tom moody

An attempt at a wikipedia page on the internet surf club phenomenon is mostly wrong, or a joke, particularly in describing it as "net.art" (an older form of internet art, as indicated by the knowing dot placement, a la the dot com era). Am not too interested in a nerd tug of war over language on Wikipedia, so here's a first draft to replace the bare bones text that's there:

A so-called internet Surf Club is a group site (usually a blog) where artists and others link to "surfed" or "surfable" items on the Web and also post some of their own creative work. "Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club" was the first to use the words "surfing club" (ironically) and others on the list below followed the form or adopted the word "club" to sound relevant. Several "clubs" on the list are arguably Net Art 1.0 or "net.art" style websites and not Nasty Nets-style surf clubs. The original clubs were never true clubs but there has been much rancor over the issue of invited membership in the supposedly open and democratic web that still exists outside Facebook-like commercial enclaves. Dump.fm is a real-time image sharing website that has many aspects of a surf club; however, anyone can sign up for Dump. The core surf clubs (Nasty, Double Happiness, Loshadka) are barely active now--their heyday was 2006-2009, which could be called the "surf club era." Arguably the widely-used, configurable tumblr sites made surf clubs obsolete.

Citations to add:

Rhizome Surf Club vs 4Chan discussion

Rhizome Surf Club vs Rhizome discussion

http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2010/05/09/surf-art-continuity/

blog posts at http://www.tommoody.us/?s=surf+club

Addendum: Although Nasty Nets used the phrase "surfing club" the usual shorthand use is "surf club." Titling the Wikipedia page "surfing club" sounds prissy and formal, or mock-formal, at this stage of the discussion.

Afterthought: One thing is fairly certain: the history of surf clubs will not be memorialized on Wikipedia by the original participants, but rather a later generation that misunderstands the "clubs" as a form of "net.art," or adds a faux mystical dimension that absolutely wasn't there at the outset. The web is mostly crap, people. Miracles happen, but attempts to claim an exalted higher plane for "surfing" are bogus--even sardonic attempts.

Have spent much time dumping at dump.fm the past few weeks (chat page possibly not work safe). Am now in the Hall of Fame (caution--giant crab; also updated hourly so the fame will be fleeting). Dump.fm is a non-exclusive surf club (anyone can sign up and dump) that has vastly broadened the range and speed of internet consumption/recycling/restating/original-content-making. It's not really described as a surf club (rather, it's a real-time image sharing site) but the design and technology have resulted in a collective style and wisdom and people with talents that might not be appreciated elsewhere, much as was the case with Nasty Nets, et al.

Dialog on the site is sketchy since it's a chat room but discussion was never a strong suit of surf clubs anyway. It has been interesting to watch big names on the Net (net art wise) come to the site, assert a personal style, and then sink or swim in the permanent tidal wave of in-jokes and sensory overload. Some get it into it and adapt their styles to the house and others never come back. Not sure if I have the stamina but am giving it my best shot because it's fun and am learning so much.

Will not single out my favorite dumpers but really like a few who scour the net for small, understated finds that shine when taken out of context or can be made into new artworks: the fruits of old GIF sites, bad webpage graphics, Op Art patterns, scientific diagrams... Also a few artists who make surprising juxtapositions of images, and/or animated, multi-part collages. You can have Bravo-TV and its reality show: I am watching the real art being made in real time on the net.

Was sort of a proto dumper (see examples from 2003 / 2007) so am feeling very at home in this environment and am learning many new tricks from other dumpers.

For the next few posts will be recycling/remaking some of my dumping contributions.

Update: Jesse Patrick Martin and Hypothete have also written about their experiences on dump.fm. More dumpology to be posted soon.

GIF above originally posted by halgand_cc on 544x378webtv (archives, week of 07/13/2003 - 07/19/2003)

Back when we were debating the "internet surf clubs" on Rhizome.org (conclusion: the Rhizome regulars said it wasn't art and if it was, it was something they invented), a commenter traced the idea of group image/may-or-may-not-be-art blogs back to the earliest days of blogging, late '90s-early '00s, in France I think. I first noted the phenom with 544 x 378 (Web TV) (see above). Nasty Nets came three years later, and added the term "internet surfing club" (pissing off a generation of academic net artists).

Tumblr blogs are too many and diffuse to be pigeonholed but their communal features and broad participation make the '06-'09 surf clubs seem creaky (the latter have drastically slowed their posting pace, anyway).

Now dump.fm has taken the concept(s) and sped them up even more with the addition of a live chat feature. Putting images in chat has been around--Yahoo! had a feature where two chatters could work on the same drawing in real time, using paintbox controls--maybe it still does. Dump.fm allows image and GIF uploads to a single public chat screen (also webcam shots) and is simultaneously creating a tumblr-like blog archive for each chatter consisting of that uploaded content.

