Thursday, August 17, 2006

Nettime


Looping
"The world runs on Internet time." - Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel.
The early net artists were, in many ways, ahead of their time (or as Cocteau might have said, "would appear to be ahead of their time, for it is really the time that is behind the work."). But now that has all changed. Net Art 2.0 like Web 2.0 is embedded in the practices and rituals of everyday life. You can't be a net artist today without taking into account where the impetus for turning the net into an artistic instrument came from. That means that early net art history anticipated the socially interconnected "second lives" of the new generation of net artists for whom the digital is but an extension of their body's functionality as it navigates the network culture. I discuss this more thoroughly in the "Spontaneous Theories" section of META/DATA.

As Baudrillard reminds us, "[t]he image no longer even has time to become an image."

Perhaps we could say net art never had enough time to become net art but that Net Art 2.0 is more in sync with its time. This may be the reason why so much of the art work being created by next generation net artists is less avant (ahead of its time) and more pop (in its time).


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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Dérive Media


Mobloggin'
"One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll." - Bureau of Public Secrets
At first glance, one would think that the Situationist dérive was made for moblogging. But some seem to think that locative media art could be positioning itself as somewhat predictable performance art spectacle, i.e. could just be more fodder for the military-entertainment complex to churn into its ongoing bomb rationale. Do they have a point?


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Monday, August 14, 2006

Melting Plastic Fantastic

What happens when the body ports itself to other parts of the world faster than ever before and the mind begins to wander?

What are the similarities between jet-lag, as kind of preemptive state of mind, and the mental space one enters when creating new art work in the passion of the moment, a moment so ahead of itself (avant) that it leaves the body behind?

Or is it the body that leads the creative potential into its fits of unconscious churning?

Right now, even as I compose these words directly into screenal space, I know that my body is OFF THE CLOCK.

And that's a good thing.

"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." - Jorge Luis Borges

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