nettime Quote me! by Garrett Lynch
Announcing the release of Quote me! by Garrett Lynch: http://www.asquare.org/project/quote-me/ (please be patient this may take a few moments to load) --- Every good artist has at least one quote, aphorism or soundbite attributed to them, yet the new media artist barely has time to keep up with the rapid change of technology let alone spend time thinking of witty aphorisms. Quote me! is a work, triggered by users to its web page, that reuses quotes and the date they were expressed from various online sources for the busy new media artist who hasn't time. Quotes are relevant comments to current political and social events, both nationally and internationally, taken from the current headlines of a handful of global newspapers via their respective rss / xml feeds, yet placed without context or explanation. Information and the database have become the ultimate pervasive commodity. New things are no longer said and done instead they are recombined, recompiled or remixed from the archives we are continuously compiling both as individuals and as a race. Quote me! is in a sense an agent for the artist. Reusing the media's carefully edited information as source for quotes the agent is able to automatically recycle information for the artists use. Allocated parameters it is given free reign to search and retrieve others quotes from the internet, republishing and archiving them on its web page. Quotes are attributed to the artist ensuring that (s)he has a voice in a space where things need to be continually said. The importance or profoundness of what is said becomes unimportant, replaced instead by the regularity and continuous act of saying. A web 2.0 tool or service as work of art, Quote me! both continues themes of net.art (reusing, recycling, transforming) and simultaneously highlights the redundancy of it as a tool when the content is unoriginal and without context. It draws attention to the highly important exploration involved in these types of recombinatory net.art works, not possible outside of the internet, yet questions the same use of techniques employed in their creation for the critical discourse that surrounds them in our collaborative, tagging, reblogging and ever more copied, unoriginal content of web 2.0. a+ gar __ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.asquare.org/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Preface by De Kerckhove of the Networking book
Hallo, Hoping to have soon the English version of the Networking | The Net as an Artwork book, I send already to you the preface written by Derrick de Kerckhove. I think it is a very good text to introduce the book's topics: it deals with the book's contents (the reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy) with an external - not Italian - point of view, that makes easier the understanding of the subject for the people abroad that are not familiar with the Italian net culture and hacktivism. Therefore, I think it could be very usefull also for the Nettime subscribers... All the best [and sorry for the long text], Tatiana -- PREFACE BY DERRICK DE KERCKHOVE for Networking | The Net as an Artwork (Tatiana Bazzichelli, 2006) Download the book from: http://www.networkingart.eu Tatiana Bazzichelli is a rising scholar and critic of digital culture and this book is a milestone in the critical theory she began developing in the 1990's while studying sociology. Her interest in the connections between art and the media matured within academic environments, to consider their social and political implications. She went on to concentrate more fully on the themes of art in hacker ethics and collaborated directly with independent Italian hacker communities and networking activists in the art industry. This book follows the itinerary in the art field and in digital activism that she has documented over time. A quest that is not exclusively personal, but that also recounts some of the experiences of many other people in Italy who began to work experimentally on art and technology during the 1980's. This type of writing I call glocal autobiography, meaning that it connects the personal to the larger connected realm of global activities. The book takes its place in the evolution of the artistic networking project AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism www.ecn.org/aha. An initiative started in 2001 by Bazzichelli as part of her plan to promote art on the Internet and to give greater visibility to the Italian digital culture, AHA has contributed to the creation of a vast network of relations and projects. Italian hacktivism and net art are little known to the rest of the world. That situation ought to be remedied, since Italians, as in so many other fields, are just as innovative on line as off, in their own inimitable way. Exporting Italian thinking on media and network technology is a sort of vocation I am presently following within a few institutions in Italy: the Faculty of Sociology in the University Federico II in Naples, and the M Node research centre within the Belle Arti Academy in Milan (NABA). The McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto is a possible platform for the diffusion of Italian hacktivist and artistic paths such as are mentioned in this book. Penetrating at the heart of current networking dynamics, of complex processes in the internet, one may notice that instead of the usual focus on technology, there is a growing trend towards interest in people, in their way of connecting and their social-cultural friendships and relations, their direct connection to the reality in which they live. Not long ago people talked a lot about the virtual, but today it's clear that the people in flesh and blood are the destiny of the network and not just machines. The network of participation and the formation of networks and relations through technology is an increasingly pervasive and global phenomenon, and the analysis of the methods with which these networks are formed is becoming a necessity for those who deal with digital culture. One must not limit oneself to solely analyzing singular contents which are present on the internet, but instead should try and understand how people who create such contents are connected between themselves in a present, extended way. One must therefore consider the social dimensions of connectivity. This book attempts to do this for the Italian communities of networkers. Quoting the famous phrase by Marshall McLuhan the medium is the message [1], today one may say that the network is the message of the medium Internet. The networking phenomenon was anticipated by the practice of mail art long before Internet evolved, just as the pointillism of Seurat could be considered prophetic with respect to the subsequent development of the television image. Until recently in America the term network was used to describe the television medium, but today it regards a much larger and vaster connective dimension, which is the Internet. Network becomes the net of social relations, it is the message transmitted by the Internet medium, which is in turn the net which technically permits transmission. The net of relations represents the message of the technical net. If the medium conditions the message (though converging on the Internet, TV, books, radio,
