Telic Arts Exchange

Distributed Gallery 1

Tom Moody

Printed 2009 in the United States of America

927B Chung King Road

Los Angeles, CA 90012

(213) 344-6137

www.thepublicschool.org

www.telic.info

Directors: Sean Dockray & Fiona Whitton

Book Design: Sean Dockray & Cybelle Tondu

Cover photograph: Mason Fong, 2009

Conversion to epub, Tom Moody, 2016

Introduction

Every exhibition at the Distributed Gallery is accompanied by a conversation. There are no press releases, curatorial texts, or anything of that sort--just a fairly in-depth conversation, which is what follows this introduction.

The Distributed Gallery, of course, has no place. There is no at, or there are several ats: at the time of this writing they are on top of a cabinet at Fong’s, on a book display table at Ooga Booga, at the entrance to The Public School, and in the back hallway next to the bathrooms at Via Cafe. It is situated in little bits of the real world, or otherwise non-art gallery places (although the operators of these establishments may take issue with the classification).

Televisions can fit in anywhere, but always seem out of place. In the last day, I’ve seen television screens at the gas station next to the pumps, in an aisle at the supermarket, in my bedroom, on the bus, and across from the counter at the corner store. The stuff on these televisions is similarly diverse, from trivia to the news to racy Asian cinema to Lost.

The people that have agreed to make a show for the Distributed Gallery (not always artists or curators) have agreed to dive into this messy (but extremely familiar) territory and simultaneously participate in the conversation mentioned above.

Although the transcript has been edited and rearranged, the text that follows remains faithful to the original exchange.

Interview

ISSUE I. Relationship of art to blogging

Sean Dockray: Can you describe how your artwork and your blog are related to one another?

Tom Moody: The best analogy is a DJ who is also a producer. You make tracks that are meant to stand alone (on a CD or internet player) as your creative work but can also be "slipped into a set." With added "meta" layers that blogging gives you--being able to comment on your own work and others' and how you see them interrelating.

SD: And you literally are making music that you've been distributing through your blog too--it's not just an analogy. But also you will also write political commentary, film reviews, critical art history, etc. It's more diverse and strained [multi-stranded? --tm] than your analogy lets on, I think. What do you leave out?

TM: Things that are adequately covered in the mainstream media: sports, tips on relationships and dieting, celebrity news, fashion. Am not being entirely flip, here, I am conscious of topics being over-covered and have a taste for the obscure, nerdy stuff.

SD: What kinds of subject matter, or attitudes, or people do you tend to leave alone?

TM: As you noted, the blog is inclusive. Besides the aforementioned subjects the media beats us over the head with, I guess what I omit reflects my unconscious biases and blind spots. Consciously I avoid personal, touchy-feely stuff, posting photos of myself, and I struggle not to write in the first person. It's not for shyness. The media always wants to put a face and a brandable personality with creative products and that gets very old.

SD: How finished does one of your images, songs, gifs, etc. need to be for you to post it?

TM: Pretty finished. If it is work in process it will usually be identified as such.

SD: Are they ever too finished to post?

TM: No, I'm not holding anything back. Certainly some art things I've done can't be experienced online--a DJ set with a good sound system or a room with wall-sized video or paintings. But within the limits of the blog/internet I'm going full throttle.

SD: Have you read this book? http://aaaarg.org/nicolas-bourriaud-postproduction. I used to push it on friends and students.

TM: I haven't, only excerpts. I'm familiar with Bourriard from artists and bloggers reacting to him and commenting on him. Also his Relational Aesthetics.

SD: What I liked at the time was that he was talking about art that was interactive or responding to cultural changes brought about by the Internet and computers, but he didn't include any properly "new media" work (XYZ art?). He uses the DJ and the programmer as analogies to elaborate his idea of postproduction, but there is little work he discusses that would be acceptable in most tech-art programs. But, do you think he's being a little conservative by not including computer art?

