general

The exhibition BITMAP: As Good As New, which originally ran at vertexList gallery in New York, travels to Philadelphia with a reception tomorrow, June 26. Details. The Leonard Perlstein Gallery at Drexel University hosts a screening of the movie 8 BIT at 4 pm, before the opening.

The 8 BIT scene has its own versions 1.0 and 2.0. (That versioning makes people mad so let's keep using it.) Version 1 is people opening game cartridges and reprogramming them to make art and music. Version 2 is people using default tools such as MSPaint to make pixel art and animations and posting them on blogs. The show contains both, but unlike the acrimonious discussions on the Rhizome.org discussion boards you don't often hear sentiments such as this expressed:

I think what may have upset some of the more process oriented artists who see computer language knowledge as a key to expression was being told they were an older version of something they really had no desire to be a part of.

Instead, the exhibition is one big happy family:

Cory Arcangel, Lee Arnold, Chris Ashley, Mike Beradino, Mauro Ceolin, Petra Cortright, Paul Davis, DELAWARE, Notendo (Jeff Donaldson), Eteam, Dragan Espenschied, Christine Gedeon, Kimberley Hart, Daniel Iglesia, JODI, Olia Lialina, LoVid, Kristin Lucas, David Mauro, Jillian Mcdonald, Tom Moody, Aron Namenwirth, Mark Napier, Nullsleep, Marisa Olson, Will Papenheimer, Prize Budget for Boys, jimpunk, Akiko Sakaizumi, Paul Slocum, Eddo Stern and CJ Yeh.

However, if Version 2 received institutional sanction this harmony would instantly collapse.

If you hate Matthew Barney--and who doesn't?--you might enjoy these stills from Creamistress 6: The Centered Polenta. The artist is Carolyn Sortor.

Exculpatory compliment to Barney: the biotech surrealism of some of his sculptures and images resonates even though the films are too slow and wooden and as the Village Voice noted, editing is not their strong suit. In any case, the vids are effectively self-parodying in their arty pomposity so I hadn't considered that someone could do a brutal takeoff on them 'til seeing Sortor's video stills. (Haven't seen the vid but I almost feel the stills are enough since Barneys are just a series of stills anyway.)

Standing in for Barney is a slightly overweight middle aged man in a tutu with orange hair and ice cream cone horns--yes! At the climax he bends over and some women dominatrixes in garb recalling 2001: A Space Odyssey flight attendants' eat a birthday cake off his backside. Then a gratuitous shot of a vaginal cave entrance in the western US with Orange Hair in his civilian, tourist duds, then some psychedelic end titles. The sleek look of Barneys becomes laughably dated mis-en-scene. It's the perverse future not of a genetically altered, gender-confused mythic dystopia but the '70s high kitsch of Woody Allen's Sleeper. This is "abject Barney" done right.

The question of whether someone is a first or second generation "net artist" is causing some anxiety over at Rhizome.org, the New Museum's net internet art affiliate. Matthew Williamson suggested that a quiz might be helpful, so here it is:

Quiz:
1. Do you know who Marcel Duchamp is?*
2. Do you know who Roland Barthes is?
3. Do either of them have any bearing on art practice?
4. Does an artist who uses a computer have to be able to "program" it?
5. Is a blog a multiple choice format?
6. Does a blog limit artistic expression?
7. Is "finding" enough or must one also "make?"
8. Which is more interesting, the network or the content on the network?
9. Is a scan of a photo of a painting on a blog "net art"?
10. Which is better, blog pages that change every day or static, fixed pages?
11. Which is better, pages where new content is at the top or pages where you have to hunt for the content?
12. Is speed a virtue on the Internet or is slowness a valid experience?
13. Broken links: cool or uncool?
14. Which is the best way to communicate--email ListServs or blog comments?
15. Is the design of a page more important or the content on the page?
16. Are default templates unartistic?
17. Are computers good and are they helping us to be a better species?
18. Should every artwork question its own means of implementation?
19. Is an artwork an individual statement in space and time or could it be cumulative?
20. When a group of artists agree on a set of conventions is that significant or insignificant?

