Various logos dreamed up post-Deepwater Horizon disaster: (clockwise from top left) arc312 for LogoMyWay, FuturisticLOGO for LogoMyWay, DrakePSolus for LogoMyWay, zoom-dg for LogoMyWay, unknown for Greenpeace UK, and sophie for LogoMyWay.

An entry by an unknown contestant for Greenpeace UK’s Rebrand BP contest depicts conventions seen commonly throughout contest entries. (via Greenpeace UK's Behind the Logo Flickr set) (click to enlarge)

The BP Deepwater oil spill disaster has sparked a tremendous amount of creative outrage, some of which we’ve been exploring on Hyperallergic LABS all week. In addition to various protests and performances, not to mention some satirical Twitter feeds, there have been numerous attempts to critically appropriate BP’s logo. Amateur and professional graphic design illustrations have been circulated throughout the Internet to re-brand the corporation’s image to reflect its destructive nature.

The inherent attractiveness of the current BP “Helios” logo appears to be a big part of why there has been such an enormous visual response to the BP oil spill. BP became “Beyond Petroleum” in 2000, re-presenting itself as a leader in other more environmental friendly fuels. Designed by logo design firm Landor in 2000, the green and yellow sunburst looks like a bright, healthy flower, visually linking humble, lowercase “bp” with the green movement. The geometric shapes give a familiar, retro vibe. The glaring offenses of the Deepwater disaster are in such sharp contrast to this sunny image that the BP Helios logo has become a symbol ripe for distorting.

The thousands of designs entered in either contest to rebrand BP demonstrate the public’s desire to speak out on the disaster. Most commonly, there are a lot of spirited, if superficial, takes on the logo, many featuring the Helios sunburst dripping with black or brown oil, such as this one by an unknown designer from Greenpeace UK’s contest. While it’s certainly energizing to see so many people creatively engaged in the efforts to challenge and tarnish BP’s image, the images created often offer an unnuanced critique of the company. Aesthetically, an image like this would certainly pack a punch if spotted at your local gas station – the ecological green and yellow flower tainted by murky oil isn’t a pleasant image, and makes people think twice about the environmental concerns of oil usage. However, as an artwork meant to challenge the larger issues at hand, the image doesn’t offer much of a message beyond “BP’s oil is bad for the environment.”

Gremlin's entry for Logo My Way's contest draws connections between the oil industry and wars past and present. (via LogoMyWay) (click to enlarge)

A second, more layered and incensed critique of BP pops up among amateur logo re-appropriations. This image, from Logo My Way’s contest, by Gremlin, borrows the silhouette from Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong soldier Nguyen Van Lem in 1968. The BP sunburst logo behind the threatened figure evokes the imminent gunshot, suggesting the calamity and horrors of the victims of the Deepwater disaster. Instead of a gun, however, the person on the left brandishes the nozzle of a gas pump. This image underscores the power of the oil industry, suggesting that the public’s been forced into this dire energy situation. However, as reflective of the intricate nature our culture’s problems with the oil industry, this image is still limited in its message. The connection to the Vietnam War remains tenuous, and the multiplicity of factors surrounding in the oil industry’s environmental concerns are lost. While difficult to apply as an actual logo, it’s still a very arresting image.

Graphic Designer Jason Prementer presents an aesthetically cohesive but less emotional response to the disaster. (via jasonpermenter.com) (click to enlarge)

Then there are the less emotional images more commonly created by professional graphic designers. This image was designed by professional graphic designer Jason Permenter, featured on his tumblelog. It utilizes the sunburst shape of the BP logo to evoke a sunrise, a new day perhaps, on planet Earth. Our little planet floats in space, which is coated in the subtle rainbow sheen of oil spills. This size of the logo-sun in comparison to the earth reflects the power the BP Corporation has over us as a planet. The solid simplicity of the design is effective in sending the message that our future is going to be determined by this crisis. It’s not especially nuanced, and the prettiness of it belies the dangers involved, but it catches your eye and utilizes the logo and related aesthetics to send its message. Ultimately, cohesive imagery wins out over explicit political message.

For me, the bottom line of each image is the viewer’s response to the response. Does it inspire action, emotion? Does it illuminate a different way of looking at the symbol? How does form create and enhance meaning? If anything, these images prove the power of a brand’s logo over the consuming public, and many people are stepping up to the challenge of rethinking that omnipresence.

