general

Humorless pink-shirted associate at T-Mobile: "How can I help you today?"
Rebellious sage: "I need some minutes for my phone."
Hpsaatm: "OK. Hmmm, whoops. I was going to help you using this tablet but there's no signal. Can you come with me over to the desk?"
Rs: "Yeah, those tablets are a really bad idea."
Hpsaatm: [Blank look with a hint of condescension]

a beat

Hpsaatm: "OK, the desk computer's up. What's the phone number?"
Rs: [Gives number]
Hpsaatm: "There's no name showing here."
Rs: "Right, it's one of those burner type deals."
Hpsaatm: "That's fine, I don't need the name. But we do recommend for your safety and security that you give us a name."
Rs: "Just out of curiosity, what could happen?"
Hpsaatm: "Someone could claim their phone was stolen and use your number if they had it."
Rs: "I've had the number for years and that's never happened -- I'll take the risk. In fact [feels a rant coming on] this is one of the last services where you don't have to give your name, and that's great. I assume it's because T-Mobile is a German company."
Hpsaatm: "Not anymore, it just became an American company."
Rs: "Well then, guess what -- the policy will change. This time next year you'll ask my name, address and Facebook."
Hpsaatm: "We just ask your name, that's all. Your reasons for not giving it are your business."

Update, February 2021: It took a while but T-Mobile appears to be out of the burner phone business. Rebellious sage is still able to buy minutes for his "legacy" burner phone but when it breaks the only way he'll be able to get a phone from this company is to buy a "plan" and give up all his contact info. Tracfone, here we come.

Continuing, from the thread on Rhizome about the panel topic "post-internet," a term that attempts to pull it all together without any consensus as to what it means (kind of like net art). Patrick Lichty said "we're flailing around, looking for a signpost." I said no we're not, and he said:

I think we've turned into an interesting galaxy of techno-media arts, and the people who I think who are flailing are not the artists, but select individuals who insist on trying to quantify things in an increasingly plural set of practices.

and yet

Diversity is a bitch to explain to the Board of Trustees or a collector. They like names.

So I chimed in:

On our panel in 2008 the NYC art gallerist Magda Sawon was in the audience and after listening to Petra Cortright, Damon Zucconi, and yrs truly talk about our work and what was happening on the group blogs she said, "I don't see anything new here, it's just the collage and the found object."
More than terminology, we need people who can see a bit more perceptively and help artists with the hard work of evaluating what's going on in these "cell" activities. This means learning more about people's processes in order to make distinctions between, say, found art and made art, between art and what Paul B. Davis called "instrument building," and between a "look" (such as what [James] Bridle mashed together) and actual core similarities in people's methods.
There's much to be done, and artists will continue to run the fork lifts and keep the bridges trussed while postindustrial panelists spin new unhelpful names for the infrastructure.

Patrick Lichty, in that post-pompous internet thread on Rhizome:

I find it sort of funny that Tom seems to have the appearance of a little intergenerational angst.

and

I'm just throwing this out, because I feel like I honestly don't have a clue anymore. I'm not looking for a new Dada Soiree or a Futurist Manifesto, but honestly, I ask WTF? at times... I'd really love to see some people take some risks that aren't aimed at commenting on the art world, art fairs or Marina Abramovic (I'm just as guilty as anyone else here).

and

Somehow, I just have this gut feeling that in the 'Post New Media' era, we're flailing around, looking for a signpost.

My response (response-ish because am not sure what Lichty's putting out there):

In the "sings the blogs" example above, "post-internet" was a rather trite way of saying your art was based on something the whole world was already reacting to. The other term was "internet aware art." When Guthrie Lonergan first used it, it was a joke: like, I think we're all pretty aware of the internet. Then people such as Ed Halter started saying it meant "art based on the internet" and Guthrie defined it again in a joking way, meaning art made with an idea to how it was going to look on the internet. Calling something a bullshit label isn't necessarily an intergenerational conflict. Artists younger than me also laugh at "post-internet."
There are good things keeping us occupied in this pre-"post-" stage. Just anecdotally, in my own recent experience:
I see people on dump.fm doing amazing work with Photoblaster and bon.gs and GIFmelter and it's all relatively new, or at least a relatively new mix of HTML5, canvas and/or jquery and the old filetypes that still work in browsers.
In Computers Club Drawing Society we use communally available drawing software (from the late '90s I think) to make new drawings on a blog: this isn't aggregating or archiving, the work is made from scratch with software that doesn't allow cloning, importing, or pasting screenshots, only digital drawing and painting.
I'm also involved with the modular synthesis revival where cottage industries are springing up to build small pieces of hardware that combine old-fashioned voltage control with Arduino boards, granular synthesis and other purely digital processing.
None of this is "post-" anything but it's also not New in the sense of a James Bridle repackaging well-known concepts to promote his own work. Just because there's no buzzword doesn't mean people are flailing.

