Networked Art And Culture
The year 2000 marked a watershed moment in the Cornell Library’s commitment to alternative forms of multimedia discourse, as produced on and for the internet. The Library designed and produced three issues of the net.art journal, CTHEORY Multimedia, under the curatorial leadership of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (University of Victoria) and Cornell Professor Timothy Murray. The Library’s commitment to preserve the journal’s design and artworks provided the artistic vision for the Goldsen Archive. Since then, Goldsen has provided the international impetus and leadership for novel strategies for the exhibition and preservation of networked artworks. Timothy Murray has provided the vision and assistance for the off-line preservation of artwork files from the exhibition INFOS 2000 (Slovenia), the collection Computerfinearts.com (Israel), and Turbulence.org (USA). The result is Goldsen’s preservation of the largest collection of internet art in one physical site, as well as the Archive’s commitment to furthering the development of experimental platforms of internet culture and discourse. The Archive hosts the homepage of the curatorial team of the new media listserv, -empyre- a soft-skinned space, and has provided a supportive venue for incubating theoretical projects of networked art from Australia, France, Canada, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
Nancy Nisbet, Exchange 2006: A Performance of Technology-Tracked Free Trade, brochure. USA, 2006. Gift of the artist.
The Exchange project used cultural resistance to unsettle questionable relationships between international politics, technological surveillance, and identity construction. Challenging the politics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and identity construction based on collections of economic and surveillance data, the artist loaded her personal belongings onto a commercial transport truck and drove across Canada and the United States, including visits to the Goldsen Archive and Johnson Museum of Art in July, 2006. Wherever she stopped, she traded her belongings with the people she met. Each of the items was conspicuously tagged with a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip to provoke thoughtful and informed questioning of the limits and liabilities of this technology. Individuals participating in Exchange were asked to trade an item of their own and to tell a personal story relating to that item. The stories were recorded, and the RFID tags enabled people to scan items and listen to these stories.
Maurice Benayoun, The-dump: 207 hypotheses for committing art, book. FYP éditions, France, 2010. Private collection.
The Dump (http://www.the-dump.net) is a blog of unfinished art objects offered to the public for inspiration and open source completion. In 2008 Maurice Benayoun submitted The Dump as a doctorate thesis entitled: Artistic Intentions at Work, Hypothesis for Committing Art, directed by Professor Anne-Marie Duguet at the Université Paris 1, la Sorbonne.
INFOS 2000, distributed in M’ars: Magazine of the Museum of Modern Art: Ljubljana 13:1-2, print publication and CD-ROM. Slovenia, 2001.
Curated by Timothy Murray and Teo Spiller, an exhibition of international net.art works submitted and presented “off-line” as an open source CD-ROM. The CD-ROM was distributed for free at the Slovenian INFOS 2000 technology fair and for free in the art magazine, M’ars, and mailed to international art centers lacking high speed internet connections.
Turbulence.org, Hard Drive, hard drive and cord. USA, 2014. Turbulence.org Collection.
Co-directed by Helen Thorington and Jo-anne Green, Turbulence has been commissioning and supporting net/web/hybrid art since 1996. Known as one of the “premiere web sites for net art,” Turbulence.org has commissioned over 230 original net/web/hybrid art works and hosted over 20 real-time, multi-location performances. As networking technologies have developed wireless capabilities and become mobile, Turbulence.org has remained at the forefront of the field, supporting art works created with hybrid technologies, such as Locative Media and Augmented Reality (AR). With the support of three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Turbulence has donated 140 works for off-line preservation to the Goldsen Archive. The preservation project includes detailed artist questionnaires regarding the data and software of each piece. See http://turbulence.org/preservationists/.
Computerfinearts.com collection, DVD. USA, 1997-2007.
Computerfinearts.com is an extensive collection of internet art by 98 artists, managed and maintained online by Doron Golan. In 2007, Goldsen collaborated with Golan to mirror the site on the Goldsen website and to provide off-line archival preservation of this collection, which is available for consultation in the Kroch Library.
Various authors, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space. NAi Publishers, Netherlands, 2008.
etoy, Mission Eternity Project T-shirt produced for the Goldsen Archive with its Capsule Identification Number, two Mission dollars, and etoy statement. Switzerland, 2013.
Between 2005 and 2011 the MISSION ETERNITY GROUND-CREW collected, scanned and processed data (official documents, personal photographs, interviews, voice samples, job related data and lots of other material). In hundreds of hours of research, many live sessions with Sepp Keiser and post production, etoy studied the nature and architecture of the info-sphere generated by the TEST PILOT during his life. Results: a M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULE (a digital file of ca. 1 gigabyte) and a contract between the PILOT and etoy.CORPORATION that regulates the transfer and integration of the PILOT's mortal remains into the MISSION ETERNITY SARCOPHAGUS. As soon as the M∞ PILOT contact is submitted, the M∞ CAPSULE ID is generated automatically: a unique 16 character alphanumeric code identifies each PILOT and his/her data.
CTHEORY Multimedia.
CTHEORY Multimedia is an online journal of net.art curated by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (University of Calgary) and Timothy Murray, Curator of the Goldsen Archive. Conceptual editions of net art and digital architechtonics address and reflect on global themes of critical imperative to the digital age. Between 2000-2002, the Cornell University Library Electronic Publishing Program designed and published three volumes of the experimental networked journal: Tech Flesh: The Promise and Perils of the Human Genome project; Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia; NetNoise. Each volume contains 12-15 works of net.art by international artists and is archived by the Goldsen Archive on the CTHEORY Multimedia site for further consultation and interface.
-empyre- a soft-skinned space.
-empyre- is a global community of new media artists, curators, theorists, producers, and others who participate in monthly thematic discussions via an e-mail listserv.-empyre- facilitates online discussion encouraging critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media. The list is currently co-managed by Renate Ferro (USA) and Tim Murray (USA) with the moderating team of Simon Biggs (UK), and Patrick Lichty (USA). Melinda Rackham (AU) initiated -empyre- as part of her doctoral research in 2002.