ARTSINCE/1990

Jenny Alaca (KIT) / Bachelor of. Art History & Theory / College of Fine Arts, UNSW 

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What a "cloud" now looks like - Google cloud servers.

The sky returns to the ground again since 9/11. Another era of fear in surveillance.

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After After 1990: Birth/Death of the Sky

Conclusion: Art after 1990’s

  1990's:                        "THE PROMISE"

  Politics:          "End of history" (Francis Fukuyama 1989)

Economic:       Free Market   

Culture:           Globalisation

  Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. "

    1990's:                          "THE LET DOWN"

  Politics:            Nationalism and racism

Economy:        Housing market crash, loss of jobs, labour outsourcing

                        End of manufacturing

Culture:           "The culture was"  "Remember the times "

  1990's:                        "THE RESPONSE"

                         Anti intellectual

                       Anti aesthetic

                       Anti conceptual

  Disclaimer: First of all I'd like to say that my position in this course has not only allowed me to analyse what happened after 1990, but also defy exclusively “high” forms of art school pedagogies i.e. fine arts with visual culture. Participation in this course saw itself as a political choice in the emphasis of visual culture studies. As applicable in any instance: you can never study one binary without the other.

After 1990, following the end of the Cold War, saw the weakening of the nation state and a prominence in capitalism, flipping, doubling, and expanding our world as we know it. Globalisation was at heart of this.

Since the World Wide Web in 1989 saw the expansion of a new global village. On the Internet gave rise to truth in Joseph Beuys' "everybody is an artist", where everybody became the author. This new distribution of voice, destructed the sacred ideologies behind authorship weakened under new values in democracy over autocracy. The postmodern condition allowed distance between the author and the viewer, god and man. On this notion of the perceptible, the romantic narrative of the sky changed forever, saturated with condensation of information. However, now that the "internet is dead" we know this is no longer true, we know we are all centralized, in Utah cloud servers.

We are living through, what Matthew Fuller calls a “flex of identity”, an otherwise “data body” as described in his book ‘Flesh Machine’ (1998), as the total collection of files connected to an individual” – a collection in service to corporations and the state of which we live through such as Facebook. Here I will state that we have three deaths: 1. when our heart stops 2. when our brain stops 3. when our name stops. After 1990 saw the quintessential breakdown in our mortality, but only coming to realize it's fuller potential today. The decaying corporeal body does not expire its data body and our ghosts are capitalist bots tweeting in cloud servers. 

It was also a time where became popular in the art world to criticise the modern white “genius”, with anti-intellectual aesthetics, whom the YBA's and Grunge artists from America’s 80’s were known successful for. Often using installation art to invite the audience to politically invade authorship with their bodies. Regardless of my harsh criticism I have with Relational Aesthetics I will mention it does follow this notion, however only so much to say that "you are author, but I am author." Our relationship with the world evolved with the new ways in which we can access it. Technologies such as are enabling us to see beyond our natural vision, extending beyond our corporeal fleshy bodies. Policies such as laws on censorship, regulate the eye on reality, editing our human rights. Vision has always been a luxury.

In 1989, “the sky” was only as high as the Berlin Wall, while freedom from nationalism was on the other end of it. It's fall saw the sign for the beginnings of postmodernism and now “sky’s the limit.” After this sign hit the Western world, “The sky” expanded, becoming free to access (at least it looks like it from the ground), but importantly it inspired new openings for possibilities in art.

It’s important to note that the sky as we know it, now exists in a digitised form (at least perceptible for some who want to believe it) and a new Post-Futurist energy. Our sky is no longer the spectacle of pure and the unreachable. The sky has been deconstructed, invaded and transcended from a “space” to a “place”. Globalisation is the “bird” that cuts through the open sky spreading and dispersing centrality in the world in circumstances that aren't universal or equally measured. That bird missed out on nations that have no access to the World Wide Web, have a closed economics policiy, are in poverty or protected by nationalism… these countries became what was known as “the third world”, now is the developing country. In the “global village”, we are all interconnected through networks of politics, industry, economy and technology. The collaboration between nations introduced ecumenical expansion, this is a huge turn in the arts.

