The comment thread of a recent Art Fag City IMG MGMT essay on relational aesthetics and 4Chan has set me off on a tangent: I really think it's time to stop thinking of digital media as immaterial. The whole physical art/non-physical art distinction is a big red-herring. We are accustomed to thinking of vision as something external to our bodies, and therefore when we interact with something visually, we can think of it as "virtual" in a way that we would never ascribe to a sensation of touch or smell. But vision is just as much a physiological process as the other senses. And vision is unique in that many of the components of its sensory organ (the eye) are actually comprised of brain cells. It's like our eyes are little bits of brain, sitting in the front of our heads. It doesn't get much more visceral than that.
The development of the eye, from Beyond The Zonules of Zinn by David Bainbridge (p.146)
Here's something that David Bainbridge has to say about the iris in his brain anatomy book Beyond The Zonules of Zinn.
...when you are staring lovingly into somebody's eyes, you are actually staring at the perforated frontmost extension of his or her brain, which I admit does not seem quite so romantic. Yes, the iris is brain — the window on the soul after all. Admittedly the iris is an unusual part of the brain. Beautiful pigmentation led to its name, which means "rainbow." Also, it forms its own instrinsic muscles to open and close the pupil, and so it is the only part of the brain that can move itself. (p.147)
[emphasis mine - SM]
Note: There are lots of other reasons besides eyes to drop the whole immateriality-of-digital-media idea. A simple one: the material effects of e-waste on the environment. A complicated one: the myth of immateriality fosters misleading utopic/distopic notions of imagery and content that are capable of propagating themselves, spontaneously reproducing in some kind of ether-type netherworld (so-called virtual space). It's very Cartesian, as if the internet is supposed to operate according to different physical laws from everything else.
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I'm just going to walk around saying " Eye plaque forms deep cavity, brain forms two-layered eye cup" all day while I ponder this.
I seem to recall reading about some experiments in the 1800s to "fix" the images from the retinas of dead people- the idea being that the last thing seen by the person would persist chemically somehow after death, and could be "developed" with the right chemistry. I think this figured as a plot device in a Sherlock Holmes book or something and I may be conflating fact with fiction, but it's creepily similar to some of the brain-imaging stuff going on now.
I've found the article I was thinking of. (link to .pdf)
http://www.billjayonphotography.com/Images%20in%20the%20Eyes%20of%20the%20Dead.pdf
"It was a commonly held belief throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century that the last image seen by the eyes of a dying person would be “fixed” on the retina for a considerable period of time. Therefore, if a murdered person’s eyes could be reached without delay, the culprit could be identified from the retinal image."
(Rob's link: PDF download)
yiiiiiikes!!
Also, why did that Art Fag City essay have to go and mention The Game?
I was doing ok there for a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28mind_game%29
Shit fuck damn. Now you made me lose the game, Rob.
(Hey everyone, check out this game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28mind_game%29)
Sally, I hate to keep complaining about straw men arguments but "Immateriality" only came up on the Chan thread because some painter semi-troll brought up the "I believe in what i can touch" non-argument (in the course of telling us about his painting, of course). "Immateriality" was discussed in the previous AFC thread (not terribly well--vague panel topic). The issue was how images were becoming like oral culture or music--no one was questioning the validity of digitalized art. Your thoughts on the biology of vision are very interesting but maybe don't need to be opposed to comments written by cave people.
Question: did you have a reference to Boris Groys' essay about digitalization here that you took out? I was just reading that essay and was going to compare notes.
The only way for me to win the game at this point is to reset, which means every single person must also lose so we can start over. Step one involves "I lost the game" posters in every maternity ward in the world so the newborns are taken care of. Then it's on to the rest of y'all.
I lost the game.
Hi Tom. I tried to make it clear that this post is only tangentially related to AFC. Thinking about that thread (and, yes, a little bit the thread on the immateriality panel which wasn't as interesting) while reading Bainbridge got me going on this idea. Nobody on AFC is being directly addressed by this post and I probably shouldn't even have mentioned it here. (Different blog, different conversation.)
But you are right in that the target of this argument is a conglomerate, not a specific individual. That's a lot a like a straw man, so maybe you got me there. But I do find myself in this conversation often. Mostly in person, less so online. Most people that I talk to (including at least one artist who has an online practice) take the approach that objects provide an embodied aesthetic experience whereas online digital media provide a virtual, immaterial, ephemeral (pick yer disembodiment term) experience. The commenter that you dismiss as a painter troll is just articulating what a lot of people take for granted. I'm not as dismissive of him as you...there's a lot of genuine anxiety out there about this stuff.
To be clear, my point here has nothing to do with whether digital media is valid or not, its about whether it has a physiological dimension or not. I am certainly NOT arguing that physical art is good and online art is actually physical so therefore it is also good. Not interested in that kind of polemic.
I mentioned Groys at AFC when I was trying to make a point about anonymity. It's similar to the point I am trying to make here about immateriality. I think there's a connection between the two, but I haven't tried to draw it out explicitly yet.
The immateriality thread got better once the shouting and posturing was finished (same with the Rhizome social media art thread). The Amy Sillman AFC threads were chock-a-block with those tactility folks.
To me it's similar to the old analog vs digital argument in film and music. Certain art world people see themselves as the last bastion of realness in the face of those widespread changes.
Have been enjoying the Groys book but he is basically Loki, or the Devil. I like what he says in that chapter about conflicts in different generation of media (e.g., LPs vs CDs--though he doesn't mention that explicitly) creating their own Oedipus tragedies.
