A fine roundup of works but you forgot under the heading Google Maps ….insert shameless promotion here…….

http://lincolnlab.net/LPforPlatform/liquidprairie.html

if I do say so myself..pfhthththt

yikes

Guthrie Lonergan is unusually perceptive and has a caustic wit. That said, credit is generally given for defining a term when it's actually defined. "Internet Aware Art" is a Delphic utterance that flatters each person who uses it with his/her own definition, as seen in the posts here following the Net Aesthetics 2 panel discussion, when it was clear that no one knew what it meant. You attempted to qualify your attribution to Guthrie, but people who don't follow the link can't know how thin his authorship is:

"Beard: You recently told me that you were working on some ideas for 'offline art.' Care to elaborate on what shape they might take?

"Lonergan: Right now I'm scheming how to take the emphasis off of the Internet and technology, but keep my ideas intact. Objects that aren't objects… I got a couple of books and a t-shirt in the works. Right now I'm really into text (not visually/typography… just… text…), and lots and lots of lists… 'Internet Aware Art.' :)"

I'm not reading where it says internet aware art is "an attempt to describe the tendency for artists to translate behavioral or situational tendencies occurring online to other contexts, particularly offline." I think the authors of this post are giving themselves "best of 2008" for a Boswell-like coinage.

Hey Tom

I'm unclear on how giving a name to something (or attempting to do so) constitutes a form of flattery in and of itself – isolating and naming a phenomenon is not necessarily even an act of value judgment, except perhaps in the sense that one is judging said phenomenon as having the positive value of "notability" (which would be a circular argument anyway).

I agree with you that "Internet Aware Art" is a muddy and somewhat subjective term, but I don't see how the editors' attempt at a rewording of IAA is so wildly off-base, and don't agree that it is purely and limitlessly subjective. To me, it's more interesting that such a throwaway bit of language in Guthrie's interview started getting circulated by other people–I'm sure he didn't expect that to happen.

Perhaps it points to the fact that there is *something* going on that artists and critics would like there to be a name for: maybe art that bears the "spirit" of net art that's nonetheless not online? I keep "spirit" in quotes to agree with you on the vagueness of what that quality might be–and maybe that's really the most subjective part, the wiggly conceptual core that bugs you.

Anyway, maybe Internet Aware Art isn't the most precise term for that "something" – or maybe you disagree that that "something" is notable in the first place? Or that IAA is now being circulated in a fashion that Guthrie didn't intend?

(And what's a "Boswell-like coinage"? Surely you meant a "Johnson-like" one?)

Hi, Ed,
I was referring to how Boswell became Johnson's de facto mouthpiece through a much-lauded biography. (Isn't that what we usually mean when we say "_______'s Boswell"? Maybe that's just me being cynical.)

If the Rhizome editors think something is "going on," that is, art that imitates the internet, they should just say it and claim credit for the observation rather than put it into mouth of an artist. By having Lonergan say it (even though he didn't, not in the way that the editors meant), in a sense it frees them from having to come up with other examples.

I'm not convinced there is any such art but am as keen as anyone else to see Lonergan's version of it.

As for it being circulated by "other people" I think those were mostly Rhizome editors.

Tom

OK, well we could parse intentionality all day long about what Guthrie meant (unless he chimes in here himself) but MY take on it is offline artwork in dialog with online culture. Not net art but maybe about-net art.

Various examples of how this could happen:

Eddo Stern's "Deathstar"–video work created from online "bash Osama" games:
http://eddostern.com/deathstar.html

AIDS-3D's "OMG Obelisk"
http://www.newmuseum.org/assets/images/exhibitions/00000411/05.-AIDS-3D.jpg

Seth Price
"Video Game Soundtracks 1983-1987" (source material from file-sharing systems)
http://www.ubu.com/sound/price.html



(In terms of the "other people" using Guthrie's term…if it were only Rhizome editors [which is not the case entirely] why would it matter? this was in the context of the Rhizome editors' picks from Rhizome…already situated as such.)

Hi, Ed,
Enjoying this slow motion discussion!
You said Lonergan's term "has certainly resonated and has gained some significance in describing the approach of other artists."
Resonated with whom?
Two of the artists you cite (Stern, Seth Price) aren't influenced by Lonergan at all, certainly not his coinage. Maybe AIDS-3D is but I haven't seen an interview where they acknowledged the debt in making their OMG piece.
We could indeed "parse intentionality all day long about what Guthrie meant (unless he chimes in here himself)." That's my point - we could and he hasn't.

"Internet Aware Art as derived from an interview with Guthrie Lonergan" is not really a highlight of 2008 but the subject of an essay you feel needs to be written.

Re-reading my earlier comment in this thread, when I said no one knew what the term Internet Aware Art meant in the Rhizome posts following the Net Aesthetics 2 panel discussion, I may have been confusing it with "emotional net art" and "epic net art," two other terms that seemed to have a lot of individual meanings but are more critic-driven than artist-driven.

Important update…last night at Light Industry the following exchange took place during Guthrie's q & a.

Ed: On Rhizome, there was a large discussion about your phrase “internet-aware art,” and a claim that people at Rhizome had used it incorrectly. So since you’re here, I’m wondering if you can tell us: what did you really mean by the term?

Guthrie: Well I didn’t make up a definition—I just wanted to throw it out there. But in my mind I defined it as these ideas of the Big Database that I was trying to talk about [in my lecture tonight] and just sort of being aware that even if you’re not making internet art, that your art is going to on the internet probably, and somehow any attempt to be aware of that can change your work, thinking about that internet context. You know, if your work will end up on VVORK, or something like that.

Ed: So kind of like, “internet ready art”

Guthrie: Something like that. It’s a big notion, what it means.

…and for reference, Guthrie's description of his presentation, which was called "We Did It Ourselves!"

"The success and failure (and illusion and depravity) of DIY in the era of Web 2.0 – Little entries in The Big Database – selections of new Internet art and Internet 'non-art' – My Favorites! – Something very real struggling beneath a heavy and ancient structure of corporate software defaults and cultural banality… What have we done? I will try very hard to offer insightful and enthusiastic annotation as I surf the net in public for you. I broke my laptop's keyboard but maybe I can borrow my girlfriend's. We will look at a vague Internet art movement (moment?) still growing – critical of but subject to technology – artists in relationship to The Big Database, collecting tiny home video thumbnails, or posting difficult metaphysical questions on Yahoo! Answers (a lot of Travis Hallenbeck and Joel Holmberg), etc. – regular Internet users as artists – artists using Google.com – And with just-as-powerful pieces of online 'amateur content' – an entire YouTube-based Fandom for fans of box-fans and washing machines, and 11 year-old kids sharing dull dreams as downloadable 3d models. A fully linked playlist will be released after the event… Please come!" - Guthrie

My discussion above with Ed Halter about so-called Internet Aware Art (in 2009) seems to have gotten disconnected from the above post in my Rhizome comments archive (aka member activity stream). (There is no link back to this post where the comments appear in the archive.) I found the post again via Google. For future reference the post link is http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/jan/16/highlights-from-2008/