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A beautifully crafted set of four tea towels sporting a series of authentic search engine results returned to a user when the criteria, 'Please Help Me', 'Is Anybody there?', 'Please listen to me' and, 'Can you hear me?' were entered into the search field, while using Google in Netscape 4.7 on Mac OS 9.2 or Netscape 6 on Windows 98.
A sequence of fair use background images arranged for aesthetic and formal reasons, paired with a short story assignment generated through Amazon's Mechanical Turk in response to the image sequence.
-- FROM THE ONLINE SHOWCASE "MADE IN INTERNET" ORGANIZED BY MARCIN RAMOCKI FOR ARTBOOM FESTIVAL 2010
Nowhere is a three-dimensional milling machine that carves a landscape relief on a 70x70x10cm large block of hard foam. The machine receives a stream of live search requests from the german search engines metager and metager2 (www.metager.de) via the internet. The users search movements erode rivers and canyons on the surface. Search requests that shoot through the internet just for a fraction of a second and generate an answer on the searchers screen, cause the machine to write a constant growing sculpture into the space. The continuous stream of changing search requests defines form and rhythm of this process.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE ARTIST'S STATEMENT
This loss of trust in humanoid media is accompanied by a new silence in the dialogue between master and servant. The language that is directed at the servant becomes terse. The previously still cultivated courtly official style gives way to short commands. The example of these commands reveals what has becomes apparent: communication has become machine language. William Thackeray even brags about this in 1850: “We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years.” After its high point in the eighteenth century, communications between lords and servants seem to have come to a standstill. “In the Victorian household, there is an impression of increased silence.” What causes this silence? Something bisects the old human-human interface. The transition from listening to dumb waiter hints at the cause: the nineteenth century is a time in which the most varied services are transferred to technical media, which in their telematic, indirect, oblique communicative abilities replace the personal conversation with a depersonalized understanding. In this gradual but nonetheless comprehensive process of transferal may lie a reason why the corporation AskJeeves ultimately decided to abandon the imagery of the servant.
But why are these functional characteristics of various facets of domestic service relevant? Within those facets of the servant that elevate him or her to be the center of information gathering and dissemination is hidden a comparison with the service portfolio of a search engine. Thereby one may demonstrate how thoroughly the knowledge of search engines as well as domestics can be assessed. On the other hand, the implicit juxtaposition of servant and search engine susses out Jeeves, forcing one to pursue the question of the plausibility of the metaphor. The privileged knowledge of domestics feeds not only off their activity as messengers but also off their roles as literary narrators and as shapeshifters between the hierarchies, not to mention their effectiveness as spies. All of these facets—the collection of information, its transmission and bundling, and its eventual processing—suggest a servant in whom an actor may be seen, one who operates in a structurally analogous way to those agents that hunt data for Google: the transition from servant to bot takes just one small, significant step. Virtual agents like Googlebot, Teoma (the search bot of AskJeeves), and web crawlers in general are programmed to be informers that pass regularly through the Internet, constantly searching for new information, which they gainfully process.
With the transferal of the classic service functions to technical media, a setting emerges over the course of the nineteenth century and forms the basis of today’s familiar search engines. The servant is transformed into a technological conduit for data: first, as the telegraph wire, then the telephone line, and, ultimately, the modern computer data cable. With the delegation of service to things, the servant becomes a media-technical figure of knowledge, the descendents of which are the search bots of today.
-- EXCERPT FROM "ASK JEEVES: SERVANTS AS SEARCH ENGINES" BY MARKUS KRAJEWSKI IN GREY ROOM, WINTER 2010
Each code represents a visual enryption of a search on 'Aram Bartholl' in a specific language on Google.
A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person's name at Google.
A large number of people can be found by name on Google today. Everyone who is working on a computer and uses the internet regularly can be found on Google. Even people who don't use computers can be found sometimes because their names appear in 'old' media (i.e. books) on the net.
'Egosurfing' is a popular way for a user to find out what websites and information Google returns on his/her name search.
How many hits does Google show on my name? Am I popular? Do I want to be found at all? Who writes about me? What do people find out about me when they google my name? Am I in concurrence to other persons with the same name? Do I rely on the results Google shows me on a person's name? In which way do I relate to someone which I only known by Google results?
Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" centers around faith in the power of the keyword to unlock its bottomless treasure chest and put the right answer in one window. Years have passed since the company's ranking algorithm outpaced the approach of human navigators filing information into channels -- an approach that Yahoo has been trying to keep alive by farming the digital labor to users themselves. But even as search algorithms make dinosaurs of the Dewey decimal and other brain-powered systems, it might be worth considering the benefits of staying open to a plurality of variously scaled methods.
