Fuck Google, indeed.

5) F.A.T. Lab’s FUCK GOOGLE Week (2010)

Recently F.A.T. (Free Art & Technology) Lab held a week-long series of posts “themed around evil mother Google” during Transmediale10 in Berlin.  This included the now-infamous alleged GPS-bugging of a Google Street View car, custom Firefox themes, and even an instructable on building your own Street View car to fight back against the corporation.  (see also a recent Cargo Collective design campaign).

Vimeo link: Fuck Google Week roundup

4) Constant Dullaart, YouTube as Subject / YouTube as Sculpture (2008-ongoing)

In addition to having the best possible name for a digital conceptual artist, Constant Dullaart’s body of work consists of manipulating with contemporary methods of online viewing and production.

His YouTube works draw attention to the user interface that mediates the majority of Internet video traffic in the Western world, whether by sculpturally mimicking the effect of a loading video or by taking the “Play” icon to a rave.

3) Charles Broskoski, Films (2008-ongoing)

Broskoski’s Films is a daily streaming video program with a difference — there are no moving images to be found, only the subtitle tracks.

Broskoski’s film choices are suited to his audience and include new classics, such as Ghostbusters and Terminator 2, so that anyone who was young in the 1980s or early 90s may actually be able to identify by quotes alone.

Make sure to visit his paintings gallery while visiting the site.

The Internet's answer to the best items for contemporary assemblage: "tinsel, inflatable object, marble, hair, fluorescent lights, ball, water, image of a cat"

2) Ben Schumacher’s Portfolio

Fittingly hosted on a free Blogspot account, Ben Schumacher’s portfolio holds a number of gems situated right at the intersection of Internet art and contemporary sculpture.

He presents a number of clever conceptual pieces, from a contemporary assemblage sculpture crafted according to the specifications of a Yahoo! Answers query to an iStockPhoto image of pool water printed on top of a pool cover. Schumacher merges the preoccupation with the cheap and every day by fashioning a number of his sculptures and wall pieces out of materials from IKEA and Walmart.

A view of “www.fromthedarkpast.com” by Rafael Rozendaal

1) Rafael Rozendaal, COLORFLIP.COM, FROMTHEDARKPAST.COM, INTOTIME.COM, NEKROMISANTROP.COM (2008, 2009, 2010, 2010)

No conversation about contemporary Internet art is complete without Rafael Rozendaal.

Chances are even if you haven’t heard his name you’ve visited one of his websites in the last few years. His particular blend of pop aesthetics and flash animation have made his works popular, though how he treats each website as an individual piece adds an interesting layer.

Purchasing a Rafael Rozendaal piece entails purchasing the domain name as well as the art associated with it, and the website must remain visible to the public (the collector’s name is placed in the Title bar).

One of the most important social, political, and artistic concerns facing us today is the question of access: our ability to share media, our ability to take ownership of or simply to view films, music, and other forms of art. In the past, non-digital and only finitely reproducible media created a certain type of economic exchange and ownership which has long been upended by file sharing. Every day millions of people download and stream films on the Internet in an alternative form of exchange more related to cultural capital than economic capital. This is a political action accomplished as easily as downloading the flat version of Avatar.

Sherrie Levine, "Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp)" (1991)

There is a storied history of artists, particularly those associated with their own contemporary avant garde, supporting liberal viewpoints about access to and use of media. This carries a range of meanings based in the history of the time, including support of public education or public libraries and openly appropriating copyrighted material (Guy Debord, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine). The dialogue surrounding illegal downloading is no different: based on the principle that the free availability and use of material can only stand to benefit society, breakdown class division, and (hopefully) establish a practice that will become a norm for a late capitalist society. Currently we have many labels for these ubiquitous activities: piracy, filesharing, and copyright infringement.

