[-empyre-] blogs as a new net art

[tommoody3rd@comcast.net]

Hi, thanks for inviting me to post to this list. For those of you in Australia, I am not the retired cricket player turned coach--but I have learned a bit about him since we share each other's google hits.

Linkoln has posted already on the topic of whether blogging is a (mere) artist's journal or an (ideal) vehicle for online improvisation. For him and jimpunk it is certainly the latter. I have written about how their work differs from traditional "net art" practice and would like to put that series of posts before the group.

The instigating event was a wishy washy New York Times article declaring that Net Art was dead, except to the extent it wasn't. My series of posts in response is here:
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/26709/
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?26735
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/26771/
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?26806


The following excerpted paragraph addresses Linkoln's and jimpunk's practice:

"There has been a sea change that the [Times] writer completely missed--an influx of artists redefining the medium, not so much through browser-dismantling code a la Jodi.org, but testing the limits of how much a window can hold, like turning an amplifier up to 11. These largely basement producers handle Net graphics in a painterly or expressionistic way, cocking a half-appreciative, half-horrified eye on all the weird content out there on the Internet. The phenomenon isn't about marketing (yet) but rather thrives within the Net's potlatch or "gift economy" of upload exchange. Artists put up simple animations made with .GIFs or Flash, with sound or without, as well as appropriate, resize and mutate found .GIFs and jpegs, attacking visual phenomena the way a junglist attacks sound (to make an electronic music analogy). Rebellious defacement and smartass humor trump the tedious academic-cum-Sol LeWittoid pallette of earlier net practice. In the Times thread [ http://www.digital
 mediatree.com/tommoody/comment/26709/ ] Sally [McKay] sums up the first generation of self-defined Net Art as 'long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof.'" [I then go on to discuss the more immediate browser to browser model that I think SCREENFULL and its precessor WebTV represent]

These issues also relate to my work, but SCREENFULL and Chris Ashley have been out front from the beginning about the blog as a means of pure content delivery, perhaps  the vanguard of a "new net art." (And yes I value art for art's sake as a subversive or problematizing force over overt,  self-declared political work, although my blog is strongly political.) 

I started my weblog  to document my studio practice but increasingly look to it to deliver the goods themselves. I am doing more animation and music these days and find they are well suited to the blog environment.