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internet

Virginia Heffernan Thinks The Internet Is Art

by Emily Colucci on November 8, 2016

Virginia Heffernan joined the Internet in 1979 at 9. Growing up near Dartmouth, the cultural critic learned the computer language BASIC from the college’s president John Kemeny with a group of her classmates. I learned this random factoid about Heffernan’s online life at her lecture on Tuesday night at School of Visual Art’s Design Research, Writing and Criticism Department, where she discussed her new book Magic and Loss: The Internet As Art.

Heffernan’s bizarre, meandering lecture was full of tidbits about her own web usage including her high score in Angry Birds, her meetings with Google or her chat room experiences on early live chat feature Conference XYZ. Her over-the-top adoration of her own online history might explain why she thinks the Internet is art.

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Can the Term “Gentrification” be Applied to the Internet?

by Rea McNamara on April 6, 2016

On Monday, luxury lifestyle website Amuse published an interview with Petra Cortright, in which she used the term “gentrification” to describe how the internet is now less weird.

“I think the internet is becoming this really gentrified place,” the LA-based digital artist told writer Iona Goulder. “Today’s forms of social media feels more like people’s personal brands. Now it’s just people promoting their shit constantly and it makes stuff on the internet less weird. Everything feels more censored.”

Boosted by the interview’s SEO-driven headline — ”Petra Cortright on the Gentrification of the Internet” — the story circulated through my social feeds this week, eventually provoking a dust-up within some of my internet art circles. Cortright is among the increasing number of artists whose practices were shaped by the surf club era and who have gained bricks-and-mortar gallery representation and Rhizome cataloguing, so an overarching criticism of her statement stemmed from the perceived entitlement of an early internet user. There is an enduring fondness that borders on immaterial fetishization for a time when the internet was this unfettered, non-indexed boon of online amateur cultural production.

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GIF of the Day: Mark Brown’s GIF Dump

by Michael Anthony Farley on September 25, 2015

Ok, Mark Brown’s “GIF Dump” [h/t Rhizome] is technically a video, but its content warrants inclusion in our prestigious “GIF of the Day” series.

We see an endless stream of animated GIFs cascading through a void, occasionally leaving a contrail of digital artifacts. At first, it’s an apocalyptic image of planes falling from the sky. But that soon becomes a random assortment of office supplies, household objects, and other miscellaneous renderings—all presented totally out of scale. It’s somewhat hypnotic and somewhat boring—an apt metaphor for the sheer weight of detritus we’ve inherited as users of an aging internet.

From Mark Brown:

“Originally created in 2007 as a video for Dan Deacon, ‘Gif Dump’ has been recently revived and retooled under the curatorial advice of Kari Altmann for the online exhibition Netmares Netdreams 2.1“

Appropriately, like a spectre of internet past, nearly all links [including our own] that reference Netmares Netdreams 2.1 now lead to dead ends. Rhizome’s suggestion to see “More work by Mark Brown” directs us to http://www.mcbrown.info, what appears to be a junk site aggregating advice on personal injury litigation and finance (the artist’s current website is markcharlesbrown.com) The domain http://www.netmaresnetdreams.net now appears to be owned by the Japanese entity GMO Internet, Inc. Thankfully, the exhibition still has a MySpace profile.

Watching these GIFs fall into the great digital abyss, it’s hard not to speculate about the fate of digital culture—what will be preserved, what will degrade over time, and what will simply be lost. Here, a rendering of a molecule and a phonograph player are treated with the same weight—the images utterly divorced from context and their original file type. Sometimes a video really is the GIF of the Day.

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Sanitizing the Web: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update

by Corinna Kirsch on April 22, 2015

Crappy websites, art websites, old websites—Google is pushing you out. This is gentrification on the web.

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Let Us Now Praise YouTube Poop

by Corinna Kirsch on October 3, 2014

Do you know about YouTube Poop? Office poll: Probably not. But you should know where your art comes from.

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Ello: The First Artist-Friendly Social Media Site

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on September 26, 2014

For real.

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7 Rising Art Stars to Watch: Deanna Havas

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on August 28, 2014

Last but not least, our interview with Deanna Havas!

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Friday Links: Everyone’s Got to Bow to Somebody