International artists from China, Russia, Africa, Islam, became important in Biennials. Another of sign of the weakening in privatization of the arts was in  the new showmanship attitudes in art collectors as cultural capitalists. The art journals would list the collectors are the most influential people in the art world. These changes in capitalism saw the art world very closely associated with neo-liberal ruling elites, art as high end luxury goods. Artists were competing to sell their art to SAATCHI, see Damien Hirst. the middle of our geographic earth shifted towards the sky.

The sky is the bearer of code, saturated with information and trafficking signals, damned government and military official satellites. After 1990 marks a point in time where we find ourselves in a counter-surveillance or "sousveillance" with the sky – surveying surveillance. Artists critiqued this new autocratic space and privatising of public space through surveillance.America became so closely watched, and the borders between countries got tighter, surveillance got tighter, and so did “counter-surveillance”. This means the reversal of Facoult’s Panopticon gaze, in that the “watchman” and the “watched” are looking right at each other. Where are we looking at now? Who is looking at us?

Artists like Barry McGee (Twist) and Banksy helped turn tagging as a low form of “street art”, to become trendy to art collectors. This saw a huge shift in street culture, from the "non-conformist “ or “urban rebel” becomes the new celebrity, of fashion and culture. It's monetary value determined the "higher" art value. Graffiti is otherwise classified as the “Post-death of painting”, painting in it's zombie undead form. Street art was not just offensive to society because of it's invasion to private property, but tot he art world in particular an offense to modernism and it's pure canvas.

White however, "the white canvas" and the “white cube” by this point has become an iconographically induced non-colour, a visual abomination in itself, with politics, history, and Malevich rolled into white. White is not neutral, it is constructed with so much history. When you stroke white, you stroke the history of white. The 90’s pushed to challenge notion of the “non-place”, the white canvas deriving in a similar kind of ideology of an attempt to produce a 'non-place'. The 90's was the counter-culture against the unachievable “tabula rasa” by creating a “junkspace” using flow/base material.

9/11 marked the collapse of the sky. The high-rise sky built from capitalism, saw the “death of postmodernism”, or at least at lot of what was fundamental to. I ask now - where has the sky gone to? Because new media artists are going "underground" to look at the world, with new processes such as data-mining, video sniffing and hacking. Click Here 

Jenny Alaca.

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Aleksandra Mir, First Woman on the Moon

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9/11, Fear, Anxiety, Relational Aesthetics, Empire & the Multitude

*Introduction

As a new media artist myself, I guess I want to start by discussing my thoughts on geospatial technologies, how I see them challenging the rhetoric’s of memory and how artists are critically employing locative media in their works to respond to the aesthetics of failure conditioned in ubiquitously closed systems. Location-aware devices such as the common GPS, track our “electronic footprint”through network coverage such as the Internet. Looking back at the time when the immortality and spectacle of the Internet still proved it’s existence, was a time we were falsified by the ‘promise’ of the World Wide Web, for instance it’s immortal presence was undoubted, provided its third eye, “god-complex” that appears to have no off-switch and provided its neutral, common carrier service, promising reliable and unmediated communications. We know this is not true. After 9/11 web users traded in their enthusiasm with fear in the possibilities for cyber-terrorism. After the blatant signs of threat and infiltration, anybody who still believed that government systems were safe would be considered naïve. Artists questioned why our real-world anxieties translated into the cyber-world, empathizing with net-space infiltration as we would with real-world terrorism. Captialism and the terror of neoliberalism to me is the larger terrorist. Introducing distinctions such as the the 1%ers.

Experiencing ...

There are three key ideas that struck me this week - I've touched on these in the other blog entries! But I'm going to get into it now:

1. Overidentification

Overidentification is an interesting hyper-ironic strategy played out by embodying an over-exaggerated version of the figure or idea being criticized. By hyper-performing you get to demonstrate every quality of it's kind, also one would be performing the character in it's most irrational state... conscious irrationality. The idea that you become "more fascist than the fascist."

Two examples where overidentification is used...

Antony Gormley, Field for the British Isles, 1993 / Wim Delvoye, Cement mixer , 2011

2. Surveillance: "Big Brother"

Foucault’s Panopticon conceptualized the quintessential Big Brother, however today sees itself expanding from a specific targeted number of people 'prisoners', to the everyday-person. Surveillance in public and private spaces, actual or virtual worlds. This marks the new "Big Brother" anxiety in societies. After 9/11 not only was there the fear of the all telling, all knowing, all seeing eye, but the counter-surveillance of this.

