NetArt: Links
(in alphabetical order)
auf Deutsch
in chronological order
Plattforms for NetArt:
- Abstraction Now:
In August and September 2003 the Künstlerhaus Wien (Vienna) presented
the exhibition "Abstraction Now" with non-mimetic art in its
multi- and intermedia dimensions. Abstraction is featured as a "hybrid
dynamic process" (Pfaffenbichler). The curators Norbert Pfaffenbichler
and Sandro Droschl presented examples in the media painting, sculpture,
photography, film, video, CD, installation and net as parts of a mediascape
with digitized picture processing. This contemporary mediascape prohibits
divisions in independent, media specific developments. "The Online
Project" contains between one and three contributions of each of
the 22 artists and groups. Many contributions are integrated parts of
the site (Dextro, Insertsilence, Juerg Lehni, Golan Levin, Lia, Meta,
Glen Murphy, [N:JA], Norm, Casey Reas, Return, Soda/Ed Burton &
Julian Saunderson, Manny Tan, James Tindall, Mariugop) and links connect
with further projects (Jodi, Jan Robert Leegte, Peter Luining, Mus Watz,
Yark Napier, Nullpointer/Tom Betts). The net projects present processes
with f. e. Java and many times with Shockwave and Flash but the source
code remains closed (exception: Marius Watz). Some projects are soundtoys
(see below) which combine audio and visual processes with possibilities
to navigate with mouse movements (Burton, Insertsilence, Lia, Luining,
Return, Tindall). Lev Manovich discusses the contributions of the Online
Project in Abstraction
and Complexity as examples for a paradigm shift from reduction (abstract
art and science between 1910 and ca. 1920) to complexity (& emergence):
They oscillate "between order and chaos". Manovich contradicts
the curators' equation of non-mimetic with non-representative art and
proposes an investigation of abstract works as "symbolic representations"
of "the new social complexity" (7/2004; 5/2015, 1/2020: site
under renovation).
- Banner Art Collective:
The Website "Banner Art Collective" was installed by Brandon
Barr (concept) and Garrett Lynch (design) in October 2002. Its archive
contains more than hundred banners. The archive offers examples of abstract
banner design and banners with humorous and activistic messages for
an integration into web pages. The banners are developed in part by
well known artists (f. e. Agricola de Cologne, Gerhard Mantz, Millie
Niss, Jim Punk) and by students. HTML-instructions are offered for the
integration in web pages. Artists find the Interactive Advertising Standards
of the Interactive Advertising Bureau as preconditions for an integration
of their own contributions into the archive. A Banner
Art Collective's Artist Kit simplifies the work with these standards
(3/2003. 9/2011: The URL-adress
does not exist anymore, but it is stored in the
Internet Archive without the files of the banners).
- Carnivore:
In 1st October 2001 "Carnivore" was installed by RSG (Radical
Software Group) as platform on the website of Rhizome.
The platform includes contributions of Cory Arcangel, Area3, Jonah brucker-cohen,
Vuk Cosic, Mark Daggett, Joshua Davis, Entropy8EntropyZuper!, Lisa Jevbratt,
Golan Levin, Mark Napier, RSG, Scott Sona Snibbe and others. Their "client
applications" (Java applets and Flash-movies) are visualizations
of (transformed parts of) dates collected in a local area network with
software of RSG ("packet-sniffing"). The software "Carnivore
PE" (since 4/6/2002 for Windows) was inspired by Ethernet and is
offered as Open Source Software for download. It could be a method for
employees to control employers, nevertheless: The processing of data
traffic in a local are network is directed in contributions for "Carnivore"
primarily to esthetic presentations instead of decoder functions. RSG
reuses in "CarnivorePE" the name of the FBI-software "Carnivore"
(the terms for DCS1000)
which supervises the international data traffic (via search terms).
That context caused the jury of the Prix
Ars Electronica 2002 (department "Net Vision", prize:
Golden Nica) to state that "the Carnivore project" is "based
on the FBI's software for monitoring network traffic". That statement
provoked a counterstatement by the jury of the Read-Me
Festival 1.2: "The relationship of Rhizome's Carnivore to the
FBI's spying tool of the same name seems to be a matter of concept and
hipness-value, but it is not explained and is not very obvious."
(3/2003. In May 2015 the URL-address of the former platform only contains
the source code of Carnivore; 1/2020: "Version 8" with a "Processing
library").
- CODeDOC
:
The online gallery Artport
of the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York presents smaller works in "CODeDOC" (since
September 2002, curated by Christiane Paul). Paul decided
that "the code should not exceed 8 KB" and that it "should
move and connect three points in space." She excluded HTML and
FlashScript to reduce the number of relevant artists. The website leads
users first to the source code (C++, Java, Lingo, Perl, Visual Basic)
of a contribution and then to the browser presentation. Furthermore
the integrated American artists (Sawad Brooks, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway,
John Klima, Golan Levin, Kevin McCoy, Mark Napier, Brad Paley, Scott
Snibbe, Camille Utterback, Martin Wattenberg and Maciej Wisniewski)
commented the works of their colleagues (3/2003).
Christiane Paul organized CODEDOC
II for the Festival Ars
Electronica 2003 in Linz (Ars Electronica Center
and Brucknerhaus, September 2003) as a platform for European Artists
(Ed Burton, epidemiC, Graham Harwood, Jaromil, Annja Krautgasser &
Rainer Mandl, Jean Leandre, Antoine Schmitt and John F. Simon jr.) (2/2004).
- copy-art.net
In June 2004 the curator Irini-Mirena Papadimitriou launched the platform
at IBID Projects (London). The site included works by Anna Best, Bigert
& Bergström, Colectivo Cambalache, Critical Art Ensemble, AK
Dolven, House of O'Dwyer, Per Hüttner, juneau projects, Miltos
Manetas, Matthieu Laurette, N55, Szuper Gallery and Thomson & Craighead.
The platform received eight further projects for the exhibition at the
ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, September-October 2004).
Six projects are included after the ICA show (Stand: Oktober 2006).
Some links direct the observers to works on other web sites by Anna
Best, Critical Art Ensemble, Ella Gibbs, Miltos Manetas, Thomson &
Craighead und Carey Young.
Any use of (parts of) the works has to follow the rules which are defined
by Creative
Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0. The works can be
downloaded, copied and modified. The authors have to be named.
Thomson & Craighead use a standard copyright information ("All
rights reserved....") in attributed-text.net
(1997; 9/2022: blog actualized) as a starting point for a collection
of links. These links direct the reader to web pages with articles including
discussions of copyright problems and others. These web pages appear
under the copyright information and the bibliographical notes are presented
over it. The Critical Art Ensemble expands the field of discussion from
questions concerning copies and modifications in the context of copyright
to the same questions within the framework of biotechnology. In Free
Range Grain they discuss the EU's "laws regarding the importing
and labeling of GM [=genetically manipulated] foods". Mathieu Laurette
follows the communication guerilla's strategies with his form for the
indication of news about a give away for downloads: On Laurette's form
for an e-mail distribution a firm can be noted. The readers of the e-mail
will receive a faked information about the firm's reaction to the free
offers of a competitor by opening one of its products for free copies
("How to launch a rumour on the Internet?", 2000).
The works realize remix strategies (Colectivo Cambalache, Doug Fishbone,
Isabel Saij) or they offer material for copies and further exploitations
including transformations (Carey Young, Gavin Wade) and/or they present
strategies and theories on the themes copyright (Matthieu Laurette,
Szuper School, Thomson & Craighead) and (post-)autonomy (David Goldenberg)
(10/2006; 10/2009: website not
accessible).
- Electronic Literature
Collection Volume One:
In: Electronic Literature Organization. October 2006. The platform includes
60 works exemplifying electronic literature's development from 1994
to 2006. The examples are selected by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort,
Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland for the "Preservation,
Archiving and Dissemination Initiative (PAD)" of the Electronic
Literature Organization. The platform facilitates the use of each work's
functions by introductory remarks and technical informations ("instructions").
The parallel availability of the database as CD-ROM criticised the character
of the works included: They are closed projects independent of net conditions
(like connections to external archived files (external links), online
uses of participants and archived entries of previous uses). The horizon
of the selection is not constituted by interactions and the distinction
between cooperative and collaborative participation procedures (Christiane
Heibach: Oszillationen//Netzkunst/Netzliteratur, see below in Contributions
to the History of NetArt) but by the readers' explorations of the
authors' programming decisions. The functions made available to readers
by the monitor presentations and their programming codes (Squeak, Hypertext,
Processing, Flash, Director, VRML, Quicktime and others) are the dominant
points of reference, except they are forced in the position of passive
observers. This kind of electronic literature doesn't integrate itself
inseparably into the net culture like the Assoziationsblaster
(Dragan Espenschied/Alvar H.C. Freude, since 1999, with an english
version) but tries to control its embedding as frame (art) within
the frame (culture). The development of the technical possibilities
offered by hardware and software is the dominant point of reference
meanwhile the net culture realized by its participants remains excluded
(We can find traces of the net context only in the use of external material
filed for reuses in closed archives and the used common hardware and
software).
N. Katherine Hayles offers an introduction to the database in "Electronic
Literature: What Is It?" (see below in Contributions
to the History of NetArt) The article constitutes chapter 1 of her
book "Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary"
with a wider discussion of the subject. The book contains the database
on CD-ROM (Hayles, N. Katherine: Electronic Literature. New Horizons
for the Literary. Notre Dame/Ithaca 2008. Free CD-ROMs without book
available: Electronic Literature Organization. Maryland Institute for
Technology in the Humanities (MITH). B0131 McKeldin Library. University
of Maryland. College Park, MD 20742).
Since February 2011 the website Electronic
Literature Collection Volume Two is accessible. In February 2016
Volume Three was
launched.
In 2012 Florian Cramer criticised in "Post Digital Writing"
the Electronic Literature Organization's criteria for the selection
of works (see below in Texts
on Actual Aspects of NetArt; 10/2009, 4/2015; 1/2020).
- Extrapolation:
The website of "Wigged Productions" (directed by Seth Thompson)
presents the online exhibition "Extrapolations" from the 1st
July 2006 to the 15th June 2007. The server of the curator Huberto
Ramirez is used as an archive for half of the eight works, meanwhile
other links conduct to works on external sites. The projects
use the media photo and film in digital forms of animation for the mediation
of political contents.
Ramirez looked for documents of a kind of political engagement which
tries to provoke social changes not from the margins but from the centers
of power. These centers aren't bound anymore to locations or nations.
According to Ramirez the model of Tactical Autonomous Zones is removed
by strategies for actions within the centers of power. Strategic configurations
are reactions to ephemeral situations and will be reconfigured by occasional
needs. Ellipse and metaphor are strategic means to brake up established
interpreting kinds of understanding. Ramirez' curatorial
statement refers to Craig Owen's "The Allegorical Impulse"
(October, Nr. 12/Spring 1980, part I, p.67-86; October Nr.13/Summer
1980, part II, p.58-80).
Deva Eveland's Mouthpiece
#2 offers a document of that "impulse". He puts toothpicks
with glued little flags printed with stars and stripes between his teeth
and violates his gums. The flags hinder talking: The flags and the nationalism
symbolized by them muzzle [In German: "machen 'mundtot'" =
kill (talking by) the mouth].
All examples use 'worlds' of images for the imagination of 'worlds':
The images represent more than the facts. The orks present the effects
of globalization in a direct but exaggerated manner (The
Yes Men's proposition sheds a new light on the difference between
the poor and the rich in the distribution of food compare the
Plattsburgh lecture
in March 2002) or in an indirect manner for example via the presentation
forms of mass media (Jody
Zellen) or via the latin alphabet which actually needs no other
than an English presentation (Peiyun
Lee). Lana Lin demonstrates the (still?) impossible egalization
of cultural differences embedded in languages in No
Power To Push Up The Sky via the presentation of 15 translators'
efforts to repeat in English the content of an interview with Chai Ling
in 1989. Ling organized the students' protest in China. She reported
the situation some days before the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing.
Arzu Özkal Telhan demonstrates in The
Unattended Body the relations between social indifference and the
fear produced by terrorism under the conditions of the globalization
in the U.S.A.: Those who rest for too long time in passageways without
recognizable reason alarm the video voyeur's care of security (the care
of the observers, our care) meanwhile passengers and drivers ignore
the persons with deviant behaviors (10/2006; 4/2013:
website not accessible. See Internet
Archive).
- The Famous Sound of Absolute Wreaders:
Johannes Auer developed the concept of the project which is constituted
by levels of texts over texts: manual text modifications, audio comments
and coded transformations. Five authors Auer, Reinhard Döhl
(died in 5/29/2004), Sylvia Egger, Oliver Gassner, Martina Kieninger,
Beat Suter changed contributions of other authors. These texts
constituted the basis of a radio version for two speakers, which was
sent by ORF in
9/7/2003 and lasted 40 minutes, and a net version with six projects.
"Multitasking" (Auer) became "multi-talking" in
the radio version via readings of texts collaged manually and generated
as remix as well as "multi-asking" via comments in normal
and alcoholized mental states.
Two net projects reflect levels of the project in especially impressing
manners: Oliver Gassner divides in "as time goes on: absolute wreaders"
Kieninger's text on Gassner's tango
rgb and Auer's "Lob-Buch einer gemeinsamen Reise" in four
frames with activatable auto-scroll functions. He adds a fifth frame
with a text, which asks to reactivate the auto-scroll functions permanently,
and includes its own auto-scroll-function in the request. Suter and
René Bauer use in "Scrabble mit Döhl" Döhl's
modification of Kieninger's "der schrank. die schranke", his
comments on contributions of further participants and their net projects
as basis for transformations of texts and pictures. Five scripts generate
text fragments running over the monitor as "multi-layer-scrabble"
and expand the project's material via net search.
Kieninger's "Fenster 1 2 3 4 5 6", Gassner's "as time
goes on" and Suter/Bauer's "Scrabble" present models
for simultaneous ways of reading parts of texts in movements. These
models modify strategies of the literary avant-garde and point to reading
possibilities provoked by the forms of presentation (6/2004: 1/2020:
The original website
with the web version reports "temporarily closed". An announcement
of kunstradio.at
contains an audio-file in an .m3u format of the radio version. The Internet
Archive stored only some web pages of the project. Beat Suter's
report The
Making of 'The Famous Sound of Absolute Wreader's documents the
project).
- The 5k:
In autumn 1999 the web designer Stewart Butterfield installed "the
5K" (5120 bytes) as a platform with a competition for contributions
of any kind. The contributions can't be larger than 5k and server-side
processing is excluded. The contest is renewed every year since 2000.
The jury evaluates "function", "aesthetics", "concept"
and "size score"/"entries overall". The prize is
a donation of 5120 US Cents, a symbolic sum: Cent=Bytes. Users could
evaluate and comment the archived works. The platform "is entirely
non-commercial and does not accept sponsorship or advertising"
(3/2003; 6/2006: The URL-adress leads to a placeholder-homepage
without archive; 1/2020 no longer accessible in the network).
- Illegal Art:
Since November 2002 the travel exhibition "Illegal Art: Freedom
and Expression in the Corporate Age" (curator: Carrie McLaren)
presented many examples for different ways to reuse copyrighted audio
and visual resources. The organizers received legal advice (together
with other groups) from Chilling
Effects Clearinghouse, "a joint convention of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University
of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics".
The website of the exhibition features film extracts, animations, music
and art works in different media partly combined with their juridical
history : Some law-suits remained open in the course of the exhibition
(3/2003).
In 2004 the Homepage
of the former travel exhibition informed about new cases like "The
Grey Album" of DJ Danger Mouse and Brad Neely's new audio track
to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone" (with links and
downloads).
(s. chapter (Il)legal
Art in From
Radical Software to Net Activism) (6/2004; 5/2013: Films stored
in the Internet Archive)
- Kingdom of Piracy <KOP>:
KOP thematizes Copyleft/Copyright problems, as they occured in conflicts
between advocates of the net ideal of limitless connectivity including
free download and the Copyright demands (download barriers against private
copies, etc.) of the software- and entertainment industries. The last
ones threaten the net architecture with their regulation demands: "Data
Lords" contra "Digital Commons" (Curatorial
Statement). The three Writing
Projects 2002 elucidate the urgency of these problems.
The ACER Group in Taiwan was the first sponsor of KOP. The directorate
staff of ACER was replaced in April 2002 and the government of Taiwan
began with an anti-piracy-campaign. The Taiwanese pilot site was given
up in the midst of June 2002 after the directorate of the Acer
Digital Arts Center demanded the control of links and a change of
the platform's title. The curators Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch and
Yukiko Shikata resisted these demands. They found in 2002 a new server
for KOP
at the Ars Electronica Center (Linz/Austria; no longer accessible in
the web). FACT in Liverpool installed
an expanded site in February 2003. Projects of BEIGE, Shu Lea Cheang,
Eastwood, Espenschied/Freude/Milles,
Olia Lialina, Graham Harwood/Mongrel, Uebermorgen, Raqs Media Collective,
RSG, www.0100101110101101.ORG
and others found their ways to the ends of the project with different
means (3/2003).
The project "DIVE" (2003) heightens the awareness to conceptual,
software and process related aspects of net projects. DIVE 0.1 is published
by FACT in Liverpool as website
and as CD-ROM (with book, Armin Medosch (ed.): DIVE. An Introduction
into the World of Free Software and Copyleft Culture. FACT, Liverpool/Virtualcentre-Media.net
2003, ISBN 0-9541604-9-5). The server of the site (for downloads) and
the CD-ROM contain a series of net projects under the category art,
for example browsers like I/O/D's Webstalker
and Nullpointer's "Webtracer" or epidemiC's "Antimafia"
for an activistic use of peer-to-peer, The Yes Men's Reamweaver
for the construction of modified mirror sites, Double Negative's "plaNet
Former" and others. Further webpages introduce into Copyleft-licenses
and free networks (with links). Articles by Armin Medosch (see
below), Janko Röttgers, RAQs Media Collective (see
below), Saul Albert and Lawrence Chua explain the investigative
context of "Kingdom of Piracy". "Kingdom of Piracy"
became the most extensive and conceptually most precise platform for
relations between Free Software, net activism and NetArt, especially
after the installation of "DIVE" (2/2004; 1/2020: only the
version
of the Dutch Electronic Festival in 2003 (DEAF 03) is accessible on
the web).
- Looped:
25 Danish artists present loops with few and short sequences (video,
animation, text, sound) since 16th October 1998. The loops are substituted
permanently. The platform which someone (Mette Sandbye for "Artnode")
had to do! (3/2003; 10/2009: website unavailable)
- NETescopio:
Since 2008 a database with examples of net art is developed by the Museo
Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz/Extremadura,
Spain). The works being selected and stored on the museum's server integrate
important international examples into a documentation of Spanish and
Ibero-American net projects. The works are featured in short descriptions.
The source codes of some works require reconstructions for the accessibility
of their functions on contemporary browsers and plugins/apps (s. Dekker,
Annet: Assembling Traces, 2014, see below in Texts
on actual Aspects of NetArt).
The archive is open for inclusions of further works. Proposals are wanted.
After being evaluated positive the proposed works will be integrated
into the database (4/2015).
- Netfilmmakers:
Since 2004 every three months a new edition, usually with three films
(including experimental, net specific forms in and with film formats),
is published in the "netgallery". Themes of past editions
have been "Territory" (2004), "Docu-Slash" (2006),
"Navigation" (2006) and "Real-Un-Real" (2009) among
others. Director and curator Annette Finnsdottir presents the platform
in an article for Vague Terrain (Journal 11/2008): She points our attention
to three examples. The most interesting of them is the "interactive
netfilm" (Don't) Leave Me Alone von Kassandra Wellendorf (2006)
allowing users to start movements in the pictures of the diptych. In
What Remains (2009) Alan Sondheim presents 3D digital filmmaking in
times of Second Life.
In comparison to platforms being always open for contributions like
YouTube and Vimeo Netfilmmakers unavoidably provokes the question concerning
the legitimation of a curated film platform with closed entities. The
subject oriented selection of Netfilmmakers is opposed to platforms
like dvblog with no other limitation
for contributions than the format Quicktime and being interesting enough
for the editors (Doron Golon, Brittany Shoot and Michael Szapowski).
Curatorial activities are substituted in dvblog by the editors' tagging
(10/2009, 5/2013; 1/2020: Server
not accessible. The curatorial activities between 2008 and 2010 are
documented on Vimeo).
- or-bits.com:
From 2009 to 2012 Marialaura Ghidini curated eight exhibitions on subjects
like "Acceleration", "On-Looking" or "Simplicity".
Although many contributions by artists are not net-specific, nevertheless
for the distribution on the net the works have to consist of dates storable
on the platform's server and to be accessible by users via World Wide
Web.
In her texts accompanying the exhibitions Ghidini explores the ways
to observe the world changed by the internet. She reflects for example
in Acceleration on
the ways of observing the world and how far they are transformed by
the accessibility of films via internet. Although films are not a network-specific
medium, nevertheless, via the net distribution their perception is changed
by the possibilities to jump backwards and forwards.
In his contribution to On-Looking
Andrew Venell makes Google's algorithms for Ad-Sense a subject of discussion
by the integration of this kind of ads into Ghidini's curatorial contribution.
In his statement
Venell discusses the problem to use such algorithms in searches for
web pages offering adequate contexts to embed ads. He plans to use the
profit from the advertisements on his own web pages for his own ads
on other pages.
In a world observation guided primarily by ways to use the internet
Ghidini's platform demonstrates how seldom the differences between network-specific
ways and offnet ways of observing are recognised: They merge to one
worldview. When the "post-medium condition" (Krauss, Rosalind:
Two Moments of the Post-Medium Condition. In: October, Nr.116/Spring
2006, p.55-62) came up then the reflection of media specific ways of
observation lost its central value for artists' concepts. Since then
the artists thematise the impact of contemporary mediascapes upon world
observation in different combinations and constellations of media. With
their projects artists try to provoke reflections and discussions about
the relations between media and observation. Inevitably the contributions
to or-bits.com demonstrate how far the contemporary artists modify media
configurations developed for the first time in works of the seventies
(4/2015).
- page_space project:
Braxton
Sodermann's introduction explains the goal of the platform (2004):
Authors collaborate not to create a text field as links which are graphically
distributed on a page as Ted
Warnell did it in his contribution to "The Field Project"
(1999) but they create digital environments for the presentation
of texts written by other authors. The projects have been programmed
in Flash and Macromedia Director. Priority has the screen page as a
presentation space for (parts of) texts but not the code. The relations
between code, screen display and code poetry, exemplified in Talan Memmott's
Lexia
to Perplexia (2000), are not relevant for the featured works. Jason
Nelson's untitled
(to reconstruct) enfolds Jody Zellen's text via clicks on squares
as a tree structure from top left to downright. Deena Larsen's Cut
to Flesh presents a surface with distributed interrogation marks.
Clicks on the interrogation marks start diagonal moves of parts of Zellen's
text. Larsen offers the non-hierachic complement to Nelson hierarchic
structure: The same text is enfolded and readable in all of its parts
in Nelson's work meanwhile it appears in Leeson's graphic presentation
in fragmented phrases without reference to their connections. Jim Andrews
uses in Arteroids
words and parts of phrases written by Christina McPhee and Helen Torrington
as elements with whom the "script/"-element of the player
should not collide and which have to be shooted. Realistic game environments
are removed by a text space which requests from level to level to solve
more and more difficult situations. Brian Kim Stefans' Dibagan
allows readers to distribute words of geniwate's text on a surface.
The game offers four elements to move them out via cursor and to read
them. Picture and sound offer the context to recognize the relations
between the words: the war in Iraq. Simon Biggs' non-LOSS'y
translator turns Loss Pequiño Glazier's text (written with
Greek letters and Arabic numerals) into a graphic element of a dynamic
presentation which integrates the letters written by participants but
doesn't reconfigure the field from input to input
Further contributions
and collaborations by and with Simon Biggs, geniwate, Loss Pequiño
Glazier, Deena Larsen, Brian Kim Stefans, Pedro Valdeolmillos and Jody
Zellen (10/2006).
- Processing:
Since Mai 2003 the platform contains examples (with source code) of
Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Brendan Dawes, Mikkel Crome Koser, Golan Levin,
Lia, Mark Napier, Josh On, Schoenerwissen, Jared Tarbell and others
for the implementation of the software "Processing". Many
contributions present possibilities of "generative art". The
software was developped by Benjamin Fry
and Casey Reas and the current
version is available free of charge. "Processing" was
developped at MIT (Media Lab, Aesthetics and Computation Group, in collaboration
with the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea). The software is via LGPL
(Library General Public Licence) open for implementations and developments.
Reas explains
that the software facilitates the artistic practice in relation to C,
C++, Java and Open GL. Furthermore Processing is useful for the development
of code with a bigger number of elements whose generation will need
intense calculation.
OpenProcessing presents
contributions of participants together with their codes. The applet
of Processing allows to revise the codes, to download them as .pde-files
and to open the coded generation processes.
Rhizome published a call to its members to send contributions to the
platform Tiny
Sketch a (part of OpenProcessing). After the closing day at 13th
Septembe r2009 the members of the platform Rhizome voted the best contribution
until 30th September (prize: 200 USD). The code of each contribution
had to be written in Processing "using 200 characters or less".
Workshops and tutorials
offer introductions into "Processing" to participants without
any knowledge of programming. Pogramming instructions
in book form are also offered. Daniel Shiffman's "Beginner's Guide"
is published as book and
as website (6/2004,
10/2006, 9/2009).
- Remixthebook:
Mark Amerika's print version of "Remixthebook" (Minneapolis/Minnesota
2011) is supplemented by a website. It contains 25 contributions realised
by artists and critics with remix strategies and complemented by comments.
In the video Isarithm the site's
cocurator Rick Silva shows how the opportunity can be grasped to use
the book as source material for a remix. In Food
Remix Michelle Elsworth resists this source material and discusses
the remix possibilities offered by a supermarket. In two video recordings
she documents and comments simultaneously remixes of the supermarket's
product range (or product mix) realised in situ.
Many contributions are stored on the platforms Vimeo, Issuu and Soundcloud,
meanwhile only a few of them are archived on the server of the site
"Remixthebook". The
Art of Walking by Maria Miranda and Norie Neumark is one of the
works stored on the site's server. The artists remixed their own visual
and text material in three films. The simultaneous presentation of the
three variants (not integrated into one film) did not fit into the download
schemes of the platforms mentioned above. On the other hand MTAA (Michael
Sarff and Tim Whidden) prefer to use photos sorted by other authors
on Flickr as source material and to publish a description
of their procedure on the site "Remixthebook". MTAA inserts
a still of the trailer of Mark Amerika's book into images of interiors
found on Flickr and stores these mixed images again on Flickr. The artists'
contributions to the site "Remixthebook" show not only different
kinds of remix strategies, but simultaneously different kinds to use
(distributed) platforms, too.
On the About page Mark
Amerika points to the possibilities of remix practices to transgress
the limits between artistic procedures and discourses. Curt Cloninger
uses this proposal in his text editing performance Twixt
The Cup And The Lip #3 (with Microsoft Word Screen) to vary Amerika's
expression "letting the language speak itself". Partially
he writes and draws with a software to produce notepads. In Creativity
(Capital C) has been hijacked by the artists Janneke Adema in turn
deals with some pages of Amerika's text by the substitution of terms.
In her artist's statement
she defines this procedure as "scholarly critical method".
Yoshi Sodeoka repeats himself simultaneously in his film contribution
An Artist Yupping About Some Art
Stuff X4. He defamiliarizes the audio document of a lecture by Mark
Amerika via accelerations and multiplications of voices: Sodeoka accepts
Amerika's commission to remix the audio document of a lecture on remix
strategies and rejects the task by alienating the source so far that
it is becoming a substitutable material for artistic procedures. Sodeoka
shows with his digital version of sound poetry that digital procedures
usually transform the remixed to provoke reinterpretations, but they
don't pick up (neo-)avantgardistic deconstructions of semantics. Sodeoka
subverts the platform's advertising function to stimulate the purchase
of the book with the promise that buyers will learn to be be able to
differentiate between the remixed and the remix (4/2015).
- runme.org:
The "software art repository" presents download systems. It
includes tools for users' own creations. A system of categories in the
form of an index and a hypertext keynote system help users to find their
pathways. Categories like bots
and agents and political
and activist software offer interesting projects. The platform includes
many links to projects on other sites, too. Runme.org exists as archive
since January 2003. The reason of the installation of runme.org as archive
was to last longer than the sites of the programming artists. The open,
but moderated platform is offered as chance for net presentations. Projects
which have been downloaded in runme.org until the 1st March 2003 were
presented in Read-me 2.3
in Helsinki (University of Art and Design, Media
Centre Lume, 5/30-5/31/2003) (3/2003, 8/2003).
- Singlecell
and Doublecell:
"Doublecell" (12/2/2002) is the second, conceptually modified
edition of "Singlecell" (2001): The two platforms of Golan
Levin present projects realized with Director, Flash and self made
software (in C++, Java, Lingo and ActionScript). The projects in "Singlecell"
don't have different levels (no links to different pages) and they don't
divide the surface of a page in different frames: After the opening
each contribution presents the monitor surface which introduces the
user to all functions. The sites present reactive animations or movies,
with or without sound, in "Singlecell" in amorphous and in
part anthropomorphic forms. Excellent Computational Design by Ed Burton,
Danny Brown, Peter Cho, Joshua Davis, Juha Huuskonen, Golan Levin, Lia,
Casey Reas, Jared Schiffman, Manny Tan, James Tindall, Martin Wattenberg
and others (3/2003).
