Share This. Art in social networks.

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Ungoghing van Gogh - Kyle McDonald

Artist Kyle McDonald uses an algorithm to extract the characteristic brush style from classic van Gogh paintings. They loose their wild brushstrokes and therefor are standing still instead of the suggested movement in the originals.

This new Artistic style Algorithm is something McDonald plays around with and the concept is explained here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.06576v1.pdf Offering artists and others a new method of treating their material.

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Long-term archiving

by Johan Oomen, Brigitte Jansen and Lotte Belice Baltussen - Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision houses and collects an vast collection of Dutch multimedia productions. This collection contains both physical and digital objects, that are archived and presented in a media-historical and cultural-historical context. Each year, about 55,000 hours of audio and 10,000 hours of video are added to the digital archive managed by the institute. The bulk of this content is produced by the Dutch public broadcasters. In addition, a selection of content from e.g. commercial broadcasters and amateur creators is archived. Sound and Vision also archives more complex multimedia content: in 2008 the Institute started archiving web video and in 2013 it structurally began archiving websites.

Starting 2016, Sound and Vision will expand its multimedia archiving practices. Specifically archiving and making accessible content such as social media, web video, websites and games. To this end, the Institute is explicitly seeking collaboration with partners.

The results of the Share This projects offered valuable perspectives and a foundation for further research into the long-term archiving and dissemination of content that is shared through social media and other multimedia content.

For instance, Share This has provided us with various insights into the different ways in which visual artists and artists use social media to distribute their works. Through the public meetings we had the opportunity to hear this directly from them. Share This also gave us the opportunity to talk with partners and to hear what role digital culture plays in their activities. Many of these discussions concerned the issue of how to archive online culture and present it when making it accessible again.

Share This distinguishes five categories in which image-makers use social media for creation and distribution of their work. The categories "Social Commentary' and 'Audience Engagement' in particular are interesting to Sound and Vision, given the social and societal relevance of these categories. We are exploring how to apply this categorization on the collection and presentation policy of the Institute.

We look back on a very successful partnership, and will continue to share knowledge and experience with the Share This partners.

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Surfing the net. Riding the wave

by Ioana Stanescu - researcher / ma film 

Everyone is familiar with the expression: Surfing the net, a phrase used by many including myself to describe browsing, looking up facts and getting lost on the world wide web for hours. However, I never thought about the origins of this expression until very recently when I realized that somebody at some point in the history of the Internet coined this term.

It turns out that somebody is a librarian called Jean Polly. In 1992 she was one of the first to elaborate on the topic of the web in her writings. While searching for a metaphorical title to catch the essence of this new phenomenon, she came up with the phrase surfing the net. Polly goes on explaining: ‘I wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the Internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well. I also needed something that would evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger’

Considering this expression dates back to the earlier days of the Internet, I wonder if nowadays its essence still meets our expectations. Obviously our engagement with the online screen has changed drastically since ’92. We definitely don’t need the endurance to use it well, especially not for the digital born amongst us. Surfing the net became so ordinary, that it’s hard to imagine a world without the web. 

On the other hand, our interaction with the screen has rapidly evolved. Meaning nowadays we have far more possibilities in engaging with the web than back in the days. Web 2.0 empowered anyone who chose to join a social network, encouraging users in becoming creators and giving them tools in order to do so. Not without consequences but that is a whole other story.

During my research for ShareThis, I came across fun, trivial and complex projects set on social networks when I suddenly realised that it is precisely the birth of these networks and our interaction with them that keep the word wide web fun and exciting. 

Online creators are more than ever surfing the waves of fun. Remixing images and sound, using the net aesthetics to their advantage, creating alternative exhibit platforms, overall exploring the possibilities of the Internet as a canvas. As a result, social networks set a stage for new forms of cultural expression, specific to this medium.

And this ‘art’ born online may not always be highbrow, it may not appeal to everyone and it most certainly not always belong in a museum. The liberating part is it doesn’t have to. We no longer exclusively depend on institutions to reflect on the nature of creativity. Online we will always find an audience to support and/or criticise what we create, because on the net, opinions are legitimised by the online presence of the user and not by an art degree. 

From the early days of the web, the essence of surfing the net enabled an environment in which dialog and creative freedom could flourish. Eventually the social networks boosted up creation by making online creativity mainstream, easy accessible and shareable. 