Surveillance was sold as used for the increasing levels of theft -  Hyperconsumerism and surveillance eased the anxieties of the 1% ers, but see the anxiety's lie in its regulation. Surveillance is a sign that we have lost power in vision - a lack of ourselves.

3. Jacques Rancière and the Political

As opposed to feminism's "the personal is political" mode of politics, Rancière provides a critique on being political.

From: Jacques Rancière. "Ten Thesis on Politics." in: Theory & Event. Vol. 5, No. 3, 2001.

Thesis 1:

Politics is not the exercise of power. Politics ought to be defined on its own terms, as a mode of acting put into practice by a specific kind of subject and deriving from a particular form of reason. It is the political relationship that allows one to think the possibility of a political subject(ivity) [le sujet politique] not the other way around.

Thesis 2:

That is proper to politics is the existence of a subject defined by its participation in contrarieties. Politics is a paradoxical form of action.

Thesis 3:

Politics is a specific rupture in the logic of arche. It does not simply presuppose the rupture of the 'normal' distribution of positions between the one who exercises power and the one subject to it. It also requires a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions 'proper' to such classifications.

Thesis 4:

Democracy is not a political regime. Insofar as it is a rupture in the logic of arche -- that is, in the anticipation of rule in the disposition for it -- democracy is the regime of politics in the form of a relationship defining a specific subject.

Thesis 5:

The 'people' that is the subject of democracy -- and thus the principal subject of politics -- is not the collection of members in a community, or the laboring classes of the population. It is the supplementary part, in relation to any counting of parts of the population that makes it possible to identify 'the part of those who have no-part' [le compte des incomptés][7] with the whole of the community.

Thesis 6:

If politics is the outline of a vanishing difference, with the distribution of social parts and shares, then it follows that its existence is in no way necessary, but that it occurs as a provisional accident in the history of the forms of domination. It also follows from this that political litigiousness has as its essential object the very existence of politics.

Thesis 7:

Politics is specifically opposed to the police. The police is a 'partition of the sensible' [le partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement.

Thesis 8:

The principal function of politics is the configuration of its proper space. It is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one.

Thesis 9:

Inasmuch as what is proper to 'political philosophy' is to ground political action in a specific mode of being, so is it the case that 'political philosophy' effaces the litigiousness constitutive of politics. It is in its very description of the world of politics that philosophy effects this effacement. Moreover, its effectiveness is perpetuated through to the non-philosophical or anti-philosophical description of the world.

Thesis 10:

The 'end of politics' and the 'return of politics' are two complementary ways of canceling out politics in the simple relationship between a state of the social and a state of statist apparatuses. 'Consensus' is the vulgar name given to this cancellation.

 go to:  Aleksandra Mir HERE

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Barry McGee (Twist)

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Return of the Zombie: The Post-Death of Painting

Fiona Rae, Maybe You Can Live on the Moon in the Next Century, 2009

Introduction*

"…competence in one context necessarily includes knowledge of other contexts (which doesn’t necessarily mean you have to produce in or toward them). As composer Hanns Eisler once put it, in regard to his own genre, “If you know only about music, you know nothing about music"

1. Remix

Above this is Fiona Rae's "Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century". There are reasons why I revolt to her paintings - because I have been taught to. It reminds me of everything I was taught "not to do" in secondary school. I am reminded of the "no rainbows" rule, "no bears" rule (I think my art teacher specifically mentioned Care Bears), "no love hearts" rule, "no butterflies" rule, and the subtle "I-know-your-in-a-certain-drip-paint-stage-in-your-life-but-stop" rule... Mindful that I did attend an all-girls public school, and these elements must've become a ban over time from constant default "girl-brain", funny because it was denied from the minds of adolescent women to shape them with the minds of the male "master painter." It also represents Rae's critique on Abstraction as a movement that dealt with the predominately male intellectual "expressing" himself in formal elements such as shape, line, form, colour, revealing the true stroke or hand of the artist (Guy Debord). Rae chimes into techniques used by Abstraction Expressionist artists such as Pollock, Rothko, Kandinsky, De Kooning and Miró (I have demonstrated the likeness below). SO YES I LIKE THIS PAINTING A LOT. This work is the zombie of painting for me. Painting that I thought was obviously dead, before I started to learn how to paint. It's resurrected in the 21st Century for overcoming what? The hand of the artist is a twisted concept here, considering that Fiona Rae reinvents the brush mark and reinvents painting, in a generation where painting is in short supply over the digital. She hybridizes digital painting and traditional, mapping out fictional nature on photoshop and combining it. This is an image of contemporary culture - it is remix. Rae believe that painting is not dead, but finding and blending into new forms. Zombie form. New Media artist Paul.D.Miller aka Dj Spooky, also talks about the new rise of remix culture, as the zombie of montage.

