Cory Arcangel, Sorry I Haven’t Posted, 2010. WordPress blog.

Arduino: The Documentary, upcoming 2010. Commissioned by LABoral Centro de Arte, Gijon, Spain. Trailer on Vimeo.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, I’m An Internet Guy, 2000. Short story

Culture Jamming – Media Actionism In The 21st Century provides a two year research in european Culture Jamming, from its roots in the Dada Mouvement to Situationism and postmodern info-wars. The documentary features, among others, UBERMORGEN.COM, 0100101110101101.org, and Molleindustria‘s political games.

Above is an excerpt not featured in the movie, where Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org) talks about the project United We Stand (2005 – 2006).

On August 21, the Belgian version of Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art closed. In this Youtube video, iMAL’s Director Yves Bernard offers a short tour around the exhibition.

Made for the blog YGAW by Silicon Sentier, which also featured a long review about the show.

Filippo Minelli, Contradictions, 2009 – 2010. Ongoing photographic project, various locations.

Jose Bolanos, Destroy the Web, 2010. Firefox add-on.

It’s just a damned Firefox app, but if you ever dreamt to destroy a website, you have to try it.

Constant Dullaart, therevolvinginternet.com, 2010.

On show in the exhibition “Artie Vierkant and Constant Dullaart” at Extra Extra, Philadelphia. Documentation here.

Carlo Zanni, Iterating My Way Into Oblivion, 2010. Data Cinema

Right now, in Daebudo (South Korea), my good friend Hans Bernhard is musically torturing high-value detainee James Powderly. They will go on for 24 hours. Check it out here: http://tortureclassics.com/LIVE.html.

The live performance is part of the amazing project Torture Classics, a collaboration between Hans Bernhard and James Powderly.

The July issue of Flash Art (Italian Edition) features a short essay I wrote on how art is reacting to Youtube and other social platforms. Pdf scan here.

Below you can find some of the links that inspired the text.

Petra Cortright, Das Hell(e) Modell, 2009
Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstucke, Op. 11, 2009
Oliver Laric, 50 50, 2007
Oliver Laric, Touch My Body (Green Screen Version), 2008
Brody Condon, Without Sun, 2008
Alterazioni Video, I would prefer not to, 2009
Constant Dullaart, Youtube as a Sculpture, 2009
Jodi, Thumbing Youtube, 2009
Martin Kohout, Moonwalk, 2009
John Michael Boling, Guitar Solo Threeway, 2006
Curatingyoutube.net, 3 Hours in 1 Second, 2010

Padface. Via Beautiful Decay.

“I think you just need to pick up your smart phone to realize that the most radical changes in the way we relate to images often happen outside the art world”.

Massimiliano Gioni, interviewed by Flash Art on 10,000 Lives, his project fot the next Gwangju Biennale.

The Creators Project is an amazing series of video interviews done with visionaries and researchers from all the world, and committed to “identify and celebrate the work of visionary artists wherever they are”. My personal playlist includes, by now, Mark Essen, Spike Jonze, Takeshi Murata, and Paul B. Davis, but I’m looking forward to see the interviews with Julius Von Bismarck and MOS Architects as well. A personal note: Paul B. Davis’ interview was partially shot during the set-up of the exhibition Playlist that i curated at LABoral in December.

Jeremy Owen Turner is new media artist and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. He has been an online performance artist since 1996 and has performed in virtual worlds since 2001. Known as “Wirxli Flimflam” in Second Life, Turner has co-founded the group Second Front (est. 2006). He interviewed me for his MA thesis on avatar design.

Jeremy Owen Turner Interviews Domenico Quaranta about Medium Specificity and Avatar Design in Second Life. 2010

TURNER: How is Second Life a medium of its own and how is it a mix of media?

QUARANTA: I prefer to think about Second Life as an environment than as a medium. I know that, saying this, I’m making a choice – and quite a radical choice. Of course, Second Life is a medium as well, and being part of the computer environment, it is intrinsically multimedia. But I think that all the artists who understood Second Life as “just a medium” usually made really bad art. Actually, this happens every time somebody uses a corporate software platform in order to exploit its potential as a medium: web browsers, Flash, Photoshop, Second Life. None of them was created as an artistic medium. You are acting within the framework set up for you by programmers and software designers – which means that you are less free than a painter. In 1997, the English collective I/O/D wrote: “Software is mind control – take some”. You can do it either by designing your own tools or subverting the existing tools.

Formalist artists in Second Life are just making advanced 3D design on a community platform. It is bad as art because it is just exploiting the potential of a software tool; and it is bad as 3D design because Second Life is a bad 3D software platform, with many limitations and a defined aesthetics.

Something better came up when artists understood the potential of Second Life as a place and as a social platform. When weird people with little in common with those Second Life was meant for – net artists, activists, Fluxus-style performers – started gathering in communities such as Odyssey. When they started designing their avatars not in order to make a beautiful or impressive avatar, but to construct a social persona. When they started designing objects and environments, activating scripts etc. not in order to explore the aesthetic potential of their medium, but to challenge their audience, subvert their expectations, make things happen.

Of course, when you are using Second Life as a performative platform, you are still using it as a medium. Making performances still means designing objects, writing and activating scripts, etc. But the perspective is completely different.