At the same time I am very well aware of the restricted ‘freedom’ imposed by the social networks. But the same goes for established institutions and life in general; we will never live without restrictions. And restrictions are not always a bad thing because they make us aware and critical of the society we live in. 

Next to making trivial projects artists clearly feel the need to embed social commentary in some of their works by criticising the usage of terms & conditions, privacy matters and our obsessive engagement with social media. 

As illustrated in this ongoing research, online based projects are very much divers and if museums truly want to understand, buy, present and preserve ‘art in social networks’ I belive they need to take a closer look at them and analyze each work in the context in which it is presented on the web. 

I would enjoy seeing some online projects next to a Picasso someday, as long as they always remain online based; because not every work is made to be transported into a physical space. And let’s not forget we need the engagement with the online networks so we can keep on surfing the net.

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Platform as a Gallery: presentation of the new cultures that is you…

by Floor van Spaendonck - Het Nieuwe Instituut

The “Share this” research process, a collaboration of Upload Cinema, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, started for Het Nieuwe Instituut through its connection to the ‘Interior’ program by the question related to the forms of presentation through the notion of the period room.

The period room was a phenomenon in the 19th century whereby a collection of original furniture and furnishings, usually recreated in a historical era or presenting an aesthetically pleasing combination, was presented in a room that may never existed in that form in a particular building. The period rooms were also used in the earliest museums for presenting works of art and furniture in matching context. From 1938 on -when the director of the Stedelijk Museum (Willem Sandberg) demanded white walls for his presentations- the so-called ‘White Cube’ was introduced and the period rooms mostly disappeared as an educational or presentation model for museums. Either way studies and theories about ways of presenting and notions on the interior have never disappeared and nowadays the focus is not only on presenting ‘without walls’ in a physical sense but also on presenting in a virtual sense.

In order to look more closely to the presentation in a virtual context and more precisely in the context of social media platforms I like to refer to a classic work in media theory; The Language of New Media (2001) from Lev Manovich.

Manovich attempts to get to grips with the specific characteristics of new media by comparing them to old media in general and film in particular. Crucial in this respect is how he attempts to define the ‘language’ of new media.

Manovich’s starting point is the specificity of the material (zeros and ones) that lends itself to certain techniques (cutting and pasting) and results in a specific visual idiom. In his analysis of the unique qualities of new media, he makes use of his knowledge of the medium of film, and attempts to use the codes and techniques of the ‘old’ medium’ to understand the new (such as montage versus composition). Although Manovich does not succeed in defining the language of new-media products, he does manage to describe them in terms of their specific structure. Put simply, the narrative structure of film contrasts with the database structure of new media. I believe he hits the nail right on the head when he complains that ‘...today we have too much information and too few narratives’. Inspired by Manovich and making use of several of his lines of reasoning, I would like to answer the following question with analogy to the question we posed during our research: does the online platform offer a new means of presentation comparable to that of a museum?

Do new media have the potential to present museological objects or is ‘presentation’ the cultural form of a bygone age, an age in which the museum was the representative medium that conjured up our culture and dictated and reflected our consciousness?

New media are most prevalent in websites, social media and computer games. ‘Online media’ is the collective noun for all internet manifestations. Just as a library contains many different types of books, the internet comprises a variety of websites and social media platforms. Online media is thus the nomenclature for the vehicle (the internet) rather than for the specific characteristics, language or objectives of these media manifestations. It is, in short, an enormous database comprising an array of smaller databases made up of data, surrounded by membranes that function as interfaces and that determine and make visible the routes through the data.

The link between the (informative) website and the computer game is the genre of the virtual museum. Here the user can explore the collection of a virtual museum by navigating through its virtual spaces. By using space as a metaphor, the interface of the DVD helps the user to understand what a new media product actually is: a container for data through which routes have been laid out: a library, a museum, a warehouse, an archive in which visitors can find their own way.

However, doesn’t the museum also consist of a collection of spaces with objects that are unified by the curator? What, then, is the difference between both interfaces?

In the old media, the individual elements are connected in a unique structure; the component parts are not separate from this structure. When the curator has finished, the exhibition is realised as a final, physical vehicle. The exhibition forms a whole that offers viewers meaningful components on the basis of which they construct a whole. By contrast, in digital media the individual elements and their connective structure are independent of each other. Both the data and the structure can be endlessly modified so that there is no definitive result in which data and structure are inextricably linked. In new media objects the form/medium and content are independent of each other.

