[Nettime-bold] best of cream

[Josephine Bosma <jesis@xs4all.nl>]

[Here is a cream special which was meant to send to nettime more then a
week ago. The events in the US made me (and no doubt countless others)
stop working for a moment. Yet it seems to me it would be bad to make
all cultural life come to a halt. We are not in war yet, and if we were
it would be very unwise to loose ourselves completely in purely
political and practical debates is my opinion. Let us not give in to
fear and nihilism. About cream: cream is a newsletter dedicated to
thought and criticism around net art or art in networks. It was
initiated because I (and others, like the writers who collaborate on
this newsletter voluntarily) found the discourse on art in networks too
irregular and often lacking depth. Cream is supported by laudanum.net
(Australia) and all people working on cream do so without pay or
support. The idea is to create a criticism which is independent of
institutions as much as possible, it seems important to create a more
constant flow of text/thought which exists beyond festivals, conferences
and exhibitions of art in new media. The representation of an art
criticism which is aware of the technological (and also the political)
changes of the last decades in 'mainstream' or 'high' art circles is
almost nil. Maybe we can help change that. Feedback and questions about
cream can be sent to cream-info@laudanum.net. warmly, J]


***************************************************************

                          best of cream 


****************************************************************

Enjoy life. Don't let last weeks horrors destroy everything we've worked
for. One way to influence even the most devastating of events is by not
letting them take over. After the first shock of the WTC/Pentagon
disaster has slowly faded away into a dangerously destabilizing gnawing
fear for war it seems it is probably best to simply get going again. In
these dark times one can maybe feel lifted when remembering Sarajevo a
few years ago, a city tortured by snipers and war. In this city people
would not give in to total cultural devastation and they kept visiting
theaters, exhibitions, lectures. Art makes life richer. Art is the soul
of culture, and it should not wither. 
The idea that human life needs more then just a few basic parameters is
what provoked the first thought of a magazine on net art which went
beyond the bare 'bread and water' strategy which dominates net criticism
in europe. This magazine is what you have before you now and its name
was chosen to add something luxurious, something 'tasteful' and
fattening to the rigid gaze of the politically correct. Here is what
should have appeared more then a week ago: an extract of the five creams
which have appeared in the first half year of its existence. It has
become a beautiful compilation. Cream could be short for 'collaborative
research into electronic art memes'. 
Electronic art has of course developed in such a 'nano' way, with
technology seeping into every pore of our daily lives, that one can
hardly speak of it as a separate category anymore. The next revolution
in the arts has begun already long ago and it is a silent one. It seems
as if not the arts and artists themselves are having trouble to cope
with it: the problem of art today seems to lie in its reception. What is
art's context and its meaning? What is its value and its definition? It
is important to combine forces in order to build a new narrative in
theory and discourse around art. It is not wise to widen the gap between
different sections of artistic practice and presentation, like we have
seen at this year's Ars Electronica. We can take the best of the
experiences of the electronic and 'traditional' art world and build on
it. In cream the strategy is to work with writer's who are aware of the
influence and background of technology and techno-cultures. This
deliberately controversial choice was made in order to make sure that
important political and cultural aspects of our information society do
not get lost within a broader art discourse, even if we appreciate more
traditional discourses in art. To further enhance a deeper understanding
of  art in techno cultures and art within net culture in particular, we
would like to use this opportunity to mention some initiatives (most of
them older then cream) which cover this territory well. If you don't
know them yet, do check out (in alphabetical order):

art and culture:
http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/
http://switch.sjsu.edu/
http://www.metamute.com

dance:
http://www.art.net/~dtz/theory.html

historical archives:
artnetweb/INTELLIGENT AGENT:  http://www.artnetweb.com/newsletter/
new media notes: http://www.artistsireland.com/nmn/
telepolis (also for some present day art related texts):
http://www.heise.de/tp

We would appreciate if you would let us know of other initiatives at
cream-info@laudanum.net

::::::::::::some editorial info:

cream is an experimental collaboration of writers and curators in the
field of net art. cream will come to you as a (somewhat irregular)
bi-weekly newsletter devoted to theory and criticism concerning art in
network culture. All texts and reviews are kept as short as possible,
they are not introductions to larger texts elsewhere on the net. You can
subscribe to cream and we invite you to forward  this mail to anybody
you feel might be interested in the content of cream.

