Articles

Major labels got you art direction. Indie rappers got Pen & Pixel to photoshop them on to a pile of gold holding a Glock.

By analysing a series of exhibition projects responding to central changes in web technology since its public unveiling (1991), this study identifies a historical trajectory for discussing the evolution of curating on the web. Such evolution highlights how curators have devised exhibition models that operate as platforms for not only displaying art specific to the web, but also for producing and disseminating it in a way that responds to the developments of web technology—and its socio-cultural and economic impact. With the massification of web tools, in fact, these platforms have generated distributed systems of artistic production free from the physical and conceptual limitations of the gallery and museum space. They have not only become spaces for displaying art, but also platforms that nurture its production, different modes of audience engagement and critique the canons of the institutionalised art world. Originating from the desire to reduce the historical fragmentation of this field of work and its partial mapping, this study follows a periodisation that starts from the early internet, with its BBS-enabled platforms such as ARTEX (1980), to introduce the 1990s experimentations with the web browser and the developments of projects like äda’web (1995). It then dives into the Web 2.0 when, with the platformisation of the technology, curators developed an array of approaches for adopting existing web services, as in the instances of CuratingYouTube (2007–present) and #exstrange (2017). Lastly, it outlines the trends of today’s web, which saw the birth of projects like the blockchain-enabled cointemporary (2014), to then draw conclusions about the relevance of this historical trajectory in the field of curatorial studies and the production of web-based and digital art.

Why the dark forests of the internet — podcasts, newsletters, and other private channels — are growing, and why might that pose a problem

Desprez’s 121 engravings illustrate garbs supposedly found the world over in 1562, worn by humans and monsters alike.

Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Katie Sisneros explores this interplay of repetition, context, and meaning, and how in it can be seen a parallel to meme culture of today.

Posted on Thursday 5 Sep 2024. 1,133 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

A guide on turning your diary into dollars.

"People who are not Trump supporters might see him as clownish, but among the group that he's speaking to, they trust him." A disinfo researcher on how people's realities aren't shaped by facts, but by niche celebrities and online.

My endless battle with the "Project Hydra": why I can't seem to finish projects, and the strategies I'm exploring to finally complete what I start. A personal journey through productivity's thorniest challenge.

One holiday snap has been manipulated thousands of times on thousands of computers. Gordon Comstock on how a woman on a beach in Bora Bora taught the world to tinker with pictures

We have conditioned ourselves and each other to believe that artists, musicians, writers, inventors and creators must orient themselves as entrepreneurial go-getters - monetising their work into startups, small businesses or branded products. This myth of the creator-entrepreneur radically narrows d

There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy.

One of my portfolio companies raised a round a few months ago and I left their board. So, for the first time in a long time, I am not on any boards of directors. Since I no longer have anyone speci…

Between July and October of this year, I did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook—and the internet more broadly—in the

A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.

Then Life Continued

The fun little service omg.lol is the new hotness on micro.blog and seems to be seeping out into the wider internet. Not only is it ridiculously cheap for what you get, the developer Adam seems to be making constant updates and offering more and more value for money.

Analyze server access logs to view the subscriber count from popular RSS readers.

These are 47 of the best blogging platforms where you can start your site in 2020, publish amazing content and build your audience. It’s easier than ever to start a site and create your online home.

If you enjoyed the old web of the 90s and 00s; if you love tinkering with your personal website; or if you just like quirky, fun things on the internet, you will love this.

There are two ways that I know of to customize the footer on a Write.as website. The first one is through CSS and the second one is throu...

Promising to make you look wired and magically promote your content in social networks, the Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons occupy a good spot on pretty much every page of the World Wide Web. Because o

My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]

A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.