These issues converge in Danny Snelson's work as a writer, editor, and archivist. His titles increasingly overlap in the internet's library without walls--an environment that often embodies the Foucauldian idea that "one never archives without editorial frames and 'writerly' narratives (or designs)," as Snelson put it in an email. As an archivist, he has made substantial efforts to preserve endangered cultural artifacts -- making them universally accessible and useful, you might say -- on behalf of PennSound, an audio archive specializing in recorded poetry, and UbuWeb, where, at the suggestion of founder Kenneth Goldsmith, he scanned out-of-print titles and reformatted them as PDFs for free distribution via the site's /ubu channel. The PennSounds and UbuWebs of the internet undertake preservation projects that small presses and recording labels can't touch due to financial reasons, thus ensuring that experimental work will continue to reach audiences in years to come. Distribution networks like these matter in an environment where the internet (for those without access to academic libraries, at least) is often the first and last stop for research -- a realization that impelled Goldsmith to formulate a radical ontology in the title of his 2005 essay, "If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist."
The copyright struggles of the last decade give archivists of Snelson's generation reason to be wary of the legal and political ramifications of distributed networks -- perhaps more so than people like Goldsmith, who first encountered the internet in its early, utopian days with fully formed ideas about the limits of print publishing. This, in part, is why Snelson balances his expansion of searchable online catalogues with the creation of hermetic archives. One of these is a site devoted to digitizing Marshall McLuhan's legacy; the link to it is passed hand-to-hand, and the site is coded with a robots.txt file blocking search engines and the unfavorable copyright attention they might bring. Then there is Endless Nameless, a collaboration with James Hoff under the brand of No Input Books. Hoff and Snelson fill hard drives with downloaded avant-garde content and sell them, iTunes-like, for $0.99 per GB. Materials are sorted in folders with the names of the publishers, labels, and galleries that first brought them to the public--a decision intended, Snelson writes, to preserve "the material production history that often gets lost in digital distribution." The list of folder titles ranges from Ace Books to Zone Books (along with a few dozen numerical titles), adding up to approximately four terabytes, a number that, in Snelson's estimation, exceeds the data hosted on UbuWeb. For each Endless Nameless customer, the folders are selected randomly to fit the desired amount of memory. The hard drive's discrete physical form makes it easy to keep it off the grid.
Ceci Moss is Rhizome's Senior Editor.
For my top 5-10, I've decided to pull together my favorite online exhibitions of internet-based art from the past 12 months.
Each week or so, Computers Club introduce a new work by an artist. Many of the Computer Clubbers have helped to define the current crop of internet-based art influenced by Larry Cuba and Tron-style computer graphics, such as Laura Brothers, Nicholas Sassoon, and Elna Frederick.
► Internet Archaeology's "Guest Galleries"
Internet Archaeology is a site devoted to the recovery of graphic artifacts found within earlier internet culture. (Think Olia Lialina's A Vernacular Web.) Their Guest Galleries section features original work using images culled from the collection by Tabor Robak, Krist Wood, Jacob Broms Engblom, Daniel Leyva, Emma Balkind, and Nasdaq 5000. My favorite piece so far is Robak's Heaven, which I posted to Rhizome not too long ago.
► JstChillin's "Serial Chillers in Paradise"
Run by Bay Area-based artists Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito, JstChillin's "Serial Chillers in Paradise" series is quite ambitious -- for a full year, they're knocking out a new work, in the form of a solo site, by an artist every two weeks, with an accompanying essay by Denny and Ito.
Like software, the curatorial project NETMARES & NETDREAMS signal the progression of their exhibitions through versioning. The exhibition "2.2" went live last summer, and it is loosely based on beach iconography, with a gloss of dark surrealism. A sense of the ominous pervades throughout, from Harm van den Dorpel's dizzying montage of palm trees to Michael Guidetti's loop of a rippling, virtual ocean.
► Club Internet's "Dissociation"
Now closed, Club Internet's fall exhibition "Dissociation" was entertainingly cryptic, as I discussed in a previous post to Rhizome. Of the included works in the show, Harm van den Dorpel's Ethereal Others received the most airplay, but Christopher Pappas' RADIUS (CIRCULAR) and Ola Vasiljeva's Joan Miró were also quite intriguing.
► mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com Curated by Tolga Taluy for the Xth Biennale de Lyon
The theme for this year's Xth Biennale de Lyon was "The Spectacle of the Everyday" -- a proposition that would be difficult to fully carry through, I think, without an online segment. Thankfully, Tolga Taluy curated a special online exhibition of internet-based art as a portion of the biennial, titled "mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com" with works by thirty-one artists, including Nicholas O'Brien, Isabelle Prim, Math Wrath, Nicolas Djandji, Raphaël Bastide, Petra Cortright, and many others.
