Collecting the Uncollectable
May 15th, 2009
Tomorrow I will be on a panel the Catharine Clark Gallery to talk about my role in acquiring Ken Goldberg’s Memento Mori. You can read all the details in this press release.
An Organization to Support Collectors
April 27th, 2009
Portion of image on "Imaginary Museum Projects" by Tjebbe van Tijen
Here is the question of the day: If an organization is set up to help promote and promulgate Internet Art, what should that organization be chartered to do? That was the question at a lunch with the kind lady I had met last Thursday and her husband,also very kind (see previous post).
It’s not an easy question to answer. You can’t just throw money up in the air and expect it to rain art. So where does one start?
First off, let’s look at the different sorts of collectors. I see three broad groupings of Internet Art collectors: Read the rest of this entry »
I Left My ‘Art in San Francisco
April 23rd, 2009
What made me lose my 'art in San Francisco...
Last night I attended a reception relating to SFMOMA. I don’t want to be precise about the details because I’ve not asked the people involved for permission to do so. What I do want to record is my excitement and thrill regarding several of the dialogs that took place during this reception regarding Internet Art.
My feeling is that Internet art - just like so many other things that relate to the Internet - will be launched, bloom and prosper somewhere around San Francisco and the Bay Area. It logically follows that the progenitors of such an art movement would be in the same age group as are all the current flock of Internet titans and techies. Thus the people I have been interested in talking to have been roughly 24 to 36 years old. Read the rest of this entry »
Yes, We Can - Blog Again
January 25th, 2009
It’s time to start posting to AotN again. It’s been over six months since I finished the two courses on new media taught by Dr Christiane Paul at UC Berkeley, yet I have been incapable of producing a new post. The whole point of taking the courses was to help me write better posts. Read the rest of this entry »
Berkeley Big Bang: Day 3
June 4th, 2008
June 3 was the last day of the Berkeley Big Bang and a celebration of forty years of Leonardo.
Introduction: 40 Years of Leonardo
Stephen Wilson kicked off the event with refections on the 40 years of Leonardo - the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. He wondered “How will the Journal survive?” given the mounting language and production issues.
He then presented a review of computers and art thirty years ago (the time he joined Leonardo and today. I can quibble with facts. He twice mentioned Wired magazine when I believe he intended to say Byte magazine. He talks about the lack of art in the computer field in 1979, yet Melvin Prueitt’s books on computer graphics had already entered their Dover reprints stage of life by 1974. But I cannot dispute his conclusions: the world of art and computers has grown from a smaller and lonelier place to a huge place that nonetheless has issues such as still being marginalized.
Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2
June 3rd, 2008
The reason you go to an event like BBB is to listen to highly educated people expound in a highly intelligent manner. You hope, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, that you will understand what they say and, fidgeting with talisman, that they share ideas that are thrilling. With those thoughts in mind let’s double-click on Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2.
Berkeley Big Bang: Day 1
June 1st, 2008
Today was the first day of a three day “Berkeley Big Bang” event at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). There were two events and each was quite special. The first was Lynn Hershman Leeson: Virtually Everything, Virtually at the PFA cinema. This was an eight hour marathon showing 16 Hershman films dating from 1977 to 1994. The first three hours (which I watched) provided a glimpse as to why she has attained the stature she has as a filmmaker and as an artist and as, well, an impresario of wonderment.
Up to now my contact with her work had been through her project in Second Life: Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive in which one of her collaborators is my friend Henrik Bennetson of the Stanford Humanities Lab. So I was delighted to see that Ms Hershman appeared on the screen as RobertaWare, her Second Life Avatar, and gave us a tour of the Dante Hotel while the speaker, Steve Seid, introduced the program.
Web Artist: Ken Goldberg
March 12th, 2008
Ken Goldberg is an artist. Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering.
So what defines who is an “artist”? What enables a professor at a major university have an alter ego that can encompass whimsy, caprice and felicity? Do his two sides have an irrational connection or a rational disconnection?
Many facets of Ken’s development and output are reported in a 2005 biographical article from the East Bay Express. But there’s more and new data waiting to be explored. In 2008 I hope to be in contact with Ken via a project or two. While doing so I hope to research and report back to you at a later date what Ken is looking into these days and where he is setting his sights.
MBCBFTW
March 10th, 2008
MBCBFTW is an abbreviation of “My boyfriend came back from the war” - which is the name of a web site built in 1996 by Olia Lialina et al. More details regarding the background of the site are available at the Last Real Net Art Museum.
Christiane Paul in her seminal work Digital Art says “Early net art produced some classics of the genre, among them Olia Lialina’s [MBCBFTW]…”
As Ms Paul points out, Lialina:
“expanded the piece into the Last Real Net Art Museum, which used the original MBCBFTW as a starting point and then developed an archive of variations on the work by other artists. The project points to the possibilities for creation and presentation offered by digital networks, such as the infinite reconfiguration of information in an open system, but not accommodated by traditional museums.”
Today, we often call this sort of endeavor a “remix”. Almost immediately upon exploring the site and understanding its openness to the possibilities remixing, I began to build re-mixes myself. As of this writing I have created six variations ranging from Advent calendar to Web 2.0 versions. Most of them are not yet complete. I seem to start yet another new remix before quite finishing the prior remix.
I have created a page on the Art of the Net wiki (Click on the link below) where you can find links to all the remixes as well as much, more more about my thoughts on Lialina’s work.
Audience-Sourcing FAQ
December 8th, 2007
2007-12-31. This post has been copied to the Art of the Net Wiki. All further updates and edits will occur on the Wiki. Link
What is audience-sourcing?
Audience-sourcing is the act of people, while in the process of observing a work of art, transmitting some aspect of their observation process to others in some durable manner.