Sally, I think ephemeral fits considering the work on our sites are just one blown fuse away from irrelevance. (to paraphrase a friend who used that description for InterAccess gallery)
Ephemeral & ephemera are interesting terms. Collins English Dictionary definition of ephemeral is "lasting for only a short time; transitory; short-lived" (it also means a short-lived organism, like a mayfly). The definition for ephemera is 1. a mayfly, 2. something transitory or short-lived and 3. a class of collectable items not originally intended to last for more than a short time, such as tickets, posters, postcards, or labels. Definition 3 is the way the artworld currently uses the term ephemera, and at this point it kind of means the opposite of transitory. It means something that has been salvaged from the flow of time and can be historically fixed...because it has a material presence. Like the props and relics left over from performance that stand in as markers for the performance. When ephemera is used to talk about online art it evokes the history of mail art, conceptual art, performance, fluxus, etc.
Online images are ephemeral in that they are not meant to be cherished as-is for ever and ever. But they exist as ephemera because they do actually stick around in the digital archive as artifacts of past fleeting moments. (I shouldn't have used the word in my comment above...striking...)
And by the way: relevance! hah. that's funny. "My art is relevant because...." (there is no good way to end this sentence).
But as Groys notes media is itself in flux so the images have to be translated for different media (I almost said new media) and data is lost. Like the conversion of GIFs to DVD for the gallery--the final product is invariably worse because the DVD standard mushes the image. The "original" is the data which doesn't change, only the means of display. So new works are constantly being created on the fly. That's why the Rhizome director used the term "version" to describe Guthrie's MySpace Playlist. But everything about that work changed when it was shown as a video in the museum. (You have to take my word for that as a physical witness, just as I accept your description of the Schoenberg Cats piece.)
(My new crusade is to tie all discussions to actual artworks.)
I take your word on that. And I don't really need to see it to believe you because even if it didn't look different the context for reception is so radically different that it couldn't possibly be the same piece. Also, back to the materiality of audience experience, our sense perceptions are affected by context. If you see a tiger in the jungle you see it differently than if you see a tiger in the zoo. And, just to be thorough, the piece is physically made of different "stuff" when it is translated to different media. Groys is talking about the creation of 'new' originals. If I remember correctly (we are getting this stuff from his from his book Art and Power, the chapter on authorship...I think, not time to check the reference at the moment), he is making an argument that the distinction between original and copy is becoming irrelevant when discussing digital media. I'd agree. You have to take each instantiation of the piece on its own terms. I would assume that Guthrie is on top of this. So if his piece changes in the museum, then he's making those changes knowingly and asking for a different kind of analysis.
The trick to ontology is to accept temporality. The fact that something has a material presence and effect does not mean that it is fixed that way forever. The beauty of the archive, or the museum, is that we can both respond to the work in its present state and context and use that experience to also imagine ourselves responding to it in past states and contexts.
Speaking of mayflies, I had a tragic thing happen with a jar of pondwater- it had a mayfly larva in it, and I was kinda cursing it for eating all the volvox and rotifers*, and kinda watching to see what would happen, and I forgot to check it for a few days, and then there was this perfect mayfly perched patiently on top of the water, waiting for me to open the lid, except that it was dead. It's 24 hours were up, and I'd let it down.
*I'm not sure if that's what they eat, actually.
I mean "its".
Oh, and the game.
"Asking for a different kind of analysis" is generous. It also could be seen as accepting the inevitable compromises that come with institutional support. I don't fault him personally--not everyone will be Barnett Newman refusing a Whitney show because he doesn't agree with the context. Guthrie was big enough to offer that the original incarnation was better. (He does great work and if I'm vehement it's that I want to see him better represented.)
I honestly don't think the audience could have imagined the MySpace Intro subjects as they appeared in a semi-anonymous YouTube playlist. Maybe if there had been screenshots of the playlist and a sample loop or something. There was only a text label describing the background, with the usual recuperating jargon about "construction of identity."
@LM
It just occurred to me that since the electrical system at InterAccess can handle 2, but not 3, George Foreman Grills, (don't ask me why I know this) that the GFC can now be used as some sort of measure of the relevance of an artwork.
Works for me.
For best most relevant media art ever.
Rob, maybe that mayfly had the most zen life of any mayfly ever. No territorial competition, plenty of food, a whole lifetime devoted to the study of light refracting through glass and water (okay, maybe also a bit of trying to get out. Hopefully not too much).
"Asking for a different kind of analysis" is generous. It also could be seen as accepting the inevitable compromises that come with institutional support.
As an independent curator I do accept that working with institutions inevitably involves compromises. I also think it's the curator's job to bear the burden of compromise, and try to negotiate for the institutional resources to give the artist the best possible context for the work. But, as I've said elsewhere, the paradigm shift between online contexts and museum contexts is so great that I simply can't imagine how a piece designed for one can work in the other without changing in some significant way. And if that change means the piece doesn't function anymore then it shouldn't be done. It sounds, from what you are saying Tom, like this piece by Guthrie just didn't belong in a museum. If I was the curator and I really wanted Guthrie in the show, I would've spent a lot of time listening to what he wanted and tried to get the resources in place for him to come up with something that worked. Maybe try for funding to commission something new for the exhibition, or use the exhibition resources to promote the url and provide whatever technical support might be required to handle lots of traffic. Or maybe a different kind of exposure altogether, like an artist's talk, or (god forbid) a panel, or a workshop. None of these are great solutions, but maybe they'd be better than what happened. A lot of what curators do, when they are really being effective, is advocate for budget items on behalf of artists.
