Search Results for: guggenheim

Last night at 0-Day Art's presentation at Eyebeam, the term "net art" was bandied about as if we all knew what it was.
It could be something practiced by one of 13, or possibly 14 types of actors. (See discussion with Duncan Alexander on whether the "wtf is a net artist" list is a catalog or a shrug.)

It could also mean something different depending on when it occurred, for example:

The Josephine Bosma era (early web through the Dotcom crash). Any artist interviewed by Josephine Bosma. The heyday of Steve Dietz at the Walker Art Center, or Dia Foundation's attempt at an online gallery.

The Blogosphere era (roughly 2001 - 2007). Rhizome transitions from a ListServ to a blog. Eyebeam Reblog (now kaput). Surf clubs. YTMND and 4Chan thrive as non-blog sites. Rise of Delicious and Flickr. Livejournal, MySpace collectivize the blog model, leading to:

The Social Media era (2007 to the present). Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Various attempts to make networking on these giant sites "performative." Trolling and friending as bullshit relational aesthetics. The economy of liking. "Aggregation" beyond the dreams of Borges.

(hat tip Lindsay Howard for Josephine Bosma link.)

Update: Add YouTube to the blogosphere era - guess it has to go somewhere. But did anyone call themselves YouTube artists the way some people (actually) tried to call themselves twitter artists? Seems like that was more of a media creation-slash-museum misfire, a la the Guggenheim's non-paradigm shifting YouTube show.

Update 2: Since I already had net art being slung around in the Duncan convo I decided it needed to be bandied about in this post.

To:

Olia Lialina, who quoted my term "ubiquitous mini-cinema"* in her essay about animated GIFs for the Guggenheim's blog for the YouTube "Play" show. As I noted to her in an email:

It's kind of ironic that your essay appears in connection with a YouTube show, since one of the purposes of that show was to sell people on the idea that YouTube, not animated GIFs, is the "ubiquitous mini-cinema" of today. Even if the organizers of the show didn't or don't notice this dichotomy, I'm glad you got the ideas about GIFs in there.

Chris Goode, for the link to a page of my "1-bit drawings" in his essay about Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony. His point was

One-bit music is the aural equivalent of a monochrome bitmap image and as such it has a certain ugliness: but scaled up to meet Perich's ambition in writing symphonically for it -- and, Lord knows, he's not kidding around -- the mismatch becomes remarkably moving, almost overwhelmingly so, with thick pixellated tonal swarms buzzing in and around your cranium: imagine the Ride of the Valkyries developed as a game for the Sega Mega Drive, scored by Glenn Branca for an orchestra of a hundred stylophones, and you're just beginning to get there.

*from

More from the discussion on Paddy Johnson's blog of the Guggenheim Museum's call-for-entries for artists to make YouTubes that will be judged and exhibited as art. The museum's teaser video is just awful.

Commenter Paul Slocum says: "I’ve decided that instead of submitting something myself, I’m going to contact producers on Youtube who are true to the spirit of Youtube and deserve recognition, and urge them to submit specific videos to the contest. Rally, y’all."

My reply to that:

Here are my YouTube faves. Paul Slocum has a good idea of encouraging producers we like to submit but after watching that Guggenheim call-for-submissions video again I wouldn’t wish that process on my worst enemies. Normal video pausing into pseudo-glitchy jitter, gratuitous sped-up city scenes, quasi-8 bit music, a groovy fake Yellow Submarine sequence, stop-motion graffiti oozing off the wall and strutting around: the full panoply of effects a 30-something high paid art director would create to conjure happenin’ youth. By contrast, the work in the above faves list is no-budget, sincere, incomprehensible, vague, “weak,” anti-YouTube, no-style, slight, non-corporate, etc (but also brilliant). Recall what happened when Guthrie Lonergan curated a group of touchingly inept MySpace intros on YouTube. The work got duller when it was linked to directly by Rhizome.org and even duller when shown on professional gear at the New Museum. The work I love most would shrivel in the institutional spotlight and I shudder to think of a techie explaining to Silicious how to make a more polished use of Poser software.

Update: YouTube is constantly changing the size of the player window, such that pieces that need to be full bleed suddenly acquire annoying letterboxing. Just noticed that a few more pixels have been added to the width so that even the widescreen pieces a few months ago now have thin vertical black stripes on the right and left. The only kind of art anybody should be making for this "medium" is shitty half-assed art that will somehow survive the hosts' regular tinkering.

Update, 2013: I closed the "Teleclysm" YouTube account over the "unitary identity" issue and general Google weirdness.

Comment below posted to Paddy Johnson's blog, in response to two threads about an upcoming Guggenheim "YouTube show."
Briefly the museum isn't scouring the 'Tube but asking for artists to send "new YouTubes," and the show is in effect a collaboration among the museum, Hewlett Packard, which will be providing gear and "technical advice," and Google. Johnson questioned the credentials of the standard "video art" curators to judge YouTubes (because the platform is a web meme factory, a slightly different animal from "video art") and offered substitute judges, including me (I would be great because I basically hate YouTube).

The question under consideration is whether YouTube is just a delivery system for "video art" of the established, Nam Jun Paik variety, or whether it’s a culture unto itself that curators should be learning about. By culture I don't mean "digital culture" in the starry-eyed Nicholas Negroponte sense of an evolving hive mind but a culture in the Margaret Mead sense of a group with its own mores, which may or may not mature into a canon with critics, philosophers, checks, balances, etc.* According to the New York Times, Hewlett Packard will be collaborating on the project "to teach skills like editing, animation and lighting to the video-naïve," and as noted by NYC the Blog, the YouTube platform has company rules and acts as a censor independent of the museum. All this suggests that YouTube will be thought of in its original, intended, non-vernacular sense as a place to find "new talent" for art and TV, even though, over the years, the YouTube "street has found its own uses for things," in William Gibson's phrase. James Kalm mentions several of those; I noted in the earlier thread that YouTube is becoming a substitute iTunes, with people posting their favorite obscure song with a single still image for the consideration of the site’s talkative commenters. (I've been calling the site "America's Jukebox.") Will that and other "pirate" uses of YT–-such as OAVs or "original anime videos" featuring anime clips recut with new music–-be reflected in the Guggenheim's filtered call for entries? Doubtful--the YouTube competition will ultimately be WhateverWeSayTube.

*forum culture, in Beau Siever's phrase