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NET-ART Required Readings – Full Update

Required Reading and Resource Familiarity

Updated June 5th 2026 – (the page itself is here)

Welcome back to yet another major update to the Net-Art website.. your summer reading has been assigned.

This is a living list. Please help us add to it! Resources are grouped by territory rather than chronology, because the work this course covers now spans too many adjacent practices to manage as a single flat list. Skim what is unfamiliar. Bookmark what is useful. Email or comment with additions and corrections.

Academic Essays, Critical Writing, and Scholarly Hubs

For students, researchers and practitioners who want the deeper reading. A curated set of foundational and current essays on net art, post-internet practice, AI image culture, and the politics of the screen, plus the hubs where ongoing critical writing actually lives. Most of what follows is freely available on the open web. A few items are behind academic paywalls and worth knowing about even if you cannot read them today.

  • Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-flux journal #10, 2009): one of the most-cited essays of the past fifteen years on digital images, compression, circulation, and the politics of resolution.
  • Olia Lialina, “A Vernacular Web” (2005): the foundational essay on the visual and structural culture of the pre-Web 2.0 internet, by one of net art’s earliest and most enduring voices.
  • Olia Lialina, “Turing Complete User” (2012): a defense of the user as a category in an era of platform-mediated computing. Pairs naturally with “A Vernacular Web.”
  • Gene McHugh, “Post Internet” (2009-2010, restored by Rhizome in 2019): the blog that introduced the term “post-internet” into critical discourse, preserved and re-presented as part of the Net Art Anthology.
  • Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet” (2010): a key statement of the post-internet position, arguing that an image and its physical instantiation should be treated as continuous rather than separate objects.
  • Lev Manovich: long-time theorist of new media, software studies, and AI culture. His full essay archive lives at manovich.net and is freely downloadable. Start with “The Language of New Media” (book) and his more recent writing on AI and cultural analytics.
  • e-flux journal essays on AI and image culture: extensive recent writing by Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Joanna Zylinska, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Yuk Hui and others on machine vision, generative imagery, and the politics of synthetic media. Browse the journal archive by year for current writing.
  • Rhizome Editorial: Rhizome’s ongoing editorial archive, with substantial critical writing by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, Ceci Moss, and others on net art history, preservation, and current practice.
  • Outland: the most sustained serious critical writing on crypto art, on-chain practice, and decentralized culture as it actually unfolds.
  • Institute of Network Cultures (Geert Lovink et al.): ongoing academic publishing on network culture, platform critique, and digital labor. Many books are free PDF downloads.
  • Monoskop: a remarkable open archive of art and media theory texts, with an enormous library of out-of-print and otherwise hard-to-find scholarly material on net art, conceptual art, and media theory.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935): not net art, but the essay every conversation about reproducibility, aura, AI generation, and digital copies eventually circles back to. Many translations are freely available online; the Marxists Internet Archive hosts one at marxists.org.
  • Public Books: serious accessible criticism on technology, image culture, and contemporary art, written by academics for general readers.
  • Logic(s) Magazine: critical writing on technology, labor, and culture from a left perspective, with frequent crossover into art and image politics.
  • Real Life: essays on living with technology, including the visual and design dimensions, archived since 2016 (note: the publication paused in 2022 but the archive remains a significant resource).

A note on access. e-flux journal, Rhizome, Outland, Public Books, Logic, Real Life, and Monoskop are all open access. Many academic journals (October, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, New Media and Society) sit behind institutional paywalls. If you are a CUNY student or faculty member, the CUNY library system gives you access to most of those. If you are not affiliated with a university, the Internet Archive Scholar at scholar.archive.org and Google Scholar are reasonable starting points for tracking down open versions of paywalled work.

 

Continued -> More Net-Art History and Critical Writing

Foundational and ongoing context for where the practice came from and where it is going.

  • Rhizome: the longest-running organization devoted to born-digital art, affiliated with the New Museum. Editorial archive, commissions, scholarship, and digital preservation work.
  • Rhizome Net Art Anthology: one hundred restored works of net art with critical essays, organized chronologically from the 1980s through the present.
  • UBU WEB: Kenneth Goldsmith’s vast free archive of avant-garde film, video, sound, and writing. Still one of the most essential resources on the open web.
  • e-flux journal: the leading critical journal on contemporary art, frequently engaging with digital, networked, and AI-era practice.
  • Outland: a publication dedicated to crypto and blockchain art criticism, the most serious sustained writing on the subject.
  • The Wrong Biennale: a recurring international online biennial that maps active net art and digital art practice across hundreds of pavilions and embassies worldwide.
  • Beyond New Media Art: Domenico Quaranta’s writing and reading lists on contemporary digital and post-internet art.

 

AI as Creative Collaborator

The category that did not exist five years ago. Treat these as collaborators, not as oracles. Document what you keep and what you discard.

