unpublished link to Paul Slocum's surf club history

Paul Slocum compiled an internet surf club history, where he explains the "clubs" as the product of a particular technological moment, specifically, the use of PHP and MYSQL in the late '90s/early '00s to make dynamic websites, a practiced that flourished in the mid-'00s. His listing of the main group blogs employing these techniques for "art," including sites that preceded and followed them (for context), is thorough, if lacking in value judgments. All these sites can't be good, in fact many of them weren't.
Slocum's original, clean HTML design for the history can be found on this archive page at Rhizome.org.
Rhizome posted the history on its blog, where it added a second side scroll, made navigation more awkward, and kiboshed the "retro" effect of the HTML page. Their blog, you may recall, is the result of a recent redesign by Coca Cola's ad agency, which added zany upside down fonts and rendered past content on the site invisible. The blog is also now published separately from the Rhizome front page, for some reason.
There was back channel discussion of the possibility that Slocum's survey would coincide with the "official" archiving of the surf club Nasty Nets. Rhizome saved all the posts from that site and published them on their back pages but never finished the conservation. Curiously, the far more art-world-friendly (some might say conservative) site Vvork was lovingly preserved for future generations (or until the next site redesign).

Cloning Aura - interview re: surf clubs

moody_interview

The interview I did a few months ago on the topic of Nasty Nets and internet surf clubs is being published by Link Editions, in connection with the book Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats by Chiara Moioli. The interview appears in a browsable form at Issuu.com. A PDF version is forthcoming via Lulu. From the Link Editions post:

The Surfer’s Conspiracy. Investigating with Tom Moody digs deep into Surfing Clubs and the way they turned the practice of appropriation into a natural attitude, with the help of one of the most active surfers and of the best critical voices in this scene.

This publication is a spin-off of the book project Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats, by Chiara Moioli: an essay that explores the close relation between practices of appropriation an, going through Postmodernism, 70s-80s subcultural movements, net.art and the Surfing Club generation. This is the second of five interviews (Florian Cramer, Tom Moody, Vittore Baroni, Vuk Ćosić and Cory Arcangel) in English and Italian, that will follow in the upcoming weeks. The book, in Italian, will be available on our shelves from mid March 2016.

The interviews are being published in weekly installments on the Link website.

Domenico Quaranta on surf clubs

In a recent interview curator Domenico Quaranta gives his take on the "so-called surfing clubs generation" and places Nasty Nets, one of the so-called clubs, into a comfortable academic narrative that is about fifty percent fantasy.
As an actual, prolific participant in Nasty Nets, and a continuing, prolific participant in its real time chat descendant, dump.fm (which Quaranta seems not to have heard of), and as an early adopter addressing "internet in the gallery" problems (mine was the first show at And/Or Gallery in 2006), I've had a fun time combatting misinformation about these cultural moments (see, e.g., this Q&A).
Below is a chunk of the Quaranta interview with some impertinent interruptions. The questions (by Melanie Bühler) are in bold and my comments are italicized.

...In what sense has appropriating content as part of artistic production shifted with the rise of the internet when compared to earlier artistic strategies connected to appropriation?

...Early surfing clubs like Nasty Nets mark the turning point in which artists active online realized that filtering and recontextualizing general web content was more interesting, and more topical, than designing the web. Artists built relationships looking at each other’s delicious account, and were deeply aware of how a simple blog post can be a powerful act of re-framing, as texts such as Kevin Bewersdorf’s “Spirit Surfing” prove.

TM: "How a simple blog post can be a powerful act of re-framing" was an issue I'd been dealing with for a few years, as an artist-with-blog, before Bewersdorf's (I felt) overdetermined manifesto. A few simple cues, such as a mildly authorative-looking white page, were sufficient to effect this transformation. I didn't see the need to dress it up with loopy theories about "spirit surfing."

What was the context in which Nasty Nets emerged? How does it relate to earlier internet art and is there a relation to what later emerged as post-internet art?

The so-called surfing clubs generation shows elements of continuity with and resistance against the former “net.art” generation.

TM: Resistance yes, continuity, not so much. Quaranta attempts to normalize Nasty Nets as some kind of bridge or synthesizing movement.

Resistance is made explicit in Guthrie Lonergan’s famous “Hacking vs Defaults” diagram, and is related to the broader shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, from html to blogging platforms, and to the artist’s shift from the position of internet pioneer to amateur user among many others.

TM: See the famous diagram and my discussion of it below.

