Instead of blogging last Tuesday, I went to a panel full of the folks over at n+1 about The Internet. The Friday before that, I went to a panel staged by Rhizome called "Net Aesthetics 2.0". Both had their charms, but both ended up disappointing me.

I was looking forward to the n+1 panel because they are a bunch of intelligent people who could probably bring an interesting perspective to contemporary life in a networked world. At best, the speakers seemed well-thought yet uninformed, at worst they were petulant - reducing The Internet to merely a series of Gawker comments saying bad things about them. Mark Grief was easily the least self-obsessed, yet his broad questions concerning interaction spurred by and within the confines of the web have largely already been asked by internet and digital media thinkers before. His speech was a fish-out-of-water case, not realizing that critical thought has in many cases moved beyond his thinking. I left the panel thinking that we should not leave cultural criticism of networked culture to the literary-types.

As for the Rhizome panel, I was pleased to see Tim Whidden ad Tom Moody speak and was looking forward to hearing from Petra Cortright, one of the contributors to Nasty Nets. While most of the panelists were interesting, I was severely disappointed with Petra and Damon Zucconi. I posted these thoughts on Art Fag City's review earlier tonight:

"Damon made attempts to refer to some interesting theory-esque threads in digital media studies, but ultimately he came across as someone who has perhaps read some fancy terms before but is clueless when it comes to how to use them. He may actually have known what he was saying, and it could have been a problem with nerves in front of a crowd, but to me it seemed like he needs to do a lot more research.

As for Petra, I really do like her work and think what she’s doing is significant in the trajectory (sorry Tim) of net art (sorry again). After hearing her speak, however, it seems like she should leave the analysis of her work to others."

The fault I found with Petra on the other hand was her seeming inability to grasp the significance of her own work. She didn't seem to realize the statements about nostalgia, production, and affect that something like Nasty Nets is constantly making. I suppose this might be the very reason she is able to create these works in the first place, though.

I don't like the idea of writing negatively about these young artists, but in this case - as with the n+1 panel - the problems were utterly remediable by the speakers doing some basic background research on the topic.

Posted by Nathan at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been so much happening this week that it seems impossible to write about anything else. As I write this entry, the "super Tuesday" results in the primaries are rolling in, but earlier in the week, a certain sports team brought disappointment to my doorstep and Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!. At least the first and third topics would be fair game for this blog, but the first and second have occupied much of my mind. Two items that have caught my eye this week, however, have been:

• Lauren Cornell's review of Bad Beuys Entertainment on Rhizome.org: On the one hand, I enjoyed this review because of its subject rather than its substance - the clever name, the pointed use of video, and the approach of the collective (criticism through embrace). Yet the reason I cite the review rather than the collective is Cornell's brief observation that "[l]ong before the onset of video-sharing platforms, the [late 90s video work of the collective] would be an amazing Youtube find: an amateur homage to the culture industry that winds up as a critique not only of media's power, but our own consumption of it." In a way, an observation like this provides a glimmer of hope for a culture that increasingly looks to its YouTubes. These tools do indeed make it easier for more people to engage in cultural critique - knowingly or otherwise. Yet it is only through a type of nostalgia that we can see exactly what we are experiencing now.


• Jean Babtiste Bayle's MyOWNspace: admittedly, I did find this thanks to the previous item, but it is worthy of its own mention. MySpace is nothing if not an easy target for cultural and artistic criticism. There is an unrefined, raw, unselfconscious air about the site and its users' pages that lend themselves easily to parody and theoretical target practice. The site sports sorely dated designs in a design conscious Web 2.0 net-world, and relies on crude markups and hacks for users to personalize their little corners. MySpace is technostalgia alive and well. MyOWNspace serves as a particularly clever parody. The creator has fun in sending up every little detail, from the premise, to the Google ads. It is parody as it should be, fun yet insightful.

Posted by Nathan at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in the Rhizome Artbase I cam across a couple of interesting pieces by Martin John Callanan: I am Still Alive and I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. The works play with the notion of immediacy - on the web and in text message communication respectively.

News brings together (or at least claims to) thumbnail images of the front pages of every national, daily newspaper from around the world. The web page is filled with the evenly spaced images and interrupted only by a small text box in the top right of the viewer's browser stating "I Wanted to See All of the News From Today: [today's date], Martin John Callanan." Alive, on the other hand, claims to involve a device that searches local wireless networks for open, connected devices like PDAs or cell phones, and when it finds one, sends the message "I am still alive" - translated appropriately for the country of course.

What I enjoy about both pieces are their direct and simple nature. News presents nothing more than "the news" in the form of its most prominent signifier, the national daily paper. Alive does not discriminate between phones more than it has to for delivery and presents the surprised recipient with a message that states a simple, if slightly bewildering statement.

Where News succeeds is in its critique of online news and news aggregators. The project earnestly, ingenuously, and almost feyly approaches its stated goal - one it shares with Google, CNN.com, and of course the New York Times own "All the News..." claim. Yet in doing so, it points out the quixotic and ultimately sisyphean task it really is. In this way, News also parodies the larger project of the socially networked internet: totalizing archivization and the myth that "everything is at your fingertips." The work shows that in fact, when everything is at you fingertips - it's actually just a bit too much and perhaps what we're looking for after all is a different sort of archive. Thus Callanan successfully mocks the major online news outlets' earnestness at the same time as he nods to the enormity of their common project.

What I enjoy about Alive is how it plays with the notion of immediacy in media like text messages or social networks. In these media, users/participants are constantly engaged in a project of updating and enhancing. MySpace users continually fiddle with their profiles to convey just the right message for the moment - Twitter users somehow find the need to update friends and followers with minutiae (and these friends and followers find the need to pay attention). These are media of archivization of the present, where a steady stream of information implies life and a cessation of the flow signals death. This is not only corporeal death - as that certainly is evidenced in suddenly static texts and profiles - but also a halting of participation, which is the equivalent of death in these media.

