The Best of the Web, 2008

Hi, Paddy,
Thanks for including my post here.
My definition of new media included technical skills but also a certain utopian mindset about computers, and statements such as Lev Manovich’s “new media objects exist as data.”

That techno-utopianism was recently expressed in an anti-surf club diatribe from one of the resentful old guard in the Rhizome.org comment boards (http://rhizome.org/editorial/2234):

“In a recent interview, Cory Arcangel mused why contemporary net art is so interested in comedy (and why youTube has turned into America’s Funniest Home Videos). One answer might be that it’s easier to be coy, cynical, and cryptically allusive than to bite off the Herculean (and easily ridiculable) task of massively modulating/modifying culture. Cory’s own work is more admirably Warholean than the work of most of his delicious.com re-blogging followers. But I have to wonder — can an army of purposefully a-political, barely discernible, self-referential, online detritus re-hashers somehow magically equal a tactically ingenious, below-the-radar, cultural revolution?”

The poster’s condescending snottiness aside (and bad, pompous writing–”admirably Warholean”—please), that belief in “massively modulating/modifying culture” and “below-the-radar cultural revolution” is a goal of new media artists as I see it. The artists I know and admire would never be so presumptuous as to see themselves as the shock troops of some Leninist/Maoist revolt. (We know how those turned out.) They also recognize that the internet is just too big to imagine working in all but a little corner of it. That’s not being a-political, etc, just realistic.

BTW in my original post I didn’t “align” myself with either group. It’s obvious from the tone which set of criteria I prefer but I admire many new media artists, just not the ones who insist on programming skilz or aspire to massively modify/modulate culture. As I said in the post, the so-called surf club artists come from both schools.

@Tom With all due respect, you are micromanaging my words. “Prefer” versus “align” is an editorial choice and while there is some difference, I don’t think it’s significant enough to lose sleep over.

Hi Tom (you sexy beast),

Our shock troops informed me of your activity in this sector. You are always so feisty! I think you may possess repressed revolutionary tendencies.

In all fairness, I haven’t really delineated my proposed tactics for massive modulation. They aren’t revolutionary, overtly political, or even technically “resistant.” But they are at least purposeful. I’m working on the paper below that will explain things more clearly.

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Paper proposal submitted to:
http://medialab-prado.es/article/3er_encuentro_inclusiva-net_netart_segunda_epoca

Title:
Commodify Your Consumption:
Tactical Surfing / Wakes of Resistance

Abstract:
Internet “surf clubs” (artist-run, invitation-only group photoblogs) have been critically described by their practitioners using a variety of loosely defined, partially elucidating analogies: film montage (Olson), Duchampian found objects (Moody), Cornellian wunderkammern (Bewersdorf), and semiotic play (Ramocki). This paper analyzes group photoblogging, public bookmarking (via sites like delicious.com), “artistic surfing,” and related practices from the more fruitful/apt perspective of de Certeau’s “tactical consumer.”

I first establish a model for understanding these recent practices of tactical consumption by proposing a continuum of artistic “production” ranging from “strong/deep/strategic” to “weak/shallow/tactical.” Toward the “weak/shallow/tactical” end of this continuum are precedences like DJ Spooky’s remix ethics, Fred Wilson’s and Haim Steinbach’s object ensembles, Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project, Vannevar Bush’s Memex trails, Debord’s derives, Bourriaud’s notion of “post-production,” and Galloway/Thacker’s notion of “edges.”

I argue that “artistic surfing” is a tactical practice of “strong consumption” that produces a trace (or “wake”) which acts as a form of “weak production.” The goal of such surfing (whether explicit or implicit) is to broadcast a singular and personal signal of resistance amidst a “wave” of commercial content and noise.

I then critique the efficacy of this model of resistance as it applies to the contemporary internet. If the ocean in which I choose to “surf” is comprised of corporate culture, then my “wake” through it may be less an assertion of my own singular resistance and more a local case-study in how the “creative demographic” surfs the corporate network — a marketing statistic rather than an inflection of critical agency.

Finally, I suggest other net art options further down the scale of production that still utilize tactical consumption; but produce a stronger, less impotent, more resistant signal. These options involve deeper levels of media modulation, more strategic plans for “spinning” the “wake” (strategies for online trace dispersal), and a greater emphasis on personal transformation as a viable practice of tactical resistance.

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If you want to dialogue via posts here, please send me an email so I will know to return (otherwise I’ll foget). If you just want to slag me but you don’t require a response, carry on.

Love,
Curt

Paddy, micromanaging would be insisting you use my word accompanied with intimidating body language. I’m just clarifying, especially since the post was called “stark” and “starkly polarizing.”

My difference with Curt Cloninger is over the purposefulness or practicality of art. As an artist I do align myself more with the art-for-art’s-sake crowd, which is not the same as “formalism,” Greenbergianism, or other epithets, but suggests its own ethos of chaos and troublemaking.

“Stark polarization” was Ceci Moss’s phrase at Rhizome.org.

“Stark polarization” was Ceci Moss’s phrase at Rhizome.org.

Thanks for introducing me to the name for surf clubs. I participate in some, but didn’t know there was a name.