Home : About || Contact : Search

Curt Cloninger

Curt Cloninger is an artist, an author, a designer and a professor of art & design. Over at playdamage.org his ever-changing splashpages are collages of text (fragmented poetry? prayers?), animated images, pop music and a link; they bring you into little worlds, risky styles, and experiments. As it says in the status bar in http://www.playdamage.org/26.html 'Everybody needs a place to fail'.

Intro to Net Art

Do you consider yourself primarily a designer or primarily an artist?

I think I'm a better artist than I am a designer. I'm working to be a better designer. I don't know if I'm primarily anything. When I'm making art, I'm an artist. When I'm designing, I'm a designer. Hopefully my graphic design will be artistic, and hopefully my art will be well-designed.

Describe from your own work, in which you use the internet as a creative medium, what are some qualities of the medium that you feel most inspire you?

Things I like about internet-based art:

  1. You can immediately publish your own work.
    I can make something and immediately put it on line and people are seeing it seconds after I finished it.
  2. You can revisit your art and change it.
    http://www.lab404.com/plotfracture/ keeps growing and changing. I don't have to finish something once and for all. If I have a better idea for something, an addition or a change, I can make it at any time.
  3. Internet art (and all new media art) is (or can be) reactive.
    http://www.lab404.com/grace/ looks different and sounds different depending on user input. So I can create an environment and establish its parameters, and then let the user "finish" the piece. Brian Eno calls it "unfinished art." This is interesting, because it makes your art less didactic. The user is given a part to play, and thus valued and involved. We don't call them "patrons" (they aren't patronising us), we call them "users" (we are serving them, they are using us).
  4. The artwork is the medium is the gallery.
    http://www.playdamage.org/ is a web site, or is it an artwork itself, or is it a gallery containing discrete works of art? If I paint a painting, I've got to find some place to show it. When I make internet art, every computer in the world that's online is immediately ready to show it. And if you build enough cool stuff, word gets around and people come.
  5. I can do it from deep in the Appalachian Mountains.
    I'm looking out of my office window right now at my neighbors sheep and horses. I'm not in New York or London. Yet people all over the world are looking at my work right now. And I published it from here.
  6. You can collaborate with like-minded people all over the world.
    I just finished participating in a 10-artist collaboration. People in New York and London and Spain and who knows where else all took part in this artwork. No phone calls were made. No face to face meetings. The instructions for the piece were established via email, the pieces were uploaded to the each artist's web site and linked together. The piece, when completed, will be promoted via the net, and it will be experienced via the net.
  7. It is (or can be) multimedia.
    I can use audio, video, animation, still images, drawings, text.
  8. It is (for now) necessarily minimalistic.
    Due to bandwidth restraints, net art can't be film, or television, or even high-resolution digital art. This forces me to push myself to encode meaning and emotion in a quickly downloadable package. It's a welcome challenge, because it forces my work to be more immediate and concise, which makes for better work.

Also, see my "understanding the web as media" outline: http://www.lab404.com/media/

Do you have any 'rules' for what is net art?

My definition is a lot more loose than some. If you can transfer your net art to another medium without hurting it or altering its impact, then it's probably not net art. http://www.lab404.com/data simply wouldn't make sense offline. Having said that, playdamage.org could fit on a CD-ROM and be viewed from one, so what makes it net art? Well, that project is ongoing. I add a new screen about twice a month. So to put it on a CD-ROM freezes it, which hurts it. Thus it's net art.

And (this criterion makes me very liberal in my net art restrictions) I think art that's bandwidth-aware is net art. http://www.playdamage.org/grace/ is finished, so you could put it on a CD-ROM without hurting it, but I made each screen under 150K, so it downloads quickly. And this thin file size caused me to make some minimalistic decisions about motion and visual aesthetics that I wouldn't have made were I designign the piece for a CD-ROM. So if the piece was made from the beginning with the restrictions of the internet in mind, and if those restrictions somehow effect the piece in a crucial way, then it's net art. A scanned Rembrandt etching is not net art. Rembrant didn't make the etching from the beginning with the restrictions of the net in mind.

Some people claim that if you used the internet (in a collaborative social way) to make your art, then it's net art. So my friend and I collaborated on this piece via the net while he was in Japan ( http://www.lab404.com/tokyo ), so some would say that makes it net art. Could be.

Good discussions of what is and is not net art are at:

If you could only show someone three individual examples of what net.art is what would you show them?