nettime Sodom Blogging - Alternative porn and aesthetic sensibility
[This text was commissioned by the German art magazine 'Texte zur Kunst' http://www.textezurkunst.de for its 'PORNO' issue (no. 64, December 2006) and is online at http://www.textezurkunst.de/NR64/SODOM-BLOGGING-d.html (German) and http://www.textezurkunst.de/NR64/SODOM-BLOGGING-e.html (English). English translation by Gerrit Jackson. ] SODOM BLOGGING Alternative porn and aesthetic sensibility The contradiction of all pornography is that it destroys the obscene. Like the beautiful for classicism, the sublime for Dark Romanticism and the ugly for the grotesque, the obscene is porn's aesthetic register, its aura and its selling point. Sade invents modern pornography as the discourse of art crosses a historical threshold from rule-based poiesis to the sensitive aisthesis. The 120 jours de Sodome illustrate precisely this clash of cultures: a gang of perpetrators, old aristocrats who combine and choreograph their orgies according to the rules of poetics; a group of victims, young children from the bourgeoisie, whose sensibilities unmask the debauchery as perversion in the first place; and as a result, a mutual escalation of poiesis and aisthesis, construction and sentiment, machine and body. Conceptualism and performance, the antagonistic and complementary poles of modern art, are already fully developed here, and their conjunction of the pornographic and the mechanical will be taken up again in Duchamp's Large Glass and Schwitters's Merzbau, patrician sex-machine construction and petit-bourgeois sensitive cathedral of erotic misery. That the pornographic logic of the taboo on obscenity cancels itself nowhere more thoroughly than in pornography itself, is demonstrated exemplarily by the performances of Annie Sprinkle. An actress in seventies mainstream porn who became an Action artist and alternative porn pioneer, she not only transgresses generic boundaries but also turns the classical imagery of heterosexual pornography on its head. With her ritual invitation to the audience to see into her vagina by means of a speculum, Sprinkle concludes the iconographic tradition of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde (1886) and Duchamp's Ãtant donnés (posthumous, 1968), but disarms the previously lewd gaze, exorcising, an agent of both sexual education and enlightenment, both the taboo and the sexual mystery from such display. Speaking of an obscene heft of language and discovering in a word such as 'cunt' [...] great power,[1] writer Kirsten Fuchs indicates not only the taboo of Indie porn discourses which defuse this heft but also the failure of industrial porno-graphy to reproduce it. Sade, whose systematically constructed escalations blunt the consumer's sensibilities just like any mainstream pornography, attempts to save the taboo by carrying his excesses to the extreme of ritual murder, a figure of thought, Romantic and sentimentalist at its core, which lives on in the urban legends of performance art suicides Rudolf Schwarzkogler and John Fare, and is physically performed, in a race against the Zeitgeist, in Genesis P. Orridge's modifications of his body. The exploitation of the porn viewer consists in the false promise of obscenity, or its simulation - as Gonzo porn has done since John Stagliano's Buttman series - through the aggressive penetration and protrusion of bodies.[2] Yet this is precisely where mainstream and independent pornography, the business and the activism of porn meet: Sprinkle's performances are Gonzo with the addition of a feminist empowerment which returns the object of such protrusion to the position of the subject. And the independent pornography which has recently established itself as a genre, mostly on the Internet but flanked by sexually explicit auteur movies such as 9 songs and Shortbus, can be the subject of a discussion free of bad conscience because, among other reasons, it presents good sex without obscenity; fulfilling, after the interventions of the feminist anti-porn debate of the 1980s, Peter Gorsen's diagnosis of a neo-vitalist tendency in contemporary sexual aesthetics that consummate the program of turn-of-the-century anti-industrialization and Naturist movements.[3] Thus, the boundaries are blurred between the pornographic exploitation of codes from subcultures and artistic experimentation on the one hand, and the sub-cultural appropriation of pornographic codes on the other hand. The Australian porn holding gmbill.com hosts Project ISM at ishotmyself.com, a simulated conceptual art project by women who photograph themselves, and beautifulagony.com, a website - the eroticism is quite successful - exclusively devoted to close-up videos of men's and women's faces during sex and orgasm, thus serializing the concept behind Andy Warhol's Blow Job, in recursive application of Warhol's aesthetic to itself. The milieus, roles and interests of art and commercial enterprise, of artists and sex workers, of sex industry and cultural criticism seem to blend into each other:
Tools and Fools (was Re: nettime Ken's Taking No Prisoners)
Thanx for the posting - interesting review. However it seems to lack proper insight into what tools really are. Creator's ideology gets projected into the tool, and then the Big Disappointment comes, because the tool really doesn't give a fuck. To put in more formal terms, creator C assesses the reality R, estimates how it diverges from his/her desired reality Rd, and then designs tool T which is supposed to nudge R towards Rd. Tool, being a function devoid of any ideology, will readily whore itself to anyone that cares to use it, often moving R directly opposite of Rd. So what is the root problem here? C was either not clever enough to properly assess R (which is nearly impossible anyway, due to complexities involved) or C was using ideology as an afterthought justification for something he/she would do anyway for cash, blowjob or whatever. Where does it leave Cs of the world? I think turning the stones of imagination and seeing which snake will crawl out is Good Stuff. Maybe it will end in total destruction of life, maybe it will make everyone so happy that we'll just drool for the rest of our lives, but one thing is sure - it will not be the boring shit that non-technology activism was churning out for the last few millenia - revolutions, ideologies, assorted kleptocracies, rebels, anarchists - who cares? They didn't create a single new thing since the invention of masturbation. It was all tools and toolmakers. end (of original message) Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows: Cheap talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates. http://voice.yahoo.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
