Jon Ippolito is an artist, educator, new media scholar, and former curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Ippolito studied astrophysics and painting in the early 1980s, then pursued Internet art in the 1990s. His works explore digitally-induced collaboration and networking, a theme that is prominent in his later scholarship.
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History
After applying to what he thought was a position as a museum guard, Jon was hired in the curatorial department of the Guggenheim, where in 1993 he curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and subsequent exhibitions that explore the intersection of contemporary art and new media. In 2002 Jon joined the faculty of the University of Maine's New Media Department, where he co-founded Still Water with Joline Blais. His writing on the cultural and aesthetic implications of new media has appeared in the Washington Post, Art Journal, and numerous sleazy art magazines, including in a regular "Cross Talk" column for ArtByte magazine.
Jon also has an abiding interest in the legacy for today's artists of the work of John Cage as well as conceptual practices of the 1960s and 1970s. His contributions to this subject include curating events for the New York presentation of Rolywholyover A Circus for museum by Cage. He is particularly interested in the parallel between digital art and Minimalist and Conceptual art, a parallel that led him to propose a new paradigm for preserving art called the Variable Media Network. [1]
Projects
Often working collaboratively, Ippolito’s work traverses digital art, new media, and community building. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Maine’s New Media Department where he teaches classes on programming, online culture, issues of variable media, and viral media. With Joline Blais, he co-founded Still Water, a lab devoted to studying and building creative networks.
Still Water, a New Media lab at the University of Maine at Orono, was founded in 2002 by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito to promote network art and culture. Although the program's title derives from the name of a river that flows alongside the physical facility, "still water" also connotes the values electronic and cultural networks need to thrive.
These include transparency, open access to ideas and code; variability, the capacity to morph into new configurations as the need arises; and stillness, a rare quality in today's frenetic culture but one demanded by any creative endeavor. Still Water is not a center--for a successful network has none--but a medium primed for the transmission of multiple waves of culture.
In the 1990s, Ippolito worked with artists Janet Cohen and Keith Frank creating works that exposed the adversarial side of collaboration (Agree to Disagree and the Unreliable Archivist). During this time he also curated the Worlds of Nam June Paik and Virtual Reality: an Emerging Medium at the Guggenheim.
Recently Ippolito has been working with collaborators John Bell and Craig Dietrich on digital tools. These projects include the distributed publication tool ThoughtMesh, a 2005 Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular commission that has grown to include conference proceedings, poetry, and full length books. ThoughtMesh is an unusual model for publishing and discovering scholarly papers online. Created by Jon Ippolito and Craig Dietrich, it gives readers a tag-based navigation system that uses keywords to connect excerpts of essays published on different Web sites.
Add your essay to the mesh, and ThoughtMesh gives you a traditional navigation menu plus a tag cloud that enables nonlinear access to text excerpts. You can navigate across excerpts both within the original essay and from related essays distributed across the mesh. So let's say you are reading an essay on Modern art. You can pick a single word out of that essay's tag cloud--say Picasso--and view a list of all the sections from that essay that relate to Picasso. Or you can view a list of sections of other articles tagged with Picasso, and jump right to one of those sections. You can also combine tags to narrow your search, such as Picasso + Cubism + 1900.
As an author, you can choose to post your essay in a central repository hosted by the Vectors program at USC, the sponsor of this project. Or you can self-archive your essay on your own Web site. (That's the "distributed publication" part.) Stemming from research into variable media at the Guggenheim, the team is producing the Variable Media Questionnaire and a new art metaserver. Ippolito and collaborators, including Bell, Blais, and Owen Smith, developed The Pool, an online project design workspace noted by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a "new avenue for new-media scholars to do their jobs." The Pool is a collaborative online environment for creating art, code, and texts. In place of the single-artist, single-artwork paradigm favored by the overwhelming majority of documentation systems, The Pool stimulates collaboration in a variety of forms, including multi-author, asynchronous, and cross-medium projects. [2]
The MARCEL project, formed by a group of international experts from art, science and industry under the general direction of Don Foresta (Fine Arts School of Wimbledon (UK), Fine Arts School of Cergy (FR)), provides a portal site for art, science, and industry. Recognizing the need for collaboration between artists, artistic establishments and the public and private sectors in building a permanent high band-width network for artistic experimentation, MARCEL has involved ASAP to help build a portal site for organizing and coordinating a permanent art and cultural network. To further high-bandwidth experiments, the Still Water lab has purchased and installed additional equipment for Internet 2, with proposed persistent connection to the Collaborative Media Lab. Still Water and ASAP have collaborated on numerous international MARCEL events, helping to connect artists and scientists from Montreal to Prague.
