By
Jacob Gaboury on
Friday, August 6th, 2010 at
11:00 am
Tanner America is critical satire in the form of a Tumblr blog. The site is updated several times a week with "snapshot" style images and brief accompanying captions. Each image depicts a moment from the daily lives of the Tanner family of Colorado Springs, CO: the kids' science projects, camping trips, remodeling the house, purchases from Home Depot, and their neighbor Linda. The images are purposefully mundane and would be of little interest to anyone outside the Tanner's immediate family and friends.
What makes the images satire is the fact that they are clearly, intentionally fabricated. Each image has been noticeably photoshopped in such a way that it becomes an implicit critique. In many ways they resemble JOGGING-style sculptures or performance, as the strange juxtaposition of objects announces itself as fabricated and implies some form of intentionality, some form of critique.
The clearest commentary would seem to be a general critique of white, middle class, heterosexual Middle America. The Tanner's lives are dull, they have too many kids, they are uncritical and indulge in consumerist behavior, they watch Fox News, their Facebook page lists their political views as "Tea Party", etc. In a way Tanner America is poking fun at the suburbs, at the concept of "normal, everyday Americans," and in doing so reinforcing the kind of snide elitism that the Tanners would no doubt accuse "us" of, if they were real.
At the same time there is another critique, not of the values and lives of people like the Tanners, but the way they use the Internet and what it means to them. Taking a look at the default Tumblr theme the Tanners "chose" to use it seems grossly mismatched with the style and tone of the images and captions they post. It looks like a McSweeny's book cover, all minimalist design and Helvetica font. The cultural implications of the design seem completely absent from the Tanner's actual blog, as though it was chosen because it simply "looked nice," or it was a default that they simply never changed. It brings to mind Olia Lialina's series of essays on the vernacular web, but while she is trying to identify the kind of early everyday uses of the web that have been lost or forgotten, Tanner America seems to point to a contemporary vernacular that is not especially informed or interested. It doesn't necessarily understand how to use the technology it has, nor does it make conscious decisions about the aesthetic or brand it is trying to produce. The demographic depicted on Tanner America seems to point to a kind of Parent Web, for lack of a better term - the Web for people who have come to use and even rely on it, but for whom the technology is an afterthought. Like many parents of a certain generation out there, one could imagine the Tanners being deeply concerned about computer viruses, getting overpriced tech support at Best Buy or emailing photo attachments that have not been resized. Perhaps it is best to read Tanner America not as a critique of that vernacular use, but of the assumption that we all use these technologies in the same way.
By
Brian Droitcour on
Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Nick DeMarco, Too Cool, 2010
"Time doesn't exist when you're... just chilling!" Topping an administrative page on the site of curatorial collective Jstchillin, this slogan rephrases a familiar bit of folk phenomenology: Time flies when you're having fun! But in denying time's existence, rather making its perceived acceleration a metaphor for losing yourself in the moment, the slogan suggests a swap of the trinity of past-present-future for something else -- a sense of time that (until the end of this essay, at least) I will call "chill time." Jstchillin is concerned with the internet, and my description of chill time will be, too. It entails an awareness of parallel threads of messages, ordered by clock-time sequence and subjective assignments of importance (cf. Facebook's feed settings: "Top News" and "Most Recent"), and the knowledge that these messages will wait until you find them (in your e-mail, in your RSS aggregator, etc.) but might be irrelevant when you do if you wait too long. Chill time is simultaneity of the recent past and lagging present, the sum of attempts to track some threads into the past and push others toward the future. Awareness of physical surroundings tends to be fuzzy as you sift through old layers of digital sediment and deposit new ones. Jstchillin founders Caitlyn Denny and Parker Ito describe it like this: "[T]o chill is to live in a constant state of multiplicities, a flow of existence between web and physicality."
Jstchillin encompasses a number of initiatives, including the gallery show "Avatar 4D," but its flagship project is "Serial Chillers in Paradise," an online exhibition that has featured a different artist every other week since October 2009. Chill time, I think, is the central theme of "Serial Chillers," one that many commissioned artists have approached through conventional associations with chilling. Video games were the subject of an illustrated short story/film treatment by Jon Rafman, and Jonathan Vingiano's browser add-on Space Chillers was a game. Ida Lehtonen's contribution folded soothing ocean sounds into a video of exercises that computer laborers can do to stay limber during breaks, while Eilis Mcdonald's sent you scrolling through bits of pat, New-Agey advice and then to a page with equivalent visuals; both artists drew on packaged relaxation. Zach Schipko and Tucker Bennett's feature-length movie Why Are You Weird?, parceled into YouTube uploads, is a story of art-school students who spend almost all of their onscreen time at parties or hanging out in their dorm rooms, rehashing crits.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at
11:00 am
Evan Roth'sAnimated Gif Mashup 2.0 allows users to mash-up animated gifs found on the web into a collage and add sound. It's a bit like YTMND except you can pile on an unlimited amount of gifs.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at
10:00 am
Nicholas O'Brien has produced another killer interview for Bad At Sports. (We posted his previous one, A Conversation with Jon Rafman a few weeks back.) This time, he speaks with artist Eric Fleischauer about his work and his current exhibition "Post-Cursor" at Chicago's threewalls. Fleischauer is keenly interested in the process of obsolescence in recording technology, and its importance for storage and archives. It seems fitting then, that the entire interview is recorded on videotape.
