Memento Mori in American Express Black Ink

American Express Publishing Corporation "produces authoritative lifestyle content that empowers affluent, primed consumers – and the businesses that serve them – to make informed decisions".

American Express Publishing Corporation is the publisher of Black Ink - the art of extraordinary living.

Published quarterly, Black Ink is exclusively for American Express Centurion® members. The notorious Black Card and by extension Black Ink is available by invitation only to the highest echelon of American Express cardholders. Each issue of Black Ink focuses on a single topic, such as the worlds best restaurants, and explores it in a way that is relevant and beneficial to the lifestyle of the discriminating, ultra-high-net-worth individual. Black Ink advertisers constitute an elite group of the worlds most respected, super-premium product and services.

The Fall/Winter 2011 issue is The Art Issue and it features an article titled "The Rise of Internet Art". Here are the first few lines of the article.

In 2009, a private collector and San Francisco entrepreneur named Tho Armour acquired a piece of Internet art called Memento Mori. Here's what Armour received: a contract stating that the website's URL was now his property and a lovely Japanese cast-iron box containing a flash drive that held the site's source code, the string of unique demands that functions as a website's DNA. Like most Internet art Memento Mori is created and displayed on a computer. These works are not reproductions of tangible paintings merely shown online. Instead, according to collectors like Armour, this is art that takes full of advantage of and is, in fact, made possible by the Internet...

Needless to say I was very pleased to receive a copy of the magazine that American Express publishing sent to me. As of this writing, I do not yet have permission to display the whole article. I am looking into how I can do this.

My first reaction is that the author, Ben Austin, does a very nice job of combining my enthusiasm and optimism regarding Internet art with reporting on all the issues that surround the actual production of Internet art by everyday artists – including managing intellectual property rights, convincing collectors that this really is an art form, and locating galleries that understand how to educate clients as to this new media.

All in all, a very nice read – and I hope to be able to let you all read the entire article very soon.

Kal Spelletich At The Art Technology and Culture Colloquium

Kal Spelletich is a San Francisco artist who "explores the boundaries between fear, control and exhilaration by giving his audience members the opportunity to operate and control some fascinating and frequently downright dangerous machinery."

The following are some random/disjointed notes I started writing while attending the Art Technology and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley with Kal Spelletich as guest speaker on Monday October 10, 2011.

Collecting the Uncollectable

Tomorrow I will be on a panel the Catharine Clark Gallery to talk about my role in acquiring Ken Goldberg's Memento Mori. You can read all the details in this press release.

An Organization to Support Collectors

Portion of image on "Imaginary Museum Projects" by Tjebbe van Tijen

Here is the question of the day: If an organization is set up to help promote and promulgate Internet Art, what should that organization be chartered to do? That was the question at a lunch with the kind lady I had met last Thursday and her husband,also very kind (see previous post).
It's not an easy question to answer. You can't just throw money up in the air and expect it to rain art. So where does one start?

First off, let's look at the different sorts of collectors. I see three broad groupings of Internet Art collectors:

I Left My 'Art in San Francisco

Last night I attended a reception relating to SFMOMA. I don't want to be precise about the details because I've not asked  the people involved for permission to do so. What I do want to record is my excitement and thrill regarding several of the dialogs that took place during this reception regarding Internet Art.

My feeling is that Internet art -  just like so many other things that relate to the Internet - will be launched, bloom and prosper somewhere around San Francisco and the Bay Area. It logically follows that the progenitors of such an art movement would be in the same age group as are all the current flock of Internet titans and techies.  Thus the people I have been interested in talking to have been roughly 24 to 36 years old.

Yes, We Can - Blog Again

It's time to start posting to AotN again. It's been over six months since I finished the two courses on new media  taught by Dr Christiane Paul at UC Berkeley, yet I have been incapable of producing a new post. The whole point of taking the courses was to help me write better posts.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 3

June 3 was the last day of the Berkeley Big Bang and a celebration of forty years of Leonardo.

Introduction: 40 Years of Leonardo

Stephen Wilson kicked off the event with refections on the 40 years of Leonardo - the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. He wondered “How will the Journal survive?” given the mounting language and production issues.

He then presented a review of computers and art thirty years ago (the time he joined Leonardo and today. I can quibble with facts. He twice mentioned Wired magazine when I believe he intended to say Byte magazine. He talks about the lack of art in the computer field in 1979, yet Melvin Prueitt’s books on computer graphics had already entered their Dover reprints stage of life by 1974. But I cannot dispute his conclusions: the world of art and computers has grown from a smaller and lonelier place to a huge place that nonetheless has issues such as still being marginalized.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2

The reason you go to an event like BBB is to listen to highly educated people expound in a highly intelligent manner. You hope, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, that you will understand what they say and, fidgeting with talisman, that they share ideas that are thrilling. With those thoughts in mind let’s double-click on Berkeley Big Bang: Day 2.

Berkeley Big Bang: Day 1

Today was the first day of a three day “Berkeley Big Bang” event at the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). There were two events and each was quite special. The first was Lynn Hershman Leeson: Virtually Everything, Virtually at the PFA cinema. This was an eight hour marathon showing 16 Hershman films dating from 1977 to 1994. The first three hours (which I watched) provided a glimpse as to why she has attained the stature she has as a filmmaker and as an artist and as, well, an impresario of wonderment.

Up to now my contact with her work had been through her project in Second Life: Life to the Second Power: Animating the Archive in which one of her collaborators is my friend Henrik Bennetson of the Stanford Humanities Lab. So I was delighted to see that Ms Hershman appeared on the screen as RobertaWare, her Second Life Avatar, and gave us a tour of the Dante Hotel while the speaker, Steve Seid, introduced the program.

Web Artist: Ken Goldberg

Ken Goldberg is an artist. Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering.

So what defines who is an “artist”? What enables a professor at a major university have an alter ego that can encompass whimsy, caprice and felicity? Do his two sides have an irrational connection or a rational disconnection?

Many facets of Ken’s development and output are reported in a 2005 biographical article from the East Bay Express. But there’s more and new data waiting to be explored. In 2008 I hope to be in contact with Ken via a project or two. While doing so I hope to research and report back to you at a later date what Ken is looking into these days and where he is setting his sights.