► Why + Wherefore's "7 x 7" Series
Why + Wherefore-ians Summer Guthery, Lumi Tan, and Nicholas Weist presented two installments, one complete and one in process, of their series "7 x 7" this year - the first invited 7 publications to curate 7 shows, and the second invited 7 curators to put together 7 shows. The results are varied and unique - ranging from a gallery of Flickr photos tagged "emoticon" (by I Heart Photograph) to a selection of mp3s in which the narrator describes the visual details of an item, such as a photo or a website (by VVORK) to artworks made in Photoshop (by Josh Kline). Rhizome was a participant as well, with "The Long Gallery" curated by Brian Droitcour, a collection of works that exceeded the browser's frame horizontally.
► "The "Painting" Show" Curated by Hanne Mugaas, in collaboration with Private Circulation
I liked the way this show skirted the divide between online and offline exhibition -- all the works were distributed in pdf form by Private Circulation, with the intention that the recipient would print out and display the 10 "paintings" by artists AIDS 3-D, Kerstin Bratsch, Charles Broskoski, Marcel Dionne, Aleksandra Domanovic, Anders Nordby, Guillaume Pilet, Hayley Silverman, Anne de Vries, and Ulrich Wulff.
► The web web
thewebweb is a net art website in seven acts.
The balance between Internet mythology and new html technology (canvas & js) is perfect.
By Anton Gerasimenko, Sergey Chikuyonok, Kostya Loginov, Showpanorama, Vladislav Yakovlev, Natasha Klimchuk, Kate Malykh, Sergey Filippov, Andrey Zubrilov, Anton Schnaider, Vasily Dubovoy
► Webjam
< ~ ~> surfing club
► Avastard by Carlo Lowfi
A great piece with Twitter avatars.
► Temporary.cc
The question about archive when visit really matters.
► GEO GOO by JODI
One of my favorite 2009 exhibition. The way they expose net art in real life was for me inspiring.
Photo gallery
► Mybiennalisbetterthanyours
A Fresh net art overview for 2009 by Tolga Taluy
► Ben Schumacher
Especially his piece 0%
► Junk Jet
A nerdy fanzine discovered in 2009.
► net.art GIANT FUNNEL
The feed I should take on a desert island.
August 4, 2006, the personal search queries of 650,000 AOL (America Online) users accidentally ended up on the Internet, for all to see. These search queries were entered in AOL's search engine over a three-month period. After three days AOL realized their blunder and removed the data from their site, but the sensitive private data had already leaked to several other sites.
I love Alaska tells the story of one of those AOL users. We get to know a religious middle-aged woman from Houston, Texas, who spends her days at home behind her TV and computer. Her unique style of phrasing combined with her putting her ideas, convictions and obsessions into AOL's search engine, turn her personal story into a disconcerting novel of sorts.
Triptych 2009 from siebren versteeg on Vimeo.
Internet connected computer program output to gold leafed LCD monitors, realtime image searches for 'triptych'
Samara Golden’s colorful, multifaceted video and sculptural installations have been popping up quite a bit in New York City recently. Earlier this year, the artist’s "Yes no party" was set up within an alcove in the basement of the Sculpture Center in Queens as part of the group exhibition “In Practice Winter '09.” Golden then presented her sculpture "There's more but it's invisible" at Columbia University’s 2009 M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition, and this piece is now on view at the Project Room at Marvelli Gallery in Chelsea until June 27. I spoke with the artist at the Sculpture Center and then at her studio, where we discussed her interest in combining video and sculpture, her incorporation of images culled from image searches on the web into her installations, and more. - Chloe Gray
You surf the web for images to incorporate into your installations. Can you talk about your surfing methodology?
Sometimes I start by typing in a broad term like “messy room,” and when I find a good picture I take elements out and print them, such as a lamp or a vase that I like. In other cases I use the "messy room” picture to help me figure out what I’m looking for; I like the mirror in the picture, so I search for “unique wall mirror” and see what I can find. It's very fun, like making an immediate wish list for a 2D thrift store.
On another level, I’m interested in what photographers call “gaining access”: the ability to have access to other peoples lives. Using the internet allows me access without interfering. Photographers often have to consider these issues because there is an implied responsibility to their “subject.” I’m interested in the idea that I am just looking at what the subject wanted me to see, and then using it to make something new.
Do you feel like you have an “implied responsibility” to the image or part of an image that you decide to use, like the “implied responsibility” that you describe photographers as having?
Yes, and I follow the golden rule. It would be interesting if someday someone would want to recycle a corner of a photo of one of my sculptures to add to their hovering jelly mass sculpture of the future.
Where do you get the other materials used in your installations?
Primarily from thrift stores. I've been a thrift store addict forever. I can completely wear myself out looking around in thrift stores; I can’t stop. Last week I was at the Goodwill on 123rd street, and I overheard a guy explaining that when he gets a break from work he rushes over to look at the racks of clothes arranged by color. He said its “color therapy.” I agree.
This winter I got to go to Germany to do a show. There they have something called “Sperrmüll,” which literally means “bulky waste” in English. One night a week they put things that they don’t want on the curb and anyone can take them for free. I made most of my installation, called Penumbra II, out of German refuse. It was great, and free.
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