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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: CJronlund, Melissa, author. Title: Cxjntemporary art and digital culture / Melissa Gronlund. Description: New York : Routledgc, 2016. Identifiers: L C C N 20160261.^8 | I S B N 97811 .^8'«6.-^86 (hardback :

alk. paper) | I S B N 97811.189.%447 (pbk. : alk. paper) | I S B N 9781.^1.S676852 (e-book)

Subjects: LC^SH: Technology and the arts. | Arts and society. 1 Art and the Internet. | Digital media—Social aspects.

Classification: L C C N X 1 8 0 . T 4 G76 2016 | D D C 701/.0.1—dc23 L C record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20160261.38

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Challenges to immateriality 107

representation. I n contrast, net. art, as wel l as the tech industry even today, took novelty as profoundly different: it perceived its moment as a beginning.

Th i s sense o f optimism is key Net.art came about in the 1990s, alongside perestroika and the collapse o f the C o l d War. Manifestoes abounded, pro­claiming the new in the time-honoured manner o f the historical avant-garde: Haraway's cyborg manifesto (1983), V N S Matrix 's " A Cybermanifesto for the 21st Cen tu ry" (1991), and Alexe i Shulgin and Natahe Bookchin 's tongue-in-cheek "Introduction to net.art" manifesto (1997).^' A number o f important net. artists were from Russia and Eastern Europe, such as Lial ina , Shulgin, and V u k Cosic, and for them, net.art provided not only inexpensive channels o f c o m ­munication that had been previously unavailable but also a chance to exercise their own behefs in anti-commodity approaches to ar t-making against the Western art world. Feminists took advantage o f the internet as a tabula rasa: a territory free o f inherited power hierarchies. Various groups, gathered under the term cyberfeminism, worked to exploit the web's capacity for disembodi­ment and its lack o f gender constraints. (The term "cyberfeminism" is said to be coined both by the scholar Sadie Plant and the Australian collective V N S Matrix in the same year, 1991.) Part o f the cyberfeminist project was already retrospective: to re-write the history o f technologies to show women's crucial contribution, undoing the image o f technology as a masculine domain. Plant's influential study Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997), for instance, showed the historical importance o f women, such as Ada Lovelace, Anna Freud, and M a r y Shelley, to computing and suggested the very make-up of digital technology - coding - as feminine in or igin: the proto-binary system of punch cards was inspired by the Jacquard loom and practices o f weaving. (Notably this lineage for coding - the support structure the punch cards were held on - already challenges Claude Shannon's ideal o f immaterial information.)

Other cyberfeminists conceived o f identity as multiplicitous, drawing from Haraway's cyborg, third-wave feminism, and postmodernism, and sought to understand women and women's sexuality as polyvalenced.^ T h e y used the internet to create a field o f new forms o f pleasure and knowledge, where power and sexuality were stripped o f patriarchal norms. Mult imedia artworks ( C D -RDMs, video games, virtual reahty modules) stressed interaction vwth the user where he or she could experience this new reality. I n V N S Matrix 's video game All New Gen (1995), for example, "cybersluts", "guerrillas", and "anarcho cyber-terrorists" hack into the B i g Daddy Mainframe, the Oedipal embodiment of patriarchal technological power, to create a new wor ld order.

Net. artists' creation and inhabitation o f alternate communities o f hkeminded people was important both to their th inking and the work produced; they used platforms and mailing lists, such as ada'web, Eyebeam, Rhizome.org, and 7 - 1 1 , to promote and discuss works and jo ined "surfer clubs" to share internet folk art - the w i l d , terrible, and fascinating things on the web. These platforms are as much a part o f the net.art project as the artworks they supported. I n turn, the "mainstream" art world largely ignored them or didn't k n o w where to put them. Art exhibited on a screen was deemed not aesthetic enough. It was difficult to

108 Challenges to immateriality

Figure 3.2 V N S Matrix, still from All New Gen, 1992, interactive installation.

Courtesy V N S Matrix

sell or simply to see on a platform beyond a computer console. Some major insti­tutions considered ways to exhibit the work , such as the San Francisco Museum o f Modern A r t in its "010101 : A r t in Technological T i m e s " exhibition (2001) and the W h i t n e y w i t h its 2000 biennial, but these were exceptions.

Net. artists intervened directly in the fabric o f the wor ld and took advantage o f the internet to both initiate and exhibit their projects; whi le the "medium" was generally code, many o f the works were realised in the real world. A n d per­haps because o f mutual antipathy w i th art institutions, instead o f aiming after a gallery public, net.art often directly connected w i th the general pubHc. The pubhc and its relationship to distribution is later picked by Seth Pr ice in his text Dispersion (2002/2008) , where he posits the distributed tentacles o f the web as a more potent site for a public than the pubhc "plop art" sculptures that dot city sidewalks and squares. T h e internet allowed a number o f subcultures to come into contact w i t h each other, transforming what were individual unique interests into shared pastimes: this was one o f the projects o f the surfer clubs, where all the members shared the same aesthetic, w h i c h was reinforced by their interaction w i th and accumulation o f new examples.

"In this timely volume, Melissa Gronlund offers an expansive account of how art has responded to the proliferation of digital technologies in the twenty-first century. Providing much-needed historical contextualization for a wide array of present developments, Gronlund formulates an indispensable set of ideas, terms, and arguments in dialogue with key artistic practices. Essential rpariinn for anvnnp who narp.q about art after the internet."

Erika Balsom, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts, King's College London, UK

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet's promises of democratisation.

An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art - especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory - as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education.

Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007-2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.

ART

Cover image: © Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

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