This Day in History

On June 17, 1997, both Cynthia Kitchen (one of the lead avatars in GRAMMATRON) and myself were featured in the Workspace site at the Tenth Documenta (dX) in Kassel, Germany.

It was the Day of the Manifestoes.

Do these virtual appearances mean we were IN Documenta?

Unfortunately, the Workspace site and all of the "dX" website were taken off the web at the end of the event - strange, huh? But that's how they thought back in those days.

Fortunately, the net dot artist Vukie Coshic downloaded the whole site before the "dX" organizers knew it, and virtually republished it here (a readymade net dot art work of sorts).

Nine years later we have to ask: where have all the net dot artists gone?

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Metadata: net art, Documenta, manifesto

Methodology

In a previous post, I mentioned the connection between Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Work (aka The Arcades Project) and something I am calling "blogstyle". I have been looking for an opportunity to put into practice a methodology similar to the one Benjamin employed for his Passagen-Work, and the chance to do that has finally arrived. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is about to launch an exhibition this summer called "Decades of Influence" - and since I supposedly influenced the emerging digital/net art scene here in Colorado, I am making a new work for the show.

Lately, I have been looking at blogging as theory-performance. Not as an academic space for the theory of performance (though that's OK too - go for it) - but a place to play out my own theoretical performances as blogstyle poetics. I now want to filter that impulse through an "imaginary plug-in" I will call Passagen-Work, which is the name of the art work too. It will officially start going live on June 16th - that's tomorrow - at this blog address - but the first post (a remix of this one) is already up there.

Speaking of methodology, here is what Benjmain wrote in his file on methodology for Passagen-Work:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Of course, he contradicted himself in the best of possible ways and actually said a lot - and so one can imagine that I will attempt to do this too, whether I want to or not.

But I do like the idea of Benjamin's methodology being remixed with my own remixological blogstyle - and some kind of theoretical performance art project emerging out of it. The subtitle of my Passagen-Work is Theory As Remixology As Performance As Art?

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Metadata: art, blogging, blog, remix, Walter Benjamin, Denver

Futurist, Come Home

Interesting mix of image/text props from The Futures Lab and what they presented to the Urban Libraries Council (.pdf file). Easy to scroll through it all and the last half samples from some valuable (net) art and music to help them make their point that future thoughtware in the network society will create a Post-Consumerist Culture.

You buy it?

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Metadata: futurist, art, music

Glossing the Blogroll (Pt. 2)

Continuing from yesterday:

Pinnocchio Theory is an excellent mix of theory-oriented writing on everything from Marx to Alfred North Whitehead to new age economics to the all-encompassing Age of Aesthetics we find ourselves operating in. What is that on the horizon?

Innovation and the New remain our highest values in postmodernity and the Age of Aesthetics, just as they were in the age of twentieth-century modernism. The categorical imperative of our productive endeavors is still to “make it new.” But the sign of this imperative has been reversed; it has flipped over from negative to positive. Modernist creation was fundamentally antagonistic: “there is no affirmation which is not preceded by an immense negation” (Deleuze). “Making it new” had avant-gardist, anti-capitalist, or at least subversive and anti-conformist connotations; it was always opposed to the standardization and repetitiveness of mass production. (Even the fascist side of modernism — as in the Italian Futurists and Ezra Pound — was anti-capitalist in this sense). But today, in a world of flexible production and lifestyle marketing, the imperative to “make it new” is enthusiastically embraced by Capital. After all, corporations themselves are now mindful of diversity, and opposed to standardization and repetitive mass production. And so they embrace a perpetual newness that is upbeat and free of antagonism. Continual “reinvention” is the watchword, both in corporate organization (the focus of Tom Peters’ interest) and in product design and marketing.

On the Silliman Blog, interfacing poetics and proprioception is the hot topic of the day. I like that it comes up in connection to Charles Olson as well. Let us say that the proprioceptive nerve centers of the poet-on-the-go anticipate the next poetic becoming in the compositional field of play...(even if it is a mouthful).

The consensual hallucinations of k-punk remind me of the most intense of the avant-pop days and their frottage with cyberpunk aesthetics ("the horror, the horror...").

I recently blogged GAM3R 7H30RY here.

Blog Art is an ongoing exhibition of new work in the blogosphere, still up as the featured exhibition at Hyper-X. Will this show ever end?

Green Cine is an excellent blog for keeping up with the most interesting parts of the film scene.

The Now What Blog offers a glimpse of the small press scene with a very smart, literary spin to it. Keep an eye out for the posts by "blonde"...

MITPressLog is self-explanatory. I imagine I'll be engaging with it somewhat in the months ahead, as soon as my META/DATA book is listed in the catalogue (end of summer).

That's it for now...

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Metadata: blog, theory, literature, cinema

Glossing the Blogroll (Pt. 1)

A little "glossing" is in order:

Oz Blog is my first real attempt a blogging. Starting in January 2002, I performed the work while a visiting International Fellow and Artist in Residence at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. This is an excerpt published by The Iowa Review. The entire work is actually hidden online somewhere...

Screenfull is wild. Melinda Rackham reviewed the project for Rhizome and said:

Appearing before me is an art work that breaks the daily tedium of grazing over cloned and sanitised blog interface design - those sorts of creepily nice blogs that make me shudder on the inside with their readable, balanced, cutesy, clean, neat, artless, self conscious, logical, and organised versions of blandness.

The Screenfull project also won one of its developers (who also happens to be a Grad student in my lab) the top Graduate School Creative Work and Research Award at the University of Colorado of Boulder and Screenfull The BOOK, created in my "Electronic Writing and Publishing" course, is also now featured at the student-built HIAFF website.

DVblog is the most interesting experimental video art blog on the web (new at the site: jimpunk's DVblogH4ck [punk also works on Screenfull above]), while rantapod inmixes thoughts on networks, assembled cinema, performance, politics, and ranting.

Adrian's Vlog is less raw than the exuberant transmissions at DVblog, but his vogma manifesto (written in 12/2000) attests to the fact that he was doing it before anyone else and, from a theoretical perspective, understands its cultural implications better than anyone. He is undoubtedly the best person to teach this stuff too, which he does, in the new honors program he's developing at RMIT.

Speaking of theory, Pt. 2 of the blogroll glossing will continue looking at the theory and lit sites I've linked to so far, as well as a few others.

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Metadata: blog, video, art, Australia

Blogroll, Please...

Just started my blogroll (you'll see it to the right of these posts). It only took me four months...

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Metadata: blog