I think acknowledging the challenge and then working toward an effective solution is worth it. I'm not ready to consign museums to the scrap heap of history. For one thing, art audiences are way more conversant with online discourse than they used to be (especially if you are curating for broad audiences, which is usually my preference). Secondly, I really don't think that the online discourses are in any danger of being co-opted by artworld hierarchies. That stuff only holds any influence over people who are already invested in it. Artists who straddle both worlds have to be saavy enough to understand that they are working with two different paradigms. Curators have to be saavy enough to help them.
(apologies to readers besides Tom for whom this may seem to be off topic and disjointed. We've ended up carrying on a conversation that crosses several different threads on several different blogs.)
I don't know whats better,
this post of sally's
dica
or the game...
and i'll never have to choose,
so everything is a-o-k
but donkeys have eyes too
and you KNOW they're playing the number P game consistently
Groys talks about the museum's dual function as a zone of preservation and innovation. Guthrie mentions that the videos from his original list are disappearing and it's true the NewMu "version" does sort of preserve them (although it is a non-collecting museum). But we also expect the museum to show us something we haven't seen and to excite us somewhat.
My thinking is a sort of the ancient "truth to materials" idea. What works best in gallery space? What works best online? Are there points of crossover? As long as the crossover work that you decide to show is interesting (I can think of a few examples), let the preservation vs innovation issue take care of itself.
The NewMu curator said audiences "engaged with" the MySpace Intro videos. It would be better if they loved or hated them.
Yup. I totally agree. Interested in your examples of crossover work that is interesting.
holy crap you are all nerdy
Oh yeah? I see one finger pointing at us and three pointing back at you.
Yep.
Not sure why there's this recurring wave of the idea that we are not attached to our own bodies when clearly they aren't going anywhere, at least anytime soon (and I wonder if they ever truly will.) Or that computers and the internet aren't tied to any physical materials, money, or manual labor at any point in the process...but apparently people have to keep being reminded? The same with reminding people that individuals are still creating content and data, it's not autonomously spouted out by a hive mind ecosystem or by the machines themselves. Sometimes the divide is between people who have had more prolongued access to the back-end of technological processes and those who are skimming the surface at the user end only. Beyond that it becomes a difference in almost religious beliefs about technology and the future, and I can only attribute the waves to the struggle between the mind and the rest of the body which seem to be amplifying. I think the main thing aiming to be established is that different realms have different effects, which seems so obvious from the start, but now you have people stating they would rather look at art objects online than in an offline space which is of course both positive and negative where the body is concerned.
Everyone keeps scrambling for a new distinction because apparently "online" and "offline" aren't good enough. Maybe because this places too much distinction on the internet as a descriptor of space, or because artists don't want to be pigeonholed into net art and want to drive home that certain things online are merely representations or notes of an offline work that functions better in that space with the whole gamut of body presence, sensory awareness, scale, physics, etc., and sometimes vice versa. Each realm has its own limits, of course. Spaces are also becoming more and more blended between this distinction and consequently providing artists with more blended options.
All the means of content dispersal, archiving, researching, platforming, and networked sharing seem like old news or at least an established and obvious part of the process by now. Still worth critiquing, sure, but not with any kind of mystique or shock at their existence and use in contemporary art. This translation (art from a site to a room) topic is always a good one, but to me the most interesting thing about the situation at the moment is making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario that you know will never occur due to various constraints, especially physical or equipment-related ones. Most projects can move between instantiations but this brings up some interesting possibilities and questions. There is also more online startup curation happening than before, by people all over the world who just need your files to put on a show. This results in an artist being more aggregated and experiencing a lot of their shows through documentation only. Also of interest is the idea of being able to materially understand a lot of online realms, as in literally revealing materiality or making models of "essences" that can only be understood as a result of "second nature" online processes and creative software. This is what I'm focusing on in a category of my own practice and what I hoped to present at that doomed immateriality panel but it didn't really end up there.
As usual everything is just case by case, work by work, space by space. It's just another option in a pool of options. For some people the computer is more of a primary medium than others but I'm not sure why that's surprising or confusing to anyone, especially considering the usual history of technology in art-making and human culture in general. It's good for people to still be puzzled by the speed and seeming invisibility of the internet, but not by the use of of it.
(Randomly found this post and responded at length, hope that's ok!)
welcome K. thanks for posting!
Of course it's OK, we're happy to hear from you. (and I like your summation)
I'm guessing K is Kari Altmann, since she's the only Immaterial Dispersal panelist with that initial. It reads like her usual writing. Here she says the topic of "translation (art from a site to a room)" isn't as interesting as her own work, consisting of "making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario that you know will never occur due to various constraints, especially physical or equipment-related ones." We could certainly differ on whether that is more interesting. For some artists, dealing with the realities of physical space after being asked to make "net art" in it isn't just an abstract data point on a curriculum vitae. That is why discussion of practicalities can be useful even if it is not as interesting to Kari.
I knew who K was and I don't think she's hiding her identity or anything. Besides, I like her thoughtful post! I certainly sympathise, however, with your situation of being asked to "make net art" for a physical space. It sounds to me like the kind of lazy curation where artists are selected as stand-in representatives for supposedly hot trends. Curating 101: don't use artworks as illustrations.
I wasn't really talking about me, lots of people are thinking about what can be carried between net and non-net. "Making 3d/4d proposal imagery" is one thing an artist can do, certainly. But the challenge of working in real-life situations helps build strong minds and bodies.
Hey Tom, your comment makes Oldenburg spring to mind.