- {Software}
Structures:
In June 2004 Casey Reas presents his project "{Software} Structures"
on the portal Artport of the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
He demonstrates the usability of LeWitt's verbal concepts for "wall
drawings" for the development of visual structures in generative
art. The codes are written in Processing,
Flash MX and C++ and result after download in faster or slower generating
screen pictures. The source code is presented in text files separate
to the downloadable files.
Reas presents in one part of his project five three static and
two animated Processing-translations of three "wall drawings"
which LeWitt notated in the Seventies and early Eighties. Reas developed
three further examplas (#001, #002, #003) out of verbal concepts stimulated
by LeWitt's notations for"wall drawings": Reas developed verbal
concepts in a first working procedure without anticipation of the chances
and problems of the different pogramming languages. The next step after
the verbal concepts was the realization of codes in different programming
languages: The third example (#003) was modificated with Processing
by Reas, Robert Hodgin, William Ngan and Jared Tarbell. Die Processing-"Implementation"
wurde mit C++ (Casey Reas) und Flash MX (Jared Tarbell) rekonstruiert.
Flash realizations with fewer elements had to be developed because program
code with hundred and more elements runs very slow in Flash. Versions
in C++ are only available for downloads and separate installations.
An intense effort in time was necessary for the development of variants
in C++. They are generated by computers faster than the variants for
net browsers which are written in Processing (10/2006).
- Soundtoys:
Steve Tanza founded "Soundtoys"
in October 2001 as a platform for audio-visual projects. Users are able
to influence the visualization and/or the sounds via cursor actions
and/or clicks and/or inscriptions. Presented are games (f. e. Steve
Tanza, Peter Luining) beside digital sound instruments (z. B. Ixi/Thor
Magnusson and Enrike Hurtado, Chris Yewell) and non reactive works (f.
e. Tina LaPorta). Tanza transfers the audio visual possibilities of
soundtoys to an index which presents the projects as movable houses
on a map and gives an audio accompaniment to cursor actions on houses.
This index disappeared with the redesign of the site in February 2006.
It was substituted by Neil Jenkins' Tag
Navigator (5/2013: not found), the Content
Navigator by Adam Hoyle/Julian Baker, and others. Stanza reused
his index in Inner
City (5/2013: not found), now with links to his own projects.
The journal includes
articles about the history and the theoretical context of soundtoys.
All artists are presented in interviews, including artists
like Amy Alexander, Jim Andrews, Corby & Baily, Golan Levin or Adrian
Ward, who are introduced with links to works on other sites, too. The
interviews thematize the question
of the adequate medium for the distribution of soundtoys CD-ROM
or internet because the closed audiovisual systems of "soundtoys"
exclude connectivity (3/2003, 6/2006, 5/2013, 5/2015).
- Translocations:
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
accompanies the exhibition How
Latitudes become Forms (2/9-5/4/2003) with the platform "Translocations"
(curator Steve Dietz). Artists from Brazil, China, Croatia, India, Japan,
Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey and U.S.A. received commissions
for nine net projects.
Fran Ilich's Webblog Big(b)Other
and Re:combos Translocal
Mixer allow distant participants verbal and audio cooperations.
Both projects present modifications of normal net practice. The modifications
are approximations to the framework of the exhibition. Translocal
Channel presents a South African video archive and lectures on questions
of globalization as well as a discussion about "global curating"
(as streaming and stored videos).
Sawad Brooks' and Warren Sack's Translation
Map seem to fit into this round dance of thematic oriented events.
Users are able to send contributions to sites whose actors send them
further to net forums and ask for translations (Betaversion
0.02). The support of a "collaborative re-writing process"
via "a multi-protocol message delivery system" is an idea
which can't have many perspectives to be realized with success: The
problems to transgress language barriers are preserved in the net context.
Raqs Opus (Open Platform
for Unlimited Signification) offers a forum open for downloads and ties
to the net utopia of files and software shared free everywhere and by
all (Another part of "Translocations": Andreja Kuluncic's
Distributive
Justice: America: s. Lesson
13) (3/2003).
- The Wartime Project:
Andrew Forbes reacted in November 2002 to the scenarios of an American
war against Iraq and initiated "The Wartime Project". He invited
net artists to send contributions to memorize "the horror and destructiveness
of war". The website included already 133 projects (from December
2002 to February 2004). A wider part of the projects used software for
games and animations. The works illustrated Bush's war world 'overaffirmative'
(f. e. lokiss) or parodied it (entropy8zuper!,
Evgenij Vasilev). Other contributions ranged in the critical field 'estheticizing
of politics' (microbo und bo130). The movement of anti-war activists
was presented in some projects as motivation for further actions (Ruth
Catlow). Some artists used the chance to download their works on the
server of the "Wartime Project". Other artists placed links
to anti-war projects which are installed on their own sites. The project
was an important part of the Anti-War
Web Ring (3/2003, 8/2003, 2/2004, 10/2009: Site temporarily not
available, 5/2015: Server unavailable; 9/2022: accessible on the web).
- whitneybiennial.com:
Peter Lunenfeld and Milton
Manetas directed their attention in a talk to the idea to search
for the URL addresses which are occupied by the Biennial
of the Whitney Museum of American
Art. The idea of a platform as extension of (and alternative to)
the Whitney Biennial
2002 was realizable because the domain name www.whitneybiennial.com
was free. This domain name directs the attention of surfers to the site
and allows them to recognize the intention.
Michael Rees developed Turntable
as Flash application. Twelve
artists mixed for "Turntable" one to six Flash-based snippets
out of animations. The snippets can be installed several times, modified
and dislocated in "Turntable". Manovich explains Rees' tool
in Generation
Flash 1/3 (see below) with the terms "loop"
and "sample" which characterize formative features of a "remix
culture". Furthermore the first version of the platform contains
one to five Flash animations of 122
artists. Manetas had the idea that in 3/7/2002, at the opening of
the Whitney Biennial, 23 U-Haul trucks with rear-projection screens
for the presentation of the whitneybiennial.com could surround the Whitney
Museum of American Art. Matthew Mirapaul announced this event in 3/4/2002
in The New York Times as an alternative to the opening gala of the Whitney
Museum. The spectators expected the trucks in vain but found an invitation
of Whitneybiennial.com to a party in Chelsea.
The platform received a second
net presentation after the Whitney Biennial 2002: Simulated exhibition
spaces present pictures on walls. The pictures are connected with hotspots
which link to 22 animations and games. The platform with its project
character and its openness for new initiatives constitutes an alternative
to the temporally limited Biennial exhibition events (2/2004).
Mai Ueda installed a linklist
simultaneous to the Whitney
Biennial 2004. The list presents 42 thumbnails with screenshots
(with links to big screenshots which allow to read the URL-adresses
of net projects) as a selection of works like a group exhibition. Ueda's
proceedings for 2004 is meagre in comparison to the platform as an expansion
and counterposition to the Whitney Biennial 2002 because he did not
realize more than a net feature of a group of net projects in the form
of visual data (3/2004).
- The Widget Art
Gallery:
Since 2009 Chiara Passa presents each month a new contribution of an
artist in her virtual gallery space. The project of the web-based
App cross platform are available on a blog, as widgets in the dashboard
of Mac OS as well as an app for iPhones and iPods. Many artists placed
a moving object in the center of the "mini single art gallery room".
Up to now works
are realised by Anthony Antonellis, Andrew Benson, Marco Cadioli, Jon
Cates, Jennifer Chan, Flavio Doricchi, Alberto Gulminetti, Rea McNamara,
Bill Miller, Prosthetic Knowledge, Daniele Puppi, Yoshi Sodeoka, Caterina
Stratti, Chris Timms, Rodell Warner and others (4/2015. 1/2020: New
contributions usually follow in 2 to 3 months).
Contributions to the history of NetArt:
Texts on Actual Aspects of NetArt:
- Adams, Randy: Paris Connection. A Project in Critical Media.
In: trAce. Online Writing Centre: Review, The Nottingham Trent University,
Clifton/Nottingham, 5/17/2003. Randy Adams interviews Jim Andrews (via
e-Mail) on Paris
Connection. This site was initiated by Andrews and was realized
with coauthors. It presents five Parisian artists (Jean-Jacques Birgé,
Nicolas Clauss,
Frédéric
Durieu, Jean-Luc Lamarque, Antoine Schmitt, Servovalve) using mostly
Director (resp. the program language Lingo) and knowing each other.
"Paris Connection" is a co-production of four portals offering
French, Spain and Portuguese translations of contributions to explain
the artists' projects. Andrews interviews the Parisian artists and provokes
them with his Director knowledge to sometimes surprising responses.
Andrews ascribes in Adams' interview the notion "critical media"
to a net criticism which investigates intensive software and net conditions.
Andrews marks a difference between "critical media" and "touristic"
contributions by authors which don't write primarily on "multimedia
net.art" (2/2004; 1/2012: the former URL-address
is not accessible anymore).
- Arns, Inke: Read_me,
run_me, execute_me: Some notes about software art.
Lecture, Kuda.org Centre for New Media, Novi Sad, 4/9/2004. Print version:
Kuda (ed.): Umetnicka praksa u vreme informacijske/medijske dominacije
/ Art practice in the time of information/ media domination, Novi Sad
2004, p.39-48. Arns marks differences between Software Art and Computer
Art of the sixties, computer based reactive installations of the nineties
and Generative Art. Software Art directs the attention of recipients
to the code in the context of its use: Software serves not only as a
means which was treated either in Computer Art and reactive installations
as part of the black box computer or in Generative Art as notation for
the digital generation of surfaces.
Software is a central part of the contemporary landscape of media and
machines. Software Art refers to the processes of their construction
and fixing by their users and/or by other instances: Software Art offers
model cases for a test of the society which began to handle digitalization
as an ordinary case. "Coded performativity" doesn't only mark
a feature of the code readable by humans (compare "Codeworks"),
but marks as well the framework created by laws (as code) and the established
manners of use. insert_coin
of Dragan Espenschied/Alvar Freude and walser.php
of "textz.com" (Sebastian Lütgert) thematize these social
conditions.
Here Arns differentiates her thesis of the illocutionary character of
the source code (Arns, Inke: Texte, die (sich) bewegen..., 2001, see
below). (6/2004; 1/2020: The text version was not found on the net,
but a video
of the lecture. Now the text version is only available as print).
- Arns, Inke: Texte,
die (sich) bewegen. Zur Performativität von Programmiercodes in
der Netzkunst.
(Texts That Move (Themselves): Notes on the Performativity of Programming
Codes in Net Art). Lecture, "Kinetographien", conference,
European Academy, Berlin, 10/25/2001. In: Arns, Inke/Goller, Mirjam/Strätling,
Susanne/Witte, Georg (ed.): Kinetographien. Bielefeld p.57-78. Texts
which appear in moving (cinetic) net presentations cause Arns to ask
what moves surfaces resp. "phenotexts": the source code resp.
the "genotext". Who observes only the phenotext as performative
disregards the illocutionary character of the genotext: Readers can
be able to foresee the functions which source codes will actualize in
processors.
It is impossible to divide spoken words from speach
acts, to separate speach and the act of speach in a communication
context. Comparable with the speach act is the relation between the
code as computer input and the digital process caused by the input:
The source code and the speach act cause effects "without time
delay".
Arns finds the performativity of programming codes in Software Art and
"Codeworks" (Alan Sondheim).
If codes reproduce legal limitations (resp. limitations caused by the
legal code) in the source code then it results in "coded performativity"
(2/2004).
- Arns, Inke: Transparent
World. Minoritarian Tactics in the Age of Transparency.
In: Andersen, Christian Ulrik/Pold, Søren Pro (ed.): Interface
Criticism. Aesthetics Beyond Buttons. Aarhus 2011, p.253-276. The ideal
of transparency followed by modernist architects until the sixties is
combined by Inke Arns with Michel Foucault's analysis of the "disciplinary
societies" and their transition to the "control societies"
explained by Gilles Deleuze as the next phase in the development of
"dispositive power". Transparent walls permit social control
by offering occasions for surveillance.
Digitalisation changes the function of transparency into criteria for
interfaces as surfaces offering an easy handling of functions without
being confronted with deeper levels: The danger is banned that users
are confronted with codes. If transparency of the levels organizing
the programming of computing processes is wanted than the user surface
has to be opaque. The code controlling computing processes ("coded
performativity", p.12 quoting Reinhold Grether) and visualization
don't anymore depend from each other but exclude each other: One level
is transparent because the other level is intransparent: "In the
age of transparency we find ourselves dealing with a fundamental de-coupling
of visibility and performativity/effectivity." (p.261) Transparency
of surfaces relevant for the user's control of functions requires intransparency
on levels underneath these surfaces: "The age of transparency is
distinguished by the decoupling of (panoptical) visibility and (post-optical)
performativity." (p.273)
Arns features projects realized until 2007 by the Camera Surveillance
Players, Bureau d'Etudes, Dragan Espenschied and Alvar Freude, Annina
Rüst and Local Area Network, Michelle Teran, Trevor Paglen and
the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Manu Luksch and others who either
point to hidden control functions (1) or lead them ad absurdum (2):
two manners to 'showcase' them to controlling persons (2) or to control
people (1).
In "the age of transparancy" the panoptical surveillance of
"disciplinary societies" and the post-optical "performativity"
controlled by hidden software diverge: Today transparency and control
aren't as complementary as they have been in a not so distant past (3/2013).
- Arvers, Isabelle: Cheats
or Glitch? Voice as a Game Modification in Machinima.
In: Neumark, Norie/Gibson, Ross/Leeuwen, Theo van (ed.): Voice. Vocal
Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media. Cambridge/Massachusetts 2010,
p.225-242. Arvers discusses the relations between images and sounds
in Machinima videos. They are offered as well as often viewed and downloaded
from websites like Machinima.org, The Movies, YouTube or Dailymotion.
Arvers interviewed authors and collected their statements on intentions
and technical problems.
Game engines are programs constructed for the development of a game's
animation and constitute the system for the control of the gameplay.
Game Engines are used in the production process of Machinima videos.
Because these engines don't include databases for facial expressions
the independently created sounds (voices) take over the function of
individualisation. In some examples sounds and images are applied as
separate elements meeting each other sometimes in 'bizarre' ways. In
some videos the represented persons move restless like game figures
meanwhile simultaneously they keep talking with each other: Only on
the audio level the dialogic modes of expression are presented.
Figures with helmets undermine expectations concerning visual individuation
(for example The Ill Clan: Apartment
Huntin', 1988; Chris Burke: This
Spartan Life, Episode 1, Module 3, 2005). In "Bill & John"
(Episode 2,
2006) Bertrand Le Cabec and others use images and sounds as complementing
each other without necessity to present faces: The configurations of
combat fighters (in exterior views) were taken from the game "Lock
on Modern Air Combat". When these configurations are presented
then the pilots communicating with each other can be heard. When the
communication about actual combat situations can be heard meanwhile
these situations are shown then this prevents often expectations to
see the pilots' faces. In other videos the figures' typification of
mask-like faces causes unconventional film aesthetics (Alex Chan: The
French Democracy, 2005; Eddo Stern & Jessica Z Hutchins: Landlord
Vigilante, 2007). However in 2007 Paul Marino uses in I'm
Still Seeing Breen the software FacePoser to accomodate the facial
features of his protagonists to the spoken words (4/2015; 1/2020).
- Betancourt, Michael: Critical
Glitches and Glitch Art.
In: Hz Journal. Nr.19/2014. Betancourt is not satisfied by studies reducing
Glitch Art to the formal differences of glitches on the one hand as
maloperations and on the other hand as modifications looking like maloperations
("glitch-alike", see Moradi, Imani: GTLCH
Aesthetics. Dissertation The University of Huddersfield. Huddersfield
2004, p.10). He points to the observers and their ways to give meanings
to the works produced in one of the ways mentioned above by locating
them in their actual social context.
Betancourt's rejection of interpretations understanding each glitch
as "inherently critical" is based on Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's
comments on autonomous art and their bourgeois refunctionalisation.
Recipients will open up "the potential for a critically oriented
practice" by their capacities to interpret technical processes
with their knowledge of normal uses and interruptions. In selecting
glitch procedures artists should be able to anticipate the interpretive
horizons of their recipients for example by their ways to relate
disrupted as well as non-disrupted parts with each other (4/2015; 1/2020).
- Biggs, Simon: Transculturation,
transliteracy and generative poetics.
Lecture, "European Electronic Literature Conference", University
of Bergen, Bergen, 9/12/2008. Language contains more than speach acts
and text: "Language has always included the visual, aural and tactile."
Biggs outlines the concepts of "transculturation" (Fernando
Ortiz), pluriliteracy (Ofelia Garcia/Lesley Bartlett/JoAnne Kleifgen)
and transliteracy
(Sue Thomas/Chris Joseph/Jess Laccetti/Bruce Mason/Simon Mills/Simon
Perrill/Kate Pullinger) elaborating relations between different uses
of media and cultural fields.
Biggs presents John Cayley's Translation
(2005) as a model of "dynamic processes of signification".
Cayley thematises transitions between lingustic states with audible
and visual means. Generative procedures between translations transform
a text by Walter Benjamin explicating translation as a problem of transformations.
Sometimes the text appears in one language for a short while. The reduction
to one language is a moment within passages between generative phases:
"...he conflates the technical with the cultural..."
Biggs refers to Terry Winograd's definition of the computer as a linguistic
machine instead of a thinking machine: "The very notion of 'symbol
system' is inherently linguistic...a form of verbal argument."
(Winograd 1991) In "Translation" Cayley shows on one side
the linguistic structures in contextual independency and refers on the
other side to the contextual dependency of meanings by pointing to the
instability of generative processes. This contextual dependency is dynamic:
"...these dynamic processes of signification." Language is
"computational" and culture as well as language can be understood
as "a network of constantly regenerating relations." The consequence
of these conclusions is to understand technology as "the material
manifestation of the social" (7/2009).
- Bosma, Josephine: Post/Digital
is Post/Screen. Arnheim's Visual Thinking applied to Art in the Expanded
Digital Media Field.
In: A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research. APRJA. Vol.
3/Issue 1. 2014. According to Bosma the term "post-digital"
highlights a reorientation: Although digital media spread faster than
ever, actual analyses of the social and cultural consequences of technological
developments aren't primarily focused on digitalisation. Contemporary
artists react to these reorientations by focussing the attention not
longer only to digital processes but to the aspects being neglected
until now.
In the view of Bosma arguments in Rudolf Arnheim's discourse on the
function of the model formation in perception and cognition (id.: Visual
Thinking, Berkeley 1969) can be expanded to a conception of post-digital
tendencies. The perception is based on the reduction of complexity made
possible by modeling schemes, because an unfiltered registration and
memorisation of sense-data surmounts human capabilities. Arnheim pleas
for a holistic method of thinking in offering possibilities for the
reduction of sensory stimuli by a comprehensive structuration of the
perceived. On the one hand he mentions early scientific "models
for theory" as examples for models being constitutive for the perception
processes ("Visual Thinking", chap.15), on the other hand
he highlights psychological processes.
As an example for a theory-laden change of a point of view Bosma points
to the discourse led since the Renaissance between the arts and the
natural sciences about the ellipse explained either as a deformed circle
or as structured by its own relations between the center and the periphery:
"A shift of the perspective can apparently enrich the way we approach
things, even if not every detail of this new view is in line with the
reality it reveals."
Bosma recognizes similarities between Arnheim's approach to explicate
the basics of visual perception as crucially constituted by more than
only visual elements and Alexander R. Galloway's criticism of "The
Interface Effect" (book, Malden/Massachusetts 2012) highlighting
computing processes beyond the signs visible on screens ("the digital
as a complex structure of forces obscured by a focus on the screen").
Relations between computing processes and screens are central in Lev
Manovich's analysis of new media. Bosma regards Galloway's criticism
of Manovich's focus on screens as an important source for the development
of a "post-digital approach" by transgressing limits of the
critical focus on screens.
In the view of Bosma the following works present results of this "approach":
As an example of "Code Art" she presents Jaromil's "Forkbomb".
The alternative network "Netless" by Dania Vasiliev stands
for networks integrated into installations and performances. Furthermore
Bosma features actions by "The Yes Men" as "Post-Internet
Art" because she understands their engagement in investigations
of established imaginations of the digital as a development towards
a concept of "the post-digital". The Yes Men's lectures are
distributed as video documentations. With their hidden provocations
of the audience the Yes Men highlight "different dimensions of
reality" and discuss an "in-between space" being "a
physical space, a technological space, and a conceptual space at once".
Because The Yes Men combine media strategically to reach the goals of
politically motivated actions as activism always did it, installations
with integrated networks and/or internet access would have been more
convincing as examples demonstrating hitherto unknown qualities of an
"in-between space".
Furthermore with her Arnheim inspired approach trying to explore levels
of reality Bosma renews an elder subject of the artistic avant-garde
of the the 20th century. Although Bosma doesn't want to return to a
renewal of pre-digital media uses and concepts she calls the
pre-digital investigations of the cinema and the television problematic
, nevertheless she arrived there.
With her absorption of examples from Code Art and activism into the
actual paradigm of art criticism Bosma gives the label "post-digital"
afterwards to these media forms and strategies originating in the web
1.0. With her efforts to demonstrate the term "post-digital"
as an offer to wider insights Bosma's discussion does not get more than
a mere dichotomisation between pop versions of the digital and the abandonment
of this culture. Bosma reduces this discussion to the problem "screen"
versus "post-screen" and highlightens alternatives to dominantly
screen-related projects. These alternatives existed already before the
popular multiplications of mobile computers and mobile phones with touchscreens.
But what has been changed between the criticism of graphical user interfaces
of standard operating systems for personal computers and the media constellations
of web 2.0 determined more dominant than ever before by global players?
An approach integrating the evolution of interfaces and its connections
to the technologies for screen presentations could be more promising
for investigations of artistic projects with the goal to provoke a media
criticism than a simple avoidance of screen presentations, while most
recipients only experience these "post-digital" projects by
photos and film documents distributed on the internet and presented
on screens (4/2015; 1/2020).
- Breeze, Maryanne: The
Sound of Reality Lag: Versionals are the New Black.
In: Furtherfield Review, 8/7/2007. Platforms of web 2.0 like MySpace,
Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and others substitute "ego-mediated
variables" by "actuated identity markers". The amount
of markers, their distribution and the connections with and between
them is crucial for "versionals", not for friendship. Private
data are turned into "open-ended versional noise". The relations
to reality become infected by the "versional effect" (7/2009;
1/2020; 9/2022: page not fund in the Web).
- Calovizza, Giovanni/Finucane, Blake/Franceschet, Massimo/Smith, T’ai u.a.: Crypto Art. A Decentralized View.
In: Researchgate, June 2019. This "decentralized position paper" explains the blockchain method and its applications in art from different perspectives. After an introduction to blockchain technology as the division of information into blocks that are interconnected ("cryptographic hash function") and disseminated via peer-to-peer, further aspects follow from art historical and artistic perspectives as well as from the perspective of platform operators. In their search for precursors of "Crypto Art," T'ai Smith and Blake Finucane believe they can find connecting factors in Marcel Duchamp and Conceptual Art (keyword "dematerialization"), but then have to sum up: "...crypto art inverses the critique of art's economic value that was initiated by Duchamp and espoused by practitioners of conceptual art." The gallerists Jonathan Perkins and James Morgan report from the early days of NFT platforms. These reports may become documents for histories of the NFT art trade (9/2022).
- Cayley, John: The
Code is not the Text (unless it is the Text).
Lecture, "p0es1s. Poetics of Digital Text", Symposium, Universität
Erfurt, Erfurt, 9/28/2001. In: Electronic Book Review. Vol.3, 9/10/2002;
5/25/2003. Modified, shortened German/English print version: Block,
Friedrich W./Heibach, Christiane/Wenz, Karin (ed.): p0es1s. Ästhetik
digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit 2004,
p.287-306. The code should function as computer input which starts reading
processes. If this is not the case then forms of programming languages/codes
are used as stimulations for the production of experimental texts like
"Codeworks" of MEZ/Mary Anne Breeze and Talan Memmott: "The
code has ceased to function as code." Unfortunately neither MEZ
nor Memmott develop a "Code Pidgin English" in the process
of writing.
The artists' group Jodi integrates text parts in their source codes
which are not readable for processors: "code-as-text". Cayley
presents his Codework "Pressing the 'Reveal Code' Key" as
an example both as source code (in HyperTalk) for computer input and
as readable text with "ludic" qualities: "...this code
is the text." The work presents a readable text and demonstrates
a working code: "logic-as-literature in new media".
A "literature constituted by flickering signification" is
able to deal with the status of texts as always "compiled, decompiled,
recompiled". "Flickering signifiers" (N. Katherine Hayles)
jump between different digital contexts and levels. This strategy is
based here on the difference between the levels of code and text: "The
code is not the text." (Compare the counter-position of Florian
Cramer in "Digital Code and Literary Text", see below) The
title of the net version offers an extended version of the non-equality
of code and text which is relevant for Cayley's own example: "The
code is not the text (unless it is the text)" (2/2004).
- Cox, Geoff: Virtual
Suicide as Decisive Political Act.
Lecture, conference "Activist Media and Biopolitics", Universität
Innsbruck, November 2010. In: Sützl, Wolfgang/Hug, Theo (ed.):
Activist Media and Biopolitics. Critical Media Interventions in the
Age of Biopower. Institut für psychosoziale Intervention und Kommunikationsforschung.
Universität Innsbruck. Innsbruck 2012, p.103-116. Geoff Cox points
to politically motivated suicide and its thematisation in computer games
before he presents "virtual suicide" as a tactical means in
social media.
Wafaa Bilal exposes in the modificated game A
Virtual Jihadi (2008) the situation of Iraquis between American
occupants and the Fundamentalists' terror. The first-person shooters
"Quest for Al-Qua'eda: The Hunt of Bin-Laden" (2002) and "Quest
for Saddam" (2003) realised by Petrilla Entertainment are modified
into the fundamentalist game "The Night of Bush Capturing"
(Global Islamic Media Front, 2006) chasing George W. Bush instead of
Osama Bin-Laden or Saddam Hussein. Bilal takes over the code of "Quest
for Saddam" that was used in "The Night of Bush Capturing",
too, and gives the characteristics of his appearance to the suicide-bomber.
Bilal's version thematises the tensions between "the extreme fantasies
of islamophobia and islamophilia" (pdf p.2/print p.104). Cox documents
this content with an artist's quote instead of an analysis of the game.
Cox borrows the social framework of a "mechanism of control over
the imaginary" from Franco Berardi who interpretes suicide as "the
pathology of the psycho-social system" (Berardi: Precarious Rhapsody...
London 2009, p.55; pdf p.1/print p.103).
Adult Swim's internet game "Five Minutes to Kill (Yourself)"
(2009) offers suicide as a goal "rather than go back to work"
(pdf p.3/print p.106). The gamer navigating her/his avatar wins if (s)he
is fast and successful to escape the office work by efforts to find
someone or something causing his/her virtual death. Cox recognises a
parallel structure between the game's "mise-en-scène"
(pdf p.4/print p.106) of violence and "the symbolic violence of
the capitalist workplace" (pdf p.4/print p.106). For me the game
doesn't try to let the gamer react to the challenges of the actual working
conditions but parodies in an ironical and entertaining manner the daily
struggles in provoking its latent violence and exposing oneself to it.
Olga Goriunova's Suicide
Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word (2000) for the production of notes
indicating suicides is used by Cox as an intermediary to a discussion
of Tactical Media for the "virtual suicide" in social media.
The "cycles of struggle" are integrated by the "current
neoliberal regime" as a "motor" useful "for its
own development" (Mario Tronti: The
Strategy of Refusal, 1965; pdf p.5/print p.108). If Facebook threats
moddr with legal steps because their Web
2.0 Suicide Machine (2009) with its mechanism for "unfriending"
violates the rights handed over to the platform owners in the course
of the registration procedure, then moddr transgressed a line between
integrable and not anymore integrable resistance: The resistance of
the net surfers not wanting to work anymore for Facebook's win is a
direct threat for its business model. The "unfriending" reduces
the data traffic necessary for the advertisement revenues and it provokes
the owners of the platform to legal actions to mark the limit of tolerance.
For Cox Facebook is following the "logic of governmentality"
criticised by Michel Foucault. This logic illustrates the replacement
of "the regulatory function of the state in relation to the market
(liberalism) with the market itself (neoliberalism)." (pdf p.3,6/print
p.105,109). Cox presents Les Liens Invisibles' project Seppukoo
(2009) as a further example for "virtual suicide". One of
its authors presents it as "'viral'" and as "a sort of
involuntary form of strike" (pdf p.8/print p.110): By "the
mechanism of viral invitations" "individual actions"
of "unfriending" are shifted "onto a collective stage"
(pdf p.8/print p.110 quoting Guy McMusker) (4/2013; 1/2020: Adult Swim's
Five
Minutes to Kill (Yourself) is not accessible anymore on the web).
- Cox, Geoff/McLean, Alex/Ward, Adrian: The
Aesthetics of Generative Code.
Lecture, "Generative Art 2000: 3rd International Conference on
Generative Art", Politecnico di Milano, Milano, 12/14-16/2000.
