flawedart – Page 5

Dear Internet

Dear Internet
2007
project documentation
by Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress.

Connection, dislocation, fear, communication, fragmentation, collectivity, intimacy, disembodiment are all possible and often simultaneously present in our attempts to interact with others online and off. Dear Internet is an experiment in collective publishing that attempts to investigate how networked technologies become platforms for the paradoxes of social relations in digital culture.

Dear Internet began in 2006 as a kind of inversion of the security and authoring conventions of blogs and blogging. Dear Internet was set up as an unmediated publishing platform where users were urged to address the Internet directly and indulge in their deepest thoughts, feelings and fantasies with the abandonment, comfort and protection that only online anonymity can provide. Initially, letters rendered some interesting aspects of the complex relationships, or lack thereof, we have with the humans of the world. Sadly, but perhaps fittingly, contributions waned and the automated publishing platform gave way to spam. The blog is now an archive of spam email and seems to be establishing a “purely” networked identity – blissfully free from the messy and complex emotive states of humanity.

2009 update: blogger detected and removed the Dear Internet blog for violating blogger’s terms of service agreement.

The first wave of human contributions to Dear Internet were presented at MAP in 2007. Installation Notes:

One or more webcam equipped computers are located throughout the installation space with internet browsers open.
Through an established email account, to which installation visitors are given user id and password, participants are invited to email a letter addressed directly to The internet at: dearest_internet.user@blogger.com.
All emails are inventoried and published at Dear Internet blog.
Submitted letters are gathered from Dear Internet blog, remixed and randomly projected as scrolling ticker texts in the installation space.
Accompanying scrolling texts are a series of image projections. Projections feature webcam images of letter-writing installation participants accompanied by images accessed from anonymous live IP surveillance and web cameras.
Installation audio consists of computer reading excerpts from submitted letters while being underscored and sometimes interrupted by cinematic scores and sound effects.

The Presence of Absence: A Conversation with Charles Cohen

The Presence of Absence: A Conversation with Charles Cohen. Mark Cooley, Charles Cohen. NewMediaFix.net, Rhizome.org

spacer.gif{ART}

spacer.gif{ART}
2005

launch site

Obsolescence meets timelessness in a new Art form.

What is a “spacer.gif”?
The spacer.gif is a means, employed by web designers, of keeping table-based layouts from collapsing in on themselves. The spacer.gif was once a valuable tool in a net world governed by the interdependence of content and layout. However, to the contemporary high-efficiency web designer, who employs css formatting and layout capabilities, spacer gifs are largely an obsolete and unnecessary tool. The independence of content from layout has come, and spacer gifs, as a concept and as digital objects, are disappearing.

What is spacer.gif{ART}?
As the digital culture industry forges on to virtual territories yet unseen, spacer.gif{ART} hopes to salvage small pieces of the wreckage left behind. spacer.gif{ART} produces and distributes limited edition archival prints of spacer.gif image files downloaded directly from the web by our highly skilled team of curators and techno-conservators. Our portfolio collections represent a dying breed of often unknown artists who utilize(d) the tools of a rapidly fading past to create extraordinary table-based web design experiences. Our curatorial staff hand picks the most extraordinary examples of the spacer.gif to offer to you, our patron, as handsome limited edition archival prints.

More than a parody of http://www.softwareartspace.com, spacer.gif{ART} is simultaneously a functioning ecommerce art site (disabled 2007) and meditation on the projection of artistic value in early and late capitalist society – how, in the digital age (the age of the nonexistent original), art marketers are still relying on analog value systems (based on the the logic of original / copy). It seems we’ve entered the postmodern digital age with much of our modernist baggage still in tow.

untitled ’83

untitled ’83 | 2005

materials: digital prints, declassified documents
size: 5 – 8.5″ X 11″ pieces / total size 8.5″H X 55″L

White Flag

White Flag | 2005

produced for Unfurled Estonia, curated by Pond

Unfurled Exhibition Catalog
Sirp (August 5, 2005)
Posttimes (August 5, 2005)
Terri Cohn. ‘Unfurled.’ /ArtWeek /(7/04)

White Flag is a U.S. flag spray-painted white. Depending on the cultural context a white flag may have various meanings. In the United States the predominant understanding is that a white flag signifies a surrendering – or at least a devious/heroic plan to ensnare the enemy in a deadly bluff. This White Flag is not a celebration of modernist values, or an example of witty iconic pop art. This is one flag become another. Disclaimer: White Flag will fade and crack while exposed to natural and human elements during exterior exhibition thereby, beginning a transformation back to the U.S. flag.

