Spontaneous Combustion!

“Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.”
-Marshall McLuhan

This panel will explore the dynamics of social networking sites and open source software as it is being utilized in postmodern digital art practice. Currently, artists are collaborating, networking, performing and creating interventions in social, political and conceptual art utilizing frameworks created under a variety of contexts.

Preston Poe, Panel Chair

Preston Poe is an artist working with a wide range of media, often creating site-based performance and installation, as well as New Media Professor, and Director of The Electronic Gallery at Salisbury University.

He will share his experiences as artist, programmer, collaborator and facilitator in the context of the broad range of performance-based social sculpture and site-specific New Media.

Lee Montgomery, “My Greatest Successes: Improvisation, Documentation and Failure”

By presenting several examples of works from his own career, Lee will reveal the failures that most defined some of his more successful works, and how those failures were redeemed or diminished by subsequent documentation.

Lee Montgomery is the founder of Neighborhood Public Radio (an ongoing, eight year long, transmission based collaborative project with social practice overtones) and is Assistant Professor of Electronic Art in the Department of Art
and Art History at the University of New Mexico. Lee’s work with his collaborators in NPR has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, The DeYoung Museum, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Ceci Moss, “Internet Aware, Post Internet, Expanded Internet: Recent Developments in Internet-Based Art Practice”

Ceci Moss is a PhD candidate and an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice, digital technology and perception, the materiality of media, postmodernism and digital art preservation.

Within the last 5 years or so, two terms have cropped up in discussion of contemporary internet-based art – “internet aware art” and “post internet art.” These works are not intended to be viewed and experienced exclusively online, but are seen as always having the potential to go offline, in many cases becoming physical objects. The dispersed nature of many of these works also allows multiple forms of engagement, across a number of different contexts. This paper will review these concepts of “post-internet” or “internet aware” art while also providing examples of recent internet-based art practice that seems
to pertain to these ideas by artists such as David Horvitz, Artie Vierkant, Kari Altmann, Travess Smalley, Mark Leckey, Seth Price, Samara Golden, Anne de Vries and others. Why, within the past 5 years, have internet artists been so attentive to the materiality of their projects, often working both on and offline? How does this relate to a digitally-informed experience of being in public? Is this a response to shifting conditions within the space of the internet itself, brought on by social media, expanded bandwidth (allowing the faster transmission of video, images, sound, animation, etc.), and a limitless landscape of data? Are we seeing the emergence of expanded internet-based art, perhaps akin to expanded cinema?

Joseph Delappe, HEAD SHOT! Performative Interventions in Online Gaming.

Joseph DeLappe is a Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he directs the Digital Media program. Working with electronic and new media since 1983, his work in online gaming performance and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the United States and abroad – including exhibitions and performances in Australia, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Canada.

Delappe’s work as a performance artist operating in online gaming contexts is uniquely situated as an ontological explorer through the promulgation of political agency, critical mischief, and hacktivist positioning. He’ll direct his focus towards two of his most recent projects engaging in durational performative actions online. dead-in-iraq (2006 – 2011) was an in-game protest/memorial taking place in America’s Army, the popular Defense Department funded recruiting first person shooter, wherein the names of fallen United States military are typed by the author into the game’s text messaging system. He has also engaged in the creative reenactment of aspects from the life of Mahatma Gandhi in the online community. These include, The Salt Satyagraha Online: Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life, (2008) involved the creative reenactment of Gandhi’s famous 240 mile, 1930 protest march in what was a mixed reality durational performance work involving a specially converted treadmill.

Robert Lawrence, “Performance, Space and Time: Site Specific Activities”

Robert Lawrence will share with the panel and attendees several open source tools and strategies developed for simultaneous web streaming of live video from international dispersed mobile devices. These will be presented in the context of their application in his own Tango Intervention series that has been produced in 33 international cities, most recently as part of Exchange Radical Moments, a live art festival in 11 cities in Europe on 11-11-11.

Interdisciplinary artist Robert Lawrence has engaged the unique conceptual opportunities of the Internet to examine issues of location, of ‘site’, of physical and cultural ‘position’. He approaches electronic art as social sculpture and
he is very interested in the ways that digital technologies are reformulating the formerly restrictive rolls of media producer and media consumer. All his work is developed in three complimentary – and often contradictory – streams: one in
the physical world, one in the virtual world, and one in the media world. Through this hybrid practice he directly engages the way contemporary life is lived, and identity is continually reconstructed, through our engagements with real, mediated and virtual influences.

Ei Jane Janet Lin, “Humanity at its Best”

Ei Jane Janet Lin is a Chicago-based performance/video artist with a fiber and material studies background from Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Maryland Institute College
of Art. Her work deals with the many complex, contentious and multi-layered relationships existing between the East and the West, reality and fantasy, and convention and transgression through performances of sexuality and power exchange in art and pornography.

In my collaborative performance video works with artist Miao Jiaxin, I document humanity through sharp juxtapositions between contrasting virtual and analog worlds. With my collaborator, I interacted online with the community of cam4 in
explicitly Performance Art oriented interventions. The website cam4 describes itself accurately as ‚”Free Live Sex Webcams – Free Live Cams Sex Chat‚”. My performances play with the expectations and limits of the cam4 community, flowing in and out of variously experimental erotic, comedic and theatrical moments.

The installation—and by association the exhibition itself—is the articulation of the contemporary. Even paintings cannot escape this “installed” quality, the considered and particular installation of things and images, even when approached in a haphazard or off-hand manner. We all have an idea of what contemporary art represents while only knowing the specifics of any particular instance. It is this knowing what it means via evoking a particular that pushes people towards an attempt to transcend this generality.

