Hello, everyone,
I might suggest that we wrap early bundling projects of internet art into this list. Realizing that the month began with a discussion of internet art (Renate and I were in Korea launching this month's discussion of 'convergence' on -empyre- and had difficulty participating), I think it would beneficial to include conceptual curatorial projects in internet art as early forms of the remix of book/text/image. Projects in which I was involved include CTHEORY Multimedia (http://ctheorymultimedia.cornell.edu), which I curated from 99-2004 at Cornell with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (the CTHEORY book series also can added to this list) or Turbulence.org which continues today, with a distant corollary being Doran Golan's project, Computerfinearts.com, although Doran's emphasis was more on collection than concept. Another rather funky remix project was the off-line net.art exhibition that Teo Spiller and I curated for the Slovenian INFOS2000 Festival, for which we ran a competition and ten packaged 25 pieces of net.art onto a CD-Rom and distributed it freely as an open source gift to everyone at the Festival, as well as to readers of MARS art magazine in Slovenia. All of these projects are archived at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art (http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu). I personally always thought of these projects as interventions in dynamic writing.
All the best,
Tim Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
________________________________________
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of NEW-MEDIA-CURATING automatic digest system [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2013 7:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: NEW-MEDIA-CURATING Digest - 22 Oct 2013 to 23 Oct 2013 (#2013-136)
There are 3 messages totaling 595 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. unbooks (2)
2. Half-time discussion refresher (to be consumed with a martini i>--|
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 21:21:32 +0800
From: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: unbooks
Indeed!
And we haven't really talked about dynamic book/writing projects but some
others would include:
Remix the Book: www.remixthebook.com
Art History Flash Book: http://arthistoryflashbook.blogspot.co.uk/
Scalar: http://scalar.usc.edu/
Gamer Theory: http://futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/
Vectors: http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=6
Learning from YouTube: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-youtube-0
Booksprints: http://www.booksprints.net/
inmediares: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/
Liquid books: http://openhumanitiespress.org/liquid-books.html
Open Humanities Press: http://openhumanitiespress.org/index.html
And.
On 17/10/2013 21:36, "helen varley jamieson" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>this reminded me of turbulence's networked book on networked art
>(http://networkedbook.org/) - has this already been mentioned? (i'm not
>able to keep up with all the postings - TL;DR ;))
>
>h : )
>
>On 17/10/13 12:27 AM, Charlotte Frost wrote:
>> From: James Elkins
>> Date: Thursday, 17 October 2013 00:54
>> To: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: October's theme: Art History Online, an introduction
>>
>> Charlotte,
>>
>> My pleasure.
>>
>> Hi everyone. I'm glad to report on my efforts to write art history
>>online. I
>> started this in an informal way a couple of years ago -- I used to post
>> questions to Facebook, collect the answers, and thank people in the
>>text. I
>> did that with this book:
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/Art-Critiques-Guide-Second-Edition/dp/098602161X
>>
>> It's full of footnotes thanking people on Facebook. (A third edition is
>>in
>> preparation, so if anyone has stories or ideas about critiques that
>>aren't
>> in the book, please send them to me!)
>>
>> But I really started writing art history online earlier in 2013. I have
>>two
>> book projects that are currently being written live. I'll summarize
>>them and
>> then say something about how it's going.
>>
>> 1. "North Atlantic Art History and Worldwide Art" is being written on
>>Google
>> Drive. Most Drive pages are embedded, live, in my website
>>
>>
>>http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/251-north-atlan
>>tic
>> -art-history
>>
>> and I continuously post new additions to Facebook. Here for example is a
>> post on the worldwide spread of art criticism, one of the topics in the
>> book:
>>
>> https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1/posts/10201173872961275
>>
>> 2. "Writing with Images" is a book on experimental writing in art
>>history,
>> theory, and criticism, and more generally all writing that uses images,
>> including fiction. It is being written on two blogs, and they are both
>> linked to my own website:
>>
>>
>>http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/256-writing-wit
>>h-i
>> mages
>>
>> Here is one of the two:
>>
>> http://305737.blogspot.com/
>>
>> And here is a typical Facebook post that started a big discussion. The
>>topic
>> was why Derrida, Foucault, and others don't count as art history:
>>
>> https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1/posts/10201243699906905
>>
>> I have plans to write one other book live, in addition to the "Art
>> Critiques" book. Everything I write is posted to Facebook, Twitter,
>> LinkedIn, and most are also posted on my Academia.edu site:
>>
>> http://saic.academia.edu/JElkins
>>
>> The idea of writing online, for me, is to acknowledge the fact that
>>these
>> subjects are open-ended, and that there is no single authority. I also
>>like
>> the idea of exposing unfinished things to immediate critique: it avoids
>>the
>> appearance of the polished text -- sometimes I don't even wait for
>>"rough
>> drafts," but write live online, so people might see the text at any
>>stage.