As we have entered the age of ubiquitous digital information it is incredibly important that these issues and the active debates surrounding them are thoroughly understood. Over the next several years the ways that governments, corporations, and individuals chose to deal with intellectual property enforcement may radically shape the way we interface with our own culture in the future. Some of these decisions are happening right before our eyes — this past year a major court case ordered the closure of “The Pirate Bay” (though true to form the site soldiers on defiant), France adopted its HADOPI 2 three strikes bill into law (and recently unveiled an ironically copyright-infringing logo), and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international treaty between 36 major countries (including the entire European Union) has yet to be publicly unveiled but may require Internet service providers (ISPs) to sever an entire household’s Internet connection based on suspicion of piracy. Drafts of ACTA have also included clauses making the search of laptops and iPods at customs or border crossings a possibility.

As individuals it is important that we engage with these issues, but for artists it is imperative. Appropriation and source material have been important artistic tools throughout history but with new developments it is already becoming more and more difficult to defend basic rights like Fair Use — YouTube bots, for instance, have scanned and removed many pieces of video art which included snippets from songs copyrighted by major corporations, completely disregarding the songs’ context and the possibility that they may constitute Fair Use. One of my favorite examples is Obloy Syndrome’s “Sprince (Dog Divengrin),” which has been re-uploaded and removed from YouTube several times over the last two years (here). Thankfully the piece now has a home on Megavideo.

Artists have been dealing with the copyright debate admirably for many years, but there are a few whose recent projects stand out.

AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE

In December of 2008 two graduate students at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Timo Klok and Tobias Leingruber, caused a stir by releasing a Firefox extension called “Pirates of the Amazon” (2008). The extension was simple, it added a link to Amazon.com product pages that read “Download 4 Free” and would automatically redirect your web browser to “The Pirate Bay” and search for the item you were browsing.

Timo Klok and Tobias Leingruber, "Pirates of the Amazon" (2008)

The two free culture radicals were served a take-down notice by Amazon on December 3, 2008, just one day after they had uploaded the extension.

In a statement to the New York Times two days later, they wrote that [Amazon and "The Pirate Bay"] might look like opposites, but are actually quite similar in regards to the mainstream media content they provide … Our project demonstrated this practically. So it’s a parody of any kind of media consumerism, whether corporate or subcultural.” The project was lauded by many as a great example of social activism through art, though some weren’t so pleased, posting for instance: “Great, just make it apparent you are stealing stuff.” The statement (as well as the official documentation page) issued by the two artists is apt in its self-description as “parody,” actively inverting the types of ads that show up on torrent trackers for paid content sites.

“Pirates of the Amazon” is in no way alone in its approach to copyright issues by way of highlighting absurdity or revealing mystic truths. The work of Evan Roth is also engaged directly in this divide, somewhere between boyish prank, conceptual art, and anti-capitalist activism.

Evan Roth, "Available Online for Free" (2008)

A recent retrospective of Roth’s work at Advanced Minority gallery in Vienna dubbed Available Online for Free, in fact, made a profoundly similar statement about commercial distribution systems to that of “Pirates of the Amazon.” In conjunction with the exhibition, Roth printed rolls of red stickers with the words “Available Online for Free” and went around city stores placing them on software, movies, and music packaging.

More recently, Roth has begun a piece called “Intellectual Property Asshole Competition,” which pokes fun at the recent copyright controversy between the Associated Press and artist Shepard Fairey. Roth has taken the two images from the copyright dispute — an AP photograph of U.S. President Barack Obama and the iconic “HOPE” image created by Fairey after the photograph, respectively — and created out of each an edition of nine hand-crafted replica paintings, each of which are on sale on his website for $600. How does it become a competition? The first entity to sue Roth over the paintings wins. My money’s on Fairey.

While we wait for the results of Roth’s competition, you can help the cause by becoming an Intellectual Property Donor:

Evan Roth, "Public Domain Donor" (2008)

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it.
- Dr. Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park (ironically, paraphrasing the famous idiom)

Recently on Hyperallergic, artist An Xiao contributed a piece called “Cover Art, or Vito Acconci Gets a Follow Back,” making the case for artists who choose to directly reference or re-stage existing artworks.  The article draws a comparison between derivative works and cover songs, arguing essentially that a piece recreated by another artist is much the same as a song re-performed by another group.  This may be an apt comparison, but she glosses over an important fact: most cover songs are terrible.

