YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Connor

lines on the record: 86
first: 2019-02-25
most recent: 2019-02-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Email okay. So one of the interesting works that uses email is marktribe, Alex Galloway, and Martin Wuttenberg's Starry Knight, which is a great project to talk about because it uses rhizome's own archive. It's based on rhizome's text base. All of the emails that were sent on Rhizome's listserv in the 90s were”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, it had an important role. And what's fascinating about that work is that, you know, you could say that the form of it is a book, but it wouldn't really have existed without internet access, Google, all these other kind of tools coming into play. So all those things are part of the making of that. Of that piece and part of the tool set, I would argue”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Email, yeah. Well, one of the works I was going to mention in relation to tools would be Blindspot by Miaoying, a Chinese artist here in 2008, Googled every word in the Mandarin dictionary, an 1800-page dictionary, and she whited out the words that were censored. And it was kind of like an early stage in that initial moment of Google and China trying to kind of come to a rapprochement, which of course is relevant in the present. It certainly is certainly not.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think really when it comes to net artists using every tool that's connected to the internet, one of the works that I know is what's working.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Michael Connor. He's the artistic director of rhizome. We're talking about internet art or net art, where there's a show now in New York at the new museum about showing some of these works. Let's talk about the tools that are used in the works that you picked. You pick 16 works out of 100. Browsers, obviously the top use tool of art because it is the communications vehicle for a lot of things, especially in the early internet.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being invented All right, we're going to talk about that when we get back. We're here with Michael Conner. He's the artistic director of rhizome. They have a show now called The Art Happens Here. And it's about the history of art made on the internet and for the internet and various ways. And we'll talk about that and more when we get back.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that's important about the project that you are starting to refer to is that there is a longer history of networked art that goes beyond the internet. I mean, you could argue that the Lumiere brothers actually set up a communications network around the world with their agents that were exchanging these films in five continents within, I think, the first two years of the cinematograph being invented. So networking is actually, I think, a pretty important part of art, but the computer and the computer network makes that kind of more powerful and a new form of art or new forms of art begin to proliferate because of that technology. An artist plus the internet isn't just an artist on the internet, it's a kind of different kind of entity.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell people that when they're looking at their net artworks, what you see on the screen isn't the work, it's the exchange that's the work, it's the dialogue that's happening. And so it's not just about the object, but about like what's unfolding through that kind of moment of what you can do.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I like to define it as art that happens on or through the internet. Called simple net art diagram. So, this is the best explanation of that art. Okay, go for it. And it's just a diagram that shows two computers with a line connecting them. And there's a lightning bolt in between them. And there's a little label that says the art happens here pointing to the space between the computers. And MTA made this work because they wanted”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I like NetArt because it sort of a little more casual and it implies a fuzziness about it that I think is appropriate given the complexity of the internet. Internet art makes it seem like it's something really specific to me, which is not correct. You know, the internet is so has so many different forms of how do you define it?”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Did you think about how it had been done previously with other mediums? I mean, the first thing that was the first movie that was broadcast is a beautiful film of Two Men Dancing, which is really quite lovely. I don't know if you know that. It's a little tiny film that they made. I think it was Edison made it because they had men in the studio and they just were showing movement. And so it was quite artistic in a way. But did you think about how to talk about how different internet art is? Is it net art or internet art? Just net art. Use the term net art in your”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed. And so the idea was they would link up these different sites and kind of share works back and forth in an ongoing kind of performance. So for each hour of the day, there'd be a different venue that would be producing and receiving and displaying. And what survives from that is a lot of documentation It shows kind of like sort of these very active scenes where people are making drawings and moving around the space and connecting with one another. But I think that what it comes down to is this idea that when the network becomes available to you as a possibility, I think that there's a lot of questions like what can this enable me to do. And for many people, I would argue that one of the first things I want to do is just kind of connect with one another. And that means really creating culture, I think, through the network.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was an effort to connect a number of sites worldwide using fax and slow scan TV and early internet, but it was only text-based”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right, which is really interesting. I mean, when you saw these things then, it was really something because it just didn't exist. It just, that's, now we're so used to these things and how easily we become used to these tools. But at the time, these things people didn't share things like this. I remember downloading a book on the internet at a server at a college, and I kept saying, I've downloaded a book. And they were like so. And I'm like, you don't even understand what that means. I was quite particular about it. I was like, this is bigger than you understand, right? This moment in time, this will be, this is like an aha moment for me at least So, the first work, the 82 work, was a similar thing.