Continuity is related to the participation of artists of the former generation, like Olia Lialina, and younger artists grown up in the cult of early net.art, like Cory Arcangel, in surfing clubs; but also to the ability of the former generation to anticipate tastes and topics of the new.

TM: Cory Arcangel was never a surf club participant, that's inaccurate. Lialina was invited to join NN seven months after it started. She adapted well to the blog format but was not an innovator of blog-based art, in the sense that, say jimpunk had been with the 544x378 WebTV.

There is a lot of interest in defaults in early net.art, too. Many early net.art works deal with appropriation, reframing and the absence of the digital original, and some artists have always been attracted by digital folklore.

TM: Unfortunately net.art didn't find a dynamic way to engage an audience with these issues, such as a group blog, but instead relied on links from institutions that told you what you would be consuming and what to expect.

Despite Lonergan’s diagram, early net art is not all about “sophisticated breaking of technology” and glitch aesthetics.

TM: Quaranta is arguing with Lonergan now! This is partisanship masquerading as an objective curatorial point of view. Lonergan embodies his comparison in the contrast between my blog and JODI's "blogs," a topic Quaranta is completely unwilling or unable to tackle.

hacking_vs_defaults

Also, the surfing club generation, at least at the beginning, shared with net art the interest in the internet as a way to exist as an artist outside of the art world, away from its rules and its contexts.

TM: That's not true, you find art references throughout Nasty Nets posts. Several of the members were artists or art school trained.

At the same time, the surfing club generation created the conditions for the later shift toward post-internet.

TM: Possibly the surfing club generation WAS post-internet.

Two of the core features of post-internet — namely, the creation of works that can fit the exhibition space while simultaneously addressing the artist’s experience of the internet, and the importance given to documentation and mediated experience of art — find their roots here.

TM: It wasn't a "root" -- we were talking about these issues. It's just that the more interesting, urgent question was "what would a blog-based art look like?" An actual schism over a shift from blog-based art to gallery based art happened later, with Paintfx.biz, which broke up over this issue, as Michael Manning noted in a recent panel. I don't know if I'd call that progress.

When your practice manifests itself mainly in collecting or making images, collecting or making videos, what prevents you from getting into the white cube? Pictures and videos are totally gallery-friendly; the audience that you can find in the gallery is now familiar with the internet jokes, stories and aesthetics, as Lialina acutely pointed out;

TM: This wasn't always so true. The response to my 2006 show in Brooklyn, "Room-Sized Animated GIFs," was like, "what's a GIF?"

and if you want to resist commodification you can always make fun of the “art object,” e.g. by choosing some cheap print on demand service to materialize a digital file. Artists like Kevin Bewersdorf and Guthrie Lonergan stopped being active as artists when they realized that their practice was, like it or not, bringing them straight into the gallery.

TM: Bewersdorf and Lonergan both took hiatuses but are back, with coverage in Rhizome and ArtNews, respectively. Did they pause because "their practice was bringing them straight into the gallery"? We don't know, but it's a good story.

The importance given to online documentation of art was pioneered by surfing clubs like VVORK, a blog run by a group of artists (including Oliver Laric and Aleksandra Domanovic) and featuring mostly pictures of artworks displayed on a white background with an essential reference (anticipating a trend in art blogging in which the flow of images and their arrangement prevail over text);

TM: One could say that Vvork was a conservative step backward, shifting the focus of a group blog from "the whole world" or at least "the whole internet" to obsession with the narrow confines of gallery-based practice. Some of us noted this at the time.

and is related to this generation’s perception of the networked computer as their natural environment, and thus as their main context for any kind of experience, included the experience of art. We could update Picasso’s famous statement saying that, for them, a found online image is better than the Nika; and an online image of the Nika is better than the Nika itself, because it’s ubiquitous, free, easy to share and use, spreadable and loaded with information (tags, metadata etc.). I’m wondering if Brian Droitcour [5] is aware of how conservative his criticism of post-internet—an art, in his own words, that looks crappy in the gallery and great online—may appear from this perspective. Making an expensive artwork and placing it in a respected white cube for the sole purpose of generating a good JPG may actually be the most corrosive challenge brought by netizen artists to the art world and its values. The gallery is not openly criticized, but subtly abused by turning it into a stage, and insulted by treating it not as a point of arrival, but of departure in an endless process of redistribution.

TM: This is a rehash of whether Guthrie Lonergan's phrase "internet aware art" meant art based on the internet or art made ready for the internet, which has been covered extensively here and on Rhizome.

