I just posted this GIF on tumblr ... but it's just too beautiful not to post everywhere.
(from the commons)
Dragan Espenschied quote:Non-art Sites:
From: Gravity
"The pressure to be up to date with technology appears insane to me. It doesn't bring any more beauty or pleasure. Instead it creates things that are hard to understand and impossible to handle. So nobody can actually experience them beyond reading the artist's concept."
(quite rich considering that it comes from Rhizome) ([eta] I'm mocking Rhizome, not Dragan Espenschied)
Tom Moody Quote:
“Artists, too, have to compete with real world content far more captivating than anything they could come up with, which the Internet effectively gathers all in one place (sneezing Pandas, etc). Two possible responses are (1) to continually rise above it through aesthetic and conceptual framing and posturing or (2) to disappear into it and trust the viewer to ultimately sort out what's going on. The Web is a consumer's medium, not a producer's, so the artist is inexorably led to consumption as a "practice." The degree of criticality can only be inferred, not implied."
I find everyone's work to be more alive in the surf club, probably because even though a surf club is still a controlled context, it seems truer to the web than most pristinely designed individual artists' sites. I also noticed that surf clubs don't function that differently than the traditional artists' exhibiting collectives that we like so much here. Unmoderated by curators, and a variety of other gatekeepers and the artists end up driving it themselves, to mixed results, but when it's good, it's very good.Marisa Olsen on Surf Clubs:
1. As a place where artists promote their “real world” work.
The site acts as a slide sheet and resume for self promotion. [in case you haven't noticed, this is most definitely NOT what this class is about, you don't take a printmaking course to print exhibition invitations, or an art history course to write up your own C/V]
2. The site acts like a more traditional "white space" gallery.
Harwood - Mongrel Tate, http://gallery9.walkerart.org/, http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/espace_overview.html
3. Where the art starts offline but there is a web component that's important to reach the intended audience.
http://www.critical-art.net/ http://www.safetygearforsmallanimals.com/SGSA.html
4. where artist use the medium itself to mess with the ideas of what the internet should be.
http://www.exonemo.com/ http://www.jodi.org/. http://map.jodi.org/
5. where artists use social networking / web 2.0 tools and the culture of digital society itself as a medium for making art.
Tom moody, Double Happiness, Loshadka, nasty nets
6. People who never intended to make art, but it has "become" art over time, or some of us artists consider it art. [Joe is some of us]
All Your Base, Fensler Films
Think about how you use your white-space (backgrounds).
Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.