their network-enabled work: John Cayley, Yael Kanarek (04/25)/Thalia Field
(04/26), Nick Montfort, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin.

April 25, 2005: Brown University, Providence
April 26, 2005: Boston Public Library, Boston
For more information, go to http://turbulence.org/elo/index.htm

"Re:Writing: Writers, Computers and Networks" is a collaboration between the
Electronic Literature Organization and New Radio and Performing Arts,
Inc./Turbulence.org. It is made possible by the Department of Literary Arts,
Brown University and the LEF Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

JOHN CAYLEY is a London-based poet, translator and publisher. He has
lectured at Brown University and the University of California, San Diego,
where he was also a Research Associate of the Center for Research in
Computing and the Arts (CRCA). Cayley's most recent work explores ambient
poetics in programmable media, with parallel theoretical interventions
concerning the role of code in writing and the temporal properties of
textuality. He won the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry
in 2001. http://www.shadoof.net/in/

THALIA FIELD is the author of "Point and Line" (New Directions, 2000),
"Incarnate:Story Material" (New Directions, 2004), and the forthcoming ULULU
(Clown Shrapnel) (Coffee House Press, 2006). Her collaborations with
choreographer and media artist Jamie Jewett include "After the Fall"
(premiered at Danspace, 2004), "Seven Veils" (premiered at Slought Networks
Gallery, Philadelphia, 2003) and "REST/LESS," an interactive poetry
environment for dance that can be seen at Green Street Studios as part of
the Boston CyberArts Festival on May 6 and 7, 2005.

YAEL KANAREK is a new media artist who has been developing her
integrated-media project World of Awe since 1995. At the core of "World of
Awe" is "The Traveler's Journal"-an original narrative that uses the ancient
genre of the traveler's tale to explore the connections between
storytelling, travel, memory and technology. Selected for the Whitney
Biennial 2002, Kanarek is the recipient of numerous awards, including a
Turbulence commission for "Portal," an interactive net.dance in
collaboration with dance filmmaker Evann Siebens and composer Yoav Gal. She
is represented by Bitforms gallery in New York City.
http://www.treasurecrumbs.com/

NICK MONTFORT is a poet and computer scientist who has developed pieces of
interactive fiction and other types of online writing and art, often in
collaboration with others. He wrote the first academic book about
interactive fiction, Twisty Little Passages (MIT Press, 2003), and co-edited
The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003) with Noah Wardrip Fruin. Montfort is
co-vice president of the Electronic Literature Organization. Montfort is the
recipient of a 2004 Turbulence commission. http://nickm.com

NOAH WARDRIP-FRUIN has recently co-edited two books: The New Media Reader
(2003) and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004).
His artwork has been presented by the Whitney and Guggenheim museums.
Wardrip-Fruin is co-vice president of the Electronic Literature
Organization. Wardrip-Fruin is the recipient of a 2003 Turbulence
commission. http://hyperfiction.org

For more information, go to http://turbulence.org/elo/index.htm

--
Untitled Document Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org
New York: 917.548.7780 ? Boston: 617.522.3856
Turbulence: http://turbulence.org
New American Radio: http://somewhere.org
Networked_Performance Blog and Conference: http://turbulence.org/blog

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4.

Date: 4.21.05
From: Kevin McGarry <kevin AT rhizome.org>
Subject: Rhizome Seeks Summer Intern to Work on ArtBase Development

Rhizome Seeks Summer Intern to Work on ArtBase Development

Rhizome.org, a nonprofit organization focused on new media art, is
seeking an Intern to work on maintaining and expanding the ArtBase, a unique
online archive of over 1500 new media artworks established in 1999.

We seek a person to work with the Content Coordinator to invite artists to
submit their work to the ArtBase, and to reconfirm and, where needed, update
the accuracy of metadata and links associated with older works in the
ArtBase. The position primarily involves Internet research and email
correspondence with artists, plus maintaining careful records of the
information that is collected.

The successful candidate will be articulate, interested in new media art and
archives and able to take charge of and report regularly on their progress.

Rhizome.org is among the oldest and most well-respected organizations in
the field of new media art. For more information about the organization
and our programs, please check out our web site: http://rhizome.org.


PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:
+ Emailing artists to invite them to submit their work to the ArtBase
+ Updating obsolete data in existing ArtBase records
+ Searching online for and compiling information about artists and specific
artworks
+ Writing descriptions of artworks

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
+ Excellent written and spoken communication skills
+ Knowledge of contemporary art and new media art
+ Familiarity with Excel
+ Must be highly organized

Exceptional candidates will also have the following skills:
+ Advanced training in art history, curatorial practice, or library sciences

START DATE: May or June, 2005.

END DATE: TBD

HOURS: One day per week on-site (Chelsea).
Willingness to keep up with emails remotely is a plus.

SALARY: This is an unpaid internship. It would be ideal for a student
who receives academic credit for internships.

LOCATION: Rhizome is located at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
New York City.

TO APPLY: Please email a cover letter, writing sample, and resume to Kevin
McGarry,
Content Coordinator: kevin AT rhizome.org

Please note the days of the week you will be available this summer, and if
you have a laptop (which is a plus, but by no means a requirement).

Kevin McGarry
Rhizome.org
New Museum of Contemporary Art
210 Eleventh Avenue
NY, NY 10001
212.218.1288 X 220

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5.