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, yeah. I mean, they had spaces set up in Koreatown and in Venice and at, I think, a Mexican restaurant, also somewhere in south-central LA. They had these kind of interesting really community-based spaces, and they had people making work with these new tools and sharing it and really kind of anticipating a lot of the things that would later happen. But doing it in a way that was very community focused.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to have people in these local communities make and share images with each other and use some sort of video writer to annotate them and exchange them back and forth. So they had a kind of restaurant.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that was Robert Adrian X's The World in 24 Hours, which is our oldest work. We have also electronic cafe 84, which is a really nice older project. Both of those works are early networking projects where people were interested in the idea that telecommunications networks were ways of connecting people and having participatory kind of events. It absolutely was. Electronic Cafe 84s in particular are really fascinating story. That one is from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and it was five sites that were connected over sort of early networks that used the community memory bulletin board.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess it was 2004 was the last time they'd seen it before we presented it online. It kind of dealt with the question of archives in two ways like one, the idea of public circulation being its own form of archiving by putting it into people's hands and the other, the sort of institutional question of archiving, like how do we resist these forces of technological obsolescence and make things continue to have another network?”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then it had this other life through its circulation as a kind of product for sale. But then it went away. Like the artists haven't seen this work in 20 years almost. Where was”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like an incredible resource. They put together this list of films in the 70s that they considered to define the art of cinema. So we know that project has its own problems, but we thought it was an interesting way to look at net art. So we did this work online. You can see it at anthology.org, and you can see the hundred works and like all these different stories about them there. This exhibition brings together 16 of those, and we wanted not to make a best of or a particular time period, but instead to think about what are the problems that come up when you're thinking historically about net art and digital culture and what are the kinds of questions that we think people should be asking about that. So the works are intended to show a diverse range of media forms and positions on the question of archiving. And this one in particular is an interesting in relation to that because it started just as this encounter between people, not something that's intended to last over time necessarily.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, when we were doing the show, so I should explain that this show comes out of an effort called NetArt Anthology, which is an effort to retell the history of NetArt through 100 works. Right. So in the research of the Netart and History, we've seen people try and tell a story in book form in different ways. But we wanted to kind of look at the works themselves and let a story emerge from that in an almost fragmentary way. And we were inspired by the model of anthology film archives here in New York, which has. Sort of essential cinemalists”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early internet age. Right. And so, what were you looking for when you were bringing together the show? What was the conceptual ideas? Like, because some are browsing, talk about the different types of things that you were presenting, browser-based versus, and which there was Netscape browser, then there was other during that time period that was the dominant browser, actually.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, each of these is the composition that they made. And I'm also fascinated with the idea that you could kind of take it and sort of sell it as a work, like an epistolary novel of the early internet age.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is doing is really sort of spinning up an instance on the cloud for us to kind of access this work interactively through essentially like a live video connection. So that's why at the beginning you saw that I was able to choose the location of my server because having a low lag time is important to the experience of the work. It's not like a video where you can buffer and have that kind of lag. So, these are some very sort of high production value pieces that they made just for one another as a way of kind of getting to know each other and developing that intimacy. And there's a lot of really rich detail and depth in them. So here we're looking at Oria, who is one of the two people, sent a picture of herself, and you can mouse over it. Animates the picture, and you can see her partner underneath.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so in order to make this work accessible on the web, Environment using a platform that they call emulation as a service with the University of Freiburg.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And flash and sound and all these other things. So finding the right browser that ran this work took that kind of knowledge of that, if you remember. He did it at one of our conferences, actually, which was interesting. So let me see this.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Skin on skin on skin by a group called Entropy at Super. And it's really what year? This is from 99. And it's actually just turned 20 years old, a couple of weeks ago. It's a good post-Valentine's Day work because it's actually a series of 25 internet-based love letters that they sent back and forth, multimedia love letters. They did it after meeting online on hell.com, which you may. Oh, I remember. Yeah. And the work was actually intended to be private just for them, but other uses of Hell, like kind of, I think they stumbled upon their private directory and then it became public. So then they decided to sell it. So they made it a pay-per-view artwork in the early internet. But the work involves all kinds of things like shockwave.