Email from Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu

 This is from an e-mail from Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu regarding the immediate visibility of criticism on the web (and sites such as Wikipedia) in relation to his band. The above image was found in a Google image search from an online music site (I actually shot this photograph years ago on a Xiu Xiu tour – possibly Cape Cod?):

Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 4:10 AM

it is very difficult for me to deal with internet criticism. i do everything i can to avoid coming across it. the longer i work on music, the less secure i feel about it – and the fact that anyone can talk whatever shit they want and i might find it on accident makes me insane. for this current record i am more fastidious than ever about not looking on message boards or seeing reviews but by total chance i saw 2 that really bummed me out. despite the fact that i put forth a conscious effort not to examine our reviews for the sake of keeping my fragile self opinion intact, it seems impossible. i think the hard part for me is that a message board is a defacto review written by someone with no connection to journalistic responsibility that can be seen by anyone. with magazines one had to seek out a review but when someone, myself for instance, tries as hard as i can to avoid reading reviews and still comes across them, it is aggravating in the extreme to know that opinion about the band i play in being formed by unavoidable off handed and casual remarks. this is what bothers me about wikipedia as well. that facts can be determined but a public median bell curve rather than by disciplined research. again this steams from insecurity on my part but also from wishing that critques could be specialized rather than diffuse. even with bigger online music sites, because the content is infinite it leads to shit writing with little heart as there is so much space to fill.

RESPONSES FROM LUKE FISCHBECK

Luke Fischbeck of Lucky Dragons responded to the questions from the first post on this blog. Image from Toulouse, France.

   •    What negative and positive aspects arise when artists make something in context of art, puts in online, and a following forms of non-art-context-people?

maybe it’s drawing these boundaries that creates value–in other words, sets up inequalities. it’s easy to see this happen in reverse, when something from non-art-context is appropriated into art-context, so maybe this is just a form of appropriation? de-appropriation? i would like to hope that this process expands, and makes more permeable, the boundary of what is called art-context. 

    •    What are the negative and positive aspects of the immediate visibility and accessibility of knowing what people are thinking?

oh! magic? negative aspects follow from falling for the false promise of magic–there is no possibility to know what people are thinking, only to imagine backwards from the results of their thinking… and you will always be visible through obscuring and distorting layers. positive aspects follow as side effects from setting magic as a utopian goal: infinity, lightness, equality, immanence, immediacy, lucidity–all require a mistrust of the law, an openness. 

    •    Does the artist feel pressure to be popular and meet the demands of his/her growing audience? If so, can this reduce an integrity in one’s practice? Is it possible to intelligently work inside this?

probably everyone feels pressure to be popular, or at least legitimate, or valuable. to intelligently work inside this could mean understanding the role you play in creating–or at least helping to give form to–your audience’s demands (and they yours!). integrity sounds good, like a trustworthy knot tying you and your audience together, like a tight ball of ethics. but maybe diffusion is also good, an ethical cloud, a field of possible attitudes that binds you together, but cannot be seen the same way from any two locations. i want to say that hoping to be popular is in itself a kind of intersubjectivity, trying to see yourself from the outside, from many outsides. this action makes it impossible, in turn, to imagine integrity as something central that can be increased or reduced, tightly wound to protect against attack. instead, popularity, demands, integrity, even intelligence and work, can all be imagined as connecting material, collaboratively made, and never appearing the same way twice–culture!

    •    Could an online following stunt the development of a young artist’s practice if they were to receive too much attention too early?

attention itself is a material that can be used like any other, to fit whatever form, to carry any message. it’s easier, and more important, to understand this in an online context… but it’s important, for the sake of “the development of a young artist’s practice”, to acknowledge the precarity of this specific attention… and to figure out a way to translate this to other attentions. but not to worry about it too much. 

    •    Is there a responsibility towards your online following?

there’s an accountability on each one’s part to the entire system of exchange… you don’t owe each other anything directly, unless you’ve promised something in words. 

    •    In the aforementioned example (when a viewer wrote “FUCK YOU” on a poster I had sent him in response to a post he didn’t like, and re-posted it on his blog), how does one understand and react to situations like this?

best to leave it alone! if you can understand why he reasonably reacted the way he did, and yet you stand by the content of your post, then a dialogue has been created, and can grow on its own, or end there… it’s not really personal until you react again, i don’t think. nice to let these dialogues / digressions / diversities / disagreements exist for as long as possible, fragile things. 