Uses of Perl as not working code (Perl Poetry) are denied by McLean/Ward.
McLean and Ward present examples of codes causing different working
processes in different computers. These different executions of the
same code complicate the esthetic discourse on relations between program/concept/text
and presentation in a manner which the authors compare with relations
between the text of poetry and its vocal performance.
The executions of McLean's and Ward's examples produce "'watermarks'
of the processor and operating system". The relations between code
and execution are variing with the used processors and these variations
indicate the quality of the code and vice versa: Codes can be
used as model cases for investigations how monitor presentations are
generated (2/2004).
- Cramer, Florian: Animals
that Belong to the Emperor. Failing Universal Classification Schemes
from Aristotle to the Semantic Web.
Lecture, Forum on Quaero: A Public Think Tank on the Politics of the
Search Engine, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, 9/30/2007. In: Nettime,
12/19/2007. Cramer criticises projects (Theseus, Quaero) of the Semantic
Web offering one of the possible classifications of knowledge ("cosmology")
under the term "ontology" as the only basis of data processing
with "semantic tags" in the future: "Beyond cosmology
falsely named ontology, it is metaphysics disguised as physics."
As much as projects of the Semantic Web try to pretend to be able to
replace human beings by software with its processing of meanings ("semantics")
and their references to facts ("ontology"), computers remain
"syntactical machines" processing data input with programmed
algorithmic procedures incapable to substitute "ontology"
or any world of words' and phrases' meanings: The "culturally and
folksonomic ways" of data input and processing can't be skipped
over (7/2009).
- Cramer, Florian: Digital
Code and Literary Text.
Lecture, "p0es1s. Poetics of Digital Text", Symposium, Universität
Erfurt, Erfurt, 9/27/2001. Modified german/english print version: In:
Block, Friedrich W./Heibach, Christiane/Wenz, Karin (ed.): p0es1s. Ästhetik
digitaler Poesie/The Aesthetics of Digital Poetry. Ostfildern-Ruit 2004,
p.263-276. Cramer explains his counter-position to John Cayley (see
above) and his interest in software as text in non working uses of programming
codes. Net Poetry of Jodi, antiorp/Netochka Nezvanova, MEZ/Mary Anne
Breeze, Ted Warnell, Alan Sondheim and Kenji Siratori amalgamate structural
and speach act oriented research (Structuralism and Philosophy of Ordinary
Language).
Authors of Codeworks integrate in their writing processes conceptual
NetArt with uses of Open Source methods. They develop their writing
procedures further with takeovers from Hacker Cultures meanwhile industrial
software (with closed source code) like browsers and plugIns (QuickTime,
ShockWave, Flash) is integrated as a means of production into Hyperfictions
and Multimedia Poetry (2/2004).
- Cramer, Florian: Exe.cut[up]able
statements. The Insistence of Code.
Lecture, Ars Electronica 2003, Brucknerhaus, Linz, 9/8/2003. In: Stocker,
Gerhard/Schöpf Christine (eds.): Code The Language of Our
Time. Ars Electronica 2003. Ars Electronica Center, Linz/Ostfildern-Ruit
2003, p.98-109. Iconic programming languages have a low complexity in
comparison to the syntactical possible relations of text based software.
Therefore interfaces divide the use of visual signs (icons) from the
text based software. Text based interfaces allow a transparency of relations
between the levels of programming and its use. This transparency is
not possible with iconic interfaces. Cramer presents the relationship
of code and interface as the crucial point of codeworks created by Alan
Sondheim and MEZ/Mary Anne Breeze (2/2004).
- Cramer, Florian: Peer-to-peer
Services. Transgressing the Archive (and its Maladies?).
In: (Internet-) catalogue of the exhibition "adonnaM.mp3-Filesharing,
the Hidden Revolution in the Internet", Museum of Applied Arts,
department digitalcraft, Frankfurt am Main, 3-4/20/2003. New in: Cramer,
Florian: Anti-Media. Ephemera on Speculative Arts. Rotterdam 2013, p.102-112,250s.
Cramer characterizes peer-to-peer networks like Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa
and Freent as music archives and interprets the net and its organization
(ICANN, TCP/IP, DNS, etc.) as its own archive with object- and meta-data
(IP-adresses and domain names). Peer-to-peer networks don't always use
the archival organization of the internet but possess sometimes their
own server- and/or terminal-based organizations. GNUnet and Freenet
move files between the integrated terminals: The places of memory are
moving and become unlocalizable for censoring efforts (of the Copyright
industry). If files are lost in storage media and hard disks then the
data can be found in the instable peer-to-peer networks: Filesharing
as a chance for a "cultural memory" surviving the deletion
of memory because of the "unsystematic means of data transfer"
(2/2004).
- Cramer, Florian: Post-Digital
Writing.
Keynote Lecture, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, West
Virginia University, Morgantown/West Virginia, 6/22/2012. In: Electronic
Book Review, 12/12/2012. New in: Cramer, Florian: Anti-Media. Ephemera
on Speculative Arts. Rotterdam 2013, p.227-239,259s. In the "Keynote
Lecture" for the "Electronic Literature Organization [ELO]
Conference" Cramer summarises the history of hyperfiction in short
and in a critical perspective. Meanwhile in countries like Germany "literary
writing" never became a subject of academic discourses and the
development of electronic writing ended after a boom in the late nineties,
in the United States this art form was and is supported in the academic
environment by "ELO initiatives like 'Born Again Bits' and 'Acid-Free
Bits'". Nevertheless its possibilities were reduced to closed and
downloadable systems without regards to webness and its manifestations
in link systems and "communication streams". Furthermore Cramer
points to failures of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) to
react to new art forms using filesharing and the distribution of files
via telecommunication.
The kind of literary criticism prefered by the ELO presupposes works
marking themelves as "literary" and disables itself to react
to transgressions of the limits between "amateur and professional
writers".
According to Cramer the development of net art after 2000 went ahead
quite similar to electronic literature. Contemporary artists use the
internet as a distribution medium only and not anymore as an artistic
medium with its own possibilities. Connections between net art and activism
in "hacktivism" and copyleft initiatives are today integrated
in the mass culture (correction of Cramer's critique: If mass culture
highlights alternative movements then these movements must not be successful
in their efforts to move from the periphery to the center and the engaged
groups must not be able to persuade politicians and a sufficient number
of voters for their goals). In the view of Cramer on the one hand the
possibilities of the internet are not explored further, on the other
hand the "hactivism" is too well established.
Cramer outlines his point of view in criticising Kenneth Goldsmith's
comments on "plunderphonics" (in "Uncreative Writing",
New York 2011). Meanwhile Goldsmith uses net cultures as sources for
his artistic activities, nevertheless he remains a distanced observer
unable to transgress the dichotomy creative/uncreative.
Furthermore the neoliberal "Creative Industries" can't be
called into question from Goldsmith's point of view: "It is tempting
to maintain notions of 'literary writing' or '(un)creative writing'
out of resistance to these developments." Yet according to Cramer
"uncreative writing" should be practiced with a "clever
inventiveness" to provoke and question established "creative
industries".
In the view of Cramer the contemporary developments of digital media
provoke a new evaluation of the analogue procedures and media: He characterises
this tendency as the hallmark of the "Post-Digital". Cramer
regards a return to the "publishing of self-made books and zines"
as a possibility to practice alternative forms of "social networking"
beyond the control of the "four corporate players" (Google,
Apple, Amazon, Facebook).
He mentions Annette Knol's book "Colors Simply Hiphop"
(undated) as an example for a "DIY [Do-it-yourself] printmaking"
undermining ELO's criteria in a twofold manner with its appropriation
of lines from Hip Hop lyrics (net finds from sites archiving lyrics):
with its artistic strategy and with its distribution. According to Cramer
Knol and "DIY printmaking communities" return to the origins
of the "home computing and to home pages in the literal sense of
the word."
Cramer's criticism of the digitised mass culture is based on the criticism
of mass culture by Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Max Horkheimer ("Dialectics
of Enlightenment", New York 1972 and Stanford 2002/"Dialektik
der Aufklärung", Amsterdam 1947). With his evasion to the
self-made analogue Cramer can show a place of retreat but he can not
outline ways out of the stated crisis as well as earlier the classical
criticism of culture by the Frankfurt School was not able to offer a
concrete utopy.
In Prehistories of the Post-digital
Geoff Cox reacts to the problem of the relations between art, media
and society as it was outlined by Cramer with a sketch
of a prehistory of the "global contemporaneity". Cox features
the "Post-Digital" as a simultaneity of "different geopolitical
contexts" being "badly known": Cox reacts to Cramer's
positive evaluation of the "Post-Digital" with a negative
one. Cramer and Cox demonstrate how the term "Post-Digital"
can be used as a categorisation of contemporary phenomena, nevertheless
new approaches for a criticism of its causes remain missing that can
be used as a point of departure for the development of a perspective
toward an alternative practice of art (4/2015; 1/2020).
- Cramer, Florian: Zehn
Thesen zur Softwarekunst.
(Ten
Theses on Software Art). In: Auer, Johannes/Heibach, Christiane/Suter,
Beat (ed.): netzliteratur.net_Netzliteratur//Internetliteratur//Netzkunst
2003. Print version, German/English ("Ten Theses about Software
Art"): Gohlke, Gerrit (ed.): Software Art Eine Reportage
über den Code/A Reportage about Source Code. Media Arts Lab des
Künstlerhauses Bethanien. Berlin 2003, p.6-13. For Cramer Software
Art problematizes its means with these means as well as with other media.
The relation between instruction and execution is thematized in a way
external to computers in "event cards" of George
Brecht (example "Lamp Event", part of the event card Three
Lamp Events, Summer 1961: "on. off") and in .walk
of Social Fiction. A difference to the conceptual, dematerializing instruction
is marked by artists who work with software not only to use its functions,
to present models of its functions or to expand its possibilities but
to treat the code as material (via interventions and modifications).
On one side Social Fiction resystematizes in ".walk" the "Conceptual
actionism of the sixties" as "computer software", on
the other side there are artists who treat software as material in "Codeworks"
as well as in modifications of games and pages in HTML (example: Jodi).
Critics introduced the term "software art" for works, which
don't fit into the framework of the art world, but need explanations.
The term "art" in Software Art means craftmanship, too, which
causes a new use of the former concept "ars" which integrated
arts and crafts. Conceptualization, media pluralism, knowledge of software
and processualization are combined in Software Art in sometimes extreme
different manners. If Software Art's pluralism is reduced by "critics,
curators and juries" to few, often realized media forms ("experimental
web-browsers, data visualizations, modified computer games and cracker
code") then they leave aside this pluralism which complicates the
definition of art (6/2004).
- Cubitt, Sean: Immersion, Connectivity, Conviviality.
Lecture, Museum für Moderne Kunst (MUMOK), Vienna/Donau-Universität
Krems, Department für Bildwissenschaften, Telelecture, 11/8/2007.
Cubitt interprets the difference between the uses of adequate media
for low- and high-resolution in pictures or films from a social point
of view. He mentions the low-resolution screens of mobile phones and
the human-to-human-communication via SMS as examples for the "actuality
of isolation" and the "illusion of community". Efforts
to transpose technical demands of high-resolution media and transmissions
to mobile gadgets with little screens and interfaces can transpose the
problems of the high-resolution context the dominating "actuality
of community" resulting in "the illusion of isolation":
The "neo-baroque spectacle" of the high-resolution media runs
the danger to become the only paradigm of media. All users participate
but they imagine themselves as isolated observers.
This "neo-baroque spectacle" is fixed on the "fight against
the absolute evil" meanwhile it remains undetermined concerning
all other problems. The "immersive sublime" of the high-resolution
media finds its counterpart in the "connective despair" of
the low-resolution media. The communication in a "world of hyperindividuation"
fails: "The binarism of hi-res and low-res takes us to the sick
heart of the contemporary world." Only "convivial tools"
will be able to actualize the lost possibilities of communication: "...a
dialectic of embodied experience and socialisation on the grounds of
a mediated world."
Cubitt interprets Urban Tapestries
of Proboscis (see Collective tips, part
1 and part
3) as a nostalgic and simultaneously utopian project: It is as well
"sewn into the fabric of surveillant and corporate networks"
as it is "another model of network interdependence" (7/2009;
5/2015 not accessible anymore on the web).
- Dekker, Annet: Assembling
Traces, or the Conservation of Net Art.
In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies. Spring 2014. Dekker pleas
for a not only backward-looking conservation of net art. On the one
hand works with a source code not functioning in contemporary net conditions
(new browsers for new operating systems) provoke the question if the
code can be rewritten. On the other hand contributions should be integrated
produced by users acting as participants of the work ("input from
visitors") and as agents in the 'context' of a work.
Since 1996 the website mouchette.org
is organised by Martine Naddam. This site is used by Dekker as an example
to outline her understanding of a 'context': When the widow of the film
director Robert Bresson tried to prohibit references of any sort to
his movie «Mouchette» then the participants reacted with
mirror sites (see ann.25). These mirror sites documented a specific
state in the development of the site mouchette.org.
According to Dekker the results of preservations or reconstructions
of net art are caused by the ways chosen by participants of a net community
to archive several states of a project as well as to care for continuations
or resumptions of the possibilities for participations (as interactions
with the net project). A net project's context can be constituted and
cultivated by the net activities of the participants (blogs, websites,
etc.): "Such a process does not exclude conservation but incorporates
future thinking in its practice while guarding or making documentation
as traces of a past..." (4/2015).
- Dyer-Witheford, Nick/de Peuter, Greig: Empire@Play:
Virtual Games and Global Capitalism.
In: CTheory, 5/13/2009. The authors explain the "Empire's"
(Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri 2000) working conditions of game developers.
Then they feature some possibilities of "Games of Multitude"
for engagements against these conditions by taking over procedures of
games made for the training of soldiers and traders to develop them
further: The Empire creates the possibilities for its own transgression.
The authors outline the working conditions in companies of "ludocapitalism"
to demonstrate the necessity for the workers to use their own capabilities
to escape these conditions. But the "meshwork of satellite offices"
shows the companies' successful strategies to keep the wages down.
Games developed for e-learning in armies, corporations and tradings
show the capabilities of gaming procedures. The development of these
procedures to enable the gamers' "'autoludic' activities"
offers chances to gain gaming strategies against actual social and economic
conditions transgressing piracy and protest: The authors present games
like agoraXchange (Jacqueline
Stevenes/Natalie Bookchin 2004-2008) and Superstruct
(The Institute of Future, 2008) as possibilities to learn the planning
of strategies. These games can interrupt the "magic circle"
of a game world separated from reality by proposing ways to develop
strategies for the exploitation of inconsistencies in existing power
structures and for the change of concepts to observe the world. That
sounds abstract and is far from a proposal to begin to change the world
by specific kinds of online games and gaming strategies. Realizations
of the proposed gaming concept will be useful only as forerunners of
a practice resulting in a change of power relations (7/2009; 1/2020:
The website of "Superstruct"
is not accessible anymore).
- Flanagan, Mary: Locating
Play and Politics: Real World Games & Activism.
In: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Perth, September
2007 (perthDAC 2007); Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Vol.16/Issue 2-3.
2008. In «La production de l'espace» Henri Lefebvre distinguishes
between an alienated abstract public space specified by propriety, surveillance
and consumption, and an urban space characterized by the social life
of the people living there. Blast Theory's Can
You See Me Now? (2001) is critically featured by Flanagan because
local characteristics and streets are only substitutable parts of the
playground. Their own histories aren't integrated as elements of the
game. Flanagan presents Anne Marie Schleiner's Operation
Urban Terrain (OUT) (2004), Suyin Looui's "Transition Algorithm"
(2006) and Samara Smith's "Chain Reaction" (2006) as positive
counter-examples. No one of these projects integrates GPS. The author
doesn't conclude to renounce locative media in projects with local points
of reference but recommends to direct the attention more to the conceptual
aspects of the game design than to the technological means. Flanagan
mentions the opposition between goals accessible with instrumental-oriented
actions and social oriented local points of reference but she doesn't
offer a concept to mediate the technological means with social ends
in games for activists (7/2009).
- Fuller, Matthew: Behind
the Blip. Software as Culture.
In: Nettime, 1/7/2002. Print version: Fuller, Matthew: Behind the Blip.
Essays on the Culture of Software. Brooklyn 2003, p.11-37. After computers,
software and interfaces have been created for the needs of users their
horizons of expectations are oriented towards the digital consumer goods.
There are changes possible: "Software culture" includes the
development of new concepts not only on a technological level but on
a philosophical level, too. This culture constitutes a "digital
subjectivity" with its own sensibility.
Fuller explains differences between "Critical", "Social"
and "Speculative Software". The last one fulfills his criteria
of conceptuality and digital subjectivity: "Software...as mutant
epistemology." (2/2004)
- Galanter, Philip: What
is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory.
Lecture 12/11/2003. In: Papers of Generative Art 2003 Conference (Politecnico
di Milano, Faculty for Architecture of Campus Leonardo, Milano 2003).
In his efforts to define Generative Art Galanter points to the following
problem of Claude Shannon's information theory: An arbitrary sequence
of different elements contains high information meanwhile repetitions
of identical elements are redundant (low information).
Galanter offers the combination of surprise (high information) and redundancy
as a possible solution: "Structure" and "complexity"
rise between the extremes of high and low information. The measure of
"algorithmic complexity" can be found via the explication
of the smallest possible amount of rules necessary for a universal computer
to produce the relevant sequences of dates. The "algorithmic complexity"
doesn't solve the problem because the random order needs the longest
algorithm. The criterion of "the length of a concise description
of a set of the entity's regularities" defines the "effective
complexity" (Murry Gell-Mann). The "effective complexity"
of chance and of strict order tends towards zero.
Galanter defines the use of systems as a characteristic of Generative
Art. He proposes to explain this use of systems with the methods of
complexity theory. The consequence of this definition is to recognize
"generative art...as old as art itself" (10/2006).
- Garcia, David: Beyond
the Evidence.
In: New Tactical Research, 9/2019. A BBC radio show (Andrew McGibbon:
Evidently Art, 2019) and texts by Tatiana Bazzichelli (2016) and Paolo
Cirio (2017) highlighted the importance of evidence in a socio-critical
art. Forensic Architecture's investigation into the circumstances of
the murder of Halit Yozgat (The
Murder of Halit Yozgat, 2017) is explained by David Garcia as an
example of an "investigative installation": During the ninth
NSU (National Socialist Underground, Germany) murder in 2006, a secret
informant of the Hessian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution
(Andreas Temme) was in the Kassel Internet café, who claims that he
did not notice the murder. Forensic Architecture's exact reconstruction
of the crime and the location of the informant before, during and shortly
after the time of the crime prove the opposite. Members of the Hessian
CDU doubted this result and thus protected the informant.
According to Garcia, beside Forensic Architecture projects by artists
such as Erica Scourti, Michael O'Connell, Jonas Staal, Lawrence Abu
Hansen, Wachter & Judt, Trevor Paglen, !Mediengruppe Bitnik and others
also reveal an "Evidentiary Realism" (Cirio) as a contemporary
trend.
For forms documenting socially critical tendencies artists and activists
should also substantiate 'evidence through facts' epistemologically,
because then their strategies of revealing can be distinguished from
strategies of 'misinformation'.
How can the truth content of 'rival narratives' be tested? Garcia mentions
the point of view of the sociologist Noortje Marres (in "Why We
Can't Have Our Facts Back", 2018, see above), for whom "epistemic
authority" can only be won over in the discourse on "epistemically
diverse viewpoints". But the "knowledge democracy" in
which such debates are possible is being infiltrated by populists. In
contrast, committed citizens can form "knowledge assemblies".
For Garcia, extending the influence of "knowledge assemblies"
on political opinion-forming is a decisive means against populism (1/2020).
- Garcia, David: From
Tactical Media to the Neo-pragmatists of the Web.
In: Aceti, Lanfranco/Jaschko, Susanne/Stallabrass, Julian (ed.): Red
Art. New Utopias in Data Capitalism. In: Leonardo Electronic Almanac,
Vol.20/No.1, January 2014, p.124-135. Garcia presents the development
of net activism from the nineties until now. "Tactical Media"
were shaped by the will of the actresses and actors to develop a "liberating
power of expression in politics" (p.127) via the web. In the nineties
the internet, with its new possibilities for participation, should also
make it possible to express a new "ideal of democracy" (p.127).
Michel de Certeau (in "The Practice of Everyday Life", Berkeley
and Los Angeles 1984/1988; original title: L'invention du quotidien.
Vol.1: Arts de faire, Paris 1980) explains the "consumer"
as tactically dealing with given strategies (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
p.xii,xix). For Garcia the "consumer" anticipates the evolution
from the "overlapping practices" of "artists, hackers,
political activists, independent media makers" (p.127) to the networks
of tactical media's developers and users.
In this evolution to Tactical Media Garcia recognises an "expressivism"
unfolding that had been anticipated by the "Romantic rebellion
against the rationalist utilitarianism of the Enlightenment" (p.127):
He sees parallels in the roles of artists in Romanticism and in tactical
media networks, not without taking into account the change in the fields
of action as it was caused by the internet (p.129).
In order to be able to distinguish the possibilities of engaging in
Web 2.0 from the Tactical Media of Web 1.0, Garcia draws on Felix Stalder's
distinction between a decentralized "front-end" and a centralized
"back-end" executed in long-lasting and intransparent plans
(Stalder, Felix: Between
Democracy and Spectacle: Front-End and the Back-End of Social Web,
2012). Garcia sees a shift in net activism from the former to the latter:
from Tactical Media to clicktivism, from independent social interventions
planned in collaborations to programmed platforms such as MoveOn
and Avaaz which offer programmed
functions and no longer scope for tactics. Instead of looking for debates
on controversial topics, consensus with many users is perferred.
Garcia sees his assessment confirmed by this statement by Ricken Patel,
the head of Avaaz: "In order to bring about radical change in the
world you don't need to be controversial." (Patel 2007) At Avaaz
member surveys replace controversy and it is easy to become one of the
members who are constantly asked for donations. Les Liens Invisibles
have criticized this "armchair activism" with the "online
petition service Repititionr"
(2010): "Tweet for Action, Augment your Reaction." (p.133.
"False signatures" generated by the service are a way to success,
too).
Garcia proposes that failures should be used to recognize opportunities
for a renewing of democratic politics in the age of networks (1/2020).
- Goriunova, Olga: Swarm
Forms: On Platform and Creativity.
In: Mute. Vol.2/nr.4. January 2007, p.46-57. On the one hand static
platforms present their contents on "a single entrance" and
curators care for the "common theme", on the other hand "dynamic
platforms" are "multiple interface platforms" and administrators
maintain "the overall healthy functioning" but don't care
about contents.
Goriunova foresees possibilities of "art platforms" to remain
independent and concentrated on common themes beside the "dynamic
platforms" often discussed under the slogan Web 2.0. These platforms
are operated commercially, meanwhile the copyrights of the contributions
are properties of their authors ("shared copyright"). The
minor amount of contributors guarantees art platforms' independency
because it keeps off investors.
Enthusiasts as curators of the platforms and their participants should
take care for their programmatic goal. According to Goriunova it is
a characteristic of an art platform to constitute a "cultural entity":
"Its subject is avant-garde and marginal." Beside runme.org
(see above, platforms) confounded by Goriunova
she calls Micromusic.net and Udaff.com
as examples for art platforms. These examples are well known from her
earlier articles. The difference between art platforms and platforms
for a "hive mind" seems to be more important for her than
the difference between static and dynamic platforms. Her summary: "...platforms
cannot in general be stigmatised as loci of the unoriginal 'hive mind',
and there is no need for a term like Web 2.0" (4/2007).
- Grosser, Ben: How
the Technological Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits
Personal Representation.
In: Hz Journal. Nr. 19/2014. In the view of Grosser the social network
Facebook unnecessarily restricts the possibilities of its users to install
their own pages. Without software changes it would be possible to offer
three genders instead of two. However for the choice of a third gender
it is possible to circumvent the Facebook-settings restricting the choice
of gender-related dates.
Furthermore Facebook standardises the input for languages and does not
permit alternative spellings. Likewise some languages are ignored although
they are the medium of the communication between members of wider social
groups.
Grosser recognises in these settings the world-views of a white middle
class dominating Facebook's management. He recommends to modify this
one-sidedness and to favor a wider variety of users' possibilities to
decide between alternative self-definitions concerning the criteria
of gender and race. Facebook also should do so in cases disturbing the
interests of advertising clients and their wishes to use archived user
data for interpretations of clients' attitudes.
If the majority of black youngsters use MySpace for messages then this
possibly is the result of Facebook's failure to consider the interests
of wider population groups accordingly. This non-consideration contradicts
Facebook's position as the dominant platform for messages useful for
communications about themes transgressing the interests of specific
groups. One of these themes comes up with the problem how to take into
consideration general questions of an adequate treatment of minorities.
Grosser recognises Facebook's non-considerations as parts of a tendency
to "homogenise" the identity of "friends" in a discriminating
manner. This contradicts the demand of tolerance claimed in social networks
and on the streets by participants of the recent social revolts (In
February 2014 Facebook changed their gender settings for users of its
American version and in September 2014 for users of the German version;
4/2015).
- Guglielmetti, Mark/Innocent, Troy/Whitelaw, Mitchell: Strange
Ontologies in Digital Culture.
(1/2008). In: ACM Computers in Entertainment. Vol.7/Issue 1. February
2009. Philosophy and "information sciences" use the term ontology
in different meanings. Meanwhile philosophers try to find an epistemological
framework for the ontological problem of relations to that which exists
("what is"), studies in information sciences comprehend the
structures of relations between elements in systems as creating ontologies
in representations of knowledge with the consequence that these
ontologies are used as representations of that which exists: If it is
possible to imagine only those parts as real which are represented in
systems of knowledge then the limits of these systems define limited
concepts of the world with restricted references to real entities. Against
these conventionalized frameworks of being the authors focus on "strange
ontologies" proposed by artistic projects.
Before they start their investigation of "strange ontologies"
the authors prove the estrangement provoked by "social software"
of platforms like Facebook and del.icio.us: In Facebook, "friend"
is used for symmetrical relations, meanwhile in del.icio.us
it has the meaning of "an asymmetrical 'fan' relation" between
the tagging person and the author of a tagged file.
Installations and games interrupt the parameters of the computational
systems representing real entities with the means of these systems.
In his Origami
Butterfly series (2006) Jonathan McCabe transgresses the usual procedures
of generative art using swarms with self-modifiying parts: Divisions
and repetitions are elements of procedures creating structures.
In opposition to conservative systems representing the world in static
categories, "dynamic, local and relational qualities" are
generated using systems in a strange way. An example offers Brock Davis'
self
portrait developed using an editor for the 3D simulation ("Forge")
of "Halo 3" ("manipulating 3D objects in the editor environment
for Microsoft's Halo 3"). The readability of the signs representing
objects changes: They are secondary as game elements in a pictorial
space and suggest primarily the contours of a face (7/2009).
- Helmond, Anne: Lifetracing.
The Traces of a Networked Life.
In: Bray, Anne/Dockrey, Sean/Green, Jo-Ann/Navas, Eduardo/Torrington,
Helen (ed.): Networked. A (Networked_Book) about (Networked Art). 2009.
Helmond underscores the close connection of net users' self performances
between social networks and search engines. Some techniques of search
engines to archive and display user data provoke certain manners to
use networks: "...identity is performed through and shaped by social
software and constructed by search engines." Services like Storytlr
offer possibilities to "mashup your data into stories." This
kind of services lumps together the users' activities in different social
networks. The overviews provoke the impression of "one big data
stream scattered across the web". The result of users' interests
in self performances via social networks are strategies of "Search
Engine Reputation Management (SERM)" to avoid search results displacing
them from the top of the rankings: "...people are very willing
to submit a large amount of information about themselves to search engines
for a sense of control over the outcome."
Some techniques of the Google search engine foster SERM strategies:
The Google Blog search engine indexes every RSS feed. This includes
each Twitter entry within the "public timeline".
The search engines circumvent little by little the "walled gardens"
created by the registry and login. In the meantime the social networks
supply the search engines more and more overt with user data. The function
of specific search engines like Wink,
yoName, Spock and Pipl is to find
informations on persons in the web and social networks with no more
input as search request than the name, the user name or the e-mail adress.
This availability of all data about activities is corresponding to services
offering to users the administration of data created by them for their
self performance and distributed on several networks and media: lifelogging
software.
The "multimedia diary" provided by Nokia between 2004 and
2007 offered an overview on the user's pictures, messages and videos
in chronological order. These "lifelogging" activities express
the desire to collect as much data as is possible about oneself and
the closer environment. "Lifelogging" provokes an understanding
of the data in the web as "a place holder for the intentions of
humankind." (John Battelle)
This understanding becomes productive in thematic restructurings of
available data, f.e. in Google
Flu Trends and in projects like Jonathan Harris' und Sep Kamwar's
We Feel Fine and I
Want You To Want Me: "Instead of using this data for health
issues or for artistic purposes it may also be used for monitoring or
surveillance." Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon" is used
by Michel Foucault as a model of the "surveillance societies".
This model is transgressed by "consumer surveillance" and
privatised in an enjoyable way in "self-surveillance" facilitated
by services like "your.flowingdata.com" (YFD). The response
to the surveillance is a "sousveillance" (Steve Mann)
a surveillance from the bottom up realized by individuals, not by states
or corporations. "Sousveillance" remains conform to the established
social conditions in an "identity 2.0" receiving the statistics
of its own activities and popularity by "Twitter Counter"
or "Twitter Analyzer".
