Performing the web: negotiating affect and online aesthetics

Studies in Visual Arts and Communication, 2016

Digital art activities (commonly known as net art) refer to a wide range of works that are computerbased art, accessed freely online, created by artists using web browsers, developer codes, scripts, search engines, applications, and various other online tools. Net art blurs the boundaries between art, design, political activism, and communication and raises questions about the authorship and translocality of art. Its relationship with the art world has been unclear as much as its nature as an avant-garde art movement.

2017

The complexities of post-modernity tend to dissolve any facile model of direct cause-and-effect in politics, and yet as a democratic polity, we look for the comfort in knowing that political expression can enact change. Protest art, or acts of creative expression intended to resist dominant powers, forces, and structures, models the potential for political expression to create change that is not immediate, direct, or obvious, but rather "moves the social" through expressivity and aesthetics. While these features lend themselves to an analysis guided by affect theory, this sub-discipline within communication studies has tended to lack the methodological specificity to reproduce or expand applications. Daniel Stern's vitality pentad acts as a heuristic by which to study rhetorical objects; these objects are studied due to their expressivity, rather than their appeal to reason. Stern excludes "still" media forms such as photographs and illustrations; however, by looking at the way in which digital artifacts are imbued with movement in its networked path, we can understand that all digital media are time-based. The objects of study speak to the temporal, vital dimensions of digital protest art: Turkey's Vandalina art collective, which places protest stickers on transit cars, demonstrates how force and scale engender feeling of intimacy in public spaces. Iran's Zahra's Paradise, a webcomic-turned-graphic novel, offers differing temporal environments for the reader and weaves its aesthetics into the narrative to create a sense of space and place. Finally, the images of #HandsUpDontShoot, through their directional iii pull across digital networks, illustrates social media's tendency to remix aesthetic features of older media forms. Major insights drawn from this research speak to the political importance of subject formationor interventions thereinand vitality forms as a method for rhetorical criticism, which allows the rhetorical critic to be more specific and methodical in applying affect theory to rhetoric. It also challenges the positivist notion that political expression must result in measurable change in order to be validated. Finally, this project addresses the virtual potentiality of digital data and offers a perspective that sees all digital media as time-based. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to Dr. Darrin Hicks, who not only directed this dissertation, giving me invaluable (and sometimes cringe-inducing) revisions that infinitely improved this project, but also acted as a sounding board, friend, and a pretty good tenant. Additional thanks must be given to Dr. Christina Foust for seeing promise in my research and for helping me navigate the dissertation process, the world of academia, and life in general. I am indebted to your mentorship. Thanks to my dissertation committee, including Dr. Joshua Hanan, Dr. Kate Willink, and Dr. Trace Reddell, all of whom saw the import and promise of this dissertation. Thank you to Dr. Armond Towns, who suggested that the case study of #HandsUpDontShoot be expanded to focus on the aesthetic parallels to anti-lynching photography, thus immensely improving that chapter. I am grateful to Dr. Justin Eckstein, who stuck his neck out for me on multiple occasions, which opened up many doors for me. Thanks also for your support and encouragement. Thank you to Dr. Lindsey Thomas, who reviewed Chapter Four and helped with the additionally tedious task of formatting for submission. Thanks to my parents for believing in me and encouraging me to pursue two terminal degrees and not judging me for the pay cut that came with that. Thanks to Eric and Keith, who show me that families don't have to fit into a mold to be loving and full. Finally, all of my love and gratitude to Woody Hoyt for making it all work with 1.5 incomes for three years, for doing basically all of the household chores for a year, for moving with me, and for encouraging, supporting, and loving me even when I was cranky and sleep-deprived. I couldn't have done this without you. TABLE OF CONTENTS .

2006

The cultural convergence of art, science, and technology provides ample opportunity for artists to challenge the very notion of how art is produced and to call into question its subject matter and its function in society. The mission of the Leonardo book series, published by The MIT Press, is to publish texts by artists, scientists, researchers, and scholars that present innovative discourse on the convergence of art, science, and technology. Envisioned as a catalyst for enterprise, research, and creative and scholarly experimentation, the book series enables diverse intellectual communities to explore common grounds of expertise. The Leonardo book series provides a context for the discussion of contemporary practice, ideas, and frameworks in this rapidly evolving arena where art and science connect. To find more information about Leonardo/ISAST and to order our publications, go to Leonardo Online at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/ Leonardo/isast/leobooks.html> or send e-mail to <leonardobooks.mitpress .mit.edu>.