The Maine Intellectual Commons Web site includes up-to-date information on the progress toward these initiatives as well as archives from the University of Maine's 2004 Conference on the Intellectual Commons, featuring MIT's Hal Abelson, Creative Commons Neeru Paharia, and SPARC's Peter Suber. The goal of this broad-reaching initiative is to establish standards for creative and scholarly research that contribute to a culture of sharing rather than hoarding.
Mind Sets, an exhibition proposal for the Guggenheim museum, attempts to create a miniature Internet--a glimpse behind the computer screen at the vertiginous matrix of information that holds our society together. The exhibition design, by the New York-based architecture firm LOT/EK, fills Frank Lloyd Wright's rotunda with a metal lattice, allowing visitors for the first time in the building's history to walk out into the cavernous interior.
The selection and placement of the projects on view would be determined by visitors' choices rather than by a predetermined curatorial agenda.
Publications
With Joline Blais, Ippolito produced the book At the Edge of Art. The book examines prominent new media artwork and artists, such as Alexander R. Galloway and jodi, arguing that the confines of the established art world are failing to recognize the home–grown and often ephemeral art found online. The book creates a metaphor between digital art and the human immune system, relating the auto-immune response to the important role of art in society.
In addition Ippolito has published over a dozen book chapters and over forty print articles in a range of outlets such as the Washington Post, Artforum, and Leonardo. He has also presented at numerous academic and culture venues including the National Academies, NASA, and the American Assembly.
At the Edge of Art
Far from the studios and galleries that sheltered art in past centuries, creative people sitting at computer keyboards are tearing apart and rebuilding their society's vision of itself. Though they may call themselves scientists, activists, or hackers rather than poets or performers, today's electronic visionaries are redefining art for the Internet age. Art's recent eruption in fields as diverse as artificial life, computer games, and community activism reveals a seismic shift in the role it plays in society. No longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block, these works infiltrate stock markets, sway court cases, and network bedrooms, reaching across the globe to expand the edge of art. But is every instance of creativity, from shrewd e-commerce ventures to clever toy designs, equally valid as art? Has the distinction between art and non-art become irrelevant in an age when art and science, commerce and fashion are all whipped together in the global culture blender we call the Internet? The answer is no, though the reason has little to do with the traditional rationales for defining art, be they to distinguish high and low culture or to validate creative programs in academic settings. Art may be temporarily out of place, but society needs to make a place for it. Because society needs art to survive.
Each of the six main chapters in At the Edge of Art charts a different edge of creative expression that has emerged during the Internet age.
- Code As Muse
- Deep Play
- Autobiography
- Designing Politics
- Reweaving Community
- Preserving Artificial Life
Apart from examining a new genre of creative expression, each of the six main chapters in At the Edge of Art also examines a different function performed by art of that genre. The book's central metaphor suggests that these functions are analogous to those performed by the antibodies in the human bloodstream, leading to the provocative conclusion that art is an immune system for the collective unconscious.
- Perversion
- Arrest
- Revelation
- Execution
- Recognition
- Perseverance
Dialogs
- Interview of Jon Ippolito by Karen Verschooren
- "Artificial Life and Natural Death," discussion with Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, New Media and Social Memory, University of California, Berkeley, January 18, 2007
- "How to Hack Copyright for Fun and Profit," Open Source Culture Lecture Series, Columbia University, New York, December 2, 2004.
- "Creators and the Commons: Why and How To Share" at Conference on the Intellectual Commons, University of Maine, November 20, 2004.
- Interview by Dominico Quaranta, "Leaping into the abyss and resurfacing with a pearl," Noema (Ravenna, Italy) (November 2005).
- Interview by Liisa Ogburn, "What's Your Story: Jon Ippolito," Eatthesewords.com, October 2, 2001.
Writings
- At the Edge of Art
- Permanence Through Change
- Three Threats to the Survival of New Media
- Canon Fodder: Why Distributed Culture Makes Academics Nervous
- Death by Wall Label
- Can Museums Evolve as Fast as Their Assets?
- The Politics of Perspective
- Whatever Happened to the Gift of Economy?
- Does the Art World Really 'Get' the Internet?
- Should Some Code be Censored
- Whatever Happened to the Scary Cyborg?
- Do we want Convergence
- Deconstruction or Distraction?
- Should you Feel Guilty Turning off the Computer
- Is Cyberspace Really a Space?
- What Does Cyberspace Look Like?
- Intellectual Property or Intellectual Poverty?
- The Museum of the Future: A Contradiction in Terms?
- "Given: The Universe. Shown: Every Artwork"
- Looking for Art in All the Wrong Places
- The Art of Misuse
- An Open Letter on Dot-Museum
- Whose Opera is it, Anyway?
- Why Art Should be Free
- Who Controls New Media
- Missing Links
- Artist as Researcher
Notes
- ^ http://www.three.org/ippolito/
- ^ Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education May 30, 2008.
External links
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