Joan Miró, Entwurf fur eine Tapisserie / Joan Miró, Ballerina II,1925

2. Street Culture: Tagging/Mark Making

"Tagging" is the new mark making, it is the hand of the anti-genius, it is the hand of the commoner, coming out of an anti-authoritarian culture  prevalent from repression against the freedom of speech at times of political angst. Where the commoner has little or no say, in the streets they have a voice and it can be as loud as Obey Giant - in particular takes on a propaganda-like revolt. These outsider artists critique the street's 'non-place', reflects on their anti-white cube, anti- tabula rasa mentality. Non-places reveal spaces that have been privatized and maybe facilitated by some kind of form of authority, such as a new complex shopping centre, or on a train carriage. Trains get hit with such as high percentage of tagging. Trains are that awkward non-place, when you are traveling you are in the in-between, of A & B, of here and there and indefinitely no where. Non-places like train carriages call for such attention. It's clinical, polished state and manicured aesthetic, projects the notion that it ALREADY knows what you are going to want/need, or that it understands people while being removed from the person. Trains have windows to ease our awareness, some have toilets to ease our bladders, the design of the train cater for the needs of the general citizen, there's nothing personal surrounding it's designs, it's distant and safe. This is perfect breeding ground for those who find desire in tagging and graffiti. It adds the human back onto the trains. it is a call to recognize the individual, it is a threat to not undermine the power of the voice. Even when it's as simple as an ego-name, or something that is as amateur as "I <3 KEVIN"  it's closer to understanding the person riding the train, than their government calculated train ticket fees. This comes from a generation living  in the digital age where freedom of speech is as accessible as writing a new wiki post, or blog post or social media post. That INSTANT flogging of expression has it's expectations to translate onto the streets. Like why do we need or want to know that "~you heart Kevin~", you and Kevin mean shit-all to those who witness your tag, but you could say that 'medium is the message'...  it is not the~you heart Kevin~ that is the message, while in most cases is probably spontaneously written, and it's value is of temporary importance, but it is the fact that it is etched in, to CUT and disrupt the permanence of the ever-watchful authority in and of public property, the disruption and critique of "what is public" and "if it is public it belongs to us" that lies. For conceptual street artists, the message is often as political as the medium itself and the message-value is retrieved, such as when "Twist" show cases his Street Art in museum$.

Barry Twist

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1. Postmodernism embodied in a beanbag (leopard print-haha)

The beanbag takes form of your shape, it has no preconception of gender politics. The leopard print makes the chair decorative, the print does not have anything to do with the function of the beanbag. 

2. Modernism embodied in the B.33 chair.

Design by the Bauhaus, the B.33 chair is the purest way to experience sitting. Ideally this is the most rational chair that will social engineer the rational citizen. It was designed around the tall, skinny European male. The beauty of the chair comes follows purely from it's "ultimate chariness"

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Deconstruction: Objects and Space

*Introduction

Looking back at the ideologies of European modern architecture and design,  the new postmodern object and space criticizes the utopian vision in the school of Bauhaus and design. Austrian architect Adolf Loos discusses in his essay "Ornament and Crime", that space and architecture must remember and be mindful of the rational citizen, universality, no ornamentation, no decoration, a purest chair produces the purest experience of sitting and that it honours the essence of the material itself (wood with woodness.) I will be looking at how Modern European object and space ias a kind of "social engineering", to produce for a "social" world, with "rational" citizens living in it.

1. Cookie Cutter: Bauhaus, social engineering

I think of it like a cookie cutter. Let's call this the cookie cutter model. Where the architect takes a "universal" template cut-out and stamps out the dough to engineer equal design, but see the cookie cutter model fails because the outer edges of the dough don't make the cut. The center of the dough gets the fuller cut and bake the richest .