>>
>> Most of the discussions and suggestions happen on Facebook. I find
>>LinkedIn
>> completely moribund and uninteresting. I also use Scribd and
>>Researchgate,
>> and I find no real community on either site. Academia is a very active
>>site
>> for me (lots of visitors and downloads) but no community. Twitter just
>> hasn't developed much use for me simply because comments are so short.
>>There
>> is such a thing as a complex idea!
>>
>> Facebook works fine. There is a fair amount of TL;DR ("too long; didn't
>> read") -- that is, people make comments based on the lines introducing
>>the
>> post, without having read the text. But even that can be useful. If I
>> summarize a chapter in a sentence or two in order to post it on
>>Facebook,
>> then I am in effect sending the same message a reader gets when she
>>thumbs
>> through a book before she buys it. The title and abstract do count, so
>>even
>> off-topic comments based on the title and abstract can be useful.
>>
>> When I get specific comments, criticism, suggestions, etc., I
>>incorporate
>> them immediately into the text and thank the people who posted. So my
>>books
>> will have lots of passages like this:
>>
>> "Reading an early version of this chapter, Colleen Anderson remarked
>>that
>> this subject connects to Cixous's works on.." etc.
>>
>> All those references will make for an unusual reading experience, but I
>> think it will feel, and be, more participatory.
>>
>> I don't think this crowd sourcing would make sense for all of art
>>history,
>> theory, or criticism. These subjects I'm working on have two
>>characteristics
>> that make them especially well suited. (1) These books are about very
>> undecided, contentious subjects, where even fundamental terms are
>>undecided;
>> and (2) they are about general topics, not specialized ones.
>>
>> Regarding the supposed wildness of the internet: I had a "fan" page,
>>with
>> 16,000 "fans," but most were inactive. I shut it down, and my current
>>page
>> is a personal page, limited to 5,000. Of those, about 300 are active,
>>and
>> only about 20 or 30 are spammers (I shut them down whenever I see them).
>> Less than 10, I think, are crazy in an unproductive sense: that is,
>>there
>> are many people whose opinions are wild in relation to academia, or in
>> relation to the art market, or in relation to modernism or
>>postmodernism --
>> but less than 10 or so who are non-social, solipsistic, fanatical,
>> fundamentalist, or otherwise unproductive.
>>
>> On the other hand there may be 100 or more who are art historians, and
>> "lurk" on the site. I hear about them in different places, and in
>>different
>> ways; some are friends. But they have strong disciplinary allegiances,
>>and
>> they don't like to post, or be "seen," on unserious sites like Facebook.
>> Those users, I have to say, do bother me, because they are timid.
>>
>> Hope this helps; feel free as always to write me, here or elsewhere; and
>> please do have a look at the many posts and see if there's anything
>>you'd
>> like to add. So far, everything I'm doing online is intended for
>>eventual
>> print publication: the reason is simply that it yields a different
>> distribution, different readers. It isn't better or worse, or the past
>>or
>> the future: it's just another medium.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>--
>helen varley jamieson
>[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>http://www.creative-catalyst.com
>http://www.wehaveasituation.net
>http://www.upstage.org.nz
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:25:25 +0100
From: Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: unbooks
Then you are into the whole electronic literature field - which is a big field. Start with the ELO or ELMCIP to begin exploring that...
best
Simon
On 23 Oct 2013, at 14:21, Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Indeed!
>
> And we haven't really talked about dynamic book/writing projects but some
> others would include:
>
> Remix the Book: www.remixthebook.com
>
> Art History Flash Book: http://arthistoryflashbook.blogspot.co.uk/
>
> Scalar: http://scalar.usc.edu/
>
> Gamer Theory: http://futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/
>
> Vectors: http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=6
>
> Learning from YouTube: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/learning-youtube-0
>
> Booksprints: http://www.booksprints.net/
>
> inmediares: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/
>
> Liquid books: http://openhumanitiespress.org/liquid-books.html
>
> Open Humanities Press: http://openhumanitiespress.org/index.html
>
> And¦.
