An Embassy journal » August 2010 FREE

Cultivated Xerox » Tue Jun 29, 2010 8:46 am

OMG, the modern soothsayer of useless and infinite wisdom also known as the world wide web has turned 28 and in that time has managed to revolutionise contemporary modes of living beyond even science fiction's wildest dreams, providing a new, multilateral society that welcomes all and rejects none. Always open, predominantly free and essentially virtual, this temporally existent world lies seemingly submissive at everyone’s fingertips, an enticing Eden of instant gratification that flourishes within the newly acquired concentration spans and desires of 21st century culture users. In the realm of artistic practice, the internet contains within itself and solely is an amazing compound of (re)searchable material and self-publication, available 24 hours a day and played out to an audience of infinite scope. Things are easy, life is cheap and creativity is universal. But can this state of affairs really allow for the magical utopia of perfection it overtly suggests, or is a creative apocalypse looming on the horizon?

George Kaplan » Wed Jun 30, 2010 8:23 pm

I don't think I understand the question, could you rephrase it?'Always open'?'Predominantly free'?'Essentially virtual'?'Temporally existent'?'Instant gratification'?

Can you qualify these statements? Do you think this is a greater revolution than, say, the Gutenberg press? Do you not think the 'creative apocalypse' was already instigated by the anyone-can-do-it attitude of D.I.Y. culture or even the evolution of the middle class and the concept of leisure? Take 'noise' music for example, where talent, skill or any sort of aesthetic judgement are rendered redundant and all you need is spare time and a disposable income.

» http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

» http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/8259533.stm

» http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8460129.stm

» http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China

» http://io9.com/5558640/unlocking-the-box-that-holds-the-secret-to-digital-preservation?skyline=true&s=i

Cultivated Xerox » Thu Jul 01, 2010 12:11 pm

I don't think I understand your lack of understanding. The internet is instantaneous and always available to us, and as 'us' I mean Westerners, as of course that is all we can refer to, it being the economic and social framework we exist in. Any art that we produce and any mode that we proliferate it on will be stuck within this construct. The internet does not play the

same role in Eastern or developing countries in the same way that Western music or art or literature or theory over the last century does not always bear much relevance to the fundamental structures of their societies - of course, this is changing, with the unfortunate worldwide Americanisation of culture, but until a Western notion of democracy, equality or freedom is rightly or wrongly installed in these countries (brought about not by superficial works of art but by political or economic radicalism) then all we can do is arrogantly talk about our own in a universal manner, like you do talking about the concept of bourgeois leisure pursuits. I am not saying that you can't compare internet usage there to internet usage here in a way to belittle my unavoidably middle-class, overdramatic question - go ahead, that is the nature of an open forum - but then have you ever tried to justify your own creative output when comparing it to that of someone of a similar age in a poverty stricken country?

And when you talk of DIY culture bringing a creative apocalypse, do you see this as a bad thing? Are you of the traditional Greenbergian ilk where art can only be proclaimed as such when a few men chuffing on cigars have a collective orgasm over another man's colourful geometric jism on a large sheet of canvas? I take it as such by your uneducated, conservative judgement passed over the expansive genre of experimental music. But that is another argument entirely and not something that needs to be discussed here.

Where the internet varies from this old structure of do-it-yourself is the new uprising of the self-promotional rather than the collective. Which I guess is maybe what I was alluding to. And I say essentially virtual as the internet is not real, ie people can create new lives and personalities for themselves in a way that doesn't work in physical reality. And it is basically free, both in monetary terms or content, although of course you have to pay for access to certain elements of it.

George Kaplan » Thu Jul 01, 2010 7:38 pm

Ok perhaps that sentence about noise music was phrased unfairly as a clumsy attempt to be provocative, the point I had intended to make was that within this milieu, qualitative judgements are irrelevant, redundant or at least entirely subjective, and that its creation is as much a social and leisure based pursuit as its consumption, to the extent that both could perhaps be considered indistinguishable. The history of experimentation with sound is as long and as complicated as the history of human culture and I don't believe 'noise' music or any other cultural form needs to be justified on any terms beyond than those of any single person who enjoys it. I was attempting to imagine what was insinuated by the phrase 'cultural apocalypse' as a negative counterpoint to the possibility of a 'magical utopia' and my contention is that the universe of experimental music could be seen in exactly the terms you describe that of the internet (as could that of contemporary art), essentially both conditions at the same time. Again, I still don't quite get what you are asking, do you mean to query whether the speed of delivery affects the quality of the result? Or the depth? For example my attaching a couple of web links rather than my own field research, or your using a wikipedia entry as a shorthand for a much richer argument. Does this undermine the relative position either of us takes?