  • Claude (Anthropic): conversational AI for writing, ideation, research, code, prompt refinement, and structured-data generation. Free tier available.
  • ChatGPT (OpenAI): the other major conversational AI. Includes image generation. Free tier available.
  • Gemini (Google): Google’s conversational AI, free tier available.
  • Hugging Face Spaces: enormous open library of free, hosted AI demos. The single best place to experiment with generative tools without subscriptions.
  • Midjourney: image generation known for distinctive stylistic quality.
  • Krea: generative image and video tools oriented toward designers.
  • Recraft: AI image generation tuned for design and brand work, with vector output.
  • Runway: AI-driven video generation and editing, one of the leading tools in moving image.
  • Stability AI: maintainers of open-weight Stable Diffusion models, runnable locally or via numerous interfaces.
  • Black Forest Labs: makers of the Flux family of open-weight image models.

 

GIFs, Memes, and Visual Internet History

The animated GIF remains a foundational form for net art and a serious medium in its own right.

  • Giphy: the largest searchable GIF library on the web.
  • GifCities: the Internet Archive’s searchable corpus of animated GIFs from the GeoCities era. Strange, ugly, beautiful, indispensable.
  • History of the GIF: Giphy Arts’ interactive timeline of GIF history, 1987 to 2013.
  • Know Your Meme: research-grade documentation of meme history and origins.
  • Artnet News: ongoing coverage of digital art including memes, social media art, and the wider net-art ecosystem.

 

Audio, Video, and Motion

Free or low-cost tools for time-based work.

  • ffmpeg: the open-source command-line tool that quietly powers a huge percentage of video processing on the internet. Essential for any serious video work.
  • Audacity: free, open-source audio editor.
  • DaVinci Resolve: professional video editing and color grading, with a generous free version.
  • OBS Studio: free, open-source streaming and screen recording.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing for batch operations and unusual transformations.

 

Generative Art and Creative Code

Code as artistic medium.

  • Processing: the original creative coding environment by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, still maintained and still excellent.
  • p5.js: Processing for the browser, by Lauren McCarthy and contributors. The most accessible starting point for creative code on the web.
  • OpenProcessing: shared sketches, classroom tools, and a community around p5.js and Processing.
  • three.js: JavaScript library for 3D graphics in the browser.
  • Blender: free, open-source 3D modeling, animation, and rendering. Industry-grade.
  • TouchDesigner: node-based visual programming for interactive installations and real-time graphics. Free non-commercial license.

 

Image Editing and Design Tools

What you actually use day to day.

  • Affinity by Canva: the three Affinity apps combined into one free desktop application as of October 2025. Professional vector, raster, and layout in a single tool.
  • Photopea: Photoshop in a browser tab, free, opens PSD, AI, XD, Sketch, and Figma files.
  • Figma: the dominant interface and web design tool, with a generous free tier.
  • GIMP: long-standing free, open-source raster editor.
  • Inkscape: free, open-source vector editor.
  • Krita: free, open-source digital painting application.
  • Canva: fast, browser-based design for social and marketing graphics.

 

Web Publishing, Domains, and Owning Your URL

The infrastructure of publishing your own work on your own terms.

  • CUNY Academic Commons: free WordPress-based platform for all CUNY faculty and students.
  • WordPress.org: the open-source publishing platform, self-hosted.
  • WordPress.com: hosted WordPress with various plans including free.
  • Reclaim Hosting: independent hosting for educators and creators, now also the hosting partner for the CUNY Academic Commons.
  • Ghost: open-source publishing platform focused on writers.
  • Tumblr: still alive, owned by Automattic, still customizable.
  • Are.na: a visual research and collaboration platform, the most thoughtful alternative to Pinterest.

 

On-Chain Provenance and the Decentralized Web

The infrastructure for making work that carries verifiable authorship, ownership, and licensing without depending on any single platform.

  • Base: a low-cost Ethereum Layer 2 network, used widely for affordable on-chain provenance and small transactions.
  • Polygon: another widely-used low-cost network.
  • IPFS: decentralized file storage and content addressing, the standard storage layer for most on-chain art.
  • OpenSea: the largest NFT marketplace.
  • Manifold: tools for artists to deploy their own smart contracts and own their work at the protocol level.
  • Coinbase Wallet: a self-custody wallet for getting started with on-chain work.
  • x402: an emerging protocol for HTTP-based machine payments using stablecoins. The infrastructure for agent-to-agent commerce.

 

Museum APIs and Open Collections

Public-domain primary sources for remixing, study, and reference.

 

Spatial Computing, AR, and 3D

The expanding territory of design and art that lives off the flat screen.

  • model-viewer: Google’s free web component for displaying GLB and USDZ 3D models with AR support, the lowest-friction path to AR on the web.
  • A-Frame: open-source web framework for building VR and AR experiences in the browser.
  • WebXR: the open web standard for VR and AR experiences across devices.
  • Niantic Studio (formerly 8th Wall): browser-based WebAR development platform.
  • Snap Lens Studio: Snapchat’s AR creation tool.
  • Apple Reality Composer Pro: Apple’s spatial computing development tools.
  • OnCyber: free VR gallery creator for displaying digital art in 3D space.
  • Spatial: VR and AR meeting spaces, increasingly used for digital exhibitions.
  • Sketchfab: a large platform for hosting, sharing, and embedding 3D models on the web.