TURNER: Have you seen evidence of avatars that were created strictly with visual/optical relationships in mind or with some other aesthetic consideration that seemed independent of a community/social discourse? If yes, please describe any one of these projects.

QUARANTA: If it happened, it’s completely uninteresting to me. If there is something in Second Life you can’t fight against, it is it’s visual side. You can play with its kitschy aesthetics, but you cannot be set free from them.

TURNER: If you were role-playing the art critic Clement Greenberg, how would you critique an avatar’s design in Second Life? For example, would Greenberg insist that an avatar’s form be distributed in order to mirror the 3-dimensionality of virtual worlds or be flattened in order to privilege the 2-dimensional characteristics of the computer screen?

QUARANTA: If I had to play a parody of Clement Greenberg in Second Life, I’d either choose one of the options you suggest. If I had to role-play him seriously, this is a different story. I think Greenberg’s formalism was widely misunderstood, mainly thanks to the way it was used by his followers. Greenberg wrote: «Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium».[1] Since Greenberg was a clever guy, I’m sure he would identify “what’s unique in the nature of Second Life” in code and theater, and he would set his rules according to it. Or, at least, this is how I understand formalism as applied to virtual worlds. A virtual world is not as simple as a canvas. At a first level, it is a piece of software. At a second level, it is a community platform, where everything that happens appears to be on stage. Thus, it seems that to be “formalist” in Second Life means to operate at both the levels of code and of staged performances.

But this is, of course, an interpretation like many others. Greenberg was also one of the harsher enemies of kitsch and pop culture. For him, kitsch was the opposite of the avant-garde, and was part of the cultural strategy of a totalitarian regime [2]. He never understood that the avant-garde may use kitsch in order to tell something relevant about it; thus, he never understood Pop Art. So, it’s even more likely that he would never enter a virtual world.

TURNER: To what degree does anthropomorphism have a direct and lasting influence on avatar design in Second Life?

QUARANTA: To a high degree. An avatar is a persona. You – as its puppeteer – have to identify with it; and the other people, as both the audience of the story you are telling and as the other characters in the story, have to identify with you and recognize you as part of their community.

TURNER: What kind of avatars have you seen “artists” rather than “designers” create, in Second Life? How are the outcomes different?

QUARANTA: Designers create interesting avatars. Artists create interesting characters.

TURNER: How essential is “narrative” when critiquing Second Life as a discrete medium?

QUARANTA: Fundamental. In a virtual world, there is no art without narrative.

TURNER: Have you critiqued virtual art in other worlds outside of Second Life? If not, why did you choose SL over others. If you have explored other worlds, please explain what the art was like within them.

QUARANTA: I’ve never been in other virtual worlds. I joined Second Life because, from the outside, I understood that a really interesting community was developing there. I’m not interested in virtual worlds per se, and I’m definitely not interested in “virtual art” – I’m interested in art, wherever it may happen. Art made in virtual worlds – actually, any art made out of the main art world – is interesting when people who have never been there get interested in them. African sculpture became interesting as art when the cubist started stealing African sculptures from anthropology museums. And art in Second Life became interesting when many people interested in art downloaded the client to see what was happening there. According to what I know, nothing comparable happened in other virtual worlds. There are, of course, many isolated examples; some of them – Lawrence Wiener’s Palace chatroom (1997), Joseph Delappe’s performances, Isbiter and Straus Sim Gallery (2004) – anticipated the Second Life burst; many others were a consequence of the development of the Second Life art community. Also, I’ve seen a lot of good art about World of Warcraft, or about The Sims Online; but no consistent art community seems to have developed into World of Warcraft, or into The Sims Online. Do you know any?

[1] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”, in Forum Lectures, Voice of America, Washington, D. C. 1960. <<http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html>>

[2] Cfr. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and kitsch”, in Partisan Review, 1939. <<http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/kitsch.html>>

A new version (2010) of Versions (2009), Oliver Laric‘s ongoing video essay and one of the most powerful statements on contemporary culture I stumbled upon in the last years.

What happens when mid-career art stars suddendly discover the potential of the digital medium?

This question is rolling into my head since when I read, last week in Art Basel, a short article on The Art Newspaper, enthusiastically endorsing Thomas Ruff‘s recent series of prints, Zycles (2008 – 2009).

I already knew about David Hockney‘s even more enthusiastic praise of the virtues of the computer, but Ruff’s naive remake of the computer art of the Sixties put a new light on it. Nevertheless, I still don’t have any answer for my question – just many incongruous feelings. Can anybody help me?

More soon. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this funny quote by his majesty Hans Ulrich Obrist (about Hockney’s Photoshop paintings):

“I’ve never seen anything like it… At first I thought it was a painting. The more I examined it, the more I wasn’t sure.”

Damn, Mr. Obrist, Adobe Photoshop was first released in 1990. Where did you live in the last couple of decades?

Aristarkh Chernyshev & Alexei Shulgin (Electroboutique), 3G International, 2010.

“At particular times, a great deal of stupid people have a great deal of stupid money”.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan (2010) by Lance Wakeling is an amazing, Web 2.0-friendly version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Each word of the book, from the title on, can be searched on whichever search engine, shared on all the social platforms available up to now, advertised on Google Ads and adopted for 1 $. Definitely, language is not free anymore. What do you think, Mr. Joyce?