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lindsay Jane Mauds. She's not a dinosaur of the internet. She's someone instead who researches these tools. One of her kind of Key projects is to look at browsers of the past and kind of research and understand their different affordances, what they were capable of presenting and what they weren't. There's a lot of really practical ways that come into play. I can show you one if you want to do that. One of the works in the gallery exhibition at the New Museum, they're not all browser-based, but one of the ones that is, is called”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they were trying to save them for posterity, all the various computers and devices. And one of the problems is, two problems actually. One is they were missing some of the software to use it, to be able to use it. And the degrading of that software. And then secondly, the people who knew how to use it. And so they would have to find really old people to work some of the very early technologies, which I was, if not, they were just blocks of bricks. They were like bricks that didn't do anything. And so it was a really interesting. So they brought me in. They're like, what do we do? And I was like, I don't know. Like, I don't know, something. It was a really interesting question. I guess go to the companies and hope that they would preserve them. Yeah. And, you know, keeping hold of that knowledge is an important part of what we do. We actually have a software curator.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that what we're doing when we use emulation is not preserving the artwork necessarily, we're preserving the software that made it run. And so the real problem isn't keeping a hold of the work, but it's keeping a hold of all the cultural and technical context that surrounds it, which is kind of different than, I think, preservation in a museum traditional context. Well, except it's interesting you say that because I was at the Smithsonian 10 years ago and they had all these computers they had to save.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Format can be treated in a way that doesn't fix it necessarily in a given position, but instead allows it to kind of live. So there's a couple of different technical strategies that we've developed in particular that we found to be really suitable to our preservation strategy. One of them is emulation. Preservation director, Dragon Spinshed, is a really key advocate of emulation as a way of bringing works from the past into the present. And one of the interesting things about emulation, which is using a piece of software to imitate another piece of software,”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this whole history that you can draw on and kind of bring forward as a resource for the present. So go ahead. Well, so this exhibition is an opportunity to kind of bring together different positions from the history of internet art into, I think, present them in ways that show how they are kind of relevant to this moment in time as well. Right, which is any exhibition wants to do that. But you were preserving these over time and with what in mind, were they presented somewhere? Are they in this archive? Well, the question of how to preserve internet art is like a really complicated and interesting one. But I think Rhizum has a particular take on that conversation. You know, we're sort of interested in the idea of Internet art being reperformed and thinking about how this very active”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here because the art is happening. It's not a passive object on a shelf. It's something that happens in encounters between people and machines. And what we find is that over time internet culture is devalued. So people don't recognize its value and they're not putting the resources institutionally into sustaining it. And also companies don't kind of consider the kind of downside of obsolescence as they push forward for always having a new platform and a new thing. Right. And so there is a kind of cultural aspect to the way that internet art kind of doesn't last. All right. So you had been collecting and preserving it because what was the idea that it should be collected and preserved like other works of art? Well, Rhizom is really an organization that focuses on a very contemporary form of culture, but we do that with the knowledge that there's a conversation that people can draw on from the past. So we're always trying to support younger artists in emerging works and new kinds of practice that aren't even recognized as art yet. But in doing so, we want people to know like.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It came together as a kind of online community to bring people together to share information and talk about this new kind of communications platform and how it could be used artistically. But very quickly after that, it evolved into a conversation about how works that were made through that new platform could be sustained over time. So in 1999, Rizen began an archive of digital art called The Art Base. All right, talk about that because things go away on the internet. There's been the Internet Archive to save websites and things that happen. Like you can find old Yahoo's, old Googles, the original things, but the internet by its nature, even though there's a famous line in the movie about Facebook, the internet's written in pencil. It does go away. It has the ephemerality that is very different in art. That's the case. Sure. I actually don't like to use the word ephemerality about the internet because I think that the internet kind of doesn't have to go away. Right. There is something that's very performative about the internet. That's one of the reasons why we call our exhibition The Art Happens.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I recall that and some others. I've been around Of the internet. I covered it very early. And art was sort of something I hadn't thought of, although it occurred on it all the time. And there's memes. There's creat Kinds of things. So I'd love to sort of get an idea of how this came together, and then I want to talk about the actual individual pieces, and there's some you want to focus in on. So let's talk about how it came. Sure. Well, I think that story is sort of inextricable from the story of rhizome itself, which is an organization that was founded in 1996. So, you know, pretty early in the life cycle of the public internet.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spare time, I And you're listening to Roco D. From the Vox Media Podcast Net Red chair is Michael Connor, the artistic director of rhizome, a digital art community affiliated The new museum in New York City, where I am right now. Rhizome is currently running an exhibit, a fascinating exhibit at the museum highlighting the history of art made on the Internet. It's called the Art Happens Here.”
2019-02-25 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT