general

Let's keep talking about the phrase "internet aware art."
Two senses of the term are in use:

1) Offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind. (A behavioral quirk observed by the artist* who originally coined the phrase).

2) Offline art that is influenced by online conventions, trends, and jargon. (This is mostly a theory in search of artists, where curators look for examples of non-tech art informed by tech concerns. "We know the internet must be changing art, so let's go find examples. Look, here's a sculpture that uses the letters 'OMG'--it's perfect. I'm sure the artists weren't aware that this is what we were looking for.")

Both senses of "internet aware art" are present on the Vvork website, and suspect:

An example of the first type: this installation called Turbo by Baptiste Debombourg. The sheetrock of a gallery wall bulges surrealistically like a hand or head emerging from a TV in David Cronenberg's movie Videodrome, almost to the point of touching a conveniently placed viewer. The drywall is cracking but miraculously retains its convex shape during this real space morph. Neat idea but it doesn't need to exist as a piece--you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the "product" being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic's visit who noticed the piece only "read" from a couple of angles and didn't hold up to more than a few seconds' study? Vvork means never having to explain--success is presumed.

An example that combines both types of Internet Aware Art: Also very jpeg-friendly, this installation by Martin Pfeifle, titled about:blank, consisting of stressed-past-the-point-of-cracking wood (reminiscent of Kai Vierstra's work) that appears to be circulating around the walls of a gallery space. "about:blank" is Internet jargon, a command to load a blank page into a browser, to use as an "inline" frame (an HTML page within an HTML page), which can then be modified by scripts. By calling his installation "about:blank" Pfeifle wants you to think about internet browsing and how it relates to his hand-made, three dimensional work: the gallery wall is the page; the wood is the inline frame; the cracking is--the script? A virus? Time to go read the press release.

(*Have not consulted with Guthrie Lonergan on any of this--he may hate it.)

from Brenna on Nasty Nets: Futuristic Control Panels

A selection of wooden cabinets for the den or family room, each of which features an enormous flatscreen TV surrounded by domestic books and knickknacks.

Compare to Barbara Gallucci's photo project, where she photographed the "TV nook" under the stairs in a typical Levittown home and what owners are doing with the nook 40 years later. In case the meme has faded, Levittown is "the first and one of the largest mass-produced suburbs... a symbol of postwar suburbia," per Wikipedia.

The TV was smaller then but no less a spaceship artifact in the suburban little house on the prairie. Most of the people in Levittown filled in their nooks with something else, as shown in Gallucci's photos. Mainly because of the awkwardness of the stairwell placement--presumably their big flatscreens are elsewhere in the room now.

The flatscreen/widescreen phenomenon spreads like a disease, not just in homes. Every bar has one. Even office computers, which presumably aren't being used to watch Lawrence of Arabia or play videogames, are now coming equipped with font-stretching widescreens. The screens get bigger but '50s-style conformity never goes away.

Have been enjoying the writing on the blog Post Internet.

A dissenting remark: the author misinterprets Guthrie Lonergan's phrase "internet aware art" based on a interview Lonergan gave (where he didn't define the term) as opposed to a more recent public talk (where he did give a definition). See discussion on Rhizome. Post Internet subscribes to Marisa Olson's idea in her piece Netacronyms and this interview of an art based on internet jargon and conventions, whereas Lonergan was talking about art made offline with an eye to how it would look on the internet (for example on the website Vvork, where art is represented by a single installation shot and compelling tag line). The latter is a more subtle and caustic notion.

A quibble: Post Internet's recent analysis of Travis Hallenbeck's Tinypic Video Thumbnails, an 85 page artist’s book and .pdf, is excellent but mistakes the source of the thumbnails collected in the book. It is not YouTube, which PI gives considerable space to describing, but a less-well-known image and video hosting service called Tinypic. Tinypic is very popular with children, which explains the prevalence of "youthful goofing around and skateboarding." Unlike YouTube it doesn't use the middle frame of the video for a screen shot. The screen shots that Hallenbeck chose for his book are generated by some automatic, server-side process (the selected thumbnail frame seems to be occurring about two seconds into the video) but this makes PI's discussion of the folklore of the middle frame mostly superfluous.

Update: Deleted some portions of this post. Still thinking about some of the issues of post-internet art.

Update 2: Ha, whoops, the pre-edited version of this post was picked up by a spam blog and showed up in Post Internet's trackback. PI revised the Hallenbeck post, splitting it into two, a discussion of the YouTube middle frame and a discussion of Hallenbeck's Tinypic thumbnail book. PI has also added an afterward to the post referencing "internet aware art." More on that later.

Update 3: Forgot an intermediate step in the timeline of critical massaging of the term "internet aware art." After the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel in 2008 at the New Museum, Paddy Johnson mentioned Ed Halter's use of the term and Lonergan commented: "'internet aware artist' is partially a sarcastic joke, because everyone is supposedly quite aware of the internet (but the art is not yet.) i’d bet its the same thing that you were/are talking about, Marisa, can’t wait to hear your response in rhizome board dudeland." A year later, in his Light Industry talk, he proposed the "art made for the net" definition.

"Hoarding" is definitely a topic in the air--why are we suddenly obsessed with obsession?
There's the TV show Hoarders (Bill Schwarz says they need to meet the Pickers--ha ha).
Wikipedia has an entry on digital hoarding.
Seth Price in his entertaining but incoherent Teen Image essay also talked about hoarding in the digital context.
OK, that's all, gotta get back to my stuff.

Show me a corporate executive who says he has stopped printing manuals for his products or who wants you to do online billing to "save the trees" and I'll show you a liar.
It's about cost savings, which will not be passed on to you.
So sick of these lies--they are everywhere.
Greenwashing BS. Make it stop.

Update: If banks and credit card issuers are so concerned with trees they could stop stuffing promotional materials into their billing envelopes...