    •    There are companies and trend watcher groups who too become part of the audience. I’ve been contacted by some people in past regarding some of my projects. They were “interested” in me, and wanted to know more about what I did and how I did it. In a different, but similar situation: I once posted a photograph on flickr of a friend who had found himself in an American Apparel advertisement without his permission (they used a photo they found online). Though my post probably had no more than 20 hits at the time, my friend was contacted in days by the company regarding the issue (who will probably see this post too). How does this element play in all of this?

this process goes in more than one direction – - like a two-way mirror but with more than two ways! I like thinking about the capitalism we’re living in, where consumers and producers are pretty much one and the same (all in a big pretzel mess)… how does marketing fit into that? what is there left to sell? the most simple explanation is that marketing is the narrative, a story being written out of the material of so many fast and random dialogues. maybe it’s preferable to leave the dialogues complicated, unresolved, without a story to them, but the forms come and go so fast, and let such amazing things begin to take shape… i think it’s a good thing that this is a job for someone, to figure out how what you do is working

CHAT WITH CECI MOSS

The following is a Gmail chat with Ceci Moss, Senior Editor at Rhizome. Copied and pasted from Rhizome’s site, Ceci is also a writer, musician, DJ, and curator. She presently writes and edits the online contemporary art and music journal A Million Keys. For the past seven years, she’s programmed the weekly radio show Radio Heart covering experimental, post punk, noise and miscellaneous obscurities on KALX and East Village Radio. She also produces solo recordings under the name Mi Or and the Pedestals. Above image found on my external hard-drive from January 2008.

Me: Is there any place on there that you thought would be a good place to start? Something that has come up?

In the talk I did w/ Laurel Ptak, there was the tension between doing something for your following – and maintaining an integrity in your work.

Ceci: I think what you get at on the blog

is the sense that artists have more of an immediate contact with their audience now

moving some artists into more of a performative mode

me: Like, self as performance. Exhibiting one’s personality, like via a blog.

Ceci: there’s that, definitely

but also, some artists who work in mediums like photography

would see a more instant response to their artwork

that, 20 years ago, would not take place in the same way

me: yes. have you talked w/ artists who have come across any problems with this response?

Like, maybe feeling pressure to please people more.

Sent at 4:29 PM on Friday

Ceci: not necessarily — although plenty of artists I’ve talked to are excited about the prospect of more people seeing their work

me: what’s interesting about the internet and audience, is that it is easy to see what people like and what people don’t like.

Through re-blogs… google alerts…. etc….

I think “market” is the wrong word here, but it almost becomes like a market, like watching the collective approval or disapproval of something.

Ceci: But sometimes how people come across work is purely by happenstance

Like a popular blog posts images of an installation, and then a ton of people bookmark it, etc.

Is that a gauge on popularity, exactly?

Or more an audience’s reading habits, or taste informed by those habits?

Sent at 4:33 PM on Friday

me: It might not show popularity, but it increases the artists “network value.”

But maybe that is a whole different conversation.

Ceci: Totally

me: But, besides just bookmarking, there are the “likes” like on tumblr, or the star rating…

So, that does reflect what people like.

Ceci: There are plenty of ways to give the thumbs up for something, sure

me: And do you think this changes the way artists work online? Or, artists who grow up online?

B/c the audience is a lot more active

and connected

Ceci: I think what shifts is the understanding that you’re always in public, and that you’re always connected to that public,

Like, there’s an action/reaction to whatever you produce

Also, and this is another subject, I think in the case of work that exists offline in physical form, things can get leaked earlier or misrepresented

Like — the only images of your installation or sculpture may be blurry, taken on a camera phone

I’m not saying the blurry images misrepresents the work

but I am saying that it may misrepresent how the artist wants their work represented — some artists are sensitive about that

me: yeah

but also, maybe those artists misunderstand how information circulates now

that the blurry cell phone image is part of the discourse of the work in today’s digital communication society

Do you have any thoughts about art, that when placed online, goes outside of the context of “art”? – The question on the blog was: What negative and positive aspects arise when artists make something in context of art, puts in online, and a following forms of non-art-context-people?

Ceci: I think it’s a great thing

For a long time, art has been associated with an element of surprise or discovery

Larger circulation allows for that to happen more often

and to reach more people

A negative response can also be interesting

Like the comment fields in Dennis Knopf’s bootyclipse videos

me: I haven’t seen those…

Ceci: For the project, he took booty dancing videos from you tube, but cut out the actual footage of the girls dancing

So all you see is the interior of people’s homes and bedrooms

He reposted the videos online, with all the same titles/info/tags etc

So, viewers searching YouTube for booty dancing videos would find them and play them, expecting to see a girl dancing

When they discover that material has been edited out, many responded in anger

me: ha, that is the surprise!

Ceci: the comments are really funny

me: yeah

the comment fight is so interesting

when people berate each other (and the video) in comments

Ceci:

YPop That Pussy

The users are angry at Dennis, for not delivering the goods

It’s quite funny and smart

me: I like that

And this is an example of an artist working inside this terrain of internet users/audience – knowing that people will find it b/c of certain tag words…

If that was the intention.

Do you think, that because artists can have a larger and more immediate audience b/c of the internet: do you think that this shifts the artists interest outside of a more “autonomous” art-referential thinking – and more open to non-art-context people?

did that make sense?

b/c the audience is no longer just in the art community – so, to keep it within the discourse of where contemporary art is at – you either bring a wider internet audience into that discourse – or you expand that discourse to include them.

I just read a TJ Clark book on Gustave Courbet, and he discussed how Courbet was painting for both the critics and art world of the time, but also for the new emerging audience coming out of the new communities of migrants from the rural to the urban, and this upset a lot of the art people of the time..

