Net Works

Case Studies in Web Art and Design

xtine burrough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136944826
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Net Works offers an inside look into the process of successfully developing thoughtful, innovative digital media. In many practice-based art texts and classrooms, technology is divorced from the socio-political concerns of those using it. Although there are many resources for media theorists, practice-based students sometimes find it difficult to engage with a text that fails to relate theoretical concerns to the act of creating. Net Works strives to fill that gap.

Using websites as case studies, each chapter introduces a different style of web project--from formalist play to social activism to data visualization--and then includes the artists' or entrepreneurs' reflections on the particular challenges and outcomes of developing that web project. Scholarly introductions to each section apply a theoretical frame for the projects. A companion website offers further resources for hands-on learning.

Combining practical skills for web authoring with critical perspectives on the web, Net Works is ideal for courses in new media design, art, communication, critical studies, media and technology, or popular digital/internet culture.

Part I

Formalism and Conceptual Art

Edward A. Shanken

Many important parallels can be made between conceptual art and the art and technology movement in the 1960s. As a result, the history of conceptual art has great relevance to contemporary artists using the World Wide Web as an artistic medium.

Conceptual art has its roots in the event scores of Fluxus artists such as George Brecht and Yoko Ono, dating from around 1960. Informed by the aesthetic theories of John Cage, these simple textual descriptions served as a “score” to be contemplated or performed, as in La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 To Bob Morris:

Draw a straight line

And follow it.

Conceptual art, as theorized in the work of philosopher and anti-artist Henry Flynt (who coined the term “concept art” in 1961) focused on concepts rather than the physical form of a work, further connecting this emerging tendency to language and away from actions.

“Concept art” is first of all an art of which the material is “concepts,” as the material of, for example, music is sound. Since “concepts” are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.¹

Conceptual art was further elaborated in the work of artists such as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Wiener, and Art & Language later that decade, also employing language as an essential element. Their work, like that of artists exploring performance and other experimental practices, can be seen as a revolutionary counterbalance to the dominant formalist art theory prescribed by critic Clement Greenberg. Following Greenberg, the physical materiality of paint and canvas took on unprecedented importance in postwar art, exemplified by the New York School of abstract expressionism (including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem De Kooning.) By contrast, conceptual artists, following Marcel Duchamp, explicitly challenged the “beholder discourse” of modernist formalism. Such postformalist tendencies (to use theorist Jack Burnham’s term) were identified as heralding the “dematerialization” of art. Informed by Marxism, many artists sought to undermine the art market’s capitalist logic by producing dematerialized works that defied commodification. For example, Brecht’s artist’s book Water Yam (1963), which included many event scores, was published as an “inexpensive, mass-produced unlimited edition … [in order] to erode the cultural status of art and to help to eliminate the artist’s ego.”²

In his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), LeWitt asserted that “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work … [t]he idea becomes a machine that makes the art …” Such a notion underlies the artist’s wall drawings, in which the “idea” for the work would be written by LeWitt (sometimes accompanied by a diagram) and then executed on site, typically by assistants. In many of them, the title of the work describes the idea that “makes the art,” as in Wall Drawing #46: Vertical Lines, Not Straight, Not Touching, Covering the Wall Evenly (1970). Kosuth emphasizes “idea” even further, insisting that in conceptual art, the art is not the result of the formal elaboration of an idea, as LeWitt suggests, but that the conceptual core of a work of conceptual art remain an immaterial idea. This conviction is made explicit in his phrase “art as idea (as idea),” which appears as a subtitle in many of his early works. Thus the “art” in Kosuth’s classic One and Three Chairs (1965) consists not of the formal realization of an idea in a material artwork, but solely in the underlying idea itself, which persists immaterially as an idea.

Conceptual art has sought to analyze the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art, rather than to elaborate another stylistic convention in the historical succession of modernist avant-garde movements. Investigations by conceptual artists into networks of signification and structures of knowledge (that enable art to have meaning) typically have employed text as a strategic device to examine the interstice between visual and verbal languages as semiotic systems. In this regard, conceptual art is a meta-critical and self-reflexive art process. It is engaged in theorizing the possibilities of signification in art’s multiple contexts (including its history and criticism, exhibitions and markets). In interrogating the relationship between ideas and art, conceptual art de-emphasizes the value traditionally accorded to the materiality of art objects. It focuses, rather, on examining the preconditions for how meaning emerges in art, seen as a semiotic system.

There are important parallels between the historic practices of conceptual art and the art and technology movement that emerged in the 1960s. The latter, reincarnated in the 1990s as New Media Art, has focused its inquiry on the materials and/or concepts of technology and science, which it recognizes artists have historically incorporated in their work. Its investigations include: (1) the aesthetic examination of the visual forms of science and technology, (2) the application of science and technology in order to create visual forms, and (3) the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models. In this third case, new media art, like conceptual art, is also a meta-critical process. It uses new media in order to reflect on the profound ways in which that very technology is deeply embedded in modes of knowledge production, perception, and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding epistemological and ontological transformations. In doing so, it challenges the systems of knowledge (and the technologically mediated modes of knowing) that structure scientific methods and conventional aesthetic values. Further, it examines the social and aesthetic implications of technological media that define, package, and distribute information.

