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Missed the Rhizome Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel in Chelsea a couple of nights ago because I had to w*rk. Too bad--really wanted to go. MTAA has a report. The distinction between the early vernacular web and the current more "regulated" web laid out in in Olia Lialina's article here serves as a good background for understanding the shift from net art 1.0 to version 2.0. Essentially it's the world of home pages, links, and artist-scientists vs the world of blogs, Google, and fast delivery of every imaginable kind of content (except the gallerygoing kind), with artists, scientists, and artist-scientists struggling to make sense of it. I have also pontificated on it, though not in product release terms. Another distinction I would make is between the anecdotal ('70s conceptualism in web form--what Sally McKay has called "long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof") and the purely experiential (entertainingly transgressive images, music, and video produced in a collaboration-friendly, peer to peer, non-Industry environment; deliberate confusion between professional and amateur [the vernacular thankfully hasn't gone away]; better sound and pictures generally) that broadband and googling makes possible.
Update: Sal Randolph has a report on the panel at Rhizome.org.*
Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/20235/ (scroll down to Randolph's comment).
Internet
Non-Internet
Internet
Non-Internet
"I like the ones on the Internet better."
"That's not the point--the shots on the bottom are just documentation of pieces that can never be experienced on the web, just as net art always flops in the gallery setting."
But seriously, I'm pretty happy with the DVDs I just burned (these flared-out shots notwithstanding), inspired by Paul Slocum's work for the Dallas show. Picked up that Toshiba TV on clearance for 74 bucks. The LED Grid is an HTML piece--a found GIF remixed to blink at different rates. I used a capture program to convert it to a video file, then burned the file to DVD, which is then set for chapter repeat in the player. For the OptiDisc piece, the same capture program played the original GIF 12 times to make the video, also set on chapter repeat. I like Paul's idea of burning several animations to one DVD and then having several TVs going at once. Now I know how to do it and don't have to bug my friends so much.
"Technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, the invention of the locomotive also entailed the invention of the rail disaster. Virilio sees the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress. The growth of technology, namely television, separates us directly from the events of real space and real time. We lose wisdom, lose sight of our immediate horizon and resort to the indirect horizon of our dissimulated environment. From this angle, the Accident can be mentally pictured as a sort of 'fractal meteorite' whose impact is prepared in the propitious darkness, a landscape of events concealing future collisions. Even Aristotle claimed that 'there is no science of the accident,' but Virilio disagrees, pointing to the growing credibility of simulators designed to escape the accident -- an industry born from the unholy marriage of post-WW2 science and the military-industrial complex." (hat tip to MBM)