Ceci: I think for some artists, sure

But there are other artists who probably believe in the importance of that autonomy

it’s hard to generalize

me: Yeah.

but for the latter

they probably wouldn’t be working online, or would they?

Ceci: Probably not

If you want to limit your audience, the internet would be the wrong place to do it.

Sent at 5:02 PM on Friday

me: Do you believe in a responsibility towards your following? Like, that it’s not just the art that matters, but that a consideration for these people that are following what you are doing? I sometimes get emails saying that I have influenced people’s lives, which was weird at first. And then I realized that so many people can see what I am doing, that there should be some kind of responsibility here. Maybe even in terms of “educational,” though, I’m not sure.

Ceci: I think it’s the same responsibility that comes with other art forms too,

like music

At the end of the day, you should do what you want to do for yourself and pursue the questions that you think are important – the questions that drive your practice.

EMAIL FROM CORY ARCANGEL

Below are emails from artist, Cory Arcangel, in response to the first post on the blog. Above image found on Flickr (from his show at Team Gallery at the end of 2008).

Mon, May 3, 2010 at 9:15 PM

Hey David,

There is going to be multiple points of entry into any content put online. This is simply the structure of the web. Making work online has always interested me because it’s going to create friction no matter what because it’s very difficult to anticipate what exactly will happen to the work, and the trillions of ways it will be read. This friction is where I think the energy lies. It can be played off in the work.

ps – I think all of your questions can be re-written as:
What happens when work using the codes of fine art becomes entertainment?

Cory

—

Tue, May 4, 2010 at 7:34 PM

Hi Cory -

What are you thoughts on this idea of entertainment? One would think most artists would be opposed to this because “entertainment” has a negative connotation – art is supposed to be better than entertainment, it is supposed to invoke thought. Entertainment is supposed to amuse. I guess online this “supposed to” has no power.

hope you are good, so nice in NY right now!

- D

—

Wed, May 5, 2010 at 10:28 AM

I like my artwork to be entertaining. It’s something that I’m a little bit embarrassed of. A kind of guilty pleasure. In each new work, often I try desperately to scrub it of any feeling of entertainment, but almost without my knowledge or power, these elements creep back into the work. Its as if I am powerless against this force. It is possible this is one reason I feel so comfortable working online. Online this tendency gives the work a certain kinda ambiguity as to its purpose or intent. Because online, as I mentioned before, content can operate in many different systems simultaneously.

There is a section on my website called “Things I Made”, where I post my projects. I purposefully called it “Things I Made” as opposed to “Artwork”, or “Works”, because I felt “Things I Made” could lead to a multitude of readings – maybe I’m  just a bedroom tinkerer, or a weekend coder, or just a creative person with a home on the web, or an artist. A few years ago, this page was just a list of titles, which linked to the projects. My projects have titles like On C (2007-8), Punk Rock 101 (2006), etc, etc. I realized after a few years this was an “artist portfolio” construct. Meaning, a page of poetic sounding titles with dates was something that would most likely read as “art”. Therefore I added descriptions next to these links a while back – something to pull the content back into a more grey area. Also, I liked that a poetic sounding title with a date next to it and a small personally written description was a construct often found in the websites of bedroom computer programmers posting their software.

—

Wed, May 5, 2010 at 7:38 PM

Hi Cory,

You’ve told me before that you use Google Alerts. How does the presence of this immediate feedback (whether it is the viewpoints of a young blogger or a more “established” art journal) inform your practice?

- D

—

Thu, May 6, 2010 at 10:39 PM

Hey David,

I don’t use Google Alerts or Google Blog Search to look at viewpoints. I think that would drive me crazy. I guess Im old fashioned, but I tend to like my feedback in person. Though, I do use Google Blog Search to track the dispersion of some of my work, and other similar media. I do this mainly to familiarize myself with how things tend to spread on the Internet, as some of my work is about this process. Studying this mechanism helps familiarize myself with it therefore if I have a project which uses this landscape I am able to do so fluidly. My project Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009) is an example of this. This project – which is Schoenberg’s well-known 1909 piano composition Opus 11 realized by cats walking on pianos downloaded from YouTube and edited together – is partly a play on the system of meme culture. To put it simply the punchline is, “Do people like cats enough to make even Schonberg a minor meme?”. So by being familiar with what things get passed around and how they get passed around, I guess I was able to roll it all up and re-enter it into the system. An infinite loop of nothing and everything at the same time. Id like to say the nothing is the entertainment part of it and the everything is the art, but I could just as easily say the art is the nothing (thx Andy) and the entertainment is the everything.

Cory

—

Fri, May 7, 2010 at 12:41 AM

Hi Cory,

This reminds of something you told me during a studio visit at my first summer at Bard. I don’t know if you said it spontaneously, or if it was something you had said many times before. It was something like: it’s easy to get one step ahead of the art-world, but how do you get one step ahead of that? It was very much like a zen koan, and it has stuck with me.

- D

CONVERSATION WITH LAUREL PTAK

I talked with New York based curator, Laurel Ptak, who started the blog http://www.iheartphotograph.com/ some 4 years ago. We talked via Skype chat. The above image was e-mailed to me from laurel, taken at a talk she did at Texas State called “Curating in and Around the Network” (photo by Barry Stone).

