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Networked Narratives

#NetNarrr

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Lecture change for next week!

12:15 on WEDNESDAY (no class Thurs)

Room 301 in the HF Building (??)

Dr. Leonardo Flores:

Third Generation Electronic Literature

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For your viewing pleasure...

NetNarr Video 2

Studio Visit with Brett Gaylor

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1st Blog Post due by Sunday!

-Your first blog = an introduction REFLECTION (not a summary, but a thoughtful consideration #NetNarr & response)

-What are your first impressions of #NetNarr? -What is your digital life like now? What have you done to get started in #NetNarr? Share your contributions. How will our discussions of digital culture help you grow?

-From the readings/videos/discussion for the week. What was the most compelling ideas or topics for you, and why?

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Checking out our network!

#NetNarr visualization (TAGS)

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Art movements that have influenced

digital art….

Dada

Found object art

Conceptual Art

Oulipo

Fluxus

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Dada

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Dada Poetry

Cut-Up Art

Interplay of Randomness and Control

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Chance

Nonsense as protest

Audience participation

Dada-ists incorporated chance into the creation of their works of art. This went against all norms of traditional art production whereby a work was meticulously planned and completed. The introduction of chance was a way for Dadaists to challenge artistic norms and to question the role of the artist in the artistic process.

The term "dada" is a colloquial French term for a “hobbyhorse”, yet it also echoes the first words of a child. Some say that the Da Da sound mimics the yes, yes, of the Romanian language. Either way, all these suggestions of childishness and absurdity appealed to the group - they were keen to put a distance between themselves and the traditional conventions of mainstream society.

The key to the success of a dada event was audience involvement so that attendees were not just onlookers of art, but became involved in its production.

At the time, this notion was radical, and the total negation of traditional art.

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Found Objects/Conceptual Art

Marcel Duchamp

Found Object
The shift from object to concept

Moholy-Nagy

Conceptual Art
The virtual object

Marcel DuChamp was a pioneer of Dada. He sought an alternative to representing objects in paint. So he began presenting objects themselves as art. He selected mass-produced, commercially available, often utilitarian objects, designating them as art and giving them titles.

He selected “Readymades,” as he called them. These objects disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Duchamp’s “The Fountain” (the urinal) is perhaps the most famous example of Found objects as art.

Found object originates from the French objet trouvé, describing art created from undisguised, but often modified, objects or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function.

The result - The context into which the object is placed becomes the most relevant factor in the work. The idea of dignifying commonplace objects in this way was originally a shocking challenge, teasing out the question of what is considered art, as opposed to not art.

Found objects as art then paved the way for conceptual art - work that was “in the service of the mind,” as opposed to a purely “retinal” art which is intended only to please the eye.

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. He was a leading figure in the conceptual art movement.

Conceptual art, sometimes simply called conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns.

The first wave of the "conceptual art" movement extended from approximately 1967 to 1978. Some works of conceptual art are also called installations - constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. With concept art, there is shift away from emphasizing the object-based work of art to pointedly expressing cultural values of society at large.

Video

Finally, a concept approach to art paved the way for the virtual object. That is, the art is an immaterial object that exists in the human mind and a digital environment, rather than in the “real world”. For example the art object may live in a digital domain - the Internet, intranet, virtual reality, cyberspace, etc.

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OULIPO

(Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle)

An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais.

Unlike the Dada, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts.

For example, the technique known as n + 7 replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary.

Notable members of this group include the novelists George Perec and Italo Calvino, poet Oskar Pastior, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

The element of the game in literary production. Precursor to generative art made computationally.

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Fluxus

Emphasis on

Participation & Event

Fluxus, an international group of artists, poets, and musicians who integrated life into art through the use of found events, sounds, and materials, thereby bringing about social and economic change in the art world.

The Latin word Fluxus means flowing, in English a flux is a flowing out. Fluxus founder George Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’.

Fluxus art involved the viewer, relying on the element of chance to shape the ultimate outcome of the piece.

Fluxus artists did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the value of art, nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art. Fluxus not only wanted art to be available to the masses, they also wanted everyone to produce art all the time.

Fluxus artists were most heavily influenced by the ideas of John Cage, who believed that one should embark on a piece without having a conception of the eventual end. Fluxus is often associated with experimental music and found sound.

It was the process of creating that was important, not the finished product. Fluxus as an art movement was critical in the development of experimental and performance art as well as the installation or art event. Fluxus valued participation and collective creative production.

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Controlled Randomness

Collaboration

Live performance,

networks,

connectivity

Controlled randomness is an important concept. Consider digital art, where the artist uses uncertainty or unpredictability as an intricate part of the process. For instance, generative writing that relies on computational configurations. Or consider machine created poetry based on algorithmic mash-up of text sets. Think of new media art such as painting machines or poetry generators.

Collaboration is a critical aspect of current digital art. Network communication technologies allow for new forms of creative collaboration, collapsing of boundaries and bridging distances. Much of digital art today is team produced, with members bringing different kinds of skills and talents to the effort - programmers, engineers, scientists, and designers. Digital art is interactive, it can harness collective intelligence, it can be crowdsourced, or it can be a product of virtual world building and a dynamic participatory culture.

Digital art can be instantaneous, live, live-streamed, real time, it can be instantaneously shared throughout the world, it can be event based and global and archived all at once.

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Technology Pushing the boundaries of Art

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Key vocabulary to build upon: terms from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media

Characteristics of Digital Media:

(Nonlinearity, Multimedia, Hypertextuality, Collaboration, Portability, Preservation)

Data

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What to do for next week?

Read Chapter 1 in Digital Art by Christiane Paul “Digital Technologies as a Tool”

Write your introduction blog post by Sunday!

Remember the lecture change! We will meet at 12:15pm Wednesday Jan 31 (next week).

Continue with network contributions: surf the hastag, tweet comments, tweet your blog post, shared resources, #dda contributions (1-2 week!)