Mark Wilson, “Untitled Gray Ground & Untitled Light Gray Ground” (1973) (click to enlarge)

Personal computing may have begun in the 1980s but the history of computer art started much earlier during a period when only a few visionaries sensed the impact computers were going to have on our lives.

The Slovakia-based Translab has a good online archive of early computer art from names that aren’t widely known but were important for their early work with computers. These works date from the third quarter of the 20th C. and reveal a parallel history of electronic experimentation that doesn’t have much relation to commonly known art history.

For further reading on the topic, Wikipedia’s page on the topic is very helpful. One fact in particular jumped out at me, namely that most of the creators of early computer art were engineers and scientists — and not “artists” — who had access to university computing facilities.

According to the Translab page, the two major centers of computer art during this early period were The Murray Hill lab, Bell Laboratories, New Jersey, US (now AT&T), and Technische Universitat Stuttgart, Germany (Max Bense).

According to Wikipedia:

The first two exhibitions of computer art were held in 1965 – Computer-Generated Pictures, April 1965, at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, and Generative Computergrafik, February 1965, at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany. The Stuttgart exhibit featured work by Georg Nees; the New York exhibit featured work by Bela Julesz and A. Michael Noll. Note the names of these expositions, not mentioning the word ‘art,’ because these ‘generated pictures’ were not yet seen as such.

A. Michael Noll, “Four Computer-Generated Random Patterns Based on the Composition Criteria Of Mondrian's Composition With Lines” (1964) (click to enlarge)

I don’t know much about the Stuttgart space mentioned above but I can say that I’m not surprised that the Howard Wise Gallery was the venue for the one of the earliest computer art shows. During its short existence in New York (1960–71), the Wise Gallery was home to many firsts in electronic and digital art. Owner Howard Wise’s New York Times obituary mentions he was, “an art patron and a former dealer who gave important early support to the technology in art movement in the United States” and that his gallery exhibited “the first survey in the United States of contemporary kinetic art” and three years later he showed “the first comprehensive survey in this country of kinetic light art.” As if that wasn’t enough, Wise also organized the first exhibition of video art in 1969, TV as a Creative Medium, and “two years later he founded Electronic Arts Intermix, a nonprofit organization that distributes artists’ videotapes and provides editing and post-production facilities for independent videomakers … which became a model for other arts support groups in New York and elsewhere.”

While some of these early computer art projects look more like experiments than finished projects, I would love to see a comprehensive exhibition of this period that could give us a critical assessment of the success and/or failure of these projects.

Hat tip @DesignObserver via @kirstenbutler

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Scattered amidst the usual YouTube bootlegs and video tributes was a beautiful cover of “I Want You Back” done by KT Tunstall. She opens the song with a simple, “I think you might know it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The audience, of course, goes wild. Everyone knows the song, and both they and Tunstall rock out to the familiar beat. The specific YouTube video I found had already had more than a million views, and the comments are filled with praise, both for her and Michael Jackson.

A good cover song helps a young band connect with the crowd, and a great cover song elevates both the new rendition and the original. Johnny Cash made waves a few years ago for his cover of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt,” and Tori Amos dedicated an entire album to covering the songs of male performers singing about women.

Johnny Cash

As an artist who hangs out a good deal with musicians, I’ve always been jealous of jam session culture. Most visual and conceptual artists I know prefer to work alone, and they only show their work after months of painstaking labor. On the other hand, most musicians I know are constantly humming their tunes, singing with each other, singing each other’s work.

In that sense, then, musicians are regularly covering songs. They are always singing, always jamming. And it’s in that sense that I find cover songs so wonderful. To me, they are not simply tributes to another musician. They are not derivative works (the words and notes are more or less the same), or imitations (each cover song reflects the style of the musician), or remixes (the cover performer isn’t trying to change the song per se).

In other words, cover songs are a lot of fun.

In October 1969, artist Vito Acconci performed “Following Piece” (1969). A study in the public spaces we occupy and assumptions around privacy, Acconci followed random people in Manhattan during the month and reported on their activities until they entered a private area such as an apartment or car.

Here’s what Media Art Net had to say about it:

Following Piece is one of Acconci’s early works. The underlying idea was to select a person from the passers-by who were by chance walking by and to follow the person until he or she disappeared into a private place where Acconci could not enter. The act of following could last a few minutes, if the person then got into a car, or four or five hours, if the person went to a cinema or restaurant. Acconci carried out this performance everyday for a month. And he typed up an account of each pursuit, sending it each time to a different member of the art community.