It seems to me that posing hypothetical situations could be very useful in the process of pushing at the boundaries of what can be carried between net and non-net. I have been looking at Altman's website to try and figure out just what exactly she is talking about. I don't like the Jenga Towers very much. As online images they fall pretty flat and I think they'd fall even flatter if actually materialized in a gallery space. But How to Hide Your Plasma (Handheld Icon Shapeshift for Liquid Chrystal Display) is more interesting. It's part of a group show in which artists collaborated with a 3D modelling expert to create hypothetical works for a virtual white cube called The Chrystal Gallery.
Altman's images are by far the best in the show which is otherwise kind of pedestrian and looks too much like gallery spaces in Second Life. The idea of creating a pretend white cube gallery online and filling it with pretend art is kind of limited, and Altman's imagery doesn't really transcend the pervasive sense of defeat that emerges from these hard-to commodify representations of commodity. But, unlike the others in the exhibition, her images do have an imaginative pull, like science fiction, creating a sense of immersion in a world with different physics from our own. It's like documentation of an installation that would be a must-see if we could only get to the parallel universe where it resides. I think that's a project worth pursuing, and it does tease the net/non-net dichotomy in a useful way. Because the internet is also a real-life situation that exercises our bodies and our minds.
The Oldenburg is terrific and creates a plausible illusion even though you know it's a collage. My bone to pick with Kari and her crew is this desire to insulate and elevate your work online to make it very clear you are doing art. I went back and looked at the collection of YouTubes she did for AFC of nerdy men and boys beaming themselves out of basements using cheap FX and found it insufferably condescending. One of her "specimens" found the grouping and made a few self-deprecating jokes about trying to be subversive with these tools because he lived in a state of fear. She started interrogating the poor guy--"How do you think you are being subversive?"--completely tone deaf to his dry humor. I notice his entire YouTube account is deleted now.
The plasma blobs of hers you found are somewhat nice for the reasons you eloquently state but it's kind of disingenuous for her to talk here about the superiority of making 3D models when many of them were done on assignment to comply with someone else's dubious premise. As you note, there are a ton of these 3D galleries out there.
I understand a little better where you are coming from now, Tom, and I take your points. Even in non-net contexts I've never been a big fan of art that works hard to read as art. I do want to mention though that I don't think Altman's comment here is making the kinds of claims to superiority that you are ascribing to it. I think she just made a pretty straightforward statement about what she's personally interested in right now in her own practice.
I'm not tone deaf to dry humor. I'm surrounded by it.
The (very young) person commenting on that old youtube post from 2008 (not sure why Tom is going through all my old posts at the moment) was trying to joke about being subversive in a way that misread the post anyway. The post was about reading those things as an archaeological record in the future, a supposed future where humans have been erased, and how confusing the data could be or what it could possibly mean after humanity had disappeared. It was collecting a very apparent genre of user videos and presenting them in an imagined and sinister way, as though being viewed by whatever technology had outlived us.
To find that youtube grouping condescending is taking it too far. It was meant as a problematic but sympathetic performance and part of a larger point about technology controlling users through desire. I am, myself, a computer user, and no stranger to computer addiction. I don't think all those guys were nerdy so much as they were a revealed demographic of the computer class. A detached entity could easily organize them as a "species." From that proposed point of view, you are curious to watch them erase themselves and understand why they're doing it. Patterns among the data set become interpreted as cues. My response to that commenter was in tune with the performance of the post.
I would be happy to offer more explanation on any works or continue debates about specific works via 1:1 discussions on gmail or chat, especially as what gets posted on public channels is usually not the whole story. I've asked Paddy before to delete my explanatory comment on that old AFC thread as I don't think it holds up over time. It was another one of those situations where I got asked to contribute to something at the last minute and encouraged to explain it before I had completely figured out how. I took a stab at it but didn't think of the best text until months later, long after everyone had moved on, and that post is mostly forgotten except for the random straggler. I would love to do IMG MGMT again with a more prepared topic and I believe I've suggested that to AFC a few times.
And yes, Sally's point is correct, I am simply talking about the things I do or don't find interest in personally in the comment above. I mentioned proposing things for a 4d space because I was working on Chrystal at that time, and thinking about it a lot. I'm sure my interests are going to reveal themselves in what I choose to work on and vice versa. To be clear that was the first time I have worked that way (4d proposals), and it's not what my work generally consists of. I have also translated things from a site to a room many times and said that topic is always a good one.
Kari, my projector was next to yours for 4 hours in a recent show and we didn't talk about our work at all. I brought up dump.fm because we had previously had a dump vs tumblr conversation on Paddy's blog and you got angry at me for personal reasons I knew nothing about, and then sent me some emails about a fight you had with someone. After a few unpleasant hours in your company I looked back at some things you had written to see if I could at least see some substance in your work that might counterbalance the personal bad vibes. I concluded it's all pretty consistently of a piece. (Not saying the work is all bad, some of it's good, was interested more in the stance or attitude.) You did imply your 3D/4D work was more interesting than what we had been talking about in this thread: "to me the most interesting thing about the situation at the moment is making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario..."
oh brother. New York arists squabbling over personal issues. I thought we had Rhizome for that.
The personal is the political but touche anyway.
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The development of the eye, from Beyond The Zonules of Zinn by David Bainbridge (p.146)
Here's something that David Bainbridge has to say about the iris in his brain anatomy book Beyond The Zonules of Zinn.