>
>
>
> On 17/10/2013 21:36, "helen varley jamieson" <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> this reminded me of turbulence's networked book on networked art
>> (http://networkedbook.org/) - has this already been mentioned? (i'm not
>> able to keep up with all the postings - TL;DR ;))
>>
>> h : )
>>
>> On 17/10/13 12:27 AM, Charlotte Frost wrote:
>>> From: James Elkins
>>> Date: Thursday, 17 October 2013 00:54
>>> To: Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Subject: Re: October's theme: Art History Online, an introduction
>>>
>>> Charlotte,
>>>
>>> My pleasure.
>>>
>>> Hi everyone. I'm glad to report on my efforts to write art history
>>> online. I
>>> started this in an informal way a couple of years ago -- I used to post
>>> questions to Facebook, collect the answers, and thank people in the
>>> text. I
>>> did that with this book:
>>>
>>> http://www.amazon.com/Art-Critiques-Guide-Second-Edition/dp/098602161X
>>>
>>> It's full of footnotes thanking people on Facebook. (A third edition is
>>> in
>>> preparation, so if anyone has stories or ideas about critiques that
>>> aren't
>>> in the book, please send them to me!)
>>>
>>> But I really started writing art history online earlier in 2013. I have
>>> two
>>> book projects that are currently being written live. I'll summarize
>>> them and
>>> then say something about how it's going.
>>>
>>> 1. "North Atlantic Art History and Worldwide Art" is being written on
>>> Google
>>> Drive. Most Drive pages are embedded, live, in my website
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/251-north-atlan
>>> tic
>>> -art-history
>>>
>>> and I continuously post new additions to Facebook. Here for example is a
>>> post on the worldwide spread of art criticism, one of the topics in the
>>> book:
>>>
>>> https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1/posts/10201173872961275
>>>
>>> 2. "Writing with Images" is a book on experimental writing in art
>>> history,
>>> theory, and criticism, and more generally all writing that uses images,
>>> including fiction. It is being written on two blogs, and they are both
>>> linked to my own website:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/256-writing-wit
>>> h-i
>>> mages
>>>
>>> Here is one of the two:
>>>
>>> http://305737.blogspot.com/
>>>
>>> And here is a typical Facebook post that started a big discussion. The
>>> topic
>>> was why Derrida, Foucault, and others don't count as art history:
>>>
>>> https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1/posts/10201243699906905
>>>
>>> I have plans to write one other book live, in addition to the "Art
>>> Critiques" book. Everything I write is posted to Facebook, Twitter,
>>> LinkedIn, and most are also posted on my Academia.edu site:
>>>
>>> http://saic.academia.edu/JElkins
>>>
>>> The idea of writing online, for me, is to acknowledge the fact that
>>> these
>>> subjects are open-ended, and that there is no single authority. I also
>>> like
>>> the idea of exposing unfinished things to immediate critique: it avoids
>>> the
>>> appearance of the polished text -- sometimes I don't even wait for
>>> "rough
>>> drafts," but write live online, so people might see the text at any
>>> stage.
>>>
>>> Most of the discussions and suggestions happen on Facebook. I find
>>> LinkedIn
>>> completely moribund and uninteresting. I also use Scribd and
>>> Researchgate,
>>> and I find no real community on either site. Academia is a very active
>>> site
>>> for me (lots of visitors and downloads) but no community. Twitter just
>>> hasn't developed much use for me simply because comments are so short.
>>> There
>>> is such a thing as a complex idea!
>>>
>>> Facebook works fine. There is a fair amount of TL;DR ("too long; didn't
>>> read") -- that is, people make comments based on the lines introducing
>>> the
>>> post, without having read the text. But even that can be useful. If I
>>> summarize a chapter in a sentence or two in order to post it on
>>> Facebook,
>>> then I am in effect sending the same message a reader gets when she
>>> thumbs
>>> through a book before she buys it. The title and abstract do count, so
>>> even
>>> off-topic comments based on the title and abstract can be useful.
>>>
>>> When I get specific comments, criticism, suggestions, etc., I
>>> incorporate
>>> them immediately into the text and thank the people who posted. So my
>>> books
>>> will have lots of passages like this:
>>>
>>> "Reading an early version of this chapter, Colleen Anderson remarked
>>> that
>>> this subject connects to Cixous's works on.." etc.
>>>
>>> All those references will make for an unusual reading experience, but I
>>> think it will feel, and be, more participatory.
>>>
>>> I don't think this crowd sourcing would make sense for all of art
>>> history,
>>> theory, or criticism. These subjects I'm working on have two
>>> characteristics
>>> that make them especially well suited. (1) These books are about very
>>> undecided, contentious subjects, where even fundamental terms are
>>> undecided;
>>> and (2) they are about general topics, not specialized ones.