The changing speed of the discussion and image uploading is not for the old or weak of heart. Chat is hell for me due to an inability to express myself in thoughts under a paragraph. (Twitter is fine for one-liners but lousy for conversations.) With chat you have to mesh quickly with the "house vibe" and have no ego about losing your precious words and pictures quickly in a volatile stream.

Paddy Johnson has posted her thoughts on the Boris Groys lecture at SVA, linking some of his rhetoric to the surf clubs and other artists working on the internet. Agree his ideas give those activities some theoretical heft (this blog is all over the "weak repetitive gesture" and "low visibility" as strategems, avant garde or otherwise) but it may require some creative misinterpretation since he doesn't seem to actually read blogs.

Last August Johnson tweeted a Frieze article quoting Groys ("Reflecting on the profusion of the blogs and the mysteries of the readership, Groys mused, 'I am convinced they are being written for God,' later clarifying, 'who, of course, is dead.'") which I made fun of ("meaning no one is reading me"). In his lecture he noted the author of personal cat site A never commented on personal cat site B but seemed OK with that; at least they weren't watching TV.

SVA's press release claimed he would be talking about "artistic rights [beginning] to manifest themselves as general human rights" which seemed ridiculous but that was not part of his talk. Elsewhere he differentiates between artists using the "weak" sign subversively and political agitprop-ists (or terrorists) pursuing the "strong" sign but overall his critique seems to be that politics have left art, which is the opposite of what SVA was saying he would say.

Frieze called him an “imp of the perverse” dispensing “nihilist irony” so his actual beliefs may not be that easy to pin down. Will read his recent book Art Power and report back.

This post on William Eggleston a few years ago discussed the difference between two movements, "art photography" and "artists with cameras":

[Jim] Lewis' phrase "new art photographers" glosses over a not-so-old schism in the world of Museum-collected photography, between "art photography" and what might roughly be called "artists with cameras," a distinction outlined in Abigail Solomon-Godeau's famous essay "Photography after Art Photography." Almost exclusively shot in black and white and practiced by the likes of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander, art photography was firmly ensconced in the museum in the '60s and '70s under the stewardship of MOMA curator John Szarkowski; it emphasized darkroom practice and objective standards of quality in photos.

The "conceptual photography" of [Richard] Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and others, however, emerged from the world of painting, sculpture, and video. These artists used photos to document a performance, advance a theory, or critique the mass media, and didn't much give a damn about photographic values (including the old prohibition on color). In addition to this generation change in America, developments in European contemporary art gradually came to light in the late '70s: Gilbert & George, for example, used vivid colors in their photopastiches at least as early as 1975, and the conceptualist Jan Dibbets had no qualms about color in his images of tilted landscapes and car hoods. And finally, as Lewis mentions, color printing technology was vastly improving during this period.

Thus, while Szarkowski may have taken a big leap vis a vis older art photographers by giving Eggleston a one-person museum exhibit in '76, other trends were fast making that radicality a non-issue. The Europeans and young Americans weren’t invited into the tea circle of art photography because William Eggleston opened the door: instead, they found their own critical advocates, and after a few years of publicity and sales, they simply took over the show--and color came along with them.

The same types of distinctions could be made between "new media" artists and what could be called "artists with computers." The latter care about their laptops as much as Cindy Sherman cared about her camera. Necessary mechanical skills can be learned but the habits accompanying those skills need to be unlearned. Also, artists may not always and at all times be "with computers"--it's a tool to be picked up and put down as needed.

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don't care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. New media artists tend to germinate in design or media arts programs whereas artists with computers incline to studio arts backgrounds or autodidacticism. Rhizome.org has traditionally been a bastion of new media whereas Paddy Johnson's blog (particularly last summer's IMG MGMT series) has provided a platform for artists with computers. (She may not appreciate being lumped into this diatribe.) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich's principles ("new media objects exist as data," etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

The so-called surf club artists come from both schools. Nevertheless, resistance to the clubs (comparing them to George Bush and closed source programming) and sarcasm of certain reactionaries seen in the Rhizome chat boards in June of 2008 could be construed as evidence of the split. New media artists scoff at the art world's notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

[This may seem like a strange time to pigeonhole Rhizome since they are in the middle of a fundraiser (this blog just kicked in for a seedling membership). The staff can't be held accountable for the obscurantists in the chatrooms; there is some sentiment within the organization for "artists with computers" so giving is recommended, enabling the institution to thrive so it can be colonized, ha ha.]

1996 essay is philistine but also largely correct. These poor kids, painters, getting out of Columbia and going straight to Deitch Projects are the proof. That is painting on life support.