Date: 4.21.05
From: Kevin McGarry <kevin AT rhizome.org>
Subject: Rhizome.org Seeks Intern to Work on International, Scholarly
Outreach Program

Rhizome.org Seeks Intern to Work on International, Scholarly Outreach
Program

Rhizome.org, a nonprofit organization focused on new media art, is
seeking an Intern to work on an international outreach program building
the subscriber-base of our site and email lists.

We seek an exceptionally smart, web-savvy, people-person to take on
responsibilities relating to our organizational subscriptions program.
This intern's primary responsibility is to oversee the invitation and
sign-up process for organizations subscribing to Rhizome.org. The successful
candidate will be articulate, interested in new media art, archives,
non-profit development and willing to grow the audience of our organization.

Rhizome.org is among the oldest and most well-respected organizations in
the field of new media art. For more information about the organization
and our programs, please check out our web site: http://rhizome.org.


PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:
+ Help maintain an online database of libraries, centers and schools that
might benefit from subscriptions to Rhizome.org (we use a unique,
easy-to-use web-based software)
+ Send out invitations to the appropriate people at these institutions
+ Conduct follow-ups. Answer any questions about Rhizome.org that might
arise
+ Help negotiate subscriptions
+ Organize accounts such that the Director of Technology can implement new
subscriptions


REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
+ Good communication skills (i.e. letter-writing, follow-up, phone outreach)
+ Experience with organizational development
+ Must be highly organized

Exceptional candidates will also have the following skills:
+ Experience with arts administration

START DATE: May or June, 2005.

END DATE: TBD

HOURS: One day per week on-site (Chelsea).
Willingness to keep up with emails remotely is a plus.

SALARY: This is an unpaid internship. It would be ideal for a student
who receives academic credit for internships.

LOCATION: Rhizome is located at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
New York City.

TO APPLY: Please email a cover letter and resume to Kevin McGarry,
Content Coordinator: kevin AT rhizome.org

Please note the days of the week you will be available this summer, and if
you have a laptop (which is a plus, but by no means a requirement).

Kevin McGarry
Rhizome.org
New Museum of Contemporary Art
210 Eleventh Avenue
NY, NY 10001
212.218.1288 X 220

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6.

Date: 4.22.05
From: Anuradha Vikram <durga_akv AT yahoo.com>
Subject: Call for Proposals: The C4F3 at ISEA2006/ZeroOne

Deadline: June 1, 2005

This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose: A
Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals to submit
proposals for an installation of augmented furniture, audio/video/software
installations and interactive artwork for The C4F3 (The Cafe) during the
ISEA2006/ZeroOne from August 5-13, 2006. The goal of The C4F3 is to create
an active ambient space of augmented everyday objects that is not just an
art gallery, a restaurant, or a chill space, but a new kind of project space
where the whole environment has been rethought in terms of the capabilities
of current technology. This Call for Proposals is an invitation to artists,
designers and technologists to propose existing work for exhibition and/or
use within the café and new projects that support this goal. The
Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international non-profit
organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange
among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art,
science and emerging technologies. ZeroOne San Jose is a milestone festival
to be held biennially that makes accessible the work of the most innovative
contemporary artists in the world. In 2006 it will be held in conjunction
with the ISEA2006 Symposium.

Submissions will be accepted online ONLY at
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/C4F3/index.html

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7.

Date: 4.20.05
From: joy.garnett AT gmail.com
Subject: Open Source Painting

hi all,
my text on appropriation + painting went live on the NYFA site today:
............................................................................
...............

NYFA Current - straight from the artists
http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_current.asp?id=105&fid=1&sid=17
<http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_current.asp?id=105&amp;fid=1&amp;sid=17>
April 20, 2005 | Vol. 14, No. 8

In Their Own Words: Joy Garnett
http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=349&fid=6&sid=17
<http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=349&amp;fid=6&amp;sid=17>
*Between Yahoo.com <http://Yahoo.com> slideshows, 24-hour television news,
and competing tabloid newspapers, we've become a culture that's accustomed
to the sensations of media imagery. Here Joy Garnett describes how she
transforms news photographs into paintings, a slowing-down process to
counter what she sees as our culture's mal-absorption of images related to
technology, surveillance, and war.*

{image}
Joy Garnett (2004)
(Photo: Bill Jones)

I'm an information junkie?well, more like an image junkie. Right now I'm
preoccupied with media imagery, particularly representations of conflict?the
images people see daily in newspapers and on TV. I think of these images as
part of an overarching "media narrative" that permeates the public domain,
and also as my raw material. The images stream throughout public
consciousness quickly, disappearing almost as soon as they appear to make
room for more. They're not meant to stick to you for long, much less get
under your skin. Media imagery essentially serves as glossy political spin
and advertising, slickified misinformation with high production values. This
material offers itself up for examination, re-use, and remixing, á la open
source.

The term "open source" was coined to describe software whose source code is
made freely available to end-users, giving them rights in varying degrees to
modify, make use of, and redistribute their innovations freely or
commercially. An open source culture is one that encourages and supports
this kind of information sharing in the broadest sense. The Wikipedia page
on Open Source Culture (OSC) states, "As more domains of contemporary life
are affected by technologies of cultural reproduction, the possible domain
of OSC expands." For contemporary artists who rely on appropriation, this
caveat describes a positive force, a wonderful thing. And though it may be a
relatively recent term, "open source" is really the longstanding operative
principle for innovation: new artworks and technologies are built on the
backs of old ones. Nothing comes out of thin air.