Note: There are lots of other reasons besides eyes to drop the whole immateriality-of-digital-media idea. A simple one: the material effects of e-waste on the environment. A complicated one: the myth of immateriality fosters misleading utopic/distopic notions of imagery and content that are capable of propagating themselves, spontaneously reproducing in some kind of ether-type netherworld (so-called virtual space). It's very Cartesian, as if the internet is supposed to operate according to different physical laws from everything else.
- sally mckay 9-13-2010 2:09 pm
I'm just going to walk around saying " Eye plaque forms deep cavity, brain forms two-layered eye cup" all day while I ponder this.
I seem to recall reading about some experiments in the 1800s to "fix" the images from the retinas of dead people- the idea being that the last thing seen by the person would persist chemically somehow after death, and could be "developed" with the right chemistry. I think this figured as a plot device in a Sherlock Holmes book or something and I may be conflating fact with fiction, but it's creepily similar to some of the brain-imaging stuff going on now.
- Rob (guest) 9-13-2010 2:59 pm
I've found the article I was thinking of. (link to .pdf)
http://www.billjayonphotography.com/Images%20in%20the%20Eyes%20of%20the%20Dead.pdf
- Rob (guest) 9-13-2010 5:04 pm
yiiiiiikes!!- sally mckay 9-13-2010 8:17 pm
Also, why did that Art Fag City essay have to go and mention The Game?
I was doing ok there for a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28mind_game%29
- Rob (guest) 9-15-2010 1:57 pm
Shit fuck damn. Now you made me lose the game, Rob.
(Hey everyone, check out this game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28mind_game%29)
- L.M. 9-15-2010 2:02 pm
Sally, I hate to keep complaining about straw men arguments but "Immateriality" only came up on the Chan thread because some painter semi-troll brought up the "I believe in what i can touch" non-argument (in the course of telling us about his painting, of course). "Immateriality" was discussed in the previous AFC thread (not terribly well--vague panel topic). The issue was how images were becoming like oral culture or music--no one was questioning the validity of digitalized art. Your thoughts on the biology of vision are very interesting but maybe don't need to be opposed to comments written by cave people.
Question: did you have a reference to Boris Groys' essay about digitalization here that you took out? I was just reading that essay and was going to compare notes.
- tom moody 9-15-2010 8:51 pm
The only way for me to win the game at this point is to reset, which means every single person must also lose so we can start over. Step one involves "I lost the game" posters in every maternity ward in the world so the newborns are taken care of. Then it's on to the rest of y'all.
- joester (guest) 9-15-2010 11:02 pm
I lost the game.
- sally mckay 9-15-2010 11:26 pm
Hi Tom. I tried to make it clear that this post is only tangentially related to AFC. Thinking about that thread (and, yes, a little bit the thread on the immateriality panel which wasn't as interesting) while reading Bainbridge got me going on this idea. Nobody on AFC is being directly addressed by this post and I probably shouldn't even have mentioned it here. (Different blog, different conversation.)
But you are right in that the target of this argument is a conglomerate, not a specific individual. That's a lot a like a straw man, so maybe you got me there. But I do find myself in this conversation often. Mostly in person, less so online. Most people that I talk to (including at least one artist who has an online practice) take the approach that objects provide an embodied aesthetic experience whereas online digital media provide a virtual, immaterial,
ephemeral(pick yer disembodiment term) experience. The commenter that you dismiss as a painter troll is just articulating what a lot of people take for granted. I'm not as dismissive of him as you...there's a lot of genuine anxiety out there about this stuff.To be clear, my point here has nothing to do with whether digital media is valid or not, its about whether it has a physiological dimension or not. I am certainly NOT arguing that physical art is good and online art is actually physical so therefore it is also good. Not interested in that kind of polemic.
I mentioned Groys at AFC when I was trying to make a point about anonymity. It's similar to the point I am trying to make here about immateriality. I think there's a connection between the two, but I haven't tried to draw it out explicitly yet.
- sally mckay 9-15-2010 11:27 pm
The immateriality thread got better once the shouting and posturing was finished (same with the Rhizome social media art thread). The Amy Sillman AFC threads were chock-a-block with those tactility folks.
To me it's similar to the old analog vs digital argument in film and music. Certain art world people see themselves as the last bastion of realness in the face of those widespread changes.
Have been enjoying the Groys book but he is basically Loki, or the Devil. I like what he says in that chapter about conflicts in different generation of media (e.g., LPs vs CDs--though he doesn't mention that explicitly) creating their own Oedipus tragedies.
- tom moody 9-16-2010 4:56 am
Sally, I think ephemeral fits considering the work on our sites are just one blown fuse away from irrelevance. (to paraphrase a friend who used that description for InterAccess gallery)
- L.M. 9-16-2010 5:02 am
Ephemeral & ephemera are interesting terms. Collins English Dictionary definition of ephemeral is "lasting for only a short time; transitory; short-lived" (it also means a short-lived organism, like a mayfly). The definition for ephemera is 1. a mayfly, 2. something transitory or short-lived and 3. a class of collectable items not originally intended to last for more than a short time, such as tickets, posters, postcards, or labels. Definition 3 is the way the artworld currently uses the term ephemera, and at this point it kind of means the opposite of transitory. It means something that has been salvaged from the flow of time and can be historically fixed...because it has a material presence. Like the props and relics left over from performance that stand in as markers for the performance. When ephemera is used to talk about online art it evokes the history of mail art, conceptual art, performance, fluxus, etc.
Online images are ephemeral in that they are not meant to be cherished as-is for ever and ever. But they exist as ephemera because they do actually stick around in the digital archive as artifacts of past fleeting moments. (I shouldn't have used the word in my comment above...striking...)