2020

The call will remain open until August, 24th, 2020. About the event Redes Digitais e Culturas Ativistas [Digital Networks and Activist Cultures] is an event organized by the Postgraduate Program in Languages, Media, and Arts (LIMIAR) at PUC-Campinas. Its first edition was held in June 2016. The event collaborates with the dialog between programs of the university itself and other participants, receiving papers from researchers from all over Brazil and also from abroad. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this event seeks to promote a plural debate among participants, to create opportunities that bring together different areas of political, cultural and media knowing/doing. 4 th Meeting's Theme: Boundaries between languages, media, and art Amid contemporary identity processes, contact spaces of different powerful languages and places are revealed, which are fueled by the inconstancy of movement and the need of change. In the 4 th RDCA [acronym for Redes Digitais e Culturas Ativistas], the "boundary" represents the element that opens up to the (de)structuring transformations. Despite the political, cultural, and social turmoil of the contemporary world, there may be a force in neighboring spaces to proliferate the creation of new ways of being and living. It is in the contact between cultures, poetics, media, images, bodies, spaces, technologies, and networks, and the interdisciplinarity generated by these contacts that we aim to centralize the debates of the discussions of this Meeting.

In the essay "The Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism," I discuss two forms of on-line resistance as executed through two artist projects that use the networked database structure as a tool for social contestation. First, TO INFORM: Brooke Singer exposes her own electronic data to enlighten a general public of one's freely available data. Second, TO SUBVERT: iSEE, a collaborative project between the Institute for Applied Autonomy and the Surveillance Camera Players makes use of the database structure to subvert the monitoring of the public sphere. An excerpt from the essay's introduction states that: If we accept Walter Benjamin's statement that property and possession belong to the tactical sphere, the computer age in conjunction with our networked reality have introduced a new tactical sphere - - the marketplace of information. At the heart of this sphere is the database, the warehouse of information. Each public sphere is part of a civil domain that is governed by a set of laws and policies. Therefore, just as any civil, public space, the Internet must have its own set of policies that mirror those of our physical space. Amongst the on-line policies and regulations currently being established are decisions pertaining to appropriate policing and monitoring of cyber space, and determining the boundaries of privacy in a networked society. The questions surrounding on-line privacy are complex and encompass a wide number of issues such as ownership, which in itself introduces a chain of other questions. It is impossible to present an answer to these involved questions as they will continue to arise. However, I do contend that unless non-governing independent groups protect the Internet as a space for independent production, dissemination and open discourse, the radical potential of the Internet will be consumed, largely through its very nature. Therefore, if there exists today an artist avant-garde, looking to merge art with daily social life, it is the growing number of socially active artist engaged in cyber resistance as a critical practice in which the network and the database represent tools for engagement.

Information, Communication & Society

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today edited by Eva Respini, 2018

The essay critiques the term Post-internet art as capacious reference to the ways that experiential, multisensory installations treat images as inherently variable and reproducible, and—in the most benign cases—as mutable works, equally at home in the space of the museum or on a webpage. In contrast, however, this essay argues that Barry, Birnbaum, Hershman Leeson, Scher’s and other post-internet art antecedents introduced in the 1990s suggest new affinities with what can be thought of as other perceptual systems and subjectivities. In doing so, their multimodal and multiplatform artworks offer a feminist methodology for contemporary art history that contests and re-inscribes existing modernist predecessors.

CongressCATH 2005 Ethics and Politics of Virtuality and Indexicality, National Museum of Photography, Bradford, 2005

It has been suggested by numerous scholars that humanity is currently involved in a period of intensive change, some arguing that the scale and scope of historical transformation over the last thirty years is without precedent (Webster 2000). However, the dynamic and direction of this change is articulated differently across disciplines and philosophies in often-contradictory ways. In this paper, I would like to articulate my understanding of the ways in which online work can be an index of material existence, suggesting that taken collectively, internet art attempts to understand and describe the complexities of current changes at different levels of generality. Internet art is a cultural form that seems to engage the spaces of its own contradictions and tries to extend them as far as possible. It is produced and consumed in relation to the network technologies through which emerging patterns of domination are organised, by artists and not-artists in fragile spaces temporarily resisting processes of commodification and colonisation. In the paper, with reference to a number of internet art projects, on some of which I collaborated, I will suggest that internet art can be an index of ethical resistance to incorporation in terms of its counter protocols at the technological level, its organisational forms and dialogical exchanges, and its non-representational aesthetics.

Art & Design, 2019

The first International Socially Engaged Art Symposium (ISEAS) was held in Raseborg, Finland, in 2017. The ISEAS is an annual art gathering where artists work intensively together through the methods of participatory art. Artists implement different possibilities of intervention with local communities and in public space. Interventions are done within a short time (it is a seven-or ten-day event), but artists live together in a residence, and work such as curating the artists and communities, defining the theme of the symposium and bringing artists together for preliminary planning starts a year in advance. In this article, I analyse the curating process of the ISEAS 2019, the theme of which was In Nature, inspired by an awareness of the Anthropocene epoch.