NMS2014

Janelle Monae's music is a steampunk mix of sixties jazz and pop that serves as a sort of story/soundtrack that stretches across several albums. In them she tells the story of an Android that falls in love with a human (which in the universe of the albums is forbidden) and all the conflicts/anxieties that take place as a result. The story of the android is one that Monae uses to talk about the other, the oppressed, in a sort of futuristic stranger in a strange land. I would highly encourage you to watch her short film, "Many Moons" that's imbedded into the link.

Here's an introduction to notion of the mundane reality that "we're all cyborgs now" insight on the extensions of mental and physical abilities from locally based cyborg anthropologist Amber Case. We'll talk more about her ideas in subsequent classes. Amber Case: We're All Cyborgs Now. Filmed December 2010, Posted January 2011, TEDWomen 2010. Accessed February 21, 2014.

Here's part 1 (of 3 segments on youtube) of documentary by John Akomfrah on Afrofuturism---an African-American literary and cultural movement, associated with science-fiction writers Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler and others. This movie's protagonist the "data thief" digs through archives of past, present and future, drawing on intersections between various musical genres which share a mythos of future technology and the extra-terrestrial. The future read as history, something already happened, the Atlantic Slave trade framed as alien abduction narrative, the music producer/DJ as cyborg --- human/machine hybrid finding new connections through material memories of black culture. "The Last Angel of History (part 1)" Posted on Youtube by Desultory Heroics. November 23, 2013. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqgkXbQOi68

This is a page I came across whilst frustratedly slogging about on one of those rabbit-hole-look-there-are-so-many-fucking-links-all-over-that-move-and-change-colors-and-shit-aren't-we-so-disruptive-type-sites. It is rather unremarkable in most ways, but I found it a semi-welcome respite from the rest of the site. Like many other sites of this era, it is a web poetry message board of sorts that relies on user generated content, namely semi-anonymous bits'o "creative writing" that are supposedly prompted by way of the writer viewing one of three pairings of images. Some users attempt to narrativise the images to varying degrees of success, and some people write about fucking jars of peanut butter, as in literally humping said jar. Like many such collections of user generated avant-poetry it becomes increasingly difficult to suss out which pieces have an actual considered conceptual core, and which are just word diarrhea. Nevertheless, I found some of them sort of charming. Also of note is that there are mail-to links associated with each writing that are supposedly linked to the writers email account. This seems bizarre in a present where such personal information is closely guarded, hidden from the masses of web-weirdos and spambots.

One of those sort of chintzy web-novel thingies. It involves the sordid internal dialogue of a mother and "the baby" as she, the mother, ambulates about her apartment performing various domestic type tasks. The structural system of little footnote-y links that elaborate little bits of the main body of the story remind me of reading Infinite Jest. Most entertainingly the woman refers to her baby as "the baby" and "the baby" is pretty much more interesting than her. It seems, based upon my chosen links, that net.art of the visual variety has very limited appeal to me. In fact I have decided that it is rather fucking obnoxious and that people should refrain from producing any more of it. Story/writing/narative/shit-poetry based stuff is OK I guess.

"When I was learning how to write in grade school, I noticed that all my teachers wrote with near-identical handwriting on the chalkboard...I realized that we were being taught to write in a specific font." The statement here is from series by contemporary artist Jesse England. This is not net.art, but an interesting variant on "remediation," or a perverse post-digital gesture pointing to non-obvious connections between new and old modes of communication design. England, Jesse. "Learn to write in Different Fonts: Jesse England" Accessed February 14, 2014. http://jesseengland.net/index.php?/project/learn-to-write-in-different-fonts/

This 5 minute edit of a digital ethnographic study by Michael Wesch is an excellent visual introduction to particular techno-social affordances and constraints of the Internet, echoing some ideas from lecture about hypertext and is useful to understanding the broader technical behind-the-scenes through the first decade of internet--- a helpful supplement to thinking about net.art and other forms of production online "The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)" Youtube video, 4:34. Posted by Michael Wesch, March 8, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Rhizome, one of the early media art organizations, continues to serve contemporary new media art communities and, importantly, to conserve and archive Internet based artworks. In this collection you'll find a variety of net.art and hypertext fiction projects from the first decade.