- sally mckay 9-16-2010 3:37 pm
And by the way: relevance! hah. that's funny. "My art is relevant because...." (there is no good way to end this sentence).
- sally mckay 9-16-2010 3:45 pm
But as Groys notes media is itself in flux so the images have to be translated for different media (I almost said new media) and data is lost. Like the conversion of GIFs to DVD for the gallery--the final product is invariably worse because the DVD standard mushes the image. The "original" is the data which doesn't change, only the means of display. So new works are constantly being created on the fly. That's why the Rhizome director used the term "version" to describe Guthrie's MySpace Playlist. But everything about that work changed when it was shown as a video in the museum. (You have to take my word for that as a physical witness, just as I accept your description of the Schoenberg Cats piece.)
(My new crusade is to tie all discussions to actual artworks.)
- tom moody 9-16-2010 3:55 pm
I take your word on that. And I don't really need to see it to believe you because even if it didn't look different the context for reception is so radically different that it couldn't possibly be the same piece. Also, back to the materiality of audience experience, our sense perceptions are affected by context. If you see a tiger in the jungle you see it differently than if you see a tiger in the zoo. And, just to be thorough, the piece is physically made of different "stuff" when it is translated to different media. Groys is talking about the creation of 'new' originals. If I remember correctly (we are getting this stuff from his from his book Art and Power, the chapter on authorship...I think, not time to check the reference at the moment), he is making an argument that the distinction between original and copy is becoming irrelevant when discussing digital media. I'd agree. You have to take each instantiation of the piece on its own terms. I would assume that Guthrie is on top of this. So if his piece changes in the museum, then he's making those changes knowingly and asking for a different kind of analysis.
The trick to ontology is to accept temporality. The fact that something has a material presence and effect does not mean that it is fixed that way forever. The beauty of the archive, or the museum, is that we can both respond to the work in its present state and context and use that experience to also imagine ourselves responding to it in past states and contexts.
- sally mckay 9-16-2010 4:20 pm
Speaking of mayflies, I had a tragic thing happen with a jar of pondwater- it had a mayfly larva in it, and I was kinda cursing it for eating all the volvox and rotifers*, and kinda watching to see what would happen, and I forgot to check it for a few days, and then there was this perfect mayfly perched patiently on top of the water, waiting for me to open the lid, except that it was dead. It's 24 hours were up, and I'd let it down.
*I'm not sure if that's what they eat, actually.
- Rob (guest) 9-16-2010 5:25 pm
I mean "its".
Oh, and the game.
- rob (guest) 9-16-2010 5:27 pm
"Asking for a different kind of analysis" is generous. It also could be seen as accepting the inevitable compromises that come with institutional support. I don't fault him personally--not everyone will be Barnett Newman refusing a Whitney show because he doesn't agree with the context. Guthrie was big enough to offer that the original incarnation was better. (He does great work and if I'm vehement it's that I want to see him better represented.)
I honestly don't think the audience could have imagined the MySpace Intro subjects as they appeared in a semi-anonymous YouTube playlist. Maybe if there had been screenshots of the playlist and a sample loop or something. There was only a text label describing the background, with the usual recuperating jargon about "construction of identity."
- tom moody 9-16-2010 5:45 pm
@LM
It just occurred to me that since the electrical system at InterAccess can handle 2, but not 3, George Foreman Grills, (don't ask me why I know this) that the GFC can now be used as some sort of measure of the relevance of an artwork.
- Rob (guest) 9-16-2010 6:34 pm
Works for me.
For
bestmost relevant media art ever.- L.M. 9-16-2010 6:54 pm
Rob, maybe that mayfly had the most zen life of any mayfly ever. No territorial competition, plenty of food, a whole lifetime devoted to the study of light refracting through glass and water (okay, maybe also a bit of trying to get out. Hopefully not too much).
- sally mckay 9-16-2010 8:10 pm
"Asking for a different kind of analysis" is generous. It also could be seen as accepting the inevitable compromises that come with institutional support.
As an independent curator I do accept that working with institutions inevitably involves compromises. I also think it's the curator's job to bear the burden of compromise, and try to negotiate for the institutional resources to give the artist the best possible context for the work. But, as I've said elsewhere, the paradigm shift between online contexts and museum contexts is so great that I simply can't imagine how a piece designed for one can work in the other without changing in some significant way. And if that change means the piece doesn't function anymore then it shouldn't be done. It sounds, from what you are saying Tom, like this piece by Guthrie just didn't belong in a museum. If I was the curator and I really wanted Guthrie in the show, I would've spent a lot of time listening to what he wanted and tried to get the resources in place for him to come up with something that worked. Maybe try for funding to commission something new for the exhibition, or use the exhibition resources to promote the url and provide whatever technical support might be required to handle lots of traffic. Or maybe a different kind of exposure altogether, like an artist's talk, or (god forbid) a panel, or a workshop. None of these are great solutions, but maybe they'd be better than what happened. A lot of what curators do, when they are really being effective, is advocate for budget items on behalf of artists.
I think acknowledging the challenge and then working toward an effective solution is worth it. I'm not ready to consign museums to the scrap heap of history. For one thing, art audiences are way more conversant with online discourse than they used to be (especially if you are curating for broad audiences, which is usually my preference). Secondly, I really don't think that the online discourses are in any danger of being co-opted by artworld hierarchies. That stuff only holds any influence over people who are already invested in it. Artists who straddle both worlds have to be saavy enough to understand that they are working with two different paradigms. Curators have to be saavy enough to help them.
(apologies to readers besides Tom for whom this may seem to be off topic and disjointed. We've ended up carrying on a conversation that crosses several different threads on several different blogs.)