Certainly a degree of subtlety was lost in my own response. I used extreme examples of poverty in Africa and censorship in China in the hope that it would be made clear that the internet is neither completely open or universally accessible, but to varying degrees throughout society both globally and domestically, my personal example being that I cannot access YouTube as I cannot financially afford the new operating system which would allow me to upgrade my browser. As for being instantaneous and always available, you obviously have a much better broadband connection than I do. To be more serious, you use a few problematic terms such as 'developing countries' and 'Americanisation' (which I approvingly note you spell with an 's' rather than a 'z,' but is, some might argue, 'Europeanisation'), 'bourgeois' and 'middle-class.' When I used the phrase 'middle class' (without a hyphen) I in no way intended this to be pejorative, my intended observation was that the development of the internet could not unequivocally be considered to be some sort of quantum leap in the progress of human culture, not until we are able to get some historical perspective at least. The concept of virtuality is equally fraught, and I will not attempt to go into it right now.

Your second post appears to revolve around issues of justification and judgement, from my own perspective I find that there is at least some degree of irreconcilability here. My position is perhaps that any judgement is subjective, that is to say personal, and this allows the possibility that therefore justification is a question of personal integrity, perhaps even dignity. Like DIY culture, this is all very well as a matter of principle, but in my personal experience of music culture, DIY hasn't turned out to mean that the most musically talented have access to make music no matter what their social status, it has come to mean that anyone with enough social status has that access, no matter what degree of talent. I could easily trap myself in a reductive discussion of my own conflicting viewpoints on this matter but I find myself in the position which I think was expressed by John Cage; "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it."

the_halsingean » Thu Jul 01, 2010 11:26 pm

I feel I have to question the use of the G word as a indicator for cultural elitism in this instance. Although the term Greenberg has become synonymous with a particular variety of uncompromising art criticism he was principally active at a time when there was an unprecedented expansion in the number of practicing artists. It was arguably more the sheer number and homogeneity of 8th St. style painters subscribing to Greenberg’s opinions that spelt High Modernism’s doom rather than any formal impasse suggested by notions of opticality or flatness.

Furthermore these Greenbergians you speak of were not part of a social elite but individuals with a lack of formal art education compared with today’s standards. What little education Americans had was frequently paid for by their participation in the Second World War as part of the GI Bill of Rights introduced in 1944. I think it would be dangerous to separate a forum dealing with the cultural implications of the internet from the great number of preceding devices that have enabled substantial cultural development. It comes down to the visibility of such activity as much as it’s volume. Just

because the countless hundreds of skiffle bands formed in the 1950’s didn’t have a myspace profile (unlike the swathes of mediocre party noise acts that have succeeded them) doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

a_sense_of_freedom » Sat Jul 03, 2010 4:14 pm

I Digress

I’m bored so I thought it best to spend my time productively online. I’ve read a lot of articles and seen a lot of things I’ve never seen before, but I forgot to go to work and I lost my jacket.

The open (to some) source that is the internet is shaping production and the work force, creating creative capital, immaterial labor, speculative investment - a series of word combination I overheard on public transport.

The internet or indeed computers and telephones have changed the way we work, by this I'm not specifically talking about the work of art. I mean work in the general sense. The majority of city jobs involve no physical work, you are eyes and ears, whereas you use to be arms and legs, but neither give you a head, of any real significance.

» http://neuroethicscanada.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-that-you-think/

I Digress, if we follow the DIY ethos then surely the internet is the perfect forum as it doesn't cost rent to have a voice online -well not in the same way it does in the physical world, but yes it is a valid point to note that the continuous updates render everyones browsers defunct eventually and then you pay through the nose or http://lowtech.org/projects/n5m3/

"When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money." - Oscar Wilde

» http://www.goodreads.com/quotesshow/173910

-

"The entertainment business was a distribution business, in other words people who controlled pathways to people’s eyeballs, where they sat in the movie theatre or how they got cable, those people controlled the media business...What makes the Internet a radical game changer is that it makes distribution a commodity – in other words, anybody can have a pathway to an eyeball – marketing becomes more important but distribution is almost trivial."

» Quote taken from -http://www.standardoslo.no/v1/sql/ex.archive.php?shownews=47

To narrow this down to art, as I am under the impression that we are not simply speaking about the technological revolution in general but how culture has been affected by this, predominantly the visual arts.