The reasonableness and obviousness of the principle of open source should
render the current corporate-driven shrinking of the public domain, the
increasingly narrow interpretations of copyright law, and the chilling
effect on fair use and artistic expression particularly onerous and
counter-intuitive. I apply the logic of open source to select the images I
use. My paintings are based on photographs from the public domain, and I
think of them as being akin to DJ remixes or the work of software hackers,
though my method of sampling is strictly eye-hand, more rough approximation
than sample. I find images?journalistic photographs?online, save them to a
folder, and print them out. Some I eventually make into paintings. I don't
use projections, I don't draw grids. I just hold the printout in one hand
and a paintbrush in the other. This isn't so different from tweaking and
repurposing source code, but instead of code, I seek out news images to
tweak and repurpose as paintings. The paintings embody an imprecise,
imperfect transformation. They recontextualize documents that describe
real-life events, interpret them through the slow filter of the physical
body, and remake them as purely subjective, contemplative objects.

{image}
Joy Garnett
Meat (2005)
Oil on canvas,
Courtesy the artist.

The search for images invariably leads me to disturbing source material; the
act of painting is a way to deal with it. My visceral attraction or
repulsion to images is what gets me into hot water, leading me into areas I
might not otherwise seek out. It was in this way, in the mid-'90s, that I
was drawn to declassified images of nuclear tests (I was watching Dr.
Strangelove on television when suddenly I got an idea), and hence into the
realm of military image archives. Until then, I had been concerned with the
representation of invisible phenomena via scientific visualization and
imaging technologies. I was interested in the notion that photographs and
other mechanically produced visual records should be considered objective
and "neutral." Having grown up among scientists and photographers, I
understood early on that photographs are anything but neutral, that they're
sophisticated constructs useful for swaying opinion and demonstrating
theories. Soon after seeing Dr. Strangelove, my interest in invisible
phenomena grew to include encumbrances other than the purely optical, such
as the inaccessibility and omission engendered by government secrecy.

Science and technology, surveillance and control, media and
war-as-entertainment, our culture's schizoid propensity for utopian and
dystopian projections?these became my subjects. I began to read Paul Virilio
(Pure War, Desert Screen,) and Manuel DeLanda (War in the Age of Intelligent
Machines,), and also got into cyberpunk novels, including the requisites:
Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, and Geoffrey Ryman. I
spent a lot of time online talking with net artists and digital theorists. I
wondered what relationship my painting?and painting in general?might have to
their ideas, and how such a slow, old-fashioned medium might play a relevant
part in the discourse about technology and global politics, communication
and creativity.

It has been discussed at length how world events are transmitted
instantaneously to our living rooms with increasing ease and how our
understanding has become altogether mediated, mitigated, edited, and served
up according to specific agendas. Our mal-absorption of these transmissions
is appropriate, proportionate to, and partly responsible for our constant
state of attention deficit. But even the networks can't program everything;
political and corporate agendas often spin out of control. As Susan Sontag
recently reminded us in Regarding the Pain of Others, the meanings and
intentions attached to photographs are not fixed but fluid and fugitive,
depending on how they are contextualized and framed. This framing can only
be controlled up to a point: photographs are wild things. In regard to
understanding and maybe utilizing (not taming) this wildness, painting
wields some unexpected power. Since painting carries with it hefty
historical baggage, we are conditioned to regard it in a certain way.
Painting can't help but stand outside the confabulations of contemporary
media representation?no one regards a painting as "reality." Whereas film,
video, and photographic forms of artistic expression?though they may offer
an insightful or ingenious critique of media?are caught in a complex game,
functioning as the very thing they critique.

Appropriating media images in order to make paintings entails parsing an
endless, indiscriminate surfeit of stuff. The idea is to slow down the rush
of media in order to engage it in painterly interplay. The paintings' focus
oscillates between the problems of journalistic photographs as we experience
them ("Is it real?" "Was that posed?") and the actual realities such
photographs are supposed to represent. The paintings reinvent the
photographs, absorbing and emphasizing the uncomfortable relativisms and
moral ambiguities they contain. They invite the viewer to reconsider these
inconsistencies, to engage them in an art context.

The contents of the mass media remain locked behind an impenetrable,
retentive surface. It, everyone, everything must keep moving in order to
make room for the next ad or the next news flash. I think of painting as a
way to intercept, infiltrate, indulge in, hold onto, and eventually
dismember, eviscerate, and embody the glamour, the gloss, the glitz, the
horror, the sublimity, the madness that photographs in the media portray,
but nevertheless withhold. Ironically, it's because painting emits from and
is aimed at the sensibilities of the slow human animal that I think it gives
us a way to do that.

Joy Garnett has exhibited internationally and in the US. In 2004 she was
awarded a grant from the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation.

For more information on Joy Garnett, visit:
www.firstpulseprojects.com/joy.html
<http://www.firstpulseprojects.com/joy.html>
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/
www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/dmc/docs/lectureseries.html#garnett
<http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/dmc/docs/lectureseries.html#garnett>
www.debsandco.com/garnett.php <http://www.debsandco.com/garnett.php>

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

8.