And in much the same way, art which relies exclusively on recreating and rephrasing existing pieces carries a tremendous probability of emerging as flat and unconsidered. Particularly in digital art, where the open transference and transformation of cultural materials is of critical importance to many artists.  What it comes down to — and An alludes to this — is that while now, yes, it is possible to take a conceptual action and recreate it within the framework of the Internet and digital media, it had better be pretty poignant if it desires to read as anything but a conceptual exercise by someone burdened by the context of art school.

For instance, searching for “Following Piece,” the 1969 Vito Acconci performance that An writes about re-staging, yields this video:

Aron Taylor, Following Piece (2008)

The artist restages “Following Piece” in “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” blindly following rudimentary artificial intelligence characters around the game world until the NPC (non-player character) is killed due to simulated civil disorder. This video is accompanied by a text which explains it as being “based stupidly on Chuck Baudelaire’s concept of the ‘flaneur’ [and] Jean Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra,” continuing for several paragraphs to provide descriptions of other works by Acconci.  The entire text, then, is a justification for an artwork wherein we immediately get the joke and which is incapable of transcending the barrier of benign cleverness, no matter how many theories and thinkers are hurriedly paraphrased as justification. To a degree I’m surprised to not see a dual mention of Baudelaire’s flâneur and Debord’s dérive, simply because both deal with walking.

To “stand on the shoulders of giants,” is a commonly stated but often loosely implemented idiom. The idea is that one standing on the shoulders of giants is able to see further and do more than the giants themselves. Which is to say, a metaphor for taking what has come before us and building upon it, or perhaps most appropriately, work done with full knowledge of what has come before but not beholden to older forms. Progress itself.

Ramsay Stirling, "Enduring Freedom" (2008) (click to view the piece)

Some cover art becomes very problematic when viewed in this light. At the beginning of this year an artist named Ramsay Stirling emerged briefly, his work circulating on the likes of Rhizome and VVORK, whose online portfolio consisted almost entirely of major conceptual artworks recreated for the Internet. He has since, for reasons unknown to me, taken his site down and replaced it with a large “BRB” in italic yellow, but his work still bears exploration given the question at hand.

Among Stirling’s recreations were works like “Abstract Webpage (.com) (After Ad Reinhardt)” (an .html page with a black background and nothing else) and “Enduring Freedom (∞ Flags)” (posited as a collaboration with Jasper Johns; click the image to the left to view it in all its glory).  Much of the site functioned as these do — as humorous gestures that updated postmodern and other 20th century art pieces using the Internet as the primary method of distribution.

This became very problematic, though, with Stirling’s “Internet Delivers People,” (2008) a flash video redux of Richard Serra’s “Television Delivers People” (1973) in which the artist changes the entire script of Serra’s video piece to turn the original commentary into a vessel to critique the commercial structure of the Internet.  This is a piece that has tried so hard to be poignant that it has missed the point entirely — Serra was critiquing a “one-to-many” distribution system, Stirling is regurgitating this argument and trying to align it to a fundamentally different platform.

Left: Richard Serra, Television Delivers People (1973), Right: Ramsay Stirling, Internet Delivers People (2008); image links to Serra's Television Delivers People, via UbuWeb

It seems in fact that, especially in media art, updating an older work most importantly necessitates a scrupulous examination of the medium of transmission itself.  Eva and Franco Mattes of 0100101110101101.ORG occasionally make what I would argue are in fact successful pieces of cover art—in their Synthetic Performances series they re-stage important works of performance art in Second Life. This could easily fall flat, but their specific selection of which pieces to perform [for instance, Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971) and Marina Abramovic and Ulay's "Imponderabilia" (1977)] suggests an interesting exploration of our relationship to the body in virtual space.

Eva and Franco Mattes, "Reenactment of Chris Burden's 'Shoot'" (2007)

This medium specificity is something which actually makes the piece An wrote about, Platea’s “Following Piece 2.0,” a bit more interesting. Key to the initial “Following Piece” is that Acconci wrote out the results of his performances and mailed them to major figures in the art world. In this way the performance was just as much about the act of surveying a stranger as it was about the artist creating a different kind of art object, one disseminated through the postal system rather than the gallery, and marking his transition from experimental poet to performance artist. The difference being, now the people who receive the message are selective — those who followed @platea or the appropriate hashtag on twitter.

