The internet has been a site for art since before the current pervasiveness of home and portable computing. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s artists produced Net Art, often by creating a web page in which a work or a group of works was sited. While these artists were indeed venturing into new territory, their works were and continue to be challenged by specific limitations: how does one present, maintain and drive traffic/viewers to a URL? Should the work become archived? Preserved on a disc or database do interactive elements become null and void? Through a combination of institutional exhibition and acquisition, as well as what could be called a short-sighted view of the ubiquity of the internet equating a universality of access, many early net art works vegetate, islands in a vast sea of websites – accessed via art world specific portals, rarely visited, stationary and un-linked to. read more
Two Point Oh
xCurated by Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour
Artists: Constant Dullaart, Ian Dolton-Thornton, Ryan Trecartin, Sabrina Ratté, Pronunciation Book, Kalup Linzy, Sara Ludy, David Horvitz, Chris E. Vargas and Greg Youmans, and Jeremy Deller.
January 17, 2012- February 29, 2012
The internet has been a site for art since before the current pervasiveness of home and portable computing. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s artists produced Net Art, often by creating a web page in which a work or a group of works was sited. While these artists were indeed venturing into new territory, their works were and continue to be challenged by specific limitations: how does one present, maintain and drive traffic/viewers to a URL? Should the work become archived? Preserved on a disc or database do interactive elements become null and void? Through a combination of institutional exhibition and acquisition, as well as what could be called a short-sighted view of the ubiquity of the internet equating a universality of access, many early net art works vegetate, islands in a vast sea of websites – accessed via art world specific portals, rarely visited, stationary and un-linked to.
“Post-internet art,” a phrase coined by artist and curator Marissa Olson and developed by writer Gene McHugh, refers to works in which the internet is not so much a novelty, but rather a banality – a site in which we traverse everyday. The artists in Two Point Oh make use of internet technology that is situated in the everyday – Google Image Search, YouTube, Wikipedia, Vimeo and blogs as potentially material and site for their practices. These works are in plain sight and/or use tools that are readily accessible, and that act comes with risk: loss of ownership and control of distribution, the mundane limitations of the host website’s interface, commodification of their ‘page views,’ and competition in the form of every other entry on such a space. Yet these works also are rewarded the opportunity to address an audience on their own terms, both temporally and spatially.
Critic and media theorist Boris Groys describes the seemingly infinite reproducibility of the digital as a half-truth. The invisible data – i.e. the HTML code of a given website or the binary codes of digital media – is reproducible, yet its visualization via a multiplicity of venues (laptops, projections, smartphones, etc.) is unique to the manner of its presentation. Groys describes the data as analogous to a score and the presentation as a performance of it, and in translation necessarily a betrayal or a misuse. With the works in Two Point Oh, this sense is amplified through the multiplicity of contexts in which these works can be accessed. Some are encountered via RSS readers outside of their site, others find themselves posted onto Facebook walls. Pronunciation Book, included in this exhibition but not directly attributable to a particular artist or as an art project per se, might be visited for the service it provides. By choosing to gather these works into an exhibition, we have somewhat estranged them from this heterogeneity of context, but it is a mild form of affixing the viewer’s experience to a desired narrative or pattern. There still remains the likelihood of viewing the works piecemeal. We do not subscribe that exhibition be viewed in the same manner one would encounter it in a museum or gallery. Rather the works in Two Point Oh may be approached as other online media or information – a jumping off point or an open tab among others.