(but I would be very disappointed at not being able to show them more)

Web as art media

In your essay "Understanding the Web as Media" you urge the reader that we have been trying to get the internet to do what we want it to, rather than asking "What is the web good for? What can the web do that other media can't do? What can the web NOT do that other media CAN do?" If you had to narrow this discussion by adding "for art" to the end of your questions, how would you respond?

  1. Internet art doesn't want to be static. We want art to be static and finished, but on the net, everything is in flux. Curators kill themselves figuring out how to archive this stuff. I think it wants to burn brightly in its time and then be gone, or remixed, or replaced.
  2. Internet art doesn't want to be discrete. The net begs conncetions and recontextualizations. I maintain a "gallery" of net art here: http://www.deepyoung.org/. The gallery is my chance to show what these artworks mean to me. I thus imbue their art with another layer of meaning simply by being able to act as a portal to it. Offline curators do this with their brick & mortar exhibits. Now anybody can do it with a website.
  3. Internet art wants to be intimate. I know you can display it on screens and it can be experienced en mass, but I think most net art is experienced by one person, one monitor at a time, in their personal space, in their personal time.
  4. Internet art wants to be remarkable. Like viral marketing on the net, there needs to be something literally remarkable (meaning, people deem it worth making remarks about it to their friends) about a piece of net art. If this makes net art like pop art, then I guess net art wants to be pop art.
  5. The internet does NOT want to be about machines. This is a trap that the geeky early net.art adopters and cyber-utopian idealists have fallen into. I don't experience the net as a machine. I use a machine to access it, but I'm not staring at a motherboard everytime I check my email. The internet is a network of PEOPLE, not machines. The machines are just the technical substructure. As the novelty of the media wears off and it becomes incorporated into our normal culture, net art will (hopefully) be less and less about machines.
  6. Net art wants to be about identity. Some artists explore the trans-gender and eponymous/pseudonymous aspects of this. Some artists explore the exhibitionist aspects of this. I probably fall in with the latter.
  7. Net art wants to be about communication. Despite the cynical, post-modern, situationist camps that say none of us can be known or mean anything, we want to know and be known. It's inescapable.
  8. Net art wants to be decentralized. No single body arbiting what is or isn't net art.
  9. Net art wants to be collaborative, because the net is simultanously a global communications network and a global display gallery. So artists using the net as a communicaitons network to help them make their collaborative artworks will likely also use the net to then display their art.

In his essay, 'What is Interactivity anyway?' Nathan Shedroff pits new supposedly 'interactive' technologies against conversation, sports, storytelling. He says that "Interactivity is not what you think it is."1 Do you agree or disagree with this reduction? Further, whether or not your agree, if we accept this narrow definition for a moment, do you have an example of an interactive experience (in his sense) that you've had through the internet?

I agree with Nathan (and on more than just this point). "Interactive" is an unfortunate buzzword. It's too broad. Life is interactive. If all an internet experience offers me is mere "interactivity," I'll just have a conversation with my wife. If all an internet experience offers me is "immersion," I'll just go for a walk to the back of our cove. There is no more immersive experience than these mountians in the spring.

Bulletin boards and email represent the most interactive experiences I've had on the net. There was a time when the dreamless.org bulletin board was active, and designers were on 24/7, that it was so "live" it was almost like a chat room. I'd be having dialogues at dreamless all during work, and then I would leave for my lunch break and go running, and my mind would be whirling with arguments and comebacks, things I should have posted, or couldn't wait to post when I got back to my desk. Then we started real-time hacking the bulletin board visually using unorthodox CSS, and it was like a world-wide, real-time, collaborative visual jazz. Screenshots of those jamsare here. Good times.

Anytime something is real-time with a human being on the other end, you have a heightened "interactive" net experience. Here's one: http://anemone.cx/beautyandchaos/ (but someone else has to be on the other end)

Community, Identity

You wrote "The online world is networked, which means there are living PEOPLE out there... Any place where people share beliefs and concerns and humor and friendship and commitment -- that place is a real world."1 Being someone who spends much professional and personal time communication through the internet, can define what the word 'community' means to you?

That definition works. Any place where people share beliefs and concerns and humor and friendship and commitment -- that place is community. If you don't believe in meaning or the possibility of presenting one's real self, you can't be part of a community. How can we meet each other face to face > till we have faces? Just because you talk trash at a bulletin board doesn't mean you are part of that online community. I would also add, if you don't care whether or not an online community survives, I wonder whether you have really entered into that community.

Notes

Selected Links from Interview:

Also see a resource listing reference materials for Curt's course Internet-Based Art & Design.

Recommendations