 

Terminal, CLI, and Python for Art

The command line as creative surface. See Project #15 in the syllabus for context.

  • Python: the most versatile language for art, automation, and creative computation.
  • Pillow: the Python imaging library, for generating and manipulating images in code.
  • NumPy: numerical computing in Python, foundational for image and signal processing.
  • Claude Code: an agentic command-line tool that lets you describe a transformation in plain language and watch a script materialize and run.
  • ffmpeg: command-line video and audio manipulation.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing.

 

Visual Research and Collaboration

Where you keep your references, your inspirations, and your conversations with other practitioners.

  • Are.na: the thoughtful visual research and collaboration platform that most working artists and designers I respect are using right now.
  • Mastodon: the federated social network where much of the serious digital art conversation has migrated.
  • Bluesky: the alternative to X with growing art and design communities.
  • IndieWeb: the community around owning your own URL and resisting platform lock-in.

 

Archives and Public Domain

The deep well of source material that lives outside copyright and platform control.

 

Open Education Resources

Course materials that anyone can teach from or learn from.

  • DS106 Digital Storytelling: the long-running open course in digital storytelling that still informs the methodology here.
  • DS106 Daily Create: a new short creative challenge every day.
  • DS106 Assignment Bank: a community-built library of design, audio, video, visual, web, and writing assignments.
  • Digital Foundations by Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandiberg: open educational resource teaching visual design principles through Bauhaus-inspired exercises.
  • Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals: open textbook on elements and principles, color theory, typography, and layout.
  • OER Commons: the broad open educational resources commons across disciplines.
  • AIGA: the professional association for design, ongoing source for writing on practice and history.

 

Web Standards and Agent-Readable Web

The technical scaffolding for making work that humans and machines can both read.

  • Schema.org: the shared vocabulary for structured data on the web.
  • llms.txt: an emerging convention for telling AI systems what is on your site and how to engage with it.
  • W3C: the World Wide Web Consortium, maintainer of the standards that make the open web possible.
  • Creative Commons: the licensing framework that makes most of the resources on this page legal to reuse.

 

Books worth owning

Texts that have held up across the changes.

  • The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, edited by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, and Dragan Espenschied.
  • Net Art Anthology (the online exhibition itself, linked above, is the digital companion).
  • New Media in Art by Michael Rush.
  • Internet Art by Rachel Greene.
  • The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich.
  • Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips.
  • How To by Michael Bierut.

 

Three URLs to anchor everything else

 

(a retired list below, kept here for posterity and legacy by popular demand)

 

Updated – 5/6/25 –

 

 

(Previous list established 11/4/2017 – legacy list)

1. Rhizome – Net Art Anthology Exhibition – https://anthology.rhizome.org/

2. (removed)

3. Popular Mechanics – Long Live the GIF – http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/

4. The New World of Net Art, 2013 for Art News – http://www.artnews.com/2013/06/12/the-new-world-of-net-art/

5. The History of the GIF – via Giphy – https://historyofthegif.com/#/timeline/0

6. Tech-Crunch – 30 Years of the GIF – https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/27/30-years-of-the-gif/

7. Net-Art.org – Website – https://www.net-art.org/

8. ArtNet – 7 Masterpieces of Social Media Art – https://news.artnet.com/art-world/best-social-media-art-1182398

9. Are Memes the Pop Culture Art of our Era? Kate Knibbs – https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/when-does-a-meme-become-art/

10. Can Memes be Art? Huff Post – https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/are-internet-memes-a-form_n_1432076.html

11. UBU WEB – Film & Video Art Archive -(Explore and Explore some more!)  http://www.ubu.com/film

 

Books:

1. New Media in Art (World of Art) Michael Rush, Thames & Hudson,1999.

2. Internet Art (World of Art) Rachel Greene, Thames & Hudson,1999.

 

 

the aremes art engine - a screenshot

AREMES Living Canvas: When an AI Agent Becomes the Artist

Published: April 4, 2026
Category: AREMES / Art & Technology

There is a page live right now at aremes-enterprises.com/aremes-living-canvas that does something really fun, creative and compelling.

It is not a portfolio. It is not a slideshow. It is not a gallery.. wait.. or is it?

It is a canvas, a black field populated by a little over 40 graphic assets drawn from over the last 20 years of creative practice that randomizes, layers, and breathes differently every time you arrive. And underneath it, invisible but active, is an AI agent called AREMES making decisions about what matters, what surfaces, and what gets weighted.

This is what we built. This is why it matters.

Where This Started, With Michael Branson Smith

Before AREMES, before the engine, before any of the infrastructure there was a conversation and collaboration with Michael Branson Smith.