4/16/2010 ——————————————————————————-

laurelptak

11:04 AM

hihihi

david_horvitz 

11:04 AM 

hello!

laurelptak

11:04 AM

how are you???

david_horvitz

11:04 AM

I am good, just had some coffee.

How are you doing?

laurelptak

11:05 AM

me too, maybe too much

david_horvitz

11:05 AM

Yeah, me too.

laurelptak

11:07 AM

how is the library project going? 

http://drugstorebeetle.wordpress.com/

david_horvitz

11:08 AM

They are all sent out.

laurelptak

11:09 AM

how do you know when things are accepted?

david_horvitz

11:09 AM

I don’t really….

If they list it in Worldcat I do

laurelptak

11:09 AM

yeah

david_horvitz

11:09 AM

and sometimes I get a thank you for the gift letter

but that’s about it

laurelptak

11:10 AM

do you have thoughts on the idea of ‘the gift’?

david_horvitz

11:10 AM 

Yeah…

laurelptak

11:10 AM 

seems to be a reoccurring strain in your work 

or maybe ‘generosity’

is a better way to explain it about your practice 

?

david_horvitz

11:11 AM 

I’ve been thinking about the gift a lot, and the library project was an attempt to make an actual gift, instead of something being about a gift.

laurelptak

11:11 AM 

why is this an important strategy for you?

david_horvitz

11:12 AM 

In the case of the gift, it’s easy to say something is “about” it – but the gift has more potency when it is actually a gift. I used to make a lot of newsprint posters and give them away

and would think that was “a gift”

  but then it became a problem for me b/c it seemed to be more about easy access to mass production

and more about surplus

laurelptak

11:14 AM

since you use a lot of digital tools towards this end i wonder if network culture frames these ideas of production and generosity or if it is incidental to it?

david_horvitz

11:15 AM 

it def. does in the sense of production. and i am figuring out ways to incorporate generosity into it. like, the library project def. has generosity – but, lets say, the Kiosk project I did at Golden Parachutes in Berlin, 

http://www.goldenparachutes.net/?p=david_horvitz_bio

I gave away the digital files – but I don’t know if that is “generosity” – that is jut the nature of digital communication – files, copies, transfers, etc…. it is meant to distribute…

laurelptak

11:17 AM 

yeah, maybe digital communication seems to almost naturalize the possibility of generosity through cheap and global access, mass production etc?

and then we get to watch how hard corporations fight this will to generosity!

record industry, etc

david_horvitz

11:25 AM

Can I ask you some questions relating to the blog I made?

laurelptak

11:25 AM 

yes!

david_horvitz

11:25 AM 

I’m not sure where to start… 

It is about the “online-following”

laurelptak 

11:27 AM 

i have a lot of thoughts on this

since i’ve been running a blog everyday for almost 4 yrs now http://www.iheartphotograph.com

david_horvitz

11:28 AM 

yeah

laurelptak

11:28 AM 

i went into it rather naively, but have had to think a lot about this stuff along the way. most recently, i have been thinking some about having an online audience demand to relate to you almost as an institution when you are just one person, you don’t have all this infrastructure behind you or might not exactly be ready for or aware of the responsibility this entails

david_horvitz

11:34 AM

do you feel you have a responsibility to the audience?

laurelptak

11:34 AM

absolutely

but that idea came to me over time

david_horvitz

11:35 AM 

does this ever conflict with a responsibility to your own practice? and maybe to the artists you blog about?

laurelptak

11:35 AM

i think its important to explain that i started my blog as an entirely personal project. i really thought of it as my digital roladex. just a place to collect interesting things for myself. never imagined that anyone else would be looking/responding.

david_horvitz

11:36 AM 

so, you never really promoted it, it just kind of slowly spread….

laurelptak

11:39 AM 

well, i would say it spread rather quickly and without me consciously promoting it at all

i sent a link to literally 5 people maybe 

who i thought would be interested or i would value their feedback

and from there there were non stop emails and page-views to the site

but i NEVER realized i was working with a ‘public medium’ let’s say until it started happening that way

david_horvitz

11:40 AM 

and then at some point, instead of you sending it to others to ask for feedback – people began to look to you.

how did your thinking change?

laurelptak

11:41 AM 

yes, and a lot of them very quickly

at first it was really nice

it felt like people to engage with or start a dialogue, to share information and ideas in a generous way

but quickly it was too much to respond to

david_horvitz

11:42 AM 

yeah, it became a burden?

just one of you, and too many of them…  too many to have a one-to-one communication…

laurelptak

11:42 AM 

not a burden exactly, but i could never keep up with the demand for my attention and i felt guilty about that

it seemed like a contradiction, blogs were at that moment at least seen as valuable precisely b/c they represented the personal, the authentic, etc

but i couldn’t be personal to a global audience of many thousands of people in a meaningful way exactly

david_horvitz

11:44 AM 

yeah

laurelptak

11:44 AM 

i still haven’

t resolved how to “fix” this problem

david_horvitz

11:45 AM

have you ever thought of what you do as education?