- sally mckay 9-17-2010 9:42 pm
I don't know whats better,
this post of sally's
dica
or the game...
and i'll never have to choose,
so everything is a-o-k
but donkeys have eyes too
and you KNOW they're playing the number P game consistently
- jol (guest) 9-18-2010 2:24 am
Groys talks about the museum's dual function as a zone of preservation and innovation. Guthrie mentions that the videos from his original list are disappearing and it's true the NewMu "version" does sort of preserve them (although it is a non-collecting museum). But we also expect the museum to show us something we haven't seen and to excite us somewhat.
My thinking is a sort of the ancient "truth to materials" idea. What works best in gallery space? What works best online? Are there points of crossover? As long as the crossover work that you decide to show is interesting (I can think of a few examples), let the preservation vs innovation issue take care of itself.
The NewMu curator said audiences "engaged with" the MySpace Intro videos. It would be better if they loved or hated them.
- tom moody 9-19-2010 6:13 pm
Yup. I totally agree. Interested in your examples of crossover work that is interesting.
- sally mckay 9-19-2010 6:55 pm
holy crap you are all nerdy
- sr (guest) 9-24-2010 1:22 am
Oh yeah? I see one finger pointing at us and three pointing back at you.
- sally mckay 9-24-2010 2:32 am
Yep.
Not sure why there's this recurring wave of the idea that we are not attached to our own bodies when clearly they aren't going anywhere, at least anytime soon (and I wonder if they ever truly will.) Or that computers and the internet aren't tied to any physical materials, money, or manual labor at any point in the process...but apparently people have to keep being reminded? The same with reminding people that individuals are still creating content and data, it's not autonomously spouted out by a hive mind ecosystem or by the machines themselves. Sometimes the divide is between people who have had more prolongued access to the back-end of technological processes and those who are skimming the surface at the user end only. Beyond that it becomes a difference in almost religious beliefs about technology and the future, and I can only attribute the waves to the struggle between the mind and the rest of the body which seem to be amplifying. I think the main thing aiming to be established is that different realms have different effects, which seems so obvious from the start, but now you have people stating they would rather look at art objects online than in an offline space which is of course both positive and negative where the body is concerned.
Everyone keeps scrambling for a new distinction because apparently "online" and "offline" aren't good enough. Maybe because this places too much distinction on the internet as a descriptor of space, or because artists don't want to be pigeonholed into net art and want to drive home that certain things online are merely representations or notes of an offline work that functions better in that space with the whole gamut of body presence, sensory awareness, scale, physics, etc., and sometimes vice versa. Each realm has its own limits, of course. Spaces are also becoming more and more blended between this distinction and consequently providing artists with more blended options.
All the means of content dispersal, archiving, researching, platforming, and networked sharing seem like old news or at least an established and obvious part of the process by now. Still worth critiquing, sure, but not with any kind of mystique or shock at their existence and use in contemporary art. This translation (art from a site to a room) topic is always a good one, but to me the most interesting thing about the situation at the moment is making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario that you know will never occur due to various constraints, especially physical or equipment-related ones. Most projects can move between instantiations but this brings up some interesting possibilities and questions. There is also more online startup curation happening than before, by people all over the world who just need your files to put on a show. This results in an artist being more aggregated and experiencing a lot of their shows through documentation only. Also of interest is the idea of being able to materially understand a lot of online realms, as in literally revealing materiality or making models of "essences" that can only be understood as a result of "second nature" online processes and creative software. This is what I'm focusing on in a category of my own practice and what I hoped to present at that doomed immateriality panel but it didn't really end up there.
As usual everything is just case by case, work by work, space by space. It's just another option in a pool of options. For some people the computer is more of a primary medium than others but I'm not sure why that's surprising or confusing to anyone, especially considering the usual history of technology in art-making and human culture in general. It's good for people to still be puzzled by the speed and seeming invisibility of the internet, but not by the use of of it.
(Randomly found this post and responded at length, hope that's ok!)
- K (guest) 9-24-2010 8:09 am
welcome K. thanks for posting!
- sally mckay 9-24-2010 1:41 pm
Of course it's OK, we're happy to hear from you. (and I like your summation)
- L.M. 9-24-2010 1:44 pm
I'm guessing K is Kari Altmann, since she's the only Immaterial Dispersal panelist with that initial. It reads like her usual writing. Here she says the topic of "translation (art from a site to a room)" isn't as interesting as her own work, consisting of "making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario that you know will never occur due to various constraints, especially physical or equipment-related ones." We could certainly differ on whether that is more interesting. For some artists, dealing with the realities of physical space after being asked to make "net art" in it isn't just an abstract data point on a curriculum vitae. That is why discussion of practicalities can be useful even if it is not as interesting to Kari.
- tom moody 11-19-2010 12:58 am
I knew who K was and I don't think she's hiding her identity or anything. Besides, I like her thoughtful post! I certainly sympathise, however, with your situation of being asked to "make net art" for a physical space. It sounds to me like the kind of lazy curation where artists are selected as stand-in representatives for supposedly hot trends. Curating 101: don't use artworks as illustrations.
- sally mckay 11-19-2010 2:05 pm
I wasn't really talking about me, lots of people are thinking about what can be carried between net and non-net. "Making 3d/4d proposal imagery" is one thing an artist can do, certainly. But the challenge of working in real-life situations helps build strong minds and bodies.
- tom moody 11-20-2010 5:02 am
Hey Tom, your comment makes Oldenburg spring to mind.