It’s easy enough to take someone’s canonized artwork and reframe it within your new historical context, but this can only truly be rewarding when the gesture is appropriately thought out in terms of both contexts.

A woman stands in a crowded square with her eyes closed.

Slowly we see her move forward, talking under her breath to an unseen participant. Her eyes remain closed. Occasionally she makes an abrupt course adjustment, narrowly avoiding one of the swath of unnamed individuals moving directly in her way. Passersby turn to watch the spectacle, the woman moving through the crowd and muttering to herself, denying sight of her eyes.

Jill Magid, still from Evidence Locker series (2004)

The woman is artist Jill Magid and the city is Liverpool. The situation described above is a performance from her 2004 Evidence Locker series, in which the artist developed a friendly relationship with the security staff monitoring all of Liverpool’s closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems and instructed the operators on the manner in which she was to be filmed moving throughout the city.

In this particular moment, Magid had called the officer whom she knew to be on duty at the time, closed her eyes, and instructed him to verbally guide her through the crowded square. She placed her ultimate trust in the hands of her omnipotent participant, actively engaging with top-down systems of surveillance.

Magid says of this work that she “seek[s] the potential softness and intimacy of the[se] technologies, the fallacy of their omniscient point of view, the ways in which they hold memory (yet often cease to remember).” Her work thus creates playful interventions into information technologies designed as control mechanisms, dealing explicitly with subverting the traditional power structures of surveillance.

But as the tools of surveillance become more and more democratized there is a significant body of emerging work focused directly on the related idea of “sousveillance,” sometimes also termed the “participatory panopticon.”

Sousveillance (French for “undersight” as surveillance implies “oversight”) is a term attributed to Steve Mann (an individual whose work in “Wearable Computing” also garnered him the rather dubious title of “world’s first cyborg”). It refers to the ability of individuals in information age societies to set up civilian or private-run methods of surveillance — often decentralized networks and often with the potential for acting as witness for social or political injustices and spreading the information quickly at a global scale.

Josh On, They Rule (2004)

This isn’t your average Neighborhood Watch. Take TheyRule.net, an interactive artwork and sousveillance network created by Josh On in 2002. They Rule creates a platform for visualizing the connections between individuals in positions of power in some of the biggest corporations in the world. Depending on the map you select (10 richest people, Bush family and oil companies, media outlets and the companies they’re owned by or affiliated with, &c.) They Rule offers a visual display of major companies and the people who sit on their boards of directors. Most importantly the framework highlights which individuals have ties to multiple companies by placing representative icons between the associated firms and drawing a line through the individual, creating a literal link.

These were especially urgent issues to deal with in George W. Bush’s America. In 2002, for instance, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced its “Total Information Awareness” program, a tentative mass indexing of civilian information (credit, medical, shopping trends, &c.) for federal intelligence use. Even under the Patriot Act this wasn’t considered admissible: the program lost funding in 2003, but not before provoking a significant work of sousveillance art: the Open Government Information Awareness Project (OGIA), a platform created in 2003 by MIT Media Lab graduate student Ryan McKinley. OGIA allowed any individual on the internet to invert the process of information collection that DARPA had proposed by providing an editable database of personal information on corporate and public officials.

Ryan McKinley discusses his sousveillance projects, including OGIA

But They Rule and OGIA are not a type of artwork likely to be lauded with gallery distribution and acclaim, despite their status as important works with profound social and political consequence. The use of these examples, in which the artist creates a central tool for the public to add content to, is not to infer that sousveillance work is out of the reach of an individual artist’s voice. Just as one tweet could expose profound political strife or or one blogger can influence an entire nation’s economic process so too can an artist expose truths that are hidden in plain view.