Related to this is another important difference between new media objects and museums: the distinction between linear and ‘random’ modes. Whereas the museum curator’s working process results in a story with a beginning and an end, presented in a gallery, digital media objects can be approached from different angles: there are many roads from a to b. The internet is an enormous building with countless entry points that increase in number every day.

Because each new-media object essentially forms a database – a three-dimensional space – it requires an interface that makes the data visible, that indicates the routes through the data and helps the user to orient within the database space. The choices users makes on the basis of the information offered by the interface result in their personal routes through the spaces, consisting of various screens encountered in their chosen sequence.

You are the presentation

Museums organise spaces and objects, and orientation is a prerequisite in focusing the viewer’s attention on the objects on display. New media organise spaces, and the cursor is the necessary instrument to allow users to move through the space. The choices made by users result in a sequence of screens. The screens appear one after the other. However, this sequence is not prescribed but is determined in real time by the users. Is this therefore an instance of a chain with a narrative effect? Do the screens represent a chain of causality? If the screens represent a story, this must be considered the users’ story. This story emerges only from the users’ meta-relationship to their own actions. I contend that if we take the comparison between an online presentation and the museum as our starting point, the conclusion should be that the new media story is uniquely that of the users.

In concluding this research phase, where we harvested great series of ‘art’ works on the social media platforms and divided them in 5 categories, I found the sub-questions related tot the manifestation on the platform, as relevant but also it addressed the urgency for redefining the values of the presentation. The transformation of society caused by the digital era also effects the classical presentation of arts and the position of the museum. If we demand the museums to adopt the digital, we should also look into the parameters of the digital, like Manovich does in his work. And then maybe we conclude that it takes more then a museum to make a shift, maybe we conclude that it takes you.

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The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the era of the digital revolution

by Margriet Schavemaker

For years, it was widely believed that the worlds of contemporary art and digital (post/new) media art were mutually exclusive. In 2012, art critic Claire Bishop published an article in Artforum on “contemporary art’s repressed relationship to the digital,” and asserted that “new media art …rarely overlaps with the mainstream art world.” But if we look at what’s happening around us, we’re forced to concede that things are changing. From presentations by (post) internet artists like Simon Denny at the Venice Biennale, to a summer bursting with internet-related art in contemporary Dutch art institutions like Witte de With (Art In The Age Of…Planetary Computation May 22 – August 16  2015) and De Appel (Your Time Is Not My Time May 23 – June 28). However, seeing as the latter drove a wedge between the group of young curators of De Appel Curatorial Program (with half choosing an exhibition of objects and their relationship to art, knowledge, and memory), it’s clear that the tide hasn’t quite yet turned. In the words of Lev Manovich: Not all the denizens of “Duchamp land” are ready to join hands with those of “Turing land.”

With Beatrix Ruf at its artistic helm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam offers an array of presentations and activities for the more hardcore media art lovers among us. On the heels of the grand survey Ed Atkins in the Winter/Spring of 2015, comes Algorithmic Rubbish: Daring to Defy Misfortune, which opens at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam on July 4, featuring works by Blast Theory, James Bridle, Constant Dullaart, Femke Herregraven, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Template, and Suzanne Treister.

In the years ahead, the Stedelijk’s research program and exhibition roster will also focus on the digital revolution’s wider impact on our society. The online world – in which sharing, co-creation, and searching for alternative economies are crucial elements – is an important model for a new, groundbreaking generation of artists. They test out the possibilities of the latest technological tools and media and, more importantly, play a new (critical) game with the art world’s traditional aesthetic, ethical, and socio-economic relations. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam will focus on the work and ideas of this generation of artists, with exhibitions, commissions, public program events, and acquisitions. Share This! is the incredible first step in this direction.

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Platform As Gallery

The Internet offers artists new grounds to explore and new tools to work with. Using the specifics of a social network to build a platform, artists stretch the concept of a gallery by turning social networks into temporary exhibition and work spaces.

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Facebook Feedback - Thomas Cheneseau

Facebook Feedback is an initiative that consists solely of art, created through Cheneseau’s Facebook profile. Videos, images and code already existing on Facebook, as well as screenshots taken from timelines, are transformed into collages and entirely new imagery. 

