Brad Troemel
Posted inArt

Revisiting Tumblr as Art

by Ben Valentine

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of commissioned essay for The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium. This essay is a revised and expanded version of Ben Valentine’s “Tumblr as Art” that was first published on June 19, 2012.

Much has been written about the rise of internet art. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen net artworks such as “intotime.org” by Rafaël Rozendaal; Twitter art by the likes of An Xiao and others; “e.m-bed.de/d/,” an immersive online music video experience by Yung Jake; and “$,” a Google Docs piece by Man Bartlett. But there is a burgeoning field of both social and discrete, beautiful, and weird internet art that demands our attention: Tumblr art.

Posted inArt

Five Art Projects That Change the Way We Browse the Web

by Ben Valentine

BERKELEY, California — Whatever definition for art you hold dear, quality art often offers the viewer a chance to challenge that definition and a new means to look at the world. New perspectives are important: they disrupt our expectations, allowing for new ways of thinking, new dialogues, and new ideas. A particularly interesting genre of internet art offers the same possibility. Rather than the single URL-based work that links nowhere, works that embrace the internet’s networked structure allow us to engage and explore the internet in an entirely new way. These works give us new ways to browse.

Posted inArt

The Potential for Journalism in the Expanded Field

by Ben Valentine

BERKELEY, California — As more of us can afford the tools historically only available to publishing houses, we have increasingly adopted them to share our stories and thoughts online. The invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s cheapened and quickened the arduous process of writing texts by hand. The cheaper the publishing, the cheaper the books, making information more accessible and creating an economic environment where more people could become publishers, creating an increasingly diverse, cheap, and accessible flow of information to an increasingly wider audience. Before the printing press books were rare and expensive, few possessed them and few could read them. The internet has expanded what the printing press started at an unprecedented degree.

Posted inOpinion

Required Reading

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

This edition of Required Reading has a heavy dose of California and some very critical texts.

Jon Jackson says goodbye to LA with billboards — Mike Kelley shows in LA after 8 years — Donald Kuspit tears apart John Baldessari — Paddy Johnson gives Brad Troemel the thumbs down — House Republicans hate federal arts funding

Posted inArt

Always Social: Getting Noticed (2008-2010), Part Two

by AX Mina

The most striking aspect of social media art is that it contains facets of net.art, by being digital; visual art, by existing on a two-dimensional surface; public art, by existing in spaces used habitually by hundreds of millions of people; and performance art, by being inherently social. Whether the aggregate is greater than its sum remains to be seen …