While thinking about how the internet is changing how we find and promote art, it’s important to highlight a new tool that might help us understand our online presence: Klout. What is an artist’s reach? How many people can be expected to show up for a young artist’s solo show? Which critics really matter? These are questions that have only become more common, and although many of us feel queasy about the goings-on of the art market, and possibly more so about quantifying influence, it’s a reality we can’t ignore.
Internet Art
Posted inOpinion
The Museum of Endangered Sounds
Brendan Chilcutt’s Museum of Endangered Sounds is an online, interactive museum of the old sounds from outdated technology.
Posted inArt
Twitter as Art
After thinking through the idea of Tumblr as art, I began to find the difference between various social media platforms glaringly obvious. Marshall McCluhan’s phrase “the medium is the message” came to mind. How do settings and mediums change or possibly mandate artistic intention? After exploring Tumblr’s unique qualities, I wanted to expand the focus to another relatively new platform for artistic creation, Twitter.
Posted inArt
Cloaque.org, An Online Collaborative Collage
An interview with Carlos Sáez, about his collaborative piece, “Cloaque.org.” The tumblelog, created with Cladia Mate, is a stunning collaborative collage.
Posted inArt
Tumblr as Art
Much has been written about the rise of internet art. We’ve seen URL, Twitter and Google Docs works. But until recently I hadn’t encountered Tumblr art.
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Screens, Networks and Our Imagination
When I visited JODI’s current exhibition, Street Digital, at the Museum of the Moving Image, I wondered how the notorious duo would take their earlier net art practices into the “street” (or gallery). Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans of JODI became well-known in the 1990s for upending traditional internet experiences with their online artworks. From wwwwwwwww.jodi.org to http://404.jodi.org/, they presented abstract code and programming glitches as art, bringing the background source of digital works into the foreground. Their work looked more like a crash of your web-browsing program rather than a coherent, readable text.
Posted inOpinion
The Internet Makes Me Happy
An online artwork by Emilio Gomariz makes you self conscious about enjoying the web.
Posted inArt
Getting Naked for Ai Weiwei [NSFW]
BEIJING — When Ai Weiwei’s assistant, Beijing artist Zhao Zhao, was brought in for questioning recently, the supposed charges were simple: distribution of pornography. The image in question was “One Tiger, Eight Breasts,” a shot of Ai with four young women, all of them naked. I first saw the photo in August 2010, when he tweeted a link to it and said “Trusting each other fully,” though the link to the image no longer works.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading includes Tracey Emin’s gift to 10 Downing St, you too can levitate in photos, Koons as roadkill, Nike’s swoosh is 40, internet art bubble, evolution of the hipster, autobot aethetics, street art in East Timor & more.
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China’s Instant Messenger and Why New Media Types Need It
It’s a well-known truism that the internet in China is lousy. But business has to be done and file transfers have to be made. New media artists in particular, who can work with large complex files, would be at a loss if they relied on Western sites like YouSendIt (blocked), DropBox (blocked) and even Skype (routed through servers outside China). Any file over 50 MB can literally take hours to download from the web, if not longer. What’s a file-heavy new media artist or denizen to do? Enter Tencent QQ, China’s top instant messaging system.
Posted inArt
WTF Is Google+? An Artist’s Handbook
Community is enough to make Google+ worth a whirl, but what exactly does the site provide for artists? Conversely, what is it missing? A few initial thoughts based on a week’s worth of use.
Posted inArt
Five Problems With Showing Internet Art
Art Fag City associate editor Will Brand responded to my review of curator Lindsay Howard’s Speed Show Awareness of Everything on Facebook, and the conversation quickly turned to the intricacies and etiquette involved in exhibiting internet art.