TM: There is a tendency in the decelerated art world to use the computer as a metaphor without actually touching the damn thing. It may not be conservatism so much as ignorance or the fear of making a judgment in unfamiliar territory. We are constantly having our radical-ness tested: we get the critical gist of sampling but not, say, hyperlinking. As for Bourriaud's ideas, I think I tend to practice relational aesthetics (a refried concept from the '70s) more than I believe in it. As an artist I'm interested in finished, stand-alone works but the blog is sloppily gregarious and incorporates and reacts to what other people are doing.

SD: To me, one of the most interesting things about the recent popular net art (as opposed to net.art) is the way it emphasizes use over creation (I'm cribbing from that Bourriaud book now, I guess, but he would say post-production instead of production). It's refreshing not to have art discourse revolving around how someone did something technically, and with GIFs it's usually not a mystery. But at the same time, there is still a significant element of competition or attention-seeking, and definitely a place for the "how did you do that?" conversations. Basically, I'm really interested in going more into what you['ve] said about the social nature of GIF-making, of blog-writing, etc.

Maybe an easy way to dive more into it is to explain the difference between your blogging on your own weblog, versus on Nasty Nets?

TM: Agreed there is a place for the "how did you do that?" conversations but there is surprisingly little tech talk about GIFs and other "internet folk art" on the sites I've participated in (such as Nasty Nets) or follow (such as cpb.tumblr). On my old blog (more on that below) I had a fair amount of interesting how-to dialog going on in my comments but with Nasty a tacit agreement quickly developed that we weren't going there. Just post things and riff back and forth, and leave the viewer to suss out who made something and how it was made. On my current blog, though, I'm constantly talking about process.

ISSUE II. Relationship of art to blogging (showing whole blog in gallery)

SD: I remember reading that you actually showed your weblog within a gallery context. Was that interesting for you?

TM: It was hard work! I did my normal blogging routine as a performance piece. A computer was installed in the project space at artMovingProjects gallery in Brooklyn, and visitors could talk with me via comments, which were an active part of my blog at the time. It was kind of a goof on interactive installations but I took it seriously in terms of being conscious of gallery hours and wanting to be as entertaining as possible during those time frames. I upped my quotient of animated GIFs so at any given moment there was some new, hopefully confectionary thing beckoning from the gallery pedestal.

SD: Am I remembering correctly that you were throwing out questions about whether you could sell it? The performance itself, the blog posts you made, the whole blog, the computer with its browser history, any of it. I'm not trying to say it can't be commodified because rich people will find a way to buy anything. But did anything "out of the ordinary" happen during the process? For example, if someone bought your blog out from under you, that would have been highly unusual. Were there any non-standard interactions that you had with people? I'm wondering what you got out of it.

TM: The question "how are you going to sell it?" surfaced on my blog comments and I gave my answer. By way of recapitulating that: A buyer was considering the piece (it was ultimately too much for him, I think, or too little...I don't really know his thought process). He wouldn't have bought it out from under me, in any case: what was for sale was the month-long performance, documented on DVD with the HTML pages and associated files (GIFs, mp3s, etc) for each day of BLOG, the piece. An edition of three, as I recall. What I get out of it remains to be seen. The art work is still on the market and a certain precedent has been set for thinking of blogging as an art-bounded performance work. Other people had put blogs in galleries before, but not where the blog was a disembodied surrogate for an actual breathing artist who was thinking about that particular space (among other things) and interacting with it in real time.

SD: Yeah, by "get out of it" I was thinking about two things at once: (1) You called it "hard work," and I really do believe that when blogging becomes a performance it is a lot of work. I'm curious how this economy of generating content for free (which is often capitalized on by MySpace, or whoever) will go, and how it relates to art production. (2) By setting up this unusual situation in the gallery, I wondered if you got a new type of interaction, strange experiences, different ideas about what your blog was doing, etc.

TM: As I said a few years ago (and I think it still holds up): "My blog is a combination of things--studio diary, ongoing documentation of past work, and a place for work-in-process, as well as collaborations, original pieces made for the web, and mini-curated exhibitions of things I like (of both an art and a web-oddity nature). I'm interested in the crossover of visual art, tech, electronic music, film, science fiction, and politics and not just replicating the art world online, with all its ancient structures and restrictions." With BLOG I extended this laboratory environment into a gallery space--kind of a road show that didn't actually involve travelling.