Contributing to cream so far: Saul Albert, Inke Arns, Tilman
Baumgaertel,
Josephine Bosma, Sarah Cook, Florian Cramer, Steve Dietz, Frederic
Madre, 
Tetsuo Kogawa, Sarah Thompson.


::::::::: cream special september
2001:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Theory: Florian Cramer on Program Code Poetry
Review: Tilman Baumgaertel  -
                        notes on writing the history of the digital 0.1
Thought:    Saul Albert  -  Net art of the Living Dead
Report:     Sarah Cook  -  Twice Curated - the criteria for net art in
the 
economy of the Venice Biennale
Thought: Frederic Madre - Rock

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Florian Cramer is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie
Universität Berlin. He is also the programmer of the web site
'Permutations'
<http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin> and Free Software activist.

         -  Program Code Poetry  -

The history of computer programming is rich with self reflexive language
games, games which either code self reflexivity into algorithmic machine
instructions or algorithmic instructions into everyday language. Perhaps
the most basic example of the former are "Quines", program source code
which, as a software equivalent of von Neumann's self reproducing
automata, generates an exact copy of itself (see
<http://http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm>) while recursive
acronyms like "GNU" for "GNU's Not Unix" (which iterates infinitely when
dissected into its component words) may be the the most prominent
example of the latter.  
>From the opposite angle, there is a longer history of artists and poets
using computer instruction and protocol code as material. In its 1962
manifesto, the French Oulipo group around the poet Raymond Queneau and
the mathematician Francois le Lionnais proposed to use computers for
poetic games, process text with Markov chains (just as a number of more
contemporary digital arts works like Charles O. Hartman's and Hugh
Kenner's "Virtual Muse" poems, Ray Kurzweil's "Cybernetic Poetic" and
Cornelia Sollfrank's "Net.art generators") and write poetry in the Algol
programming language. In the early 1970s, Le Lionnais and Noël Arnaud
published poetry written in Algol code which, just as the early Perl
Poetry of Larry Wall and Sharon Hopkins from 1990. Even where their code
did not properly compile and run on computers, it took artistic
advantage of the fact that any digital code is potentially
machine executable and at least twice readable as source code and
output.
In comparison to digital art forms whose output is not code, Algol and
Perl poems even have the potential to contaminate and short-circuit both
instances of digital data.
While no other form of net art and net poetry is structurally as closely
linked to computing as programming code poetry, more recent net art and
net poetry takes an aesthetic step beyond the former in modeling its
language after programming and protocol code without strictly
reproducing its logic. The code poetry of, among others, mez, Alan
Sondheim and Ted Warnell seems to build on two developments a) the
re-coding of traditional pictorial ASCII art into amimetical noise
signals by net artists like Jodi, antiorp, mi-ga and Frederic Madre, (b)
the mass proliferation of programming language syntax through web and
multimedia scripting languages and search engines. For the reader of
mez's "netwurks", it remains all the more an open question whether the
"mezangelle" para-code of parentheses and wildcard characters only
mimicks programming languages or is, at least partially, the product of
programmed text filtering.

In my view, code poetry reveals that digital poetry has been
misperceived in the last ten years, with too much attention for
elaborate
interfaces - "hypertext" itself is nothing more than such an interface -
and too little attention for structures coded into its very language. 

::............__________->

Tilman Baumgaertel is a journalist and writer. He studied art history
and wrote a book about Harun Farocki as his thesis. He published a book
with interviews in 1999 called [net.art], and is working on its
successor. Tilman Baumgaertel has written extensively about net art, and
his work can be found in for example the catalogue of Net_Condition and
the online archive of Telepolis. He now works for the Berliner Zeitung.