*Sorry, there are no answers to the quiz. The purpose is to help us formulate them. The first two questions are especially snotty but it seemed to me that much blog discussion at Rhizome was either oblivious to these two thinkers (who are fairly central to the the gallery art world's "conceptual" practice) or dismissive of them. Duchamp, mother of the readymade or "found object" is an obvious touchstone; Barthes is mentioned for his analysis of wrestling and other lowbrow forms.)

Update: A number of people answered the questions, starting here.

An earlier post talked about the Web as "consumer's medium."

Characterizing it that way is sacrilege to the tech community gospel that TV and radio are "one way, passive" media while the Net is active and productive. But even old Rhizome.org hand Alexander Galloway talks in his book Protocol about how seductive roaming among hyperlinks is. (From his tone he seems more disposed to transgressive disruption of same in the manner of old school net artists jodi.org.)

Other artists encountering this flowing, sensational, “fascinating” (in the Baudrillardian sense) environment view it as a *success* of the post-dot com era, creating an inexhaustible pool of potential subject matter.

The best differentiation I've seen of late 90s Net Art and the present bunch: the former was interested in the mechanics of the network and made art about that. "What is a hyperlink and can we mess with that?" "What are the social implications of networks?" etc. The latter crew views the Net as a "medium that works across media" (Damon Zucconi's phrase) so that artists are dealing with the Net and its status as a medium but also all the content it touches (video, music, digital painting, photography, and emerging hybrid forms). The goals are larger and more ambitious but also more difficult.

The old Modernist ideal of working through past art to arrive at your own becomes especially troublesome within this suddenly exponentially expanded field.

The blog VVork exemplifies a new type of art "statement" based on endless, voracious consumption that has the (perhaps unintended) consequence of making the quest for originality seem silly. The curators scour the net for examples of conceptual-style art that is readily documentable in the form of photos and short video clips. Most of the accompanying one or two sentence explanations are lifted off the artists’ sites. They are posting several hundred artworks a year in this fashion. They consume and we watch over their shoulders. They don’t alter anything, they don’t editorialize, and their comment feature is rarely used. As “fellow consumers” we have to decide if the consumables have value.

The bloggers and surf clubs discussed at the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel follow a similar model. But instead of stoically re-creating the art world online, they are opening themselves to a galaxy of experience that could potentially be considered art, while at the same time subversively slipping in their own content.

Some of the first generation Internet artists have knickers in twists about the term "Net Art 2.0" for online art in the era of blogging, YouTube, and social bookmarking.

"Art cannot be versioned!" cries one. "It doesn't really communicate anything except a suggestion that Net Art 2.0 is in some way an improvement over Net Art 1.0," wails another.

But... but... Historians do make value distinctions among movements. Monet's and Seurat's Impressionism benefited from increased understanding of optics and color theory, improving on the stale classicism of their peer William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Renaissance perspective leapfrogged over the crude schema learned in Gothic form books. Greek statuary grew more lifelike than Cycladic totems, and so on.

The first generation of Internet art consisted of a small inner circle furtively communicating on ListServs, doing online versions of Douglas Huebler style conceptualism, spouting Frankfurt School quotes at each other, and boasting about their programming skills. The current generation is trying to wrap its collective head around an ungovernable explosion of online content and doesn't have time to worry about grabbing history by the neck in the way of those earlier, frightened scolds.* The present movement is bigger, broader, more porous, and more generous. It uses "defaults" unashamedly, taking advantage of improved media platforms and increased bandwidth. With greater interconnection and connections to the world outside the art world, new hybrid forms are blossoming.

But... but... As far as naming this better, happier moment, "Net Art 2.0" can only be ironic. How often is a software upgrade a real advance over the prior version? Usually it's just minor tweaks because capitalism demands new models coming off the assembly line each fall.

Whereas the difference between first and second gen Net Art is more in the nature of a Kuhnian paradigm shift. More on this as we go.

*Eloquent descriptions have been made of the new work but until the present post they have lacked a movement-aware, defensive tone. The present post is the result of being put on a panel where mad dogs were expected to fight (we didn't) and a couple of horrible subsequent weeks trying to reason with the squawking on the Rhizome discussion boards. (Surf clubs called "teenage goth nerds," bloggers compared to George Bush because they aren't open source enough, etc. One member of the old guard offered this helpful suggestion--not an actual quote but how I translate it: "Net Art 2.0 makes me sound dated, but I like 'post-Net Art,' which you makes you sound late getting on the bus.")