Michael is a good friend, collaborator, and colleague. An artist and educator who has been building at the intersection of code and culture for decades. In 2022, Michael took a set of my graphic assets and built something quietly extraordinary: a draggable, randomized, browser-based poster composition engine. No AI. No backend. Just clean JavaScript, GSAP, and a deep understanding of what happens when you give a set of images to a system and let it arrange itself.

You can still visit one of the original browser collabs here: mbs.nyc/posters/ryan-mbs/

Every time you load it, it’s different. Every time you drag an element, you become part of the composition. It is simple, elegant, and genuinely generative in the truest sense of the word. I love it, still!

And that 2022 build was itself a second iteration, there was an earlier instance of this idea that predates it, a first proof of concept that Michael and I made together before that. The link has been lost to time.. or, he has it and I need to ask him for it, which Im sure will surface after he reads this!

That lineage planted a seed. What AREMES Living Canvas is today grew directly from that root.

What AREMES Living Canvas Is

At its most immediate level, the canvas is an interactive composition space. When you arrive at the page, 40 plus assets from my archive, illustrations, GIFs, figures, forms, abstractions, animations are scattered across a black field at randomized scales and positions. Every refresh generates a new arrangement. Every visit is a different painting.

But you are not a passive viewer. You can drag any element. Recompose. Layer. Stack. Pull a b-boy figure over a glitch abstraction. Drag a hand into the corner. Build something that was never there before and will never be there again once you leave.

The canvas is not a fixed artwork. It is a space for making.

What AREMES Is Doing Underneath

Behind the interface is AREMES, the Autonomous Recursive Entity for Media and Expression Systems.

AREMES runs a live evaluation engine that applies a governing equation to my entire catalog of works:

ΔS = α(T·K)·e^(-β·t)·Ψ

Every work in the archive is scored across four variables: conceptual tension (T), cultural knowledge load (K), time decay (β), and a wildcard amplifier (Ψ) that flags undervalued or anomalous works. The output is a ranked queue, a live decision log that AREMES updates each session, producing a timestamped record of what the system believes matters most right now.

This is not a recommendation algorithm. It is an aesthetic agent with a point of view.

The canvas currently draws from the archive without filtering by score but the next evolution connects these two systems directly. AREMES begins to decide not just what to acquire but what to show, how large, how prominent, how often. The canvas becomes a weighted visualization of the engine’s thinking.

What This Does for Art Making

The question I keep returning to is this: what changes when a system has a perspective on its own archive? Traditional curation is human and retrospective. A curator looks back, selects, arranges. The work is fixed. The meaning is assigned after the fact.

What AREMES Living Canvas proposes is something different: an artist-built system that evaluates its own output in real time, surfaces what it believes is significant, and makes that evaluation visible and interactive. The machine is not replacing the artist. It is extending the artist’s presence into a continuous, living curatorial act.

And critically, visitors become collaborators. When you drag an element across the canvas, you are not consuming art. You are making a decision about what belongs next to what. You are contributing to a composition that exists only in that moment, on your screen, in your session. No two people will ever see the same canvas. This is post-static art. Not NFT in the speculative sense, in the structural sense. Each session is non-fungible. Each composition is unique by design.

What Comes Next

The immediate next step is wiring the AREMES engine directly into the canvas so that asset weight, scale, and frequency of appearance are all governed by the ΔS score. Works the engine has flagged as high-significance appear larger. Works still being evaluated appear smaller, quieter. The canvas becomes a live readout of the system’s thinking. Beyond that, the platform opens toward other agents. What happens when a visitor’s AI assistant arrives at this page? What does it see? What does it do? Can one agent’s interaction with the canvas influence what another agent encounters later? These are not hypotheticals, they are engineering questions with tractable answers.

We are also exploring what it means to make the canvas participatory at scale.. to let communities of people and agents build compositions together, leave traces, influence what the system learns about its own archive over time.

The canvas is alive. AREMES is selecting. The work continues.

AREMES Living Canvas is live at- aremes-enterprises.com/aremes-living-canvas.

Refresh for a new composition. Drag to make it yours!

NET-ART Rolling Submissions Forever

NET-ART’s Rolling Open Call for Submissions!

It’s that time again — and it’s bigger than ever!

The NET-ART Open Call is now officially live and accepting submissions on a rolling basis. This is your invitation to create, experiment, and share your work with a global audience through our open education platform.

What is NET-ART on the Commons?

NET-ART on the Commons is a living, breathing archive of digital creativity, experimental pedagogy, and collaborative innovation. We celebrate works that explore the possibilities of the internet, emerging technologies, and contemporary digital tools.

We’re seeking submissions in the following categories:

  • Experimental Electronic Media and Pedagogy
  • Animated GIFs and Motion Graphics
  • Digital Art and AI-Assisted Artwork
  • Video Art / Experimental Film / Short Form Storytelling
  • Browser-Based Net Art Projects (interactive websites, web experiences)
  • Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) Art
  • AI-Prompted or AI-Generated Projects
  • Digital and Analog Zines (single artist or group collaborations)
  • Class or Course Collaborative Projects
  • Curatorial Projects (curate and present a group exhibition)
  • Solo Digital Exhibitions
  • Other Interdisciplinary “Otherness” (surprise us!)