The parts fit into each other in the "assemblage of platform, engine
and user". Users are requested by social networks and search engines
to complete their profiles. The profiles feed the data flow from the
social networks to the search engines: "...a reconfiguration of
the user...the lifestream is more service-centered than user-centered."
Tagging creativities of the social networks' users deliver the data
amounts required by search engines. The keywords of tags can be used
as means in strategies to harm someone's self performance.
With this "reconfiguration" of the self performances in a
data space making it impossible to eliminate digital traces the fulfillment
of the authors' last wills determining the future of (parts of) their
performances becomes a probably growing demand for services like Etoy
(Mission Eternity), Mediamatic
(IkRip) und Pips:Lab (Die Space).
The data space online provokes a new form of the testament (9/2009;
1/2020: These sites are not accessible anymore on the web: Storytlr,
your.flowingdata.com, Twitter Counter, Twitter Analyzer, IkRip; 9/2022: not found on the Web: Google Flu Trends).
- Holmes, Brian: Drifting
through the Grid. Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure.
German print version: Springerin. Vol.X. Nr. 3. Autumn 2004, p.18-21.
Holmes recognizes two imperial structures combined in projects for collaborative
mapping with locative media: the internet and GPS. Holmes presents the
military origins of both information systems and the political problems
of the "digital divide" as parts of an "imperial infrastructure"
being expanded by its liberalized social and economic use. Holmes characterizes
the military origins of the internet and GPS as if they cause the same
contemporary problems although their structures are different.
The "World Geodetic System" is the global three-dimensional
reference frame for military projects and actions of the U.S.A. Holmes
uses the "World Geodetic System" as an example to present
cartography as one part of the "imperial infrastructure".
In October 2002 Jeron Klee and Esther Polak (in collaboration with the
Waag Society) realized the project Amsterdam
Real Time. It presented in real time the routes of participants
who walked with GPS receivers and PDAs in Amsterdam (The project anticipated
Tom Carden's and Steve Coast's OpenStreetMap
(OSM): The Free Wiki World Map, since December 2004). Holmes critizes
"Amsterdam Real Time" because it doesn't escape "the
hyper-rationalist grid of imperial infrastructure". It offers "a
fragile gesture, fraught with ambiguity" and can't fulfill his
demand: "social subversion, psychic deconditioning, an aesthetics
of dissident experience". The last point is for Holmes exemplified
by the Situationism after they abandoned Constant's "representations
of unitary urbanism". Critical Comments: Beiguelman, Giselle: Re:
Interactive City: irrelevant mobile entertainment? (8/18/2006) In:
Institute for Distributed Creativity. iDC mailing list. iDC Digest.
Vol.22/Issue 19, 8/19/2006; Cloninger, Curt: Comments
to Holmes, Brian: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure. In:
Turbulence.org. networked_performance: Research Blog about network-enabled
performance, 12/31/2004; Shepard, Mark: Re:
Interactive City: irrelevant mobile entertainment? (8/17/2006) In:
Institute for Distributed Creativity. iDC mailing list. iDC Digest.
Vol.22/Issue 18, 8/17/2006 (10/2006; 1/2020).
- Holmes, Brian: Is
It Written In the Stars? Global Finance Precarious Destinies.
In: Holmes, Brian: Continental Drift. The other side of neoliberal globalization.
Blog, 11/6/2009. Short German print version with the title "Was
steht in den Sternen? Globale Finanzen, prekäre Schicksale",
in: Springerin. Vol. XVII. Nr. 1. Winter 2010, p.18-24. In Black
Shoals Stock Market Planetarium "shimmering points of light"
were projected in constellations similar to starry skies on a dome (the
concave part of a sphere's segment) hanging from the ceiling. In 2001
this installation by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway was first exhibited
in the Tate Gallery (group exhibition "Art Now: Art and Money Online",
London). It received data of the actual stock market. Cefn Haile's software
used these data to generate "A-life agents". These "creatures"
appeared as shimmering spots on the concave screen similar to
the projection of the starry sky in a planetarium. Each point
of light represented "the stock of a publicly traded corporation."
Intensity and movements mirrored the actual tradings in stock exchanges.
The title's term "shoals" points to the relation between artificial
life and stock exchange trading. "Shoals" denotes sandbanks
being dependent from the the water current, and the term "shoaling"
is used for the behavior of fish swarms. Following Autogena and Portway
the term "shoals" refers to "shoaling" as well as
to the "Black-Sholes formula" invented by Fisher Black, Myron
Sholes and Robert Merton. It allows to define the actual stock value
more precise than ever before and to reduce the risks of trading with
shares if the conditions remain constant. After successes Sholes' and
Merton's company "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed
in 1998. One of the collapse's reasons was the "feedback effect"
caused by successors dealing with the "Black-Sholes formula",
too. The complexity theory reconstructs manners of feedback effects
leading to chaos. The reconstruction of the stock market using algorithms
of artificial life points to research methods of the stock market's
dynamic processes beyond the deficiencies of the "Black-Sholes
formula".
The installation and the explanations of its authors deliver Holmes
pretexts for his explanation of the globalization as well as for more
essayistic remarks like his pointing to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
Group as a winner. He describes Anish Kapoor's stainless steel sculpture
"Cloud Gate" and its costs as a result of the neoliberal globalization.
The sculpture was placed on the AT&T Plaza in Chicago's Millenium Park
and became an attraction for tourists. Holmes opposes the costs of this
attraction 11,5 million dollars with the conditions of
the poor inhabitants of Chicago: 20% of the inhabitants fall "beneath
the poverty line." Detroit's organization of a culture with spectacular
events caused "flashy postmodern casinos" to attract investors
by regenerating its "impoverished core" after the collapse
of the automobile industry. The examples from Chicago and Detroit are
used by Holmes to present the "creative industries" and the
"casino capitalism" (Susan Strange 1986) as two sides of one
coin.
Autogena's and Portway's installation presents its visualisation of
the dynamic trading processes for a contemplative aesthetic observation
meanwhile the reference of the shimmering lights to the stock market
remains relevant for the reception of the projection. The connection
between the parts of the projection and the whole appears fascinating
and questionable simultaneously. The insiders of the stock exchange
trading concentrate themselves on its autonomous processes and ignore
the influences of external causes as well as the external factors influenced
by these processes. The installation follows this concentration on autonomous
processes.
The mirroring world of "Cloud Gate" deforms the closer surrounding
in reflexes: the tourists and the skyscrapers of Chicago. The sculpture
turns the attention of visitors away from the poor people being displaced
from the Millenium Park. Human beings serve in "Cloud Gate"
as substitutable objects for the inner reflections of mirror worlds.
Holmes describes the inner reflections of the "infinite variety
of speculative performances" using Detroit's event culture as an
example: "The performer is often a 'mark', the target of someone
else's strategy." Holmes explains the stock market as a system
and the investors as agents following its processes and their repeated
sequences: Its reconstruction as a system of artificial life presents
the companies producing commodities and its distributors as not more
than sources for the input of the stock market.
The installation "Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium" excludes
the influences of the stock market on the organizations of production
and distribution as well as the reactions of the companies' managers
and workers on these influences. This omission is used by Holmes as
a gateway to social criticism: He reconstructs the omission via interpretations
of the presented elements. The "supernova of derivatives trading"
constitutes "meta-commodities that govern the unfolding of the
contemporary economic model." The analysed "artificial world
model" provokes Holmes to the proclamation: "We need a different
world model, which cannot be abstracted from price information analysed
by computers."
In his sociocritical approach Holmes expands an analytical method to
recognize the social structures within the internal relations of the
art works to a kind of interpretation recognizing affirmative or critical
references to the social sourroundings in relations between the structures
of a work and the social structures of its context: He reconstructs
the relations between the presented and the absent or hidden aspects
of the society producing art for its needs and desires. The exploration,
on the one hand, of these needs and desires, and on the other hand,
of the reactions of contemporary artists to these conditions tries to
find out the alternatives hitherto neglected by the society and its
arts (11/2009).
- Holmes, Tiffany: Arcade
Classics Spawn Art? Current Trends in The Art Game Genre.
Lecture 5/20/2003. Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts
and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology, Melbourne, May 2003. Print version: Miles,
Adrian (ed.): Melbourne DAC streamingworlds, the 5th International Digital
Arts and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology. Melbourne 2003. "'Retro-styled'
art games" are modifications of classic arcade games like Pong,
Asteroid, Missile Command and Centipede. Art games are restricted to
simple interfaces for a short playtime in comparison to computer games
with several levels for longer running times. A "conceptual message"
enables a project via social themes like gender and race to problematize
the ego shooter scenario and its development in battle games. Holmes
exemplifies some ways to develop concepts focused on contemporary power
structures by projects like Natalie Bookchin's The
Intruder (1999), Game Lab's Sissyfight
(2000), Ricardo Zuñiga's Vagamundo
(2002) and On Ramp Art's Tropical
America (2002): "Art game play sometimes requires a tolerance
for critical theory mixed with intelligent humor..." (7/2009; 1/2020)
- Ivanova, Victoria: Art's
Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié.
In: Parse Journal, Issue 2, Autumn 2015. According to Ivanova the term
"value" can be differentiated into three fields of meaning:
"ethical, functional and economic" (p.92). "Ethical"
are "the referent's non-instrumental qualities" (p.92) pointing
beyond morality, while "functional" also includes "use-value"
outside the economic values. Ivanova presents the interplay of these
value concepts in refractions from Conceptual Art to Post-Internet Art.
In her reconstruction of these refractions the following postulates
play a decisive role because they determine what art should be: 1.)
While following discourses on social values art should not lose sight
of reality but rather influence these discourses. 2.) Art should not
reflect economic values uncritically. For Ivanova the former is a problem
of the art of the sixties and seventies, the latter a problem of Post-Internet
Art.
While the latter (2.) integrates values into its concept in such a way
that strategies of "branding" lead to economic success of
the artists, the former (1.) pays too little attention to possibilities
for interventions meanwhile they concentrate themselves on discussions
of values. In order to sound out the possibilities of bringing both
sides together Ivanova presents the possibilities of a "right"
and "left accelerationism" (p.103) attempting to make the
communication media more accessible despite their "capitalization"
(p.103) in developing peculiar modes of presentation with integrated
articulations of "values": "Changes to systemic conditions
need not be immediately tangible or game-changing, but the impetus needs
to be discernible if art's value is to have integrity that isn't just
a matter of formal integration of its component parts." (p.104).
According to Ivanova strategies that directly criticize "capitalization"
are not an option because in this way their dictum of integrity, which
can be achieved by integrating values into ones own practices, is replaced
with a success-oriented use of resources. The old discussion, as to
whether activism (respectively intervention) or politically effective
autonomous art is preferable, is renewed by Ivanova with her plea for
the latter. Instead of gaining perspectives through a discussion of
strategies in and for a media landscape changed by social media, Ivanova
argues with terms such as "ontology" and "value",
which she does not define, and with questionable reconstructions of
a "conceptual/post-structuralist turn" (p.94) (1/2020).
- Kasprzak, Michelle: Ethical Engagement with NFTs Impossibility of Viable Aspiration?
In: Cheang, Shu Lea/Stalder, Felix/Chaudronnet, Ewen: From Commons to NFTs. Makery Media for Labs, 2022. Michelle Kasprzak first presents reactions to the ecological problems of Ethereum's Proof of Work method (before Ethereum’s switch to Proof of Stake), then she reports on projects using Ethereum-based NFT trade also as a cash machine, but now it serves as a means for good causes. The Golden NFT project of the Peng! Collective uses the auctioning of digital works (via OpenSea) created by artists for this purpose to raise money as a means to obtain European passports for immigrants. This kind of passport procurement was previously only possible for rich non-Europeans, who can live with the consequences of ecological change and were or are partly contributors to climate change. Those people will receive European passports (in ironic utilization of the unfair, investor-favoring process of awarding "Golden Visa") who have lost basic working conditions in their home countries. The Art League of Congolese Plantation Workers CATPC (in the Democratic Republic of Congo) is cooperating in Balot NFT (since 6/14/2022) with Dutch artist Renzo Martens to auction 306 partial simulations of a wooden sculpture in order to be able to buy one hectare of plantation land with each of the 306 tokens. In 1931 the sculpture was created in Congo and it represents the Belgian colonial official Maximilien Balot. The wooden sculpture was built on the occasion of a Pende uprising against Unilever's plantation system and the Belgian colonial power. Additional information: The wooden sculpture is now on loan to the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond. It was sold by the Pende to the current owner in 1970 to send village children to school (Woodward, Richard B.: Visions from the Congo. Kap. A Rising of the Wind. Art from a Time of Rebellion in the Congo In: Blackbird Archive. Vol.11/No.1, Spring 2012). The VMFA is in dispute with Martens over the rights to the photographs used in the simulation (Boffey, Daniel: Row about Congolese Statue loan escalates into Legal Battle over NFTs. In: The Guardian, 2/19/2022). Requests to the museum to loan the wooden sculpture to the White Cube created by CATPC in the Unilever Plantations area went unanswered (9/2022).
- Kelkar, Shreeharsh: Post-Truth
and the Search for Objectivity: Political Polarization and the Remaking
of Knowledge Production.
In: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. Nr.5/2019, p.86-106.
To investigate the media constellations that led to the phenomenon "post-truth"
in the USA, Kelkar combines two research approaches "institutional
political science" and "science, technology and sociology"
(STS) by combining the investigations of the history of the "political
polarization" of the former with the "analyses of 'objectivity'
in science and public life" of the latter (p.86,90). The former
pursues the construction of a conservative counter-public sphere to
academic, fact-oriented discourses, while the latter contradict a reduction
of "knowledge democracy" to evidence-based proofs and examine
the institutional preconditions of this "knowledge democracy".
For the STS researcher Noortje Marres (in "Why We Can't Have Our
Facts Back", see above) attempts to reverse "political polarization"
through "fact checking" lead to an increase in "demarcation"
(p.99) between the publics interested in fact-oriented knowledge and
the publics of a conservative counter-public sphere. According to Steve
Hoffman ("The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment
of Post-Truth Demagoguery"), the conditions of "post-truth"
are more diverse than Marres recognizes: the historical causes of "demarcation"
lie before social media. But the latter have promoted the "alternative
fact-making universe" (p.99).
While according to Marres the "demarcation" runs between fact-oriented
discourse and "mystification and propaganda", Hoffman recognizes
two ideologies that are independent of each other. According to Kelkar,
however, Marres' "true/false demarcation" is to be agreed
to the extent that efforts of the "social media giants" to
expose lies through "journalistic fact-checkers" (p.99) and
to label them as such point the way to a restoration of "knowledge
democracy" under conditions of "post-truth". While Marres
sees in "fact-checking" only an intensification of "demarcation",
and the way to a solution only leads via discussion, according to Kelkar
the exclusion of the producers of fake news should be institutionally
anchored: "A new knowledge-producing 'center' of researchers, journalists,
and platforms" should be able to confront institutions that spread
"white nationalism, conspiracy theories, and hate speech"
(p.101). Crucial for such a center and the formation of "new civic
epistemologies" (p.102) are the exclusion criteria, which institutions
should be included in the circle of accepted researchers and which should
be explicitly excluded. Kelkar points to the exclusion of the Infowars
portal from the social media Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (p.101f.)
as an example of how such exclusions can deprive the platforms that
disseminate fake news of publicity.
The conservative power dispositive is thus to be answered by a power
dispositive that is strong enough to reinstall a "knowledge democracy",
which derives its legitimacy from the difference between "fact-checkers"
and fake news, but cannot claim this difference without institutional
processes that are able to enforce exclusions. This is a demand to reinstall
lines of demarcation, which should have been dismantled since the revolts
of the 1960s. Do we only have the choice between a policy that restricts
freedom of expression and a policy that abolishes this freedom? For
Marres obviously remains the choice of an open discussion of divergent
views as the only way to support political publicity (1/2020).
- LeMay, Matthew: Reconsidering
Database Form: Input, Structure, Mapping.
In: dichtung-digital. Issue 2/2005 (Vol.7/nr.35). The criticism contains
the following antithesises to Lev Manovich's articles "The Anti-Sublime
Ideal in Data Art" (2002, see below) and Database
as a Genre in New Media (1998, integrated with Modifications in
"The Language of New Media", Cambridge/Massachusetts 2001,
p.218-243. see Contributions
to the History of NetArt, above):
1. ) The assumption of "a fundamental divide between form and content"
constitutes the basis for Manovich's critical remark on Mapping art
and its "endless ways to map one data set onto another." LeMay
points to "the complex interrelations between data and the database"
in Mapping art and contradicts Manovich's characterization of databases
as additive and extensible collections of "separate elements".
2.) Between the organization of data collections and databases should
be distinguished more precise than Manovich does it because he doesn't
consider different relations between "form" and "content"
in "static" and "dynamic data sets". Manually executed
static coordinations of sound and picture files with textual indices
are the precondition of searches in archives. Generated dynamic combinations
as results of computer aided searches caused by keyword inputs can leave
observers baffled because they (still) can't integrate the outputs in
frameworks, contrary to archives executed by observers for observers.
The differentiation between static and dynamic data sets demonstrates
its relevance in the case of the difference between systems for CD-ROMs
and search systems in the internet: Contrary to static structures on
CD-ROMs, the dependency of the action of retrieval programs on manual
ascribed indices appears in the internet as a dissatisfying combination
of a dynamic search with static assignments.
3.) Contrary to Manovich, "the anti-sublime" characterizes
not the transfer of incomprehensible data collections to lucid visualizations
but the "database logic". This change of the point of view
allows to regard the selection, the organization and the presentation
in a considerably tighter interplay than with Manovich's observations
with a one-sided orientation to the "beautification of data"
(Simanowski, Roberto: Mapping Art as Cultural Form in Postmodern Times
2005). Databases are characterized by "the interconnectedness between
data-as-content and structure-as-form". These are traits responsible
for the prevalent position of the database assumed but not adequately
described by Manovich (4/2007).
- Lichty, Patrick: Variant
Analyses. Interrogations of New Media Art and Culture.
Theory on Demand Nr.12. Institute of Network Cultures. Amsterdam 2013.
Lichty has chosen media reflective texts written between 1994 and 2012
and presents them in the book "Variant Analyses" as elements
of an analysis of art, internet and activism. Most of Lichty's articles
highlight the social effects of the internet's evolution to a central
medium of information and communication.
In his analyses of the internet, the net activism and net art Lichty
uses the time diagnoses of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari not only in his first and eldest text ("Haymarket
RIOT's Machine", 1994, co-author Jonathan S. Epstein), but in many
texts written later, too. The acceleration of the traffic, trade and
information exchange caused a delimitation of all spheres. The consequences
include mutual takeovers and approximations between media (forms). Within
these developments photography and video achieved the positions of key
media according to Baudrillard and Virilio (p.14,35). After this phase
follows the internet as a separate "referent from which to operate"
(p.15). In the course of the evolution of the web 2.0 digital images
gain a new importance as Lichty demonstrates in "Art in the Age
of Dataflow" (2009). There he draws the attention to two blogs
of Manik (Marija Vanda and Nikola Pilipovic) and Nasty Nets (with Marisa
Olson and Camille Paloque-Bergès, see her "Remediating Internet
Trivia" (2010)): The images presented in these blogs are "found
footage" (p.18f.) modified partially with commenting intentions.
Artists create projects in the web 2.0 not only increasingly in and
with data flows, furthermore they visualise these information processes
in digital presentation forms (examples by Martin Wattenberg, Golan
Levin and Ben Fry, p.142,154ff.).
In "Art in the Age of Dataflow" Lichty outlines an evolution
of artistic activities: After the breakup of the "narrative closure"
(p.145f.) by exponents of the literary avant-gardes new textual forms
arise in hypertext projects branched by links. Finally the participants
of data flows were enabled to cooperate in the development of ways to
visualise these flows: "art's journey from structure to flow"
(p.142).
Lichty discusses the breakup into the "molecular" (p.55, refering
to Felix Guattari) and the "flow" in and between milieus (p.154,
refering to Deleuze/Guattari) as inseparable movements offering chances
to conduct the evolution beyond Baudrillard's diagnosis of the fractal
stage of simulations.
In the view of Lichty an activism becoming amorphous reacts to the power
hierarchies maintaining themselves in societies with amorphous boundaries
between social spheres ("On Amorphous Politics", p.158). Lichty
discusses "indeterminacy" (p.141,144) not only as a characteristic
of the artistic and literary avant-gardes but also as a property of
the "openness" (p.144) of a collaborative (p.112-120) and
communicative (p.134,137f.) artistic practice being realisable simultaneously
as social practice and as activism.
According to Lichty Occupy and the group Anonymous with origins in the
"image sharing community 4chan.org" (p.57,159) are examples
for a collaborative use of the internet and mobile telephony provoking
observers to change their self location in the real space ("Building
a Culture of Ubiquity", 2000, p.94-104). In the mutual penetration
of real and simulated spaces, amongst others by "Ubiquitous Computing"
(p.94-104) and "Second Life" (S.132), possibilities arise
for alternatives being not yet conceivable for the postmodern diagnosis
of media changes and being realisable in artistic experiments (p.30).
In some chapters Lichty presents his contributions to collaborative
projects. They encompass the areas net activism (RTMark, The Yes Men,
p.39f.,43), ubiquitous computing (p.103) and net art with social media
(Second Front in Second Life, p.117f.,130f.; 4/2015).
- Lillemose, Jacob: A
Re-Declaration of Dependence Software Art in a Cultural Context
It Can't Get out of.
In: Goriunova, Olga/Shulgin, Alexej (ed.): read-me. Software Art & Cultures
Edition 2004. University of Aarhus 2004, p.137-149. Artists like Sarah
Charlesworth and Hans Haacke thematize the Conceptual Art's dependence
of the art context despite and because of their art external presentation
modes and themes. Contextual Art's First Generation of the Sixties and
Seventies criticized institutionalized restrictive practices. A Second
Generation focussed its criticism on the representation of social relations
in the art world. Lillemeose divides the Third Generation of the Nineties
into a part which follows the directions of the first two generations
and another part exemplified by Peter Weibel's concept of the art work's
function as a direct intervention into the context. A certain part of
the Third Generation of Contextual artists moves from the discussion
of art as a social construction to active efforts to intervene in social
relations. Here starts a Fourth Generation of Contextual Artists and
develops a context sensitive mode of Software Art which criticizes its
surrounding.
Lillemose constructs a development from Sarah Charlesworth's context
criticism in her "Declaration of Dependence" (The Fox, nr.1,
1975, p.1-7) to a "re-declaration of dependence" of programming
artists. Software is not only a program code for compilers but a cultural
practice which combines economic, social and technical elements: "Programmers
of programming possibilities" (Thomas Dreher) produce "formations
rather than forms" (Nicolas Bourriaud) with products used in the
context by participants who can develop them further. Alternative software
"constructs a user" against a horizon of expectations defined
and limited by proprietary software. Lillemose characterizes not only
the direct action as a strategy of the Fourth Generation's Contextual
Art, but the indirectly provoking practices of agitation, too. Software
as an art and a tool are two aspects which inspire and pervade each
other. Lillemose calls the examples The Yes Men, Institute of Applied
Autonomy, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, etoy, LAN, I/O/D, www.0100101110101101.org,
übermorgen, Carbon Defence League, TWCDCC (Together We Can Defeat
Capitalism), Radical Software Group and Knowbotic Research (6/2006).
- Lodi, Simona: Illegal
Art and Other Stories About Social Media.
In: Lovink, Geert/Rasch, Miriam (ed.): Unlike Us Reader. Social Media
Monopolies and Their Alternatives. Institute of Network Cultures. Amsterdam
2013, p.239-253. Simona Lodi presents net projects and mobile applications
thematising aspects of social media like their business models and the
behaviors of users encouraged by them. In 2009, as the Facebook founder
and CEO "Mark Zuckerberg declared the end of privacy" (pdf
p.242), Facebook "blocked access of two applications to its system"
(pdf p.242), Seppukoo by Les
Liens Invisibles (2009) and the Web
2.0 Suicide Machine by Moddr (2009), because "both...invited
users to close their accounts." (pdf S.242) Registrations cause
users to transfer their rights to Facebook. The projects mentioned above
promote the deletion of contributions meanwhile Facebook treats them
as its property. Facebook's lawyers treat the company's private property
as untouchable meanwhile its CEO subsumes the intellectual property
rights of Facebook's contributors as being a part of the tendency to
"the end of privacy" (pdf p.242): Is the appropriation of
the contributors' rights the "social" in social media?
Lodi presents these projects in short explanations. She is not as precise
as it is possible in her comments on the relations between the platforms,
their business models and their contributors.
Her second main topic are the artists' reactions to political platforms
reducing activism to clicking votes for petitions. In 2010 this reduction
was named "clicktivism" by Mica White. The projects Repetitionr
(2009-2010) and Tweet4Action
(2011) of Les Liens Invisibles offer online services facilitating the
realisation of campaigns and petitions. "Repetitionr" supplies
the acceptance by "fake...signatures" (pdf p.248): The risk
of petitions without resonance is averted. Lodi embeds these parodies
of "clicktivism" in a short feature of activism's contemporary
forms and asks: "How has business appropriated hacker values, exploiting
open source principles, freedom and equality, and triggering the activist
response?" (pdf p.243) In her opinion the examples for artistic
reactions to social media mentioned above investigate the "social"
in "social media" and contribute with their "techno-activism"
to "new forms of equality and social change" (pdf p.252) (4/2013).
- Lotti, Laura: Contemporary
Art, Capitalization and the Blockchain: On the Autonomy and Automation
of Art's Value.
In: Finance and Society, Vol.2/No.2, 2016, p.96-110. Lotti outlines
the close interrelationship between contemporary art and capital: New
ways of distributing art correspond to digital modes of the financial
system's organization. In consequences of these new ways the artistic
strategies of social intervention are pushed to the periphery of the
art world (p.100). The platforms ArtRank
and Artsy (and the Art
Genome Project) serve Lotti as evidence of the interpenetration
of digital organisational forms of capital and the art world. The automation
of the evaluation of artists and works is one of the consequences: "...the
'value' of contemporary art becomes subsumed into pricing mechanisms
and loses any ontological primacy."
In this situation Blockchain and Bitcoin appear to offer ways out of
financial dependencies since money is not materially available here
and its value results only from "dynamics of the network"
(p.102). On the one hand the banking system tries to integrate Blockchain,
on the other hand there are expectations to find new applications for
"online commons".
Lotti uses the examples Monegraph
and Plantoid to investigate
how Blockchain is integrated into current art projects. The former offers
artists the possibility to provide digital works with an "authorship
layer" through which the paths of the work can be tracked and fees
can be billed (p.102f.) without having to rely on galleries. In fact
old dependencies are replaced by new ones now by "an algorithmic
third party" (p.103).
In Plantoid of the French collective
OKhaos a robot is paid by voluntary
contributions via "smart contracts" in Ethereum. In this way
further robots are financed and then developed and executed. Lotti sees
the executing persons as "'Mechanical
Turks'" (p.104).
The projects "Plantoid" and "Monegraph", according
to Lotti, reflect "the dynamics of contemporary markets" and
contribute to the "'commodification of everything'" (p.105)
(1/2020).
- Lotti, Laura:
Cryptoeconomics And/As Artistic Practice: Sketches for New Design Imaginaries.
In: Schloss-Post, Issue No. 0, October 2018. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer
system enabling decentralized "autonomous systems" because
transactions are stored immutably on different computers. Bitcoin and
Ethereum are based on Blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin Ethereum enables "smart
contracts" containing programs through which instructions of any
kind can be executed. "Tokenization" refers to "smart
contract tokens" allowing access to, among other things, "gold,
computing power, artworks or more generally, an alluring proposition
for a decentralized ecosystem."
For Lotti tokenization "with a unique ID" can be used to create
a digital parallel to a unique piece and its status as a work of art.
In contrast to the art trade and the financial system this takes place
decentrally and without institutional ties.
Systems like Maecenas use "the
rent model characteristic of financial capitalism and current internet
platforms" for "the tokenization of physical art objects."
Lotti refers to the parallels between financial systems and the art
world: On the one hand the Blockchain systems applied to the art world
appear like a consequence of the current phase of the "financialization
of art", on the other hand tokenization via "cryptography"
enables alternatives to this "financialization", as it is
not only pushed in the art world ("financialization in general").
Lotti compares these alternatives with derivatives in the financial
system. What can become a problem there due to a lack of regulation
can also open up alternatives to "financialization": "...through
the engagement with new interactive protocols, based on tokens as conduits
to the experience of a decentralized ecosystem."
Lotti mentions terra0 (2016) and 0xOmega
(2018) as examples for the current state of Blockchain Art allowing
prospects on its possibilities. Characteristic for these examples is
the interaction through "economic incentives" to create a
"common will to project" (Hui, Yuk/Halpin, Harry: Collective
Individuation 2013).
Compared to her contribution on "Contemporary art, capitalization
and the blockchain" (2016, see above), Lotti shifts the focus of
her analysis in "Cryptoeconomics And/As Artistic Practice"
from a generally critical view of the combination of blockchain and
art that does not escape the "commodification of everything"
to "affordances" that artists should take into account in
the "design of cryptosystems" (1/2020).