       - notes on writing the history of the digital 0.1 -

They used to say that journalism was the first draft of history. With
digital culture it seems that journalism has the last saying (the final
word?) too.

These was the a thought that came to my mind, when reading the book "The
rebel code" by Glyn Moody. "Rebel Code" is a fine book on the history of
Linux and the Open Source Movement. And Glyn Moody is a fine journlist,
who does what journalists do best: he gives a timely account of
important and/or interesting events that he reports to the best of his
knowledge in a readable fashion.

"Rebel Code" manages to do all of these things. In fact, it does even
more: Moody doesn't limit his study to Linux and the other usual
Open-Source-suspects such as Apache, Perl, GIMP and the Internet and Web
standards, but he also covers the many theoretical and philosophical
implications that the Free-Software-Movement has on other aspects of
social life. He adresses questions of ownership and copyright,
originality and collaboration, and chronicles the efforts of people such
as Richard Stallmann, Linus Torvalds or Eric Raymond to not only produce
Open-Source-Software, but also to come up with theoretical underpinnings
for the phenomenon.

So far, so good. So what is wrong with his approach in terms of writing
digital history? Nothing. What's wong is rather that the people whose
job it is to write history, the academics and scholars, at this point
leave the task of recording the development of a digital culture
completely up to journalists and critics.

Not that there is generally anything wrong with these people - I am a
journalist and critic myself, after all. And as such I know that my job
is not necessarily to do long and time-consuming academic research, but
rather to produce - as pointed out earlier - timely results that are
both factual and in a readable fashion. That doesn't mean that people
like Moody and myself don't get their facts straight, but rather that we
don't invest the time to do the research that would lead to completely
new or original findings or approaches towards a topic such as Open
Source.

"Rebel Code" tells the story of Open Source in a thorough and
well-researched fashion, but it basically tells the story of Open Source
that has become canonical in the last couple of years (even though his
chapter on Netscapes Mozilla project contains sources and documents that
to my knowledge nobody has published before).

If there is any "other", "alternative", "untold"
"story-behind-the-story", we wouldn't get it from "Rebel Code" - or, I
assume, from the handful of other books that have come out on the topic
of Open Source in the last 12 months. And they don't have to do this
job, because after all they are journalistic endeavours, that were never
meant for eternity or as final historic accounts of this phenomenon. So,
that would all be good and well, if academics in the many departments
that suppossedly do digital studies, "media archaeology", screen studies
and whatever the trendy term might be, would back this journalistic
efforts up with more academic research into the same topics.

Strangely enough, in the academic amateur's hour that is called media
studies etc, there is virtually nobody doing any research, but an almost
exclusive focus on analysis. If that analysis ever bothers to deal with
R.L.-subjects such as Open Source, it relies exclusively on journalistic
material, as if this material has the quality to be final and, well,
true.

Post-modernism has tought us that all history writing produces
"narratives", not final truths. In the field of digital history books
like "Rebel code" will be the final "narratives", because most original
sources will disappear soon, if they haven't done so already. For
example, the first discussion on Linux in the newsgroup comp.os.minix in
the early 90ies are already erased from any server in the world. So
future historians will not be able to access the original source, but
only the edited versions that appear in Moodys book and a number of
other publications.

If anybody would want to write another story of Linux, he won't have any
other material than the canocial quotes that have made it into books. In
journalistic books, that seem to be the final word on this topic.

::............__________->

Saul Albert lives and works in London, and has published texts in the
Swiss magazine DU and in the British magazine for electronic culture
Mute.


             -  Net art of the Living Dead  -


As the next great recession looms and the last few pennies hemorrhage
out of the NASDAQ the Internet is a changed, hostile environment for
business and for net art.

Talking at the CODE conference in Cambridge UK this April, Geert Lovink
blamed the "Shut up and party" attitude of the dotcommers and their
disregard for "business fundamentals" for their downfall. Now the
remaining poverty stricken start-ups sell cheap to established business
or die quietly.