Date: 4.21.05-4.24.05
From: Jason Van Anden <jason AT smileproject.com>, patrick lichty
<voyd AT voyd.com>, ryan griffis <grifray AT yahoo.com>, curt cloninger
<curt AT lab404.com>, "zanni.org" <cz AT zanni.org>, Plasma Studii
<office AT plasmastudii.org>, Regina Celia Pinto
<reginapinto AT arteonline.arq.br>, Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>, Jason Nelson
<newmediapoet AT yahoo.com>, Geert Dekkers <geert AT nznl.com>
Subject: Net Art Market

Jason Van Anden <jason AT smileproject.com> posted:

I posted a topic a while ago requesting "payment schemes for digital/online
art, sucessful or not". I got one email back - privately.

I have a few theories as to why this topic may be considered poison, but
then again maybe it was bad timing or my choice of title. At any rate, I
feel this is a vitally important issue so I am giving it another try:

Does anyone out there know how to sell digital art? Examples would be
appreciated. If you consider this a toxic topic - could you clue me in as
to why you feel that way?

+ + +

patrick lichty <voyd AT voyd.com> replied:

I may or may not have replied, not because I consider it poison (which I
don't), but mainly in that I don't feel it asks any questions that
aren't out there from conceptualism.

Selling ephemeral art is not new, but it remains problematic.

Now, Toshio Iwai is selling New Media through game art like
Electroplankton (GameBoy DS) which is pretty popular in Japan.

+ + +

ryan griffis <grifray AT yahoo.com> replied:

i'm kinda with Patrick - the commodity question has tagged along with
most "experimental" art forms, but i just don't find it that
interesting of a problem. think of people working in "old new media"
like diana thater who sells limited edition videos, films - and mostly
drawings of plans (not unlike christo). people buy and sell art.
in terms of payment schemes, didn't rhizome implement one way of doing
this - a membership program? it seems somewhat successful, depending on
who you ask and how you define success. non-profit arts spaces have
used this tactic for a long time. the barnsdall art space in LA (a
non-profit space on the site of a FL Wright house) charges $5 just to
see the shows, except for their selected free days. not unlike
rhizome's free fridays. of course, these fees are to support
institutions, who then exhibit (make visible) the work of artists (it
doesn't financially support producers in the same way a private gallery
system does - but then non-profit directors don't usually make buko
bucks either).
if you're looking for more entrepreneurial discussions of object
selling, maybe contact the folks that started this site that t.whid
sent in recently.
http://www.softwareartspace.com/

+ + +

curt cloninger <curt AT lab404.com> replied:

Hi Jason,

Here are some money-making models:

1.
T. just posted this:
http://www.softwareartspace.com
[sell software for looping projection purposes]

2.
Same artist loops as above, hard-wired into LCD screens, framed, signed, and
sold as animated paintings:
http://www.bitforms.com/artist_levin.html
[if it's in a frame and signed, it must be "real" art]

3.
Here is some net art for sale on a ROM:
http://youworkforthem.com/product.php?sku=P0034
[take your old experimental sites offline, put them on a ROM, and sell the
ROM. The catch -- you have to have had some actual visitors to your site
who liked it.]

4.
Here is an entire artists' hard drive for sale on a ROM:
http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Praystation.html
[make your .fla files public, and if your action scripting is interesting
enough, people will buy it just to view and re-purpose your source code.]

5.
a gallery show involving physical ephemera related to ethereal digital art
projects:
http://nothing.org/net_ephemera/
[with art in the age of mechanical reproduction, don't sell the infinitely
reproducible art itself, sell the finite incidental crap associated with the
art. scarce crap is more salable than abundant quality.]

6.
thing.net has a regular online art auction. some of the pieces are digital.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://auction.thing.net/
[trick somebody into believing that a signed website on a ROM (as opposed to
the exact same website, unsigned, online) might someday be worth money in
the art market.]

7.
charge a subscription fee (by day, month, or year) to view the art website.
The site is password protected, it gives a few samples away for free, and
then you have to subscribe to see the rest of it.
http://www.scottmccloud.com
http://www.demian5.com
[the porn site model. the salon.com model. of course, you have to have art
that somebody might want to view repeatedly after they've seen it once, and
you have to have art that somebody might want to pay money to view at all in
the first place.]

8.
use net art as a prototype/portfolio/proving ground, and then get hired to
do paying work that's related.
http://projects.c505.com/projects/ascii_rock/index.html [the original
give-away]
http://www.machineproject.com/ASCII_BUSH/ [the turbulence grant]
http://www.partizan.us/musicvideos/ais/beck.html [the commercial gig]
[this is the artist as performer model. you get paid for gigs
(installations, performaces, VJ generative projections of band tours).]

9.
Get grants and commissions.

10.
Win contests.

+ + +

Jason Van Anden replied:

Hi Patrick,

I can think of two ways that money has been found to fuel Conceptualism:

1.) public support
(ie: DIA, NEA, etc...)

2.) retro-fit into "old art" gallery model
(ie: documentation for sale as limited edition prints)

Clearly there are plenty of examples of net art that has adopted this
approach. It seems to me that where these forms differ is in the
distribution.