laurelptak

11:45 AM

not exactly in those terms, but that is a good way to think of it maybe

david_horvitz

11:46 AM

or maybe even… a social responsibility – you have an audience, and you have the power to show them something interesting that they might not normally see.

sometimes I get emails from young people, and I feel I need to be a positive influence for them.

laurelptak

11:47 AM

well, i really became a curator to begin with b/c of my audience. it was never something i thought about professionally or tried to pursue at all. but i started to be asked to curate exhibitions because people who were looking at the blog liked what i did and started invited me to curate things ‘offline’. and many of the people who supported me in the beginning, who came out to see those shows etc were my audience, people who were paying attention to what i did online. so from the start I’

ve felt a huge connection and indebtedness to this audience.  

and i suppose the idea of social responsibility is part of the terrain for curators, so yes, i definitely think of it that way consciously now. i think blogging and curating have a lot in common generally speaking. i suppose i think blogging is curating. it’s about selecting and thus by default promoting certain ideas/artworks/etc. over others. trying to forge a discourse.

david_horvitz

11:50 AM

yeah

laurelptak

11:51 AM

one thing i’ve been considering about blogging is how the production and the reflection happen all at once

do you know what i mean?

david_horvitz

11:51 AM

can you explain that 

laurelptak

11:54 AM

well, i think this speaks to a larger shift, one that comes from the expectations of advanced capitalism in a global, digital, information-based economy. it’s the idea that the producer and the consumer are essentially now one in the same

david_horvitz

11:54 AM

yes

laurelptak

11:56 AM

and there are some startling things about what becomes required of us as digital laborers and how much responsibility we are willing to or forced to accept that i think forms like blogs are a perfect example of. also think of youtube. or designing your own sneakers at nike.com. 

david_horvitz

11:57 AM

crowd sourcing?

laurelptak

11:57 AM

totally

i think an interesting question is who exactly is making us feel this sense of responsibility to an audience?

david_horvitz

11:59 AM

yeah, i’ve never thought about it from that angle. 

Have you thought about that?

laurelptak

12:01 PM

no, it just kind of struck me now, i’ve been thinking about these ideas of immaterial labor more abstractly or theoretically so it’s a nice chance to talk to you about them more practically and how they relate to experience

david_horvitz

12:01 PM

What about a reciprocity in attention? If someone gives us their attention – that we should feel responsible to give something back.

laurelptak

12:04 PM

yes, that’s one layer, a sort of personal responsibility i would say. but it’s naïve to think about an audience’

s attention without also discussing other layers that have more to do with the way that capital functions (be it cultural or economic). think of the concept of ‘internet famous’ here. but also the economic imperative that is also latent in these forms, but also informing their creation. every time i log into blogger it asks me if i want to “monetize” (exact wording!) my blog by adding ads.

david_horvitz

12:05 PM

Where do you feel immaterial labor lies in your blog? Your blog as the labor for a larger structure? Or, also, something coming from below (your audience) that manifests into the blog? Though, how would labor of your audience inform your blog? 

did that make sense?

laurelptak

12:05 PM

i think so

david_horvitz

12:06 PM

(On a side-note – we can talk about next – have you ever been contacted by companies b/c of your blog? To do work for them?)

laurelptak

12:06 PM

i think there is a direct way in which the labor of my blog is related to the labor of my audience. just like i take the time to post work, they take the time to think about what i post and to send me their work or suggestions in return. 

(YES)

david_horvitz

12:08 PM

I see, and does this dialogue inform what you would post next? In a feedback sense? Or do you try to stay strictly on “your own” agenda? Though, what does “your own” even mean…..

laurelptak

12:09 PM

honestly it goes back and forth. there are phases when i really rely on my audience for content and time when i want to think more self-reflexively about contemporary photography as a discourse and how i might add to that with my choices, and during these time i tend to do more research

i used to really value feedback in terms of commenting in the beginning, but i’ve had to remove that feature over time b/c of the negative ways the audience used it which is interesting to me

david_horvitz

12:10 PM

Yeah, do you feel it is a way of navigating in between doing something for a large audience but also keeping some kind of integrity?

laurelptak

12:11 PM

yes, and my conclusion over time is that it’s really hard to have integrity AND a large audience 

i’d personally rather have the former

one thing i think a lot about is how many different people look to my blog for different reasons, agendas even sometimes

i feel most comfortable with artists and educators using it as a resources for themselves or their students, when it functions more strictly in the realm of a kind of gift economy

it gets much more complicated and conflicting to me when i think about how gallerists or collectors or companies that want to advertise there want to use it for instance. of course i want artists to be able to make a living from what they do. but I’d prefer to stay out of that side of things. the blog ultimately facilitates connections between people. but of course I can’

t control the nature of those communications, nor would I want to.

david_horvitz

12:14 PM

want to talk about instances where you’ve been contacted?

laurelptak

12:14 PM

sure

david_horvitz

12:14 PM

i have some interesting stories…

laurelptak

12:14 PM

let’s hear!

david_horvitz

12:15 PM

the most straight forward thing that has happened was someone – I can’t remember what they were – some kind of trend watching company or something – they straight up asked: “How do you spread your ideas? We want to know how it is that we found out about you? What you did to hit our radar…” Like I had a secret marketing trick.

