Ok, I went to this talk for two reasons, first because I am interested in the ways communities construct knowledge and in how we can observe that, and because Camille is a student of my friend Bernhard Rieder and I know how hard it can be as a grad student at a big conference, so I wanted to be supportive.
The talk itself was hampered by how little time was alotted to speakers in every panel--only 15 minutes instead of the usual 20. That missing 5 minutes equals 1-2 pages of text and it's quite a challenge to explain any but the most superficial ideas in only 15 minutes. Unfortunately Camille's talk was fairly complex, and I think it didn't all come across clearly. However, since she has posted her slides and paper, I was able to take a closer look and found that my initial impression was correct; she is onto something quite interesting.
I'll quote a short passage from her paper that sums up what she is studying right now:
From this quick contextualization, we can specify two major directions the net.artists have followed in Internet cyberculture: the economy of things (the growing population of hobbyists among the sub-cultures on the Web), embodied by informational objects (content and form) that are collected and shared in most of web communities, and the economy of people (triumphant in the Web 2.0’s fashion), embodied in the usage of applications, information processing and communication networks.In the talk she went on to discuss the example of nasty nets, a site that was active from 2006-2007 and at which a group of net.artists shared links and images of interest that they discovered while surfing, identifying an emerging vernacular that counters the serious or high culture (or hacker, which is an interesting connection) approaches to both the Internet and to net.art. Talking afterward, there was some thought that the 4chan "/b/" image board may be a good place (or even the best?) to spot the bleeding edge of memetic evolution online. --Not that we needed an excuse to visit it, but what the hell. ;-)
4 comments:
Kim ! I just discovered your blog today (sooo late...). Thank you retrospectively for your kind word of support. I will keep you updated when I have a newer, improved version of this (as we say, it's "under construction"...). :))))
Camille, I forgive your tardiness. ;-) I really found your paper interesting--this is part of your dissertation, right? And, the table by Guthrie Lonergan that you mentioned ended up really inspiring a review I did of UBERMORGEN.COM's "Sound of eBay" project. So thanks!
Thank you. Believe it or not, I don't follow my vanity links anymore. I found your blog via the Mirkopedia affair ! For one second I thought someone had really opened a wiki about Mirko and his thesis or something, so I just had to double check.
About my dissertation : yes and no ; I am not studying net art per se but it just so happens that this trend of net artists that I mention in that paper is a very good example of net literacy/creativity that you can find spread on the web in the doings of the everyday user. Yes that table is really neat, Guthrie is pretty good at summing things up, like all the nasty nets people, who are not theoreticians and have no will to be, but have often striking and realistic decriptions of their own doings (so rare in art...).
I think the major hurdle in trying to talk about the vernacular on the net and/or web is that it seems so futile in comparison to the in-your-face effects of web2.0. So besides the 15 minutes limitation, I think It was my fault for not focusing my research on an historical recontextualization. The presentation at IRC the results of last year research where I was still wondering how to tackle my thesis problematics. Now I know I want to insist on a historical perspective.
Oh, right, I'm talking tomorrow about Ubermorgen to my Net Art students !
What are you discussing re: UBERMORGEN? I know Hans and Liz a bit; they are really nice. And, they are really willing to come into a class and talk to students, so in future if you wanted them to come give a talk, they'd probably be happy to do it (but they can't usually do it for free, so maybe that's a problem).
I found the Sound of eBay much more interesting when i started to consider the history of Net.Art and where it is right now. In fact web 2.0 has, according to some critics/artists, had a really devastating affect on it. --Well, I'll be curious to see what you think of my review once it's posted--should be in a few days.
Ciao!
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