+ + +

"zanni.org" <cz AT zanni.org> replied:

altarboy, the server-sculpture

http://www.zanni.org/altarboy.htm

and

http://www.zanni.org/altarboy-interview.htm

+ + +

Plasma Studii <office AT plasmastudii.org> replied:

>Selling ephemeral art is not new, but it remains problematic.

funny, anyone conjures up a problem. probably just a form of xenophobia, a
variation of seeing jesus face in a tortilla. people not comfortable with
strange things and interpreting it with what they do know, which seldom
makes any sense.

every piece of art is subject to wear and tear. possibly, for now, you can
pretty much guarantee it works by selling the machine and software as a
package. and then, like collectors store paintings in temp controlled
warehouses, a buyer has the option to just shelve it. if machines
malfunction, restoration's a hazard we've always dealt with, (but usually
well made ones don't even do that). like Degas' pastels are made with
materials prone to degradation. ideally, we can include better built
hardware/os.

old (mac) laptops are cheap and have all the useful features, or 10 year old
interactive pieces work fine on this new machine (even the web). but
certainly in a few years, file formats will be even more standardized.
probably, we're just in the pony express era, seeing the need for zip codes.

there are a few examples like hyper card works that will get lost to most of
us in the settling down process, but so did those wax tube recordings for
the old victrolas. worrying about processor speed would be like expecting
silent movies not to run a little fast. spilled milk. while "new media" to
grows past infancy, these things get ironed out, and not always without some
disappointments. but we're already in pretty good shape.

so you can start selling what are essentially kinetic electric sculptures
but mostly balls in the court of the reticent buyers.

+ + +

patrick lichty replied:

Maybe. Somehow there doesn't seem to be a social contract that buyers
can make sense of at the moment (or many instances of them)

+ + +

Regina Celia Pinto <reginapinto AT arteonline.arq.br> replied:

Well, browser at:

http://arteonline.arq.br/newsletter/debate.htm

Museum's newsletter has changed some information on this issue since last
February. There you will find a link to Edward Picot's interesting article
on this subject.

+ + +

Jason Van Anden replied:

Hi Curt,

Thanks for the feedback.

My motives are pretty simple: to find a support system that enables me to
devote myself to making art full time.

I had a feeling that this topic may have been brought up before, and this is
why I was asking about it here; Rhizome community as a collective
institutional memory. Where or how else would I find this information if I
was not around when the topic got stale? What terms would I Google?: art
net business sale etc... try them and you will see how easily that system
breaks down.

Which brings up another point - it seems like there is a riddle to be solved
in that "old art" galleries need to promote their wares online (artnet.com),
and yet online artists have so much difficulty finding a market in their own
element.

I had an excellent aesthetics teacher in college named Larry Bakke, who
would rant about how "new" media typically anchored itself to old media
before finding its own. Fake wood paneling stuck to the sides of station
wagons was a favorite example of his. Of your examples - I think that only
#7 starts to transcend the paneling.

+ + +

Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com> replied:

On 21 Apr 2005, at 19:24, patrick lichty wrote:
> Maybe. Somehow there doesn't seem to be a social contract that buyers
> can make sense of at the moment (or many instances of them)

This is a key point.

But selling people a signed (or signed and numbered) DVD case with the
software and a contract in seems to have worked.

Sol Lewitt gets away with similar.

And there's the Free Software revenue model: customisation and
services. Or commissions and installation as it used to be known.

On the subject of the ephemerality of particular platforms:

I use Lisp for my software art because it's bitfast.
1. It's been around for fifty years and is still the most advanced
programming language there is. Its popularity is on the rise again and
it's likely to be around for some time yet.
2. It's very easy to implement, and so would be very easy to
re-implement if it should ever fall out of favour.
So as long as my code can be copied, and the CLOS and PostScript specs
exists, my art can be run.

+ + +

Plasma Studii replied:

>Maybe. Somehow there doesn't seem to be a social contract that buyers
>can make sense of at the moment (or many instances of them)

i agree that social contract is hardly a universal given. but shame
on these buyers/curators/collectors/etc. for being so nostalgic, not
in touch with modern peoples' real lives. think jason was asking
about his options as a web artist. you (patrick) would surely know,
wood paneling aside, mostly the obstacle isn't the artists missing
out on the paradigm shift, but the astonishing majority of
buyers/curators/collectors in positions to be the
authority/leaders/teachers. there's only so much we can do to ease
them along.

we can either A. make new work for new audiences where sales on the
web is integral to development. or B. re-present work in a format
the audience we are used to, those buyers/curators/sellers who are
only used to traditional mediums, are comfortable with. they get
"installation", so just don't let em hear the start up chime.

hopefully, this issue will be a moot point, the object fetish
eventually dies (like support for copyright, resistance to things
like napster), value becomes null, can't remain practical or viable.
meanwhile, value shifts to the creators of wanted services or
objects, (which would also dissolve the upper-class bias in the art
world). then web art value wouldn't be a question. but that would
really put a flip on the collector (or record company). it ain't
happening tomorrow. these may just be the dark ages.

+ + +

curt cloninger replied:

Hi Jason,

Another idea that transcends the paneling is to make art for free and give
it away. There are 8 extra hours to make art between 5pm and 3am. That
still gives you 5 hours of sleep per night. Then there are 2 full days on
Saturday and Sunday. And if you can get a non-9-5 job like teaching in
college, that's often 2 extra days per week and 3 entire months per year.

So that's 3 entire months per year to make art all the time. Then 9 months
per year making art 4 days per week all the time, and the other 3 days per
week you still get to make art 8 hours per day.

[Individual mileage may vary. Check local listings for details.]

