Thanks for the co-ordinates reset Simon!
I remember the difficulty I had trying to piece together this early
network art history when writing my phd on net.art in the late 90s. In
fact, this is what Charlie Gere picked me up on in my viva ;-) just before
he did his excellent research around early British computer art you
mention....
Since we're dredging deep-time here, I need to make a shout out to
Maholy-Nagy, and his early early telephone art practice.
Here's the paragraph on it I wrote in my phd:
We can trace the prevalence of instructions – an impersonal trope that
casts the concept's execution as secondary and perfunctory – right across
20th century art: from Moholy-Nagy's telephone pictures from 1922 (where
the idea's translation into form is still valued and carefully controlled)
, through the ambivalence of Lawrence Weiner's ubiquitous disclaimer
stating that 'the artist' could construct his artwork or not ("each being
equal and consistent with the intent of the artist" because in any case
"if the piece is built it constitutes not how the piece looks but only how
it could look" ), to the net artists' circulation of sets of instructions
amongst themselves or the public which, as the task is collectively
performed, generate the work in the manner of the corps exquisite. In all
cases, the loosening of the artist's controlling grip of the artwork and
the admission of outside agency into its realisation – a process
integrally linked to communication and its increasing efficiency – entail,
to borrow another term from Marshall McLuhan, a 'cooling' down of the
artwork. In other words, when the artist retains full control over the
realisation and execution of his/her work it conveys the
identity/touch/intention of the artist without redundancy – everything
speaks of the author, it is 'hot'. When others are admitted into this
process, then the artwork ceases to convey the identity of the artist with
such efficiency; it becomes a collection of disparate intentions, moments
and perhaps anatomical indexes – it is 'cool'. Distance seems to be an
important element in the process of cooling down the originality of the
artist, for it helps to introduce redundancy: for example the
misunderstanding of an instruction given over the telephone or the postage
stamps and markings accrued by an envelope carrying a postal sculpture.
So distance, instructions, and a multiplication of actors are obviously
really important too...
Best,
Josie
> 1982? Again, not my understanding. Here's the Internet Society's web page
> documenting the beginnings of the internet:
> http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
> ) .
>
> This proposes 1973/4 as the key period, which is pretty much in line with
> my earlier claim that 1974 was the important date, with the development of
> TCP on ARPANET. I guess that's what I used when I did some FTP back in the
> 1970's (the mainframe I was talking to was a military research machine so
> would have been connected to ARPANET). By the early 80's various network
> protocols were becoming popular, including CSNET, BITNET, USENET, JANET
> and NSFNET. TCP/IP wasn't agreed as a universal protocol until 1985/6.
>
> Seems to me there is no clear date when you can say a bunch of different
> networks became the internet. It was a process of development and quite
> fuzzy. For me it's the development of TCP that seems key as that really
> allowed networked data transmission in the form we understand it today.
>
> As for the first art to use the internet (or a network) in its production
> and/or dissemination? That's a good question which I don't know the answer
> to. I know that Bell Labs were doing work with ASCII art in the 1960's
> which was transmitted over fax and other experimental networks (Knowlton,
> et al). There were also artistic experiments in the 70's with slow scan
> TV. I often cite Hole in Space (Kit Galloway and Sherry Rabinowitz, 1980)
> as an early example of telematic art (art using realtime
> telecommunications systems), followed by the work of people like Tom
> Klinkowstein (who I did a workshop with in 1983) and Roy Ascott (Plissure
> du texte, 1983). However, HoS and slowscan were analogue, using either
> ISDN or fax-like protocols. Hard to define it as net art (recognising that
> net.art is something else - a specific group of artists working primarily
> in the mid to late 1990s). According to Wikipedia the earliest internet
> based work was by Vera Frenkel, titled 'String Games' (1974). If Vera was
> the first net artist then I can't think of a nicer person to have that
> historical accolade:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_art
>
> best
>
> Simon
>
>
> On 5 Oct 2013, at 00:06, Rob Myers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> On 04/10/13 01:41 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:
>>> To my knowledge the internet has existed as long as we have had the
>>> internet protocol.
>>
>> That's since 1982, but commercial access to the Internet didn't become
>> popular until the late 1980s.
>>
>>> People tell me the work I was doing in the 70's and 80's must have
>>> been amongst the earliest examples of digital art. However, I was not
>>> a pioneer but a third generation artist in the field, with the first
>>> generation emerging in the 1950's and the second in the late 60's and
>>> early 70's. I was very aware at that time of these earlier examples
>>> and took much inspiration from them.
>>
>> This raises the question of what *was* the first art to be sent over the
>> net (and its companion question, what was the first discussion of it
>> online? :-) ).
>>
>> I believe a Harold Cohen drawing was sent from California to London when
>> Imperial College connected to the Arpanet, for example.
>>
>>> Memory is short and the published histories are often seriously
>>> wrong.
>>
>> Yes. I've been very impressed with CAS's work on British art computing
>> history, which tallies with the gossip I heard in the 90s.
>>
>>> These historical discussions are always interesting as
>>> overlooked pieces of the story are put into the public sphere.
>>
>> Definitely!
>>
>
>
> Simon Biggs
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk @SimonBiggsUK
> http://amazon.com/author/simonbiggs
>
> [log in to unmask] Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/edinburgh-college-art/school-of-art/staff/staff?person_id=182&cw_xml=profile.php
> http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/simon-biggs%285dfcaf34-56b1-4452-9100-aaab96935e31%29.html
>
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/
> http://www.movingtargets.org.uk/ http://designinaction.com/
> MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php
>
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