Migrate away ... The duck¹s are flying (have flown) South here as well... Best
Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Anna Munster <a.muns...@unsw.edu.au> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:09:04 +1100 To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> Subject: [-empyre-] point of clarification Hi All, Ok - what a lazy moderator :-) - I let through a post that because it was by a member I ket through...when I should have checked the contents first! But what I did note was that some people seem to think that Networked is 'my' new book! I have a chapter in Networked as do various other poele such as Kazys and Anne who are speaking about their work online at the moment but it's really Turbulence's new 'book' as they were involved in instigating it. Hoepfully it will become "our' new book collectively but I did want to set the record straight. The reason I am moderating this month is not vbecause it's my book but rather because I volunteered to moderate! btw....Simon, it would be great to migrate that great post you just wrote over to the Networked site and post it as a comment to Kazys' chapter if you felt so inclined! best Anna A/Prof. Anna Munster Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting) Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au ________________________________________ From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Simon Biggs [s.bi...@eca.ac.uk] Sent: Tuesday, 13 October 2009 9:34 PM To: soft_skinned_space Subject: Re: [-empyre-] 'real' networked art Hayles concept of Oborn digital¹ is useful in contextualising what Jodi might have meant when they spoke of ³net.artists living on the net². Prior to a certain point in time artists working with computers and associated communications technologies came to this practice from other media, employing frameworks and criteria imported from other contexts. At some point this changed and a generation of artists emerged who had always worked with digital and networked media. This didn¹t happen in a simple linear manner. Nor did developments occur at the same time, or in the same way, for the various aspects of what are now, but what were not previously, related media (computers and telecommuniciations only got substantially together in the 1980¹s). There were a small number of artists working in the 1970¹s who started out in their practice using digital systems, even a few in the 1960¹s. There were, similarly, a small number of artists who emerged in the 80¹s who were using networks from the start. Bunting is an example of this although his early network practices did not engage the internet but telephone networks. Paul Sermon is another (very different) example. However, the emergence of a generation of network savvy artists, with a culture attached, didn¹t begin until well into the 1990¹s. The associated buzz, involving the engagement of theorists and cultural commentators, intensified after that time. In this sense I¹d assess Varnelis¹s observation that these technologies ³cultural implications (were) confined to niche realms for enthusiasts² more or less correct although I¹d move the dates back a little to the early 90¹s or even the late 1980¹s and identify 1993 as they key year in terms of impact, when the first web browser (Mosaic) became publicly available. There were a series of events and developments, in the late 1980¹s, when the key players in what was to emerge in the 1990¹s, with net.art and related practices, started to meet, communicate directly with one another and inform each other¹s work. It is no accident that many of these people were Eastern or Central European or were based in what had been cold-war border cities, like Berlin and Ljubljana. A few of these artists did replay historical tropes. Shulgin¹s playful refigurings of Suprematism is an example, although as much concerned with developing a commentary on his personal sense of national heritage at a time of social turbulence, post 1989, than formal art-historical deconstruction. It can be argued that the emergence of new medialities and formal frameworks are often associated with artists revisiting the past. Picasso¹s confluence of Cubism and African art is perhaps an example. Again, it would be dangerous to consider this as simply or even primarily formal aesthetic experiment. Picasso, like Shulgin, lived in a social and political context and he drew inspiration from the excitement and conflict he experienced living within it. Contemporary network culture is a very recent phenomenon. Perhaps we forget how fast things have changed and what seemed odd or futuristic to many until only a few years ago is now commonplace. There is a turbulence associated with that rate of change. Varnelis¹s piece attempts to connect artists practice with digital networks with examples of practice from a more mainstream art world (you can¹t get more mainstream in the UK than the work of a Turner Prize winner). To some degree this approach is illuminating, allowing some novel connections to be made. Zittel and Auerbach¹s work sits interestingly alongside Halley¹s or Estes¹s. It is also clear that mainstream arts practice of the early post-modern period (1960-1980) was an influence on many artists who were associated with the 1990¹s emergence of art practices situated within a networked cultural context. However, it is important to remember that many of those artists chose to work with digital and communications systems in large part because they were disillusioned with the mainstream artworld. Here I am not talking about art practices but the artworld itself. These artists sought out of a parallel system that would allow practitioners to work, communicate and facilitate new audiences without the mediation of the institutional framework the artworld was/is composed of. This activity is traceable to earlier examples, some of which explicitly join up, with practitioners associated with artist run initiatives like The Kitchen and Film-makers Coop in New York or London Video Arts and Film-makers Coop in the UK (amongst many other actitivies around the World during the 1960¹s and 70¹s) being part of the development of the prototype digital and networked culture of the 1980¹s which Shulgin, Bunting and many others are associated with. This is arguably a stronger lineage of historical precedent than that which connects Peter Halley to Josh On and in this sense Varnelis¹s piece risks being revisionist. But it can be hard to establish new historical connections without taking such a risk. However, as was pointed out in the first paragraph above, nothing is linear or simple. Whilst many of the artists associated with net.art and similar activities did seek alternate models to the dominant artworld market model others sought to play with it and turn the system to their own advantage. Vuk Cosic is an example here, his provocations and interventions functioning as both critique of the dominance of market thinking in the creative arts and an attempt to grab some of the associated limelight. He played this double edged sword with some skill. It is perhaps too early to evaluate whether Shulgin¹s more recent work with easy to consume electronic multiples is as clever and destabilising as Cosic¹s practices (he made sense of what he was doing by Oretiring¹ young) or whether he risks repeating the failures of Kasemir Malevich, the Suprematist Shulgin parodied in his Oform art¹ works, who, after a blazing period of creativity retreated into politically-correct folk-art. To me this sort of art-historical connection evidences a Oborn digital¹ art criticism which Varnelis¹s essay perhaps fails to do. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Anna Munster <a.muns...@unsw.edu.au> Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:08:24 +1100 To: "empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au" <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> Subject: [-empyre-] 'real' networked art In this chapter you marks a distinction between earlier network art (Bunting, Shuglin, odi.org et al) and the 'web 1.0' period during which there was a preoccupation with the medium of t e net itself among many artists (using the properties of html code etc) and today's networked culture in which everything is networked or rather the network is dispersed diffusely throughout all aspects of culture. Your position (sorry to simplify!) is that the reality of a networked world becomes a preoccupation itself, in fact a kind of preoccupation with the 'reality' of media. In turn, this leads to a set of cultural/artistic tactical manoeuvres: "On the contrary, the fascination with the real in ³reality² media, be it reality TV, amateur-generated content, or professional ³art² is constructed around specific tactics: self-exposure, information visualization, the documentarian turn, remix, and participation." However, I 'd also point to the 'big' statement by net artists of the '90s encapsulated by jodi's comment: 'Net artists live on the net'.( that's a paraphrase btw). So, I'd contend that in fact this preoccupation with the 'real' of networking actually begins with these earlier artists and that it might be something of a false (although currently fashionable) position to institute too much of a break at least in terms of aesthetics between earlier and contemporary network cultures. Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
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