Introduction

12Jan
Intro to the course and to each other.
Readings to do before next class:

There are two readings for this week since we don't have any assignments to work on. Both were written by Arthur Danto and deal with how art might be distinguished from non-art in our age in which any object can come to be considered art (Duchamp's urinal, Warhol's Brillo boxes, etc.) This is relevant to our class because we are working in a medium and with tools that are used for many things other than art. So, how is internet art to be distinguished from other things on the internet? What does this distinction mean for us as internet artists? Danto points us toward some possible answers. Briefly summarize these chapters and then try to address the question of what characteristics might qualify our work as internet art rather than a fancy personal web page or something else. Post this on the class wiki on the Responses and Summaries section. The pa55word for the wiki is arts341.

Three Ways to Think about Art is a chapter from Danto's book The Abuse of Beauty. (The book deals with why much art of the past century is not beautiful, but we're only concerned with a portion of what he says for this class.) Pay particular attention to the sections "What Do Museums Want" and "Artworks as Embodied Meanings. Ignore the markings on the pages in this aritcle; they were already in the book that I scanned. They don't necessarily indicate that a passage is important for our class.

Art and Meaning is a chapter from Theories of Art Today edited by Noel Carroll in which Danto clarifies some of his ideas about art's definition and its relationship to meaning.

22Jan
Discussion of Danto Readings.
Discussion of our personal experiences with the internet.
Intro to (X)HTML.
Some of the resources we used in class are the following:
List of HTML elements from W3
List of HTML tags from HTML Dog
List of CSS Properties From W3
List of CSS Properties from HTML Dog


24Jan
Continue intro to (X)HTML and CSS.
Review of last class.
Explanation of inline and block elements and span and div is here.
Text formatting, Saving images for the web, positioning with attributes and with CSS styles.

Short exercises to be completed before next class.
Make three web pages, one with images and two with text.  The text pages should have 9 words, in a 3x3 square.  The top-left should be the largest and boldest and the bottom right should be the smallest and lightest.  Make the first page using elements and attributes and make the second one using classes and properties.

The image page should have 6 images, two wide and three high.  They should get larger as you go down on the page. Use the same picture in at least two of the three rows (so you have to resize it using HTML)
Upload your pages to Netfiles (put them in the www folder) and send me an email with the URLs for the three pages (email address is at the top left of this page).
If the assignment is giving you trouble, check the HTML for the sample pages that we looked at in class.
position_intro
position2
position3
assignment example

Click here to read 10 Myths of Internet Art. (read before class on Monday. For your wiki entry, pick two of the myths and respond to them. One of the two you write about should be Myth1, Myth6, or Myth7. The other can be any myth you choose.)

We have a series of readings by and about Marshall McLuhan. Here are the links:
The Medium is the Message is the first chapter from McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Challenge and Collapse is another chapter from the same book.
Mapping McLuhan is an excerpt from New Media: A Critical Introduction which clarifies some of McLuhan's ideas.

Please read the first chapter by class on Monday and post a summary to the wiki. There are many people who disagree with McLuhan's idea that the medium is the message (we'll read a bit from one of his critics in the third reading above). Describe your position with respect to "the medium is the message" and explain either what is convincing in McLuhan's argument (if you agree with him) or what is wrong with his argument (if you disagree with him). If you disagree with him, what is the message if it's not the medium?

29Jan
Below are some links to resources to some of the topics discussed in class. There are many other resources available online if you have questions and your Visual Quickstart book also has information on all of these topics.

Creating links
More on creating links
Margins and Padding
Creating external stylesheets [toward the bottom of the page]
Pseudoclasses (Link, Visited, Active, Hover)


31Jan
Below is a list of the sites that we visited and discussed in class.
The Yes Men
Video of a lecture about Rtmark and the Barbie Liberation Organization
The Billboard Liberation Front
BLF Manual
California Department of Corrections
The Institute for Applied Autonomy
The Google AdWords Happening
Nikeground
Nikeground video

And here are the two sites we looked at in relation to your first assignment
Love or Lust
Tactics for Survival in the New Culture

5Feb
Here is an article about different categories of story shapes.
Look at work by the Oulipo such as Cent Mille Millards de Poemes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems)
John Chris Jones's The Phone.
( To find out a little more about it and to read some other interesting things, go to this page and look down for The Phone.)
Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War
Jogchem Niemansverdriet's Nobody Here.