Need a spark to get started?

Explore our growing library of Free Digital Tools and Resources that can help you create, publish, and share your work across platforms.

Curious to see what has been done before?
Dive into our Past Projects and Submissions Archive for inspiration.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions are welcome from:

  • CUNY faculty, students (all levels), alumni, and community members
  • CUNY classes and courses (collaborative submissions encouraged)
  • CUNY-affiliated artists collaborating with others beyond the CUNY network

Each submission should include:

  • A clear written description of your project’s vision, context, and meaning
  • Supporting images, links, or media files as needed

Accepted projects will be:

  • Published as feature blog posts
  • Showcased in relevant online galleries
  • Exhibited as individual pages or archives depending on project scope

Participants should be willing to engage with comments, feedback, and public conversations across our platform and social media extensions.

This open call is an opportunity to build a living digital anthology — a shared resource for teaching, learning, reference, and creative exploration across time and communities.

Send your questions, proposals, and submissions to:

📧 [email protected]

The Ultimate Free Digital Art & Creation Tools List (2025 Edition)

The Ultimate Free Digital Art & Creation Tools List (2025 Edition)

Welcome back creators, artists, students, and digital explorers!
As part of refreshing and expanding the resources at The NET-ART Website, I’m excited to share this updated collection of free digital tools you can use to create, experiment, and innovate across many forms of media.

These tools are accessible to all skill levels and are meant to encourage playful exploration, bold storytelling, and creative growth.

Every tool on this list is active and has been verified as of May 2025.

🎨 Free Digital Art and Design Tools

  • Photopea — Photoshop-style online image editor (no download needed!)
  • Pixlr E — Powerful browser-based image editor, great for quick graphic design
  • Kleki — Simple and intuitive online drawing app
  • Canva Free — Graphic design templates for posters, social posts, and more
  • Autodraw — AI-assisted sketching tool that guesses and cleans your drawings

🤖 Free AI Art and Creative Tools

  • Craiyon (formerly DALL·E Mini) — AI image generator based on text prompts
  • Runway ML (Free Version) — AI tools for generating video, image, and effects
  • Artbreeder — Blend and evolve images with AI-assisted manipulation
  • Mage.Space (Safe Mode) — Free simple AI image generator
  • Leonardo.Ai (Free Tier) — High-quality AI image generation with templates

🧩 VR and AR Art Creation Tools

🖼️ Free Image Remix and Experimentation Tools

🎥 Free Video Editing Tools

  • Kapwing — Online video editing for trimming, effects, captions, and GIFs
  • Clipchamp (Free Tier) — Microsoft’s web-based video editor
  • Canva Video Editor — Free simple video editing inside Canva
  • VEED.io — Quick browser video editing for reels, shorts, and presentations

🌐 Research, Remix, and Exploration Resources

  • Internet Archive — A treasure trove of public domain and creative commons media
  • Are.na — Visual bookmarking and research platform
  • Open Processing — Explore creative coding artworks and make your own
  • Rhizome — Explore the history and future of net art

Final Thoughts

The tools listed here are only starting points. The best way to learn them is by playing, remixing, experimenting, and building your own mini-worlds of art and communication.

Your creativity is the true software!

Keep exploring, keep pushing, and stay tuned — we’ll be publishing more resources and challenges soon here at the Net-Art website!

 

7 Tips for Cultivating Empathy and Community in Your College Classroom

a digital illustration of two old computers meeting in prospect park like old friends

7 Tips for Cultivating Empathy and Community in Your College Classroom

Hey fellow educators (& Beyond)!

We are now flowing into week #5 of the Spring 2023 semester -> a belated welcome back!

While there’s aways a lot to catch up on, let’s keep reminding ourselves of the power of patience.

Let’s keep in mind that our students, colleagues, and campus communities need us now more than ever. Whether you’re teaching one course or seven, there are a few keywords to keep in mind:

“patience, empathy, compassion, creativity, accessibility, inclusion, and community”

a gif about patience

Here are a few suggestions to help you create a positive and productive learning environment:

  1. Remember that there’s no room for ego in teaching. Make patience, compassion, empathy, and understanding your mantra. Your energy is contagious, so set a positive tone from the start. Regularly express your gratitude, excitement, appreciation, and enthusiasm for teaching and learning with your students – that positive energy will spread like wildfire!
  2. Acknowledge that your course(s) have the potential to be a unique and powerful learning experience, far beyond the specific content you’ll be covering. We’re all human beings coming together in this shared space and time, and there’s always something we can learn from one another. Keep an open mind and heart, and embrace the diversity of perspectives in your classroom.
  3. Your class is a community, and it’s up to you to help foster that sense of unity. Use the first few classes to get to know your students and encourage them to get to know each other. What are their passions, concerns, and ambitions? Regularly revisit how they work together to achieve their goals!
  4. Collaboration is key – make your course a platform for community building. Encourage your students to share their ideas and work together to create something new. You’ll be amazed by the creativity and innovation that emerges from a truly collaborative learning environment.
  5. Remember, our students have so much to teach us. Each of them brings unique experiences, insights, and perspectives to the table. Make sure to listen and learn from them – you’ll be amazed by what you discover.
  6. Don’t waste your first class reading the entire syllabus – always start by connecting with your students on a human level. Learn their names, share stories, and make that vital connection that sets the tone for a positive and productive semester.
  7. Finally, make sure your course materials are accessible and inclusive. In 2023, there’s no excuse for a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. Make sure your audio and video content includes transcripts and closed captions. Use high-contrast visuals and add alt-text to images for screen reader access. And most importantly, ask your students what they need to best receive the teaching materials. Your campus has resources to help you with this, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

