Art and the Internet 1994 - 2014. Notes and Comments (original) (raw)
Related papers
AFK. Texts on Artists 2011 - 2016
2016
AFK - an acronym for “away of keyboard” widely used online - is an anthology of texts written for catalogues and exhibition brochures along the last five years, featuring twelve texts about eleven artists and an artist duo: Rosa Menkman, Jon Rafman, Gazira Babeli, Martin Kohout, Maurizio Cattelan, Enrico Boccioletti, Constant Dullaart, Jill Magid, Aram Bartholl, Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion, Evan Roth and Addie Wagenknecht. In different ways, these artists experienced the impact of digital means of production and dissemination, they experimented with them, they thought about them, and all this is reflected in their work. As Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the Pirate Bay, they think the internet is real, and they spend a lot of time in this real space of life, communication, love, hate, surveillance, sharing, and copying. Most of the works discussed here are made to be experienced in a brick and mortar space, away of keyboard; but reflect the current way of living, communicating, loving, hating, spying, sharing, copying, on and away of keyboard. Domenico Quaranta, AFK. Texts on Artists 2011 - 2016, Link Editions, December 2016. Black and white paperback, 180 pages, English, ISBN 9781326892920
2011
In Your Computer, by Domenico Quaranta, is a collection of texts written by Domenico Quaranta between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews: a pocket version of what the author would save from the universal flood, in a world without computers. It documents most of the fields of research he has focused on critically: from Net Art to Software Art and videogames, from biotechnologies to the debate around curating and the positioning of New Media Art in the contemporary landscape, and back to Net Art again. This itinerary is traced through a selection of essays, monographic texts and interviews with artists and curators, in no particular order: from Eva and Franco Mattes to Casey Reas, from UBERMORGEN.COM to Oliver Laric, from Cory Arcangel to Tale of Tales, from Jon Ippolito to Gazira Babeli. As the author writes in the introduction: «We are in the midst of a major change. At the end of the process, not only the way we live, work, travel and communicate, but also the political and economical structures and the social organization we are used to will probably be fundamentally different from how they are now. In art, this change will be complete when the way we make, circulate and understand art is completely different from the way we do it now; and when the way we understand the difference between copies and original and between art and non-art will have adapted to the new models created by the information age. The most we can do now is to take our time, adapt to our new living conditions, be aware of the process going on and look to the most radical propositions around for signals of what is to come. In the awareness that we probably don’t have to look that far: these signals are already here, in our computers.» Domenico Quaranta, In Your Computer, LINK Editions, Brescia 2011. Soft cover, 180 pp, English, ISBN: 978-1-4467-6021-5
Art, Internet, Post-Internet: Between Theory and Practice
Although the term post-Internet emerged in 2008, since then many writers, critics and curators have been involved in the discussion of what it might mean. Some see it as the ’translation’ of net.art to fit the ecosystem of contemporary art, whereas others understand it as a form that is ’aware’ of its own environment and still carries the flag of institutional critique. Instead of using the Internet just as its material, post-Internet practitioners also take the Internet as subject matter and problematized topics like surveillance, infrastructure and control over the Internet. This dissertation puts an emphasis on theorizing the concept of post-Internet by referring to invisible infrastructures that shape the Internet, conceptualized by James Bridle as ’the New Aesthetic’; critique of neoliberal agents on the Internet as discussed by Zach Blas; the validity of distinction between digital and physical culture in the age of ’digital natives’ and the problems of authenticity, performativity and temporality in the post-Internetage. Opening chapters gives a non-linear development of the Internet as a medium and the subject of artistic practice, thus distinguishing net.art that is made using material gathered online from post-Internet. After ’defining’ post-Internet, the dissertation looks into real life applications and case studies in order to explore curatorial strategies and processes, especially focused on the rep- resentations of such works in physical spaces. Methodologically, theories are handled and explained using the practices of artists and other producers to point out the disappearance of difference between the theory and practice in life after the Internet.
#mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation,, 2019
What is Net art? Does its name refer to the medium it uses? Is it the art of the Netizens, the inhabitants of the internet? Is it an art movement or an art form? This book aims to provide a starting point in the search for answers to these and similar questions concerning the existence of Internet art. Edited by Marie Meixnerová, a Czech curator and scholar, #mm Net Art—Internet Art in the Virtual and Physical Space of Its Presentation approaches Internet art as a developing art form, through five thematic sections that map the “chronological” stages of this development. Featured authors include Katarína Rusnáková, Dieter Daniels, Marie Meixnerová, Domenico Quaranta, Natalie Bookchin, Alexei Shulgin, Piotr Czerski, Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, Ben Vickers, Jennifer Chan, Gene McHugh, Gunther Reisinger, Matěj Strnad, Lumír Nykl. For those who know little about it, this anthology can serve as an introduction to this specific area of Twentieth and Twenty-first century art; to the expert reader, it offers new and as yet unpublished information, and hopefully a new perspective on the phenomenon of Internet art. According to Domenico Quaranta: “#mm net art is an anthology edited and filtered from a very specific node in the network. This is exactly what makes it so precious: in a networked world in which all information seems to be available in the same form, at the same speed and on the same screens, your point of access is what actually shapes your point of view; and looking through another’s point of view is what allows you to think outside your own box, pardon, bubble.”
