Welcome to Jon Ippolito's home page.
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This week Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito join forces for a series of presentations at USC organized by Craig Dietrich, Still Water Senior Researcher a...
Which is the oldest human record? In his keynote presentation to the National Symposium of Brazilian Cyberculture, Jon Ippolito argues it is lurking ...
The University of Maine is poised to launch an innovative graduate program in digital curation, beginning September 2012. The online, 18-credit curri...
Still Water’s co-directors are in the news this month in articles about an online song-and-story sampler and crowdfunding for indie movie proje...
Richard Rinehart, co-author with Still Water’s Jon Ippolito of the forthcoming MIT book New Media and Social Memory, presents conclusions from ...
Photo archivists and Twitter sociologists, guerilla gardeners and best-selling Kindle authors descend on Orono, Maine for the 2011 Digital Humanities...
For the last several years, Still Water Co-Directors Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito have been working with 20 other families to found an ecovillage on...
Still Water‘s archival tools were featured in a keynote at the Compatible Data conference organized by Micki McGee at Fordham University in New ...
Drawing on the forthcoming book New Media and Social Memory co-authored with Richard Rinehart, Jon Ippolito speaks on “Wind, Rain, and Ambient ...
John Bell and Jon Ippolito are featured participants for “Mobility Shifts,” part of the iDC (Institute for Distributed Creativity) forum ...
Jon Ippolito is a footsoldier in the battle between network and hierarchic cultures. You can find out more about his work via the links at left.
A synopsis of Jon's background follows. You can also find images and bios of different lengths at the Still Water press page.
Jon Ippolito is an artist, writer, and curator who has made a career of pursuing endeavors for which he is drastically underqualified. Trained as an astrophysicist, he later turned to art (via dance, Wing Chun, and a number of other irrelevant disciplines). He is a frequent co-conspirator with Joline Blais.
technology and culture
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. The gory details can be found in his cv.
adversarial collaborations
"There is no collaboration without competition." That is the premise of adversarial collaborations, works that foreground the conflict inherent in the collaborative process. While most other collectives present their work as a "unified front," adversarial collaborators like Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, and Jon Ippolito have created installations, books, and Internet projects that emphasize physical, verbal, or mental struggles among the participants. An exhibition history and bibliography appears in Jon's curriculum vitae. You can also see the artists haggle, argue, and throw things at each other at their Web site three.org. Be forewarned, however, that many of the works there are on life support due to technological obsolescence; it's taking longer to rescue them than it took to make them in the first place.
conceptual and process art
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. See his cv for more on this topic. plastic arts
Jon has exhibited, lectured on, and written about painting and other plastic media. You can find out more in--you guessed it--his cv.
Click here to view what is doubtless an out-of-date version of Jon's CV.
The Still Water press page includes biographies and images that you can use without permission.
You can reach Jon at ude.eniam@otiloppij. Note that this address may not work for email lists; please don't add me to any newsletters or lists without my permission.
Thanks!
Select a title at left to read the publication.
This book by Still Water co-founders Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito charts art's recent eruption in fields as diverse as artificial life, computer games, and community activism, revealing 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.
"A brilliantly designed, authoritative, and open-minded attempt to ground the slippery terrain of digital art"--ArtKrush.
More...
Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach (L'approche des mdias variables: la permanence par le changement) is the first book to present a coherent strategy for tackling the thorny issues of accelerated technical obsolescence in the digital age. Co-published by the Langlois Foundation and the Guggenheim Museum and edited by Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, this bilingual resource guide presents viewpoints, methods and case studies concerning the preservation of art created with non-traditional materials, tools and technologies. It includes texts by such authors as Bruce Sterling, Steve Dietz, Jon Ippolito, John Handhardt, and Nancy Spector, as well as excerpts from the 2001 "Preserving the Immaterial" conference.
Download for free... or request a hard copy from me or from the Langlois Foundation.
On three separate battlegrounds, dinosaurs fattened on broadcast economies threaten to trample the newer species evolving in today's electronic networks. In some cases this attempt is deliberate: Microsoftus Rex and TimeWarnerSaurus have little interest in encouraging the unimpeded evolution of media. In other cases, as I hope to show, even new media advocates--including many of you in this room--unwittingly buy into hierarchic models of preservation, property, or professorship that endanger the unfettered evolution of digital art...
Read more about this in the full text...