Translated: Where you are in the dough-world, and whether you will miss out on being catered for is based on your social class, gender and wealth. That was the issue with Bauhaus for me, that it attempted to universalise space and object. The wealthy, skinny white man got the best cut of dough.

2. Irrational space and the decorative/ornamental design

"Form follows function" that's the idea. Design which is decorative" Bauhaus says is Primitivist, and fears that irrational design would produce the irrational citizen. 

So then comes postmodern design we begin to see:

The kitschy aesthetic

The joke facade: Irony and satire

Appropriative design e.g. of the monument for Vladimir Tatlin

Deconstruction

Redesign public space

Site specific works

Critique of the modernist "grid"

Critique on consumerism  

(Mitchell Graves, Alessi Tea Kettle), (SITE Best Stores, Houston), (Water Wheel, Bernard Tschumi) 

3. Bean bag x B.33 Chair

Click here to experience chairness

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Traditional brush painting which takes a life time to master meets Second Life which takes seconds to build

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China: Post Mao

*Introduction

After Mao Zedong died in 1978, China did not stop, but instead begun spinning it's global web, complex and shining in all its polished economic surplus and industrial development. China saw new policies take into effect, a continental drift shifting the nation closer to the West, marching out of a close planned economy and towards a socialist market economy. The world never saw a country that expanded so quickly, socially, politically and economically. The closer China stepped into the Western pool the faster we saw a kind-of cultural hybridisation, streams of American Popular culture flowing into and out of their traditional culture, washing some elements away and leaving some token shells behind. The results of this cultural revolution were better standards of living for those living in the inner cities i.e increased transportation, increased good and services etc... while small rural cities receives "promise"  from the basic amenities provided such as the attractive modern apartment in a newly constructed high-rise block. It became clear that China was about PRODUCTIVITY. Productivity that fuels the engine of the globalisation train. In 1978 was China's changing “reform and opening up policies” just as the “one child” policy is about to take effect in '79. 

Experiencing Contemporary China...

1. Home/Host Plus: Biennials

Paul Theroux a travel writer argues about the specifics of traveling, the ingredients needed to constitute to a desirable experience for Western tourists, referred to by him as home plus. Home +token. For example when on a trip, ideally the western traveler would want an air-conditioned hotel with cable TV,  the beach at it's feet, roaring with coral and let's just say baby turtles for a cute factor. Ever find that the point in which your holiday spectacle shatters is when you feel the disconnection between the foreign land and yourself.  The spectacle is shattered at the point when the illusion of your habitual normativity's have melted into the cold drain.

"The art world demands something like 'home plus' from the artists on which it bestows its blessing. That is to say it requires a judicious mix of the familiar and the novel."                                                                                                        David McNeill

I think of this idea of the "too real, but not real enough"...

2. Diaspora: Migration: Net Migration

image: nail houses

3. Cao Fei: Western Fantasy/ Second Life in China:

In many ways, Second Life is the ultimate fulfillment of some of postmodern theory’s more provocative formulations–for instance, it offers a remarkably convincing version of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, a condition in which the “real” dissolves into an abstract network of signs. Similarly, postmodernism’s much touted notion of the self as a social construction becomes literal here, as people assemble their avatars from a variety of characteristics available in the virtual marketplace, transforming identity into pure commodity. The more real you want your body, the more you pay. You also have to buy your sex organs.

In the end, one is left with unanswered questions about Second Life and its attraction. Does the virtual universe provide an outlet for the imagination in a world otherwise lacking in individual freedom? More specifically, does Cao Fei’s use of it constitute an criticism of contemporary China, where capitalist enterprise and real-estate development are carried on at breakneck speed beneath the eye of an ever-watchful Big Brother? Or is Second Life simply the latest version of Soma, the dream-inducing drug that controls and pacifies the population in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel, Brave New World? Cao Fei suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle–that, as China Tracy remarks at one point, “We are not who we originally are and yet we remain unchanged.”

China in the Next 40 years... From 1970, Alvin Toffler

Prediction No. 2

Nation-state power around the globe will be increasingly “multi-polar” in terms of who wields it and where

Prediction No. 25

China will continue to position itself as a long-term economic power-player around the globe

Prediction No. 37

China’s monopoly control of the world’s rare earth metals market will have a significant impact on US national security and the economy

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ffffff white. FFFFFF WHITE!

For this I appropriated "White on White" by Malevich.

