general

A few more responses to Brad Troemel's internet art history:

1. Many of those 90s "art" websites such as Mouchette, praised by Troemel for their utopian anonymity, were famously insider-y and hard to navigate. Sally McKay nailed the work of that period as "long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof."

2. Troemel suggests that after the dot-com collapse and 9/11, anonymity went out of fashion and people started identifying themselves. Yet the most talked-about sites of the "warblogging era" (on the left, at least) were Media Whores Online, Eschaton, Hullabaloo, and Billmon, all anonymous. The first art blogs, while not as covert as the political bloggers, tended to have handles such as Iconoduel, NEWSGrist, Bare and Bitter Sleep, etc. rather than proper names.

3. This is pretty, er, imaginative: "The surf clubs’ initial underdog status soon transitioned to one of institutional success for many members as venues like the Venice Biennale, the New Museum and a slew of international galleries endorsed club participants." Troemel makes no distinction between the club members's individual careers and their activities in the clubs, and greatly inflates "institutional success." A place in Miltos Manetas' "internet pavilion" is what Troemel means by "Venice Biennale"; the one-off IRL exhibition in Williamsburg is his link for "galleries" in that phrase "a slew of international galleries."

Just realized after using dump.fm and linking to posts there for several months that you can't view it on Internet Explorer. No one has exactly emailed to complain about getting the error message that "dump.fm only works with Firefox, Chrome or Safari ... (possibly Opera)." IE is famously non-compliant with international web standards but it is used by half the people in the world. It is especially likely to be used by workplace surfers during, uh, lunch breaks. Probably not worth mentioning but felt the need to make this disclaimer.

Brad Troemel (or is it Bret Schneider?) has another long footnoted screed up, this time tying a history of net art to Jurgen Habermas' notions of the "public sphere."

What is the point of having footnotes, though, if they don't actually support what you're saying? Troemel cites the internet surfing club Nasty Nets as an example of Habermas' "early bourgeoisie [sic] public sphere." (Hard to type that sentence and not laugh, since no one in the club makes a dime off of it.) Troemel claims that by Nasty's and other clubs' creation of "a meta-organizational structure within the internet"--this was around 2006--"not everyone would be able to participate in posting works, though many more viewers would be able to engage the work of prominent and emerging internet artists... due to the convenience of the clubs' unifying site of display." Yet one of the things that was often noted about Nasty Nets (within and without the group--speaking as a longtime user) was that it wasn't a platform for people's individual art, but everyone had some idea of a "good Nasty Nets post." Troemel acknowledges this, sort of ("surf clubs also espoused no specified intention beyond serving as a host environment to a series of visual-conceptual jests"), but then makes great hay of the idea that members had to be "qualified," as in having special talents or credentials. His footnote for that, a Guthrie Lonergan interview, doesn't really support that assertion, in fact would seem to contradict it. Here's the relevant passage from Lonergan:

In early 2006, I wanted to start some kind of Internet surfing community site with surf buddies John Michael Boling and Joel Holmberg. We rolled around a ton of different complex structural ideas, but we eventually decided to simply start a blog (duh). Marisa Olson helped us get it going... Basically, Nasty Nets was all the surfers I'd met through trading links on del.icio.us who'd already been developing a special "taste" in surfing: a fascination with defaults and a certain kind of banal deadpan. (I'll point to Travis Hallenbeck as the obvious best example of this kind of surfing.) It seemed like a wonderfully unpretentious and playfully nerdy thing to do, for artists who live in different parts of the world to unite though an online club. (Of course collectives Beige and Paper Rad were big influences here...) I love that every surf club seems to develop its own rhythm, even without setting forth any official goals or rules something coherent seems to develop organically (like a band). I think after a while, a lot of us felt like NN lost that rhythm and got too big... I've been praying that new surf clubs would pop up in its (temporary?) absence-- I'm really stoked for Kevin [Bewersdorf] and Paul [Slocum]'s new surf club, Spirit Surfers!

"Special taste in surfing" is meant to be sort of ironic here, I think. Am missing the part where Lonergan lays out qualifications for membership. It's semi-important to nail this down. If the surf clubs don't stand for what Troemel says they stand for ("contained unity"), then his arguments based on Habermas about the post-surf club environment being "a form of consensual affinity" make even less sense. Lonergan notes that the "club" (again, that's supposed to be ironic) had its origins in a shared bookmarking site anyone could sign up for, del.icio.us. How was the Nasty Nets "club" really different from a Yahoo! Group (where founders grant admin privileges--or not--to new members) or a YouTube playlist? Guthrie, John Michael, and Joel "curated" a group of surfers with whom they had "affinity." Tumblr and dump automate surfing and re-surfing to a much larger, faster degree, but a group blog is just another vehicle for how affinities are expressed in the Web 2.0 melee. The surf clubbers' "prominence" is mostly in the mind of the viewer--the props from one institutional site were nice but Troemel also vastly overstates its career-making potential.

Let's assume an image on a tumblr or in a blog post that you made is a form of painting, which many more people will likely see than your actual, physical artwork, unless you hook up with the right gatekeepers and survive 100 other hurdles.

Do you know the first thing about your medium? Duncan Alexander considers some properties of file types that can be read by most internet browsers in his post Let's Be Formal. Possibly you don't need to know any of this, but even if you use straight-from-the-tube paint and prestretched canvas it helps to know a little about the color wheel and different types of surfaces.

What about content? Is your painting automatically kitsch because it's on the internet? A couple of years ago Kevin Zucker discussed some of the "archetypes" buried in digital imaging programs (including "Lena," the Playboy pinup girl Duncan Alexander uses as a model in his post). In a response I wondered whether these "Pottery Barn knickknacks, Playboy foldouts [and] unimaginative nature photograph[s]" weren't still influencing digital expression in some way.

Inherent handicaps aside, the fact that some still question the kitsch factor suggests that the 1960s arguments between abstract expressionism and Pop still live and are currently working themselves out on the Internet.

According to this AP story a "team" of divers found a sunken ship captained by a naval officer who later went on to win a pivotal battle in the War of 1812. According to the divers (three amateurs with metal detectors) the sinking of the ship changed the course of history.

This was a national headline story today, covered by many news outlets.

Buried in the story is the information that (i) there's no proof they found the ship and (ii) it's doubtful how pivotal the sinking was. After losing the ship Revenge in the Atlantic, Oliver Hazard Perry was assigned to the Great Lakes and beat the British there. The amateurs claim this demotion was critical because a lesser officer couldn't have won in the Great Lakes. Wha--? The only actual historian quoted in the article politely suggests this is a BS theory.

Using sentences from the article, here's how the headlines should have been written:

Divers Haven't Discovered Ship's Bell or Anything Else Identifying It
"Whether or not there is another officer that could have done as well as Perry did is one of those 'might-have-beens' that historians are not prone to ask," historian says.