It got me thinking. Just as “I Want You Back,” written and performed by a disco group of boys from Gary, Indiana, has a different tenor when done by a female rocker from Scotland, I wondered how “Following Piece” might be performed in this age of social media and mobile phones.

Twitter and Facebook have become new forms of public space, as people share personal details about their lives and encourage others to follow them. These messages are archived both on server farms and on any personal computer that receives them. In the physical world, the addition of still and video cameras to mobile phone has made it easy to record the activities of others without their knowledge. And easy access to live web cams and Google Streetview has given desktop junkies the power to observe others with a few clicks.

Artist Nina Meledandri snapped this photo with her phone while following someone. Full documentation at http://fp20.tumblr.com

So why not do a cover? I invited members of @Platea, the social media art collective I perform with, to join me in “Following Piece 2.0.” Each of us covered the performance in our own way on Twitter, using the tools of social media and the Internet. We organized the tweets using the hashtag #fp20, to resemble the “reports” Acconci made at the end of each following.

The ten performances varied widely. On the one hand was a physical following done much like Acconci, but captured digitally. Nina Meledandri, for instance, followed a woman from the subway and along the streets of Manhattan and broadcast her notes and phone captures using both Twitter and Tumblr.

On the other hand was a digital following done purely with a computer, using the public space of the Internet as an updated version of the streets of Manhattan. Jonny Gray reported on the public tweets of those living near him, and in my own performance, I used Google Streetview to follow individuals, with a simple click and drag until they vanished from view.

Anyone following #fp20 would see a Twitter bizzaro world resembling Acconci’s original reports. The tweets seemed to resemble a regular scan of Twitter, with mundane updates and random goings-on, but those clued into the purpose of the hashtag understood they were reports of someone else’s activities, whether online or offline.

Tweets from @christinielsen during "Following Piece 2.0"

In a cover song, I find the work of the original artist to be just as important as the performance of the new artist, even as the latter is using different tools and rhythms to express the same beat. KT Tunstall’s rendition of “I Want You Back” belongs as much to the Jackson 5 as it does to Tunstall.

In this sense, then “Following Piece 2.0″ brought up the same issues as Acconci’s original work, as we explored the blurry boundaries of public and private space. Even in the world of social media, where having a high follower count and earning retweets reflects one’s popularity as a tweeter, many performers expressed a mild discomfort with following others online without their knowledge.

And yet, though performed in the digital sphere using publicly available information, the voyeuristic tenor increased, as the followings went real time and reached hundreds, if not thousands, of computers and servers. The performances belonged as much to the turn-of-the-decade Internet as they did to turn-of-the-decade Manhattan.

A fellow on Christopher St. in London whom I "followed" using Google Street View

“Following Piece 2.0″ was, in its own way, a jam session, a free-spirited mishmash of familiar beats and tunes. As fine art begins to explore the cultural paradigm shifts brought about by mobile technology and the social Internet, I hope artists borrow more regularly from open source, Creative Commons culture as we develop and share our work. Social and digital media in particular, a breeding ground for retweets, screen grabs, and viral marketing, present an ideal venue for new ways to challenge rigid concepts of originality in fine art.

Of course, the distinction between “covering” a Picasso and simply repainting it can seem more like a matter of semantics than art criticism. But if we can accept the basic idea of a fine art cover, borrowed from the traditions of music, we would also have to accept that many covers in art would be the equivalent of run-of-the-mill videos shot on webcam by a practicing guitarist. A mediocre cover just makes us miss the original work. The best covers, on the other hand, make us love the new version as much as the original.

Importantly, as artists approach a world that is becoming more global and technologically-complex, cover art can help us more deeply understand and respond to artists creating in different cultural and historical contexts and developing work in different media. A physical performance can go digital; a work from Chicago can see new life in Guangzhou; an oil painting from 1910 can become a photograph in 2010. Far from being derivative, covering a piece of art can help energize the work in novel ways that engage our audiences and challenge our own artistic practice.

And to be honest, if nothing else, there’s one very good lesson I learned from the performance. I had a blast doing “Following Piece 2.0″ and watching how others performed the piece.

In other words, cover art, like cover music, is just darn fun.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

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?”