In Summary: Lamentably not Stephen Fry

 

 

Stephen Fry: Comedian, Blogger, Polymath, self-described Whoopsie

 

It has actually been quite difficult for me to maintain a blog, something I rather scoffed at before this course. I was unprepared for the constancy with which you must express, elaborate and reference ideas and sources, and engagement in the online world. I don’t how Stephen Fry manages it on top of everything else the annoyingly brilliant polymath takes on.

Maintaining weekly posts has been hard for someone accustomed to wordy assignments, toyed with over several months, and while my performance on this particular assignment has been less than stellar, I’ve learn a lot and keep that with me, not least a new found appreciation for the web as a creative, intellectual and social resource.

My new found interest in Net Art continues and grows, as I am a regular visitor of netart.org. Funnily enough, Net Art was a limited subject to base my whole blog on in such a short space of time. I hope it is but the tip of the iceberg. I hope I conveyed my passion in my last post.

I really did suffer from a touch of writers block with this assignment, and the lateness of my entries shows that. I have been very impressed with some of my classmates’ blogs, and fascinated too. Sorry if I have not engaged as much as I’d like, but I was always more the observer than the performer.

On the topic of Stephen Fry, while I have lazily combed his website over the last months, I have noticed a certain voice, a certain leisurely comfortability with his blog that refreshes me. Naturally, you have to have a degree of recognition, as he does, to be so. One of his entries retreats from the opinion and examination that we often feel obliged to maintain as bloggers, and he simply talks about some personal pleasures. He calls them blogusosities, which, I think you’ll agree is a very Fry thing to say.

It starts:

‘Blogging down one’s thoughts can sometimes end in bogging them down. Political events, ideological disagreements, rants, apologies, defensive screeds and coverage of techno launches, political scandals and general media excitements have often been the meat, drink, potatoes, peanuts and popcorn of my blogging space, which is fine and well and high and dandy and adorable in its own way (one hopes) but it leaves little time for dilating on the subjects which really move and enliven me. So here is the first of a series of blogulosities in which I try and share a personal delight.’

I’m going to remember to think about some of my personal delights as well, from now on. As varied and humble as they are. Only because Stephen said I could.

Truism: Interactivity and the Artist

We are all so familiar now with Jay Rosen’s dogma, ‘The people formally known as the audience‘. It has become something of a truism in how we can now look at media and culture in an online world.

Art is no different. As I hope you’ve gleaned from my previous look at net art, interactivity is potent and primary. Not just because of an inherent cultural disposition to Rosen’s truism, but because of an awareness of it, and ability to comment on it. This has been the role of art throughout history, and especially the twentieth century, already.

net art is such a mash of images, words, code, sound, and software, that it seems to me to be the natural and inevitable road of artist commentary. To be interactive is to be the art of a new world. To be interactive is also the best way to deconstruct and critique that world.

Put another way, a healthy, digital world demands a healthy, subversive and critical art movement to be complete.

I hope my previous entries have displayed a little of that, whether by questioning the accepted norms of sites and information, or offering a little absurd fun and playfulness with aspects of the internet which might often be taken with an unaware seriousness. Such are the ‘truisms’ of the net, that we sometimes not dare fool around with them. ‘Why?’ net artists like jodi.org will ask. Isn’t a little bit funny, in a rascally, mischievous kind of way, to scare the day-lights out of people with fake virus, and frustrate them with absurd interfaces, if only to highlight the seriousness with which they are approaching there world.

At the end of the day we, the artists, are like jesters in that sense. Art works so well with a sense of humour, and none more so than net art.

And so, the user ‘formally known as the audience’ becomes something of an unwilling participant in the process, in a culture where ‘willingness’ is the Prime Directive. – That’s right, people, I can be an artist and a Trekkie!

Why???? you are asking. What’s the point. To be aware is the point. I could rattle off some art theory about the intrinsic value of art in culture, and it does have intrinsic value, but I won’t. If the least a work of art has done is offered an alternative, however absurd, understanding of a norm, it has done its job. In my view. Of course, I’m coming at this from a practicing artist’s point of view, not an art theorist. We tend to have more fun.

And so, in the spirit of Truism, I’d like you to explore adaweb, a complex, interactive art site that allows you to change wisdoms and truisms, play with facts and just generally get lost in absurdist interactivity. Enjoy.

A late,quick amendment

I haven’t done a blog in a while, due to some pretty severe writer’s block, and it will take away some marks, but I will persevere to catch up , regardless.

I want to start with an amendment. Last blog I spoke about literary magazines and their websites, and offered some small criticism. But what I didn’t mention, as I have only just found out about it, is the site Meanland, a coordinated blog between Overland and Meanjin. This blog is actually quite wonderful and makes everything I said in the last blog completely irrelevant. Its a great source of articles about digital publishing and literature. So, sorry Meanjin and Overland, I spoke to soon.

Net Art – part 2

 

midnight

 

I want to continue my exploration of Net Art this week, because the more I search, the more startling and fascinating individuals and collectives I found attempting to utilise the internet for artist purposes.

I’ll start with this quote I found from Joachim Blank, an internet curator:

The "Internet myth" is the result of a massive
self-referentiality of our media landscape. Unlimited
communication in a yet unknown conglomerate made of
machines, cables and people. The exclusive networld of
cyberpunks, scientists and artists has been superseded by
the thirst for information of the industrialized mass
consumption. Nevertheless, the cultural "stylistic howlers"
of communication in data networks continue to exist not only
in the underground.

Artistic projects, strategy projects, discussion forums and
autonomous network structures within the vast Internet, but
remote from the glossy, dust-free surfaces, show interesting
beginnings for an alternative use of this medium.

He goes on in length to distinguish Netart (I’ll start using one word to describe it as a specific category) and art on the net, i.e art made in the non-digital world, for the non-digital world , that is simply accessible on the web.

However, netart differs from art on the net. Art on the net
is mostly nothing more than the documentation of art which
is not created on the net, but rather outside it and, in
terms of content, does not establish any relationship to the
net. Netart functions only on the net and picks out the net
or the "netmyth" as a theme. It often deals with structural
concepts: A group or an individual designs a system that can
be expanded by other people. Along with that is the idea
that the collaboration of a number of people will become the
condition for the development of an overall system.

For me this all rings true, in several ways. As an art school graduate I am aware of the different forms artistic expression can take, and how, historically, it has adopted and adapted different media in order to do evolve and remain relevant.

In other words, it seems inevitable to me that the internet, web 2.0 and digital media like apps and software will create a flurry of artistic endeavours.

What has surprised me is how early some of this art came about, pre-dating 2.0, in the late nineties.

I’ve hit something of a wall trying to find some newer, innovative ways of art making for the web. keep me posted if you find anything.

On a final note, I delved into the links provided by Olia Lialina, whom I mentioned last post and seems to be a trail blazer. She does a lot of political work based on victims of war and the site Victim’s Symptom hosts a broad range of interesting collaborative works, working with the viewer as much as the artist. WDWTW (who did what to who?) is a great project, an extendion of Olia’s work that I mentioned, My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, that collects interesting adaptions of her original work into disperate narratives.