This Dreamweaver File Management. guide will help you keep your files in order so Dreamweaver knows where to find them.
To upload to the server, either use the utility in Dreamweaver or use Cyberduck (Mac OS) or Filezilla for Windows.

Read Nonlinearity and Literary Theory for next Wednesday. Pay particular attention to page 762 and to the sections titled A Typology of Nonlinear Textuality and The Readerless Text. You can skim the rest of the chapter. Post a summary to the course wiki in which you discuss the following: 1) the difference between a non-linear text and a non-linear narrative; 2) the topological terms Aarseth uses, their meanings, and how they might relate to non-linguistic or partially linguistic work like what you might do as an internet artist; 3) the effect that textual non-linearity has on authorship and the relationship between author (artist) and reader (viewer).

7Feb Today your proposals for the first assignment are due in class.
Hypertext and narrative continued: we looked at two more pieces that deal with narrative and hypertext in internet art.
The Dumpster gives visual form to and gives viewers access to a vast database of blog entries that deal with relationships ending. It's easy to get lost in reading the stories.
Grandfather Gets a House is another multilinear narrative.

12Feb Attend Jim Campbell Lecture. Come to class first and then we'll head to the lecture, which starts at 5:00.

14Feb Today your site maps for the first assignment are due in class.
Today university classes were cancelled due to weather. Site maps will be due next class period.

19Feb Due to the Jim Campbell lecture last Monday and the snow day Wednesday, today will be about Authorship and Copyright issues.
Lawrence Lessig's lecture on free culture is here and here
Creative Commons lets you license your work in ways that allows for future creativity and growth. And they have a large database of works that have licenses that allow borrowing/sampling of some sort.
Here is a guide to copyright law for multimedia developers. This is one point of view.
This page from Negativeland has a very different point of view. There are a bunch of pretty interesting essays on this page.
The Evolution Control Committee addresses more copyright issues in interesting ways.
Illegal Art has a lot of mashups, video pieces, and other work that deals with and makes apparent copyright issues.
Here is a guide to fair use from Standford.

Discuss rollovers. Here is a page with examples of both text and image rollovers. Look at the page source to see notes and instructions, which are commented out (in green).

21Feb Today the final version of Assignment 1 should be online before class starts. Be sure to put a link to it on your home page for the class.

Watch "Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y"

Identity: Race, Gender, and Body in Cyberspace
Blackness for Sale by Kieth Obadike
The Pink of Stealth by Mendi and Kieth Obadike
Keeping Up Appearances by Mendi Obadike
Rent-A-Negro by Damali Ayo
Black People Love Us by Chelsea and Jonah Peretti (siblings)
        Read this article about it.

Read the text and then take the quizzes at AllLookSame
Get blessed at Blessed Bandwidth
Important Artist Demographics for Sale by Jeff Gates
Translate { } Expression by Tina La Porta

Exercise due next Wednesday, Feb 28 : Create a site consisting of four pages. On each page, the elements (they can be images or text) will be within tables and arranged so they make geometric forms. On page 1, the elements should make a square; on page 2, they should make a circle; on page 3 they should make a triangle, and on page 4 they should make some non-standard geometric shape. This isn't one of your large assignments for the semester, but make it more than just a technical exercise. At least make it about something.

Reading and Response due Monday, Feb 26
p. 19 through the end of Chapter 1 in Greene's Internet Art.
In Chapter 1, Rachel Greene discusses early internet-based art, from Russian net.art to cyberfeminism and telepresence. During the early years of internet art, the net was seen as a new kind of space in which to practice art, one with its own context that deeply affected the art that was made for it. Write 3 paragraphs or so about how the space of the internet differed from that of the rest of the contemporary art world and where they overlapped. Use examples from the book as well as your own ideas.

26Feb Formalism and Conceptualism in general
Wikipedia's entry on Conceptual Art is pretty good.
This is a good article about Simon Starling, a conceptual artist who has made headlines recently.
Conceptualist internet art? Most of what we've looked at this semester is conceptual internet art.
Sonke Ziesche has made many pieces linking conceptual art from the 60s and 70s with conceptual internete art.
Mark Callahan's piece, I.S.P. (Internet Soul Portraits)

Formalism
Is there such thing as formalist internet art?
Rhizome's tag search thinks so. But how many of these pieces are also tagged "conceptual"? Is there a contradiction here? Can you find pieces in this list that are really formalist? What about these? 1, 2, 3

Dreamweaver Layers and Transparency
http://www.art.uiuc.edu/courses/spring07/arts341m4/examples/layers/

Reading Assignment
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art and
Sentences on Conceptual Art, both by Sol LeWitt


28Feb Critiques of Assignment 1

5MarFInish critiques of Assignment 1
Discuss Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art

Making scrolling boxes

Read Lev Manovich's Database as a Symbolic Form and summarize for our discussion of it on Wednesday.