Keyword: post-panels internet

kacie kim - 4 nov
is your mama a llama

mirrrroring 30 oct
definitely just googled 'pacific rim job' cuz i HAD to know if that existed (it does)

Herve Le Douche 23 oct
"Now more than ever, mobile devices are at the center of consumers' lives as they look to capture, curate and share experiences on the go,"

guthrie lonergan 22 Oct
man in suit ashing cigar vertically out of sunroof

Nullsleep 22 oct
My next album will be available in a variety of formats including concrete, steel, and blistered lamb leather.

Nullsleep 21 Oct
Weaponized Waveforms

Jeff Sisson 13 Oct
We’re seeing lots of investment in the “sunday styles bay area tech scene article” space

kacie kim 14 Sep
i'm tired of my animals

mashedpotatohead 11 Sep
someone please let me know when John McCain passes from his mad cow disease so I can fire up a stogie

Jon Williams 2 Sep
The life and times of minimal synth bros who wear pilgrim shoes everywhere

Nullsleep ‏26 Aug
The Captcha in the Rye

Jeff Sisson ‏14 Aug
my new one: SHARE THIS 666, “browser extension that replaces all Twitter/Facebook/Google share counts with 666”

Petra Cortright 11 Jul
never forget kittens distort into a cat

Jeff Sisson 29 Jun
did not know FT slogan is “We live in Financial Times”

Travis Hallenbeck 28 Jun

ｔ ｒ ａ ｖ ｉ ｓ

brian blomerth 24 Jun
I thought M.I.L.F. stood for...Mom I'd Like to Forgive...

Evan Ratliff 11 Jun
Stop. Turning. Each. Word. Into. A. Sentence. For jokey emphasis.

brian blomerth ‏10 Jun
Facebook's a fucking dust bowl

brian blomerth ‏@pupsintrouble 21 May
Stop actin like Seinfeld. Start actin like Christ.

brian blomerth 18 May
If you texted me in the last 24 hours i didnt get it-whats more is I don't care

M.E.S.H. ‏9 May
need super hifi samples of dry logs being snapped in two

Jeff Sisson 22 Apr
contemporary vinyl producers use “smart skips” which know when the DJ has to go to the bathroom

Am enjoying my solo conversation over in the Rhizome comments, where I put up this second installment in reply to Michael Connor's What's Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?

In the present post, Michael Connor makes a distinction between a Web 1.0 artist as modernist, idealistically seeking the innate language of the web, and post-Web 1.0 as post-modernist "interpreters, transcribers, narrators, curators, and architects." And somehow the increasing commercial sophistication of the web factors into this.

I didn't attend the first (2006) Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel but I was a panelist on the second (2008) version, along with Petra Cortright, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Tim Whidden and Damon Zucconi. ( https://vimeo.com/2183669 ) We were talking about surf clubs and at that point "Web 2.0" wasn't synonymous with Facebook but possibly Blogger and Myspace, which hadn't quite become the perfected advertising funnels social media is now.

Artist blogs were still a bit outside the commercial hurly burly. You weren't as indicted and implicated in the system on a Word Press blog then as you are with a Facebook page now. So there was a relative innocence to the discussion. I would say there was an equal mix of interest in making original content on and for the Web with stepping-outside-the-web-and-looking-askance at it.

I showed my "OptiDisc" GIF and using screenshots, demonstrated how it had been hotlinked on scores of other people's pages (Myspace, Livejournal, YouTube, etc), with the linkers not having any idea of its source other than that it was a "cool graphic." A kind of Calvino-esque invisible city of hotlinkers. I also showed a post from the Double Happiness blog of "rival snack squads," consisting of two very similar collections of multi-racial, mixed-gender, all-young-people cartoon characters used to personify Wise potato chips and the AMC movie chain (without actually being aware of each other). So we had 1.0, post 1.0, and commercialism all balled up in the same presentation. It seemed more innocent and hopeful, though in comparison to later essays admonishing artists to find their places in the "like economy."

Yet at the same time, that 2008 panel coincided with "Internet Week" and a commenter accused the older panelists of aiming their pitches at the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the audience. There were a few. One of them, I think, complimented me on "monetizing" the hotlinking of others by making fine art prints of their thefts, thus profiting from the pirates. I was somewhat dumbstruck, having not considered that aspect at all. (I was just thinking, how can I make the best display of this idea, I swear.)

The point of this reminiscence is to blur the lines of 1.0, post-1.0, and the commercial, which I think artists do, stepping all over curators' and historians' fine distinctions. So there.

Keyword: post-panels internet