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.

Update: Many thanks to whomever modified the Wikipedia "Surfing Club" entry, incorporating some ideas and language from this post.

Brian Droitcour's Rhizome article about Jstchillin.org provides some grist for Duncan Alexander's broad generalizations regarding two types of net artists.

Alexander's argument in sketch form:

Camp 1: "The net is their vehicle for dissemination, and they stand out from the online flow"; "design heavy" pages that look like art pages and are a final destination for the surfer (I added the non-quoted part). Examples: Computers Club, Oliver Laric

Camp 2: "This camp makes art for the net on the net, and blends in to the net-social fabric." Examples: Various Dumpers and Tumblrers

To the extent Droitcour describes Jstchillin as having a "top-down organization and meticulous calendar" that sounds like Camp 1. To the extent Droitcour describes Nasty Nets and dump.fm as "touching the issue of chill time by adapting its form" that sounds like Camp 2.

Good summation of various internet-aesthetic projects and their relation to "chill time," written by Brian Droitcour on Rhizome.org.

Discussed in the article is Guthrie Lonergan's page for jstchillin.org called 3D Warehouse. As Droitcour describes it, it's

a collection of Google Sketchup drawings of objects seen in dreams, accompanied by verbal accounts of those dreams. The sharing of dreams is an odd kind of small talk, as meaningless as discussions of weather but more intimate, something you'd only do with a close friend. But the Google Sketchup users in Lonergan's collection put their dreams out there for anyone. The discomfort you feel from this distortion of social convention is reflected in the images, which -- for all the modeling skills of the artists who drew them -- are awkward and cartoonish, thin shadows of a stranger's dreams.

That said, many of the drawings are quite seductive, especially with the full screen space Lonergan allots to them. Some have the feel of De Chirico's lonely, impossible plazas, made even lonelier by the clean, sterile outlines of the Sketchup program. These are the dreams of the modern techno-state. An especially eerie one (about halfway down this page) shows crab creatures surfacing in a vast swimming pool, with the innocuous caption:

I had a weird dream a couple nights ago that there were lobsters and crabs (by Wario Ware Inc.) inside the pool! HELP ME! lol