The visual material is then reloaded on Facebook directly into a new creative space. After stressing that post-production is kept at a very safe distance, Cheneseau notes how he utilizes different graphics and tools such as Glitch in his artistic process.

https://facebookfeedback.wordpress.com/feedback/

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Subjective Spaces - Thereisamajorprobleminaustralia

Gallery Online exhibited Subjective Spaces, a cross platform work build on user generated content available in the Warehouse library of Sketchup. The work is an online process with different outcomes, here presented as image sequences in Facebook albums.

This project plays with the limitations of the Facebook album and its narrative potential, through navigation. At the same time it explores the formation of subjectivity through online space, language and communication. 

See the work in 5 albums:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.459865270783187.1073741879.231874803582236&type=3

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.460220684080979.1073741880.231874803582236&type=3

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.460550174048030.1073741882.231874803582236&type=3

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.462160997220281.1073741883.231874803582236&type=3

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.467458753357172.1073741885.231874803582236&type=3

https://gallery0nline.wordpress.com

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Digital Formalism

Artists are keen on exploring the material and ‘physical’ side of social media. The technical possibilities and restrictions, the aesthetic or code-related characteristics of social platforms offer them new possibilities to remodel the canvas that is the social network interface. 

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Image Curation

Image Curation in social networks is often a crossover between found images, remixes and artistic creation. Popular sharing platforms have mastered the distribution of visual content. Often playful, inventive, kitsch and sometimes neurotic, these share masters try to categorize the image overload found online, using different themes to order and recontextualize content.

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Social Commentary

Throughout history, criticizing social change has always been one of artists’favourite subject. Contemporary artists reflect on the phenomena of social media and our relationship with social networks. Whether its the narcissistic, attention seeking side of social media (the micro-celebrity and selfie culture) or our obsessions with popularity ratings such as: likes, shares, weblogs, and retweets. We cannot say we haven’t been warned.  

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Audience Engagement

Artists have always been driven by the desire to get to know, engage and co-create with their audience. Nowadays, the public is empowered to help the artist create an (ongoing) work of art, thanks to our social networks. Driven by the agency of the crowd, the social network user sometimes is the subject of the work. 

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Brand New Paint Job - Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman collects rooms from Google 3D Warenhouse, an online gallery that allows users of Google Sketchup, a free 3D modeling program, to upload and share their works. 

He afterwards wraps these rooms in canonised modernist paintings. In this way, Rafman engages in the history of art in a personal way.  

http://brandnewpaintjob.com/

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Museum of Internet - Emilie Gervais & Felix Magal

The Museum of Internet is a Facebook blog started by artists Emilie Gervais and Felix Magal with them wanting to collect and show “the best images of the Internet”. 

Their precise and on-point image collection is a combination of funny, absurd and critical imagery: it underlines our current image culture and the way we deal with images online. On their choice for Facebook they say: “Facebook feels like a micro­internet on the Internet and most people rely on it more than they rely on the rest of the web. It’s the easiest way to officialize our content. It’s a Facebook page: all of them have the same format and function the same way, Museum of Internet uses the same layout as Le Louvre or The Tate on Facebook.” 

With their Tumblr page, Museum of Internet creates a drag and drop pile of images submitted by their visitors. No censorship or curation. 

Museum of Internet Tumblr page

Museum of Internet Facebook page

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Gallery Online - Ronen Shai & Thomas Cheneseau

Gallery Online, curated by Ronen Shai and Thomas Cheneseau is a self-contained virtual-reality environment, dedicated solely to digital art. 

Artists who are invited to have a show at the Gallery receive a limited time period in which they can display works and organize the Gallery space as they wish. This platform allows, if desired, the possibility for a show as a live performance with a stream of items posted in realtime and audience interaction.

https://www.facebook.com/GalleryOnline

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B4-XVI -‘before sixteen’ - Cecilia Azcarate

Cecilia Azcarate found a briliant visual connection between hip-hop and art before 1500. Looking at the images I can only say this Tumblr is indeed ‘Highlighting an invisible conversation’ between two different forms of art covering over a at least 1000 years of visual resemblance. 

http://b4-16.tumblr.com

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Scorpion Dagger aka James Kirr

Scorpion Dagger, the alias of Canadian artist James Kirr, creates GIF animations composed from early Renaissance paintings combined with common artifacts from digital and contemporary culture. 

James takes GIFs to a new artistisic level by combining low and high brow culture, a theme often used by digital artists. 

http://scorpiondagger.tumblr.com/