First I’d like to define the question – Is it - what is the internet good for? - in relation to art? And art production? But I guess you can’t ignore the internet's effect on everything, I mean after all art like the internet has become an open forum in the sense that ‘art can be anything’ - it is constantly feeding off its others and absorbing everything as subject matter/ content/ resource/ form/ art as philosophy/ writing/ tv/ theatre/ dance / science/ music – am I being too vague? Is that the Internet's fault? Am I distracted?

And I know it's not been mentioned here but I was interested in an issue that came up before in other conversations, it’s about professionalism and what is actually meant by this. And is this related to the Internet in any way?

Then this takes it into Capital will capitalise on culture , and cities will subsidise themselves with style. So everything is linked unbreakably to the capital and I guess the DIY ethos has always been to avoid being coopted (even this conversation in to art into product into capital, if there is a will there’s a way). The unavoidable constant is; to live in a city you need money to get by so it's got to come from somewhere; funding, private investment, a job, a second job etc therefore art is a hobby, right? If not a profession, and what of the amateur, is the amateur the DIY or is he/she a hack?

Another issue is the ‘do anything’ ‘do something’ issue. I guess it could be argued that the Internet does promote a fast-forward – what I mean is exactly what Kaplan mentions above:-

“Do you mean to query whether the speed of delivery affects the quality of the result? Or the depth? For example my attaching a couple of web links rather than my own field research, or you’re using a Wikipedia entry as shorthand for a much richer argument. Does this undermine the relative position either of us takes?”

This is evident in the ease with which people insult each other online, say in chat rooms or online gaming. But also the speed of delivery is reductive, e.g. text language. Lack of proofreading. A desire for instant ‘success’ take the Xfactor model, skip the learning and just BE. There are constant short cuts, like wiki you don’t need to read a whole text just get the famous quote online, forget the context/content etc.

But then there are examples of the web being used as a valuable resource that questions copyright, authorship, and gives a completely different format for distribution, but it becomes about what is it that you want? What to look for and how to find it? How you use it, not simply just the use of it, try harder. A lot of people work in PR.

I’m avoiding speaking about social networking sites cause I’d kind of like to try my best to narrow this conversation in to specific issues that affect art; its production / marketing/ distribution etc so I’m interested to know how the internet has affected people's viewing of art? I would say about 90% of art i see is in jpeg format, but I feel art hasn’t really adapted to this concern. If art is viewed predominantly online then what of the physical form? Does that become a position against the digital or does it exist along side as a support to the digital? And why use the internet? Surely it is more than just a business card and a virtual gallery?

The sort of negative side I see to all this is the overload, that everyone can and do express themselves online. This ease of showing means the forum comes before the content. It shouldn’t be a question of ‘what should I do online/on canvas/ with this latex I bought the other day that cost a fortune?’ It should be ‘This is the content and this is how it exits’ So rather that being an artist because I studied art and have a website, more working in/with art because it is the best outlet for what one wishes to deal with/discusses. I’m not sure the internet is the problem here, I think it could be art education and its model of assessment by production, but maybe I’m digressing as I don’t think this is about blame, it’s a conversation.

I Digress-Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?

"It is for the same reason - because it became increasingly merged with objective banality - that art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous."

» p.28 Baudrillard

And...

“The last thirty years have seen the transformation of art’s “expanded field” from a stance of stubborn discursive ambiguity into a comfortable and compromised situation in which we’re well accustomed to conceptual interventions, to art and the social, where the impulse to merge art and life has resulted in lifestyle art, a secure gallery practice that comments on contemporary media culture, or apes commercial production strategies, even as its arena gradually has become, in essence, a component of the securities market. This is the lumber of life.”

» Seth Price

Cultivated Xerox » Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:54 pm

Everything is disappearing, at least in a formatively historical sense.

@Halsingean, I admit my Greenbergian comment was made in a postmodern haste, but the second point you raise is important, and one I definitely wouldn't argue against - of course all past movements or actions cannot help but bear relevance on the present. But what is different now is I guess we know exactly how all developments are made at the point of their creation, rather than subjectively through the eyes of an art historian 20 years later. We remonstrate at the already out-of-date positing made when a writer chooses to formulate a theory relating to contemporary (meaning the last 10 years or so) art production, because we already know, observe and have the faculties within us to come to the same conclusion, albeit possibly less lyrically. We can monitor emerging and established art activity anywhere in the world instantaneously without even having to leave the comfort of our homes, with an education provided by whatever research we choose to peruse on Wikipedia. Which is great. But it isn't.