Art historian Clive Bell famously described the contrast between virtuosic and communal art production as "cold peaks" versus "snug foothills of warm humanity." High culture's anxiety about distributed culture has reached new levels thanks to the explosion of participatory media online. Drawing on themes from At the Edge of Art, Jon Ippolito asks what's lurking in those snug foothills that gets academics all hot and bothered?
Read more about this in the full text...
The gravest threat to the cultural survival of new media art may very well be its wall label. Few manacles on creativity have been as ubiquitous. Employed by curators everywhere, the wall label, along with the catalogue caption, has been joined in the past few decades by a younger generation of digital descriptors, the collection management record and online citation. Together this typographical dynasty has conspired to reduce every artwork, from the street happening to the stick spiral, to a single artist, date, medium, dimension, and collection.
While the reductionism of the wall label enfeebles conceptual and single-performance art, it threatens to obliterate digital culture completely. For new media art can survive only by multiplying and mutating. From computer-based installations to video multicasts, digital collaborations are the rule rather than the exception, and a work often undergoes changes in personnel, equipment, and scale as it diffuses across new media festivals, exhibitions, and web sites. Like a shark, a new media artwork must keep moving to survive.
Read more about this in the full text...
New-media artists who want their works to persevere have two diametrically opposed choices: to cast their work in traditional genres like ink or bronze, or to trust code to survive by means of its executability.
This talk examines an emerging field in which the contrast between these two alternatives is greatest: so-called artificial life, the creation with a computer of organisms that exhibit lifelike behavior and parallel experiments with animate 'wetware.'
Now, it's not at all obvious how to preserve art whose medium is self-replicating computer programs or E. coli. But these slippery media serve as a litmus test for two critical questions: whether static or dynamic forms of preservation are most likely to safeguard the future of art; and whether museums are up to the challenge.
Read more about this in the full text...
"The Politics of Perspective"
Talk by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito
cAT conference in Lisbon on July 6, 2000
Thanks for inviting us. Cornelia Solfrank spoke of her hope that online art would outgrow the myth of Net art as it existed in 1997. We are going to talk about some other myths that continue to plague online art, particularly in its narrative aspects. The myths we're thinking of reveal profound misunderstandings about what we might call the politics of perspective.
To choose a recent example: Mark Amerika, the dean of online hypertext, praised Shelley Jackson's _My Body: A Wunderkammer_ in the June-July 2000 issue of ArtByte magazine for "reconfiguring the reader of her patchwork narrative into an interactive participant whose own choices help construct the writer's story." What's wrong with this assertion?
Read more about this in the full text.
coming soon
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Cross Talk
Artbyte (New York) 3, no. 1 (May-June 2000), pp. 22-23
Whatever happened to the gift economy?
Last November, when the online retailer eToys.com sued the artist-run Web site etoy.com for trademark infringement, all I could think of was John's WordPerfect macros. Back in the days when I logged onto the Internet with my trusty 2400 bps modem, John's WordPerfect macros cropped up in all sorts of Web sites and Usenet groups, where they always came free of banner ads, usage fees, or any other quid-pro-quos. They were just there for the taking, and if "John" got anything back for distributing them so widely, it was something intangible like public prestige or personal satisfaction. In other words, John's WordPerfect macros were a gift.
When I hear people like Vint Cerf claim that "We all know the Internet didn't explode until it became a commercial enterprise" (Wired 8.01), it makes me wonder whether they are unintentionally or deliberately forgetting the gift economy that nurtured the early Internet. In 1973, when Cerf was working on the TCP/IP protocol that currently underlies all online transactions, his paycheck came not from some forward-thinking corporation but from the Defense Advance Research Project Administration, whose DARPAnet was the forerunner of today's Internet. Building on this taxpayer-funded infrastructure, the scientists and programmers who really "exploded" the Internet e-mailed ideas and FTP'd freeware into the ether without expecting an immediate payback. MUDs and MOOs, open source projects, and copylefted software each offered a different paradigm for online collaboration. When newbies like me saw so much free advice and software available online, we felt encouraged--sometimes even obligated--to contribute some of our own. As the code-sharing community snowballed, corporations added their own contributions to this economy: Netscape wrote JavaScript, Microsoft refined DHTML, and Macromedia brought us Shockwave. Aside from these enhancements, however, the primary effect of the growing corporate infatuation with the Internet has been banner ads, junk e-mail, online shopping carts--and trademark litigation...
Read more about this in the full text.
Cross Talk
Artbyte (New York) 2, no. 6 (March-April 2000), pp. 24-25.Does the art world really "get" the Internet?