Trevor Paglen, Large Hangars and Fuel Storage Tonopah Test Range, NV Distance ~ 18 miles 10:44 a.m. (date unknown)

LIFTING THE FOG

Trevor Paglen is probably the most prominent figure working today at the intersection of sousveillance and the arts. An artist with a research-based practice holding a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley, and until recently better known for his books Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World and Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, Paglen is something of an anomaly. His work though, whether termed experimental geography, research or documentary art, is incredibly provocative, especially when one hears him speak about the process he goes through in attempt to uncover classified information.

Paglen’s work deals explicitly with an attempt to visually represent the invisible: the classified and hidden infrastructure of the military-industrial complex, known commonly in military circles as the “Black World.” For instance, one of his projects is an ongoing series of photographs of secret military installations that are located in areas so remote that there is no vantage point where an individual without profound military clearance could spot them with an unaided eye. Paglen photographs these sites using lenses typically employed in astronomy, shooting from the closest legal vantage point and capturing anything from an abstract field of grey to details of planes unloading. In true performative/interventionist form he has also led groups of people on “expeditions” to various sites, taking them to the very edge of public space to learn about the social construction of hidden space.

Paglen’s work shares a common thread with many works of sousveillance: the art is not an exercise in overtly revealing classified or private information but instead a process of unveiling public information kept as a well-guarded secret.

He does this by reading between the lines in publicly available documents. His 2006 work Terminal Air, a database for tracking government flights (specifically CIA rendition flights), was created by cross-checking a list of aviation companies which hold permits to land on US military bases with public Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records. When further research into a company suggests that it is in fact a front for secret government transportation Paglen logs the public FAA records of all of that company’s aircraft movement into Terminal Air. Finally we are left with an easily accessible visualization of one portion of the world which is hidden in plain sight.

Trevor Paglen’s speech at Google in February 2009, part of the Authors@Google series

The more accessible and wide-reaching communications technologies become the more potential there is for citizens and artists to take active part in maintaining and reinforcing a participatory democracy. A positive move in this direction came when President Obama signed a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government the day after entering office, but its potential is still far from realized. Programs are still being introduced that read more as Red Scare than intelligent discourse: for instance the brand new Apple-lawsuit-bait iWatch campaign in Los Angeles, an essentially co-opted take on sousveillance in which citizens are instructed to submit leads on potential terrorist activity through a variety of platforms. The promotional video openly states its goal as a top-down surveillance system with citizens as sensors, stating “let law enforcement determine what’s a threat. Let the experts decide.”

Los Angeles Police Department’s iWatch Campaign

AIDS-3D also took part in a second, alternative interview which is available on Hyperallergic LABS.

Artie Vierkant: Thanks for agreeing to the interview. First of all, could you guys tell me a little bit about the performance you just did in Spain?

AIDS-3D: Sure no problem. It’s yet to be officially titled but its either “Será” or “Tiempo Reál.”  It was a sort of cyber oracle performance. We got a really great Spanish actress who acted as a medium, I can send you a short video hold on–

We had a feed from twitterfall.com on a teleprompter of all tweets that contained the word será without ‘a’? So in other words, all declarative statements about the future. Most were extremely banal.

AV: Naturally.

AIDS-3D: We had the audio connected to Skype which was sent to another computer which was connected to the audio system which created a delay as the information traveled through the net. And then we had the live feed on Ustream which was projected behind her, also creating a sorta infinity effect. And we had a lot of divination incense surrounding her in metal bowls.

AV: Were there any unexpected moments in the feed or did it end up a sort of dry catalogue?

AIDS-3D: We actually aren’t so sure because it was all in Spanish, which we don’t understand. The audience laughed a few times though.

AV: It sounds interesting, it seems to bridge two relatively common tropes in media art — cataloguing a large quantity of related information and a theme from the opposite spectrum, people like Jimmy Joe Roche &c. who use digital technology to create spiritual/spiritualized experiences

AIDS-3D: Yes, but I guess our message is that spiritual experiences are not in any opposition to media or technology, and often technological developments are initiated by spirituality.

AV: Or religion itself — the clocktower, created by the church initially to regulate working schedules for instance. Though now I guess it’s largely being mediated by technology — televangelism, for instance.