Constant Dullaart: Exhibited at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam in a show entitled Earthquake 2.0, the YouTube video Re: Footage from a surveillance cam in Sichuan finds itself situated onto the same site of circulation as its source material. Traditional craft is dispensed within Dullaart’s making in exchange for a conceptual sleight of hand. His choice of display methods is intimately tied to the projects’ materials. A surveillance video of a few parked cars captures the intense event of the Fukushima Earthquake and it is processed/corrected with simple video editing software and then posted back online. The resulting gesture feels right at home within an endless stream of comments, remixes and cover versions of popular music and events. However, the politics of appropriation and homage find themselves complicated by the specifics of the work. The world is steadied via special effects, yet the people still flee from some unseen catastrophe. It can be said that images are often some form of alternative versioning of reality, but in Re: Footage from a surveillance cam in Sichuan this fracturing is magnified. http://www.constantdulllaart.com
Ian Dolton-Thornton: The blog is a catchall term for personal websites, often hosted by sites providing a simple means for uploading images, videos, music and text. Loosely blogs can fall into two categories: the diary and the collection. Dolton-Thornton’s ADVANCED INTERNET SEARCHING DREAMS, or aisd.tumblr.com, meshes these two gestures and amplifies the tendency of blogs to be a proxy for self-portraiture via selection. Images – often but not exclusively from art – are collected and shared alongside with small pencil likenesses drawn by the artist. The blog operates as both a diary and as a visualization of a kind of translation process. The drawing and the original image (here, ‘original’ is a problematic term. Whether the ‘original’ is ever presented is debatable) form two sides of a four-sided dialectic. Hidden is the myriad of images he has chosen not to show, and the viewer’s own process of synthesizing the pictures and drawings. http://aisd.tumblr.com/
Ryan Trecartin’s video work has a strange immediacy. From the first frame we know we are in an alternate but familiar world; we know the colors, costumes and props are ramshackle, improvised, but also quite deliberate. There is a knowing echo of George and Mike Kuchar’s work and John Waters’ early films; a bridging of amateur and B-movie production. But the world of the homemade film, present since the first consumer cameras, has expanded well beyond that of a niche hobby, and traditional methods of performance art and outsider filmmaking find themselves out-flanked by YouTube. The characters/actors in Trecartin’s work inhabit a world in which the manic excesses of this new age of limitless media production imbue individuals with an opportunity to freely explore identity – a kind of guiltless play of children – while somehow mirroring the outside world. Echoes of art theory and art world prattle blend with adolescent backbiting and revelry. Comfortably weird on a gallery wall, the lo-res nature of their presentation on YouTube feels differently vital. http://www.youtube.com/user/WianTreetin
In Activated Memory I and Activated Memory II, Sabrina Ratté trains her skillful manipulation/experimentation using distorted 3D, and both analog and digital video processes upon a series of spaces both natural and architectural. They rotate and meld. Natural colors are overblown, filtered into a hazy Technicolor. It is easy to think of these videos in terms of memory’s crystallization and degradation. Light and space are made to ooze through the frames. Ratté’s videos are visual equivalents of the looping, reverbing feedback of the soundtrack (here provided by Roger Tellier-Craig, aka Le Révélateur). Indeed, she often works with musicians, creating videos in which sound and vision, if not created concurrently, feel unified.
Pronunciation Book: The internet is riddled with gaps and mysteries. Into this frayed material it is possible to create something radically new - new resources people never knew they needed, to be the sole expert in a self-defined field directly answerable to no one. Such is the Pronunciation Book - a well-designed YouTube page (which has spawned copy-cat pages and parodies) in which a myriad of words and their pronunciation are presented anonymously. Ranging from the mundane (until, slap bass, past) to the more esoteric (Zyzz, Mjölnir, kitsune), each video features the word in black block letters against a white background with its clear pronunciation repeated a few times by a calm male voice. The effect is puzzling, hilarious, and curiously poetic. http://www.youtube.com/user/pronunciationbook
Kalup Linzy’s series Conversations wit da Churen is a strange telephone-conversation-based soap opera in which a narrative of sex, family, and violence is clad in comedy and caricatures built with costume and vocal effects. Linzy’s work often involves and complicates issues of gender, race and class while maintaining an airy entertaining quality, allowing it to butt up against the world of popular media. Communicated via telephony, the characters of All My Churen (2003), though temporally estranged, collectively deal with a death, often in off-putting blasé terms: bickering over memorial attendance, etc. The camera places the viewer in a voyeuristic pose, privy to the goings on an unfamiliar world, which at times confirms or confounds stereotypes of black culture. http://www.youtube.com/user/kklinzy