This criticism echoes the sentiment of Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The book argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of

financial motivation. It proves, Shirky argues, that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness. Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet's capacity for "an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer" has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.

Unfortunately, I am precisely the sort of cynic Shirky's new book scorns – a techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking (why does anyone feel the need to tweet that they've just had a bath, and might get a kebab later?), troubled by its juvenile vacuity (who joins a Facebook group dedicated to liking toast?), and baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler. I do, however, recognise that what I like to think of as my opinions are really emotional prejudices. But equally, Shirky's prediction for Murdoch's paywall sounds suspiciously like an emotional objection, rather than a financial calculation. How, then, can he be certain his entire analysis of the internet isn't just as subjective as my kneejerk cynicism?

» an article in The Guardian with Clay Shirky, internet guru, 05.07.10

Everyone is creative, everyone can take part and success is guaranteed - what a wonderful, liberating state to be in. Aren't we lucky. But if the pool of creativity is actually an infinite chasm of reeking shit, who is gaining from this universal happiness? People who would once have 'done' art as a hobby now seek to be professional, because by professionalising they become historical, or known, and gain worth in a society led by status - the Xfactor syndrome expressed by a_sense_of_freedom - pushing those who actually are artists away from the possibility of turning it into a feasible career. This is, I guess, what I meant as a creative apocalypse. And I'm not judging the artist by the notion of talent, as talent is only craft and not something that bears relevance to whether someone is an artist (good or bad) or not. With the internet, the activity of production becomes not about making but rather aggressively marketing the idea of it, ie how well-designed your website is can and will affect the interpretation of your work.

The way in which we view and react to the imagery or artwork hasn't really changed, with what Benjamin raised in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' and Baudrillard developed later in his theory of Simulacra still pertinent to our cultural lifestyles. Art has lost its aura, its authenticity, to a certain extent because it is no longer mythological, it is a part of life, and it has been for some time. This is not a good or a bad thing, it just is. What is changing

however, is the idea that we need or want art to exist physically - just as printed matter is disappearing, and with our neutralised reactions to the art object, will the internet render the gallery space obsolete?

in a field of dreams » Sat Jul 10, 2010 10:55 am

-the logic of abandonment in a field of dreams-

ps: what is the internet good for?- in relation to art? And art production?

sp: but what do we have here? > the digital image ( )

ps: so lets start on a serious note…..the still apparent possible newness of digital art, and to be more precise and to move this conversation into a more personal interest, work based solely on the internet, is an obvious attraction to those seeking further afield, claiming what is outside the museums walls (boris groys)…. For example, downloadability as mode as art, at first glance this can open a democratic space liberated from the confinements of legitimization/walls , but does this democratic sheen help our culture industry? Can it be a possible place for an avant-garde ?/ radicality

sp: al I c here thou is an adolescent need for an unstuffy approach, one that continues the present aporia, rather than disrupting, walking backwards, or looking sideways, all of which I must admit is a personal idea of requirement. !

ps: sceptically I say there is no new… Outside the museum and in a space of radical possibility the internet provides a possibility of new action in line with the movement to biopower, and our growing politically conscious generation

sp: But what if this particular art is too diffused in the hum of life. what if we are simply recapitulating Duchamp’s failed attempt..

ps: we don’t need to see Duchamp’s urinal as a commentary or condemnation on commodification but a celebration of it. But this really is becoming about me,

sp: and yet I find myself fetishizing the formal characteristics…

ps: maybe we could follow Greenberg and recognise the ‘ involuntary tropism’ and applaud the riddance of ‘expendable conventions’ in order to arrive at an ‘irreducible remainder’ consisting of its ‘essential conditions’, or maybe I could just put it like the move to or difference between howard hodgkin and tobias madison > > > > (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=153730807014) (http://daskonkret.com/madison/panda/Untitled.html) …

sp: its interesting , perhaps we have here an answer to the loss of aura, a constant present..?!

ps: can you clarify though?.. doesn’t the cut & paste possibilities simply end in a further pluralism unmanaged and open to endless capitalisation?

» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVoWW3uDZXk

» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0

» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5WNcRoCXCM

» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjINHhbfqMI

» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvbL_5rH1QQ

Or, I wonder, if it is just a gesture posited in the post-fordist conundrum of free speech.... ‘…there is a very thin line between the critical gesture and the cynical recapitulation of fashionably critical tropes as a method of career advancement.’

sp: tropes follow tropes

ps: ‘…is the avant-garde formalisation of radical subjectivity the fate of all who seek to oppose the state of things.?’ (monsieur Dupont)

sp: it does seem very easy to provide anti- capitalist spectacle

ps: personally I find that often but not always proponents of this mode of work/production/distribution, use certain reasons to legitimize there practice that become or essentially always were what the work is. e.g. anti capitalists making capitalistic work,

sp: What about the internet as a vehicle for the fetishization of images—or a feeder of our iconphilic culture. Where is the art in this?

ps: Or maybe both- internet as iconphilia and iconclasm,…

sp: ‘but the goal is the same: to create a contrast between form and historical background, to make the form look other and new.’

ps: ive really lost caring

sp: to make a last point, or perhaps my first ,,,so you could say that it continues this present pluralism in a very easy manner. But this has been said before..i feel like its opening things out though and then as if my present can slip further and further..

ps: like looking at animals in a zoo… I think I heard Baudrillard mentioned

meatboy Luv » Wed Jul 14, 2010 6:56 pm

Web content is mostly a

chasm of reeking shit

but so is the rest of our world. When I don't want to see badly drawn penis graffiti I just don't pop into toilet cubicles so when I don't want to see shit image macros and animated .gifs I just don't go to those parts of the web where they'll all be waiting. When we exist as uploaded consciousnesses in some node or other there will still be the shit stuff and the good stuff out there and like we currently click in and out of where we want to on the web, on email, etc., confronted by no more unwanted experiences than we get walking around a city, I can't foresee that existence being far beyond the spectrum of freedom and repression that humans already exist within because protocols that use the internet (or whatever equivalent, historic or futuristic) only survive by people choosing to use them. For now the internet's another augmentation of the world and

as augmentations move from the pages of a science fiction

story to the pages of a catalog, something interesting happens: they lose their power to disturb. They're no longer the advance forces of the techpocalypse, they're the latest manifestation of the fashionable, the ubiquitous, and the banal. They're normal. They're human.

» (http://m.io9.com/5533833/).

As to whetherthe internet [will] render the gallery space obsolete

whatever new online alternatives there are (Cao Fei's RMB City, youtube accounts, blogs, all already old) will lose their appealing newness and things will end up getting used for what they're good for and some people will keep making work that's best in a gallery. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be actively seeking out new ways to use the internet, just that the advantages and limitations of the medium will appeal to some and put others off.

The web cannot be held responsible for cheapening visual culture. Visual culture's always been cheap because people always want you to see their contributions in any format. There's nothing about any medium or technology that in itself strips people of their critical faculties and when it even looks like there might be people step back and watch how others less cautious get affected first. The principle change that the internet seems to have brought about in visual culture is the speed of influence and you'll get people dredging up old arguments about colonialism, parasitism, illegitimacy and reclaiming or protecting culture but people will inevitably hold onto what is valuable to them and take what new things they think might be useful to them however quickly or slowly they come across them. Different people will benefit and suffer from the internet being a significant factor in our lives but that is the case with every form of communication, transport or distribution network. There are important considerations about this benefit and suffering but it will always be a case of who and how much, not if it happens at all and it will always have to be case by case so the speed can affect that but policing can't be absolute and you've got to hope that there isn't the seed of some apathy towards suffering hidden away from everyone in all of this that will cause all social self-regulation to collapse all around us.

And visibility, distribution and marketing. Just because the web is mainly accessed through screens doesn't mean it bears comparison to film and television. Yes, you get film, television and other one-way entertainment formats on the web but it would be hugely limiting to consider the internet in these terms. You'll always have to market hard to have people come see you do your thing or see that thing you made. Just because the only place to see a film used to be the cinema can't have in itself encouraged people to go see a film, it's because they thought it would be a worthwhile experience because someone told them it would be or it was good the last time. The kind of entertainment that thrives on the web is the same kind of entertainment that you go to the pub, parties, seminars or whatever your taste dictates for, that happens when people get together and want something to do where the beer, music or discussion topic is just a starting point for people making their own good time so it's probably better to model thinking about the internet more closely on how you think about a city or other busy network as an entirety rather than one aspect of it.

meatboy Luv » Thu Jul 15, 2010 6:00 am

Edit: Visual culture is not always cheap. That was a stupid thing to say. But on the web and in the rest of the world there are both freely and easily accessible parts and areas made exclusive through the need to invest time or money or both in them. Maybe the web leans more towards requiring time than money but it is a significant investment either way.

LOL_doggy=O.O= » Fri Jul 16, 2010 7:37 am

Art has lost its aura, its authenticity, to a certain extent because it is no longer mythological, it is a part of life, and it has been for some time. This is not a good or a bad thing, it just is.