>>>
>>> Regarding the supposed wildness of the internet: I had a "fan" page,
>>> with
>>> 16,000 "fans," but most were inactive. I shut it down, and my current
>>> page
>>> is a personal page, limited to 5,000. Of those, about 300 are active,
>>> and
>>> only about 20 or 30 are spammers (I shut them down whenever I see them).
>>> Less than 10, I think, are crazy in an unproductive sense: that is,
>>> there
>>> are many people whose opinions are wild in relation to academia, or in
>>> relation to the art market, or in relation to modernism or
>>> postmodernism --
>>> but less than 10 or so who are non-social, solipsistic, fanatical,
>>> fundamentalist, or otherwise unproductive.
>>>
>>> On the other hand there may be 100 or more who are art historians, and
>>> "lurk" on the site. I hear about them in different places, and in
>>> different
>>> ways; some are friends. But they have strong disciplinary allegiances,
>>> and
>>> they don't like to post, or be "seen," on unserious sites like Facebook.
>>> Those users, I have to say, do bother me, because they are timid.
>>>
>>> Hope this helps; feel free as always to write me, here or elsewhere; and
>>> please do have a look at the many posts and see if there's anything
>>> you'd
>>> like to add. So far, everything I'm doing online is intended for
>>> eventual
>>> print publication: the reason is simply that it yields a different
>>> distribution, different readers. It isn't better or worse, or the past
>>> or
>>> the future: it's just another medium.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Jim
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> helen varley jamieson
>> [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>> http://www.creative-catalyst.com
>> http://www.wehaveasituation.net
>> http://www.upstage.org.nz
>
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
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:44:08 -0400
From: Nicholas O'Brien <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Half-time discussion refresher (to be consumed with a martini i>--|
Hey Rob:
Sorry I didn't get back sooner.
Being asked to review work for Furtherfield came directly from my
> self-directed blogging. Did your reviewing for Bad At Sports come about
> as a result of other online activity?
>
It did, but in kind of strange ways. I was writing reviews and other simple
things for my own personal blog, and then I was also running a space in
chicago with some other people that focused on experimental film/video, new
media, sound, and performance. Our programming was considered pretty good
at the time and we built up a small reputation for doing some interesting
things. Then I started writing more, and B@S asked me to contribute
something and that went well and turned into a regular thing.
> I think there is a suspicion of non-market-directed criticism and
> non-market-directed art that combines in the perception of net art
> reviewing. Have you found that?
>
Sometimes. I often compare myself (stupidly) to publications that have
sponsors and agendas and how they take angles to - most often - support the
work they are reviewing and not think of it in a critical manner. BUT there
are print publications that have a tendency to do great reviews of shows
involving contemporary technology from an "outside" perspective (although I
have lots of misgivings about using that term). More importantly I think
that because the community is often quite small my writing/criticism is
about people I know pretty well already, or else have had previous
correspondances with. So I think that a lot of times that can come off as
favoritism, but I've made a point to reach out to artists and makers that I
haven't had a chance to work with in order to mitigate my own fear of
seeming nepotistic.
>
> I'm very happy to be able to play a small part in popularising the work
> I like. Marginality isn't a problem for me (although they did also laugh
> at Bozo The Clown...). Do you ever not review work because you would not
> be able to champion it?
>
No, I like challenges, but it's often hard when you want to really take
something to task and have to somewhat pussy foot around your concerns
because you don't want to upset a community of people that have supported
you up until now. For instance I've seen some so-called netart shows
recently that I thought were really disappointing but celebrated within the
community (or at least accepted as "good work"). I've wanted to pick these
apart, but I think I can still do that with the artists and now have to
make public statement about it.
Excellent! Do you have links to those?
>
Yup! Here is a shortlist:
http://badatsports.com/2013/hyperjunk-interview-dissociations-with-harm-van-den-dorpel/
http://badatsports.com/2011/networking-with-andrew-norm-wilson/
http://badatsports.com/2010/in-game-chat-with-jason-rohrer/
http://badatsports.com/2010/a-conversation-with-jon-rafman-nsfw-video/
Thanks for the good questions!
very best
--
Nicholas O'Brien
Visiting Faculty | Gallery Director
Department of Digital Art, Pratt Institute
doubleunderscore.net
------------------------------
End of NEW-MEDIA-CURATING Digest - 22 Oct 2013 to 23 Oct 2013 (#2013-136)
*************************************************************************
