Very sad news, I just saw on Networked Performance that David Crawford has passed away. David was probably most known for his work Stop Motion Studies (image above).

On Thursday night I managed to get down to Plymouth to see the After The Net (2.0) exhibition and attend the lecture by Professor Roy Ascott entitled Transiting the Net.

The exhibition itself was compact but well presented. Tantalum Memorial, which I posted about in a previous post, by Graham Harwood, Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji was impressive to see however the most interesting and yet simple work there for me was Hello process! (image top) by Aymeric Mansoux & Marloes de Valk (GOTO10). This process based work could be described as an automated Sol LeWitt machine, trialling combinations of typographic (Ascii) elements over and over again to create visually (and to an extent aurally) minimal work. The resulting print outs filled the whole wall of one of the gallery rooms.

In scale Ascott’s Blackboard Notes, a reproduction of a teaching blackboard from 1967 (seen here), towered above everything else and tied in well with what he presented in the lecture, an overview of his career and his constant attempt to define his practice with regard to emerging technology and the ideas/concerns they entail. A limited edition of Blackboard Notes (1000) were also given to visitors and well liking diagrammatic work as much as I do, which in this instance is about networks, that’s going to be framed and put on my wall.

Below are some slide highlights from Professor Ascott’s lecture. The first shows some of his early chance driven wood work and the second a game based work I’d never seen. The third is an image of some of his students at Ealing School of Art in the early sixties (Ascott is up there with artists such as Paul Klee as having revolutionised art teaching in the 20th century). The last image is where he finished, a diagram or mapping of his current ideas/practice and how he is trying to define it.

Tonight as part of After The Net a series of events taking place across three countries, After The Net (2.0) the second in the series in Plymouth will host a performance by Aymeric Mansoux.

The exhibition part of this event is already up and running since the 12th of September and will run until the 23rd of October however the lecture on the 22nd of October Transiting the Net by Professor Roy Ascott will without a doubt be the highlight of this iteration. The following is a quote from the After The Net site about the lecture:

Cybernetics and behaviour, mind and technology, connectivity and syncretism, chance and change, constitute the parameters of practice of Roy Ascott, whose talk will chart his passage through the Net, from analogue to digital and beyond. Ascott has exhibited widely, from Venice Biennale to Ars Electronica, is published in at least twelve languages, and recognised internationally as an innovator and visionary. He is president of the Planetary Collegium at University of Plymouth.

I’m hoping to be able to attend this so will post an entry here after the event.

Event originally seen on the GOTO10 mailinglist.

August Gallery in Islington, London, England is hosting an online exhibition titled a Study on Internet Art. While reasonably simplistic it is reminesent of the ‘look’ and feel of much of early net.art and does provide a sort of reading room overview of some of the key issues and topics the practice deals with. The exhibition starts here and runs throughout the month of August.

The panel discussion Net-Art versus Web Art at the Online Symposium of the Web Biennial 2005, something I hadn’t read before, is one element which I found particularly interesting in it’s attempt to move net.art forward to a more open form of art dealing with networks.

Art by Telephone was a conceptual art exhibition which dealt with networks through it’s formal structure. Conceived by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1968 the intention was to record the growing trend of conceptualization in contemporary art however also reflected the effect of global mass communication i.e. the reduction of time/space and ideas of neighbourhood and an ever diminishing natural world, essentially ideas and concepts discussed in great detail by Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) as his “global village”.

The exhibition was to include conceptual art heavyweights such as Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Dibbets and Hans Haacke as well as others who became associated with other or numerous movements at the time such as Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Robert Morris and Richard Hamilton. Formally the exhibition would consist of

works in different media, conceived by artists in this country (America) and Europe and executed in Chicago on their behalf. The telephone was designated the most fitting means of communication in relaying instructions to those entrusted with fabrication of the artists’ projects or enactment of their ideas. To heighten the challenge of a wholly verbal exchange, drawings, blueprints or written descriptions were avoided.

This exhibition was conceptual in many ways, although one of these was not intended.

Foremost as a conceptual exhibition the format of calling work in was surely the first of it’s kind and yet in a sense has comparison with the long tradition of apprenticeship/assistant within an artists studio (except here at distance, removing the single location of the studio) which has continued today in new media art under the appropriated name of outsourcing.

Secondly the exhibition, scheduled for the spring of 1968 was abandoned because of technical difficulties so in 1969 the Art by Telephone phonograph (image above, sound file below), the recordings of the artists calling in their works, was released and served as both the exhibition and catalogue for the exhibition.

The exhibition has achieved somewhat of a mythical status, the conceptual art exhibition which remained conceptual, however despite this documentation is rather poor with the best being the covertext of the phonograph and it’s recording here on ubuweb. Sadly the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago simply acknowledges the ‘exhibition’ with a line in their history timeline.