I have found that the conversation going on so far has veered towards a conservative outlook and this statement is a prime example of this. I think to even bring the idea of aura into this discussion is strangely antiquated. I also think that it is somewhat short-sighted and just not really true that having a good website will lead to you being more successful 'professionally' as an artist. Cultivated Xerox - I would be interested in your opinion on producing 'art', do you subscribe to the rather tired and bourgeois notion that it should be done by a 'tortured genius' struggling in their garret?

I concur with what meatboy is saying; there is shit everywhere, always has been and always will be. The internet does not lead to more, it just makes visible what would previously have been hidden. I think we need to highlight the use of the term 'the Internet'. An important distinction needs to be made here; the 'Internet' is a series of linked technologies, which deliver us the 'World Wide Web', effectively the Internet is a 'dumb pipe' and the WWW is what we engage with.

The ideas raised so far in this debate potentially stem from the fact that the internet streams information in an unmediated format, and information without meaning is an intensely problematic territory. The over abundance of information available can lead to option paralysis, you can now more or less get information on anything in the world so what do you look at? This leads to the problem of 'Cyberbalkanization' flicking between the same 10 websites engaging with things and people that bolster your specific worldview.

Do we not have a potential problem of holding a funeral for the wrong corpse, for it is not quality that has died but criticality? We have more information more readily available to us than ever before we just don't know what to do with it? We gaze in awe at all the goodies available to us but our eyes dart from place to place never stopping long enough to take it in?

The WWW should be praised for making this information available and as a group of artists/curators/critics/writers we should be grateful to have this resource available to us. For every video of a skateboarding bulldog on Youtube there are videos of Deleuze/ Baudrillard/ Zizek /etc and you are

presented with them on the same platform with a clear choice of what you wish to engage in (George Kaplan you could always install Linux on your machine for free and then be able to run the latest FireFox).

This is only scratching the surface of what is out there, for example you now have something like AAAARG which could not exist without the WWW.

AAAARG is a conversation platform - at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal.

AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.

or UbuWeb (http://www.ubu.com) where you can see an extensive sample of artists films, listen to recordings and read writings that previously would have only been available through galleries and museums and therefore exclusive to collectors, curators or historians, unless they happened to be on display.

Both these projects question received power structures and our relationship to copyright, granting access to anyone what was previously entrenched within capital and academia and to my mind delivering the 'magical utopia' that was promised with the birth of hypertext.

the_halsingean » Fri Jul 16, 2010 1:47 pm

“This painting cannot be copied, reproduced, duplicated. This painting is not copyrighted, not protected and may be reproduced.”

» Ad Reinhardt ‘Abstract Painting Sixty by Sixty Inches Square’

We look at more images of work/exhibitions online than we do in person. While this undoubtedly allows us a broader notion of the range of artistic activity on a international scale, it does not come without effecting a perceptible shift in what models of artistic production we now favor. Work is almost exclusively now mediated by first a camera lens, and then subsequently uploaded to an online platform. This is a step up from the reproduction of artwork in magazines because there was never the expectation that a review or advert could replace the experience of visiting the show. It is the degree of completeness offered by online documentation problematises this notion of the exhibition's actual site much more heavily.

It is inevitable that certain types of artwork photograph better. I would be surprised if everyone hadn’t had the experience of looking at an exhibition online that looks good only to recall having seen the work previously in person and having found it less than satisfactory. Would it be most pragmatic to then make an argument for only producing work which reproduces well, a studio practice that when you stand back to look at something you quickly duck behind the lens of a camera to check it’s appearance? Rather depressingly I can imagine the growing prevalence for this mode of thinking.

Around the short lived 1960’s fashion for optical painting, artwork was still principally reproduced in art periodicals in black and white. Bridget Riley’s early fame is in part related to the factor, whereas the chromatic contrasts in paintings by artists such as Michael Kidner, just as unsettling in actuality were effectively relegated to the margins. The means of dissemination have always had an intrinsic relation to artwork’s critical apprehension. This is a factor you just have to live with unless you want to integrate that layer of mediation into your practice itself. Everyone has to make that choice for themselves.

On the other hand I don’t believe that any artwork no matter how material it is exists until it has been exhibited, and here we have a means of circumnavigating the established channels of presentation. A very strange understanding of taste is all that’s stopping us... I’m going to have to leave this post here. It's with this certain kind of resignation I’ve got to go carefully photograph some of my new series of spraypainted binbag sculptures.