Sara Ludy’s field recordings involve a smart broadening of the term’s meaning. Working primarily in digital media (video, animated gifs), Ludy’s recordings are of the hybrid interior/exterior world of Second Life. She gives simple descriptions: Second Life field recording from location 134, 133, 36 in Help Island Public. A couple discusses how there are bored nerds all over the world. or, Second Life field recording from location 105, 159, 2001 in the SOUNDS MALL. A square room containing 11 wall-mounted boards of demo sound effects is recorded in sequential order around the room. Headphones recommended. Posted on the audio site Soundcloud, the works sit among such recordings as Ulverston busker at market street on thursday morning, and Gewitterregen / Thunderstorm. The connection between her process and the classical method of field recording is more than just in name. While making these recordings, Ludy is in a wild place whose sounds are as alien to most of us as any distant forest or subway. http://www.saraludy.com/
David Horvitz’s Tumblr blog began in January 2009 (since closed, a new site launches at http://davidhorvitz.com/) and consists of screenshots of all caps notes in TextEdit describing directions for the presumed reader to follow. What happens is a blurring of lines between artist and viewer, and artist and maker. In one way of looking at it: each idea is a work, the data on Tumblr’s server is a reproduction of the work, the blog post on the viewers’ computer screen is a presentation/reproduction of that data, and any actualizing of the project is yet another interpretation/reproduction. Horvitz takes this further. Some of the blog posted projects involve the reader sending objects, photos directly to traditional exhibition sites to be the physical manifestation of these directions. Using the previous logic, what is shown can be seen more so art documentation than art proper, a resultant stand-in for his dematerialized practice. http://davidhorvitz.tumblr.com/
Chris E. Vargas and Greg Youmans’ web sitcom Falling in Love …With Chris and Greg mixes stylistic gestures of network sitcoms and public access television. The characters are a queer couple grappling with the both mundane and not so mundane trials and tribulations of monogamy. The language has the written-sounding cadence of a traditional sitcom; we are aware that this is a presentation/construction and not reality. The humor comes as a product of careful juxtapositions of expectation with surprise, or as the result of wordplay and specificity. The archetypes of the gay man and the gay couple are fully malleable in this world, and are victim to a loving debate between Chris and Greg. Falling in Love plays with stereotypical identities whose in/accuracies expose the manner in which queer identity draws into contention all manner of gender normative givens. Falling in Love is an exploration of radical difference within equally radical normalcy. http://fallinginlovewithchrisandgreg.com/
Jeremy Deller has a widely varying practice with music often its subject and more specifically, how it operates within personal and social contexts. Acid Brass (2005) consists of a concert in which a brass band performs acid techno. These seemingly disparate genres are brought into a strangely warm and entertaining conversation. Part of the project involves a haphazard flow chart marking historical, political, and musicological lines of contact between acid jazz and the music of brass bands, but the sights and sounds of a crowd getting lost in the performance makes this connection in a much more visceral manner. His website uses a specific player system for his video work, but perhaps due to the Acid Brass performance led to a well selling recording for The Williams Fairey Brass Band, pleasantly exceeded its intended reach; Deller’s personal YouTube page retains the clip. Acid Brass lives as one amongst the infinitude of genre mash-ups yet the particulars of the piece insure its relevance and vitality. http://www.youtube.com/user/jeredeller
Disclaimer: The curators attempted to contact/gain permission from all the artists featured. They operated under the concept that the works, via existence online, were being exhibited, and Two Point Oh serves only to loosely organize access to that exhibitionism. They received acknowledgement/ tacit approval from Sara Ludy, Constant Dullaart, David Horvitz, Greg Youmans & Chris E. Vargas, Ian Dolton-Thornton.
Jackie Im is an independent curator and writer based in Oakland, CA. She received her BA in Art History from Mills College and her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. She has assisted on exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Queens Nails Projects and Intersection for the Arts. Im has curated exhibitions as the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Pro Arts, and the Mills College Art Museum. She is currently a curator and co-administrator of MacArthur B Arthur, a gallery and project space in Oakland.
Aaron Harbour is a curator, dj and cultural producer operating out of Oakland, CA. He received some modicum of education at the San Francisco Art Institute. He curates shows at MacArthur B Arthur. He runs an art critique blog on Facebook (facebook.com/curiouslydirect), and writes occasional long form reviews for Artcards. He has performed his music and/or DJed at various venues throughout the Bay Area such as Mighty, Club 6, LiPo Lounge, and Southern Exposure.