AIDS-3D: For sure. The first computer was used to calculate when Easter was.

William Blake, "Newton" (1795)

AV: So this sort of brings me to another point I wanted to raise, which is to what degree does your art engage with research? It seems like a number of your examples in your recent IMG MGMT essay (William Blake’s “Newton,” Ruth Schwartz Cowan, &c.) are derived from the field of the history and sociology of science. Perhaps I’m asking for how much things like this inform your work, or whether they simply inform AIDS-3D’s general philosophy.

AIDS-3D: Well we are researching stuff all the time on the internet. I think that our work has gotten more research based in the past year. We were really reacting against our experiences in academia and maybe feeling a little bit too apathetic towards art theory.

AV: You mean in the IMG MGMT piece or in general?

AIDS-3D: In general, but this reaction has faded a lot, and we are trying to be more directly communicative about ideas that we think are interesting and important. So that is why our work deals a lot with things that seem to be missing in a lot of usual art-dialogue. The IMG MGMT essay was the first time we’ve tried to communicate them in a semi-traditional essay form. And it felt really good, although I don’t think it’s the culmination.

AIDS-3D, "OMG Obelisk" (2007) installated at the Younger Than Jesus show (via Artnet)

AV: Yeah, and if “Será/Tiempo Reál” is any indication then you’re succeeding in a shift for the work — this performance seems quite at a distance from, say, the “OMG Obelisk” (2007) or even the first issue of Free Internet.

AIDS-3D: I do think that the themes are pretty much consistent, but we are little bit less concerned with being entertaining. I do still like using the language of entertainment or spectacle to communicate serious ideas. Artists are never going to be able to communicate something as clearly and rationally as a scientist or a theorist, it’s our role to combine information with aesthetics and fun.

AV: I couldn’t agree more. So speaking of Free Internet, and since we were just on the dreaded “What is art? / What is the role of the artist?” topic, can you talk a little bit about how you approach criticism in your practice? You seem interested in curation, between Free Internet and the AFK Sculpture Park, and I was wondering how you approached these things — how they’re related, how they’re different, as far as the goals you had in mind for them and the type of work they highlight.

AIDS-3D: Maybe it goes without saying, but there is a huge overlap in curatorial and art-making processes, so we sort of take the artist/curator combination for granted. Our site has always been on this edge, functioning as a sort of cybernetic feedback loop with the web: collections and samples and remixes and compilations.  We don’t really consider this a radical approach though, it wasn’t a specific decision.

We do plan a second issue of Free Internet, which will be themed on the Omega Point. We plan on having more texts but we aren’t sure if we will end up having an open call for submissions in this issue. But anyone can feel free to send us work for consideration (hope@aids-3d.com)

The consistent element will be the format: .pdf, and the presentation as a limited edition multiple/USB sculpture. We have not shown them this way yet, but we plan to in the coming months. Eventually we plan to have more multimedia pack/USB sculptures available, maybe or maybe not contained to the Free Internet brand identity … and we always plan to have it available to download for free. The sculpture editions will be reasonably priced, but of course usable as a hard drive as well. This is the general direction our work is heading. We want to make more hybrid objects we’re calling “active sculptures.” Basically they’re high-end case mods with a specific conceptual purpose. The major works in this genre that we’re planning are a series of monuments/sculptures with servers inside, running distributed computing programs like seti@home or folding@home. http://distributedcomputing.info/

via http://www.aids-3d.com/demands.html (click to enlarge)

AV: Sounds like an interesting way of solving the commerce-object question while still dealing with intangible media. Are you inspired by or do you know of any other works in this genre? The closest I can think of is James Hoff/Danny Snelson’s “Endless Nameless” (2008-2009), where they assembled a group of uniquely-curated hard drives and sell them for $0.99 a gigabyte; they weren’t aestheticized objects though.