I love pretending to go along in these conversations to get a free lunch out of it!

laurelptak

12:16 PM

ha, yes, i mostly just get annoyed

david_horvitz

12:16 PM

yeah

laurelptak

12:16 PM

it feels so at odds with what i see as the radical potentiality of things like blogging, i am interested in actual peer-to-peer communication, not the marketing re-appropriation of it.

david_horvitz

12:17 PM

have people asked you to help/join them? or mostly, to try to advertise on your blog?

laurelptak

12:17 PM

YES often

both of these kinds of requests you mentioned happen weekly if not daily

in many different forms

i get a lot of lazy people asking me to do their jobs for them

like people who work in a highly paid, commercial context like an advertising agency asking me to recommend artists or to remind them of the name of an artist I posted about previously

i just ignore and try to stay out of it

david_horvitz

12:18 PM

give them fake artist names

laurelptak

12:19 PM

hahah, great strategy! i might borrow that.

david_horvitz

12:18 PM

yeah

i once went into a meeting at MTV

laurelptak

12:18 PM

what was it like?

david_horvitz

12:19 PM

it was really interesting b/c they had no idea what they wanted from me…

laurelptak

12:19 PM

hmmm, yeah, cultural capital is like that…

david_horvitz

12:19 PM

they just knew they came across something i did, thought it was interesting, saw that other people liked it, but had no idea how to use it.

sadly, they didn’t give me a lunch at that meeting

laurelptak

12:20 PM

it interests me that ideas about taking or borrowing or stealing function differently in artistic circles than in commercial ones

david_horvitz

12:21 PM

can you explain this some more?

laurelptak

12:22 PM

well, i would imagine you have a similar conversation among friends, artists all the time in a way. but when you are having it with MTV it becomes something very different.

david_horvitz

12:22 PM

yes

laurelptak

12:22 PM

that difference is interesting to think about

where does it come from? 

b/c art is certainly an economic form too

david_horvitz

12:23 PM

exactly

laurelptak

12:23 PM

so the difference can’t sheerly be about $

something else is at work too 

what do you think that is?

david_horvitz

12:23 PM

i don’t know if i can say this?  a soul?

laurelptak

12:24 PM

haha

david_horvitz

12:24 PM

whatever that means?

laurelptak

12:24 PM

i might not have put it that way… 

interesting that art requires ‘integrity’

what does that even mean? 

how do these lines get drawn?

(just looking at the time and realizing i should go back to work. could we continue this tomorrow?? i’m really enjoying…hope you are too…)

maybe 1 tomorrow?

david_horvitz

12:26 PM

sounds good

see you then!

chat you then!

laurelptak

12:27 PM

cool 

byeybybbye

david_horvitz

12:28 PM

byeeee

4/17/2010 ——————————————————————————-

laurelptak

1:02 PM

hey hihihi

are you ready for round 2??

david_horvitz

1:03 PM

hello!

laurelptak

1:03 PM

okay

laurelptak

 1:28 PM

what’s the link again?

david_horvitz 

1:29 PM

http://virtualparticipation.wordpress.com/

laurelptak

 1:31 PM

  i’m reading what you’ve written there…

“What negative and positive aspects arise when artists make something in context of art, puts in online, and a following forms of non-art-context-people?”

I’ve thought plenty about this one

It’s strange b/c I started with the fantasy that this was the most desirable scenario for art, that it could be approachable, widely circulated.

But then I think it comes back to the idea of being responsible to your audience that we chatted a bit about yesterday.

I had to turn off commenting on my blog for instance b/c the people who weren’t engaged in the art context would say things about people’s artworks that i thought might be embarrassing if the artists saw.

That was a strange feeling.

I felt like I had failed to instruct my audience how meaningfully to interact with these kinds of images.

So of course they would just say things like “awesome sunset!” when they saw Penelope Umbrico’s work http://iheartphotograph.blogspot.com/2007/12/penelope-umbrico.html

Totally missing the point of the work itself. Or maybe I was looking at it all wrong?

Maybe artists would appreciate this kind of response too? I mean I suppose it depends on the artist.

But it really struck me that the audience felt a different kind of responsibility towards looking in an online context than they would in a museum for instance.

That interests me. 

One amazing thing about the blog for me is that almost daily I’ll get an email from a stranger that says something like “thank you so much for all the work you do” or “Looking at your blog inspires me” etc.

I’ve never had anyone thank me for a job I was paid to do!

Not on that mass and continual a basis anyways.

david_horvitz

1:41 PM

yeah, that is nice, that someone is learning or getting something out of it.

laurelptak

1:41 PM

Those emails make me understand what I’m doing as building a kind of community, though i think this sense of an internet community is a bit fractured.

david_horvitz

1:41 PM

Can you explain the fractured?

laurelptak

1:42 PM

Well, when I think of let’s call them ‘real world’ collective endeavors I think there is more a sense of mutual participation in forming and agreeing or even arguing over something collectively for one thing.

