New Media Art in a Control Society
Transcript from a Performance
Adam Trowbridge: New Media Art in a Control Society :: Transcript from Performance :: The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, USA
March 22, 2007 :: video stills here
As noted in the transcript, the majority of the statements read were not original and instead shamelessly stolen (edited and unedited) from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. Transcript:
This is…a performance and new media art…or maybe not. [video begins] [text below is read]
- – Gilles Deleuze said “Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” End quote.
- – The phrase “new media art” is pointless.
- – The selection of medium is not the selection of a wardrobe for an idea. We are well past ideas and communication. Medium should be selected like legal and illicit pharmaceuticals: where do you want to go today?
- – What is a digital painting? Idiotic.
- – Contemporary art is both scattered and networked, always in motion. Medium, if anything, is a measure of speed and distribution. Is the texture of an oil painting that different from that of flypaper? Video is faster and shedding the weight of the poetic yet precious medium of film. Photography is a film still. Internet-based art is faster but still flails, lashed down by too many examples of bad information design masquerading as art.
- – THEY create DELIRIOUS RULES and sell you free access to their BACKSTAGE if you follow these sick rules. YOU KNOW IT.
- – Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome has been falsely represented as a metaphor for a network and for networked art. Deleuze and Guattari did not deal in metaphors.
- – Rhizomatic action is a force relationship in which power is distributed then scattered before it can begin to collect. This is not a metaphorical description but a plan of action.
- – Over 650,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by military intervention in Iraq and we are here to discuss…what?
- – Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before.
- – All hoarding, speculation on art, must cease and be seen for what it is: usury and exploitation.
- – In the beginning, you enjoyed it. You were caught in the middle of the WAR between THEM and THE OTHER SIDE, and you were trying to help THEM win the war.
- – All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
- – Six billion worldwide population, all living, have a Computer God Containment Policy brain bank brain, a real brain in the brain bank cities on the far side of the moon we never see.
- – Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.
- – Human beings are not fully conscious of their real life…usually groping in the dark…at every moment groups and individuals find themselves confronted with results they have not wished.
- – Control is short-term and has rapid rates of turnover, but is also continuous and without limit.
- – New media art involves people who make watering plants more complex than it needs to be by using cell phones that call the Internet when the plants need water.
- – If you can talk about it, why paint it?
- – The Dia: Beacon is a tomb for the last gasp of studio art, let it be a monument and move on.
- – Man and machines can make symbiotic art.
- – Psychogeography: The study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behavior of the individual.
- – Inevitability of gradualness. Usually, in a few years, you are made string bean thin or grotesquely deformed, crippled and ugly, or even made one foot shorter or one foot taller, as the Computer God sees fit.
- – In the future we will have foreign genetic material in us as today we have mechanical and electronic implants. In other words, we will be transgenic. However, there’s no excuse but marketing for purchasing a glowing rabbit.
- – Users of the world are presented with fresh, owned content every day. We have the technology, the precedents, and the duty to make new art out of this owned content.
- – A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club where it costs $1,000 for a computer and $50 a month to connect to the Internet.
- – The main function of Art is to distinguish rich people from poorer people.
- – Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; we re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to us to discover what we’re being made to serve, just as our elders discovered, not without difficulty, the ultimate end of the disciplines.
- – Personal expression and human and artist centrality can be abandoned.
- – Complex machines are an emergent life form in the masturbatory fantasies of those siding with control. I distrust transhumanists but I want to be friends with a computer.
- – Any moralistic or spiritual pretension or representation purposes for art must be abandoned.
- – Primarily, based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV, sight and sound recorded by your brain, your moon brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold brainwash radio lifelong, inculcating conformist propaganda, even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual, “Don’t worry about it.”
- – Professionalism in the arts (and the accompanying stratification of skills) must be abandoned in favor of a progressive (class-less) artistry of both a personal and collective nature.
- – Over the last decades, using positions of power in your STAGE-WORLD reality, THEY introduced their key words and also their sick DREAMWORLD- TO-SELL key ideas in every aspect of culture in the STAGE WORLD society where you live : songs, movies, humor, even propaganda.
- – Derive: An experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments.
- – The economic and cultural exploitation of the artist has reached appalling proportions. The individual and/or collective artist, whose work is plagiarized as commercial ‘technique’, or exported as cultural commodity, has little control over these conditions.
- – Consciousness is not exclusively restricted to the brain. Human bodies have no boundaries.
- – The artist must be concerned with the moral relationship that his/her endeavors have to the institutions within which he/she expresses his/her work.
- – The majority of what I’ve read has been shamelessly stolen from various sources: theoretical texts, artists’ statements, manifestos and paranoid rambling. They stand as a collection of connections and disjunctions. I am, we are, a manner of speaking.
- – Art is not knowledge.
- – Art does not communicate.
- – There is nothing here for you.
- – Gilles Deleuze said that new situations could “…at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”.
[via nettime]
Originally from networked_performance by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 25, 2007, 9:12PM
one million image masterpiece
“world’s largest artistic collaboration” celebrating the diversity of global society through art. 1 million ordinary people from all around the world are invited to work on a single picture together. people of all ages & abilities are allowed to squiggle, doodle, in any shape, color, word or sketch in a large collaborative mosaic of small squares.
see also wallright & collaborative visual mosaic & pixelfest & gridlove & kollabor8 & infoscape.
[link: millionmasterpiece.com]
Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on Mar 6, 2007, 2:43AM
Stuart and Your Gallery
If you missed the launch last year of powerful art collector Charles Saatchi’s foray into the online networking, don’t worry you are not the only one. We only recently learned of the growing phenomena that are the Saatchi Gallery’s two online spaces for artists, Your Gallery and Stuart. Realizing the potential of tapping into the MySpace format, Saatchi started Your Gallery to provide a free online platform for artists. A New York Times article last month reported that since launching in May the site has, “contributions from about 20,700 artists, including 2000 pieces of video art. Everything there is for sale, with neither the buyer nor the seller paying a cent to any dealer or other middleman. About 800 new artists have been signing up each week.”