While there has never been any money in net art, the prefix "net" used
to have some tangible benefits. Every glossy art and culture magazine
needed net art stories, e-businesses needed 'visionaries', grants fell
like manna from government budgets and now it's over. Just as the
e-businesses have been fighting for the opportunity to be bought out by
established interests, net art practitioners are forced to huddle closer
to institutional warmth, or just give up and work.

This trend has dealt a double blow to naïve hopes that net art in itself
offered an easy escape route from traditional art market imperatives and
a powerful potential for subversive cultural action. Not only is net art
becoming sanitized by inclusion in galleries, national collections and
even university course curricula, but also net arts interventions in
dotcom land can seem petty now that their corporate targets are in such
reduced circumstances.

Since early 1999 this situation has led many people to announce the
"death of net art", some people to conclude that net art should no
longer be distinguished from art, and a few people to get excited about
what this change makes possible.

Net art will no longer be fashionable and will no longer attract
fashionable sponsors and hangers-on. Net art can at last be seen as a
tool, useful both formally and contextually, rather than remaining a
specific media centric genre.

Net art criticism will become more interesting as it becomes necessary
to move beyond "is it art" to more useful questions and we start to see
more mixed shows that incorporate net art. As net art mixes company with
and hybridizes other practices it will become less daunting to draw on
the rich resources of traditional art criticism and apply those methods
and histories to looking at net art.

Most importantly, net art can still be "not just art" as Matthew Fuller
has called it. The processes of net art, weaving through disparate
contexts and protocols, homogenizing and juxtaposing information spaces,
maintain the ambiguity of net art's identity allowing it to infiltrate
and enrich many contexts while taking advantage of its critical and
conceptual grounding in art.

::........................__________________->

Sarah Cook is a PhD researcher at the University of Sunderland, England
where she co-edits a site called the Curatorial Resource for Upstart
Media Bliss (www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb).


          -   Twice curated -

    the criteria for net art in the economy of the Venice Biennale

In the introduction to his catalogue to accompany his presentation in
the Slovenian pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale Vuk Cosic writes (and
I think it bears reprinting in full):

"While it would be truly polite to congratulate ourselves for the
inclusion in the Biennale, it is nevertheless important to offer a fair
account of how it actually happened. The fact that net.art has become
part of the official history of the Biennale is a consequence of the
art-political vacuum in Slovenia. The previous selection of artists for
this show have raised so much bad blood (mauvais sang) that the key
institutions have de facto boycotted the selection process staged by the
culture ministry. I am mentioning this in order for the historians of
net.art not to fall into unjustified glorification of Slovenia or
Eastern Europe as a natural basin for net.art to establish itself as
mainstream like the recent issue of CIAC magazine from Montréal is
suggesting. The relationship between net.art and the art system remains
silly, and possibly the expression 'net.art.system' expresses its
impossibility."

In fact the Slovenian pavilion, titled "Absolute One" includes three
artists: Vuk Cosic, 0100101110101101.org and Tadej Pogacar. The
exhibition was curated by Aurora Fonda (her name writ large on the
posters like the Aurora Borealis, scarcely a mention of the artist's
names). Her criteria, from her introduction states:

"Absolute One is a project which began with the proposal to highlight
the differences which still exist in forms of cultural and artistic
expression flourishing in the so-called "non-Western" countries, in
which a market is still in a phase of adjustment - and in certain cases
still inexistent - plays an important role in the development not only
of the arts, but generally in man/object relations."

It is in light of this, she argues, that she chose work that finds its
home on the web - a different kind of economic market space - and in its
disdain or lack of need for actual exhibition space and hence actual
museum or art world institutional structures.

But what is the validity of such a gesture (this art doesn't need
exhibition space, so let's give it some in Venice to highlight that
aspect of it)? In fact, if you look at just economics alone you discover
that an unfortunate divide was evident in Venice: Eastern European and
other fiscally-challenged small countries decided to show the work of
many artists (3 for Slovenia, 3 for Latvia, 3 for Greece, 15 for
Armenia, 5 for Turkey, 6 for Ukraine) -- getting more bang for their
buck? -- whereas the countries which are recognized as having a center
of the art world market within their borders were able to show one or at
the most two of their star artists (France, England, Germany, USA).