To thumb through the pages of this magazine, you'd think that the art world was especially hip to Internet culture. It's true that artists were among the first to colonize cyberspace; in 1995 8% of Web sites were produced by artists, and this growing cyber-avant-garde has remained at the leading edge ever since. Unfortunately, there's a big gap between Internet art afficionados and their offline brethren. Pick up the January 2000 issue of ArtNews and you'll find a 15-page cover article on art in cyberspace--without a single mention of art made for the Internet. For the typical artist, curator, or collector, "online art" means the scanned-in oil paintings hawked at NextMonet or Sothebys.com. I suppose that's no worse than the editors of Time magazine on the eve of the millennium choosing an online book retailer as Man of the Year--but then again that's like saluting Henry Ford because he found a more efficient way to deliver buggy whips...
It's tempting to blame this technological myopia on studio and art history degree programs for not including electronic media in their curricula. But a lot of artists using electronic media don't "get" the Internet either. Most of the video and computer-driven installations in museums these days employ expensive projectors and top-of-the-line computers to surround the viewer with sublime vistas or dazzling effects. Online artists, on the other hand, cannot possibly aspire to the sensory immersion of cinema or the processing power of Silicon Graphics, because their work has to squeeze through the 14.4 kbs modem of a dairy farmer sitting at his 386 in Iowa City. Sure, Bill Gates claims we'll all soon have wall-sized Internet projections and T1s in our living rooms--but until we do, the constraint on bandwidth can actually work to the advantage of Internet artists, encouraging them to strive for distributed content rather than linear narrative and for conceptual elegance rather than theatrical overkill. Making successful art for the Internet isn't just a matter of learning the right tools, but also of learning the right attitude...
Read more about this in the full text.
Cross Talk
Artbyte (New York) 2, no. 5 (January-February 2000), pp. 28-29
Should some code be censored?
KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BE ADVANCED AT ALL COSTS--Jenny Holzer, Truisms
Pressures to "clean up" the Internet have receded from the public eye lately, displaced by Bill Clinton's post-Littleton call for video game manufacturers to cut back on virtual decapitations and Rudolph Giuliani's jihad against risqu religious paintings at the Brooklyn Museum. There is even some evidence that the pendulum of public policy regarding the Internet may be swinging back in the direction of unfettered access, as suggested by the New York City school system's apologetic response to criticism that its family filter hindered student research. But if the clamor for overt, %de jure% Internet censorship is dying down, a tacit, %de facto% censorship seems to be quietly taking its place. Now that more and more of the Web is being shaped by a corporate bottom line instead of government-sponsored research, the academic model of freely exchanged information is giving way to a mercenary calculation of potential gains and losses. What if visitors follow one of your links to another site, are upset by what they find there, and sue you for directing them, intentionally or not, towards offensive or illegal material? If you're not getting paid to link to someone else's site, lawyers argue, why run the risk?
It's not hard to imagine similar threats of litigation aimed at online art. The Web site mockeries and misdirections perpetrated by Heath Bunting, (r)(tm)ark [NOTE: Registered symbol followed by Trademark symbol], and other online pranksters have already kept a few corporate lawyers employed writing cease-and-desist letters. Mattel told artist Mark Napier he was personally liable when he displayed distorted images of Barbie on his Web site. Of course, these interventions represent political stances that the artists themselves have chosen, and hence are candidates for free-speech protection. But other online artworks take a special risk that could only arise in a programmable language like cgi or Javascript--a liability that is not personal, but algorithmic...
Read more about this in the full text.
coming soon
Artbyte (New York) 2, no. 3 (September-October 1999), pp. 28-29
Whatever happened to the scary cyborg?
Back in 1985, when James Cameron's original Terminator drove through police stations and shot up night clubs, Donna Haraway proclaimed that the figure of the cyborg would destabilize our stereotype-ridden culture. Now, Star Trek's Seven of Nine is taking dancing lessons and going on dates, yet new media theorists who still parrot Haraway's assertion seem not to have noticed how easily the cyborg has been co-opted by old media. Contemporary movies, TV, and comic books portray cyborgs as efficient, strong, reticent, good with firearms, and willing to risk their lives to get the job done. The human protagonists of these action and science-fiction genres, by contrast, are efficient, strong, reticent, good with firearms, and willing to risk their lives to get the job done. So much for subverting stereotypes.
Truth, however, can be stranger than fiction. In November of 1995, Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles published a paper in the journal Science that documented a truly disturbing hybrid of the organic and the artificial. Adleman's cyborg bore little resemblence to terminators or borgs: it had no arms, legs, head, skin, or personality, but neither did it have silicon chips or a metal endo- or exoskeleton. It didn't even have a solid form. Adleman's cyborg was simply a few drops of DNA in a test tube. But Adleman's DNA could compute.