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on April 25, 2014

Artforum’s profile on the Greek-born American sculptor Chryssa ends on a rather strange note. “One day in her studio, I noticed a gun. She pointed to it and said she was planning to shoot [Arnold] Glimcher. Sure she was being mistreated and ignored in New York, she shut her studio on lower Broadway for good and apparently returned to Athens.” Chryssa died earlier this year in Greece. (Above: Chryssa’s “Large Bird Shape.” Courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery.) [Artforum via Andrew Russeth]
“If elected president, Barack Obama plans to prioritize, well, barring broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast from prioritizing Internet content.” That was in 2007. With news this week that the F.C.C. is considering “fast lanes” for commercial providers, let’s hope that he keeps to his promise. [CNET via Reddit]
Triple Canopy announces their 2014 Commission recipients: Kieran Daly, Primavera di Filippi & Samer Hassan, Sowon Kwon, Timothy Leonido, Frank Pasquale, Jared Stanley, and Gillian Walsh. Looking forward to seeing their projects. [Triple Canopy]
Next week, the Frieze Art Fair will come to New York yet again; talks will include a keynote by UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith and a roundtable between Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot and David Remnick of the New Yorker. We’re sure these talks will fill up quickly—their lecture hall is pretty tiny. [Frieze via Artsbeat]
Bill de Blasio has not yet addressed his promise to stop the Central Library Plan, and instead he’s kept $151 million in the budget for the renovation. Very fishy. [Bloomberg News]
Artspace provides their own rankings system for “10 of the Most Influential MFA Programs in the World.” Not sure if they talked to anyone at the School of the Art Institute (where Corinna went for grad school); their excerpt focuses on their MA program in Visual and Critical Studies, not an MFA program. Thankfully, Artspace lists off the ridiculous amount you’ll pay in tuition by enrolling in any of these programs: Bard costs $55,000 per year; Columbia costs 51,676; and UCLA sounds like a bargain at $23,465 for out-of-state residents. Sigh. [Artspace]
More on the ongoing battle between hedge funder and activist shareholder Daniel Loeb and the storied auction house Sotheby’s. Loeb has nominated three director candidates and now advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services recommended that shareholders vote for two of the three board nominees he has proposed, one of them being Loeb himself. [New York Times]
Hyperallergic has partnered with London’s Lost Lectures. Tonight, The Awl co-founder and blogger Choire Sicha will talk along with Photographer Barbara Nitke, street performers Flex (is King) + Deirdre Schoo and scientist Marc Abrahams. Should be an interesting night. [Hyperallergic]
At a White House event for kids, a 10-year-old girl hands Michelle Obama her dad’s resume, and says he’s been out of work for three years. [NPR]
London’s Victoria & Albert Museum just made a pile of money. They’ve confirmed rumors that they are getting the blockbuster Alexander McQueen show. [Artnet]
Kriston Capps continues his coverage on Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design. On April 7, the museum’s board, along with the boards of the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University were supposed to vote on how the Corcoran will be absorbed into these other two institutions. That deadline was skipped. [City Paper]

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Net Neutrality Is Finished

by Paddy Johnson and Matthew Leifheit on April 24, 2014

Three months after a federal appeals court struck down the agency rules intended to guarantee a neutral Internet, the F.C.C. has shifted its position on the matter, now supporting “fast lanes” for Internet traffic.

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Wednesday Links: Doomsday Scenarios

by Paddy Johnson Whitney Kimball and Corinna Kirsch on April 23, 2014

All this week, the Art Market Monitor has been churning out doomsday scenarios for the collectoratti. The Italian art market is dying, and “Sadly, The Picasso Ceramics Market Isn’t For the Entry-Level Collector Anymore.” [The Art Market Monitor]
This week at artnet Paddy Johnson interviews Nicholas O’Brien, a co-curator of the exhibition The New Romantics, currently on view at Eyebeam. [artnet news]
More horrific news of bodies piling up in Chicago, aka, Chiraq. [The Daily Beast]
The broken down World’s Fair towers in Flushing Meadows now have National Treasure status. There’s even talk of fixing them up! [New York Times]
New York Magazine features a whole bunch of Internet celebrities, and that’s gotta be a boon for their site. We only knew a couple of them, but Eckhaus Latta got a shoutout from Mike the Ruler. [New York Magazine]
100 new emojis on Vine. The only way you can see any of them is to pause the video. Nicely done! [Vine]
Looks like Paddle8 is doing well.

Alex Gilkes of @Paddle8 made winning $900k bid 4 Koons’ Fabergé egg wearing a 1966 @GirardPerregaux rose gold chrono. pic.twitter.com/KjXZ4p7ccz

— Jim Shi (@jimshi809) April 23, 2014

Peter Schjeldahl, with his tender prose and passionate research, is hard to leave, but it’s finally time to walk away. Enough with the MoMA and Guggenheim retrospectives! [The New Yorker]
For whatever reason, Roberta Smith ended up reviewing James Franco’s exhibition at Pace. She’s written about the actor-artist a lot. Thankfully, with this exhibition, she shows no mercy. Franco, she writes, seems informed by “confused desperation” and an “entitled narcissism.” She ends her piece with a death knell: “It’s hard not to feel some sympathy for him, while also wishing that someone or something would make him stop.” This is what we’ve all been thinking—that he needs to stop—and now she should never write about him again! [The New York Times]
Start-ups beware of the Red Herring Award. The company informs nominees of their opportunity and then charges them $3,820 for the privilege. This article was written in 2013, but as the awards are coming up again, it seemed a good time to issue the reminder that this resembles a scheme. [TechCrunch]
Judy Chicago is celebrating her 75th birthday with an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. During the press preview, she tells Village Voice reporter Lilly Lampe about her first meeting with critic Harold Rosenberg. “She brought her slides; he brought a hard-on.” [The Village Voice]
A quiz to end all Buzzfeed quizzes: the New Inquiry’s darkly sarcastic “What briefcase full of money are you?” [New Inquiry]

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