Constant Association for Art and Media: an interdisciplinary arts-lab
"Constant works in-between media and art and is interested in the culture and ethics of the World Wide Web. The artistic practice of Constant is inspired by the way that technological infrastructures, data-exchange and software determine our daily life. Free software, copyright alternatives and (cyber)feminism are important threads running through the activities of Constant.
Constant organizes workshops, print-parties, walks and 'Verbindingen/Jonctions'-meetings on a regular basis for a public that's into experiments, discussions and all kinds of exchanges."
(Constant)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
jodi.org
"JODI has over the years built quite a reputation, especially with their notorious CD-rom OSS/**** (Mediamatic, Amsterdam 1998) which, immediately after installation, executes a takeover of the computer. In 1999 their work was part of exhibitions like Netconditions at the ZKM at Karlsruhe, The Allure of the Digitalat the Tate Gallery in London and the SONAR festival in Barcelona. They were awarded a number of international prizes, amongst which the Webby Awards in San Francisco. JODI disposed of this prize immediately, calling the DotCom-audience 'ugly %commercial sons-of-bitches'. In the year 2000 JODI was present at several international group-exhibitions and festivals, such as the Transmediale in Berlin and Deathmatch at Hangar in Barcelona Even an apparently obsolete medium like teletext did not escape JODI's interference. In 2000 they released their unusual way of thinking on 'Page 379' on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of this medium."
(v2.nl)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
"Named after the pioneering critic of the commercialization of mass media, the late Professor Rose Goldsen of Cornell University, the Archive was founded in 2002 by Timothy Murray to house international art work produced on CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, video, digital interfaces, and the internet. Its collection of supporting materials includes unpublished manuscripts and designs, catalogues, monographs, and resource guides to new media art.
Emphasizing multimedia artworks that reflect digital extensions of twentieth-century developments in cinema, video, installation, photography, and sound, holdings include extensive special collections in American and Chinese new media arts, significant online and offline holdings in internet art, and the majority of works in the international exhibition, Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom. A novel research archive of international significance, the collection complements the holdings in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of illuminated manuscripts and the early modern printed book, and adds to the breadth of its important collections in human sexuality, Asian Studies, and Media, Film, and Music."
(Cornell University Library)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Internet as Art: In the digital age, the medium is the new message
"Just as video and computer technology attracted pioneering artists in the 1960s and 1970s, the Internet today is inspiring artists to tinker with the possibilities and boundaries of the World Wide Web. What started as a playful and often tongue-in-cheek experimental venture by a few code-savvy artists in the early 1990s has grown into a global art movement that is attracting attention from museums and private collectors. Karlsruhe-based media museum Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie, or ZKM, has been running a series of net.art exhibitions. Berlin's Digital Art Museum recently showed the video performance 'Hammering the Void,' by Gazira Babeli, the pseudonym for an artist who exists only in Second Life, an online virtual reality game.
Among the artists who first saw the potential for creative uses of the information superhighway were Belgrade-born Vuk Cosic and Amsterdam-based artist duo Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who perform under the pseudonym jodi on the Web. Their early digital works, much like the art being made today by Italian duo Eva and Franco Mattes - who call themselves 0100101110101101.ORG - often imitated or at least paid ironic homage to the clandestine machinations of computer hackers."
(Goran Mijuk, 29 July 2009, Wall Street Journal)
Fig.1 'T-Visionarium’ (2003-08), by Neil Brown, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Internet of the 90's was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction
"To be blunt [the Internet of the 90's] was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
I wrote that change was coming 'soon' instead of putting an end date at 1998, for example, because there was no sickness, death or burial. The amateur web didn't die and it has not disappeared but it is hidden. Search engine rating mechanisms rank the old amateur pages so low they're almost invisible and institutions don't collect or promote them with the same passion as they pursue net art or web design.
Also new amateur pages don't appear at such amounts as ten years ago because the WWW of today is a developed and highly regulated space. You wouldn't get on the web just to tell the world, 'Welcome to my home page.' The web has diversified, the conditions have changed and there's no need for this sort of old fashioned behaviour. Your CV is posted on the company website or on a job search portal. Your diary will be organised on a blog and your vacation photos are published on iPhoto. There's a community for every hobby and question.
This is why I refer to the amateur web as a thing of the past; aesthetically a very powerful past. Even people who weren't online in the last century, people who look no further than the first 10 search engine results can see the signs and symbols of the early web thanks to the numerous parodies and collections organised by usability experts who use the early elements and styles as negative examples."
(Olia Lialina, February 2005)
Fig.1 Cyndi Howells. 'Cyndi's Genealogy Home Page Construction Kit'
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