Networking. The Net as Artwork
A book about the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today. Networking means to create nets of relations, where the publisher and the reader, the artist and the audience, act on the same level. The book is a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of media and art projects which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the creation of Italian hacker communities. The Italian network proposes a form of critical information, disseminated through independent and collective projects where the idea of freedom of expression is a central theme. In Italy, thanks to the alternative use of Internet, during the past twenty years a vast national network of people who share political, cultural and artistic views has been formed. The book describes the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today. It builds a reflection on the new role of the artist and author who becomes a networker, operating in collective nets, reconnecting to Neoavant-garde practices of the 1960s (first and foremost Fluxus), but also mail art, Neoism and Luther Blissett. A path which began in BBSes, alternative web platforms spread in Italy through the 1980s even before the Internet even existed, and then moved on to Hackmeetings, to Telestreet and networking art by different artists such as 0100101110101101.ORG, [epidemiC], Jaromil, Giacomo Verde, Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, Correnti Magnetiche, Candida TV, Tommaso Tozzi, Federico Bucalossi, Massimo Contrasto, Mariano Equizzi, Pigreca, Molleindustria, Guerriglia Marketing, Sexyshock, Phag Off and many others.
Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age
2011
The last decade has seen an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and other cultural artefacts. The internet is the place where all these cultural products are stored, classified, voted, collected and trashed. What is the impact of this process on art making and on the artist? Which kind of dialogue is going on between amateur practices and codified languages? How does art respond to the society of information? This is a book about endless archives, image collections, bees plundering from flower to flower and hunters crawling through the online wilderness. With works by Alterazioni Video, Kari Altmann, Cory Arcangel, Gazira Babeli, Kevin Bewersdorf, Luca Bolognesi, Natalie Bookchin, Petra Cortright, Aleksandra Domanovic, Harm van den Dorpel, Constant Dullaart, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Elisa Giardina Papa, Travis Hallenbeck, Jodi, Oliver Laric, Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied, Guthrie Lonergan, Eva and Franco Mattes, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Claudia Rossini, Evan Roth, Travess Smalley, Ryan Trecartin.
Response. Contemporary Art and Online Popular Culture
Artpulse, 2014
The online dialogue between producers and consumers is challenging the way the relationship between high and low culture was understood throughout the 20th century. This article attempts to trace its evolution.
Constant Dullaart - In It for the Lulz
PostScriptUM #25 - Series edited by Janez Janša, 2016
“What the Internet stood for, for a long time, is something that I’m still nostalgically supporting,” said Constant Dullaart in an interview. The Dutch artist, lecturer and curator grew up in an age of the Internet “designed to be used by everyone”. In its first years, the Internet proved to be the place of warm, authentic relationships, the place where one looked for friends, not followers, and where one engaged in peer-to-peer discussions, not in simply adding a number to a stack. Now we work in corporate backyards and, especially in social network environments, we are very easily and almost inadvertently drawn to care more about numbers than people, and to commodify ourselves, our friends and the contents we produce. “Dullaart’s projects,” says the art critic Domenico Quaranta in this essay, “can be only understood as actions within a system, responding to something and waiting for a response, showing that we could invert this trend if we really wanted to.”
2013
“Beyond New Media Art” is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title “Media, New Media, Postmedia” (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation. “Beyond New Media Art” is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age. From the book’s preface: “So what is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? And what has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what accounts for the limited presence in critical debate of an artistic practice that appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organization of the world we live in?” Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media Art, Link Editions, Brescia 2013. Soft cover, 290 pp., ISBN 9781291376975
The proliferation of digital technologies in nearly every aspect of life has been accompanied with narratives of change – both dystopian and utopian – from its early days. And if art is in any way to relate to our lived experience, then it comes at no surprise that artists started to investigate the digital – as a tool and medium, but also as a testing ground for new models of thinking about art in relation to society. As Walter Benjamin infamously demonstrated in his analysis of art in times of technical reproducibility, technological advancements not only affect the way art is produced, but also the politics of its distribution and consumption. If the reproducibility of a photograph has caused the loss of the aura of the unique original – what effects do the ephemerality and malleability of the digital artwork have on previous formulas of producing, viewing and thinking art? Is digital art in its fleeting, participatory nature capable of challenging the the status of the artwork as a commodity, as envisioned by the politically motivated computer art of the 80s and 90s? Or are we today merely dealing with a digitalised version of an established system of contemporary art under the rule of neo-liberal capital?