Do you want to spend more time making art (possible in virtually any
situation, particularly with net art where your material costs are minimal),
or do you want to spend less time working at your day job (a much more
challenging prospect)? People regularly confuse these two desires, but
they're not necessarily related.

On a more personal tack, if you suddenly got a day job that you loved, would
that solve the problem? Does your art need to make money in order for you
to feel that it/you are good/legitimate?

Don't feel obliged to answer these questions publicly. I just think they're
useful.

+ + +

Jason Van Anden replied:

Hi Curt,

Just got home from said day job - decided to reply instead of create art for
the moment - you be the judge. I am not sure I understand the make art for
free as an alternative to "paneling" comment, but I totally get the rest of
what you are saying.

Perhaps I am an idealist or naive, but I believe there is a market out there
the galleries (and apparently we) do not yet understand - by way of bringing
this up I am trying to find clues as to what this might be.

+ + +

Jason Nelson <newmediapoet AT yahoo.com> replied:

Jason and all,

I've been toying with this idea of selling "net art'.
It seems to me that what needs to happen is for
artists or curators to convince others (companies,
wealthy collectors, etc...) that featuring net art on
their sites is the same thing as hanging paintings on
the wall, or putting sculptures in the main foyer.

Obviously websites, for many, are used as the main
doorway for their customers. So having some net art
work on a site would enchance their image and/or the
scope of an art investor's collection.

But then where would this artowrk be featured on the
site? How big would it be, both in file size and in
screen? Would you simply have it linked off the main
page or have it hanging somewhere within a table?

I honestly feel that this will come to pass
eventually. It will just take a few collectors
spending some cash and promoting the idea.

does this sound feasible?

+ + +

Jason Van Anden replied:

I found the softwareartspace website (#1 in Curt's list) intellectually
interesting given this discussion, particularly in regards to "paneling".
Here we have an actual artwork in the frame of my monitor in the frame of
the browser in the frame of a bitmap in the frame of a picture of a monitor
in the frame of reference of a frozen someone else interacting with it.
Talk about hardcore conceptual digital art!

+ + +

curt cloninger replied:

Hi Jason,

Sony PlayStation 2 sponsored such an "online gallery" a while back, curated
by hi-res.net and commissioning/hosting work by various experimental
designers. The space is archived here:
http://archive.hi-res.net/thethirdplace.com/

+ + +

ryan griffis replied:

hasn't Altoids and Nintendo also sponsored similar net-based projects?
i tried to find the Altoids projects again, but only found promotion of
their investments in contemporary art. i know that they had a net
art-based project...

+ + +

curt cloninger replied:

It seems like the first (and perhaps only) altoids-sponsored net artist was
Mark Napier, but I can't remember. I think Diesel sponsors similar stuff,
but it's more in the form of contests, and it's more filmic/motion design.

+ + +

Jason Nelson <newmediapoet AT yahoo.com> replied:

I imagine what needs to happen is for someone (one of
us) to convince a paint/clay/print collector who has a
website to buy a net art work. The price would
probably be low, so the hundred hours it took to make
would average out to about five dollars an hour. But
then the hope is that the idea would spread, and as
collectors love to apply their egos to their objects
their fellow collectors would surely hear about it.

Doron Golan (of computerfinearts.com) has an
interesting model created for collecting net art. But
the problem might be how do you know what an original
is. But it seems the artist could easily add something
to the work to clearly state who owns it (after it was
bought), and other add ons to the net artwork could
act as a more complex form of signing.

So maybe we should put our research skills to use and
find some collectors with a presence on the web.

[...]

I've been toying with the idea of contacting art
galleries with websites. Not the big sandstone and
metal girder ones. But the smaller galleries and
attempting to convince them to create online net art
galleries. If we could convince a few of them to
feature work, then it might translate to more of an
acceptance of net art. And then it seems from that
acceptance would come the desire to own from
collectors. It's not a revolutionary step, but it is
one that would help spread what we do.

+ + +

jeremy <studio AT silencematters.com> replied:

is it possible that there has yet to be a net art project that is large
enough or grand enough to call the attention of a collector?
I know things dont need to be large to be good, but in order for people
to begin to look at net art, dont we need to start looking larger than
the average site? or extending beyond the computer in ways?

+ + +

Curt Cloninger <curt AT lab404.com> replied:

Hi Jeremy,

A well-known ongoing, grand scale net art piece:
http://www.worldofawe.net

It's kind of like saying, "maybe garage rock hasn't attracted the
attention of top 40 radio yet because ..." When garage rock and top
40 radio are largely incompatible. Maybe net art and
contemporary/future art collectors are largely incompatible. I don't
see it as a problem to be solved. Can an art movement be
historically legitimate, culturally relevant, and
intellectually/aesthetically rewarding without ever finding a market?
Might it be all the more so without a market?

+ + +

Geert Dekkers <geert AT nznl.com> replied:

Another thought. Art gallery visitors go from museum to private
gallery, browsing, and may perhaps buy something now and then. Gallery
owners know their collectors because this is after all a select and
small community. Most gallery owners I know sell very little, can
barely make ends meet. Most artists I know do worse. Which is
unsurprising seeing as the product is this uncopyable unique work of
art (well perhaps a series of (wow) 10! prints). This is "Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Of course this is all obvious, but I
thought I might just plaster it all over.