- Lotti, Laura: Financialization
as a Medium: Speculative Notes on Post-Blockchain Art.
In: Gloerich, Inte/Vries, Patricia de/Lovink, Geert (ed.): MoneyLab
Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam
2018, p.87-100. In the "financialization" turning art works
into commodities tensions arise in the determination of prices since
cultural and aesthetic values oppose procedures of quantification based
on standards. In a digitized culture art appears socially and economically
valued in a way that, according to Lotti, provokes comparisons with
derivatives of the financial markets.
Two years after her critical article on "Contemporary art, capitalization
and the blockchain" (2016, see above) it seems plausible to Lotti
that an art with Blockchain makes use of a digital system that permits
independence from the institutions of the financial system and proposes
new modes of application for this system: Through appropriation and
reprogramming of the "current logic of financial derivatives"
(p.96) "new horizons for the creation of autonomous milieus"
(p.97) can be won.
The affirmation of existing cultural, technical and economic conditions
in Post-Internet Art can be overcome by a Post-Blockchain Art that turns
"the art of money making" (p.98) by programming "cryptographic
tokens" (see Lotti, Laura: Cryptoeconomics And/As Practice (2018),
see below) in "the art of making offers" (p.98).
The projects BitchCoin
(2015) and terra0 (2016) serve Lotti
as examples for new applications of Blockchain which can be developed
"toward the creation...of many possible, interoperating art worlds"
(p.99).
At "BitchCoin" parts of Sarah Meyohas' photographic prints
are distributed in a system constantly generating new values. According
to Lotti, how this "'liquid commodity'" with Blockchain can
lead beyond the conditions of commodity trade, is the question and the
answer is the search of new ways to overcome the limits of the current
blockchains. Lotti recognises limits "in terms of scalability (due
to low consensus speed and high entrance costs, so that only big investors
can enter the space)" (p.98f.): The possibilities for the programming
of "smart contracts", as offered by Ethereum, must therefore
be extended (1/2020).
- Lovink, Geert: What
is the Social in Social Media?
In: e-flux journal #40, December 2012. Geert Lovink defines "social
media" as a "container concept...describing a fuzzy collection
of websites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, and Wikipedia." An understanding
of the "social" as a social life dominated by symboblic interaction
caused media scientists to "the real-virtual distinction"
made useless today by social media.
For Jean Baudrillard this social determined by interaction 'in situ'
became obsolete because polls are used to find out the opinions of the
silent masses ("The Masses: Implosion of the Social in Media",
1985). For the postmodern criticism of societies and the media a communication
used to mobilise a public against the established power structures has
lost its emancipatory potential.
Nowadays the social media re-establish the social: It can be recognized
in demands to answer, and as a "corrosion of conformity" demonstrated
by the "'Facebook revolution' of the 2011". The one-way communication
of the mass media constituted a system that "plunges us into a
state of stupor" (Baudrillard) dissolving the elder social determined
by communication. This system loses its dominance because of the social
media. They are not only determined by "uploading and self-promotion",
but by "the personal one-to-one feedback and small-scale viral
distribution elements", too. Lovink answers to critics of social
media like Nicolas Carr, Sherry Turkle and Jaron Larnier that they avoid
to develop propositions about "what the social could alternatively
be, were it not defined by Facebook and Twitter." (4/2013)
- Ludovico, Alessandro: Peer-to-Peer.
The Collective, Collaborative and Liberated Memory of Sound.
In: (Internet-) catalogue of the exhibition "adonnaM.mp3-Filesharing,
the Hidden Revolution in the Internet", Museum of Applied Arts,
department digitalcraft, Frankfurt am Main, 3-4/20/2003. Ludovico presents
forms of collaborative artistic production within net projects for peer-to-peer-transfers
of .mp3-files. Furthermore he describes how music pieces are appropriated:
Sometimes the copyright is neglected generally and sometimes specific
copyright violations are intended. "A social and socializing practice"
is realized in both cases as a production for and with a "collective
performance intended to liberate sounds [from the proprietary concept
of copyright] and share them."
These processes create a "sound machine" which approximates
itself to the idea of a "Celestial Jukebox". That "sound
machine" demonstrates "the uselessness of copyright as currently
applied" (as a proprietary frontier). Hackers simulate attacks
as warnings that viruses will crash hard drive disks via mp3.-files.
These simulated virus attacks are presented as actions which caricate
the censoring attitudes of the music industry. But the music industry
is able to block a track on a peer-to-peer network via simultaneous
activations of downloads (2/2004).
- McGonigal, Jane Evelyn: This
Might Be a Game. Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the
Twenty-First Century.
Dissertation. Philosophy in Performance Studies. University of California.
Berkeley 2006. McGonigal presents examples for games using ubiquitous
computing from 2001 to 2006 for participants playing with technical
equipment (mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, digital cameras, GPS receiver,
etc.) in open air. She investigates the games following criteria of
design and adequacy for participants. The distinction of equipments
usable either everywhere ("ubiquitous") or only with regards
to site specific criteria is the presupposition for McGonigal's distinction
between ubiquitous computing games and pervasive games. Beside these
games with technical equipments prepared for them McGonigal presents
other ubiquitous games using the technical equipment of participants
(internet). Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are based on ubiquitous computing
in another manner than in ubiquitous computing games. Meanwhile it is
possible to install the playground of ubicomp games on different real
sites for new gameplays, the ARGs are singular realizations provoking
players to look for (sometimes encrypted) informations hidden by gamemasters
(puppet masters) on specific websites. McGonigal mentions an example
for the affiliation of players in groups solving the tasks of an ARG
in collaborative efforts: The Cloudmasters challenged the capabilities
of "The Beast's" puppet masters.
Meanwhile the participants of ARGs are obliged to act following the
game's fiction as if it is real, the mobile participants of pervasive
and ubiquitous games explore their capabilities to coordinate the technical
equipment with daily life's demands.
McGonigal doesn't discern pragmatic ways of playing reusing capabilities
necessary for the daily life and ways of playing based on an added level
of meanings (pragmatics/semantics). For all these games she presupposes
a game's horizon separated from the surrounding or constituting a level
of meanings above the daily life's context (Johan Huizinga's "toovercirkel"/"magic
circle"). This closed horizon has to be opened up in different
manners by games and players for required adaptations to the found environmental
conditions. Departing from Markus
Montola she doesn't feature these adaptations as a phenomenon of
games' new forms but tries to verify them as decisive factors in the
development of the theory of games (7/2009).
- Manon, Hugh S./Temkin, Daniel: Notes
on Glitch.
In: World Picture Journal. Nr.6/Winter 2011. For Hugh S. Manon and Daniel
Temkin Glitch Art is both a part of the "digital culture"
(§ 22) and is influenced by precursors realised in analogue media.
These precursors provide suggestions against the sterile products of
digital technologies. Yet the creation of "the wilderness within
the computer" (§ 55) requires specific procedures.
Artists create disturbances on digital images by interventions in codes.
Nevertheless the codes remain readable for computer programmes. Specific
transformations occur only in specific image formats (f.e. JPEG or BMP;
§ 41): On files in the formats JPEG and BMP cornered forms ("blockiness",
"crystalline fragmentation", § 31) are the results of
disturbed transformations from the analog to the digital. Unlike the
analogue disturbance procedures (§ 21) the digital disturbances
are reversible because the files are stored before the glitch will be
done and because of the function "undo" (§ 23,27). Therefore
the glitch procedures can be associated neither with the concepts of
a modern art reflecting its medial foundations as presentations of irreversible
material processes (§ 24,42) nor with Paul Virilio's explanations
of a "real sabotage" (§ 25). In found as well as produced
glitches the transformations of codes constitute an integral disturbance
being presented instantaneously ("instantaneous fracturing",
§31, vgl. § 17), meanwhile disturbances in analogue procedures
are unfolded as material processes (§ 29).
Because the disturbance doesn't stop the programmed process the effects
of disturbances appear in contexts of transformations with fewer disturbances
and in the surrounding of undisturbed codes. With this "semilegibility"
the digital glitch is not totally disturbed but shows results of a "logic
of 'almost, but not quite'" (§ 34; 4/2015).
- Manovich, Lev: The
Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art.
First publication with the title "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in New
Media" in: Chair et metal/Metal and Flesh. Vol.7. 2002. Manovich
describes the simulation of old media via software in "new structures"
as an early "paradigm" of the development of computers (Alan
Curtis Kay's work since 1970 for Xerox, Palo Alto Research Center).
The computer as a "simulation machine" becomes a "meta-meta
object" containing the original "media structure" and
the software tools for a re-mapping of that structure and for modifications.
"Meta-media" offer not merely the tools for a remix of various
data structures including the "various cultural forms" realized
with "new software techniques" but are partially themselves
the results of a remix. Manovich exemplifies that using Adobat Acrobat
Reader as a model. He presents "mapping one data set into another,
or one media into another" as one of the most executed procedures
in the practice of the everyday use of computers and "new media
art". Manovich points to Lisa Jevbratt's 1:1
(1999/2001-2002, see short
tips) and to the platform Carnivore
of the Radical Software Group (2001, see above, platforms)
for other artists' "clients" to demonstrate the presentation
of endless amounts of data in one browser frame and how they become
manageable for observations: "manageable visual objects".
Manovich marks "data art" as "the anti-sublime"
contrary to the "un-representable" and the sublime in Romantic
art (Manovich renounces to refer to the classic art book Rosenblum,
Robert: Modern Painting and the Northern Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko.
New York 1975. With the help of Rosenblum it is recognizable that Manovich
points with the term Romantic art to the relation between abstract art
and the sublime.). The problem posed by the arbitrariness of many transferences
of data configurations could be solved by an emphasis on the arbitrary
decision as a "method of irrationality". Strategies following
this method can be developed by a fresh view on different uses of "quantitative
data" in works of Conceptual artists. Manovich exposes this kind
to develop concepts as a manner to express "the personal subjective
experience of a person living in a data society": "...art
has the unique license to portray human subjectivity..." (4/2007;
1/2020: the text is only accessible in a slightly modified version with
the title Data
Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime).
- Manovich, Lev: 100
Billion Data Rows per Second. Media Analytics in the Early 21st Century.
In: International Journal of Communication, Nr.12/2018, p.473-488. Manovich
describes once again the changes of the internet caused by growing data
storage and the abilities of platform programmers to respond to user
behavior. He argues for "computational media studies" in order
to be able to examine the effects of recommendations in social media
and sites for web commerce, among other things: Do they lead to increased
attention to a few offers or to the expansion of interests and purchases?
In 1944 Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in "The
Dialectic of Enlightenment" about the development of the media
landscape of the forties towards dediversification. Manovich confirms
this with results of the research on the movie production of the Hollywood
studios. Such studies of "large volumes of media content"
are not yet the norm of media studies for the present (p.483).
Investigations of image platforms such as Instagram and Flickr show
only minor differences in the filters responding to user preferences
in different regions. Manovich mentions a study according to which the
ambitions of Flickr users in photographic image design and the clickrates
generated by Flickr do not show any connections. The results of ambitions
of photographers only succeed in attracting the attention of the users
to their photos if they communicate a lot in social media at the same
time.
Therefore the proposal seems plausible to install a recommendation system
directing the attention to the least visited images and their characteristics
(p.484; Schifanella, Redi & Aiello): Should this algorithmic procedure
be used to find recipients for a kind of photographic image design in
platforms in which examples of its application remained unnoticed?
In contrast to the forties the "cultural industry" today is
no longer creating images but "is focusing on organizing, presenting,
and recommending content created by others" (p.484). Besides film
stars "social-media mini-celebrities" (p.485) establish themselves
under the conditions thus created. With "computational methods"
the "variability of this content" (p.485) should become recognizable
(1/2020).
- Manovich, Lev: Generation
Flash.
In: Nettime, 4/9/2002,
4/17/2002,
4/25/2002,
5/1/2002.
In February 2002 Turntable
(Michael Rees) constituted the digital environment for artistic contributions
(Flash snippets) to Milton Manetas' platform whitneybiennial.com
(see
above , platforms). Manovich uses "Turntable"
as an example of a visual culture which is part of the "Generation
Flash" and shares some characteristics with the contemporary audio
culture: loop, sample & remix.
Manovich shortens the value of projects which media artists realized
in the sixties to a reuse of available technologies and to contents
precoded by mass media. Against this background he exposes software
artists accomodating abstraction and fulfilling the romantic ideal of
a creator ex nihilo (who has to begin with the development of a project's
concept with nothing else than his own imagination).
Projects of the Futurefarmers (example: Utopia)
are Manovich's proofs of a tendency in the creation of net projects
which don't compete with commercial media unlike media artists from
Nam June Paik to Barbara Kruger (a reduction of Paik's and Kruger's
wider offers to recipients) but provoke our intelligence with "small
and economical systems". The Generation Flash is as much influenced
by projects organized by contemporary entertainment corporations as
movies influenced Andy Warhol. But the contemporary distance of the
internet to the media cinema and TV offers new cultural possibilities
(Manovich doubts his own vision of romantic software artists working
"from scratch" when he explains their relations to the vocabulary
of products distributed by the entertainment industry: Why shouldn't
those products influence artists since the beginning of the development
of a new project?).
Flash excludes artists who live in countries without fast net connections.
The evolution of NetArt integrated Eastern European and Russian projects
as long as HTML was the dominating language for the writing of source
codes. Flash causes a digital frontier for artists and forces them to
work in countries which dominate the IT development: "The Utopia
is over; welcome to the Empire." These conditions don't prohibit
Manovich to articulate the hope in the "postscript" that Generation
Flash will be able to realize a "global cultural laboratory".
That "laboratory" could be able to establish a "remix
culture" which develops an alternative to the "'top-down'
cultural composites" of the international organized corporations
which constitute the entertainment industry.
Manovich marks in his article "Generation Flash" (his) frictions
on several levels between critical observations of real net conditions
and visions of net culture's future (whereby he uses Russian Constructivism
as a prototype) (2/2004; 1/2020).
- Manovich, Lev: The
Practice of Everyday (Media) Life.
In: Lovink, Geert/Niederer, Sabine (ed.): Video Vortex Reader. Responses
to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam/University
of Applied Sciences. Amsterdam 2008, p.33-44. Manovich discusses the
growing contributions to platforms of the Web 2.0 like Facebook, YouTube
or Flickr with statistic proofs demonstrating the relation betweeen
contributors and passive observers: Only a few users participate. Michel
de Certau's distinction between strategies of power and tactics of subjects
in the everyday life is picked up by Manovich to ascribe a new significance
to tactics in the Web 2.0: "...the logic of tactics has now become
the logic of strategies." and vice versa: "...today
strategies used by social media companies often look more like tactics."
The "tactical strategies" of the Anime music video (AMV) and
films in YouTube reacting to each other exemplify a creativity of contributors
to commercial platforms making it difficult for artists to mark differences
to amateurs. For Manovich the creativity in Web 2.0 can be found more
in its dynamics as a whole and in software tools of commercial platforms
meanwhile he attaches lesser importance to particular artistic contributions
to platforms like Processing or
"Information Aesthetics". Unlike Maryanne Breeze (see above)
and Juan Martin Prada (see below) and their characterisations of a change
to Web 2.0 with losses, Manovich pleads enthusiastically in favour of
the current condition of the Web 2.0 (7/2009; 1/2020).
- Manovich, Lev: Trending.
The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data.
In: Gold, Matthew K. (ed.): Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis/Minnesota
2012, p.460-475. Manovich differentiates between "'deep data' about
a few people and 'surface data' about lots of people" (PDF p.2).
He raises the question if in times of "big data" stored on
servers of companies and governments the humanities could not offer
more data for investigations than only "surface data" or if
these data constitute "the new depth" (PDF p.13).
Manovich points to two problems of researchers in the humanities if
they try to use these dates:
First: How can the researchers get access to data of internet
groups like Google or Twitter?
Second: How can they get the technical competence enabling them
to use the APIs (application programming interfaces) of these internet
groups?
Frequently these APIs give accesses to statistics but not to the evaluated
sources. If researchers are employees of one of these groups then they
get accesses to their databases and the stored data. Only governments
like the one of the United States of America make available more and
more data via APIs (Data.gov, Health.gov)
and allow to use "big data" with specific software applications
for far reaching conclusions. Manovich points to the Software Studies
Initiative of the University of California in San Diego (UCSD; Site:
softwarestudies.com) and
its steps to the analysis of "big data".
Manovich outlines a three-class society: The amount of people using
internet and mobile telephony is faced by the minor group of proprietors
of the means to store "big data", and by a smaller number
of experts capable to analyse the stored data: "We can refer to
these three groups as new 'data-classes' of our 'big data society'"
(PDF p.11).
The interests of the groups using analyses to obtain results "for
specific business ends" are in conflict with the interests of researchers
in the humanities to win new insights "about human cultural behavior
in general" (PDF p.11). But the researchers in humanities still
lack analysis instruments and accesses to data (4/2015; 1/2020).
- Mansoux, Aymeric: Free
Culture Licenses as Art Manifestos.
In: Hz-Journal. Nr.19/2014. Artists of Mail Art like Ray Johnson 'signed'
their letters with a "copyleft icon": It was a copyright logo
mirrored or turned upside down.
The GNU General Public Licence
(GNU GPL) was developed by Richard Stallman for copyright-relevant open
source software. A transfer of the GNU GPL to works of art poses problems
as Mansoux demonstrates in cases of collaborative internet works.
Bonnie Mitchell's "Chain Art Project" (1993) is useful to
point to the problems caused by a transfer of the GNU GPL to art: The
process of contributions by participants in the form of ongoing modifications
of image files constitutes a "joint work" (Chon, Margaret:
New Wine
Bursting From Old Bottles. Collaborative Internet Art, Joint Works,
and Enterpreneurship. In: Oregon Law Review. Nr.75/1996, p.257-276).
The first Copyleft License written for artworks was published in 2000.
The authors of this License
Art Libre or "Copyleft Attitude" were Bertrand Keller
and Antoine Moreau, amongst others. They substituted the "GNU General
Public License['s]" unity of manifesto and instruction by a more
pragmatic argumentation.
Modern movements and their goals to change social structures pursue
according to Mansoux projects of a "free art"
trying to establish itself as a "multidimensional, ambiguous object"
in contemporary social and legal conditions. In their projects the engaged
artists can work out one or some of the four aspects: the supply of
"toolkits for artists", "political statement", "legal
and technical framework" or "fashionable statement".
For Mansoux the efforts to position open source "under the overwhelming
allencompassing umbrella of free culture" appear today as "mere
prototypes of a globalist cultural cooperation mechanism". Mansoux
claims that this is "championed by the Creative
Commons non-profit organization". Apparently for Mansoux a
pragmatic and multi-facetted "free art" fulfilling one or
more of the four aspects mentioned above is and will be able to evade
his criticism of Creative Commons as long as it remains splitted into
alternatives: a pluralistic engaged practice against a unified culture
(4/2015).
- Marres, Noortje: Why
We Can't Have Our Facts Back.
In: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, Nr.4/2018, p.423-443.
For users visiting social media with fake news there are very few sites
for facilitating investigations of the veracity of the information.
According to Marres the polarization on the one hand in groups interested
in "knowledge" and on the other hand in groups preferring
"anti-knowledge" (p.432; "politics of demarcation",
p.431) will not be dissolved but reinforced by "fact checking services"
(p.431). The producers of such tools accept the evidence of verifiable
facts which presupposes a static information landscape with established
standards for evidence (p.428).
How can a "knowledge democracy" be practiced in "dynamic
information environments" (p.434)?
The dynamics in "information environments" are supported by
algorithms created to attract attention. The "truth-less public
sphere" (p.435) thus created provokes "the dissolution of
the modern fact" (Sergio Sismondo, p.434).
For Marres dynamic information landscapes require "to test public
media for 'experimental facts'" (p.438). The one-sided development
to an ever wider audience for fake news as well as the counter-developments
intensifying the separation between "knowledge" and "anti-knowledge"
("demarcationism", p.437,440) need to be counteracted by a
"formulation and re-formulation of new empirical truths" realised
by "different actors" and "new alliances" (p.440):
"...epistemic authority will also have to be earned the hard way,
through an exchange between epistemically diverse viewpoints" (p.441).
In this way the change from the "politics of demarcation to a politics
of selection" should succeed. This kind of politics "progressively
establishes a referent for claims through an iterative process of locating
and evaluating statement-networks in formation" (p.441, ann.28).
Before the "knowledge democracy" won't be restored through
a regained "epistemic authority...to want your facts back will
amount to empty nostalgia." (p.441) (1/2020).
- Mateas, Michael/Montfort, Nick: A
Box, Darkly. Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics.
Lecture, "6th Digital Arts and Culture Conference", IT-Universitetet
i København, Copenhagen, 12/2/2005. Print version: Proceedings of the
6th Annual Digital Arts and Culture Conference. IT University of Copenhagen.
Copenhagen 2005, p.144-153. Programmers follow the ideal to develop
codes for tasks with as much "elegance and clarity" as possible.
In "Obfuscated Programming" the opposite rule is followed
in efforts to develop codes complicating the deciphering of the task.
Although these codes are machine-readable, nevertheless they are developed
primarily for a readability by humans. A code written in the programming
language C to start the print of the words "Hello World" is
used by the authors Mateas and Montfort as an example to show extensions
of the code by "layers of obfuscation". Since 1984 juries
of the "International Obfuscated C Code Contest" (IOCCC)
select contributions presenting the "dark side of computing"
at its best.
Since 1996 "The Perl Journal" organises the "Obfuscated
Perl Contest". At least as well as C the programming language Perl
is appropriate for the development of codes difficult to read because
it offers several alternatives for the navigation of computing processes.
Due to the fact that the commands integrate many terms of the ordinary
language Perl is appropriate for a "double coding" using commands
("procedural meaning") for computing being readable as texts
("textual meaning"). Even though Perl poetry uses "double
coding" its authors care more about its textual than its procedural
meanings.
"Weird" or "esoteric languages" are programming
languages with only a few basic elements. These languages fulfill the
requirements of Turing machines for universality, however they are not
easy adaptable to various tasks. "Brainfuck" and "OISC"
("One Instruction Set Computer") are presented as examples
of "minimalist languages...comment[ing] on computer architectures
as well as the nature of computation."
Mateas and Montfort show the meanings of "double coding" and
the "puzzle-like nature of coding" "for any theory of
code" because they are "present in all coding activity"
(4/2015).
- Medosch, Armin: Piratology.
In: Kingdom
of Piracy <KOP>. DIVE 0.1. In: Medosch, Armin (ed.): DIVE.
An Introduction into the World of Free Software and Copyleft Culture.
CD ROM and book. FACT, Liverpool/Virtualcentre-Media.net 2003, p.8-19.
Medosch compares the Malaysian piracy against the British Empire (1750-1850)
with the actual use of the term "piracy" by the copyright
industry. Piracy is caused by hegemonic structures in both cases. Today
the copyright industry presumes supremacy and tries to dominate the
use of the term "piracy". In Medosch's opinion efforts don't
promise success which try to correct the determination of the term's
meaning by the copyright industry. "Kingdom of Piracy" reacts
with a semantic subversion to that determination.
Medosch explains "Open Source software (OS)" and "free
software (FS)" as well as the development of Free
Networks as an alternative practice which enables itself via initiatives
to by-pass the claims of the copyright industry. Medosch interprets
NetArt projects like Last.fm (Michael
Breidenbruecker, Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel, Thomas Willomitzer),
Frequency
Clock (radioqualia) and Nine (Graham Harwood/Mongrel) as part of
that alternative practice because they use server based software and
relate themselves to the Free Software (2/2004).
- Menkman, Rosa: The
Glitch Moment(um).
Network Notebooks Nr.4. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van
Amsterdam (University of Applied Sciences). Amsterdam 2011. Menkman
features the procedures of databending, datamoshing and circuitbending
(p.23,37f.,47ff.,53ff.,65). By means of various examples she shows how
artists of Glitch Art use these procedures.
First, according to Menkman Glitch Art is a reaction to the fiction
to produce a noise free playback medium via digitalisation. The techniques
to disturb data stored as audio, sound and film media show characteristics
of the formats because, for example, with JPEG or BMP very specific
effects can be produced. Second, Glitch Art is "cool" (p.44;
see Liu, Alan: What's Cool? In: id: The Laws of Cool. Knowledge Work
and the Culture of Information. Chicago 2004, p.176-179) only in phases
of transition, as long as its effects can be observed as disturbances
of the established media usages.
The Glitch artists develop strategies to intervene in a technology development
hiding characteristics of media to users in favour of the investors'
interests: In removing technical barriers the artists enable themselves
to manipulate hard- and software. With these strategies the artists
disturb the fictions of media being adapted to the needs of their users
until they don't perceive these media: In practice the illusion of transparency
hides the construction of the medium against their users and disables
them to control computing processes. To this immaturity forced by the
investors "prosumers" (p.58) respond with cooperative developments
of Glitch strategies. With "Glitchspeak" net communities react
to situations comparable to George Orwell's "Newspeak" (in
"1984", 1949): In their relations to governmental authorities
Orwell's citizens are kept in uncritical mental states (p.43; 4/2015).
- Miles, Adrian: Programmatic
Statements for a Facetted Videography.
In: Lovink, Geert/Niederer, Sabine (ed.): Video Vortex Reader. Responses
to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam/University
of Applied Sciences. Amsterdam 2008, p.223-229. Miles suggests "granularity"
as the basis for "non-linear editing systems" in film productions.
The smallest unit of a film can be produced by a splitting of larger
units (sequences), nevertheless it is not a fragment: "...the 'wholeness'
of a shot is qualitative, not quantitative..."
Miles features two software systems allowing film editing with possibilities
for observers to select alternative paths. "Videodefunct"
and "Korsakow-System" enable producers to combine shots with
tags offering observers limited possibilities to choose subsequent shots:
"I intend to describe these relations as 'facets' as facet has
connotations of a shot being multifaceted." Shots get their meanings
by selectable connections to other shots meanwhile the content of a
shot contains the presupposition for its combinability in a monolinear
filmic narrative. For Miles the marking of these "combinatory environments"
as interactive is a "a commonplace (and naive error)..."(7/2009)
- Moss, Cecilia Laurel: Expanded
Internet Art and the Informational Milieu.
In: Rhizome, 19th December 2013. Moss proposes "Expanded Internet
Art" as a term for works addressing the "informational dynamics"
changed by the internet. Artists address these dynamics in media on
as well as beyond the internet which is why Moss proposes the term expansion.
She does not explore the prehistory of the term, its use in the sixties
and seventies (by Gene Youngblood, Rosalind Krauss, and others) for
transgressions of the borders between old art media and new forms of
works as well as for marking the transition to new (respectively technical)
media and to intermedia art. After the art media have been replaced
by new media for Moss the replacement of media-specific characteristics
by data flows is in the foreground of the current "informational
milieu". Moss draws on the term "informational milieu"
introduced by Tiziana Terranova and turns it against the concept of
information and the sender-receiver model of cybernetics in using Gilbert
Simondon's concept of the milieu: "...Simondon posited that there
is no content proper to any elements within a system, and form (as signal)
is never abstracted from matter (as noise)...Matter is not inert, but
a potential."
Working methods of, in and with information flows as used by Kari
Altmann and Brenna Murphy serve Moss as proofs of an art that
works with "resonances" (Simondon) in the "informational
milieu" and that provokes resonances in the observer. Moss expects
from an art dipping into the contemporary milieu that it is able to
unveil potentials of this milieu but she leaves open how this is to
happen (1/2020).
- Moss, Cecilia Laurel: Expanded
Internet Art and the Informational Milieu.
Thesis, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University, New
York 2015. Modified print version: Expanded Internet Art. Twenty-First-Century
Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu. London/Oxford/New York/New
Delhi/Sydney 2019. In her thesis Moss expands the subject of artistic
works with and in an "informational milieu" created by the
internet as she already published it in her essay of the same title
from 2013 (see above). While Tiziana Terranova in Network
Culture (2004) explains the contribution of cybernetics to the "informational
milieu" (p.9,20 et seq. ) and defines the term information in reference
to Gilbert Simondon in a framework larger than the one offered by the
cybernetic reduction to physical processes, Moss understands Simondon's
critique of mathematically oriented cybernetics (p.57f.) as a paradigm
shift to a milieu concept that presents processes between technology
and man as reciprocal: Man and technology develop inseparable units
in milieus. Although Moss integrates contributions also written in the
fifties by Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer into her concept of
the inseparability of man and technology in cultures, Simondon's intellectual
environment does not provide her with decisive insights for "Expanded
Internet Art".
With Jean-François Lyotard's concept for the exhibition «Les
Immatériaux» in 1985 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (p.94-111)
and with his texts and lectures of 1985-86 Moss attempts both to determine
the development of the connections between man and technology as well
as to clarify the function of art in the technical environment created
by man.
The visitors could not follow a guideline through «Les Immatériaux»
but had to choose their own paths between the stations. Moss compares
the perplexity of the visitors in their search for the goal of the exhibition
with situations in the "informational milieu". She notes a
"continual unfolding" as a characteristic of an "expanded
internet art" that "has co-developed with the internet."
(p.45).
To Lyotard's "anamnesic resistance" (p.127f.) Moss tries to
find alternatives with the aid of the "media tourists writing in
the 2000's" (p.52) Terranova, Mark B.N. Hansen und Bernard Stiegler
in order to be able to define the contemporary "informational milieu"
as being shaped by the "posthuman" (p.128,149,151-155). Inspired
by Hansen' explanations Moss wants to recognize a milieu being constituted
by the ways how subjects react to their environment (p.155 with ann.35).