The members of my blog’s ‘community’ might engage with one another or might not.

Directly I mean.

And they never have to come to any collective decisions with one another.

I wonder sometimes about if/how that could happen more effectively online.

david_horvitz

1:44 PM

Let me try to articulate something.

I am going to reverse around this statement:  “What negative and positive aspects arise when artists make something in context of art, puts in online, and a following forms of non-art-context-people?”

Do you ever wonder about the status an artist may have when they do something in a more open creative online discourse?

Like, could there be a point, when the “artist” status doesn’t even matter?

Like for example, what is actually the difference between:

a) An artist doing something online (coming from an art background/context)

b) and then, say some random teenager who made something that went viral.

laurelptak

1:47 PM

I mean it’s pretty offensive to me that artists think the rules of their discourse should automatically extend beyond it

seems condescending i think

david_horvitz

1:48 PM

yes

laurelptak

1:48 PM

I get hung up on this problem a lot. It’s slippery terrain.

I mean it’s majorly important to me that art is inclusive and to some extent social but that is really hard to get right in practice!

I mean so that the power is actually equally distributed amongst all parties.

So that everyone has the same amount at stake.

I really think hard about those questions in almost every project I do.

Even if i don’t make that obvious or say it out loud.

I really struggle with those things when I develop a framework.

I’d be curious if this the same for you in your projects?

david_horvitz

1:51 PM

Sometimes I will hear about a project someone is going to do online, and I would be like, well, there’s hundreds of people already doing that online, and they don’t call themselves artists.

This reminds me of a studio visit I had with Cory Arcangel, where he said something like: It’s easy to get one step ahead of the art-world, but how do you get one-step ahead of that?

laurelptak

1:52 PM

Where would that place even be?

(i mean that more philosophically i guess)

david_horvitz

1:53 PM

That’s where all the trend-watchers want to be!

laurelptak

1:53 PM

But they are always two steps behind the art world!

They wait for artists to ‘innovate’

, they analyze that, and then they try and execute it for themselves.  

david_horvitz

1:54 PM

how do you stop that?

laurelptak

1:54 PM

and maybe instead of ‘analyze it’ i should say sell it to a client

david_horvitz

1:55 PM

maybe you can’t stop it.

laurelptak

1:55 PM

maybe we have to work harder to create new forms that are not so easily commodifiable

david_horvitz

1:55 PM

yeah

laurelptak

1:55 PM

i think your work tries to do that somewhat sincerely

david_horvitz

1:55 PM

make nothing. 

laurelptak

1:58 PM

i think a lot of what has been underpinning parts of our discussion come down to the fact that subversion of these systems seems rather hard contemporarily.

i think in some ways that’s why socially engaged art practices have sprung up so much recently, or we started to pay more attention to them anyway

they are an attempt to be contrarian

david_horvitz

1:59 PM

as a form of subversion?

laurelptak

1:59 PM

yeah

how does generosity become subverted by an ad agency for instance?

could it be?

david_horvitz

2:00 PM

Well…

In the sense of a new business model, of a model that is part gift part commerce.

That they learn they can give things away for free as a successful form of marketing.

laurelptak

2:01 PM

i see your point. maybe we have to work harder to find new strategies of opposition, like make our projects more sincerely dangerous? 

not just a rhetorical kind of dangerousness.

which is easily re-appropriated for the wrong reasons.

but then i’m thinking of the che guevara t-shirt. 

proof that that strategy might not work out either.

but part of the larger picture is maybe just how empty signification, representation has become. anything feels like it can be re-contextualized to so easily mean its polar opposite in contemporary life.

it’s a condition we’ve become accustomed to that might have had a kind of liberatory or radical potentiality at an earlier moment in time but now has been so absorbed into mainstream culture and more specifically capitalist culture in really excruciating ways.

postmodernism gone wrong. 

maybe we have to start to insist again on fixed meanings for some things.

david_horvitz

4/17/10 2:06 PM

What problems do you see in socially engaged art?

laurelptak

2:12 PM

Socially engaged art is something I am really struggling to formulate a position on for myself.

david_horvitz 

2:13 PM

Yeah, me too.

laurelptak

2:13 PM

It’s hard to generalize, because often the projects that fall under this heading can be quite different from one to the next. it’s important that we examine them in terms of their specificity i’

d say. but overall, in an intuitive sense these kinds of practices really feel right to me in a contemporary moment. and i have to wonder why?

i also feel its extremely important for us to critically engage with these kinds of practices. to examine what is really at stake in this kind of artwork? how does it function both in terms of the limits, conventions, and effectiveness of art practice but also in terms of the limits, conventions, and effectiveness of social practice? what kind of community does it seek to address and how does it position itself in relationship to this community? do all the players involved have an equal stake? how are the power and economic relations distributed? who decides how they are the way they are?

david_horvitz

2:13 PM

Yes

It’s easy for them to lose their criticality.

laurelptak

2:14 PM

well, i’

d say they have varying degrees of criticality to start with. and there is no one measure for criticality.

laurelptak

2:15 PM

for a long time now the going narrative about art seems to be something like: it is a semi-autonomous space that can present ‘other possibilities’ that don’t have to work in the ‘real world’ and that is why it is valuable.