It seems to me that posing hypothetical situations could be very useful in the process of pushing at the boundaries of what can be carried between net and non-net. I have been looking at Altman's website to try and figure out just what exactly she is talking about. I don't like the Jenga Towers very much. As online images they fall pretty flat and I think they'd fall even flatter if actually materialized in a gallery space. But How to Hide Your Plasma (Handheld Icon Shapeshift for Liquid Chrystal Display) is more interesting. It's part of a group show in which artists collaborated with a 3D modelling expert to create hypothetical works for a virtual white cube called The Chrystal Gallery.
Altman's images are by far the best in the show which is otherwise kind of pedestrian and looks too much like gallery spaces in Second Life. The idea of creating a pretend white cube gallery online and filling it with pretend art is kind of limited, and Altman's imagery doesn't really transcend the pervasive sense of defeat that emerges from these hard-to commodify representations of commodity. But, unlike the others in the exhibition, her images do have an imaginative pull, like science fiction, creating a sense of immersion in a world with different physics from our own. It's like documentation of an installation that would be a must-see if we could only get to the parallel universe where it resides. I think that's a project worth pursuing, and it does tease the net/non-net dichotomy in a useful way. Because the internet is also a real-life situation that exercises our bodies and our minds.
- sally mckay 11-20-2010 5:29 pm
The Oldenburg is terrific and creates a plausible illusion even though you know it's a collage. My bone to pick with Kari and her crew is this desire to insulate and elevate your work online to make it very clear you are doing art. I went back and looked at the collection of YouTubes she did for AFC of nerdy men and boys beaming themselves out of basements using cheap FX and found it insufferably condescending. One of her "specimens" found the grouping and made a few self-deprecating jokes about trying to be subversive with these tools because he lived in a state of fear. She started interrogating the poor guy--"How do you think you are being subversive?"--completely tone deaf to his dry humor. I notice his entire YouTube account is deleted now.
The plasma blobs of hers you found are somewhat nice for the reasons you eloquently state but it's kind of disingenuous for her to talk here about the superiority of making 3D models when many of them were done on assignment to comply with someone else's dubious premise. As you note, there are a ton of these 3D galleries out there.
- tom moody 11-21-2010 4:45 am
I understand a little better where you are coming from now, Tom, and I take your points. Even in non-net contexts I've never been a big fan of art that works hard to read as art. I do want to mention though that I don't think Altman's comment here is making the kinds of claims to superiority that you are ascribing to it. I think she just made a pretty straightforward statement about what she's personally interested in right now in her own practice.
- sally mckay 11-21-2010 10:07 pm
I'm not tone deaf to dry humor. I'm surrounded by it.
The (very young) person commenting on that old youtube post from 2008 (not sure why Tom is going through all my old posts at the moment) was trying to joke about being subversive in a way that misread the post anyway. The post was about reading those things as an archaeological record in the future, a supposed future where humans have been erased, and how confusing the data could be or what it could possibly mean after humanity had disappeared. It was collecting a very apparent genre of user videos and presenting them in an imagined and sinister way, as though being viewed by whatever technology had outlived us.
To find that youtube grouping condescending is taking it too far. It was meant as a problematic but sympathetic performance and part of a larger point about technology controlling users through desire. I am, myself, a computer user, and no stranger to computer addiction. I don't think all those guys were nerdy so much as they were a revealed demographic of the computer class. A detached entity could easily organize them as a "species." From that proposed point of view, you are curious to watch them erase themselves and understand why they're doing it. Patterns among the data set become interpreted as cues. My response to that commenter was in tune with the performance of the post.
I would be happy to offer more explanation on any works or continue debates about specific works via 1:1 discussions on gmail or chat, especially as what gets posted on public channels is usually not the whole story. I've asked Paddy before to delete my explanatory comment on that old AFC thread as I don't think it holds up over time. It was another one of those situations where I got asked to contribute to something at the last minute and encouraged to explain it before I had completely figured out how. I took a stab at it but didn't think of the best text until months later, long after everyone had moved on, and that post is mostly forgotten except for the random straggler. I would love to do IMG MGMT again with a more prepared topic and I believe I've suggested that to AFC a few times.
And yes, Sally's point is correct, I am simply talking about the things I do or don't find interest in personally in the comment above. I mentioned proposing things for a 4d space because I was working on Chrystal at that time, and thinking about it a lot. I'm sure my interests are going to reveal themselves in what I choose to work on and vice versa. To be clear that was the first time I have worked that way (4d proposals), and it's not what my work generally consists of. I have also translated things from a site to a room many times and said that topic is always a good one.
- K (guest) 11-22-2010 7:55 am
Kari, my projector was next to yours for 4 hours in a recent show and we didn't talk about our work at all. I brought up dump.fm because we had previously had a dump vs tumblr conversation on Paddy's blog and you got angry at me for personal reasons I knew nothing about, and then sent me some emails about a fight you had with someone. After a few unpleasant hours in your company I looked back at some things you had written to see if I could at least see some substance in your work that might counterbalance the personal bad vibes. I concluded it's all pretty consistently of a piece. (Not saying the work is all bad, some of it's good, was interested more in the stance or attitude.) You did imply your 3D/4D work was more interesting than what we had been talking about in this thread: "to me the most interesting thing about the situation at the moment is making 3d/4d proposal imagery for an offline scenario..."
- tom moody 11-22-2010 2:07 pm
oh brother. New York arists squabbling over personal issues. I thought we had Rhizome for that.
- sally mckay 11-22-2010 2:25 pm
The personal is the political but touche anyway.
- tom moody 11-22-2010 2:43 pm