Cultivated Xerox » Sun Jul 18, 2010 2:03 pm

I'm afraid you've not caught my drift LOL_doggy - I'm not surprised, with the amount of skim-reading I've been doing, I can only presume the word aura caught your eye for a brief millisecond and inflamed your inner 21st century opensourced morals. Ah well, that's what will happen with all this misdirected content proliferation and forum posturing. It's my fault for starting this whole thing off quite badly. Whoops.

» http://www.oneminutepresenter.com/2009/11/how-can-you-improve-your-attention-span/

Anyway, as I was saying, the mythology of the artist as some kind of cultural messiah no longer exists. It used to, for quite a while in fact, but I certainly don't pine for its resurrection. Art is an everyday activity, good, bad, indifferent. It doesn't matter where, what or how it is produced by society, because it always will be. Who cares? I don't.

Who's been talking about quality? So far all I can see is consumption and production, the capital value of art and the supposed Third Way of the internet. Criticality died the moment art magazines started reviewing only the galleries who held advertising accounts with them and people stopped being taught or became too apathetic to learn how to question the context of their own product. But of course this doesn't apply to everyone.

» http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKAZGsVU-Fc

Oh, and aaaaarg doesn't exist anymore having been shut down by the likes of Faber and various other publishing companies exalting the power of the copyright law on well-meaning impoverished academics, and Ubuweb, despite the brilliance of its being, is still a curated resource much like a museum or gallery, often only streaming edited sections of audio and visual work outside their original display methods.

Internet psycho-geography anyone?

The Prosumer » Sun Jul 18, 2010 6:02 pm

Techno

Bring on the final creative apocalypse.

It may be 28 years old but it has only affected our daily lives for around 10 years. So we feel the techno jolt. Old enough to have been told to produce slide documentation alongside jpegs, this has the tendency to give even 20 something artists an illusion of wisdom and lamentation. The fact that we are now within It, we find it hard to comment with objectivity. The debate here should perhaps not focus on whether these changes are positive or negative, binary oppositions and distinct polarities could be one of the positive losses of the www structure, but rather on how it has altered the power hierarchicies previously mentioned. There is an issue of nostalgia rather than a more objective retrospectivity, a yearning for the past which is emotional instead of analytical.

Another technology but what seems the most profoundly significant one of the era, The Internet has produced the World Wide Web. The distinction made by LOL_doggy=O.O= between these two terms is important, defining the difference between the technological innovation and its ramifications. But @George Kaplan links The Web is not yet fully wordly. Leaving aside the western guilt that must be cast over those that are born into this geography as it is indeed not instantaneous to all, I suppose we're talking about the effect it has had on those to whom it is available i.e the majority in our location. @Cultivated Xerox The fire and brimstone language you use is interesting Eden, magical, apocalypse? And there seems to be an assumption that we are dumb absorbers without questioning faculties, bowing down to this “other”. Is The internet and the wwweb not just reflecting us back in all our complex and contradictory selves?

Which brings me onto @a_sense_of_freedom and the concerns of self publication that you brought up. Everybody expressing themselves online means visual artists have to shift perspective. With the immediate annoyance that as an artist putting your "thoughtful" video up on Vimeo means being pitted against a visual feast of a narrative animation, comes a kind of relief. You cannot compete against something that purely strives for entertainment, you can be defiantly boring. It is an interesting challenge to those of us engaged in the visual arts. How we view it as a genre. If we propose that art and life have merged we cannot simply keep commenting on and reflecting upon situations. Is our previous position not now in the hands of the “creatives”? Who will recycle aesthetics in a much more efficient and pleasant manner? We could instead move towards strategies of overidentification as BAVO advocate:

"By radically refusing this role of the 'last of the idealists', which, so we contend, enforces all kinds of self-limitations and self censorship on artists and is nothing but a farce anyway, the art of overidentification offers an uneasy answer to the question of artistic resistance 'after' the end of history. It asks of artists to ignore society's pathetic demand for small creative acts and inversely, to uncomprimisingly identify with the ruling order itself and act out its logic in its most extreme dystopian form"

» BAVO 'Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Overidentification'

@Cultivated Xerox - Why not let the hobbyists sell their craft to those who enjoy craft, it does not necessarily mean that those actual artists of whom you speak are squeezed out from recognition. As meatboy Luv pointed out shit has always been there, it is the mode of proliferation that has changed and now it is more visible, and people revel in shit generally. Aura and authenticity are the myths, tied up with divination, we don't know if cultural messiahs did exist at the time, we were not there. Are the people that are propogated as such, as such only in retrospect? Belief in certain humans being able to create forms of greatness which don’t take into accounts specific conditions of context, geography, economics, materials available etc etc. This links into @in a field of dreams, Duchamp’s urinal was perhaps neither a condemnation or a celebration of a commodity, as I see it, it is more valuable as being about art and a challenge to those myths of high culture.