So in choosing "I am still alive" as the message sent to unwitting participants, Callanan has brilliantly honed the basic sentiment in every message that we send or profile update we make. Every message may as well say "I am still alive" since that message is the function of all such communication. Not just an odd phrase to rouse curiosity, the message is crafted to make the recipients aware of the medium itself.

I really was impressed by these two works and their deadly simple, yet pithy delivery. I strongly suggest that readers take a look.

Posted by Nathan at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just seen the web version of a piece by the British new media artist Stanza called "YOU ARE MY SUBJECTS". The piece addresses a familiar topic in new media art - surveillance - especially as is operates through the ubiquitous British CCTV system. While in the gallery, YAMS is meant to be displayed on three large screens in London with the imagery originating in New York. On the web, the viewer is limited to a single image frame with multiple simultaneous audio tracks. The image itself is sensitive to the position of the viewer's cursor in relation to the frame, displaying a series of blurred and distorted still images that only come into focus when the cursor comes to a stop.

In creating a piece meant to critique surveillance through closed circuit television, Stanza has managed to integrate only a thin illusion of liveness and avoid almost completely the specificity of CCTV. Yet, I don't mention this as negative criticism, but to point out that the stated goal of the piece (revealing a state surveillance apparatus) is not necessarily the effect, intended or not.

First of all, it's key to note that a large portion of YAMS viewers will not be in the gallery, but on their computers viewing it in their web browser - like me. This contrasts with the idea that the piece addresses CCTV as a specific medium of surveillance. Stanza has opened the illusion of surveillance to any who choose to access it, essentially feeding not only a desire to see without being seen, but also the parallel desire to be seen that we see so often in new media. The images are vague enough to imply liveness and immediacy without actually breaching those boundaries. This allows the viewer to place him/herself on both sides of the screen. We are, in a sense, viewing ourselves as much as others.

YAMS does indeed tackle surveillance, though not in the subversive manner it seems to want to. Instead of revealing a grim reality of the modern state, it undermines its outlying purpose and allows an outlet for the fulfillment of scopic desires that we see in action in so many places on the web these days (do I even need to mention them here anymore?).

Posted by Nathan at 07:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I really wanted to like E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities by Marcel O'Gorman. I really did. The jacket tempts with promises of a path toward reforming the liberal arts education, armed with the tools of critical theory and digital media. This is a promise that some of my particular intersecting interests would have some grand, noble purpose. Perhaps it was my inflated expectations but I found that several significant weaknesses make it over all, an underwhelming read.

My first major criticism lies in the first chapter in which O'Gorman itemizes and responds to the criticism he received on a paper that was not accepted for publication in an unnamed academic journal. His essential premise - that we should question the underlying structure of academic writing and the cultural norms and institutions it supports - is a fine one, but by placing it in the framework of criticizing the critics who rejected his piece forces the reader to interpret the writing as bitter and vengeful. As he addresses each specific comment made on the non-traditional essay he submitted to what can be assumed is a more traditional journal, the over-arching sentiment is that the editors were clouded by an out-dated academic apparatus and could not value his innovation as such. O'Gorman undermines his own point about the structure of academic writing through the structure of his own writing. This is not the result of innovation on his part, but a lingering aura of bitterness surrounding the section.

As the reader moves beyond the first chapter, s/he is confronted with a broad discussion of "imagetexts" and visual theory that should be quite familiar to most anyone who has read any television/video studies material. Yet instead of this being presented as foreground for further analysis, O'Gorman is satisfied to re-cover the basics applying new "punceptual" terms to familiar concepts. (The "puncepts" were clever for a little while, and I was willing to go along for the ride, but by the end they seemed superfluous.) Much of what he covered was not even particularly exclusive to digital media - that is, much of his analysis did not address the networked aspects that have become critical to deal with in digital media. Needless to say I was disappointed.

Thirdly, I disagree with his dismissal of the archival aspects of new media as a significant, institutional molding force. He claims that the potential for archivization that new/digital media have brought has been over-hyped in that it merely reinforces the existing academic structure. Yet he fails to consider that significant use does not imply useful significance. We have to consider that it is more than scholarly work that has become increasingly archival and that to say something is "archival" does not mean that it is in any way static. Archivization as we see it emerging in both academic and non-academic spheres has become increasingly tied with subjectivity and and interaction. We must tie it more to the concept of Foucault's archive in The Archaeology of Knowledge than with the concept of the traditional library. This view allows a broader and more dynamic process of archivization, but also one of greater cultural importance through which exist and express.

Despite my complaints, the penultimate section of the text reframed the entire piece. In this section, O'Gorman provides sample lesson plans for educators interested in expanding academic exercise into new media. Perhaps this should have been billed as the focus of E-Crit: It frames the book not as a study of digital media, critical theory, and their coming influence in the academic apparatus, but as a pedagogical tool aimed at influencing practicing educators not versed in these fields. In this light, the criticisms that it lacks a depth of analysis and that it does not properly address the significance of the archive in new media, both become insignificant.

Perhaps then I do not take issue with the text itself but merely the cultural apparatus through which I have experienced it. As a book with all the metatexts surrounding it proclaiming it to be something it is not, it falls short. As a long essay suggesting incremental change in pedagogical practice, it serves its purpose. But then again, as the first chapter demonstrates, I think O'Gorman might enjoy taking his readers out of their comfort zone by placing his writing in unexpecting environments.

Posted by Nathan at 08:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)