aggregate this

Not sure why we need a term "image aggregators"--I suppose because glomming onto gigabytes of net goodies (pics, sounds, videos) lies somewhere between collecting and curating, and some writers think it should be more one way or the other.

My experience with one aggregating tool, the dump.fm log, is that images, once displayed in the public space of the chat room, mostly disappear: the collection is a rarely-consulted resource. The curating is a sharing and spinning, that is to say, language function: talking with pictures, as the dump founders have it.

In any case, to inject Marxist concepts into all this ("to use their collected images as ‘instruments[s] of possession’" etc) is tired and stupid. No one thinks about this kind of thing except academics.

Another Shoutback

To Stephen Truax for mentions in his post Artists on the Internet. Will give this a closer look and report; am happy to be included as an artist but wanted to say a few words about self-promotion. Truax was the email correspondent I referred to earlier, and I am still uncomfortable with "minor leagues" and the idea of promotion in the Mad Men sense for artists.

Have written more press releases for myself and others than I can remember but they were always addressed to critics and editors of "art beat" writing for general circulation media. The goal was to communicate an idea that the artist was trying to get across, with some kind of story hook, as opposed to promoting the artist as a character or personality. When I started blogging I briefly used a photo of myself but then settled on that dot pattern because I wanted the personality of the blog to be words and pictures, not me me me.

Truax mentions several recent social media art histories, including this one by An Xiao, which, like many others', starts with the creation of Facebook. But of course before Facebook there was the "art blogosphere," which arose in tandem with the political blogosphere in the aftermath of 9/11 and Bush's Iraq invasion. Was just perusing a specimen from that era (which I still had in my browser bookmarks), the blog "Thickeye," by Benjamin Godsill, who later became a curatorial associate at the New Museum. He blogged regularly from '04 to '06, and instead of an instant network provided by Mark Zuckerberg, readers found him through links and Google searches. Here, for example, is a report he did on the Beige collective's 2004 lecture/performance at the Whitney (BEIGE was Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckmann, Joseph Bonn, and Paul B. Davis).

Was also recently re-reading this post (with comments!) from 2005, where I was complaining about the art world's lack of awareness of the internet. All that changed a couple of years later when Zuckerberg's "internet lite" made it easy for everyone to get online.

Have been toying with the idea of a book documenting the blogosphere period, to be called The Lost Years: Art on the Net Between the Dot Com Crash and the Rise of Facebook.

early-ish net art

moody-random@Mar_12_2011

Have been browsing through old Rhizome.org links and am using my blog to take some notes:

1. Netartgenerator (1999). Rhizome ArtBase lists Cornelia Sollfrank as the artist but it seems she mainly commissioned other artists (and/or programmers) to make "generators." Of the five generators only two still work. The image above was made with the image generator and the other one is the Dada generator (haven't tried it yet). To make my image I put in the word "random" and a search engine looked for some pics with the word "random" associated with them (a la Google Images) and used them to assemble the image algorithmically. For example, I think that meandering line was someone's walks traced via GPS. Looks like the NAG is still pretty active--lots of other new images from today on the Stats page.

2. Heath Bunting, _readme. This page from 1998 takes a UK press article about Bunting and turns every word into a hyperlink. So "digital" clicks through to digital.com, "interesting" to interesting.com, "the" to "the.com," etc. As you can imagine, this is an ever-changing encyclopedia of parked domain pages, search pages, corporate advertising pages, and plain old spam pages (with some "legit" sites mixed in). I like the hand-coded-seeming simplicity of this, and its relative timelessness even as the web constantly turns over site ownership. (Certain words aren't linkified--am sure each one has a story.)

awwk - posted prematurely - some ranting removed - have to work on it more

youth audiences curator

youth_audiences_curator

The magical religious phrase of the dotcom era (1996-2001) was "media convergence." Somewhat like the New Age movement's harmonic convergence, with a side of Singularity: the sublime moment when TV, music, and homepages would all be united in a single monetizable particle-plus-waveform. The dotcommers famously crashed and burned, mercifully taking their dreams and jargon with them, but like all fanatics, they waited and bided their time in dank cellars (supported by their parents) until suddenly...they were back.

While these, um, curators work on integrating the home video picks of Joe and Jane Sixpack with the youth audience lusts of their children in a family convergence special, the art world has its equivalent of media Satori in high-minded talk of "new productive systems." At institutions such as Rhode Island School of Design, future-minded administrators are seeking to engineer a convergence of the convergences by collapsing the art, architecture, design, and media vizier departments into one uber-department that will guide our audio/visual/textual discourse into the next century (or until the fuel runs out).