AIDS-3D: Yeah, thats what we’re attempting to address at least. I hadn’t seen their project before, but I had seen a few USB-magazine projects and things of the ilk. All of them seemed to lack a very interesting form. For me its too efficient to just package media on a readymade drive and distribute it. Digital media is often thought of as completely intangible, sorta a perfect symbol of dematerialization of art. But every letter you type has a corresponding physical weight, it’s still “real.” Computers and hard drives might be dense but they are still objects with surfaces which can be celebrated and ornamented. I heard this sorta ridiculous fact the other day that all of the traffic on the Internet at any given time has a physical weight of less than a single grain of sand. It’s nice and poetic but it completely overlooks the massive weight and energy that goes into maintaining the infinitesimal data flow.

AV: Do this and “Será/Tiempo Reál” suggest an increased interest in structuring or drawing information from an amorphous public?

AIDS-3D: Yeah I like that the distributed computing sculptures all act in unison to solve problems, but still have a unique form that highlights their physical presence — and of course, gives them a preciousness that outlasts the diminishing value of their working parts.

I think we’ve always been interested in feedback loops with the web and translation between virtual and material, but the latest performance was the first time we tried to really make this explicit.

AV: Are your sculptures then going to be entering (at least theoretically or mimetically) a notion of the “Web of Things?” Or maybe, what do you think of that vision of the future?

AIDS-3D, "No Fear" (date unknown)

AIDS-3D: Well I don’t think we’re necessarily going to have RFID tags on all of our socks and bananas, but yes we’re heading in that direction.  I think that the distinction between objects and information will continue to blur as home 3D printing and manufacturing gets better and better.

AV: I noticed you have a solo show upcoming in November at Gentili Apri; can you share, or are you at liberty to discuss, what you’ll be exhibiting?

AIDS-3D: Actually that show has been rescheduled for February. We’ll also be having a solo show in Stockholm with Niklas Belenius around the same time. It’s too early to say for sure what will be included but there will definitely be some iterations of the active sculpture idea, and some other works that maybe emphasize an inability to make value judgments when given so much access to different sorta of information, and the potentially dangerous (or maybe not) threat of amateurism — i.e. “knowledge enabled mass destruction” that could come from nanotechnology and biotechnology or bedroom nuclear bombs or whatever.

AV: Do you really have a concern over both attention spans in the age of a web with a bounty of information aggregation/sorting tools and the threat of this information to be used meaningfully (detrimental or not)? Do you think these are contradictory concerns or does this, like the semantically “dematerialized material” of the internet and internet art, point to an internal contradiction, or maybe an internal ambivalence, in the way we use/view this technology?

AIDS-3D: I don’t think its an apocalyptic problem, but it makes me stressed out sometimes. I feel like the only way we can adapt to having access to so much information is if we also develop radical-life-extension so that we have long enough lives to do anything with all of the detritus that’s available. As it is now, it’s definitely still uncomfortable, but I expect that this is only a short-term growing pain and not a permanent effect.

A young artist in school used to worship the paintings of Cézanne. He looked at and studied all the books he could find on Cézanne and copied all of the reproductions of Cézanne’s work he found in books.

He visited a museum and for the first time saw a real Cézanne painting. He hated it. It was nothing like the Cézannes he had studied in the books. From that time on, he made all of his paintings the sizes of paintings reproduced in books and he painted them all in black and white. He also printed captions and explanations on the paintings as in books. Often he just used words.

And one day he realized that very few people went to art galleries and museums but many people looked at books and magazines as he did and they got them through the mail as he did.

Moral: It’s difficult to put a painting in a mailbox.

- John Baldessari, “The Best Way to Do Art” (from Ingres and Other Parables, 1971)

It is no longer difficult to put a painting in a mailbox. The key is selecting the right mailbox.

The Internet has bred a certain degree of cultural democratization — citizen journalism, revolts aided by the use of Twitter, the rise of rapper Soul’ja Boy, etc. The same is true (to a degree) in art, but for the most part older methods of working stay cribbed in older methods of distribution. Paintings and sculptures are displayed in physical spaces, some video artists still routinely attempt to maintain the object aura by limiting their distribution to a production run of 5 discs, even digital media-based performances often occupy physical space (see Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas’ Technésexual).