It also got more semantically convoluted. At some points I was blogging about BLOG on BLOG. That was pretty interesting to me, and I was gratified that at least one writer picked up on how absurdly recursive it was.

SD: Is [the idea of BLOG] still interesting [to you]?

TM: I would do it again, in the right venue. To some extent the piece could not be done again the same way, though. Shortly after the end of it I stopped posting at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody, which was my blog from 2001 to 2007, and which had comments, and moved to a commentless Word Press blog at http://tommoody.us, where I've been working since. I really can't say how much of that was a reaction to the intensity of doing BLOG. It was draining, both creatively, and in terms of the load of moderating comment threads, which were active during the show.

SD: I remember the transition. There was a time when I was being reactionary and I hated weblogs. But then I became a fan of yours because it had active comments and the discussions were often pretty thoughtful. I even participated in a few of the discussions under a generic screenname. When you moved to no comments I was a little disappointed, but I think you made an observation that has grown on me: it's a lot of work to deal with spam; and discussion operates on the Internet across sites, without necessarily needing a "comments" section. Could you elaborate on that (or correct me if I'm wrong)?

TM: Comments impose a power relationship: bloggers can edit and take their time but commenters generally can't. People assume the blogger is deleting comments s/he doesn't like (I only did it with abusive/obviously psychopathic statements I didn't feel I had an obligation to host--but was amazed from some recent Rhizome discussions to read that people think moderators delete comments willy-nilly. If I had done that I would have no commenters.)

My current mindset is, since blogs are easy to get and run, a good way to have a conversation is with hyperlinks between blog posts where everyone can produce with a "home court advantage." This isn't very spontaneous but better for the kind of writing/thinking I'm most interested in. The conversations can also be visual: e.g., mixing and remixing others' GIFs. Or musical. This is happening, it's not entirely a wish.

ISSUE III. Translating art from blog to public space (specific GIFs)

TM: A question for you, Sean. For the Distributed Gallery show, will you be using DVD players to display art in the host locations, or will it be possible to display a GIF (as a GIF or rendered as a Quicktime) from a computer hard drive? I'm curious how my GIF imagery will be displayed for reasons of sizing, resolution, etc.

SD: It will be halfway in between actually. We are using these little Compact Flash video players that were recently donated to us from the Gettys California Video show. I believe they are usually meant for playing looping advertisements on buses or in supermarkets or at gas stations. For our purposes, they will behave more or less like a DVD player, but we can drag and drop video files from a computer onto the CF card and play right away. I need to look at one to see the make and model to let you know about resolution, frame rate, preferred encoding, etc. But my impression is that it is similar to a DVD. I will follow up about this in the next couple of days.

TM: Almost every show I've done lately involves a different way of translating or adapting the animated GIFs on my blog for display in public space, with a unique set of technical issues that changes the art in some way, requires workarounds, and potentially leads to new content (or disaster).

SD: Here is a quick FAQ for the players: http://www.medeawiz.com/faq_details/faq_dv68.htm. [player accepts .mpg files used in the DVD process to make MPEG 2 files, the DVD standard]

TM: Thanks. Do you know what kind of monitors you will be using? Here's the problem. Animated GIFs look crisp and simple on a computer screen but the process of converting them to MPEG so they can be played on DVD players makes them mushier. I've been able to make the mush less noticeable by showing the converted GIFs on cathode ray (CRT) screens. It hides the anti-aliasing and artifacts and adds some additional visual "oomph." If you are using LCDs for the Distributed Gallery the compression of the GIFs will be more noticeable. Not a big deal, I just wanted to make you aware of it.

SD: This is fine with me. I am actually a little less interested in purity of the images (or faithfulness to the original medium) than I am in what happens through the translation into something else. We've talked a bit about how so much material from the "world" is translated into gifs, blogs, discussions, etc. Not so much yet about the reverse (although I think this comes through strongly in the work, as well as the 2D images that you post of your studio -- world back onto net). As it turns out, there will be 3 CRT screens and one fairly small LCD flatscreen. The flatscreen is necessary for fitting within the changing room of a tiny store, Ooga Booga. There really isn't much volume in there to accommodate a TV!

