Jaromil on Thu, 23 Jul 2015 01:15:09 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Hacked Team [getting off-topic...]


dear dv,

I guess is entirely my fault calling such an OT by divagating...

apologies for my sort-of-ranty way of being somehow wrong, passionate and
definitely thinking like an old-fart about the present and future of net.art in
the age of google-artists.

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, dvyng wrote:

> Agree with the above - all of these get-tech-quick schemes for kiddie
> coders are missing the vital ingredient of self-reflexivity,
> particularly the willingness to even begin to explore the
> politics/ethics of software/hardware development (similarly often with
> digital/net/computer/etc art).

nailed, both you and mp. I was indeed cross-referring the other thread
and thinking of this "Internet Art" definition, how terrible that sounds
to my ears. Really the best that could happen to all this was almost
over 10 years ago and is best told by Josephine Bosma starting from
gracious way of calling it net.art, perhaps she'll manage to add some of
the present evolution of it now, but then it will be in relation to real
art currents and not just media channels.

There was a time in which a sort of artistic movement inherited critical
elements from surrealism and situationism and brought them to this new
condition of hyper-connectivity by exploring it with a critical eye:
then bugs were aestethicized, a sort of arte povera aesthetic of bits
and bytes was emerging and identity runners were formulating
premotitions for the current state of social networking politics we
face. Amazing. But what started to come after was either a repetition of
all this, either tapestry and entertainment, with some exceptions,
pranks and new art currents that deserve a better name, like glitch art.

Now I think that if we are to look at some "Internet Art" we can use
other classifications that really reflect on the art current and
sensitivity and aesthetics rather than use industry standards to name an
artistic period that does not really exists. Most "Internet Artists"
today are incapable to start from the sort of telematic condition in
which already at the very beginning Roy Ascott was able to see much more
than any hacker can do now.  Perhaps because this dimension now exists
*too much* and all around us? or because it is too much of a business
already - and much more, politics, warfare even.

Perhaps we should all try to describe what we are doing with digital
media without thinking about the specific medium being the message, but
just a footnote about materials used. Or better, to quote Flusser,
formulate the narrative before the production of technoimages, as it was
even before photography, and so also analyse what art production really
means, beyond its condition of reproduction and the changes in its
market economy.

Also I think nowadays (and again with a few exceptions) there is barely
a collective dimension to what used to be an "artist international" as
the surrealist, even the consciousness of it is missing. If we go on
like this, "Internet Art" will just sounds like "Google Art" to me (and
believe me Google is going around with initiatives for Google Artists
now) something put together by marketing analysts on the shelves of a
consumer-grade supermarket of special effects. In these regards I really
appreciate what the "Critical Engineering Manifesto" tries to do, pity
it is not managing to scale. Bad sign.


> This fantasy of code being the benchmark for 21st child literacy is
> nonsense when it exists in a space devoid of any context beyond a
> purely info-capitalist economic one, where younger kid superstar
> coders frantically develop yet more apps for $$$s, photocall posing
> with grinning politicians, and thus becoming postergirls && boys
> demonstrating how young people can be important/efficient contributors
> to the national economy. Like Victorian Workhouses, but now in The
> Cloud.*

It comes to me in mind an excerpt of an essay by Jonathan Alex Gold
written already more than 10 years ago, probably by the time GOOG was
come to existance, this little pink fart floating in the sky of the
Silicon Valley for a moment. Good read.


  Here  all along  I thought  I was  a scientist.  I thought  I  was a
  philosopher. I  thought I  was a mathematician,  studying algorithms
  and their proofs in the grand  tradition of Euclid and Gauss and, of
  course,  al Khwarizimi.  I  could have  sworn  that this  is what  I
  do. And yet, from what I  can gather from the reports, and from what
  people tell me about myself, that's not it at all.

  It turns out that I'm a dot-com engineer. I was dumbfounded to learn
  this.  Contrary  to what I thought  I was doing,  I've actually been
  busy    at     work    building    something     like    "the    new
  e-cyber-inter-web-world of  tomorrow's technology of  the present of
  the future." If  you're unnerved by the fact  that this phrase makes
  no sense to you, I can sympathize. After all, I'm apparently the one
  building it, and I don't even know what it is.

  In addition  to this, it  seems that, when  I'm not busy  working on
  "tomorrow's  technology today",  I'm hard  at work  all  through the
  night  in  a small  windowless  room  drinking  tons of  coffee  and
  pursuing  my dream of  becoming the  next Bill  Gates, the  next boy
  genius  Napster start  up internet  toting computer  whiz  from next
  door, set to jump with software I wrote in my garage and rise to the
  head  of a  new  empire, where  I  singlehandedly and  in bona  fide
  multithreaded fashion  strike the ladies dead  with my client-server
  savvy while wooing banks and various monied interests into my den of
  Dungeons  and Dragons  posters  and subculture  chat  rooms where  I
  tech-talk them into forking over their green with the promise of the
  next  great i.p.o.-Nasdaq  corn-fed  sensation while  simultaneously
  plotting to break in to their  mainframes so I can get from there to
  the State  Department in a zany  madcap wily hacker  plan to appoint
  Mickey Mouse  as the national security  envoy to Pakistan.  I had no
  idea I was so busy and industrious.

  I'm tired just from reading about myself.

  I have lost a hold of my  identity. It seems that it is now owned by
  Microsoft and Ebay,  by Time and Newsweek, by  Dateline and Intel. I
  try  to  think back,  wondering  if  maybe I  sold  it  to them  and
  subsequently forgot about it.  I've searched my soul for some record
  of the transaction, of some outright  bill of sale, and I can't seem
  to find  one. I've been trying  to recall any  particular times when
  maybe some  misunderstanding could have occurred and  these kinds of
  companies became under  the impression that they were  the owners of
  my identity.

> *too far? ;P

whopsie, I did far(t) too much.

ciao

-- 
Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Dyne.org Think (& Do) Tank
We are free to share code and we code to share freedom
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