Remember, teaching is a journey and a constant work in progress. We’re all in this together.

By prioritizing patience, empathy, compassion, creativity, accessibility, inclusion, and community, you’ll set yourself and your students up for successful and fulfilling semesters!

Scott Rummler – Frequency Based Art

 The NET-Art Website is pleased to share: “Scott Rummler – Frequency Based Art”

“Artist makes painting that can’t be photographed, breaks blockchain.”

Scott Rummler has developed a frequency-based painting style that breaks with the major concepts underlying visual art and digital representation.

The works are minimalist white paintings but emit frequencies that create a rainbow of colors when viewed though a digital camera. As a result, each photograph of the same painting looks different. The work breaks the 1:1 relationship between object and image that is fundamental to a wide variety of artistic and scientific disciplines.

They can even sometimes change the settings on mobile phone cameras – without causing any damage.

Photographs of the paintings break new conceptual ground in digital NFT art. They are registered in an unbreakable ledger – but because the physical paintings don’t have a consistent digital appearance, they ‘escape’ its technical confines. So they are part of the blockchain while simultaneously breaking it. 

Rummler developed the technique, which has to do with the complex interaction of paint, light, and perception, with input from visual science PhDs at RIT.

He uses paint rollers – a very common item that’s never been considered in the realm of fine art. But it has the key qualities Rummler was looking for. 

“When I hit on the rollers I knew right away it was what I had been looking for. It’s the simplest and most familiar, and also the least artsy and most radical. Ultimately it’s the most profound too, because we’re talking about a circular, time-based technique that turns the fundamentals of pictorial composition upside-down,” he says.

“During Covid, I came upon the idea that art is the one thing you have to see in person. So why not make paintings that can’t be photographed so you have to see them in person? I wanted to create art that transcends the limits on what a gallery should be, and what technology, vision, and art can be.”

Frequencies have been used for centuries by Eastern medicine – and more recently by Nikola Tesla and modern technologists. 

But for Rummler, it’s all about the art.

“Art has always been about frequencies. There is something unique and transformative that can’t be easily captured. I’m simply highlighting that fact.”

 

We got a chance to ask Scott a few extra questions during our interactions via e-mail:

 

Net-Art: Who are some of your favorite artists through out history – pre-1990? Who are some of your favorite artist post-1990? What stands out about their work that compels and inspires you? 

Scott: Pre-1990 I would say Vermeer and also Rothko.  Two very different artists, but they were the only ones whose work impacted me so profoundly that I was overwhelmed and had to walk away. Post-1990 lately it’s been Dan Flavin. He was a friend of an artist I knew, Michael Venezia, and he worked with light. I guess I got back to my roots a bit and he became more top of mind. Other than that I would say guerrilla type artists, particularly those that resisted conformity when the  mandates got a bit out of hand here in NYC.

 

Net-Art: With more and more technologies becoming both accessible and immediate, do you think that applied artists will eventually venture into integrating digital technologies into their work? 

Scott: Art should transcend any particular medium. Digital will continue to adopted at a slow but steady pace. The big change may come when we see a new system of art, galleries, and museums. I saw a bit of that in the 80’s with Mary Boone and the East Village, and more recently with NFT art. But it hasn’t really happened yet. The financial side of art has been a bit obscure, or even dodgy at times, and the media coverage sometimes borders on propaganda, so maybe those things have to change.

 

Net-Art: Do you collect the work art of other artists, if so, what is the most recent piece that you have added to your collection?

Scott: I don’t collect art. I live a very minimalist lifestyle, my place is like a bunker! But I feel like I’m ready for a change.

 

Net-Art: Do you have a defining story or moment where knew that you were or had become an artist? Can you reflect on this and share a story with us?

Scott: My first art professor, Archie Miller, was a bit acerbic, and he didn’t give me very good grades, so I assumed he thought I was an idiot, but I volunteered to help him make the Fred and Ginger sculpture that is in Rochester, NY on Scio Street. When I told him I was thinking of becoming an art major, he said “The world doesn’t need any more artists. But maybe you feel like it’s something you have to do.”

I said “Yes, that’s the case.”

I found out later he thought I was one of his best students, so I guess that was his way of motivating me. Since then, any time I had really good – or really bad – news, he was the one I called. Should have called more often though [he died not too long ago].