TM: That's great to hear about the TVs. My concern with the presentation details isn't so much about faithfulness to the GIF. It's about wanting a good art experience as opposed to a half-baked one in the debased medium of "MPEG 2." My hope is that the unfamiliarity of a looping computer animation on a TV set in a non-art setting will be enough to make up for a loss of impact the images might suffer through multiple translations.

SD: [Well,] I feel like this translation between mediums, contexts, situations, whatever, is an important part of your work. I asked you to do this show assuming that you would show moving images that refer to, if not belong on the Internet. I imagined your animated gifs on a television in an antiques shop, in the back hallway at a cafe. I'm actually curious how you feel about GIFs becoming a stranger in their own land--they were super common on the Internet just a few years ago, but now with YouTube and other ways of watching video, they're verging on obsolescence. Obviously there's a long history in art of aestheticizing the recently outmoded--how has it been working with something that is passing from ubiquitous to something of an oddity?

TM: Verging on obsolescence? Au contraire, GIFs are flashing in the backgrounds of YouTube user pages and next to millions of chatboard screen names on the net. Animated GIFs are an integral part of many commercial web pages and they also have a large and devoted culture of makers and appreciators on the artist side. Sites such as http://gifanime.tumblr.com/, http://lalblog.tumblr.com/, Mike's Digital Pog Page, the aforementioned http://cpb.tumblr.com/ and Nasty Nets, are all recent sites that mix artist and non-artist made animations in GIF form. These are not net.artists pining for the old Web but essentially the next generation.

Again, quoting earlier writing: "Animated GIFs have evolved into a kind of ubiquitous 'mini-cinema,' entirely native to the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Almost anyone can make one and almost every browser will read them. In other words, no YouTube compression, no wait time, no subscriptions or proprietary formats to view, and they can be made in the most elementary and cheap imaging programs. They are the purest expression of the democratic web and along with JPEGs and PNGs comprise its most authentic visual language." (see http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/08/05/img-mgmt-psychotronic-gifs/)

Judging from my stats I have hundreds of thousands of GIF loads from my site every year; many of these are not from my blog but hotlinked from my directory. I did an art installation where I captured 60 different uses of one GIF from my site by people on the open Web: http://www.tommoody.us/panel-notes/

SD: That installation looks fantastic!

"Mini-cinema" is interesting. It obviously evokes all the pre-cinematic display technologies from zoetropes to phenakistoscopes and praxiniscopes and a million other scopes and tropes. And they share a looping animation structure, as well as silence (which means sound, if added, comes from elsewhere).

And if you bought a zoetrope back in the day, it wouldn't be hard to draw your own. But what do you mean by "native"? (Alexander Galloway often makes use of that word for protocol, for some reason.)

I agree with you about the gifs being kind of ubiquitous--and I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about them--but what do you make of the shift in the web vernacular to Flash and CSS and PDF's from GIF's and HTML? Do you think GIFs have more staying power because they are kind of marginal (or ornamental, or peripheral, I'm not sure which is the best word here) parts of a web page?

(An aside, because I'm not sure: Isn't GIF a proprietary format? I remember banging my head against the monitor trying to create animated gifs from programs. I blamed it on Compuserve!)

TM: Thanks for the kind words about the installation. The GIF patent lapsed a few years ago so they are now open source. There was once a controversy about them, outraged web pages, etc, but that's all over. By native I mean belonging to the web as opposed to the movie industry, books, music, TV, etc. The GIF evolved as a low res graphic format for web pages and they really have no other use. They have staying power, I believe, because every browser reads them with a minimum of fuss.

If you are viewing pages with GIFs on an outdated workplace operating system it will not tell you that "additional software is required to view" or "ActiveX controls are disabled for this file" or "do you want to check for software updates?" as often happens with video or streaming media. Browsers just load them, promptly, and that's it. I realize this may not always be true, as the CSS and Adobe conspiracies make us all more dependent on paid designers and bloated retail software.