Capitalizing on this instantly successful format—that demonstrates artists’ need for self promotion and to communicate with other artists—Saatchi launched a sister site in November called Stuart (student art) to cater for the worldwide student art community. The result? In one month 1300 students created web pages for themselves there. They now have upwards of 6 million visitors a day.
It’s not only the students and professional artists who are benefiting from these online galleries, Saatchi himself is fascinated by the opportunity to see so many artists’ work from all over the world in one place. He says he spends hours each day looking at work on both sites, though for now he is leaving it to others to snap up the creations. As the rest of the art industry, dealers, gallerists, museum directors and collectors, gets involved, Saatchi is just enjoying the spectacle.
Originally
from Cool Hunting
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Jan 11, 2007, 4:24PM
Paranoid dot-matrix printers
Little Feet Bureau LLC is a Kafkaesque corporation named after Mao-Zedong’s army of gossipy old ladies recruited to eavesdrop and rat on potential enemies of the state.
From the press release: Four paranoid dot-matrix printers output endless text on paper. The system combs internet traffic looking for people linked to “dangerous information”. Every time a machine finds keywords that seem to threaten the stability of a client government, it crafts an individualized letter addressed to the offender. Sometimes, the letter accuses and threatens legal action. At other times, it summons the offender “in for questioning.” All letters warn of the legal consequences of telling anyone the letter they are reading exists at all.
Each printer focuses on its own area of surveillance. By studying a given machine, a pattern emerges– a pattern of paranoia. In its obsession to uncover hidden meaning, it will, invariably, confirm its own fears.
The piece attempts to situate itself at both extremes of the privacy/surveillance debate. One little foot is firmly planted in the hysteria of paranoia and conspiracy theory while the other is just as firmly rooted in the land of denial where benevolent governments “try the best they can”– with only the public good and safety in mind. Where the thought, “it can’t happen to me” still flows without repudiation.
“Three printers are connected to a data-surveillance system,” told me Mushon Zer Aviv, one of the developers of the project. “Each printer is assigned to a different government and combs the same data-set in search for suspicious keywords, and so the Chinese printer searches for keywords like: falun gong falun dafa tibet tienamen square massacre freedom of speech human rights news western spy 007 free playboy …
The American printer searches for keywords such as: terrorism terror suicide saddam chemical biological anti-american mexican illegal immigrationdodging Tax intelligent life-form ufo e.t. space visitor french…
Our 3rd printer is assigned to the WTO, a super power in it’s own right: mayday socialist fair trade creative commons anarchist peer to peer hacker activist pollution anti-capitalism anti-global indimedia green no sweat free chavez squat…
We are hoping to include a 4th printer the next time we install little feet, this time for an ultra-liberal government not many people have heard of (since it’s fictional), we will serve it it’s own fears and paranoias.
The printers print an accusation letter or a summon to further investigation, mostly based on real documents and real keywords used by information agencies.”
Example of LFB letter
A project by David Nolen, Toshiaki Ozawa and Mushon Zer Aviv.
More print action: Wearable inkjet printer for street art, The Universal Digest Machine, Player Printer; De ponk‘s Printball, Video print installation, 3D printing, Corporate Sabotage, Office Live.
Originally
from we make money not art
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 26, 2006, 8:23AM
Interactive Graffiti on Architecture
Interactive Architecture (video) is an illustration of the concept that digital projections can interact with the surfaces upon which they are projected.
Originally
from Future Feeder
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Aug 21, 2006, 4:59AM
Is It Illegal To Describe The Sporting Event You’re Watching?
A few years back, there was a service launched that would let anyone become their own sports announcer. It let web users broadcast their own audio commentary of a sporting event over the web. I can’t remember when I read about it, and don’t know if it’s still around at all — but the idea was certainly intriguing. There certainly are some people who just can’t stand certain professional sportscasters, and the opportunity to open up sports commentary to just about anyone is an interesting idea. Of course, that doesn’t fit with the way most organized sports view themselves. We’ve discussed in the past how ruthless Major League Baseball has been in claiming it owns nearly all aspects of a game. At the time, one of the questions was whether or not it would be illegal to sit in the stands and “broadcast” an audio description of the game to a friend using a mobile phone. Sports leagues may claim it’s illegal, but it seems unlikely that the courts would agree.
This issue is only going to get a lot more legal attention in the near future. As amateur to amateur content becomes more common, it’s going to hit organized sports in ways they don’t seem to realize. Take a look at the World Cup, for example. Again, this is an organized sporting event that has been quite aggressive in trying to protect all game-related content — going so far as to pre-warn random websites not to rebroadcast games. However, with the means of production and distribution now reaching the hands of just about everyone (for example a cameraphone and YouTube) some are starting to wonder whether organized sports will be able to cope. It certainly raises some questions about the boundaries of what can actually be presented. Where is the line? Can I call someone and describe what I’m seeing? What if it’s a videocall? What if there are two people on the line? Or 200? Or 2 million? It becomes increasingly difficult to figure out what’s okay and what isn’t when it’s no longer just a few big broadcast companies at the table. It also could destroy the idea that one broadcaster gets exclusive rights to an event. If individuals are able to broadcast their own content from a game, how long will it be until other professional sports broadcasters start to ask why they can’t just show up and broadcast on their own, even without securing the “rights”. If the events of a game are considered facts that are part of a news story — what’s to stop just about anyone, professional or amateur, from sending out their own version of the game?
Originally
from Techdirt
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 31, 1969, 11:59PM