I put a new coat of white on top of Malevich's White.

White in PS is otherwise known as #ffffff in colour code.

#ffffff >on> white >on> white noise

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Oh, Brenner~

Although he does often perform some kind of politically destructive vandal act towards another artists works, and annoys the art world at it, I do love his work and his witty thoughtfulness. His actions are not necessarily spontaneous or unplanned, they are in most instances, witty, quick and risky, but well reasoned and thorough. I guess that's where he is seen threatening in the art world. So what is a a big green dollar $ign on a white cross on a white background? Malevich's painting, for Brener, was a symbol of art busine$$ and all the people involved in it: critic$, museum$, art collector$+, gallerist$ and artist$ themselves as anti-authority. He expressed his ideas through the $ graffiti and spent years in a Dutch prison because of that.

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Post-Communism: Soviet Art

*Introduction

In the 30's, the Soviet Union was the world's largest communist state and we will soon see how after the Cold War in 1991, (the fall of the Soviet Union) artists sought to find a new vision, a new representation that revealed it's hasty anti-communist criticism. This time it seemed that the artist's learnt from their predecessors who failed in producing a "point-blank" new visual language - known as Russian Constructivism, honing leaders such as Malevich. Because Russian Constructivism attempt to create an entirely new (abstract) language, it failed to acknowledge that most citizens of Russia were illiterate and the timing for a new language did predict a self-destructive failure (too quickly) - before it even got off the ground really. Instead the art form of experimental cinema. "The pictures" in Soviet Russia flourished, establishing film schools and film makers who became interested in messing around with new film techniques and editing. Besides the genuine excitement over film itself, the rewards were also in producing   effective and blatant propaganda . Coming back!!!...Essentially the post-communist artists of the 90's have just had their nation state pulled out from under their feet. The streets remained stain from the horrors of the past, the poverty, the anxiety in the lives of people, bandaging relationships with other nations such as Moscow. Their sociopolitical directions reveal the ecstatic releasing of free democratic speech, speech that has been bottled or denied of them previously.

Experiencing the Union/Post Union...

Marxism: Economical Determinism, Production>Private Property

Forces of technological change make production obsolete

Russian Constructivism died 1924, as a failed language

New birth of Social Realism

Popular interests in film and new film theory

Starlin died, 1953

Sputnik 1, there Earth's first artificial satellite was released into orbit in 1957

Russia vs. America, to the moon, to the end of the world

Cold War 1985-91

Anti-communist movement

1. Uncovering the Soviet Underground, Sots Art

The soviet underground, otherwise referred to as "Sots Art" or the "Soviet Nonconformist Art" etc.etc.etc, rose in 1953-1986 after the death of Stalin in '53. Sots art aimed to silently practice art and visual language outside of the rubrics of Social Realism. It was "underground" or silent because the small collective of artists formed not so that we could overthrow Social Realism, they were in such small numbers anyway, they just didn't want to participate nor have their work compromised by Social Realism. They would have outdoor exhibitions, but authorities often ran them out of the vicinity. Interference with language in Russia was seen not something you want to mess and confuse. So that's why in order to keep themselves happy, it was a silent, and underground movement where their lust of experimental and avant guard-ism could be let free from having no place in the art world. In their day-to-day occupations, these Moscow/Russian artists would often take up the job as a children's book illustrator as children's books which had it's acceptable demand in "formal" experimentation such as abstraction, expressionism etc.etc.etc. cleverly looking up to American pop art where the art was forward-driven and thriving in energy, as opposed to Russia at the time as going backwards in the art world and disappearing,

Bulldozer Exhibition, 1974

2. American Russia and Globalised Politics, Alexander Kosolapov

Here I want to talk about the interesting hybridisation of modern Western signs with Russian signifiers'. In other words the language Kosolapov uses icons and symbols that of which the Western art world could interpret, engage with, relate to etc, but the context of the message is much more silent, silently making political statements of Soviet culture, without losing his audience. It was clever of him to do so. Chinese contemporary artists also saw themselves doing the same thing when they began to move to the West/West began to come in. This model is called "Home-Plus", David McNeil describes this as the right amount of home, with the slight touch of the uncanny, exotic plus. His works were quickly recognised in America this way... International Art + 

"AH FRESH FROM THE OTHER WEST", said the... Art collectors and Biennial Curators (something along those line)

Alexander Kosolapov: Lenin - Cola Cola, 1980/The Angel of New York, 2010

Or looking at visual exchange in another way that happened was Oleg Kulik's work, I bite America and America Bites me, 1997, where he came to New York from Moscow as a dog, and stayed a dog in a steel cage in the gallery for 2 weeks. In this work he exchanges roles in response to Joseph Beuys 1974 work, I like America and America likes Me, where he spent five days living with a coyote in Rene Block’s New York gallery. In his work, Kulik reversed the roles of man and animal.