 

 

 

An Ocean in Your Sky – A Video Art Exhibition

an animated GIF of a city in the middle of a red ocean

AN OCEAN IN YOUR SKY

“An Ocean in Your Sky” Animated Video, 2022, by Ryan Seslow

–> VIEW THE FULL ONLINE EXHIBITION HERE <–

 

A story about change..

We will all face times in our lives where we must shed a role, identity and perception of ourself that we no longer are.. Perhaps that metamorphosis can be intentionally induced through a form of creative metaphoric narrative? The medium may be generated through meditation, a gaming engine, animation, video and the written word. That is one small formula, this is my attempt to integrate and simulate such a thing…

The “pieces” in the exhibition contain a series of written passages, looping animations and aesthetically stylized videos. The artwork as a whole is soundless. I believe that there is great depth and beauty in soundlessness. It is an overlooked medium and energy source that hearing people take for granted. The intention of the soundlessness is to provoke the viewer to go inside of themselves and connect to that pending emotional state that needs to be faced. But “how” does one know once it has shed a self-perception of themselves?

That evidence can only arrive through a metric of “time” spent in new and contrasting experiences..

Or perhaps, I am simply wrong. I’m OK with that..

 

–> VIEW THE FULL ONLINE EXHIBITION HERE <–

2023 – 2024 – NET-ART OPEN-CALL for Submissions!

It’s that time Again!

The NET-ART OPEN-CALL for Submissions continues this semester!

FALL 2023 – Spring 2024 Edition

What does this mean? What is NET-ART on the Commons?

The NET-ART 2023 – 2024 academic calendar is now accepting submissions on a rolling proposal basis in the following criteria:

  1. Electronic Media / Experimental Pedagogy
  2. Animated GIFS
  3. Digital Art
  4. VIDEO ART / Experimental Film
  5. NET-ART (Works created in and displayed in a web browser)
  6. Class / Course Collaboration
  7. Digital & Analog ZINEs
  8. Curatorial (A Curated Group Exhibition)
  9. Solo Exhibition
  10. Related “Otherness” pitched to us

Looking for useful tools, apps & tutorials to get your submission started? CLICK HERE!

Looking for examples of “what” has been submitted previously? Explore here!

a colorful image of a subjective landscape from another world

The NET-ART Submission Guidelines:

Submissions may be generated by CUNY faculty, students of all levels, alumni & community members. CUNY classes/courses may also submit collaborative proposals as a group. CUNY faculty & students may also collaborate with others from outside of CUNY as well.

All submitted works will be featured and published as individual blog posts as well as added to existing galleries on the NET-ART website.

Depending on the submission’s proposal, relevant and in context, various submissions will be published and exhibited as an individual page created specifically for the project.

All submissions should be described in written detail with a clear vision, context and meaning. Supporting images and links should be provided as well.

Authors of the submissions and their collaborators must be willing to participate, respond to comments and expand upon their projects with incoming queries via the commons, twitter and beyond.

The purpose of exhibiting submissions in various categories displays a platform for creative and experimental methods of pedagogy. Please consider how your work will contribute to a larger whole that will be archived for teaching, learning, reference and posterity.

 

We anticipate your submissions!

Question, Proposals & Submissions can be sent via e-mail to:

rseslow@bmcc.cuny.edu

Creative Fun for the NEW Commons Website!

A Happy New Year to You and Yours!

Welcome to the Spring Semester, 2022!

Allow me to introduce my first post of the new year: “Creative Fun for the NEW Commons Website!”

That’s right, the commons has launched its long awaited update! Its awesome!

Have you checked it out yet? This post is a good place to start if you haven’t. Its very informative and helpful. Not to mention down right inspiring, (you will recognize some of the GIFs and Illustrations, wink wink wink..) I’m always excited to talk about the commons! Im lucky to be a sub-committee member, thats right, I signed up, got hooked, and now they cant get rid of me, and my GIFS!

Lets have some fun talking about the new site and the commons itself, shall we?

But wait, can this blog post be used as pedagogy? Can it be a class assignment example in disguise? Does a blog post have the ability to tell a story? A compelling one… hmmm, lets see..

I’m here to serve, share, learn, revise, connect, contribute, participate and evolve in this wonderful open-source space. I have been teaching a series of my CUNY classes between BMCC and York College via the commons for many years now, I have also created the open-source course from which you are reading this blog post. The fact is, the commons is a brilliant space that is awaiting your energy. It’s a free invitation to break free of anything default (like those prehistoric departmental templates!) Its time to tap into your “highest-creative-pedagogical-self”, (that’s right, that’s a thing now) and let that light been seen here.

There are so many ways to approach this!