That narrative can be hard for me to reconcile with many social engaged practices though

david_horvitz

2:16 PM

But for social practice, it is put into the real world, or, it uses the real world as its setting.

laurelptak

2:16 PM

but the art context it comes from can add some very problematic power constructions around it in my opinion.

or economic conditions. or sets of class relations.

maybe one parallel I could draw here comes from the discourse of criticism around photojournalism. similiar kinds of questions arise when ‘real life’ gets turned into a form of photographic representation. and isn’

t that, on some level what happens with these kinds of practices? the lines between what is actual (ie. social) and what is representational (ie. artistic) can be quite blurry.

…

david_horvitz

2:59 PM

Ok, my last thought.

laurelptak

2:59 PM

yeah

david_horvitz

2:59 PM

I think I must have been half asleep and on the verge of dreaming when I was pondering this last night, so maybe this is not interesting at all right now.

I was imagining going to the store to get something, and having to wait in line, or waiting in traffic to get to the store. Actually, I think it was more of a danger scenario, I imagined my movement to the store colliding with someone else’s movement, like a car accident.

And then I was like, “Wow, online, you don’t come into contact w/ the movement of others, I can never crash into someone else, even when they are going to the same place (site) as you”

laurelptak

3:00 PM

  for me this points to the fact that we shouldn’t assume virtual participation is identical to actual participation. one is not meant to replace the other, they exist more as two different but complimentary modes i think (elsewhwere i’ve attempted to reflect on this curatorially with the ‘in real life’

project http://www.letsmeetinreallife.com).

your dream gets back to the thing i was trying to articulate earlier though about the way community is configured online. i think i called it a ‘fractured sense of community’ but that’

s a bit clumsy, there must be a better way to describe it. everyone is there but you can feel that no one is or vice versa. maybe what we really need is an updated set of terms, concepts, and models to more fully describe, discuss, and understand this online sense of community.

ONLINE FOLLOWING

This is for the Virtual Participation panel at PSU’s Open Engagement conference. The conference asks the necessary question: can social practice art do more harm than good? My questions do not specifically look at social practice, but more broadly at artists who use the internet (which is inherently social), and how the terrain of audience is navigated. I will discuss this with a handful of people, and post what comes out of our conversations, which will be presented for the panel.

You may post your comments here, which may be selected to be presented at the conference in May.

This inquiry came from an announcement-list and tumblr that I maintained as a yearly project for 2009. I was e-mailing/posting short ideas (almost) everyday for the year. Most of these could be understood as “instructional art-works,” and came out of an “art thinking.” The tumblr, which initially served as  documentation of the announcement-list (I considered the list as the center of the project), began to take on a life of its own. The mailing list had roughly 1000 people subscribed, and the tumblr, constantly fluctuating, had around 4000. Because tumblr allows people to like and re-blog posts, it was easy to see what was most popular. I began to somewhat accurately predict what ideas would be more popular than others. A post regarding sadness or boredom would receive much more activity than a post that was more political. One time a viewer berated me in an email because one of the posts had angered him greatly (he then wrote “Fuck You” on a poster I had sent him earlier, and posted it on his blog).  This kind of feedback (which in the past may have remained, if not out-of-reach, at a distance) has become more visible and accessible – and not just in emails, but in comments, re-posts, links in Google Alerts, etc… What I want to focus on here is: how artists have navigated their practice with this new phenomena of the online-following – an entity that is actively present. And, a following who isn’t necessarily versed and positioned within the same discourse as the artist. As opposed to hanging something in a gallery, there are no physical walls online, and anyone can stumble into “the room.” I am not being critical of this aspect, this openness is something that should be embraced – but, I am asking, what problems can arise here?

Below is a list of thoughts and questions, which with the above text, a conversation can hopefully emerge:

• What negative and positive aspects arise when artists make something in context of art, puts in online, and a following forms of non-art-context-people?

• What are the negative and positive aspects of the immediate visibility and accessibility of knowing what people are thinking?

• Does the artist feel pressure to be popular and meet the demands of his/her growing audience? If so, can this reduce an integrity in one’s practice? Is it possible to intelligently work inside this?

• Could an online following stunt the development of a young artist’s practice if they were to receive too much attention too early?

• Is there a responsibility towards your online following?

• In the aforementioned example (when a viewer wrote “FUCK YOU” on a poster I had sent him in response to a post he didn’t like, and re-posted it on his blog), how does one understand and react to situations like this?

• There are companies and trend watcher groups who too become part of the audience. I’ve been contacted by some people in past regarding some of my projects. They were “interested” in me, and wanted to know more about what I did and how I did it. In a different, but similar situation: I once posted a photograph on flickr of a friend who had found himself in an American Apparel advertisement without his permission (they used a photo they found online). Though my post probably had no more than 20 hits at the time, my friend was contacted in days by the company regarding the issue (who will probably see this post too). How does this element play in all of this?
  

(images are culled from a Google image search for “audience”)