By
Jacob Gaboury on
Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
JOGGING, SMOKE BOMB IN AN ELEVATOR, 2010
If we consider Internet art to be a distinct category of art making that uses the Internet as its primary medium or platform, we necessarily distinguish it from other forms in which the Internet does not play a primary role. The objects of Internet art are necessarily immaterial, and it is this immaterial quality that makes them so notoriously difficult to exhibit and archive. For some artists this has led to a kind of hybridization of Internet aesthetics and real world objects, such that they might be purchased or viewed in a real-world setting such as a museum or gallery space. For others it becomes a matter of the careful curation of digital images and documentation in an effort to brand oneself and build cultural capital where there is little possibility for financial compensation. After all, how do you monetize an object whose natural setting is a networked space that encourages many-to-many distribution practices? How do you sell a website, a .jpeg? These are responses to a crisis in image making and distribution in which older curatorial models that rely on the limitations of physical space and the exchange of physical objects are increasingly undermined by distanced, virtual, and distributed viewership online.
For art collective JOGGING - artists Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen - this crisis is not limited to Internet art, but has instead become the normative condition under which art is produced and viewed today. In an essay on "Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age," JOGGING notes that:
Art cannot exist without an audience, as it relies on media for its existence as art. With today’s burgeoning potential for digital mass viewership, transmission becomes as important as creation. Contemporary online artists are aware of this fact and seek to actively make use of its potential. Dematerialization is not an oppressive suffocation of art but a possibility for art to flourish in disparate and progressive discourses. The web offers infinite room for expansion and participation unlimited by the more severe constraints of space and finance.
For the vast majority of young artists, regardless of their medium, the work they produce is viewed primarily online as images or video uploaded onto artist's sites and blogs. Even when artists participate in small shows, the majority of publication and viewership takes place in the form of documentation. The museum and gallery space serves a resume building function for art that is largely produced and distributed online. It no longer functions primarily as a space that draws potential viewers or buyers, but is instead a formality, something to be put on a CV.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at
11:30 am
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.
By
Ceci Moss on
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 at
10:00 am
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.
By
Ceci Moss on
Monday, April 12th, 2010 at
10:00 am
In this short clip, Vernissage TV covers a new exhibition curated by Raffael Dörig, "Surfing Club," now on view at plug.in in Basel, Switzerland. The show features work by the artists involved in the surfing clubs Nasty Nets, Spirit Surfers, Loshadka, Club Internet and VVORK -- many of them regulars right here on the Rhizome blog. Check it out!
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Live video installation constructed out of altered found objects, lazer prints from ebay and blogs, mirrors, wood, and foamcore. This piece includes a video camera that broadcasts live images to a monitor at its base. A viewer observing the sculpture is captured by the video camera, and then is able to see an altered version of themselves (via a video mixer) on the monitor.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at
11:00 am
Eilis McDonald's Rapture Heap is a multi-phased project that centres around the occupation of one of Dublin's many empty retail spaces. The first installment of the project saw McDonald curate an exhibition that highlighted the artists that influence her and brought to Ireland some of today's most prominent internet based artists (http://www.raptureheap.com/v1). "Back to Reality" is the second installment of the series. Here McDonald delivers a body of work that is a result of her 6 month residency in the retail space. Commissioned under the Per Cent for Art Scheme for Dublin City Council’s Liberty Corner, the residency period afforded the artist time and space to explore the wealth of diverse activity in the surrounding area - from the various cultural institutions, such as the LAB and DanceHouse, to the Buddhist Centre, €2 shops, financial institutions, beauty salons and 24-hour internet cafés. With this particular urban spectrum serving as her backdrop, McDonald searches for the sublime and ethereal by seeking out the spiritual and subliminal. McDonald recontextualises the discarded artefacts of the local domesticity found in charity shops and fuses them with video assemblages that include a transient public contacted through advertising and classifieds in the CityAds Weekly newspaper. "Back to Reality"; the research phase of the Rapture Heap project brings together a number of varied strands of interests and motivations. The projects future online presence provides access to a broad national and international public and an opportunity to relate to a wider demographic, while the installation provides a visceral, immersive physical environment. "Back to Reality" presents a story-thus-far in preparation for the 3rd installment of the Rapture Heap Project.
By
Ceci Moss on
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Gene McHugh, Rhizome's former Editorial Fellow and a periodic contributor to the site, received the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts’ Writers Grant earlier this year and has used these funds to begin the "Post Internet" blog. His project aims to build a space to reflect on "...art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps this is closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–a term that I’m sure I will be thinking through here sooner or later." The blog is essentially a bare-bones workspace for his loose, often train-of-thought musings on contemporary internet-based art, and covers everything from Google's Parisian Love ad to Seth Price.