"Our admiration for painting results from a long process of adaptation that has taken place over centuries and for reasons that often have nothing to do with art or the mind. Painting created its receiver. It is basically a conventional relationship" (Gombrowitz to Dubuffet). The only question is: How can such a machine continue to operate in the midst of critical disillusion and commercial frenzy? And if it does, how long will this conjuring act last? One hundred, two hundred years? Will art have the right to a second, interminable existence, like the secret services that, as we know, haven't had any secrets to steal or exchange for some time but who still continue to flourish in the utter superstition of their usefulness, perpetuating their own myth[?]

In the web context, compare LM's class notes to Marisa Olson's essay and other attempts to "professionalize" web surfing as art. LM's approach is healthier and more inclusive and fun. She makes no bones about being a participant in what she is writing about, whereas Olson converses casually in the surf clubs but then enters scholarly mode to write the definitive essay canonizing artists she prefers. In the latter role she is like the secret services in Baudrillard's conspiracy, rehashing old tropes of legitimation of art.

Have been reading the Timothy Alan Liu book Rob Myers recommended, The Laws of Cool. Especially liked the discussion of the history of typefaces and design as they made the jump from print to the web. The book features a good, if matter-of-fact, discussion of JODI, as well.

This blog confesses it has a hard time finding its place in Liu's scheme for some of the reasons Rob mentioned in his post on the artwork here (thanks--much appreciated): "...it would fail as simple web illustration. It is too interesting and has too much internal complexity. It makes a context for itself. History, problem solving and interiority are anathema to the easy post-historical consumerist cool of Web 2.0."

Alan Liu assumes everything is about "cool" and eventually even the "uncool" gets absorbed into the "cool." That is, the computerized workplace and playplace is an all-encompassing seductive experience measured in "cool," whether it's the Ars Electronica avant garde or designers creating Facebook apps.

I'm interested in seeing software and web tools made problematic through the investment of time and labor all out of proportion to their intended function. Examples would be hand-shading a gradient instead of just writing parameters for it, or hand-rendering animation frames without any use of onion-skinning or digitally generated transition frames. This is an artist stance of "doing the difficult thing" which does not make an easy jump to the web.

The labor and use of "historical" art techniques is not always conspicuous in the finished product (that is, my artwork), so Rob's vouching for it is appreciated.

A post on Rob a few years ago and some examples of his online artwork are here. We have an ongoing disagreement over whether the surf clubs "add anything" to the images they recycle.

Update: Don't know where that "Timothy" came from. Most uncool.

Lorna Mills (aka L.M. from the Sally McKay and L.M. blog) is teaching a net art class and has published her class notes. It is a mix of syllabus, lesson plan, and how-to with much editorializing and distinction-making about the current scene of surf clubs, web art 2.0, or what have you.

Rather than embrace the Web Establishment with links to textbook examples of net art, Mills is marching off into the great uncharted and taking impressionable minds with her.

Subjects covered are things yours truly has been going on about for years and were only barely adequately covered at the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panels and subsequent discussions with Rhizome chatboard naysayers. Collections, arranging GIFs on pages, using tables, distorting GIFs, YouTube hacking, hackers vs defaults, Nasty Nets, Double Happiness, Chris Ashley, Loshadka, Petra Cortright. The good stuff.

Their installation in a group show called "New Blood." The DVD cases are Nigerian and Thai cinema, mostly. One video was still rendering when I arrived so I didn't get a shot of it (just the default JVC screen with colored spheres). The snack station features a working refrigerator and microwave and gallerygoers were heating mini-pizzas (also note Hydrox cookie bag--there's a story involving Warren Buffett and the reviving of the brand after he received a letter from the group--they may be heroes). The scatter-orgy successfully translates the maxed-out, unrepressed, multiple-overlapping-media vibe of the group's blog. Taste and restraint are concepts they have no use for, making them the most lifelike of the surf clubs.

Note: two members of Double Happiness will give a presentation about the grocery store C-Town (Town-Town-Town...) in connection with this year's Conflux Festival. Details at the link.

Another note: barely visible in the top photo is a laptop "eating" slices of actual pizza, which may or may not remain for the duration of the exhibit.

An article in Minneapolis' The Rake titled The New Dada discusses Internet surfing clubs. The writer comes to the scene with a fresh set of eyes (i.e., from outside the circle of usual suspects looking in) and concludes that while much political art post 9/11 is "dull and dry and deadpan and rote," the clubs' brash and chaotic approach might be closer to the spirit of Zurich 1916.

Interestingly he found the clubs via online discussion of the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel at the New Museum. This blog feels a bit vindicated since it was trashed after the panel for being insufficiently respectful of the "sincere" political art that is out there.

A piece of mine was used in the article: the Mark Napier Steven Dutch Remix. It's funny, I've been introduced to Mark Napier several times and he says "I've heard your name somewhere..."