3. White on White on White, Kasimir Malevich

GO TO MY APPROPRIATION HERE <-

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GOOGLE/EARTH Google/Earth depart from each other.

This is the sonification of Google Earth de-installing.

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Edward Snowden: Here's how we take back the Internet

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Rise of the New Media Art

1:1 Lisa Jevbratt 1999-2002

*Introduction

There is no one digital aesthetic, there is no one new media aesthetic but there are a number of questions that digital and new media raise aesthetically and culturally. Our relations with new communications and information technologies, changing our perception of space and time. The rise of new media art sees a society that relies on the digital like an engine, moving people and time forward. We are a society interacting with others and with machines in immersive spaces surrounded by data and screens in the city. The western world experiences a paradigm shift from the "Digital Age" to the "Information Age". We begin to see the mass leakage of the screen into the everyday - signs of the digital aesthetics, in forms such as the digital grain i.e the pixel, as consumerism begins to pick up it's pace. The digital grain is also found in the insistent Futurism and nostalgia in the "low resolution", "the retro', these qualities become an effect we aim to achieve in design, in our living, in art, in architecture. The cross-over of the digital and the real become apparent, our understand of a psychical cloud in the sky meets the mirage of a cloud in the sky - data cloud computing in Utah, memory to MB, Kb, GB of computational memory and so on. The cross over is not just in "positive" future-forward ways, but also in threatening and fearful ways such as instances of Y2K, bioterrorism, London Riots via social media, politics of visibility and surveillance. Fast-forward to 2014 and we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web (since 1989) through the notion that "the internet is dead", the internet as we know it! As I will explain reading on...

Failure aesthetics is inspired by this disassociation with the promise of technology, not in cynical light but a postfurtist laugh-off at Armageddon (such as after the Y2K phenomenon), an acceptance of failure, an admiration of ‘junkspace’, the deconstruction of global networks and a celebration of the anti-intellectual. In understanding the glitches inevitable in technology, we can empathize in the desynchronization of global mnemotechnical systems and ourselves as explored by Belinda Barnet in Infomobility and Technics.I've behun to think about the concept of "missing" presences around the hype-term “lagging”, lagsthetics (if you will). I've recently become obsessed with finding a definition of this term. I haven't quite achieved it yet but-  the term “lagging” in the English dictionary, refers to water pipes, which I guess helps me think about the urban terminology in a similar way. Its slang came from web users experiencing movement on the Internet that is out of speed and sync with their real world actions, such as when navigating a virtual world, or experiencing ‘buffer’ after prompting for immediate response. If we think about the web like an interconnected network of water pipes, streaming flows of data to each user maybe that gives the web a real-world facade and reason to fail.  It inspires me to think how new media artists are employing new concepts of ‘lagging’ to discuss issues of memory and narrative states of self and geography.

Experiencing Media and New Media ...

World Wide Web, 1989 Tim Berners-Lee

Coming of the digital generation

Technology was moving from prominently "hardware" to "software", analogue to information in a "cloud"

Storing and searching the world got faster and larger

Dematerialisation of art objects

Increased remote engagement

Multiple and synchronous interaction with the world, tune in to many locations at once- without moving.

"Photoshop perfect" world

Cyber-pirates

Y2K and failure aesthetics

Data mining, threats from the NSA

There are 3 concepts I want to cover which focus on the edging into the "new media" art...

1. The New Digital Aesthetic:

The Medium is the Message - the medium vs. the message

I know that Tim Gregory was positing importance on "The medium is the message" by Marshall McLuhan. However if we were going to think about "new media art", I would say that McLuhan's writing is but a precursor to thinking of the new message and the new medium. Basically what I'm getting at is that in response to code/space, software and everyday life, at this point new media artists are writing that:

"The medium is not the message." but "The software is the information".