A visionary pairing of conceptual art and new media took place in the “Software” exhibition (1970). Curator Jack Burnham conceived of “software” as parallel to the aesthetic principles, concepts, or programs that underlie the formal embodiment of actual art objects, which in turn parallel “hardware.” He interpreted contemporary experimental art practices, including conceptual art, as predominantly concerned with the software aspect of aesthetic production. In this way, “Software” drew parallels between the ephemeral programs and protocols of computer software and the increasingly “dematerialized” forms of experimental art, which the critic interpreted, metaphorically, as functioning like information processing systems. “Software” included works by conceptual artists such as Kosuth, Robert Barry, John Baldessari, and Les Levine, whose art was presented beside displays of technology including the first public exhibition of hypertext (Labyrinth, an electronic exhibition catalog designed by Ned Woodman and Ted Nelson) and a model of intelligent architecture (SEEK, a reconfigurable environment for gerbils designed by Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT.)³

A key figure bridging conceptual art and new media art is Roy Ascott, who used textual and diagrammatic elements in his work, employing the thesaurus as a central metaphor in 1962. While Lucy Lippard’s book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1997), was dedicated to Sol LeWitt, Ascott was prominently quoted on the dedication page. In the mid-1960s, he envisioned remote collaborations between artists, writing that, “Instant person to person contact would support specialised creative work … An artist could be brought right into the working studio of other artists … however far apart in the world … they may separately be located.”⁴ His classic 1983 telematic artwork, La Plissure du Text, used computer networking to link artists around the world, who used ASCI text to create a collaborative “planetary fairy tale.” This homage to Roland Barthes’ essay, “Le Plaisir du Texte,” emphasized the “generative idea” of “perpetual interweaving,” but at the level of the tissue itself, which is no longer the product of a single author but is now plaited together through the process of “distributed authorship” on computer networks. At the conceptual core of Ascott’s telematic art theory is the idea that computer networking provides “the very infrastructure for spiritual interchange that could lead to the harmonization and creative development of the whole planet.” In this light, Ascott’s work can be seen as visionary working models of forms of community and sociality that have, in significant ways, emerged over the last two decades.

Since the advent of Graphical User Interfaces (i.e., computer desktops and web browsers) and the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, many contemporary artists with a prevailing interest in ideas and concepts have mined online media as a vehicle for artistic creation. Fields of practice such as “software art” and “database aesthetics”⁵ have emerged as artists have deployed browsers, search engines, databases, and social networks in critical investigations of the technical systems and protocols that construct and disseminate knowledge, structure identity and community, and produce and determine value. In addition to the following case studies of work by Michael Demers and Constant Dullaart, a shortlist of works that offer critical insights into these issues must include wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, the Web Stalker, Bodies INCorporated, Carnivore, They Rule, Female Extension, We Feel Fine, Google Will Eat Itself, The Sheep Market, The Real Costs (see Chapter 15), and A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter. Of particular relevance to the trajectory defined by LeWitt is Casey Reas et al.’s {Software} Structures (2004), in which the artists used computer code to interpret and implement the conceptual artist’s wall drawings as computer programs in order to “explore the potential differences and similarities between software and LeWitt’s techniques.”⁶

Notes

1. Henry Flynt, “Concept Art,” in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young, New York: George Maciunas & Jackson Mac Low, 1962. Note: slight grammar modifications in this quotation were made by the author.

2. Michael Corris, “Fluxus,” Grove Art Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007–2010.

3. See Edward A. Shanken, “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” in SIGGRAPH 2001 Electronic Art and Animation Catalog, New York: ACM SIGGRAPH, 2001: 8–15; expanded Leonardo, 35, 4, August 2002: 433–438.

4. Roy Ascott, “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision,” in Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, ed. and intro. by Edward A. Shanken, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 2007.

5. See, for example, Florian Schneider and Ulrike Gabriel, “Software Art” (2001), November 19, 2010, www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/software_art_-_transmediale.html; and Victoria Vesna, ed., Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

6. Casey Reas, “A Text about Software and Art,” {Software} Structures (2004), November 19, 2010. http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/text.html.

Bibliography

Ascott, Roy. “Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision.” In Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Ed. and intro. Edward A. Shanken...

Table of contents

• cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction to Net Works
• Part I: Formalism and Conceptual Art
• Part II: Collections and Communities
• Part III: Crowdsourcing and Participation
• Part IV: Data Visualization
• Part V: Error and Noise
• Part VI: Surveillance
• Part VII: Tactical Media and Democracy
• Part VIII: Open Source
• Part IX: Hacking and Remixing
• Part X: Performance and Analog Counterparts
• Index