So a lot of the internet based work I see in gallery shows, online, seems to be using the parameters of internet aesthetics eg. cut and paste, bad feathering, arbitrary juxtaposition of disparate imagery, 'slicing' etc. and then translating it into traditional media like sculpture or painting-eg. the current trajectory of AIDS 3d , et al.'s work suitable for the gallery and commercial environments. Internet art is gonna be huge, I think its at a tipping point in New York and I can imagine critics very soon, if they are not already waxing lyrical about the way these artists have used the aesthetics of the internet to rejuvinate and bring back seduction and sensuality to contemporary art.
I can't really pretend to know very much about internet stuff, but I think the Andrew Wilson stuff is great and exactly what internet art needs to be.
I can't really pretend to know very much about internet stuff, but I think the Andrew Wilson stuff is great and exactly what internet art needs to be.
"This understanding of the ecologies that our personal computing takes part in is crucial if artists explicitly engaging the internet are to have an impact on broader cultural planes."
The networking piece he did really hit the nail on the head in that it references something Zizek critiques about the celebrators of cyberspace and the idea of the freedom and democratization of knowledge in cloud computing, that the cloud is materially owned and controlled by corporations with an accompanying system and structure of labour relations that don't necessarily transcend the Fordist production models. Take for example this article [http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201181881418513391.html] about the emerging rare earth economies on which the information technologies software and hardware markets are dependent on which seem to hark back to earlier 19th century trade wars and the material exploitation of (neo)colonial natural resources.
"Embodiment no longer coincides with the limits of flesh; disembodiment initially experienced on the internet opens the possibility for collective re-embodiment through new technologies."
From the description of the Avatar 4D exhibition on JstChillin
See there seems to be a tone of self-celebratory post-humanism, and we both know that post-humanism is just ideology spouted by corporations to distract us from the very human toil, in a 'bare life' sense, that it takes to produce the physical technological infrastructure to create post-human avatars for white nerds with high speed access to the net living in the developed world.
See there seems to be a tone of self-celebratory post-humanism, and we both know that post-humanism is just ideology spouted by corporations to distract us from the very human toil, in a 'bare life' sense, that it takes to produce the physical technological infrastructure to create post-human avatars for white nerds with high speed access to the net living in the developed world.
More interesting for me would be work about internet exclusion, global uneven internet speed distributions and the impacts thereof and the interface between developing countries and technology, basically if someone were the artistic equivalent of what Ethan Zuckerman covers. Intrestingly enough, I don't know how informed they are but AIDS 3D inadvertently reference Danny Millers work in Jamaica vis a vis the internet and culture when they quote the wiki on virtual continuums in their 'Free Internet' pdf. So basically my position is that I really like internet art when it doest self-consciously draw attention to itself as internet art and become what I was saying, regressively Modernist foregrounding the conditions of the medium itself rather than exploring the social/political/economic issues that the medium raises.
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Ok I get it now. Internet aesthetics are actually a form of hauntology. So as a repository of information and images, of lost data and dead links and millions of geocities sites exisiting in some kind of cyber limbo Parker Ito and the chick call it a 'ruin' and a kind of neo-gothic, thus the proliferation of naked, vectorized lawnmower men in internet art. What it is is 90's retro, maybe a little in the same way Tim and Eric are and all clip art and online stock photo imagery is but its coming back to us repackaged in the wrapper of web 2.0, youtube video loops and IM screen caps and those single page scrolling image blogs. And thus it resonates with our generation who came of age in the 90's and appeals to our latent nostalgia for a lapsarian as well as political/historical idyll perhaps.
Ok so I've reconsidered my position. If the internet is a new medium, in the same way video was a new medium and the same way painting and sculpture are mediums artists use to express themselves, then we are at that necessary stage where artists are exploring and experimenting with the formal qualities of the medium and in those terms, the internet 'gesture' is more important that what is being said I guess. Like in the same way early video art is more interesting as a document than as works in themselves.
ReplyDeleteWell the first thing I'd say is that the key considerations of most internet artists I've noticed are exactly that, being critiques of post-humanism, ecology, and immaterial labour, by showing that these ideas in so far as they are ideological (/marketing) are intrinsic to internet aesthetics. for eg all the ruins blogs that sam is associated with.
ReplyDeleteTHe hauntology stuff i think is also directed at this aim. The idea being to catalogue the futurist utopias promised by the internet and the way this vision is now and has been perceived, and doing so in the knowledge that in a short time the internet will be naturalised and integrated, and so one would look back to early internet as a means of bridging that gap in subjectivity and perceptions of the pre vs post internet worlds.
I guess its like looking a 50s and 60s sci-fi in the age of the space race and nuclear threat as a way of best reading the way politics presented itself to peoples internal understanding of the world.