Perhaps fear of the artist's website is also tied to resistance to openness and loss of mystery.

"Mike Kelley has written a lot about his work and that of other people. He emphatically rejects the strategy of Warhol-style silence, describing in detail the material, referential and conceptual origins of his works. Paradoxically, that involvement has to some extent castrated his critical reception"

» Anne Pontegnie 'Educational Complex Onwards 1995-2008'

Someone like Cosi Fanni Tutti can sound off about the loss of the Underground and its lack of dark places, http://www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/details/is_the_underground_over/ "the most interesting people would be truly underground and not on the internet" whilst proclaiming the (fan)tastic possiblities of MySpace to get your stuff out there.

I think an interesting development has been that those who are supposedly avant-garde are divided when it comes to the most progressive of notions, copyright and the creative commons. That when economics come into play understandbly it is a threat. Musician Andy Falkous from Future of the Left, post-hardcore punk band reacted to illegal downloading of their album with this rant: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=62653487&blogId=485944356 His argument although hystrionic seems justified; currently they make less money on record sales because of people downloading their music for free so therefore have less time and will be eventually forced to become a part time outfit. Its straightforward. But only if they refuse to adapt to a new model, to progress.

How does this affect visual art?

It is a paradox that as in our daily lives we all become necessarily entrenched within neo-liberal accerleration of capital as that is what it does http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/16/austerity-drive-billions-private-sector, our most dominant technology is rendering our cultural lives free. As cultural producers we want to be able to live from our dalliances, are we entitled to do so? We consume more for free but we are required to work more for free:

Role: ReceptionistReports to: Office Manager, Administrator and General Manager

The receptionist will support the Office Manager in general administration and upkeep of the office, they will be the first point of call for everyone entering the office and must work well in a busy environment

General Duties:Answering the door and phones, dealing with postWelcoming staff and companiesDistributing staff and company passesGeneral upkeep of the officeKeeping up communication between staff and visitors

The job is on a voluntary basis and would be 10am- 6pm 6 days a week from 30th July until 30th August with a few hours induction on 29th July. The receptionist will receive a staff pass allowing entrance to any Assembly show which is not sold out and giving various discounts on foods and drinks within our bars. Joining Assembly for this monumental year is a great opportunity and a fantastic way to get involved with the excitement of the 2010 fringe.

» job advertisement taken from edinburgh.gumtree.com

Pragmatics come into play and ideals must fade in order for us to survive. It is how we negotiate them that is the interesting possibility, how we deal with being constant hypocrites.

To follow on from meatboy Luv and LOL_doggy=O.O= we have to assertain quality of content ourselves. It demands more of us.

» the_halsingean wrote:and here we have a means of circumnavigating the established channels of presentation. A very strange understanding of taste is all that’s stopping us...

The web is a new kind of public, one which we have yet to deal with to its full extent. The gallery will never disappear, the same as aaaaaaaaarg will always reappear with another A. The availability of resources, and communication possibilities it offers us needs to be deftly navigated, avoiding cyberbalkinisation and individualisation, perhaps more self discipline in terms of concentration span will come when this technology is no longer new.

Which brings me to the point. Why are we printing this forum?

Embassy invited a group of artists / curators / writers / theorists to discuss their opinions on the effect the Internet has had on visual culture. The discussion took the form of an anonymised web forum. The results of these discussions are published here as a starting point for a wider debate.

For the duration of the Edinburgh Art Festival (until 05.07.10) the forum will be open to all at:

» http://project.embassygallery.org/publication/

The results of this will then be published as a freely available PDF on the Embassy website

Project initiated by Embassy on the occassion of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2010

Supported through the Scottish Government’s Edinburgh Festivals Expo Fund.

Embassy is an Edinburgh based non-profit organisation for the promotion of contemporary art run by a committee of volunteer directors:

- Luke Cooke-Yarborough- Benjamin Fallon- Alexa Hare- Shona Macnaughton- Francesca Nobilucci- Ashleigh Reid

Embassy is supported by Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh University Settlement and Scottish Arts Council

EMBASSY GALLERY LTD is registered in ScotlandCompany Number:259872Charity No. SC035780

Embassy2 Roxburgh Pl,Edinburgh,EH8 9SU

www.embassygallery.org