As images or objects devoid of their operational potential, the works are sculptures like any other static and quiet object of art.  I see their formal qualities as a thing in itself – the aesthetic result of a process of engineering music.  So the form follows function and therefore the composition or constellation of objects becomes somehow more gestural than designed.  Of course as images it is difficult to understand the work as a whole but I hope that the form opens up some ideas around traditional sculpture.

This being said, I came to scrutinize my own suspicion of these so-called alternatives by questioning the fundamental basis of my own judgement: is it the responsibility of these websites and galleries to create an antithesis of the standard model of commercial distribution? Is it is also their responsibility to only show artists that otherwise would never have an opportunity to show in physical space? Following this train of thought, I came to question whether it is even the intent of these spaces and sites to operate as opponents or counters to the art market, and if it is fair of me to critique these spaces underneath these expectations. If not, then what intentions and responsibilities do organizers and curators have in the creation of their forum? To provide more substance for these considerations, I decided to talk directly with those that have been cited as promising examples of this trend in an attempt to uncover how these (mostly artist-run) initiatives consider their own activities within the larger scope of contemporary art exhibition and economics.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but ask around in my (Northern European) corner of the world, and I would guess that many of those who were working back then will confirm this picture of a generational showdown. By contrast, faded and forgotten as they may be, ‘the long nineties’ remain unsubverted. The symbolic revival of Félix Gonzáles-Torres at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, for instance, echoed his status as a guiding star of curating and art theory of that decade.

However, during the last five years, as the historicization of the ’90s gains momentum, the jury has gradually reconvened. The case being weighed is that of art’s relationship to the social. In 2007, Ina Blom published On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture, examining the practices of many of the prominent artists of the ’90s and after; a 2010 symposium at Tate Britain was entitled ‘Art and the Social: Exhibitions of Contemporary Art in the 1990s’; and Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship will be published by Verso in 2012. The art-historical claim of the latter is that the ‘social turn’ should be ‘positioned more accurately as a return to the social, part of an ongoing history of attempts to rethink art collectively’. I will proceed more sceptically – or counter-socially – by revisiting the ’90s through the social as a problematic not only for art, but also in relation to the ‘governmentality’ of our time – Michel Foucault’s term for the economics and relations of power that shape a society as a field of possible action.

His investigations require mountains of research and hundreds of thousands of miles on the road. Known for his large-format, purposefully composed photographs, Shambroom is a distinguished name. And yet, he is ready to put his approach and techniques aside for a joyride in the sea of online digital images.

“I love image making … but it’s something I know I can do. I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing the same things,” he says.

Instead, Shambroom is teaching students at the University of Minnesota about navigating images found on the internet and how image production and consumption are evolving. As he trades in his car keys for a keyboard, Raw File taps Shambroom’s thoughts about online imagery, the photographer-artists best swimming through the swell of images, Boolean searches and bombarding students with left-field assignments.

Joe Winter, The Stars Below, 2011. Mixed media installation

I did an interview with New York artist Joe Winter for Rhizome’s ongoing Artist Profile series. Teaser below, full article here.

One thing I like about your work is the fact that you seem to operate like a hacker, taking things apart, finding new ways to misuse technology. But throughout your approach appears to be deliberately poetic, wherein you bring out these singular moments of beauty. For example, when you first started working on your scanner films during a residency at the MacDowell Colony, you mentioned that you began by simply placing a scanner outside of your cabin at night. The footage became a kind of accidental biological study, as the scanner intrigued light-seeking moths and other bugs, resulting in a time-lapsed nighttime sample of the various critters in the forest. I’m wondering if you can comment on how you “hack” technology in your work, and what you hope to achieve in that process. Are you guided by a kind of poetic hacking? How so?

In most of my works that involve a technological device (printer, scanner, photocopier, etc.) the technology itself is actually fairly un-altered. I tend to adjust the context in which the object is placed, or introduce variables or conditions that exist outside what I might call the area of expertise of the device. To use your example of the scanner: whether I’m scanning documents or moths in the woods, the scanner is still executing its function in exactly the same way; I’ve simply adjusted the expected input. I’m interested in looking at a given system and seeing what else it has the potential to speak about aside from its narrow band of acceptable usage, and how its native landscape (office, classroom, computer lab) might be related to other sorts of spaces, systems, or sets of ideas.

Since you brought up the topic of systems, I’m wondering if you could discuss that further. How do you approach the notion of “system” in your work? How do you reveal the presence of these systems, is it simply an act of mimesis or a disturbance or something else?

At different moments, I might describe my work in terms of systems, structures, frameworks, rules, and/or devices. I think there are a few things at play for me on that page of the thesaurus. The first is that I am always looking for various sorts of engines to move a project forward. Just like a physical device I take up may immediately describe a set of material and procedural constraints, I’ll often involve a secondary framework–south polar exploration, the history of astronomy–that will both move a material system beyond itself and help to select supporting materials, an installation’s logic, etc. The second is developing a relationship between the system immediately at work and the secondary framework through a third, usually less visible system. To use my recent piece, The Stars Below, as an example: I first developed the material process. A series of solenoid valves release drips of water onto upright sticks of chalk, slowly eroding them. The secondary framework–an installation space suggesting something between an office and a classroom–arises from the materials involved (what is the domain of a stick of chalk? Where does this drip of water originate?) and provides a context in which to situate the erosive activity. Between these two things is a conception of Deep Time, of which slate and chalk are both products, which complicates the scales of time at play within institutional spaces. So, the work tries to establish a series of interrelations between a set of materials, landscapes, and ideas. In short, a system. Whether or not the audience is able to unravel all of that immediately is not as important to me as their awareness that there is a sense of order, an underlying logic at work.

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