Spike #70 — Surf Clubs (2003–)

By Charles Broskoski & Constant Dullaart. Spike Art Magazine #70, "Exhibition Histories" series, pages 38–47. PDF: sources/ingested/spike-70-surf-clubs-dullaart-broskoski.pdf. Source: constantdullaart.com.

Note the distinction from sources/ingested/spike-70-harm-van-den-dorpel.md — a different article in the same issue.

The editors' framing

First appearing in 2003, surf clubs were blogs to exchange artworks, texts, images, hyperlinks, sounds – often found materials from the nascent expanses of Google and Yahoo. Though some are still around, the format had its heyday in the early aughts, when the informal exchange of weird multimedia as "research" solidified the spirit of a new online culture, and with it, a community of artists that spawned into something now defined as Post-Internet. Embracing the shift to Web 2.0, surf clubs celebrated the idiosyncrasies of early web culture, before mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and filter bubbles darkened the waters.

The window

Dullaart dates the conditions precisely. Google Images launched in 2001; the iPhone arrived in 2007; Facebook opened signups beyond US universities on 26 September 2006. Supercentral and Nasty Nets both started in 2006, "in what seems to be a perfect media storm, to facilitate informal publishing, information-swapping, and exchange between artists." Filter bubbles did not exist yet, so "the sheer amount of media, of all sorts of quality, often seemed overwhelming."

Broskoski adds the counterpoint — that the exhaustion had not yet set in, and that the absence of personalisation is what made the digging worth anything:

It's similar to the mentality one has at a thrift store or a used book shop. It's not just about finding the diamond in the rough, but finding the thing that was important to you, to your own ongoing practice. Looking back at the archives of these surf clubs, it's clear that everyone had their own style, and the more idiosyncratic, the better.

He calls it "this Goldilocks zone where there was a ton of content – not so much as overwhelming as today – and most of it tended to be pretty weird."

del.icio.us as the actual network

Both attribute the community's formation to social bookmarking rather than to the blogs themselves.

I remember posting in 2006 to the weblog Squeakyfrom run by Hamy Caldwell and me. Harm van den Dorpel joined it briefly and later turned me on to the social bookmarking service del.icio.us, and I got to see all these people who had found posts on the blog I made, and had tagged my homepage. There was an instant sense of community when I got to see their online works and bookmarks. I remember seeing Petra Cortright bookmarking her dentist. — Constant Dullaart

Broskoski came to it through Cory Arcangel's class at Parsons, initially found the tagging "corny," and tagged his early bookmarks in an intentionally unhelpful way. He met John Michael Boling through it. On geography:

I distinctly remember not caring at all where someone was from, it only mattered to me how "good", probably a shorthand for unique, I thought their work or perspective was. I have vague recollections of coming across some of our European friends on del.icio.us, Harm van den Dorpel, Aleksandra Domanović, Jan Robert Leegte, Ola Vasiljeva.

He also describes the attempt "to have some of their own activity be somehow more formal than the rest of the casual bookmarking that went on – trying to figure out where the line was between research and Curation (with a capital C)."

Ownership, before the NFT

Dullaart recalls the Rhizome archiving of Nasty Nets, undertaken against the risk of hacking (which happened) or of someone forgetting to renew the domain, and the question of whether members were comfortable with it:

I remember Chris Coy [seecoy] saying that all the work had been posted with the understanding that it would belong to everyone as soon as it was online, and everyone could do with it whatever they wanted – almost the opposite of the current attitude towards the commodification of digital files as NFTs.

Broskoski traces the ethos to file sharing: "maybe it started with people growing up with file sharing websites like Napster, Kazaa, and LimeWire, realising that all intellectual property was up for grabs when digitised. We are taking things from people, so we expect people to take things from us. A real abundance mindset."

The move into physical space

Broskoski states the earlier position and its collapse in one sentence:

There was definitely a time immediately prior where there was a kind of political stance – or at least I felt like this – that showing in a gallery or physical space was degrading and an inevitable mistranslation of the work, which was ideally meant to be seen by someone in their bedroom at 2 a.m. with a million other browser tabs open. The whole premise was that a work should be stumbled upon.

Dullaart records two 2009 Amsterdam shows on the other side of that line. One was built on del.icio.us, exhibiting artists' bookmarked research alongside the finished works, with several works released simply by being bookmarked by specific people; Guthrie Lonergan's Floor Warp (2008) was in it, and the press release was published in the style of the scrolling Star Wars introduction. The other, Versions, took the comment — on a YouTube video, on a Nasty Nets post — as a medium for artworks, and was curated with Annet Dekker and Petra Heck at NiMK, the Dutch media art institute now closed. Dullaart selected several Nasty Nets posts for it and describes the difficulty: "It felt inappropriate to bring these gestures into an art exhibition, somehow – as if these works never wanted to be shown within the traditional context."

He names the transitional format: so-called "dual sites" like Mike Ruiz's Future Gallery and Extra Extra, one of whose founders, Daniel Wallace, went on to open American Medium, "where exhibitions would have both a strong online and physical component, dealing with this dichotomy."

Boon and wake

Spirit Surfers, one of the clubs that is still active, categorises their posts in "boon" and "wake". I understood this as the difference between the thing of beauty that was found online while surfing – an image or a bit of information – and the journey towards a thing. In my eyes, it enabled thinking about an entire conversation as an artwork, instead of a single argument, piece or comment. — Constant Dullaart

Flattening research into the work

Broskoski's example is Aleksandra Domanović's Biennale (Dictum Ac Factum) (2009). He lays out the release formats by descending formality: buying a domain that is the title of the piece; a directory under your own site; least formal, an HTML page at the root, "the equivalent of leaving cables strewn all over the gallery floor." Domanović made a labour-intensive 3D animation, embedded it on such a page, and put all her reference material on the same page.

Just the way everything was so flattened. All of the research and references and the final piece were all placed on the same level, as if they were the same thing. I still think it is an amazing gesture, especially now that half the links are broken.

He closes by generalising the practice, quoting Virgil Abloh: "the process is the practice, the artifacts are just the side effects."

Author biographies (verbatim)

CHARLES BROSKOSKI is one of the many co-founders of Are.na, a platform for connecting ideas and building knowledge. He was webmaster of the surf club Supercentral and contributing member of Nasty Nets.

CONSTANT DULLAART's practice includes online performances, custom routers, startups, armies, and redistributed found images, to reflect on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies. He was contributing member of Nasty Nets and curator for Club Internet.

Other names appearing

Guthrie Lonergan (on Google search parameters and insecure private directories); Petra Cortright; Chris Coy; Cory Arcangel; John Michael Boling; Damon Zucconi; Olia Lialina and JODI by way of the wider net-art lineage; Javier Morales (cover artwork for the Nasty Nets DVD, 2008); Hamy Caldwell (co-runner of Squeakyfrom); Annet Dekker and Petra Heck (co-curators of Versions); Mike Ruiz (Future Gallery); Daniel Wallace (Extra Extra, later American Medium); Domenico Quaranta is not mentioned here but curated for Club Internet.