Regarding 'mini-cinema' and silent movies, I just learned that several of my GIFs will be screened (along with Olia Lialina's, Paul Slocum's, and some others') with a piano accompaniment for an event in Chicago. The music is described as "Italian futurist piano." I'd love to be there to see/hear it.

Appendix

(selected blog posts and comments by Tom Moody)

a. Psychotronic GIFs

b. BITMAP Catalog: A Response

c. Thoughts on a Nasty Nets Post

d. Quiz

e. Net Aesthetics Trial Balloons (excerpt)

f. Comment on “Massive Links! Events and Essential Web Documents Edition”

a. Psychotronic GIFs

www.artfagcity.com/2008/08/05/img-mgmt-psychotronic-gifs/

From Art Fag City, August 5, 2008: IMG MGMT is an artist essay series highlighting the diversity of curatorial processes within the art making practice. Today’s invited artist Tom Moody shows at artMovingProjects in New York, maintains the blog tommoody.us, and recently exhibited videos in the Dallas Video Festival.

Animated GIFs have evolved over the last several years into a kind of ubiquitous “mini-cinema,” entirely native to the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Almost anyone can make one and almost every browser will read them. (From Wikipedia: “the Graphics Interchange Format is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.”) In other words, no YouTube compression, no wait time, no subscriptions or proprietary formats to view, and they can be made in the most elementary and cheap imaging programs (free if you search for open source). GIFs are the purest expression of the democratic web and along with JPEGs and PNGs comprise its most authentic visual language.

As an artist I am attracted to this medium and have been making and posting GIFs for several years. This mini-cinema can be “scaled up” for galleries and film festivals but it’s equally fun to surrender it to the big pool of home-made creations that circulates on the Web. It’s gratifying to find GIFs you made yourself circulating on the pages of strangers months or years later. I don’t consider this “mail art”--it is too chaotic and lacks that practice’s genre rules. At the same time I do consider it a legit and underexamined form of post-studio art. My main point of comparison is Jim Shaw’s “Thrift Store Paintings” show at Metro Pictures gallery (also the book), for the questions that show raised regarding authorship and taste in the art world.

“Psychotronic” is a term coined by writer and low-budget film buff Michael Weldon to describe a certain type of movie:

Psychotronic films range from sincere social commentary to degrading trash. They concern teenagers, rock and roll, juvenile delinquents, monsters, aliens, killers, spies, detectives, bikers, communists, drugs, natural catastrophes, atomic bombs, the prehistoric past, and the projected future. They star ex-models, would be Marilyns, future Presidents (and First Ladies), dead rock stars, and has-beens of all types.

…according to the intro to The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, 1983. The great thing about “psychotronic” is it is in the eye of the beholder--it could be a quality of weirdness in an otherwise “normal” film. (Although there is some dispute about this among Weldon and subsequent users of the term--it doesn’t appear to have been trademarked by Weldon and is also used by a film society of that name. The term originally came from a film called The Psychotronic Man.)

For this IMG MGMT essay I present a smaller pool of mostly psychotronic GIFs. About half are ones I made (or remixed) and half are ones I found on the Internet and saved. My site tells which is which but here I have numbered them a1, a2, etc as a gesture to the “authorless” quality of their web milieu. All of them are subject to whatever copyright claims adhere to their original publication source, so I will remove them or attribute them if you so request in the comments, and I ask that you not use any of them for commercial purposes (as if!).

GIF fans know that there is a lot sicker material out there. Gruesome actual deaths, bestiality, coprophagy (yum), etc. Psychotronic films, while not exactly family fare, generally avoid the hardcore and the abyss. Exploitation, fine, but there is nothing easier than a “money shot.”

b. BITMAP Catalog: A Response

http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/08/02/bitmap-catalog-a-response/

The catalog essay “Bitmap and Vector,” by “BITMAP” curator Marcin Ramocki, explores the two main ways of making images digitally. Ramocki posits them as central metaphors, or markers, in hyper-stimulated, hyper-simulated (i.e., post-Baudrillardian) visual culture. The essay is eloquent and informative but seems to be leading up to a conclusion rather at odds with the artists chosen for the exhibit: “The vector is the more revolutionary visual unit so the artists in this show follow the path of retrenchment.”