Read more about this in the full text.
Cross Talk
Artbyte (New York) 2, no. 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 26-27
Do we want convergence?
Cable-modem pitchmen boast downloads ten or a hundred times faster than ordinary copper-wire modems. WebTV advocates talk of connecting billions of people who can't afford computers to the Internet via their televisions. Microsoft is pitching its scaled-down version of Windows, known as CE, as the operating system of choice for everything from palmtops to automobile navigation systems to toasters. Cisco Systems and other routers are at work on "Internet 2.0," a protocol whereby the same phone line would carry voice, fax, voicemail, and e-mail simultaneously.
I don't know about you, but this kind of talk scares the hell out of me. It's not that I have a particular affection for glacial downloads or dumb appliances; it's just that the "advantages" offered by these particular models of convergence are asymmetric. Cable download speeds *are* blistering; cable upload speeds are not. Bringing the Web to TV *would* encourage more poor people to surf the Internet, but in migrating from desk to den the cyberspace portal would move from a place reserved for work to a place reserved for passive consumption. Having my toaster hooked up to the Internet would tell me nothing about GE--but it could tell them quite a bit about me. And unlike the old, democratic IP switches, which couldn't distinguish between an AT&T commercial and e-mail from your brother-in-law, the current designs for Internet 2.0 routers would prioritize some traffic over others, so that companies can bill them separately at different rates. All of this means a lower percentage of netizens making Web pages and sending e-mail, and a higher percentage channel-surfing a push-driven Internet on the same box as NBC and CNN. Let's face it: the average couch potato, if left on the couch, will choose a TV dinner over a keyboard any day.
Read more about this in the full text.
Cross Talk
Artbyte (New York) 2, no. 1 (April-May 1999), pp. 22-23
Deconstruction or Distraction?
Cascading sheets of green ASCII text over a black screen, flashing 404 error messages, proliferating form buttons and text boxes--this is what awaits the unsuspecting first-time visitor to jodi.org, perhaps the single best-known artist Web site today. The brainchild of "net.art" charter members Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, jodi strip away the reassuring navigation bars and identifiable pictograms of the everyday Web site to let loose the HTML behind the facade. Feel free to click on what looks like a help button, but don't be surprised if your browser *shows* you the code for that button instead of executing it. Feel free to vent your frustration in a text box on the site, but don't be surprised if jodi's code pounces on your sentence, eats the vowels, and spits a skeleton of consonants back in your face. With its indeciferable interface, unpredictable sequences of links, and simulated error messages, jodi.org is a theme park of computer misbehavior. "Deconstruction or distraction?" is actually the second question viewers are likely to ask themselves once they visit jodi.org. The first is, "Has my computer just crashed?"
But the question of meaning lingers. Is there anything to be learned from these HTML hijinks? What does jodi's blinking HTML mean that the same code working behind the scenes on another Web site doesn't? For now let's leave aside the question of whether the programming itself is an art form, and concentrate instead on jodi's peculiar habit of unleashing that programming from its typical function. In the extreme form, this can mean merely quoting the raw code itself. In such cases it's important to remember that a viewer is most likely to find out about jodi.org not at a site designed to teach HTML, but at such online art resources like Rhizome or Nettime. By exposing naked <HEADER> and <BOLD> tags in an art arena, jodi appear to be displaying the electronic equivalents of Duchamp's bicycle wheel and urinal: readymade mechanisms transformed into art by context.Read more about this in the full text.
Cross Talk
Artbyte (New York) 1, no. 6 (February-March 1999), pp. 16-17
Should you feel guilty turning off the computer?
I recently dreamt I was on the subway. When my train stopped at Bergen Street, a toddler who had been in my car wandered out the door alone. I ran to the door and called out, "Does anyone know this boy's mother?" I really wanted to get home, but I felt obligated to go after him. Somehow in my semi-waking state I realized I was in a dream--and as the train door began to close, I wondered whether I still had a responsibility to step off and find the boy, given that it was only a dream.
I imagine that Tom Ray asks himself a similar question whenever he turns off his computer. A zoologist at the University of Oklahoma, Ray is best known as the creator of the Tierra project. Tierra is an experiment in artificial life that has been described as a wildlife sanctuary for computer viruses. To create this digital habitat, Ray wrote snippets of program code designed to copy themselves and then left them on