Unconventional press: a still from a Ryan Trecartin video is posted as a Facebook user's profile picture (Click image to enlarge)

This is not to say that exposure to these artworks is not aided by digital media but instead to say that the full experience of the actual artworks still depends on viewing in a gallery, museum, or conference context. To use Baldessari’s commentary on the technological state of art exposure in the 1970s as a benchmark, we haven’t proceeded quite as far as we’d like to think in terms of bringing access to the experience of viewing a work of art. Many Internet- or technology-based artists, reading Baldessari’s comments, would likely feel either sympathy or a hint of familiarity in words that may echo their own reasons for turning to a more decentralized practice.

Still, the improvement of our artistic tools can’t be overlooked. A far cry from the stunted pace of print magazines and books, digital forums have been creating new channels for young and contemporary artists to build notoriety and become subsumed into the behemoth corpus of the “professional art world.” Two common examples can be found in this year’s Younger Than Jesus show: Whitney-Biennial-J-Paul-Getty-Saatchi-Gallery-Guggenheim-Museum-shown artist Ryan Trecartin, so the story goes, was first discovered through Friendster, and AIDS-3D (collaborative group Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas) have said previously in an interview that one of the ways their images first began to spread was through people posting their work to MySpace profiles.

A view of the source code of JODI.org (Click image to enlarge)

Where things really start getting interesting, however, and where exposure becomes both more easily attained and more difficult to make palpable, are in the work of artists who step away from the object. Guthrie Lonergan’s guthrielonergan.com [link NSFW] references the communicability of memes by sampling one directly (tetka.swf) and performing the Cindy Sherman/Tseng Kwong Chi-esque action of inserting himself as the central figure. Entering net.art go-tos JODI’s website (JODI.org) presents you with a home page that looks like complete gibberish in a browser, but when the source code is viewed it is revealed that the underlying structure of the page is a series of schematic ASCII drawings. Both of these projects are instantly accessible in their entirety on the Internet, and thus endlessly communicable, linkable, shareable and can be analyzed instantly by anyone from any community and for any reason.

But web page as art, despite its existence as one successful liberation of art from (physical) object, is not something I am propheting as a critical thinking point in the discourse of media art at the moment. These developments have happened, they are continuing to happen, and the discourse around them will continue to evolve. What I want to talk about specifically is an artwork that addresses the ability for digital-only objects to gain exposure, that exists and is important only because of systems of discourse and notoriety enabled by the Internet.

Stephen McLaughlin's 'Issue 1'

ISSUE 1, THE POETRY BOT ANTHOLOGY

At the end of summer 2008, Stephen McLaughlin released a piece of conceptual poetry on the Internet dubbed Issue 1. Written entirely by a poetry-generating bot (ETC, standing for Electronic Text Composition), which was created by Jim Carpenter, Issue 1 was a .pdf comprised of thousands of pages and thousands of (dismal, mundane, clearly algorithmically-generated) poems. However, the content of the piece was not the inner contents of the .pdf but the manner in which it was released on the Internet.

Each page of Issue 1 contained a different generated poem attributed to a different real poet (though some other cultural figures, notably Lawrence Lessig, make it onto the list as well). When the .pdf was finished the thousands of poems were attributed to thousands of different names culled from poetry listserves and poetry blogs.

McLaughlin then posted Issue 1 on the Internet under the guise of being a curated anthology of contemporary poetics. When he released the .pdf on forgodot.com (a site that is now defunct) and published a blog post listing the names of each poet used in the publication, it made a significant portion of the contemporary and conceptual poetry world immediately take notice. As McLaughlin explained that the milieu he and many of the names on the list were working in was small enough that it was necessary for many of the writers to set up a Google Alert for their own name so that they could track down any press mentions or else they may otherwise never be noticed.

By the end of the year Issue 1 was completely exposed and articles about the project appeared everywhere from the Harriet Poetics Blog to an online-only edition of The Nation.

The poets themselves responded thunderously: some called for lawsuits, one said happily, “I’m pretty pleased with my poem…I think I’ll put it in my next book.”

However the most poignant comment may be one poster who simply asks: “I haven’t ever heard of any of these people. Are they really famous?”