Kidding, sort of, he doesn’t really say that, but Ramocki’s gallery is called vertexList, which is a term from vector graphics, and there is a notable uptick in his prose excitement when describing those graphics that is perhaps lacking in his description of stodgy old horizontal-and-vertical, reality-based bitmaps. (In brief, bitmaps are grids of dots called pixels, similar to photographic “grain,” while vector imaging is based on drawing curves to define shapes. Photoshop is bitmap based and Illustrator and Flash are vector based. The latter use “handles” to draw Bezier curves defined by points called “vertices.”)

Here’s where Ramocki really gets cooking:

Vector image essentially does away with the necessity of the “real” and the photo-optical referent. It is a child of a purely virtual formation process and a “perfect simulation,” to continue the Baudrillard reference. Unlike the Photoshop filtering process that “tricks” the photo to look a certain way via a chain of intricate algorithms, a vector is infinitely pliable and non-photographic--any vertex can be repositioned along with the handles at any point. There is no claim of optical proximity to some existing universe; there is only design for its own sake.

This blog admits a certain bias for bitmaps (because they are dumb) and basic ignorance regarding vector graphics. I admired the vector-inspired “graphics revolution” of the ‘90s, as wrought by such collectives as Designers Republic and Buro Destruct, but still prefer the look of GIFs to the ultra-smoothness of Flash and the output of crappy pixel-based imaging programs such as MSPaint and Paintbrush to the sleek gradient fodder of Adobe Illustrator.

“BITMAP” has about 30 artists working with pixel-based reduction, craft, and image-dismantling. One hopes that Ramocki can one day round up all the artists bending time, space, and human understanding with vector (Paper Rad?) for a companion show: “Bitmap vs Vector: Who Will Win?”

c. Thoughts on a Nasty Nets Post

http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/06/26/thoughts-on-a-nasty-nets-post/

The following was originally posted as a comment to the somewhat fruitless Net Art 1.0 vs Net Art 2.0 discussion at Rhizome.org (http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/37549#52671). The "old guard" Internet art crowd has been characterizing the art on the newer group blogs such as Nasty Nets as "ironically posting links to existing media on a group blog" and asking for more explanation of why this was art, or Internet art, while at the same time saying that NN was just a later version of stuff they'd been doing for years. You can't really take both positions. The following stabs at the issue by examining a specific post from Nasty Nets on April 1. It's been rewritten slightly.

Petra Cortright had this post by Javier Morales (http://nastynets.com/?p=1498) onscreen for a while during the recent Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel, and I think it's brilliant. Using very simple means (screen shots of Google search results and some html scrolling), it tackles sexual content in a very distanced, fetishistic way--the words "penis" and "vagina," in boldface, slowly move towards and away from each other in a configuration that is both a mirror and conflict. It is a snapshot of current culture: some earnest websites such as democraticunderground.com, cybersleuths, and cvcorner are captured only because they use the word penis or vagina and google finds them. There are accompanying thumbnail images that seem to have no connection to the words underneath them--did google do this or the artist? Plus snippets of text, moving just slowly enough to be read: "or is the penis a very large clit?" "the craze for designer vaginas" that somehow have to be accounted for in the overall clash of contexts. And it's nice to look at, with its suprematist squares collapsing into each other.

This was not submitted to Rhizome for institutional sanction as far as I know. It existed "out there" with 4Chan and all the other mashup sites. It's true that Rhizome gave approving coverage to Nasty Nets but there is no link on NN to Rhizome or any other signifier that it exists in an approved stream of processing "art" content.

Perhaps you hate this piece but I don't think you can reduce it to "ironically posting links to existing media with your friends on a group blog." Perhaps you like it but I don't think you can claim it is what Net Artists have always done since the means (blogs, Google caches exploding with content) didn't exist in the early days of the web.