Here's a more extensive collection on Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/artbase/browse/archived/

Another noteworthy supporter of Internet based artworks is Turbulence. Here, in the archives, dated chronologically by year (96 - 04 for this assignment) an array of artists works commissioned by this wing of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc, a project that started in 1981 to support artists' experiments with earlier forms of networked media.

Net.art collection intiated in 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Amongst the many artists works you'll find examples of net.art conservation, and questions as to the 'integrity' of the work that accompany such endeavors --- is the artwork compromised if you update the browser plug-ins?

Internet -based art in an online venue, housed on the servers of the 'brick-and-mortar' art institution, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Then curator Steve Dietz initiating this collection which remains accessible, an incredible archive of early net.art works.

Russian net artist, Olia Lialina, one of the trailblazers in this new medium,approached from background in film and theory. Her website, linked above, was also the first network based art gallery, causing much feedback (positive and negative) from offline / online artists. You'll find Lialina's net.art works from the 1990s below her bio and cv information.

Net.art works by Russian artist Alexei Shulgin. Shulgin was quite active in the early years of Internet based art and culture, here, his website chock full of these early works which use and abuse the affordances of the medium at that time.

Described by new media artist Alexander Galloway as " simultaneously an introduction to and a retrospective of net art" this turn of the millenium collection of net.art was put together by ZKM, a German art, technology and culture institute dedicated to interdisciplinary and international collaborations.

I followed some links from the net.art year in review reading assigned, clicked around, and found this cool collection. Stolen fragments of famous pieces of art. Although the documentation was of course displayed and shared via web, what connects it to the topic of internet art seems to be the concept of fragments. That though having a piece of rock from a famous piece of art may not be much, when collected together these fragments form a commentary on something bigger, perhaps the absurd "value" Deshamps (for instance) objects are set at.

Nice, thanks. Fragmentation is a more tangible idea with which to understand technical aspects of the internet, like 'packet switching'. Related to the abstraction of fragments, there are resonant connections between Performance, Conceptual Art, the push towards 'ephemerality' in the 1960s and the ways in which those ideas resurface with new media and internet art in the 1990s. 10100101110101101.org making that connection explicitly. Please be sure to add the bibliographic citation at the end of your posts.

As mentioned throughout the interview with Ricardo Dominguez, the Electronic Disturbance Theater is a group of cyber activists who use electronic civil disobedience to non-violently take action against political powers. On this site, a part of thing.net, there are brief descriptions of the Electronic Disturbance Theater and electronic civil disobedience. There is also information surrounding the EDT's influences, beliefs and methods of electronic civil disobedience. Many of the brief descriptions are accompanied with links to larger, more in-depth articles as well. Wray, Stefan. thing.net, "The Electronic Disturbance Theater and Electronic Civil Disobedience." Accessed February 12, 2014. http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/EDTECD.html.

Thanks, this is an excellent supplement to the interview, lots of context for related ideas from broader situation behind the Zapatistas struggle and 'etmological' roots of the ECD concept

This article by Richard Joyce gives a more in-depth look at the Zapatistas and how they have created the new movement of Internet activism as means to take action against political powers. It touches upon some of the positive and negative aspects of their methods, along with a brief history and several examples of the ways they have used the Internet to take action. Joyce's critical analysis of the Zapatista movement allows for a new perspective that differs from that of the Electronic Disturbance Theater. Joyce, Richard. Bowdoin, "Zapatista Solidarity Online: A Case Study of Internet Activism." Accessed February 12, 2014. http://learn.bowdoin.edu/courses/soc022-richard-joyce/2010/04/zapatista-solidarity-online-a-case-study-of-internet-activism/.

"The GNU Project is not limited to the core operating system. We aim to provide a whole spectrum of software, whatever many users want to have. This includes application software. See the Free Software Directory for a catalogue of free software application programs."

In Open Source as Culture/ Culture as Open Source, the operating systems Linux and GNU. GNU was developed by Richard Stallman in 1983 as an open source operating system which could be developed by many different people working towards the freedom of software. The GNU project was necessary when most software was proprietary in the 1980's. The GNU web page has a great detailed history of the development of GNU from its beginning to how it is being used now Stallman, Richard. GNU Project, Accessed February 12, 2014.