It took a whole while for video art to be accepted. Now you can buy it
readily -- I picked up a copy of the excellent "Lauf der Dinge" by
Fishl and Weiss for 30 euros. How much of these have been sold, do you
think? And how much did they get out of it? (There are other examples
to the contrary, where the work is partly hardware, as in Bill Viola or
of course Nam June Paik -- these are to be seen as classical art works
[just need electricity] -- and then again, this Cory Archangel work
comes to mind, using the 80's tv and such, which is actually just video
art done up as net.art [I did look for the name of the piece, can't
find it fast enough])

What I'm trying to say is that a work is either hardware, and unique,
in which case the artist and the whole chain of command that goes with
the selling can only earn from the one sale, or the work is software,
thence copyable, and in that case everything goes for software-type art
(music, for example, freed from the carrier -- well, you know the
rest). So if you know how to make a living off shareware you might find
out (and please tell me!!!) how to make a living doing net.art.

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9.

Date: 4.22.05
From: Melinda Rackham <melt2 AT pacific.net.au>
Subject: Screenfull.net: THE BOOK

Tempted by Screenfull.net's promise: "we crash your browser with content"

I clicked. I waited. I hoped. I prayed . My screen stuttered and
jerked--but disappointingly the browser didn't crash.

What it does do though is get slower, allowing gaps and rips to appear in
the usual illusory fabric of the seamless internet as the space fills with
raucous and chaotic content. Appearing before me is an art work that breaks
the daily tedium of grazing over cloned and sanitised blog interface
design--those sorts of creepily nice blogs that make me shudder on the
inside with their readable, balanced, cutesy, clean, neat, artless, self
conscious, logical, and organised versions of blandness.

So, okay, I may be a bit cynical after a decade online, but is there
anything wrong with wanting to be thrilled? With craving entertainment? With
desiring to be jolted from my often near comatose screen behaviours of
browse, click, copy, delete, send. And thankfully Screenfull.net does all
that. When the net is looking more and more like a corporately fortified
instantaneous push media, Screenfull is a timely reminder that the internet
is a public space, a theatre of disparate dialogue in multiple and
asynchronous formats, dumbed down only by lack of imagination and the
unchallenged conventions of HTML.

Our protagonists are artists jimpunk and Abe Linkoln--personas who both draw
on iconic associations with disparate and powerful US cultural historic and
animated figures. Together their strength is in working across the history
of networked art, design, aesthetics and theory in this remix of the
phenomenal blogging paradigm. The latest manifestation of Screenfull.net is
grounded in psychedelia and code work, with the seedy cycling and stuttering
of a background colour change JavaScript, producing an atmosphere akin to
flashing broken neon of a 1970's night club. It completely refreshes with
mashed media formats -- TV grabs, print posters, Paris Hilton, Flash
animation, in-process Photoshop files of art historical imagery, and
QuickTimes.

Screenfull is completed with a radio blog--Radio Sounds--which in true
Dadaesque manner, squishes more random cut-up bytes down the internet pipe
to our desktops. But what is really fascinating here is Screenfull.net: THE
BOOK--Guns, Duchamp and Magnetic Lassos. This delightfully illogical
extension of the blog online diary format (heralded as the liberator of
journaling from the page) loops their fulsome screen content back into the
usually serene and sedate corporate .pdf-- paper page based print format.

At last, with THE BOOK, Abe and jimpunk's promise eventuated and the
multimedia content crashed my .pdf viewer. Woohoo!! But it was only alerting
me I needed a long overdue upgrade. Downloaded and upgraded I start to
explore the work.

This formatting tempts me to decode the work into a fixed liner narrative as
screen content is hermetically sealed into discrete page packets with page
numbers. No hypertextual linking here, just numerical jumps and rapid
scrolls. I now very badly need to impose meaning. Will the magnetic lasso
draw threads between this work and the Duchampian forfeiture of the Dadaist
game of art for the equally fascinating strategy of chess?

The thematic of THE BOOK revolves around the almost blasphemous possibility
of shooting our screens, killing our art and our audience, canceling our
connection. I recommend viewing with Auto Scroll . . . however page numbers
are very helpful locators. You can catch the artists with guns blazing on
pages 20 and 21. The money shot can be viewed on pages 46 and 47. Here the
lasso traces an outline of a bullet hole in glass, the glass we have seen in
the previous few images of guns represented both on computer screens and in
front of computer keyboards. But the magnetic trace renders this image as
the memory of an event past, or the faint and unspoken desire of the present
which can never be fully realised.

This lasso aesthetic, and it continual use thought out the site and book
remind me of the lacy translucent outlines present in many paintings of the
French Symbolist Gustave Moreau. Moreau's strange fusing of human and
inanimate objects, his disregard for the conventions of size and
perspective, and his opium dream landscapes of inward sensation and
contemplation place him as a forerunner of surrealism. His use of the
spidery overlay rendered in the paint technology of the mid to late 19th
century, and Screenfull's image processing lasso overlay, give both bodies
of work a quality of simultaneous surface and depth, of being at once in
creative process and post-operative autopsy.

As well there is a lot of smirky-smart doubling and splitting in these
portrait/landscape papers/screens. The use of images from a landscape
oriented screen, split in half and placed on consecutive portrait oriented
.pdf pages, which most likely will never be printed out and read together is
intriguing.