By
Ryder Ripps on
Friday, March 5th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Editor's Note: Ryder Ripps, of Internet Archaeology, along with Tim Baker (Delicious) and Scott Van Damme (MIT Exhibit), recently launched a beta version of dump.fm, a chat room where participants communicate solely through images. The site combines the creative back and forth of surf clubs, tumblr’s loose and rapid-fire network of image transmission, and the real time spontaneity of an old school chat room. Right now dump.fm is strictly invite-only, but Ryder was generous enough to offer a special invite code to Rhizome readers - “RHIZOME” - so they can play around with the site. Ryder drafted a statement about his concept and aspirations for dump.fm, below.
I remember going into AOL chat rooms, and experiencing instantaneous glee. The hyper-everything world; where experiences come and go at the pace of your typing. Instantaneous collaboration and connection. These are the feelings I wanted to recreate in conceptualizing dump.fm. Dump.fm is a place where you can share images from anywhere on the web, your hard drive or right from your webcam, in real time with other people. Today content moves so fast, making a blog post from a week ago irrelevant. Dump.fm is a place where content is hyper-transient and used to facilitate connections and induce creativity. I think in the future people will produce and consume content much faster and because of this we must reconsider the value of content. For the surf club Spirit Surfers, content is a way to document and make public the most powerful content in the hypnotic surf, “Most of the really enlightening surfs I've had did not end with a post to a surf club -- surfing is so private, it rarely ends in a public act.”, as club creator Kevin Bewersdorf states. Where surfing was a private act from computer to computer, friend to friend, and node to node; dump.fm makes it a public, real time and collaborative act. The surf becomes discovery and the discovery becomes collective.
By
Ceci Moss on
Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
A fountain and its natural form, the spring, are symbols of the miraculous life-begetting 'élan vital' that permeates the universe. In fact, life on earth is now thought to have begun in the nutrient-rich plumes of undersea hydrothermal vents, real-life fountains of life. But, when the image of the source is mimicked as Water Feature, a merely decorative, self-contained electric fountain, the maternalistic life-force is perverted into what amounts to abject MILF porn. The Water Feature is so wasteful and self-indulgent that it becomes the straw man in the argument against contemporary art as useless blubber for the tasteless elite. But— can't home and garden decor give back a little bit? Can't we efficiently retrofit some of our 'criminal ornaments' for a fairer future? If there is some leftover space inside their faux-marble fiberglass hollowness, we can definitely squeeze some useful nanotech in there— right? Let's finally answer Joseph Bueys famous challenge, “Kann Plastik die Welt verandern?"—can sculpture change the world? with a resounding “YES!"…as long as that sculpture contains a state-of-the-art-kick-ass-energy-efficient-linux-micro-PC that is totally discovering a cure for cancer.
A group of spectacular cast-fiberglass fountains stand together on an elevated server-room floor. A Fit PC 2 (the smallest PC currently available, 96% more energy efficient than a standard desktop) is installed in each water feature. Whenever the fountains are plugged in, the Linux PC's will automatically boot up and run World Community Grid software, a distributed computing project which uses a massive network of PC’s around the world to model solutions for various humanitarian problems, such as: “Clean Energy Project”, “Influenza Antiviral Drug Search”, “ Fight Aids@home” and “Nutritious Rice for the World". The delightful splashing of the water and twinkle of the energy-efficient LED’s act as relaxing and meditative status-light for the computers, tirelessly laboring within. Although there is no screen visible in the installation, the computation progress can be remotely monitored through a dedicated website.
By
Kevin McGarry on
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Within the pages of Digital Folklore Reader, Olia Lialina, one of the book’s editors, refers to a claim by the social media researcher Danah Boyd, that some American teenagers identify as Facebook and others as MySpace—preferring a conformist and clean interface persona, or a rebellious and visually pimped one, respectively.
This book, co-edited by Dragan Espenschied, is by all outward appearances a MySpace, brimming with exuberant design elements culled from all over the net and reaching deep into online history. The dust jacket repeats a background image of a unicorn perched on a boulder at sunset under a meteor shower. Its reverse is wallpapered in 32 by 32 pixel gif icons representing the gamut of popular user-generated online imagery: cartoon characters, porno ladies, geometric designs, quotidian objects, flags, logos, landscapes and text, from WTF to FREE TIBET. One layer deeper, the cover and back of the book are white, or, probably (in RGB concept), nothing. The spine is also nude, showing off the motley sequencing of pages inside, the first and last of which are a flat, vibrant #00FF00 green, allusive of web-safe color and maybe of a green screen, primed for content to be transposed onto it.
Published by Merz Akademie Stutgart, Digital Folklore Reader is divided into three sections: “Observations” (the core texts, mostly republished essays by the charming, prescient editors), “Research” (insightful student papers) and “Giving Back” (documentation of student projects). Folklore can be considered history told from the perspective of a certain cultural group, and this conception of folklore is precisely what the book endeavors to record. Digital culture involves all kinds of players, including inanimate ones that transmit and present information, and this folklore belongs specifically to users. The fact is writ large, literally, right before the table of contents, in big neon letters spelling out the eerie, friendly question, “DO YOU BELIEVE IN USERS?”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