Joel Holmberg mentions that many artists whose practices were connected to the internet and surfing clubs like Nasty Nets have moved towards more painterly, visual practices. Would you agree with this and how does this again relate to the label post-internet?

As said above, the surfing clubs participants were more interested in images than in codes. While the first net.art generation was, to some extent (and with some exceptions) iconoclastic, the second is, no exceptions, iconophiliac when not even iconolatric. Also, most of them were attracted, since the early days, by the practice of computer drawing, and by the way in which postproduction tools like Photoshop implemented metaphors and gestures taken from reality and from the field of painting. So, no surprise if they kept working on this. But it would be wrong to think that the main motivation behind this move was the will to get in the art market with an easy to get, easy to sell art form. The market success of artists like Petra Cortright, Michael Manning, Jon Rafman and Parker Ito is just the top of an iceberg made of thousands of GIFs, PNGs and JPGs circulated for free online.

TM: This is all fine, and I suppose we had to end by talking about someone's "market success."

interview re: surf clubs

A graduate student doing research about appropriation and authorship sent me some questions about the surf club era. She put the Q&A together into a nice interview [pdf] with illustrations and footnotes.

She felt the Surfing Club scene/period was difficult to grasp because:

(a) With the exception of VVORK, it was more an American phenomenon; “Old skool” net.art is actually more known and discussed in Europe (even today); (b) there is actually little literature available (Ramocki, Olson, Cloninger, Bewersdorf; I ended up reading all your blog entries from 2008 onwards, and chaotic discussions from the Rhizome archive of June 2008), and everybody seems to disagree on some general level and (c) With the meteoric rise of interest in Post Internet, it seems to me that Surfing Clubs have been forgotten.

In our back-and-forth discussion it became clear that current students are getting an, how can this be said diplomatically?, incorrect slant about the scene from later writers who weren't part of it, and welcomed a chance to put in (more of my) two cents.

more on surf club revisionism

The following is an only slightly exaggerated version of online conversations I had about Tuesday's post follower privilege, access privilege, and other things to be bitter about. A couple of interrogators are combined here as "RASG" (recent art school graduate):

RASG: You made a good critique yesterday of the Brad Troemel/Jennifer Chan position on the so-called internet surf clubs of '06-'08. You say the clubs' primary attributes weren't exclusivity and a career vehicle for members.

TM: Right.

RASG: It's personal with you, isn't it? That really weakens your argument.

TM: I don't know them. I met Troemel once. My post was basically fact-checking what I consider wrong assumptions, since I was in one of the surf clubs (Nasty Nets) and those authors are viewing the clubs with what seems to be 20/20 incorrect hindsight.

RASG: Possibly your position inside one of the clubs blinds you to what recent art school graduates face, in terms of current options. For us, it's mainly Tumblr and Facebook and you are making fun of that. That's kind of well, arrogant and hypocritical.

TM: Privilege shaming is always a good rhetorical tactic but you're assuming I had some advantage that you currently don't have. If it was 2006 you could have started a group blog and built an audience. I believe you still could, just using search traffic, word of mouth, hyperlinks from respected sites, RSS, and even social media -- without actually situating your group blog on tumblr or FB.

RASG: Oh, yeah, sure, and that's going to just get archived on Rhizome, just like that.

TM: Well, Rhizome archived Nasty Nets, but then their conservator left, so it's a half-finished project. But assuming that NN is laureled to the extent you're saying, no, there is no guarantee that an interesting group blog is going to be recognized. You have to build an audience. That was true for NN as well.

RASG: (scoffs) You already had a career before you joined NN. You can't really talk.

TM: Again, you are privilege shaming. And no, it took years of being online, blogging, before anyone thought about inviting me to be in stuff.

RASG: But you had an art career before that.

TM: That exposure didn't carry over in 2001, when I started blogging. The art world wasn't following blogs. I basically had to start over.

RASG: OK, maybe, but it takes money and tech savvy to start a blog. You had a leg up that we don't have now.

TM: I started blogging on a site called Digital Media Tree. They were hosting a small collection of blogs (still are). The webmaster was very generous with time and skill but there was no gaming the system, a la Buzzfeed. All I did was sign up and start posting -- and built a "rep," such as it is, over time. You could do that, as well. Starting a group blog outside the social media continuum isn't that hard or expensive.

RASG: You are overly romantic. Your story sounds like every one of these startups that claim to have begun penniless.

TM: I like you, as well.