PREFACE:
This post was written in response to Brad Troemel’s essay : From Clubs to Affinity: The Decentralization of Art on the Internet. It was intended to be posted in the comments section of the original essay however it experienced problems when submitted and was not able to be posted.
This essay (From Clubs to Affinity), although eventually providing a rather Utopian idea of “an environment worth aspiring to” unnecessarily demonizes surf clubs while championing platforms and distribution structures which perpetuate the same hierarchical problems that are attacked. It also seems to heavily rely on the subjective (and selective) interpretation of historical events in order to push an overly dramatized narrative convenient to the authors agenda.
In the first section of the essay the idea of virtual avatars and their usage throughout the 90’s to create ‘truer’ selves are idolized. For the most part the analysis of their intentions seems accurate (besides ®TMark who wasn’t expressing a truer self but rather co-opting the mask of incorporation in order to both critique it and use it for their own subversive practice). The latter half of this section details the ‘capitalist’ takeover of the Internet complete with its ‘mandated’ use of birth identity as avatar. The description of this web 2.0 takeover and mass reverse exodus of artists to their ‘inherited identities’ is greatly exaggerated. Certainly on a larger scale web 2.0 exploited egoist desires of recognition and the ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ syndrome; but this hardly excludes people from creating work under virtual avatars. If anything it makes the use of a virtual avatar more poignant and it challenges the idea ofanonymity for anonymity’s sake (though clearly these weren’t the intentions of web 2.0 companies).
The 90’s artists which are referenced have specific reasons for creating virtual identities, aside from simply being provided the opportunity (not to mention the multitudes of artists making work under their ‘inherited identities’ (Bunting, Shulgin,Cosic etc). The current conditions of the Internet force users and artists to be more thoughtful in crafting a virtual self and even give them the possibility of using their ‘inherited identity’ as vehicle for performance (best exemplified by Parker Ito). The web 2.0 platform referenced frequently in the essay, Tumblr, is a great example of the continued existence of virtual avatars (and the poor use of them). Many users of Tumblr choose to create anonymous blogs and obscure domains rather than ascribe them to their name. If anything I find this practice frustrating as it lends itself to a sea of indistinguishable Tumblrs, which present similar CSS themes, marginal content and overall poorly constructed online identities. Dump.fm is an instance of a web 2.0 community that although host to these same pitfalls, more successfully continues the idealized tradition of the virtual identity (a specific example of this would be Dump.fm user Noisia).
Somewhere in the middle of the first section the essay skips from artists creating avatars in the mid 90’s far into the future of web 2.0 ignoring a number of integral events to the distribution of work and the creation of communities amongst net artists; the most important of which are e-mail lists and forums. Lists like Nettime and 7-11 were fundamental to the distribution of work and the overall shaping of communities around a burgeoning art practice. There is also no mention of BBS, forums or message boards specifically The THING, which is clearly a technological and conceptual precursor to the modern promotional blog described as one of the concentric circles in the web 2.0 ‘rhizome’ network. These are worth noting because they experienced many of the same exclusivity problems (mostly in moderating content) that the essay ascribes to surf clubs.
In part two of the essay surf clubs are characterized as bourgeois organizations for self-organizing and in the process excluding other artists from participating. This seems like an absurd exaggeration of the intentions of the participants. The Lonergan interview which is referenced seems to justify the idea that the clubs were initially haphazard collectives of like-minded individuals whose only real qualification was happening to know one and other (as was the case of many early net art e-mail lists).
At the conclusion of the chronicling of surf clubs the essay seems to have reduced them from a unique group of creatives publishing collectively into a calculated ploy to become THE INSTITUTION (in a nasty capitalist way). This gives a springboard to hail Tumblr and other blogging platforms as breaking the oppressive chains of the surf clubs. This is absurd. The minimal shift in platform from a Wordpress (surf clubs) to a Tumblr (web 2.0 decentralized artists) most importantly did not replace or make obsolete the collective site or format of the surf club. Joint Tumblrs and collectivecuratorial exercises perpetuate the hierarchy that the surf clubs ‘created’ unintentionally. These types of Tumblrs similar to surf clubs are exclusive and have received institutional recognition (which to be clear I find acceptable, exclusivity doesn’t bother me all that much). The essay assumes that by giving everyone a Tumblr that they will each carry the same clout and the democratic process of peer 2 peer social interactions (likes and reblogs) will determine the success of work. The downside of this platform is describe as users that become “hollow shells waiting for Facebook comments, Tumblr reblogs, and promotional Tweets to provide the substance of [their] being” which hypocritically seems to epitomize the type of elitism mistakenly ascribed to surf clubs.
Eventually what I find problematic is not the reliance on likes and reblogs, or even the described “network artists [who] make no attempt to specify the point of comparison between their own work and the work of another.” But rather that the idealized concentric circles (promotional blogs) become the same exclusive clubs presented elsewhere (a mini high school version based on popularity and social networks). In essence Tumblr doesn’t solve the problem of exclusivity, at best it provides a simple platform, which helps highlight the dormant ‘rhizome’ of users, and at worst just creates volumes more of marginal content to sort through while perpetuating existing hierarchies.
Lastly I take issue with the assumption that somehow the distribution of Internet art was at any point in its history ‘centralized’. Throughout the 90’s distribution and production was clearly fragmented as represented by the global network of artists, e-mail lists and famous traveling conferences which many artists flocked to like a pilgrimage to finally get f2f meetings with their peers. A certain amount of 90’s fragmentation can also be attributed to the technological infancy of publishing platforms, either you could code a site or you couldn’t. Certainly surf clubs were more consolidated platforms for publishing and distribution (made possible by web 2.0 software) but the essay highly overestimates their status by assuming that they had somehow ‘centralized’ the distribution of Internet art. Not only were active participants of surf clubs self-distributing work on alternative platforms (their own sites, Beige,Tom Moody, etc.) but emerging artists were creating their own platforms and networks for distribution, which the essay seems to relegate to the minor-minor leagues (to quote a previous essay).The historical narrative you portray: 90’s utopia disrupted by a web 2.0 capitalist regime, which paved the way for a group of elitist artists seeking institutional recognition via surf clubs, and which was finally brought down by the populist Tumblr using Internet artist, is in the end simply inaccurate, and overly dramatized.
In conclusion I think the best response is summed up in an image (shown below)created anonymously on meme generator in response to Troemel’s piece The Internet Artist.