Thus she wants to recognize relations between subjects and their environment
beyond Lyotard's definition of "resistance" against the "inhuman"
(p.79-89, 116f.,149f.). Unfortunately in her effort to determine a posthuman
constellation betweeen creators and milieu beyond Lyotard's approach
Moss succeeds neither on a theoretical level nor in the analysis of
works of art by Kari Altman, Harm van Dorpel, The Jogging (Brad Troemel
& Lauren Christensen), Oliver Laric, Katja Novitskova, Hannah Sawtell,
Katie Steciw and Timor Si-Qin.
In contrast to Moss' assessment of the artistic subject in posthuman
conditions Michael Sanchez observes (in "2011: On Art and Transmission",
2013, see above) artists moving without resistance in the contemporary
flood of images and concludes that these works can no longer claim authorship
in the traditional sense: The reaction time adapted to the accelerated
flood of data prevents an artistic processing that would suggest an
editing subject (1/2020).
- Munster, Anna: Compression
and the Intensification of Visual Information in Flash Aesthetics.
Lecture 5/22/2003. Melbourne DAC, the 5th International Digital Arts
and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology, Melbourne. Print version: Miles, Adrian (ed.):
Melbourne DAC streamingworlds, the 5th International Digital Arts and
Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology. Melbourne 2003, p.150-159. Munster finds precursors
of Flash aesthetics in animation history. She describes the interpenetrations
between American animation films for "television, experimental
video and short film" and Japanese developments of Mangas and "anime
subcultures". These penetrations brought about a style combining
signs in flat compositions for allusions of space ("flat aesthetic
space"). This "return and reinvention of animation traditions"
is "an aesthetic counterpoint to the mainstream articulation of
digital visuality as realistic, organicist and seamless 3D animation"
in movies like "Terminator 2" (1992) und "Jurassic Park"
(1993).
Munster recognizes developments from the "flattened aesthetic"
of a Japanese-American "'proto-networked' society" (since
the seventies) to applications of Flash vector graphics and compression
codec under net conditions. These influences contradict Manovich's postulate
of software artists' developing "from scratch" (Generation
Flash, 2002, s.o.). The
Futurefarmers refer explicitly to "kawai" images of Japanese
anime and mangas.
With Flash the programming of animations is changed from sequences of
static images (localising pixels on grids via bitmapping) to vectorial
and temporal differences with possibilities to combine dynamic images
with sonic dimensions in good quality via compression codec not only
synchronously. Websites by hi, Res! (Alexander Jugovich/Florian Schmitt:
Soulbath, 2000) and Yugo
Nakamura (Yugop, 1998-2002)
include projects with presentations of forms to be changed by mouse
clicks and rollovers provoking observers to recognize the programming
as mainly directed to these processes: "...encounters with temporality
in nonlinear modes." Cursor movements cause not only "effects
of differential speeds" but modifications of wider fields (parallel
to sound modifications). At least since Flash applications the "computational
space" supersedes the "modernist space" (Brian Massumi)
meanwhile Manovich understands the first as a prolongation of the second
with an expansion to complexity made possible by software for image
processing like Flash (Abstraction
and Complexity, 2003) (8/2009; 1/2020: not accessible anymore on
the web; 3/2021 found in the Internet Archive after a reference by Benedikt
Merkle).
- Munster, Anna: Data
Undermining. The Work of Networked Art in an Age of Imperceptibility.
In: Bray, Anne/Dockrey, Sean/Green, Jo-Ann/Navas, Eduardo/Torrington,
Helen (ed.): Networked. A (Networked_Book) about (Networked Art). 2009.
The actual state of the web (web 2.0) offers accesses to informations
being automated results of the stored data caused by surfing traces.
The recipients observe the performance of the results but don't receive
detailed informations on the users' traces, their storage and evaluation
in databases: The complement to data visualisation is imperceptibility.
Artists' projects are presented by Munster as opponents to these procedures
of detailed evaluations. Firefox browser extensions in projects like
Nick Knouf's MAICgregator (2009),
Dan Pfiffer's and Mushon Zer-Aviv's ShiftSpace
(since 2006) and Eduardo Navas' Traceblog
(2008) focus the attention on the strategies to combine perceptibility
and imperceptibility in intransparent ways. "Traceblog" demonstrates
a strategy to obfuscate databases' tracking procedures of users' behaviors.
According to Munster the collections and evaluations of the users' traces
in databases are not a problem of privacy because the stored data don't
refer to the paths of individuals. The databases measure the traces
quantitatively. Statistic procedures lead to the behavior of the average
user and with it to "a flattened landscape of information."
Artistic projects react against these patterns of mass behavior and
try to find new ways of data processing under contemporary net conditions:
"To data undermine, then, is to radically automate and to automate
radically as a careful ethical and aesthetic gesture." (8/2009;
1/2020: "ShiftSpace" is not accessible anymore on the web; 9/2022: text not found in the Web)
- Munster, Anna: Welcome
to Google Earth.
In: Kroker, Arthur und Marielouise (ed.): Critical Digital Studies.
A Reader. Toronto 2008, p.397-416.
Google Earth expands the possibilities to use pictures of the earth
in searches for places. Cooperations between observers by interactive
exchanges and handles of data are excluded by Google Earth as well as
by Google Search. The PageRank algorithm of Google Search uses the click
rates of platforms for cooperations and communications but doesn't offer
functions of "sociable media".
The billing system for the advertisers of Google AdWords uses the rates
of clicks on links leading from the Google AdWords to the advertisers'
websites. The system presupposes Google's search algorithm with keywords
to select the adwords for the presentation of search results on Google's
website and in websites prepared to integrate them (Google AdSense).
Google Search as well as Google AdWords equalize the click rates with
users' preferences: The click rates are the fundamental data for the
PageRank algorithm as well as for the charging of the advertisers' accounts.
There is no interaction and no social moment between the acting observers:
There are only decisions of isolated persons and frequencies of click
rates. Munster explains this omission of social moments as characteristic
for neoliberalism and compares it with the "preference utilitarianism"
of Richard Marvin Hare. A "creative, post-industrial information
culture" works with the omission of social moments (as a "black
hole", as if there are no communicative acts) equating the best
with the selections of the majority.
Übermorgen.com, Alessandro Ludovico and Paulo Cirio started and
care for the project GWEI Google
Will Eat Itself. Google AdSense is used in GWEI to earn money via
a system of websites and supporters producing clicks. The revenues are
invested in google shares. The shares should be handed over to supporters.
The project's website presents the actual amount of shares and tells
how much time will be necessary to reach the goal to take over Google.
Munster presents GWEI as an example for an alternative media practice
and gives an outline of other possibilities to produce "alternative,
distributed aesthetics." (8/2009)
- Munster, Anna: The
Image in the Network.
Lecture, New Network Theory: International Conference. Universiteit
van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 6/28/2007. In: New Network Theory Reader.
Collected Abstracts and Papers. Amsterdam 2007, p.6-15. For the context
of net projects Munster proposes to replace the symbol's function by
the diagrammatic in Walter Benjamin's comparison between the symbol
and the allegory: The symbol conserves "the identity of the specific
and the general" meanwhile the allegory "marks their difference"
(Benjamin). Munster points to the vagueness of the diagrams' relation
to the represented. The diagrams gain the allegorical with this vagueness:
"...a kind of becoming allegorical of the diagrammatic."
She exemplifies this "becoming allegorical" by Digg
Swarm programmed by Digg Labs. It visualizes swarms of tips stored
by participants in tags of the platform Digg. The tips point to interesting
webpages and Digg Swarm visualizes relations between them. The dynamic
visualization actualises itself. The "Fidg't Visualizer" combines
two platforms (Flickr, Last FM): The "Tag Magnet" enables
participants to recognize relations to other participants and to use
the integrated functions. On the one side the data visualisations are
expanded to the "diagram as activity and process", on the
other side the "endless generation of its own redundancies"
is facilitated.
Geotagging on Google Maps (using the Google Maps API) is characterised
by Munster as "a mush up of the diagram and the allegory in network
visuality." The mentioned net projects exemplify "the potential
for both the disjunctive (diagrammatic expanded in its expressive capacities)
and the temporal (allegorical as a mode of unfolding historicity) to
play more overt and generative roles in our images and imaginings in
networks." (8/2009)
- Munster, Anna: Nerves
of Data. The Neurological Turn in/against Networked Media.
In: Computational Culture. A Journal of Software Studies. Issue One/2011.
Anna Munster criticises the "neurological turn" and its famous
supporter Nicolas Carr: He based his assertion that net surfing causes
not only "the loss of meditative, deep thought about the world"
but damages the capabilities to think, too, on a research by Gary Small
documenting the behavior of net surfers via Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI). Munster demonstrates that Carr's reference to fMRI lacks
scientific footing because Small's diagrams don't sustain such conclusions.
In the forties Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts developed a psychologically
oriented precursor of Artificial Intelligence. The contemporary research
in Artificial Intelligence abondoned the neuron based cybernetic research
of McCulloch and Pitts, and developed programs for predictions learning
from large databases. Google's concept for the development of a Prediction
API is criticised by Munster for its recursions between behaviors of
net surfers and the programmed learning procedures: "...it automates
the development process making it in some fundamental ways non-participatory."
If net surfers receive the predictions of their actions in the future
then, as Carr argues, their neuronal structures will adapt themselves
and they will be able to behave in the future only according to the
predictions.
Munster pleas to abandon these problematic "neuropolitics"
by a criticism of the exclusively neuron based research of the recipients.
fMRI can be used in frameworks, too, not leaving aside the cognitive
capabilities of thinking, acting, and observing: The images produced
by fMRI are suitable "as filements of the complexity of neuro-affective-perceptual-cognition"
because of its diagrammatic character admitting dynamic relations between
icon and index. These "machinic assemblage...of possible fields,
of virtual as much as constituted elements" (Felix Guattari: Chaosmosis.
An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sydney 1994, p.35) allows to regard the
contemporary "neuropolitics" critically with a "different
'vision' of the relation between brains, thought and (soft) technics"
(4/2013).
- Navas, Eduardo: Modular
Complexity and Remix. The Collapse of Time and Space into Search.
In: AnthroVision. Vol.1.1. September 2012. The authors of remix videos
archived in YouTube reacted to the links offered by the platform to
other videos: The authors of remix videos react to remixed videos because
it is a difficult and sometimes not solvable task to find the original
with the search system of YouTube.
Search engines and platforms favor the last contribution. They influence
with their preference for the newest videos which versions creators
of remix videos find and use for further remix videos. Creators of remixes
often react to the last versions of a series without knowledge of elder
versions or of the start. Often the original can't be found in the search
systems integrated in platforms. If corporations claim copyrights infringement
and ask administrators of platforms like "YouTube to take the video
remix offline" (pdf S.26), then creators of remixes can know only
parts of histories of remix series.
The remix series are not archived to present the development from elder
to newer remixes but to direct as much visitors of the platform as possible
to the last version. The search systems and platforms follow their business
models in their ways to direct the click attitudes of their visitors.
For visitors and contributors of remix videos the coaction of net conditions
guided by business models results in a state in which "...the now
rules..." (pdf p.26) This "ahistoricity" (pdf p.2) is
sustained by the efforts to distribute "constant updates"
(pdf p.4) of software with the consequence that more and more elder
versions become inaccessible: "Those who are invested in knowledge
and history as a living discourse must truly consider the stage we are
entering with algorithms that privilege the growing economy of the now."
(pdf p.27) (3/2013)
- Nitsche, Michael: Claiming
Its Space: Machinima.
In: dichtung-digital.org. Nr.37/2007. Nitsche outlines the development
of animations created with game engines since 2001 and distributed on
internet platforms. The author points not only to the integration of
cinematographic elements into the animation vocabulary, as it is determined
by games like "Doom", "Stunt Island", "Quake",
"Halo", "World of Warcraft", "The Movies"
and "The Sims", but he also mentions the "performative
aspect" (Aarseth, Espen J.: Cybertext. Baltimore/Maryland 1997,
p.21) of selections made from a preprogrammed virtual world in following
dramatic criteria (Laurel, Brenda: Toward the Design of a Computer-based
Interactive Fantasy System. Dissertation. Graduate School of Ohio State
University, Columbus/Ohio 1986, p.21).
Nitsche explains machinima productions as successors of no longer-offered
possibilities to store demo files documenting the players' game histories.
When players reactivated the game history stored in the system of a
game then the player's performance was presented like a film presentation.
According to Nitsche with this transition from the stored game play
to film presentations the demo files anticipated the later machinima
productions.
Nitsche selected three examples to discuss how "in-game topics"
of "World of Warcraft" are thematised in machinima productions:
Their plots contain actions well known to the game's players. Furthermore
the interfaces of computer games can themselves become elements supporting
the plot (f.e. Pals
for Life: Leeroy Jenkins, 2005. Until 10/24/2014 it received 41
million hits on YouTube; 9/2022: not found in YouTube).
From these "inside-out"-productions the "outside-in"-productions
can be distinguished. An example for the last one is Katherine Anna
Kang's "gothic fairy tale" Anna
(2003) using the animation vocabulary of game engines for "stand-alone
animation pieces". Meanwhile Kang revives well known literary-filmic
topoi, technically and aesthetically new ways to create machinimas are
developed in "friction zones" between "game", "play",
and "presentation".
In "Machinima as Media" (in: Lowood, Henry/Nitsche, Michael:
The Machinima Reader. Cambridge/Massachusetts 2011, p.113-125) Nitsche
points to the problem that the win of new possibilities to produce machinimas
via "screen capture and postproduction techniques" heightens
the dangers "for the identity of machinima as its own format"
(4/2015).
- Paloque-Bergès, Camille: Remediating
Internet Trivia. Net Art's Lesson in Web Folklore.
In: ESSACHESS Journal for Communication Studies. Vol.3/No.2 (6)
2010, p.117-129. With the "many-to-many communication" in
the internet the regulating power of gatekeepers was dropped. In the
World Wide Web a "pioneering crowd" (p.19) trained itself
to be able to use the new technical possibilities. With the web 1.0
a "homepage culture" (p.119) occured. It was shaped by an
"intensive and repetitive use of fixed-forms iconography such as
Webpage wallpapers, animated gifs, midi music, shiny buttons, moving
arrows, customized Webforms" (p.120).
A "vernacular Web" (p.120) came up with the wider use of the
web. Instead of considering these webpages as part of a "low culture"
and to exclude it from information flows and cultural mediations, Paloque-Bergès
proposes an understanding of "triviality" deviated from "trivium".
She chooses Yves Jeanneret's explanations of "trivium" as
a basis for a renewed version of the three-way connection grammar, rhetoric
and dialectics. With these insights the attention can be directed to
heterogeneous exchange processes ("crossroads", p.120) between
the members of a community and to the resulting forms of communication:
Social mediation processes replace normative aesthetics and their high-low
dichotomy.
In c. 2005 net artists started to publish link lists pointing to their
selections of the best web pages according to their tastes. They selected
without any restrictions by themes and presented found pages of the
"vernacular Web": Olia Lialina, Cory Arcangel, Michael Bell-Smith,
Paddy Johnson and the author (in "Nasty Nets") proved to by
"professional surfers" (S.122f.) by presenting their selections
without using any secret search algorithms and responding to search
engines with "human indexing" (p.123). Further variants of
the "vernacular Web" are blogs and animated.gifs.
The limits between publications of found pages, self-made conditions
and the documentation of takeovers (of the self-made contribution by
others) are blurred in the internet practices of Olia Lialina, Tom Moody
and Michael Bell-Smith: One's own creations are realised to be integrated
into webpages created others and stand the test in various contexts.
To the reception of one's own creations in external contexts authors
can react by their own contributions and takeovers (of their own creations
alienated by others; 4/2015).
- Paloque-Bergès, Camille: Poétique
des codes sur le réseau informatique: une investigation critique.
(Poetics of Codes in Information Networks: A Critical Investigation).
Research project for a Master 2 de Lettres Modernes, l'Ecole Normale
supérieure Lettres et Sciences humaines de Lyon, 2005-2006. Print
version: Éditions des archives contemporaines. Paris 2009. Paloque-Bergès
presents literary experiments with codes as a field ranging from text
generators to code poetry from the development of programs for
text generators to the text forms of code poetry being inspired by codes
without being machine-readable. The author restricts herself to works
being published on the internet or realised as net art.
In her introduction Paloque-Bergès refers to Florian Cramer's
thematisation of codes being not only executable by computers but being
readable by humans, too. The written code contains characteristic features
of texts («performativité», «textualité»),
normally hidden by Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) and recognisable only
indirectly by the screen presentations as they are caused by computing
processes. Paloque-Bergès discusses several artistic strategies
in thematising the relations code-text and code-computing-presentation
(resp. output).
In discussing her methodological foundation she refers frequently to
Gary Lee Stonum's discussion of the relations «message/code/bruit»
(S.133; Stonum, Gary Lee: For
a Cybernetics of Reading. In: Modern Language Notes. Vol.92/Nr.5.
December 1977, p.945-968) and to Michael Riffaterre's reference theory.
Riffaterre explains the possibility to refer in utterances to extralinguistic
phenomena as caused by intertextual relations: Reference is constituted
by internal linguistic processes (p.133f.; Riffaterre, Michael: Sémiotique
de la Poésie. Paris 1983). Meanwhile the author presents Stonum's
explanation of «bruit» as «un code virtuel, à
faire emerger» (p.55,133), she renounces to introduce her readers
to Riffaterre's conception of an internal linguistic constitution of
"mimesis". In contrast to the code built potentially out of
«bruit» (emergence), Paloque-Bergès explains the
code constituted by the «mimesis elle-même mimée»
(self-imitation) and distinguishes it from self-referring, formal and
non-mimetic languages (p.80).
The experimental literature combines language and programming in different
ways:
- Charles O. Hartman (Projekt Virtual
Muse, 1996, p.23-26,29f.,38f.) and Jim Carpenter ("Electronic
Text Composition Project, Public
Override Void", 2005-2006, p.36-39) use generative procedures
to produce texts. Carpenter emphasises the program prior to the
computed texts and ascribes the status of an art work to the program.
Meanwhile Hartman takes away the irritating aspects of his generated
texts by handwritten transcriptions and revisions, Carpenter exhibits
the generated result.
- «Languages ésotériques» like Ook
by David Morgan-War (since 1990, p.59) or Brainfuck
by Urban Müller (1993, p.56) are programs constructed with
from two to eight basic elements. The goals of the authors were
not the usefulness to execute functions but a presentation of the
"art" to invent programs (with Donald E. Knuth: «l'art
de la programmation», p.12,41f.,80s.).
- Competitions encourage the development of codes based on programming
languages like C or Perl. Juries judge the best proposals to reach
specific goals. Each year the jury of the "International Obfuscated
C Code Contest" (IOCCC,
p.50s.) looks for contributions with codes making it more difficult
than others to reconstruct their task (grand
prize/Best of Show winners): The machine readable codes of the
contributions should be ingenious in the manners to cause difficulties
to the readers' efforts to reconstruct the control of the computers.
- Paloque-Bergès selects examples of net art by ASCII Art
Ensemble, Giselle Beiguelman and Jodi, amongst others suggesting
or mimicking disturbances. Pseudo-disturbances dominate the reception
of these works, not experiments with computing processes: «Les
net.artistes jouent à mimer la complexité de l'environnement
informatique en faisant des manipulations de surface pour faire
signe vers les <profondeurs> du code.» (p.90)
- Meanwhile in "Perl Poetry" the programming is determined
by poetic questions (Larry Wall (Just
another Perl Hacker, March 1990, p.61) and Perlmonks (life.pl,
2005, and Hard Times,
2005, p.61f.)) and the machine readability is maintained, in "Code
Poetry" spellings of codes are integrated into texts not only
causing uncommon sequences of letters, but interrupting the machine
readability, too: «Le code est transformée en pseudo-code»
(p.113). As a source for codeworks MEZ Breeze, Alan Sondheim or
Pascale Gustin (p.114-119,122f.,126-130) used the context of computer
programming with its specific combinations of letters. For readers
the computer context can be a source of inspiration to develop further
possibilities of decoding, because many works were invented for
this kind of reading.
Paloque-Bergès uses often the terms «double codage»
(p.56,60,63f.,66,80,86,118,131) and «mimesis» (p.38,80,113
with ann. 375) in her analyses of the field of conflict between "obfuscations"
of codes, a net art only refering to characteristics of codes instead
of experimenting with codes, and code poetry. The term «mimesis»
stands for sought-for affinities between the characteristics of programs
and texts (p.113:«le...pseudo-code [des codeworks] mime le language
de programmation mais qui perd sa fonction d'instruction au profit de
la fonction expressive.»), meanwhile the term «double codage»
designates codes being readable by machines as well as by readers, but
with different kinds of reading for the different objectives computing
(«fonctionnel», p.57) and 'meaning' («naturel»:
«un autre sens pour le lecteur humain», p.57. Cf. Mateas/Montfort:
A Box, Darkly, see above). Paloque-Bergès analyses this problem
area of the performance of codes and texts. Furthermore she discusses
the internet forms used for the internet distribution.
Authors distributed their codeworks in mailing lists. In these lists
the authors were treated as outsiders because their contributions did
not fulfill the criteria of discursive or dialogic text forms. The senders
of codeworks were confronted with complaining mails. Furthermore numerous
receivers unsubscribed their email addresses from the lists flooded
with codeworks.
Paloque-Bergès features the strategies of Jodi and NN Antiorp
to provoke the readers and administrators of mailing lists. In the cases
of the flooding of the lists "Syndicate" (1996-2001) and "nettime"
by NN Antiorp (p.108f.,111f.) the provocations ("spam art")
contained not only texts similar to codes alarming the programs filtering
suspicious codes and receivers of the mails, but included attacks on
the conventional forms used by participants to communicate with each
other: NN Antiorp plumbed the possibilities to send counter-attacks
reacting to the complaints by the participants of a list. In her analysis
Paloque-Bergès does not recognize a goal of the counter-attacks
by NN Antiorp beyond the destruction of the communication between the
participants of internet forums.
In contrast to the contributions of MEZ Breeze and Alan Sondheim enriching
the mailing list "webartery", with the mails attacking the
subscribers of "Syndicate" the group NN Antiorp calls into
question its own communication basis: With the end of the mailing list
its archive is deleted except it will be stored as a document.
«Poétique des codes sur le réseau informatique»
is an in-depth study of the digital literature offering the relations
between the presentation forms and the codes as guideline. Unfortunately
the author's reduction of arguments to scarce remarks complicates it
for readers to follow her explanations of seldom noticed aspects of
digital literature and to recognize her interpretative approach (4/2015; 1/2020: not accessible anymore on the Web).
- Parikka, Jussi: Dust and Exhaustion. The Labor of Media Materialism.
In: C Theory. 2nd October 2013. Parikka writes a history of the media
as a history of materials with the subject "dust". Dust is
penetrating and destructing the lungs of workers, as it happens f.e.
in coltan mining to extract the precious metal Tantalum being necessary
for the production of the chips for mobile phones. For Parikka the labour
to extract minerals is an example of the connections between essential
body functions and non-human materials. Meanwhile the exploited materials
and the places of exploitation changed in the technical evolution from
analog to digital media the life-threatening conditions have not improved:
Particles penetrating the bodies of workers via the respiratory tracts
remained a constant factor.
The games Phone Story by Molleindustria
(2011, Google Android and Web) and "iMine" (2010, Google Android
and iPhone) as well as YoHas (Matsuko Yokokoji, Graham Harwood) installations
Tantalum Memorial (2008) and
Coal Fired Computers (2010) thematise
the relations between the working conditions at the extraction of materials
and the production of hardware.
The body becomes its own "inscription/writing system" (Kittler,
Friedrich Adolf: Aufschreibesysteme 1800-1900. Munich 1985). The body's
ways to react and to store its reactions as changes of the organs make
it possible to decipher the conditions of the workers producing technologies
as well as the effects on the environment. Despite the technological
development breathlessness caused by time pressure, oxygen deficiency
and narrowing of the airways are constant characteristics from the 19th
to the 21st century.
In his explanation of a continuum from the early modern times to the
(post)modernism Parikka uses quotations from Georgius Agricola's "De
Re Metallica" (1556) as supporting documents: "...the book
reads like a distant warning of that connection between wealth and its
price, of ill health and sacrifice. It is a sort of psychogeographics..."
(4/2015).
- Parikka, Jussi: Ethologies
of Software Art: What Can a Digital Body of Code Do?
In: O'Sullivan, Simon/Zepke, Stephen (ed.): Deleuze and Contemporary
Art. Edinburgh 2010, p.116-132. The discourse created by Gilles Deleuze's
explanations of the term «devenir imperceptible» ("becoming
invisible") is Parikka's starting point in his investigation of
the disguise of codes and artistic strategies to make visible the hidden
elements to navigate computing processes. Due to the unseparability
of the code(s) and its cultural context(s) Software Art as well as Tactical
Media offer mutually reinforcing approaches being useful in efforts
to develop a media criticism.
Artists like Übermorgen, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico thematise
these interrelations in developing "micropolitics" (p.118,125,130)
with strategic software applications in the projects GWEI
(2005) and Amazon
Noir (2006, p.126). These don't intervene in established relations
between technology, economics and culture but reveal them humorously.
In 2001 during the Venice Bienniale 0100101110101101.ORG and EpidemiC
published the code of a harmless virus (biennale.py)
in distributing it on T-Shirts and other carriers. According to Parikka
the interdependencies between the perceivable and the hidden code are
shown to demonstrate the superimpositions of the technology and social
affairs as an area of conflict transgressing the art world.
Parikka outlines the control of computing processes and their effects
in social constellations in using the terms "the relationality,
polymorphism and contex[t]uality" (p.124). In my view the terminology
taken from Gille Deleuze's writings results in constellations of terms
not usable for a differentiated discussion of "Software Art"
as "tactical move" (p.117) in simultaneously technical as
well as social environments: Parikka's use of terms taken from Deleuze's
philosophy demonstrates a limited potential of this approach to develop
a contemporary theory of media. The semantic fields of terms like "affects,
sensations, relations and forces" (p.116) and "abstract machines"
(p.121) are over-general and don't offer differentiations for descriptions
of technical and social processes: These terms encompass too much relations
and Deleuze's writings obviously offer not enough relevant approaches
for differentiations in analyses of digital art (4/2015).
- Peraica, Ana: Culture
of the Selfie: Self-Representation in Contemporary Visual Culture.
Theory
of Demand Nr. 24. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2017.
Peraica outlines the possibilities of Selfies through prehistories:
the history of the self-portrait as well as depictions of mirrors as
they are used in the media of painting and photography.
The possibilities of painting to make people visible in the pictorial
space by means of mirrors provide Peraica with occassions to thematize
the integration of observers into the pictorial space.
Peraica contrasts the debate of the 19th century until the beginning
of the 20th century about the medium photography as a trace of the past
and thus as Memento Mori (p.72) with photographs of the contemporary
staging of the dead often with open eyes with family members
(post-mortem photography): The consideration for the dead being common
today had first to be established.
On the one hand, Selfies take up again the integration of the observer
into a pictorial space that delimits his location, as it was developed
in the history of painting, through self-representations in the mirror
(p.66,92, image 9,18), and the dead are sometimes shown disrepectfully,
as if Post-mortem Photography had to be revived (p.77, image 11f.).
On the other hand, the distribution conditions for photography, as they
are constituted by social media, change the status of the image producer
and the possibilities of image reception. The photographer loses his/her
status as a creator and the private context of family albums, as it
was important for the Post-mortem Photography, is replaced by the Web
2.0 public sphere.
As a result of these changes the three "spaces" of the image
creating human, the portrayed person and the recipient are newly intertwined.
The "Selfie Olympics" are a competition that in 2014 (and
for the second time in 2018) called for the photographing of self-portraits
with mirrors in the bathroom. These Selfies can be called up with hashtag
in Twitter (#selfieolympics). The contributions of this competition,
in which the participants photographed themselves in unusual poses between
mirrors and other parts of the bathroom, are used by Peraica as examples
to show how the objectifying mirror image is subjectified in the Selfie,
in order to be objectified again by the reactions of the Twitter participants:
This "subject-object loop" (p.99. Cf. p.50f.) has parallels
in contemporary art photography taking up parts of the art history of
painting: The mirrors in paintings by Jan Van Eyck (p.35, image 6),
Parmigianino (p.40, graph 3), Diego Velazquez (p.39, graph 2) and René
Magritte (p.98, graph 9) are revived by Miguel Angel Ganeca and Joan
Fotcuberta (p.94 with Image 19, p.100 with image 20) in photographically
constructed spaces while in Selfies photographers present themselves
in the space depicted and thus at the moment of image formation, and
then they distribute the results via social media losing the originator's/author's
control: "...selfies are unstable...ephemeral and non-important."
(p.88f.)
According to Peraica painting is the medium for "the portrait of
self" in which the artist is concerned with "internal reflection",
while photography is the medium of the "self-portrait" in
which the "time-gap between recording and posing, as well as between
shutting and developing the film" (p.100) is used by authors for
the graspable realization of an intention. In Selfies, by contrast,
"a willing destruction of privacy" takes place, "that
subverts the endless public display of the self" (p.105, quoting
Henry A. Giroux).