 From Vuk Cosic's perspective the gesture wasn't enough and it didn't
actually speak to the real economies of scale at work in the selection
process. Therefore, he gambled away a year's salary and curated an
exhibition of net.art as part of his presentation within the pavilion,
to, as he says contextualize the work. He called this show the Temporary
Autonomous Pavilion and it was based around the theme of New Low Tech
Media. It included in addition to Vuk Cosic: 0100101110101101.org, Heath
Bunting, Tom Jennings, Vinyl Video, Jodi and RTMark.

In light of the fact that the Venice Biennale was itself a huge event
(65 countries, 286 artists and more than 30,000 square meters of
exhibition space - and that's not including all the national pavilions
outside the Giardini and the Arsenale), you wouldn't think that one
tightly budgeted, temporary and autonomous exhibition would have much
impact. But of course it did: it pointed out the fact that, like the
"Manchester Pavilion" -- a bar run by some British artists -- across the
canal, you don't need the sanction of the art system in order to be
included in and noticed by the big art world, that you can define and
set your own criteria, depending on how big a loan you can secure.

::...............................__________________----->

Frederic Madre launched france's premier and foremost hypermedia revue
http://pleine-peau.com , did some writing here and there, opened and
closed the palais-tokyo mailing list, declared 'spam art' was a genre,
fought several unfinished wars against moderation and made considerable
fuss about it, gathered some friends around http://2balles.cc , ruffled
a few feathers and got bruised while taking superb pictures of it all.
He's currently enjoying the position of france's only net-critique at
http://homme-moderne.org and values your continued support.

     
                              -rock-

The last time anyone thought being a critic could be cool was probably
during a brief space of rock writing circa 72; it stopped dead less than
ten years after that. Being a “Rock Critic” was so undeniably cool
because those critics that zoomed past mere descriptive illustration of
promo material or chuckled at void flashy newsbits, those critics that
enflamed unknown material with their own itchy obsessions or ridiculed
established stars for their faded poses, those that knew what Rock meant
when it rolled deep into the veins, those Cool Rock Critics could simply
thrust the reader in a new world of relentless desire while maintaining
a steady hand on their steering vision of the Rock chaos as it should
be: cars and girls, dope, parents, cops, glitter, spunk and attitude;
all this within stinging paragraphs of cleverly misplaced anecdotes or a
seditious choice of adjectives. Sharp, direct, quick and opinionated.
It’s obvious that the actual music was always less important than the
words about the music, words cannot convey art but will tell about the
people and their twists and turns that make them into Rock, it was
always more about the clothes and style, and the confrontation with the
rest of (always misunderstanding) society, always about the politics of
rebellion. It was cool to be Lester Bangs and ultimately die of the
exhaustion of having written all the unlived sins. It was uncool to be
the boring academic Greil Marcus, always a cynical outsider thriving for
his (now obtained) official medal, always unable to get beyond his own
writing and jump into the slimy pond of the matter itself, ultimately
afraid to be part of this brave new world or confront it. 

I hate Greil Marcus. I want to see critics jump into the hypertextual
pond right now. I want to know about who fucks who on the net art scene.
I want to see short reviews that give a sharp A to asco-o and a kickass
C- to Mouchette. I want to know which side you’re on and what’s
happening. Right now, right there. Forget about next week, forget about
next year’s arse prix, forget about resumes and openings. There’s tons
of stuff popping up all the time. It needs focus, it needs attention, it
needs reaction and nurturing, the bullshit has to go, too. Go for it and
html the playlist of your favorite net sites everyday. Put it up, plug
it, erase and fast forward to tomorrow's hit list. Go for it cause we
need new cool net art critics right now, but just don’t forget: the
artists are not your friends.

f.

<-_________________________:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

cream site (under construction) :
http://www.laudanum.net/cream

Subscriptions to cream via cream-info@laudanum.net

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

cream would not be possible without the work and hospitality of the
House of Laudanum, http://www.laudanum.net .

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