7MarDiscuss Manovich reading.
Here are two pages that discuss syntagm and paradigm: 1, 2
Some examples of database in internet art:
Bruno Latour's Paris: Invisible City
Josh On's They Rule
The Dumpster, which we looked at earlier in the semester
And Lev Manovich's essay about it.

Learn how to work with frames in HTML.
Example 1
Example 2

Your Site of the Week posts for this week and next week will be the following: One of them will be a review of one of your classmates' sites for the first project. Choose any of the sited created by your classmates and write a 3-paragraph or longer review of it. The other post will be a reivew of one of the three sites we looked at in class today. The links are a couple of lines above this line. All three of these have text that can help you process them and write, once again, 3 paragraphs or more about them. You can choose which to do this week and which to do next week, but do them both in the next two weeks.

Assignment: Use frames to create a single web page that juxtaposes historical events and/or figures in meaningful ways. The page should access and display various interlinked HTML files within its frames. The easiest way to approach this might be to make the individual HTML files independently and then make a frameset that displays them on the same page. This will be due the first class after Spring Break.

12Mar
Radical Software Group's Carnivore
and the same group's Police State
Yucef Merhi's Maximum Security
Heath Bunting's BorderXing
Surveillance Camera Players

14Mar
Frames work-around in Dreamweaver.

Opening windows with exact placement
Here is a description of how it works.
And another page with a few more details.

One-on-one discussion of ideas for Assignment 2.

Hand out mid-term progress reports.
See grading policy on the syllabus page.
Your weekly readings grade is composed of SOTW posts and reading responses.
Your class participation grade is composed of participation in class discussion and critiques as well as technical exercises and critique discussion questions.
The class attendance policy is also on the syllabus page.


Email Proposals for Assignment 3 before Saturday.

26MarHistorical Frame assignment due.
Intro to audio recording:
The Marantz PMD660 and its settings
File formats
Microphones (condensor vs. dynamic, pick-up patterns, etc)
Connectors
Here is a guide to field recording on some other page. Some of the information here might be useful.

Work on Assignment 3.

28Mar
Performance and Documentation (and some sound work), part 1:
Approximations/Contradictions by Ana Torfs
Learning to Love You More
Little Movies by Lev Manovich
American Idol Audition Training Blog by Marisa Olson
Theresa Gale (a former student here)
Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers
Cult of the New Eve by Critical Art Ensemble
Trevor Paglen and a video about him
Model Notes by Amos Latteier
Captain Kirk's Chair by MTAA
Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Female Extension (look for "English" at the top right)
Graffiti Archaeology
The Love Story Project
The Most Wanted Paintings by Komar & Melamid
360 Degrees
Arctic Circle

2AprCritiques of Assignment 2.
4AprAttend screening of The Tailenders
It is in room 112 of the Transportation Building at 7:00.
Here is a map to help you get to the Transportation Building.
Use the additional time you have to work on Assignment 3.

9AprSite maps for Assignment 3 due today.
Also due today is your sound recording exercise.

For the sound recording exercise, use the Marantz PMD660 and external mics appropriate for your material to record 2 of the following 3:
-Ambient/environmental sound in a space
-Voice/speech
-A specific, interesting sound that you try to isolate.
Upload the MP3 files to the server and put a link to them on your index page.

Today we will finish critiques of Assignment 2 and discuss basic audio editing in Audacity.


11Apr Embedding sound into web pages
Talk about proposals and maps for Assignment 3
Work on Assignment 3.

16AprAssignment 3 should be uploaded to the server before class today.
Proposals for Final Assignment also due today.

A few links to net art pieces using video and audio:
Peter Horvath's Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects
And an essay on it.
More Peter Horvath work
Somnambules
Stop Motion Studies by David Crawford
American Ghosts
Execute
28 Years
Danger
Arm Wrestle My Ego
Diagonale
ASCII rock videos
Dreamz
Body Language Sequences

18Apr

23Apr Intermediate progress check for final project. Site maps, etc.
Short demo: putting video in web pages. See samples here.
Work on final projects.
Scott McCloud lecture in the Krannert auditorium at 6:00 for those who want to leave a few minutes early.

25Apr

30Apr
2May Final Critiques today. Plan on staying late if needed