Peraica refers in her history from the self-portrait to the Selfie to
Michel Foucault's lectures on "The Culture of the Self" at
the University of Berkeley in 1983. Foucault's title inspired Peraica's
title (p.56). In order to be able to cross her reconstruction of the
dispositifs constituting the cultures of the self with the history of
the media, painting, photography and selfie Peraica presents the myths
Narciss and Perseus in interpretations by psychologists and the role
of phototherapy in psychological practice (p.62f.,81). Michel Foucault,
Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Julia Kristeva, Christopher Lasch and Marshall
McLuhan (p.45f.,52) provide Peraica with building blocks for the reconstruction
of the psychological discourse.
With these and other academic references Peraica succeeds in reconstructing
an convincing cultural history of self-representation in the media mentioned.
What is conspicous about Peraica's history, however, is the absence
of tourist photography by means of an analog camera, as it was investigated
by Pierre Bourdieu in «Un art moyen. Essais sur les usages sociaux
de la photographie» (Paris 1965) and which is continued in the
contemporary Selfie. The change of the self-representation in front
of a travel motif is part of a "Culture of the Self[ie]"
(1/2020).
- Pias, Claus: Das
digitale Bild gibt es nicht. Über das (Nicht-)Wissen der Bilder und
die informatorische Illusion.
(The digital image doesn't exist. On the (non-)knowledge of images and
the informatory illusion). In: Zeitenblicke, Nr.1/2003. Pias reconstructs
the history of cybernetics (Warren S. McColluch, Claude Shannon, Norbert
Wiener) and explains the social historical meaning of information systems.
He uses this history as a background for a discourse about the digital
image as the result of information processing procedures. The digital
image appears 'as picture' only in media of presentation. The results
of digital media for the production of pictures provoke a "transcendental
appearance" (Immanuel Kant) which shouldn't cause confusions with
analog pictures. The singularity and static (irreversibility) of analog
pictures caused kinds of archives which can't be transfered to dynamic,
processing (reversible) data systems.
Cybernetics don't call for circumstances in a given context but ask
for possibilities of systems resp. media. The media scientist Pias refers
to cybernetics' problematization of possibilities when he demands art
historians not to transfer old needs/ends to new media/means but to
use the changing limits of the digital and net possibilities as a cause
for self investigation and renewal: from a digitalized to a digital
art history (2/2004).
- Picot, Edward: Play
on Meaning? Computer Games as Art.
In: Furtherfield Review, 4/30/2009; The
Hyperliterature Exchange, Mai 2009. Following Picot, "computer
games enjoy a special position in the canon of new media art" because
they provoke expectations to fulfill criteria of interactivity. Picot
outlines some steps of the early history of computer games from adventure
games to Myst (1993) and concatenates "interactive fictions"
with "hypertext fictions" to delineate his understanding of
interactivity as an exploration of a work instead of a participation
in collaborative writing projects: works as finite entities with signs
and functions stimulating the imagination of recipients, not infinite
projects changing their character from contribution to contribution.
Picot focuses his arguments not only on this limited sense of interactivity
but presents projects of independent authors attracting the recipients'
attention by limited functions to be used to activate the next sequences
of the storyline.
Molleindustria's Free
Culture Game (2008) renounces the conventional end of the game with
winners and presents the struggle between Open Source software distribution
and the commercialization of the authors' copyright as an open game
without winners. The strategies of the gamers are substitutes for the
strategies of activists to fight against a domination of the commercialization
of copyrights. Following Picot, "the trickiness" for gamers
to act successfully in "Free Culture Game" "distracts
you from the meaning of the game" but other interpretations
are possible, too.
Samorost 2 (2005)
by Amanita Design and The
Graveyard by The Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey/Michael Samyn) exemplify
games neglecting technical functions for moves and foregrounding worlds
of signs, stories and their animations. Moves in "Samorost 2"
direct the gamers' attention to the unfoulding of the story. In "The
Graveyard" moves with the arrow keys activate a predeterminate
course: "...the game's most important qualities are negative ones..."
Recipients recognize their attunement to the storyline.
Following Picot computer games can be defined as art if they firstly
"use the structure of the game for symbolic purposes", secondly
avoid to provoke the player's skills to react fast to animated situations
and thirdly erect a distance between the player and "the game's
central character." If games fulfill these criteria then they facilitate
a concentration on "the unfolding of the story"(8/2009; 9/2022: not found in Furtherfield Review).
- Prada, Juan Martin: Web
2.0 as a New Context for Artistic Practices.
Lecture. In: Prada, Juan Martin (ed.): Inclusiva-net. New Art Dynamics
in Web 2 Mode. First Inclusiva-net Meeting. Medialab-Prado. Madrid,
July 2007, p.6-21. The lecture is written in the style of a polemic
pamphlet. Against the involontary support of commercial platforms ("social
networks") using the participants' need for communication in the
data management's evaluations Prada argues for a reconfiguration of
"net art 2.0" via "the movement for 'free data'"
and "social software" allowing the "connected multitude"
to form a "co-intelligence".
Prada ascribes a leading role to the "metadata" ("classifying,
tagging, selecting, voting, scoring, etc.") and mentions as examples
"Subvertr" of Les Liens Invisibles
and 10 x 10 of Jonathan Harris.
Valuation: Unfortunately there are too many slogans and too few concretizations
(7/2009; 1/2020: only the publication in "Fibreculture Journal",
Issue 14/ 2009 was yet accessible in the web).
- Quaranta, Domenico: Code as Law. Contemporary Art and NFTs.
In: Orizio, Zaglio e Associati (eds.): I, Lawyer. Innovation Lawyer Project. O.O. 2021, p.31-37. Domenico Quaranta introduces blockchain and NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens). He dampens expectations of high profits and shows that only a few artists generate higher revenues (20% generate $100 - $200). He also points to the return of "middlemen and gatekeepers" (p.36) in NFT trading. Instead of refusing to engage in NFT trading, the author advises: "Choosing the right mode to engage is key." (9/2022)
- Quaranta, Domenico: L’estetica dei Non-Fungible Token/The Aesthetics of Non-Fungible Tokens.
In: Civiltà delle macchine, 4/Dicembre 2021, p.66-71,89ff. The Italian art critic contradicts the view that there is an aesthetic of Crypto Art. He uses Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) as an example, whose illustration style via digital animation has not fundamentally changed with the sale via NFT. Quaranta sees possibilities for “una fenonomenologia specifica dell'arte basata su blockchain” (“a specific phenomenology of an art constituted by processes using blockchain.”) (p.70) in Okhaos' Plantoid (2016, s. tips) (9/2022).
- Quaranta, Domenico: Situating
Post Internet.
In: Catricalà, Valentino (ed.): Media Art. Toward a New Definition
of Art in the Age of Technology. Rome 2015, p.121-134. In 2013 Post-Internet
Art became a much discussed term in the art world (art trade, museums
etc.), from which net art became independent. In 2014, Brian Droitcour
explained the term in Perils
of Post-Internet Art as part of a marketing strategy to direct interest
through an "internet layer" (p. 122) to mediocre works as
exhibition objects. Quaranta, on the other hand, argues that Post-Internet
Art should be understood as an extension of strategies to address images
and texts circulating on the web: Post-Internet Art is to be criticized
against the background of "group surfing practices" that emerged
in the first decade of the 21st century (p.123).
From December 2009 to September 2010 Gene Mc Hugh thematized the Web
in a blog as a distribution and navigation medium "a distribution
platform, a machine for altering and re-channeling work" (Mc Hugh,
Gene: Post Internet. Brescia 2011, p.6) with which contemporary
art should deal. In addition to Gene McHugh, Artie Vierkant (see below),
Louis Doulas and Katja Novitskaja also addressed the artistic relevance
of the circulation of data that permeates everyday life and is determined
by the Web: "...they all pointed to the internet as a cultural
reference and an environment, rather than a medium." (p.125) The
Web is seen as a source of points of reference for art works in different
media rather than as an examination of webness (media-specific criteria
of the Web).
James Bridle's observations of a "New Aesthetic" influenced
by digital technology in everyday life, design and art, "surfing
clubs" (p.126ff.) and artists like Kevin Brewersdorf, Mark Leckey,
Guthrie Lonergan, Metahaven, Seth Price and F.A.T. Lab with Evan Roth,
Aram Bartholl, Addie Wagenknecht, Lolan Levin and others (p.126-131)
provide clues to Quaranta for an investigation of web-related everyday
and media phenomena. This investigation exists alongside the marketing
of works by a group of artists under the label "Post-Internet Art".
Quaranta confronts the commodities being labeled as Post-Internet Art
with works of artists who locate their works within the media landscape
and contexts shaped by the Web: The works are processes in which analogue
and digital media are combined in a way that is both close to today's
media use and distinguishable from it. Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin
already addressed this self-localization in a "cultural loop"
in 1999 in Introduction to
net.art (1994-1999) (p.130). In "Painting to exist only when
it's copied or photographed" (1964), Yoko Ono also anticipated
an attack on "artworks-as-commodities" (p.132) with the process
of destroying originals and replacing them with copies. Quaranta sees
a continuation of this "process of (subversive) affirmation"
(p.131) in Joshua Citarella's Compression
Artifacts (2013) and Oliver Laric's Lincoln
3D Scans (2013). Both integrate telecommunication, digital media
and objects into strategies that take up processes of the art world
(p.132ff.). To what extent these examples revitalize the Context
Art of the nineties with extended medial possibilities is not the
subject of Quaranta. The relation of concept and context becomes relevant
here again in a way whose art-world-centered way was transgressed by
net art. The two levels of firstly media reflection extending beyond
art and secondly the re-embedding in the context of art have already
been linked in context art with refractions of this context, usually
without transgressing it. By following these strategies, Quaranta's
examples of Citarella and Laric are Context Art under the conditions
of the Web (2/2020).
- Reichert, Ramón: Dating
Maps. Mapping Love in Online Dating Communities.
Lecture,
Conference "Mapping Maps: What's new about Neocartography?",
Artur-Woll-Haus, University of Siegen, Siegen, 1/21/2011. In the web
2.0 the combination of data gathering and data storing, the structuring
of databases via software, the distribution of these data via the internet
and its visualisation in interfaces for networks result in systems used
mutually by participants for their lifestyles: The participants create
data (input) and use the systems' output in specific ways. With their
uses of the output the participants create new input. These "feedback
loops" are used by program developers to find new tasks for the
modification of the social networks' systems to be able to adapt them
to the users' needs as well as to the demands of paying customers.
Instead of an investigation of the economic aspects Reichert offers
a discussion of the possibilities for users and features examples: Corresponding
to the developments of programmers users find new ways to organize themselves
via "practices of evaluative self-observation" in an everyday
life determined by data. The self-adaptation to changing environmental
conditions (everyday life including the infoscapes) is elevated to a
guiding principle: "The control technology of 'gentle adaptation'
attempts to set an interminable dynamic of self-determination in motion..."
In liberal-democratic societies "inspection procedures" dominate
the organisation of knowledge. This organisation of knowledge causes
a "conduct of conduct" constituted by a "feedback-driven
self-control". This control is a strategy of self-organization
enabling individuals to take over and apply practices of power to control
social and economic systems, as Reichert argues with references to sociocritical
texts by Giorgio Agamben (see ann.10) and Michel Foucault (see ann.14).
Reichert shows these interrelations using the "Touchgraph Facebook
Browser" (TouchGraph
Navigator) as an example. This "ego network" locates users
not only in the center of their Facebook friends but enables them to
locate themselves at other places, too: "Thus the ego primarily
appears as secondary observer of social networks letting the structural
position of the ego seem permanently changeable and fluid." Users
observe themselves as a part of the "aggregate state of the network
structure" and, according to Reichert, they leave the classic conditions
of social legitimation being documented by family trees and family images
(4/2015).
- Richard, Birgit: Media
Masters and Grassroots Art 2.0 on YouTube.
In: Lovink, Geert/Niederer, Sabine (ed.): Video Vortex Reader. Responses
to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures. Hogeschool van Amsterdam/University
of Applied Sciences. Amsterdam 2008, p.141-152. Richard presents research
results of the YouTube Research Lab at the Goethe University in Frankfort
on the Main (Institute for Art Pedagogics, New Media Department). The
researchers categorised different kinds of clip forms (see draft
of a classification scheme). Richard's description of the clip forms
offers an unprejudiced view on the video contributions to YouTube. In
a thematic bottleneck on clips combined with the tags "art"
and "Kunst" she discusses the relation between features of
art events and autonomous contributions. The last kind of clips is not
stored under the category "art". New forms of (artistic) presentation
can't be found in the tag system of YouTube. Richard characterises YouTube
clips as "a supplement, a marginal but important fresh addition
and revitalisation of art."(7/2009).
- Ries, Marc: Überlegungen
zu einer Kartographie des Unsichtbaren. Stadterfahrung und Internet.
(Reflections on a Cartography of the Non-visible. Urban Experience and
the Internet). Lecture, "Negotiating Urban Conflicts", Conference,
Institute for Sociology, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 4/8-4/9/2005.
In English in: Berking, Helmuth/ Frank, Sybille/Frers, Lars/Löw,
Martina/Meier, Martina/Steets, Silke/Stoetzer, Sergej (ed.): Negotiating
Urban Conflicts. Interaction, Space and Control. Bielefeld 2006, p.167-175.
Marc Ries characterizes urban experience as a reflection between the
visible and the non-visible. Maps offer an abstract overview and make
visible what remains non-visible to the multi-perspective observation
in the streets. In comparison to the "abstract ground plan for
the planning surveillance" the web opens "a room of its own,
a socio-mediatized room being part of a geo-aesthetics of media."
"The internet can't function like a geographical space with an
here and there, because it is a relational space with an exclusive here
and now." That makes possible "mediatic interfaces" for
a "participatory democracy" (4/2013).
- Rossiter, Ned: Processual Media Theory.
Vortrag, 22.5.2003. Melbourne DAC, the Fifth International Digital Arts
and Culture Conference. School of Applied Communication, RMIT (The Royal
Melbourne Institute of Technology), Melbourne 2003. Druckfassung in:
Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and
Theoretical Scholarship. Vol.11/Nr.1-2, S.104 - 131. Empirische Medienforschung
versucht das Wesentliche vom Unwesentlichen zu trennen und durch Elementarisierung
die Voraussetzung für eine Datenerfassung zu schaffen. In dieser
"realen Abstraktion" (Louis Althusser) gehen die Zusammenhänge
und Möglichkeiten des Mediengebrauchs verloren, die Rossiter über
einen prozessbezogenen Ansatz erfassen will. Er konstatiert Zeitmodi
"rhythmic, instrumental, scalar, biological, compressed,
flexible and so forth" , die sich im Gebrauch von verschiedenen
Medien wie Internet, Mobiltelefon mit SMS, Echtzeit-Video oder Audiodateien
auf unterschiedliche Weise durchdringen.
Zusammenhänge zwischen Medieneigenschaften und ihrem sozialen,
politischen oder ökonomisch motivierten Gebrauch will Rossiter
aufzeigen. Er diskutiert offene und geschlossene Systeme (Gregory Bateson,
Niklas Luhmann, Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers), um Strukturen zu
finden, die technische Eigenschaften und RezipientInnen in bestimmte
Bezugsfelder setzen. Die Zeitdimension, in der sich diese Felder entwickeln,
spielt auch in der Reflexion der Beobachtungsposition der Medientheoretikerin/des
Medientheoretikers eine Rolle. Sie/er ist in denselben Evolutionsprozess
integriert, in den sie/er die Entwicklung von Medientechnik und -gebrauch
eingebettet sieht: "...processual media theory itself is implicated
in the systems of relations it describes..."
Als Modell verwendet Rossiter Michael Goldbergs Installation "catchingafallingknife.com"
(Sydney 2002), die drei Wochen Börsenspekulation durch Kauf und
Verkauf der News Corp Aktien (Rupert Murdochs News Corporation) vorführt
und mit verschiedenen Börsenprogrammen zeigt, was aus 50.000 australischen
Dollars wird (7/2009; 1/2020).
- Ryan, Marie-Laure: Cyberspace,
Cybertexts, Cybermaps.
In: dichtung-digital. Issue 1/2004 (Vol. 6/nr.31). The author draws
a bow from geographic spaces using mapping procedures to maps as visualizations
ranging from fictional (action) spaces to data spaces. "Static
maps" with or without references to real spaces ("Myst";
Coverley, M.D.: Califia,
Eastgate 2000) and "dynamic maps" with computing programs
using data searching processes for the construction of visual information
systems (Walczak, Marek/Wattenberg, Martin: Apartment,
2001) constitute the two poles of described examples from the ranges
hypertext-literature for CD-ROM and internet, computer games and net
art. Mary Flanagan's [Phage]
(2000) selects datas of the hard disk, combines and presents them in
three-dimensional motions "like pieces of trash on a windy day
at the dump." "[Phage]" demonstrates itelf as "the
anti-mapper to all mappers" (Dillon, George L.: Writing with Images.
Towards a Semiotics of the Web. Washington 2003, chap.
6.2) and with it as the final consequence of data systems generating
datascapes in a self referential manner ("Civilization", "The
Sims": "let the gameworld serve as its own map").
Ryan features ubiquitous computing with locative media like GPS as a
"revenge of geography". 34
North 118 West was realized by Jeff Knowlton, Naomie Spellman and
Jeremy Height. Their project serves as a proof for the return of the
real referent and for a mapping which does not anymore open arbitrary
playgrounds for the visualization of data. For Ryan, the localization
of contributions for accesses in real spaces (<Geo-Notes>) and
for maps (<Geo-Tagging>) looks like a return to the beginning
of the textual media's history: "...the space odyssee of the text
reconnects...the real world geography" and reverts the voyage
from material to immaterial textual worlds back to the start of the
"odyssee" in cultures with oral histories (4/2007).
- Sack, Warren: Aesthetics of Information Visualization.
In: Lovejoy, Margot/Paul, Christiane/Vesna, Victoria (ed.): Context
Providers. Conditions of Meaning in Digital Art. Bristol 2011, p.123-150.
Firstly: The early concepts for computers by Alan Turing,
Norbert Wiener and Douglas Engelbart thematise the data management in
the administration as the context of use.
Secondly: Sack looks for precursors of artistic strategies
for the data visualization and proposes Conceptual Art: Bureaucratic
forms of presentation like the Index
01 of Art & Language have been used for a criticism of society
thematising also corporative strategies like the administration of vast
amounts of data.
Thirdly: Sack connects both lines of argumentation,
the digitalisation and the criticism of administration with its own
means. In the 18th and 19th centuries the "Body Politic" was
developed from an absolutistic force organizing the bodies in circles
around the center of power ("the 'star' network") to a democratic-rhizomatic
"government of things". In They
Rule (2001/2004) Josh On & The Futurefarmers visualise an aspect
of this system thematising the networks between companies via persons
in the supervisory boards and managerial positions of different enterprises.
Alternative networks like MoveOn.org
or SMS networks could be able to visualise their relations as a "form
to show the Body Politic itself to itself." Sack touches the problem
of a critical self-embedding (and transfers Art & Language's critical
self-embedding into the art world to a wider framework): Contextual
reflectivity of wider, not replaceable social frameworks is the implicit
consequence of a critical data visualisation suggested in Sack's last
phrase: "...we need to see ourselves and our imagined communities
within our larger political and cultural contexts." (7/2009; 1/2020)
- Sanchez, Michael: 2011:
On Art and Transmission.
In: Artforum. Vol.51/No.10. Summer 2013. Sanchez notes repercussions
from the reception of art in websites, as they are mostly accessed via
touch screens, on forms of artworks and their presentations in exhibitions.
This allows to draw conclusions about changes in the connections between
the art production and the art world. In referring to Giorgio Agamben's
concept of the apparatus Sanchez concludes that the notion of the artistic
subject, as it has so far been promoted by the art world, is dissolved
by the "'desubjectifying' effects of apparatuses": "Both
the informational form and the affective content of contemporary art
are optimized for an apparatus that is increasingly dominated by feedback
between the iPhone interface, the feed, and the aggregator, not the
institutional structures of the gallery and museum."
Therefore Sanchez calls for contemporary art to be understood not as
one of the "institutions producing subjects", but as as one
of the "apparatuses capturing organisms", since art is produced
and distributed in a way to which Richard Dawkins' comparison of the
dissemination of memes of biology with the dissemination of "nongenetic
data" applies (1/2020).
- Schleiner, Ann-Marie: Dissolving
the Magic Circle of Play. Lessons from Situationist Gaming.
In: Baigorri, Laura/Berger, Erich/Dragona, Daphne (ed.): Homo
Ludens Ludens. Catalogue of exhibition LABoral Centro de Arte y
Creación Industrial. Gijon 2008, p.164-171 (in Spain), 276-281
(in English). The examples for "ludic interventions" chosen
by Schleiner transgress the limits of plays and games. Johan Huizinga's
concept of the "magic circle" ("toovercirkel") determines
theories
on games (including pervasive games) until now. Schleiner confronts
them with a situationistic approach quoting Guy Debod and Gilles Ivain/Ivan
Chteglov several times.
Huizinga thematised the limit between the play and its surrounding area
meanwhile the Situationists conceptualised the environment as a playground:
The ludic is a strategy of criticism only as a practice within the criticized
context. Schleiner argues without transforming the Situationistic concept
of "psychogeography" into a term of environmental psychology
as it can be found in many articles on projects with locative media
reducing the Situationistic reflection on urban conditions to a problem
of capturing atmospheres (f.e. Jane McGonigal: This Might Be a Game,
see above).
Schleiner uses her own practice in "Velvet-Strike", "Operation
Urban Terrain (OUT)" (August 2004, see collected tips 2, part
2) and "Riot Gear for Rollartista" modifying games with
participants in the (real and virtual) playgrounds to foreground her
aim to take up the Situationistic call to change the lifeworld: "We
don't want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place."
(7/2009)
- Sentamans, Tatiana/Fabre, Mario-Paul Martinez: The
Lapses of an Avatar: Sleight of Hand and Artistic Praxis in Second Life.
Lecture. In: Prada, Juan Martin (ed.): Inclusiva-net. New Art Dynamics
in Web 2 Mode. First Inclusiva-net Meeting. Medialab-Prado. Madrid,
July 2007, p.51-77. Artistic Projects for Second Life are featured and
some of them are described more precisely. Projects problematising relations
between virtuality and reality are confronted with strategies using
the possibilities immanent to the medium. An example for the first offers
"Imaging Place SL: The U.S./Mexico Borders" (John Craig Freeman),
meanwhile examples for the latter are "Hyperformalism" (Dancoyote
Antonelli), "Code-Performance" (Eva and Franco Mattes) and
"La-Interactiva" (Richard Gras and others). Valuation: Useful
introduction (7/2009; 1/2020).
- Shanken, Edward A.: Investigatory
Art. Real-Time Systems and Network Culture.
In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies. Nr.2/Autumn 2012. In
lectures and texts written from 1968 to 1970 Jack Burnham featured contemporary
art works integrating "real time systems" as well as works
being connected to such systems. Although Shanken takes up Burnham's
argumentation nevertheless he is less interested in works documenting
processes in and with systems or demonstrating their function in installations
(comparable to experimental test set ups). Shanken focuses the attention
to works intervening into processes being controlled by systems: Their
strategies to feature aspects of systems or to document them cause more
counter-reactions by decision-makers of the art world than by recipients.
After the realisations of his visitor surveys (in the exhibitions "Software"
at the Jewish Museum and "Information" at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York) Hans Haacke experienced the trustees' successful efforts
in preventing the presentation of his works. These incidents provoked
Haacke to study in many later works the interests of collectors and
sponsors in the art world. He could document that for the sponsoring
companies art is useful to support their corporate identity: Art is
used to distract the attention of observers (as potential clients) from
business fields contradicting the corporate identity.
Haacke's contribution "Visitors' Profile" to the exhibition
"Software" (curated by Burnham) consisted of a digitised information
system actualising itself in real time.
According to Shanken Haacke's use of digitised means in "real time
systems" anticipated net projects by artists like Heath Bunting
(Own, be Owned,
Or Remain Invisible, 1998), Josh On (They
Rule, 2001, actualised in 2004 and 2011), Übermorgen in cooperation
with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio (Google
Will Eat Itself, 2005), Beatrice da Costa (Pigeon
Blog, 2006) and Michael Mandiberg (Real
Costs, 2007) being connected to information systems and demonstrating
their functions as well as their effects in ways affecting the interests
of the systems' operators. Thus Google's operators installed counter-measures
against the net project "Google Will Eat Itself".
In the projects mentioned above artists realised strategies to use the
new participation possibilities by methods of self-embedding into the
evolution of digital information systems.
In his remarks Shanken points to a critical and reflective (thus conceptual
oriented) use of the new participation possibilities, but not to direct
interventions with an activitistic goal. Shanken's interpretations demonstrate
how the participatory aspects of the artists' projects can change the
recipients' ways of life. In his final remarks Shanken chooses a quote
by Saskia Sassen as conclusion although it doesn't include an approach
being useful for artistic strategies in the future: "Through this
embeddedness the digital can act back on the social..." (Sassen,
Saskia: Territory, Authority, Rights. Oxford 2006, p.344) (11/2014).
- Simanowski, Roberto:
The Compelling Charm of Numbers. Writing for and thru the Network of
Data.
Lecture, ELMCIP Conference on Remediating the Social, Edinburgh College
of Art, 11/2/2012. Print version in: Biggs, Simon (ed.): Remediating
the Social. University of Bergen. Department of Linguistic, Literary
and Aesthetic Studies. Bergen 2012, p.20-27. Roberto Simanowski thematises
Facebook's Timeline as a renewal of chronicles from the Middle Ages,
allowing account holders variants between ways to organize databases
and narrative forms. In a field of tensions Simanowski regards the human
"predisposition" (p.25) for narrative relations as the counterpart
to the isolated elements in a database. Account holders use Facebook's
"Life Event" as a tool for the documentation of biographical
events in a chronological sequence of contributions provoking on the
one hand friends to sort out potential relationships in following the
human urge to create clarity via simplifying interpretations. On the
other hand Simanowski points to a tendency to the quantifiable. That
proves the Quantified Self-Community "gathering in about 40 groups
world wide" (p.24) (Quantified
Self) to communicate about the creation of protocols of quantifiable
life events with digital technologies. Facebook's Timeline connects
structures of databases and the tendency to report one's own life as
a "numerical narrative" (p.24) in an ongoing autobiographical
and multimedia-based chronicle.
The database interpreted by Lev Manovich as "a new symbolic form
of a computer age" (p.25) becomes in new applications like Facebook's
Timeline "symbolic...for the ongoing shift from culture to economy"
"adding 'value for the consumer' but also, and first of all, for
the companies." (p.27). Investors and corporations care about the
avoidance of too big tensions between digital collections of data and
human predispositions for narrative connotations (4/2013; 1/2020).
- Simanowski, Roberto: Transmedialität
als Kennzeichen moderner Kunst.
(Transmediality as a Feature of Modern Art). In: Meyer, Urs/Simanowski,
Roberto/Zeller, Christoph (ed.): Transmedialität. Zur Ästhetik
paraliterarischer Verfahren. Göttingen 2006, p.39-81. In Simanowski's
definition the term transmediality marks the "blending of configurated
joined sign systems into another". According to Jay David Bolter's
and Richard Grusin's "Remediation: Understanding New Media"
(Cambridge/Massachusetts 1999, p.19-44) there are several kinds of presentation
in the "history of the intermingling of different representation's
forms" provoking observers to memorize or to deny the used "medium":
"hypermediacy" and "immediacy". Simanowski characterises
a thematized transmediality ("hypermediacy") as a contemporary
consequence from Clement
Greenberg's demand articulated in "Towards a Newer Laocoon"
(1940) that art should accomplish "purity" by accepting the
confinements of its medium via reductions of all elements disturbing
self reference. Today, according to Simanowski, problematizations of
their own media presuppose to thematize multi-, inter- and transmediality.
The reason for the reduction of all elements not being part of the selected
medium the cause of "formal criticism"/"modernism"
was the self-referential reflection about the media's use. This
reflection can be saved within a framework of "multimediality which
is the logical consequence of all informations' translation into a digital
code."
Simanowski thematizes transmediality in works containing not only programmed
media. He uses the works of Emmett Williams ("13 Variations on
6 Words of Gertrude Stein", 1958/65) and Tim Noble/Sue Webster
("Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)", 1998) as examples in a
characterization of transmediality. Williams overwrites a text several
times until it becomes unreadable. The text is presented as a visual
texture not without refering to its origins: "Transmediality is
developed by the exponentiation of a medium." Noble/Webster install
a sculpture arranged with reused garbage and places it before a spotlight
causing a shadow play. The sculpture with its contour offers an uncommon
cause for recycling as light breaker: Does the sculpture merely become
a picture ("Plastik zum Bild"/"From Sculpture to Picture"),
or is the sculpture integrated into (an installation as) a presentation
of the production of silhouettes? The question demonstrates that transmediality
is a case of observation, too and Simanowski thematizes transmediality
as a "transfer taking place or being thematized in the moment of
reception."
Simanowski exemplifies the programmed transmediality by Laurent Mignonneau/Christa
Sommerer's "Life Spacies II" (1999, internet and installation):
Textual inputs are transformed into vegetable forms. In Mapping art
the "numerical code" becomes a case for "transmedial
copies" which firstly allow an easier readability of configurations
concerning social processes representing or producing the data, secondly
use the data as causes for the production of "abstract shapes",
or thirdly use data "in the service of a message without
references to the used input." Mapping art is explained not only
as a problem of the development of codes for transfers of data configurations
but also as a problem of the plausibility for the observer's cognition.
Manovich writes (in "The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art"):
"Visualisation art is concerned with the anti-sublime" and
Simanowski answers with the concept of Mapping art as a "new level
of the technical sublime" whereby artists articulate the "incomprehensible
in comprehensible aesthetic forms" without the need to comment
the aestheticized. Simanowski displaces the direction of the discussion
on Mapping art from the program code to its machine-made effects, and
with it from "meta-media" (Manovich) to the observable transmediality.
He uses his displacement to thematise "the postmodern experience
of the absence of one point as the core to begin with efforts
to understand reality" but he leaves out the not arbitrarily pluralizable
reality of the technical digital and the programming. Then relevancy
will change from the media transfer to the interplay between programming
and the technical possibilities of its machine-made execution. From
this point of view "the knowledge of programming" is not only
a case for craftsmen necessary for transmedial processes and others
but programming codes (and the cultures of the programming people) become
a decisive reference point of the reflection meanwhile transmediality
may appear as the consequence of the programmable (4/2007).
- Slocum, Paul: NFT Problems.
In: Paul Slocum's Qotile, 6/17/2022. According to Paul Slocum, platforms for trading NFT should solve the following problems:
- Verification procedures against counterfeiting (1),
- hacked artists' accounts (2).
Proof of authenticity (1) and authentication (2) are not possible without dependencies on external structures. Resales on other platforms raise the same problem. The decentralized character of the blockchain is lost if solutions with external security systems will be used. Slocum points to technical problems of the blockchain technology to secure the certificate even over longer periods of time and therefore suggests a parallel certification on paper. NFTs do not escape the risks of cryptocurrencies: Warnings from software developers and economists are ignored in discussions about NFT trading. Unfortunately, NFT trading favors certain file formats while other types of Digital Art are not traded. NFT cannot replace the notion of digital art, but it can narrow the view of the latter. (9/2022)
- Smith, Greg J.: Information
Visualization and Interface Culture.
In: Braman, James/Vincenti, Giovanni/Trajkovski, Goran (ed.): Handbook
of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics. Hershey/Pennsylvania
2009, chapter XII, p.195-211. Greg J. Smith outlines how data visualizations
and the possibilities to select via interface different forms of presentation
interpenetrated each other in the development of computer technology.
Vanevar Bush's Memex
(plan, 1945) and early head-up displays (HuD, since 1968) are early
interfaces based on concepts for links between documents in the first
case and for navigations of pilots in the second case. The interface
between human and machine included in the sixties output media like
cathode ray tubes and head-up displays.
The graphical user interface (GUI) of the computer Xerox Alto (1973)
anticipated with mouse, "windows, buttons, icons and widgets"
the GUI of the Apple Macintosh (1984). Already Apple's Lisa (1983) contained
scrollbars, trash baskets, the drag-and-drop procedure and the file
system. All these elements became a standard of personal computers for
25 years.
Lev Manovich outlines the database as a precondition for the information
becoming "modular" and the remix as an obvious method to use
modularity. For Smith these methods are the presuppositions for data
visualization. A new "data subjectivity" arises from the interactions
with interfaces of programs for data visualization.
"The Aesthetics Computation Group", directed by John Maeda,
and Ben Fry developed visualizations for interfaces offering possibilities
to change the monitor image. Steven Johnson (Interface Culture, 1997)
explains this modifiability as a consequence of the comprehensive separation
between "raw data" and their presentation on monitors. Fry's
Isometric Blocks (2004)
and Stamen Design's "Oakland Crimespotting"
(2007) are mentioned by Smith as examples for a "pervasive interface
culture" with "the implicit understanding that information
is modular and...a site for interaction."
Modes of behavior are developed simultaneously as reactions to interfaces
as well as to informations on real situations. Burik Arikan makes My
Pocket (2008) available for "self-surveillance". "My
Pocket" transgresses the division between data visualizations as
parts of interfaces and the approach to the visualized reality: The
data of transactions (shopping, bank transfers) are used in "transaction
graphs" for predictions adapted from criteria of probability. With
the calculated degree of probability all transactions receive an information
about the congruency between the actual action and elder actions: "...if
readymades are found in the past, predicted objects are found in the
future." (Arikan) (3/2013; 1/2020: Stamen Design's "Oakland
Crimespotting" is not accessible anymore on the web).
- Tanni, Valentina: The Great Algorithm.
PostScriptUM #43. Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana 2022. Valentina Tanni presents ways of using social media that subvert their algorithms. Because these are proprietary, users can only hypothesize why certain opinions are shared frequently and others rarely, and consider how to use or circumvent the algorithmically organized selection. Combinations of topics popular on social media, such as cosmetics, with political topics can serve to undermine an "algorithmic censoring system" (p.10). Word formations give rise to "Algospeak" ("to unalive" instead of “to kill”) to disable the algorithmic selection for certain contents (Taylor Lorenz; p.12 with note 11). Against this background, Tanni explains Ben Grosser's methods in the projects Go Rando (2017) and Not For You (2020), which irritate social media selection systems through randomly generated clicks ("automated confusion system," p.14) and complicate the emergence of filter bubbles based on collected data about user preferences. According to Tanni, control strategies of social media companies are tricked by user tactics: tactics versus strategies. (9/2022)
- Taylor, T.L.: Beyond
Management. Considering Participatory Design and Governance in Player
Culture.
In: First Monday. Special Issue Nr.7. October 2006. Taylor mentions
four ways to characterise the behaviors of players for integrations
into the design and management of MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online
Games): "...players as consumers, (potential) disruptors, unskilled/unknowledgeable
users, and rational/selfish actors." She regrets the absence of
active participants changing from a passive behavior following the guidelines
to the constitution of autonomous players' cultures with consequences
for the ways of playing.
Sony Online Entertainment cooperates with players to develop EverQuest.
Festivities for gamers are partly promotional events and partly meetings
between designers and players. Taylor criticises the practice to integrate
people with attention provoking ways of playing into a "strong
participatory design": With players obligated to their employers
the autonomy of gaming cultures and their context-specific background
become lost perspectives.
As an example for this autonomy the author mentions a gamers' strike
in "World of Warcraft" (January 2005) and Blizzard's response
stating "protesting in a game" as not being the "valid
way to give us feedback". The accounts of gamers participating
at the "warrior protest" have been deleted. The protest on
a specific server at a fixed day and time prohibited other gamers to
play "World of Warcraft".
Mary Flanagan, Ken Perlin, Jan Plass and a research team developed the
project "Rapunsel"
(2003-2006) as a game but not as a MMOG. Nevertheless Taylor suggests
the integration of gamers' behavior in the design process as exemplary:
Its "core value set" includes "autonomy, equity, access,
creativity, diversity, empowerment and authorship." (7/2009; 1/2020)
- Tifentale, Alise/Manovich, Lev: Competitive
Photography and the Presentation of the Self.
In: Eckel, Julia/Ruchatz, Jens/Wirth, Sabine (ed.): Exploring the Selfie:
Historical, Analytical, and Theoretical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography.
Basingstoke 2018, p.167-187. In her first part (to p.15) Tifentale pleads
for a knowledge of phtotographic equipment as a part of the "general
literacy", the general education of the "global majority"
(Nicholas Mirzoeff). Tifentale turns against studies exploring photographic
practice with smartphones, as if there were no continuities between
analog and digital photography, by quoting Werner Gräff and Franz
Roh: In 1929 both referred to the connections between purchaseable portable
cameras becoming cheaper, the expected knowledge and possible applications
(p.4).
For Tifentale the decisive separation of photographic practice does
not take place between amateur and professional photographer but between
"non-competitive photography" (p.9) and "competitive
photography" (p.5 with ann.12) with stylistic characteristics of
a photographer being identifiable in comparisons to other photographers.
The first one's motives such as family reunions are relevant
for the closer circle of friends, while a non-avant-garde "competitive
photography" increases "likeability" by following criteria
of a canon, as it has developed in instructions for the photographic
practice and hopes to fulfill these criteria with stylistic coherency
and recognizability (p.11ff.). Here there are continuities from instructions
for photographing being published in 1954 Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Willy Ronis and Heinrich Freytag (p.12f.) are quoted to the photographic
practice for the distribution via social media. According to Lev Manovich
Instagram contains an "80/20 split between non-competitive and
competitive photography" (p.18).
Manovich concentrates on Selfies which between December 2013 and September
2015 comprised about one tenth of the photo contributions on Instagram
(p.19f.). According to Manovich painted self-portraits present the depicted
person in isolation whereas the Selfies are dominated by relations between
the depicted person and her/his environment: An important part of the
image message results from where ("situation selfies", S.19)
and with whom ("group selfies", p.20) the depicted person
was photographed.
In "anti-selfies" (p.19) self-portrayal becomes a minor matter:
Instead of the face only body parts often hands can be
seen (p.22 with fig.4): "...they [the photos] and the author's
life are supposed to be the same in terms of values, interests and aesthetics."
(p.23)
In "visual narratives" on Instagram photo sequences can form
a "viewpoint character" (p.23) whose characteristic peculiarities
authors can use to make their sequence distinguishable from others.
For Tifentale these criteria are primarily the formal ones of "competitive
photography" ("an aesthetic statement", p.10). However
celebrities do not have to be good photographers in their image contributions
and are nevertheless "competitive" in the sense of "likeability"
(S.10).
If contributions follow "emotional" rather than aesthetic
criteria and do not take "likeability" into account, then
they are "non-competitive", according to Manovich: "These
authors ...use Instagram for documentation and communication with people
they know." (p.17 with fig.3). The question remains whether the
differentiation criterion form versus emotion is viable for the differentiation
of Selfies (1/2020).
- Trogemann, Georg: Müssen
Medienkünstler programmieren können?
(Is it necessary for media artists to be able to programme?). In: Fleischmann,
Monika/Reinhard, Ulrike (ed.): Digitale Transformationen. Medienkunst
als Schnittstelle von Kunst, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
Heidelberg 2004. Computer programs appear in "a blurred region
of socially coded informations and forms of observation". Examples
from the histories of technology and science sustain Trogemann's plea
for an expanded perspective which includes more than software: He presents
"the cultural history of the programmable machine" as a knowledge
necessary for the interrogation of the programmes' functions in contemporary
life. Artistic programming should follow this expanded perspective.
But Trogemann's proposition of a "cognitive school" for artists
excludes social aspects: Artistic media competence as a knowledge of
the relations between interface and code doesn't substitute questions
concerning economic and social influences on programming, distribution
and the use of programs. Trogemann acknowledges that contemporary artists
don't want to delegate the construction of program codes to specialists.
He uses this fact for the demand to investigate digitalization not only
on the level of visual perception but on the level of progamme code,
too. But Trogemann doesn't avoid to reduce code to the function to steer
projections (6/2006).
- Vierkant, Artie: The
Image Object Post-Internet.
(2010). Authors like Gene McHugh (Post
Internet Blog, 2009-10) use the term Post-Internet to designate
the evolution of the internet from innovation to banality. In the view
of Vierkant the "social condition at large", as it is determined
by this banality, can be outlined with criteria like "ubiquitous
authorship", the attention economy, the end of the priority given
to distances in real spaces, the infinite reproducibility and changeability.
The digitalisation leads to constantly changing media landscapes. Within
a project this causes a pluralisation of the media and media (combinations)
varying between different presentation environments: "...projects
which move seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation..."
The projects transmute a culture developed by 'them' ("they")
into a culture with 'our' ("we") participation as "reader-author".
In 1996 the members of the Critical Art Ensemble required a "community-based
art" acting against the established "bunker consciousness"
in On Electronic
Disobedience (1996, p.39).
According to Vierkant the Post-Internet artists take up the roles of
"interpreter, transcriber, narrator, curator, architect".
Decisive factors to change points of view are not so much the content
of the appropriated but the new interrelations in a project and the
context of its distribution. The "one-to-many hierarchy of mass
media" is replaced in the contemporary World Wide Web by "new
hierarchies of many-to many production".
If artists communicate on net conditions via "visual representations"
then they enable themselves "to think beyond the fixity of 'mediums'".
That's a method to transgress the "grossly limiting [internet]
architecture" of the "search terms, keywords, tags" (4/2015).
- Waal, Martijn de: Towards
a Myspace Urbanism?
In: Lange, Michiel de/Waal, Martijn de: The Mobile City. Blog Archive,
12/22/2008. De Waal discusses sociological criteria explaining the development
of urban culture from 19th century to the present. In 19th and 20th
century the public urban space was the platform for observations of
social differences and for arrangements with them. De Waal explains
the change from this "boulevard [BLVD] urbanism" to a plurality
of publics characterized by uses of computers, gadgets, internet and
mobile telephony, splitting the public space from its former social
function to privatisations, exclusions and reduced action forms. The
distanced observer in motion was a fundamental part of the BLVD urbanism.
The restrained self performance of the passers-by in boulevards comparing
her-/himself with others is transformed into particularizing forms of
self performance facilitating exclusions: "Myspace urbanism".
The possibilities to communicate via mobile phones and WiFi regardless
of distances provokes Danah Boyd, Mark Shepard and others to describe
"the urban stage" as "now broadened extensively with
the rise of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, Cyworld
or QQ." On the one hand the self performance takes place in virtual
spaces and on the other hand these networks are connected with real
spaces via platforms like "Plazes" (since August 2004) or
"Bliin" (since September 2006, see Collected
Tips 1, Part 3/Sammeltipp 1, Teil 3): The "tracks and traces"
can be actualized in real time and archived continually.
A growing social control supersedes the anonymity in the metropolis
of the 20th century. Available informations on city districts are analysed
to connect them with classifications of the inhabitants' lifestyles:
Websites of real estate agents like Funda.nl
offer properties allocating "three dominant lifestyle categories"
to districts. The citizens and the public sphere are replaced by consumers.
A "sociology-of-the-market" uses data collections of "lifeblogging
and geotagging" activities for its goals.
Passers-by move with mobile phones and iPods. They place themselves
in a "virtual bubble" in using these gadgets: "iPhone
urbanism".
The coffeehouse as an urban meeting place is transformed by the "Starbucks
urbanism" into a "commodified non-place". There the visitors
communicate more with "absent others" than with present people.
The "long tail urbanism" confronts us with informations on
urban places and friends (Dodgeball, February 2000 - January 2009, see
Collected
Tips 1, Part 1/Sammeltipp 1, Teil 1) we have never been seeking
for: The social networks offer us informations about which place, people
and things may fit into our preferences: "spaces become heterotopic
places."
"Reputation systems" of the "Ebay urbanism" regulate
who accepts whom: "capsular spaces".
"Networked urban spaces" connect remote locations via social
networks: "...presence is becoming a hybrid experience" by
the uses of mobile phones as "a membrane", not as "a
portal": "The boundaries between being in public or in private
soften." (9/2009; 1/2020: "Plazes" and "Bliin"
not accessible anymore on the web)
- Whitelaw, Mitchell: Art
against Information. Case Studies in Data Practice.
In: Fibreculture. Issue 11/2008: 7th Digital Arts and Culture Conference.
Perth, September 2007 (perthDAC 2007). Whitelaw selects net projects,
sculptures and videos to present them as examples for "data art".
He discusses their use of data as external and internal elements of
systems. The systems allow or prohibit inferences to the environment.
They treat the data as parts of this environment or they try to offer
conclusions on it, or they relate them only to metadata and offer the
recipients possibilities for interpretations. In other cases they present
their results as aesthetic events without informations allowing reconstructions
of the used kinds of data processing.
Golan Levin's The
Dumpster (2006) and We Feel Fine
(2006) by Jonathan Harris/Sep Kamvar visualise blog posts. All posts
are treated as equal regardless of their contents. These data sets liberated
from informations supply a "uniform density". The exclusion
of the procedures to collect data in visualisations causes a "strangely
naive sense of unmediated presentation" and with it a "sense
of collapsed indexicality."
Meanwhile Alex Dragulescu's three-dimensional "structures"
(The Spam Architecture series,
since 2005; The Spam Plants series,
2006) appear "uncanny" without informations on the processing
of data in spam mails, Lisa Jevbratt visualises the net data as a whole
in "1:1" and its interface Every
(1999/2001). The recipients can connect themselves to the websites using
the access dates integrated in the project. The origins of the data
are transparent but it is not shown explicitly how the data visualisation
within a rectangle can be used.
In State of the Union
(since 2006) Brad Borevitz elicits the frequency of certain terms in
the archive of the American presidents' speeches on the State of the
Union (since 1790) with statistic means and visualises them. Meanwhile
Borewitz on the one hand presents the origins of data and on the other
hand allows to obtain and compare the significance (as frequency) in
diagrams, Jason Salavon creates data by abstraction: In "Everything
All at Once (Part I-III"
(2001-2005) the colours of videoframes are reduced to one average colour
meanwhile the sound remains unaltered. The data origins become "objects"
and an "ultimately empty, mass of generic content."
According to Whitelaw the opposition between "data in itself"
and information is crucial to data art. Meanwhile the systems of the
projects are processing data, they can't evade their readability as
informations (as signs coordinated with meanings via contextualization
in relations with other signs and connections to circumstances external
to signs). The indeterminacy of the visualized data opens possibilities
for interpretations to recipients of data art if relations to their
origins and their context are not lost. The "data subjects"
can be able to use the reductions in artistic "data agency"
to their advantage: Data art is part of the efforts to develop schemes
for reading operations. The projects code their metadata and offer guidelines
to recipients how to use them: "This metadata must in turn inform
us data subjects..." (7/2009; 1/2020)
- Whitelaw, Mitchell: Hearing
Pure Data. Aesthetics and Ideals of Data-Sound.
In: Altena, Arie/Stolk, Taco (ed.): Unsorted Thoughts on the Information
Arts. A Guide to Sonic Acts 10. Sonic Acts Press/De Balie. Amsterdam
2004. According to Whitelaw, the concept of "pure data" contradicts
the practice: "The data is always and inevitably ordered, organized,
formatted..." The particular format and its transformation into
other formats cause consequences for the next computing processes. In
Jason Freeman's application N.A.G.
(Network Aurelization of Gnutella) formats for sounds possess not
only the transported contents but they are also used in the organization
of the search for works in Gnutella (decentralized distribution of mostly
auditive data via P2P) ("sonification", "auralization")
whereby the search follows keywords that can be entered. Ben Hanson
and Mark Rubin (in Babble
online: Applying Statistics and Design to Sonify the Internet) use
auditive formats in retrieval systems searching for specific informations
in data. Meanwhile transfers of formats via "data bending"
use data in an arbitrary and abstract way (<re-encoding>), the
"sonification" serves for the information retrieval. Despite
this difference data and informations are closely interlinked.
Lev Manovich identifies "data art" with "the anti-sublime"
(in "The Anti-Sublime in Data Art", see above) because it
offers "manageable visual objects". Whitelaw substitutes "the
anti-sublime" by "the computational sublime": Computing
processes run external to the observers' sphere of influence and are
able to provoke "simultaneous feelings of pleasure and fear"
(McCormack, Jon/Dorin, Alan: Art,
Emergence, and the Computational Sublime).
Arstists designing systems are "prototypical data-subjects"
demonstrating users their kinds to install "strategies and mappings":
"They may show us a way, to hear for ourselves." According
to Manovich, the task of art is defined by a "license to portray
human subjectivity". Whitelaw substitutes this "single subjectivity"
by processes between persons who never could reflect about themselves
in other ways than being cultivated as "data subjects, from our
GUIs to our ATMs" (4/2007).
- Yoshida, Miya: The
Invisible Landscapes: The Construction of New Subjectivities in the
Era of the Mobile Telephone.
Doctoral Thesis. Malmö Academies of Performing Arts, Lund University.
Lund 2006. Yoshida defines art for and with mobile phones as an element
of a process leading to "invisible landscapes". The shift
from the readable to the audible and invisible constitutes the core
of her argumentation. For Yoshida the current functions of the phones’
screens are not yet decisive.
She selects five examples out of the group exhibitions "Invisible
Landscapes" in Malmö (2003), Bangkok (2005) and Lund (2006) co-curated
by her. Two examples (Tony Oursler, Shilpa Gupta) are projects for mobile
phones and three further examples use mobile telephony as a subject
for presentations in the media installation, video and audio files (Laura
Horelli, Annika Ström, Henrik Andersson). Yoshida adds Rimini Protokoll’s
"Call Cutta Mobile Phone Theater" (2005) to these examples.
Rimini Protokoll shows the practice of telephone services and exemplifies
it by employees of a call center in Calcutta navigating tourists in
Berlin via mobile phones. In her interpretation of the project Yoshida
uses perspectives of Maurizio Lazzarato’s article "lavora
immateriale" (1993/97) in a persuading way.
The invisible but audible space of mobile phones (or of a certain use
of mobile phones within the spectrum mobile phones smart phones
PDAs laptops home computers) prompts an "injured
listening" and a "culture of copy" by creative uses of
sound files in the production of music. This culture provokes "iPodjacking"
(by sticking ear phones in iPods of unknown passers-by and listening
to their archive) and software for the sharing of audio files with mobile
devices (TunA
and Café
Sound Life for PDAs). These uses of sound files exemplify a "psychological
flatness" (David Joselit: Notes on Surface. In: Art History. Vol.
23/No. 1. March 2000, p. 19-34). Yoshida explains this "flatness"
and the contacts of telephone services’ employees with clients
presented, modified and reflected by Rimini Protokoll as part of a subjectivity
(imagination and productivity) forced and functionalized by contemporary
management. According to Lazzarato contemporary management expects and
uses subjectivity not only by experts but by all employees.
In her arguments on the "juxtaposition" of different spheres
of the mobile phone context Yoshida sketches the prehistory of telecommunication,
the use of it in art projects as well as the economic and social functions
of diggings for Coltan (columbite-tantalite) used for the production
of Tantalum (visualized by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann). In
microelectronics Tantalum is a necessary material for the construction
of compact capacitors with high performance for cell phones, laptops
and other technologies.
Yoshida presents the mobile phones as constituents of a controlled and
controllable space, and with Arjun Appadurai as parts
of a penetration of ideo-, media-, ethno-, techno- and financescapes
(6/2009).
- Zuñiga, Ricardo Miranda: The
Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism.
In: Soundtoys Journal 2003. The possibilities are outlined which the
internet offers to a global public as well as to a surveillance guided
by economic interests and federal security efforts. In Brooke Singer's
Self Portrait version 2.0
(October 2001-October 2003) the viewer finds her-/himself in the role
of "a data-voyeur". Zuñiga marks the qualities of Singer's
project in the realization of the first step to activism by an introduction
to the problems of the control society, meanwhile iSEE
of the Institute for Applied Autonomy (since 2002) offers a tool for
mobile telephones to realize the second step to actions in public spaces.
"ISEE" allows to find the paths with the smallest possible
amount of surveillance cameras. It can be used in demonstrations, too,
with changing conditions and the necessity to react fast. Activism has
to oppose the disappearance of the internet's "dialogical potential"
and its turn into a "decentralized panopticon" (10/2006).
Books on electronic media, hypertext and hyperfiction
in IASLonline
Rezensionen (book reviews, in German):
- Borghoff, Uwe M. a.o.: Langzeitarchivierung.
Methoden zur Erhaltung digitaler Dokumente. 2003. (10/3/2004) (Günther
Görz)
- Cubitt, Sean: Digital
Aesthetics. 1998. (3/6/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Dünne, Jörg/Doetsch, Hermann/Lüdeke, Roger (ed.): Von
Pilgerwegen, Schriftspuren und Blickpunkten. Raumpraktiken in medienhistorischer
Perspektive. 2004. (07/11/2005) (Anja Kerstin Johannsen)
- Ernst, Wolfgang: Das
Rumoren der Archive. Ordnung aus Unordnung. 2002. (12/5/2002) (Hartmut
Abendschein)
- Faßler, Manfred: Cyber-Moderne.
Medienevolution, globale Netzwerke und die Künste der Kommunikation.
1999. (4/11/2000) (Oliver Jahraus)
- Greber, Erika et al (ed.): Materialität
und Medialität von Schrift. 2002. (2/16/2003) (Hilke Achten)
- Hachenberger, Jan: Intellektuelles
Eigentum im Zeitalter von Digitalisierung und Internet. Eine ökonomische
Analyse von Missbrauchskalkülen und Schutzstrategien. 2003. (11/4/2005)
(Stefan Haupt)
- Haldemann, Alexander: Electronic
Publishing. Strategien für das Verlagswesen. 2000. (9/11/2001) (Margit
Roth/Michael Meier)
- Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas/Stockmann, Ralf (ed.): Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon. Games without Frontiers War Without Tears. 2008. (3/15/2009) (Jan-Noël Thon)
- Jakobs, Eva Maria et al (ed.): Textproduktion. HyperText, Text, KonText. 1999. (3/6/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Link, David: Poesiemaschinen Maschinenpoesie. Zur Frühgeschichte computerisierter Texterzeugung und generativer Systeme. 2007. (10/3/2007) (Thomas Kamphusmann)
- Manovich, Lev: The
Language of New Media. 2001. (9/16/2002) (Rembert Hüser)
- Mahne, Nicole: Transmediale Erzähltheorie. Eine Einführung. 2007. (01/15/2008) (Nina Heiß)
- Noeth, Winfried und Wenz, Karin (ed.): Medientheorie und die digitalen Medien. 1998. (3/6/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Simanowski, Roberto: Textmaschinen Kinetische Poesie Interaktive Installation. Zum Verstehen von Kunst in digitalen Medien. 2012. (1/27/2013) (Norbert Bachleitner).
- Stanitzek, Georg und Vosskamp, Wilhelm (ed.): Schnittstelle.
Medien und kulturelle Kommunikation. 2001. (9/18/2001) (Isabelle
Siemes)
- Suter, Beat: Hyperfiktion
und interaktive Narration im frühen Entwicklungsstadium zu einem
Genre. 2000. (7/3/2001) (Christiane Heibach)
- Weiman, Gabriel: Terror on the Internet. The New Arena, the New Challenges. 2006. (10/25/2006) (Hans-Jürgen Krug)
Blogs (B), Portals (P), mailing lists (M; with
archive: P, M) and newsgroups (N) with articles and/or news
on NetArt (NA), net conditions (NB), mobile apps (MA) and activism (AK):
- artificial.dk (NA)
- Born Magazine (NA)
- Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies (P, NA, NB)
- Continental Drift: The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization (Brian Holmes) (B, NB, AK)
- Creative Applications Network (B, NA, NB)
- Ctheory.net (P, M,
NA, NB)
- Dichtung-digital (P,
NA)
- Dictionary of Digital Art (Pierre
Berger/Yves de Ponsay) (P, NA, NB)
- Digicult (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Electronic Civil
Disobedience (P, AK)
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (P,
M, NB, AK)
- Fibreculture Journal (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Furtherfield.org (P, NA, AK)
- GPS Museum, Database
(P, NA, MA, AK)
- Hz-Journal (Fylkingen's Net Journal) (P, NA)
- Independent Media Center/Indymedia
(AK)
- Institute
for Distributed Creativity (Trebor Scholz): Blog,
Mailing List (B,
P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- Institute of Network Cultures Weblog (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Intelligent Agent (P,
NA, NB, AK)
- Magazine électronique du CIAC/ CIAC's Electronic Magazine (le Centre international d'art contemporain de Montréal (CIAC)) (P, NA)
- Monoskop. A wiki for the
arts, media and humanities (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net (P, NA, NB, AK)
- NeMe (P, NA)
- Net-Art. Portal to Web-related Art
(P, NA, AK).
- net critique by Geert Lovink (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Netbehaviour a Networked
Artists Community (P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- nettime (P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- neural.it (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Open! Platform for
Art, Culture and the Public Domain (P, NA, NB, AK)
- PARSE Journal (P,
NA, NB, AK)
- Pasta and Vinegar
(B, NA, NB)
- A Peer-Reviewed Journal
About... (P, NA, NB)
- Prosthetic Knowledge
(B, MA)
- Random Magazine (P, NA, AK)
- Remix Theory (P, NA, NB, AK)
- Rhizome.org (P, M, NA)
- Rohrpost
(P, M, NA, NB, AK)
- SWITCH (P, NA, NB)
- SPECTRE
list for media culture in Deep Europe (P, M, NA)
- Telepolis
(P, NA, NB)
- TheFeministArtProject (P, AK)
- The Next Layer: Art, Politics, Free and Open Source Software (B, NA, NB, AK)
- Turbulence: networked_performance
(B, NA, NB)
- Visual Complexity (P, NA)
- we-make-money-not-art
(B, NA)
Databases about and with (works of) Intermedia
Art:
Links refer to texts with informations on the history of NetArt and web
specific, for NetArt relevant problems since April 2002. The list was
expanded in March 2003 with links to platforms, portals, mailing lists
and newsgroups with actual informations on NetArt, net conditions and
activism, databases for Intermedia Art and book reviews in "IASLonline
Rezensionen ". Subject-oriented websites are considered as platforms
if they are more than curated links and contain artistic projects in their
database. The links to articles on actual aspects of NetArt are added
since February 2004. The dates of the entries are listed in brackets (month/year).
Since May 2015 the links are not only listed in alphabetical order, but
in chronological
order, too.
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