I personally believe this is a new taxonomic class to be evaluated. The fact of it being on a blog, a blog that blends into the Internet "street," existing "outside" the world of grants for technological innovation, where the surrounding posts may very well be found material (but you have to figure it out), the fact of it using Google to generate a snapshot of the present moment, using search features (images, etc) that were not commonly available in 1999, while maintaining old school simplicity, means it is different, and I think better. More complicated, more real than XYZ tech art where algorithm Y converts raw material X into social solution Z. Morales can't be blamed if some Rhizome staffers think what he is doing is important enough to rate a new version.

But regardless of whether I'm right about it being different, you can't both claim it and repudiate it.

d. Quiz

Posted as a comment on a Rhizome.org discussion of internet surfing clubs, 2008

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 blogcomments?

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?

e. Net Aesthetics Trial Balloons

http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/06/04/net-aesthetics-trial-balloons/

Afterthought to afterthought re:Marcin Ramocki's surf club analysis (http://www.ramocki.net/surfing-clubs.pdf):

Some 20th Century writers complained that reality (in a hypercharged mediated environment) was outstripping their ability to spin fiction.

Artists, too, have to compete with real world content far more captivating than anything they could come up with, which the Internet effectively gathers all in one place (sneezing Pandas, etc). Two possible responses are (1) to continually rise above it through aesthetic and conceptual framing and posturing or (2) to disappear into it and trust the viewer to ultimately sort out what's going on. The Web is a consumer's medium, not a producer's, so the artist is inexorably led to consumption as a "practice." The degree of criticality can only be inferred, not implied.

f. Comment on “Massive Links! Events and Essential Web Documents Edition”

http://www.artfagcity. com/2008/06/03/massive-links-events-and-essential-web-documents-edition/

A few quick reactions to Ramocki's excellent outline (http://www.ramocki.net/surfing-clubs.pdf):

1. I would date group art blogs around 2003 with 544×378(WebTV). Ramocki says it was '05/'06. 544×378(WebTV) wasn’t just Abe Linkoln and jimpunk: they had a roster of "speakers" with posting privileges. The emphasis was more on making than finding but the product/process is very similar to Nasty Nets, et al. (see http://544x378.free.fr/(WebTV)/FFFFFF.htm)

2. Ramocki values posts that start a dialog, and "challenge and response" or gameplaying is a good way to describe such interchanges. It was occasionally remarked on Nasty Nets, though, that posts with no comments had value, too--because people were stymied by them and/or needed time to process them. For some it was a game to inspire silence.

3. Some of the earliest internal discussion on NN is "why post this to NN and not our own blogs?" An aesthetic based on "what’s good for a group page" is something that might be added to Ramocki's analysis.

4. I frankly don’t understand the difference between the boon and the wake on spiritsurfers, but I’ve noticed that the SS'ers are already making jokes and visual puns about it (e.g., a directional arrow cycling between the boon and the wake). This is very much like jokes about Bob's pipe in the Church of the Subgenius webpages from 10 years ago. In-jokes about church dogma. This raises the issue discussed on Rhizome but not in Ramocki's notes: what makes surf clubs different from 4Chan or the Subgenii? Years ago during an artist's talk I asked Jim Shaw what made him different from the Subgenii and he said “I’m more anal.” The spiritsurfers manifesto describes an elevated or lofty art purpose. More thought could be given to what differentiates group activity in the surf clubs vs 4Chan than "I’m a conceptualist elitist and you’re an anonymous bathroom wall scroller." Or not--the internet’s ability to thoroughly confuse these categories has a certain fascination.

5. Ramocki's notes are blogcentric. Supercentral is not included in his analysis. They recently switched from a blog to a Wiki. It was fun group-editing the Wiki for the Internet Sleepover last August and that format should be given some consideration as a surf club "syntagmic signifier." The downside of Wikis is for all the pleasant Orwellianism of their tweakability how does an outsider follow the changes via RSS or otherwise? (Maybe it’s possible, I don’t know.)