There’s more going on offline than online. This is where Lev Manovich takes Marshall McLuhan's place of theoretical importance.

The New Athesthetic as James Bridle calls is the idea of the translated digital grain in the real world ; the pixel, the test patterns, the glitch. This comes out of the notion that the "screen" is becoming more and more transparent and invasive into our everyday experiences.

2. Online/Offline: "The Death of the Internet"

On 15th April 2014, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the second most important court in the U.S after the Supreme Court, struck down the FCC's Open Internet Order, the legal framework that protects net neutrality. This is nothing short of a disaster...

It's END OF NET NEUTRALITY!!! This means that large corporate service providers needs to treat other service equally and keeps the internet open for everyone, free and equal, without discriminating against competitors. Websites and web users now need to pay MORE for a "faster" internet connection such as Google and Netflix, providing thus faster, better, superior product to consumers. This means that service providers would have to barred off anyone who could not afford life in the fast lane.

In other words there will be a hierarchy that goes like this: "normal internet".... and then "SUPER INTERNET!!!!!!" (for the super rich) You're going to have to pay for an unfiltered access a the world of information, but there is indeed throws a filter on it right before you are aware... UGH. 

So there have been a mention of the defused spectacle of the internet - the integrated spectacle. The spectacle of the ~interwebz~ include notions such as:

Adopt Situationalist modes to diffuse itself across mediums, mechanisms of diffusion

Poses no threat/ is not threat to us

Promise centralisation and net neutrality - no matter what information is distributed.

The spectacle has become the integrated spectacle. The internet is no longer this "abstract" mystery that exists somewhere in "space", the internet is realised in the "actual" and exists in a "place" somewhere in the physical earth. For example: Let's look at the amazing James Bridle. He's probably one the most forward-thinking new media research based practitioner today. Bridle talks about the invasion of our human rights and individuality from activities such as robotic surveillance. This issues performs a new "counter-surveillance"  where now the viewer and the viewed are looking AT EACH OTHER, rather than the ideology of the "all-seeing" watchman as derived from religion -god or Foucault's  Panopticon.

(^Shadow Drone, James Bridle)

There are 5 nodes which have contributed to the death of the Internet (as we know it) as mentioned in the Hackers Manifesto:

Fear of Standardisation, discussed in Lev Manovich's 'New Media, 2001' as the fear of being reduced to numerical representations, numbers, data forms, halftone dots.

Modularity, when messages, and materials are translated into the modular, what happens to the original and what is the original when it's all just coding? 1's and 0's. Modularity also relates to the new "remix culture" as termed by Paul D.Miller aka Dj Spooky as a culture which looks back to theories of montage and collage. To remix is to reappropriate, or to "sample" with destroying the original (since the original is digital, you may always have a copy of the "untouched" version and then in that case the new version is it's own original) Hirschorn talks about collage in the sense of superficial engagement in installation, possibly alluding to the vundakarma?

Automation, this relates to the damn fear of autocorrect, much like what is happening to me right now on the internet with all of these words I'm making up, Europeaon art theorists and my terrible spelling. Now what's problematic with automation? it goes beyond spelling, but also autocorrecting the individual - as a faulty, messy, irrational, volatile being to a clean cut, "digital" template world. In terms of net neutrality , automation is the devil that typifies you by data-mining your "data body" the history of videos or website you access online etc. Automation is also in surveillance and face recognition technology.

Variability, looking at Nam-June Paik's Random Access,1963, it is the issues involving unpredictable change, the issues and fear in the volatile geography of the digital world. The flux in the digital poses anxieties in society. Are we online/offline?

Matrix Fear, this refers to the digital transcending into the "actual".

3. Lev Manovich, Post-media Aesthetics, 2001

New media creates new cultural objects that require distribution primarily through computer platforms

New media is data that can be manipulated by software. This leads to features such as modularity and variability.

New media is a ‘mix’ or hybrid of existing cultural forms and emerging ones specific to the computer: e.g. a interactive image on screen is a ‘mix’ of conventional 2D image and interactive hotspots

All media have a ‘new media’ stage -that the particular technology is more democratic, gives better access to the 'real’ etc

New media speeds up processes in cultural production that already exist...But new media also works with real-time

[sincethenwhen]

IMAGE > WALL //  MESSAGE > WALL // MONEY > WALL

(> over) the wall~