Print it and you miss Screenfull's competitive soundtracks and QuickTime
content; don't print it and the images are cut in half, forcing you to
recombine the split images in your head. It's almost like an anaglyph--a 3d
red/blue overlapping split image. Different right eye image + left eye image
+ glasses = let the brain do the interpretation work. Except they are not
like that at all, they are consecutive rather than overlapping. However the
associations are flowing freely, and isn't that what successful art is all
about? It gives you an immediate hit, as well as leaving you to ponder
afterwards.

Linkoln's previous art curatorial works certainly do that with their
rigorous mix of simplicity and humour. A Thousand Plateaus re-examines the
mountainous graphical stats for net art sites; Net.art: Those that Can't
Teach Do is a cheeky listing of well know artist/educators' course outlines.
His linear blog remix of Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From the War
turns Manovich's prime example of a new media logic of addition and
co-existence replacing the cinematic logic of replacement (p 324), back into
a logic of temporal replacement plus (rather than instead of) co-existence.
Recently Linkoln's curation of Pop Up at Turbulence.org, complete with a Pop
Up Manifesto exuding self-evident gems like: "4. Pop up windows neither pop,
nor up.", displays an intelligent and maturing engagement with the unique
qualities of net worked art.

Our co-author, jimpunk, is a talented and elegant artist who capitalises on
the Rococo potentialities of HTML, JavaScript and Flash to create sites of
infinite variability, detail and unending surprise. His works have been
perfectly described by Tricia Fragnito as "a web version of a roller coaster
ride: scary and fun and at the end you want to go again." In true networked
style, jimpunk often works collaboratively across geographical space, and
produces sites which exploit the unique experience of net browsing. He
embraces the pixel and what some would call "bad web design" using web safe
colour, pop up and flashing graphics in works like
www.-reverse.-flash-.-.back-; and in one of my favourites the now offline
www.nowar.nogame.org. Although his breed of network art may have had an
early Jodi-esque influence, we can see from the intimate and poetic musing
of 1n-0ut [meditation], it has grown up to be distinctively "jimpunk."

Scrolling around the Screenfull site, with Radio Sounds open in another
window, I am reminded that even though THE BOOK is a tightly thematic
curatorial collection, the bastard space of the network from which it is
comes is a chaotic, asynchronous, competitive, market place. It babbles with
recombinant, disjunctive, atmospheric content - designed not to be seen not
from a single authoritative cinematic perspective, but to be engaged with at
many levels.

It is for this reason web will emerge as the dominant media of the 21st
century, and as cinema did in the 20th century, it both builds upon and
differs from all that has come before. Networked space's most immediate
lineage is in what Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark call "Distance Art."
The activities of telecommunication art--from mail art, sound and radio art,
telematic art, assemblings and Fluxus as well as distributed textual
authorship. Artists and authors working in these distance fields challenged
the stability of the art production and distribution models of the 1960's
and 1970s, so that when the net emerged, new aesthetics were already in
process.

Authoring art in symbiosis with an evolving electronic communications
systems, means working with an as yet largely unknown language. Right now
artists are connecting half visible dots to form a rapidly shifting template
of the future.

In less than a decade aesthetic sensibility has radically altered--7 years
ago, in 1998, when net.artist's were universally obsessed with making tiny
fast clean files and web pages with no more than 4 text lines of text on
screen, the now deceased Estonian web artist Tiia Johannson was making
massive web works of sometimes single images. Puzzled, I asked her why, and
her reply (made even more dramatic by her fabulous Marlene Dietrich accent)
was the foretelling "I like to make them wait."

If jimpunk & Linkoln want to make us wait while they stuff our browsers with
content, we will wait. It is in small shudders of expectation; those sudden
shocks; those intimate reminders of packet rhythms, that make Screenfull, in
all its format manifestations, succeed. It is both flexible and fixed;
distributable and located; doubled and traced; embracing full content and
empty potentiality. For me the characteristics of risk taking and shape
shifting, together with the rigours of knowing ones medium and a sense of
larrikin humour, define networked art. In the words of Johannson--on the
Network "you have to be plastic to survive."

______________________________


Abe Linkoln: http://www.linkoln.net

Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (eds), At a Distance: Precursors to Art
and Activism on the Internet, MIT Press, 2005:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10451&ttype=2

1n-0ut [meditation]: http://www.jimpunk.com/1n-0ut/

jimpunk: http://www.jimpunk.com

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=8830&ttype=2

Pop up: http://turbulence.org/curators/popup

Radio Sounds:
http://www.screenfull.net/stadium/2005/03/screenfull-radiosounds.html

Screenfull.net: http://www.screenfull.net

Tiia Johannson: http://artun.ee/~tiia/netproject/

THE BOOK: http://www.screenfull.net/THE_BOOK_2.pdf

Tricia Fragnito, This is your Browser on ):mpun<, BlackFlash mag,
2004/02/27 :
http://www.blackflash.ca/

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Rhizome ArtBase Exhibitions

http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/

Visit the third ArtBase Exhibition "Raiders of the Lost ArtBase," curated by
Michael Connor of FACT and designed by scroll guru Dragan Espenschied.

http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/raiders/

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Rhizome.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of
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Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard
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the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council
on the Arts, a state agency.

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Rhizome Digest is filtered by Kevin McGarry (kevin AT rhizome.org). ISSN:
1525-9110. Volume 10, number 17. Article submissions to list AT rhizome.org
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