“A U.S. flag painted white, Mark Cooley’s White Flag plays on various cultural resonations. In the United States white flags signify a surrendering – but exposed to natural elements (sun, wind, rain, etc.), White Flag will crack and fade, eventually returning the artwork to its originary incarnation as a piece of cloth. We are left with an open ended question about the evanescent nature of art and the axiomatic character of symbols in the political imaginary. White Flag also alludes to various monochromatic paintings in 20th century Western art (Rodchenko, Robert Ryman, Malevich, Yves Klein, Rothko) that position themselves as the death of painting, a non-painting painting, a blank slate to which we impute meaning. In Cooley’s piece, an actual flag underlies the layers of paint – as if to expose the political and social underpinnings of a Modernist ‘neutral field’.” Press Release, Written by Marisa Jahn

Independent Media Series @ SMSU

Open site archive

The Independent Media Video Series @ SMSU was initiated at Missouri State University by mark cooley with sponsorship from the SMSU Film Society. The series ran from 2002 to 2004 in the aftermath of 9/11 with the goal of encouraging critical debate on the campus of SMSU (now MSU) and in surrounding communities. The series came at an important time and helped to bring together activists who soon after galvanized to form the Ozark Peace Network.

Some Thoughts on Computer Security and the Living Dead

Some Thoughts on Computer Security and the Living Dead. Mark Cooley. Rhizome.org

Dissention Convention

Dissention Convention.
2004
Networked performance and public projection

Live Mix Archive

Coinciding with the Republican Convention in New York, more than 20 international net artists and digital artists broadcast a new collaborative art-polemic with a focus on how Bush and the US Republicans negatively influence every locality around the world.

All multimedia performances were created live, online on Furtherfield’s VisitorsStudio. These were projected at Postmasters Gallery’s RNC NODE, a way-station, which served as a physical node of an ad hoc public broadcasting, a system of online, real-time protest performances and alternative news actions. All online streams were also output in local bars and projections from windows.

Participating Artists Included: Maya Kalogera, Marc Garrett and Patrick Lichty, Moport.org & Glowlab, Chris Webb, Concrete Myrth & Sim, Lewis Lacook & Alan Sondheim, Sheila Murphy, Helen Varley Jamieson, Karla Ptacek, Vicki Smith & Bea Gibson, Joseph and Donna McElroy, Neil Jenkins & Roger Mills, Digitofagia vs. Autolabs, Michael Szpakowski & Ruth Catlow, Ryan Griffis & Mark Cooley

uConnect

uConnect
2004
a collaborative project with Ryan Griffis.

Installation Sample

uConnect is an attempt to deal with the materiality of digital commodities, commerce, and culture. Mocking both museum and retail showroom aesthetics a computer display sits atop a pedestal under a vitrine exhibiting a stock tropical island screensaver. Interrupting this banal yet inviting simulation is a soundtrack made up of recordings of workers in the microprocessor industry testifying to the hazardous working conditions in so-called “cleanroom” environments. As the testimonies unfold it becomes clear that “cleanroom” facilities are constructed to protect technological components from the contamination of humans, yet provide little or no protection to humans from the toxic effects of the dangerous chemicals used in the manufacturing process.

The value of the human life and the decline of all of earth’s life systems (due in large part to “technological advances” of the 20th and 21st centuries) is continually eclipsed by the next wave of consumer gadgetry that offers endless ways to negate and disguise the real in favor of the virtual. The piece has a similar appearance and conceptual framework as many ready-mades or object appropriations yet seeks to make explicit the political economy of the object in ways often left out of common-object-as-art scenarios. Detourned laptop computer advertisement pamphlets, featuring a juxtaposition of digital euphoria and consumption with the abuses suffered by workers in high tech industries, are provided for gallery visitors to browse and take.