Category: University of Oregon

Excerpts from the Art in America article “The Perils of Post-Internet Art,” by Brian Droitcour:

Most people I know think “Post-Internet” is embarrassing to say out loud. But so is most of the language that’s used to write about contemporary art, and “Post-Internet” does the job of artspeak so efficiently that people keep saying it, embarrassment be damned. The “Post-” part conjures an aura of historical significance, the mantle of the avant-garde; “Internet” supplies social relevance. Together they lacquer art with an intellectual finish as thin as it is opaque.

The term has recently appeared in a variety of far-flung contexts: a talk at Frieze Art Fair, a forum at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a panel at the College Art Association conference. Unlike “Neo-Expressionism” or “Neo-Geo,” “Post-Internet” avoids anything resembling a formal description of the work it refers to, alluding only to a hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the context of digital technology.

Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what “Post-Internet” means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision. “I know it when I see it”—like porn, right? It’s not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex—renders it lurid. The definition I’d like to propose underscores this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as art. Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery’s purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.

…Post-Internet art is in love with advertising, like a lot of art since Warhol, but it’s the obsession with art-world power systems—as represented by the installation shot—that irks me the most about it. After a century that has witnessed art in newspapers, art on the radio, art in the mail, art on television and art on the Internet, here’s a self-styled avant-garde that’s all about putting art back in the rarefied space of the gallery, even as it purports to offer profound insights about how a vast, non-hierarchical communications network is altering our lives.

**To learn more about Post-Internet art read Brian Droitcour’s full article on Art in America at: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/

The Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures is now accepting applications for its week-long summer school. The Lüneburg Summer School provides advanced training in the study of media, their theory, aesthetics and history.

This year’s topic, “Challenging Methods”, reacts to the demands for a discussion of methods that recently have become prevalent in the context of media studies. Historically and institutionally, this field of research originated when scholars from a variety of fields started to confront their disciplines and specifically their methodologies with the questions of media epistemology. From those investigations of the hitherto overlooked media-­‐theoretical presumptions and media practices of their original fields, a discourse emerged that was labeled media studies – “Medienwissenschaften”.

Article from Art in America, by Sarah Hromack and Rob Giampietro
ROB GIAMPIETRO is principal at Project Projects, a design studio in New York.
SARAH HROMACK is director of digital media at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Two experts assess the impact of digital media and new design on today’s cultural institutions:

“It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via Web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? The promises and pitfalls of new technologies are forcing museums to rebalance their traditional mandates to care for a collection of physical objects while enabling scholarship and providing the wider public an opportunity to engage with works of art. “—R.G. and S.H.

In his 1955 book Designing for People, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss was one of the first to write of designing a “man-machine interface”—in that case, a more accessible cockpit for pilots in WWII. By applying techniques from the emerging fields of ergonomics and information theory, Dreyfuss and his team aimed to integrate controls, seating and instrumentation in order to close the gap between a pilot and his aircraft. Like the full-room scale of the first mainframe computers, the cockpit subsumed its human operator—it was an interface that was also an environment, operating at the scale of architecture.

In the same book, Dreyfuss turns his attention from the hard lessons of war to the soft power of culture, evoking another bit of architecture that might be reshaped by the new logic of the interface: the museum.

“A half-hour’s tour through a museum with a TV camera,” he wrote, “can bring to life a wealth of art and knowledge that could otherwise not be seen in months.”1

Once again Dreyfuss was aiming to close a gap, to give people immediate access to all the world’s artwork. Paradoxically, his scheme for facilitating this immediacy required the mediating device of broadcast television.

To read the full conversation between Sarah Hromack and Rob Giampietro, click here to see the full article over at Art in America.

• October 27, 2014: Bodies

  Discussion featuring Alondra Nelson and Jessie Daniels with Lisa Nakamura and Sidonie Smith.
  Office Hour Discussion led by: T.L. Cowan
  Date/Time: Mon Oct. 27 7­8pm ET
  Readings:

  1. Aldonra Nelson. “The Social Life of DNA.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 29 Aug. 2010. http://chronicle.com/article/The­Social­Life­of­DNA/124138/
  2. Jessie Daniels. “Web 2.0, Healthcare Policy and Community Health Activism.” Policy and Politics for Nurses and Other Health Professionals. Eds. Donna M. Nikitas, et. al. Sudbury MA: Jones and Bartlett (2011):
     277­285. https://www.academia.edu/6820282/Case_Study_Web_2.0_Healthcare_Policy_and_Co mmunity_Health_Activism

• October 28, 2014: Making Bodies
  Discussion with Skawennati and Heather Cassils moderated by T.L. Cowan.
  Office Hour Discussion led by: T.L. Cowan and K. Surkan
  Date/Time: Tuesday Oct. 28 3­4pm ET
  Readings:

• October 29, 2014: Bodies 2013 at Illinois
  Discussion featuring Dorothy Roberts and Karen Flynn moderated by Sharon Irish.
  Office Hour Discussion led by: Sharon Irish
  Date/Time: Wed. Oct 29, 4­5pm EST
  Readings:

  Excerpts from Frankenstein, esp. chs. 5, 11, 12, 16, 24
  http://www.literature.org/authors/shelley­mary/frankenstein/index.html
  on Bluejeans or Google hang­out

Bryce Peake (PhD Candidate, Media Studies):

“I received one of UO’s inaugural Julie and Rocky Dixon Awards in Graduate Innovation. As part of the award, I will spend next year at Intel as a technology research scientist working on a few projects. My research charts a socially conscious pathway for wearable technology innovation by grounding the development of wearables in the postcolonial histories and sociotechnical lives of deaf prostheses. The NMCC was crucial to making this happen, and it is because of the great courses I took through the certificate that I was able to connect my research with the innovation work Intel was doing. So, kudos to the certificate program!”

Kudos right back at you, Bryce!

Bryce Peake is a Julie and Rocky Dixon Doctoral Fellow in Graduate Innovation at Intel Labs, and a PhD Candidate in Media Studies in the School of Journalism & Communication. His research draws on science and technology studies, feminist standpoint theory, and historical anthropology to explore the somatic technopolitics of gender and media imperialism.

To learn more about Bryce, and what he has been up to with the aid of the Julie and Rocky Dixon Award, check out the Dixon Spotlight for more information.