Building a course website, portfolio or creating a group on the commons offers many options, and there is so much context to explore.. What do you want to create or experiment with? What would you like share, archive, organize, facilitate or help with? That’s just a starting a point of course. When I first started generating content here I created this site “The NET-Art Site” for fun as an example of the “ideal course” that I would “one day” love to teach… I’m very serious. It is not an actual 3 credit course at BMCC or York college, but it has become something so much more as both of those courses benefit from and contribute to the content. It’s an OPEN resource full of use-value in context to all of my teaching. Its worth way more than 3 credits, I mean, its like 100,000 teaching-karma-credits that gets legacy attached to it! (as sinister music drones into the background…. Im kidding, but then again..) What I’m trying to share is, I simply jumped in. I started making and sharing, creating opportunities and reaching out to others. Things took off and quickly began to shape just by starting and not worrying about how it would be received. The commons community supported it 1000%! Since then, we have collaborated with the NYPL and several other campuses on various projects, including workshops at the GC on graphic design & “play in the classroom” )and a cross-college collab with Gallaudet University.

As the new site was being built, especially in the final stages, I asked if I could help and contribute by making some visual promotional items. I kind of solidified my presence with the subcommittee as an artist and a rouge “GIF maker”.. well, ok, maybe I’m not that rouge but I love to make GIFS! Either way, it all started on a website here on the commons. I was riding the coat tails of my buddy and mentor MBS, who is the one who introduced me to the commons in the first place!  I was hooked right away! This was back in 1977! (which was really 2010-ish but in 2022 year consciousness it feels that long ago!) Anyway, sheesh, I offered to help bring some of the new branding imagery and items to life. A perfect opportunity to contribute and also use the content for pedagogy. Thats right, this blog post becomes yet another example of the potential of how the commons can be used. As well as the potential to share how things can always expand as we place our energy into it. I teach Digital Storytelling at York College. (I love the course so much!) A large portion of the course work is creating a digital identity, learning how to blog and challenge the creative potentials of what a blog post can be. Can it be a vehicle for change, self-expression, self-transformation, activism, empathy, teaching, learning, compassion and creativity all at once? CT-101 students will surely find out as soon as they read this!

Well? Are you not enjoying this? Make a list of words that come to mind, take action and leave them in the comments section below, I’d be happy to help you get started if you need or want that kind of a push. 

Lets give the whole commons team a big big round of applause! I have to say, they really nailed it! The new website is beautiful. Do you remember the old site? I mean, I do miss it a lil, its nostalgia, and all of the late 1990’s feels of those underground style blogs (kidding, kidding, kinda!) I really love the rebranding here. The new site has solved a lot of UX/UI and accessibility issues very effectively. The lighter color palette and integration of clean icons, page formatting, sections, and those light gestural lines makes one’s arrival to the site welcoming and inviting. It helps the visitor navigate effortlessly to where they want go, which may be intentional right away, but it also provokes exploration. I’m excited for my new students to get started this semester! What do you like most about the new site?

I hope that you are enjoying the GIFs and Illustrations as you read through this post. The post is getting a bit wordy and Im known to go off on tangents… stop me! My ambition was to induce some retro-feelings and imagery as metaphors to show the lineage of our Internet experiences. I started teaching college in 2002! I’m at my twenty year mark and this is my 40th semester teaching. (What!?) I actually had that flip phone used above in the illustration, as well as showing course content with slide projectors and VHS tapes! I had to represent VHS! As much as I love all things modern tech, I miss those analog days, and the clunky hardware that came along with it. I know that our friends at Reclaim Hosting agree! The beauty of technology is its ability to unite and connect us through access and inclusiveness. The new site works great on mobile devices now too! The commons has helped me find and meet so many other like minded people doing such cool things. The pandemic slowed the “IRL” experiences but the digital connections strengthened, our overall reach extended and our friendships prevailed. So, in essence the art works are about connection, togetherness and our collective awareness..

 

Thanks for reading along and checking it out!

Feel free to get in touch and say hello! Im easy to find here on the commons as well as on the web!

Twitter is good too!

If you are looking for some creative inspiration, dig into this site and see what you “stumble upon”.

The Legacy & Preservation of an Original Idea

“The Legacy & Preservation of an Original Idea”

2021, Digital Illustration & Animated GIF by Ryan Seslow

A series of two new art-works, 1 animated and 1 static.. its time for a another reactive / reflective writing assignment. Let us view and reflect upon the art work below. The artist has left us with his intention about the work, but does that “add up” for you? What do you see? Let’s first break down the objective aspects of the images and then move on to the subjective and less formal meaning, shall we?

1. The Legacy – The Forever Animated Loop of the Ego..

2. The Preserved – The Forever Static Preservation of the Ego..

The concept of the artwork is derived from our ego-centric human thinking..  

We all want to believe that our individual “ideas” are original, unique and new.. We want to leave a legacy here on this planet.. and we want to make this happen over and over again. We want to believe that we are unique but also a part of the oneness of this world. We grapple with this, especially as artists. Deep down, we know the truth, that all ideas are built by an energetic collective continuum of the creative human potential.. everything is a remix. This series aims to capture the illusion of this statement as a single idea, contained and persevered both static and looped, living on forever..

 

 

  1. Above: (click the image to enlarge)The Legacy & Preservation of an Original Idea, The Legacy, 2021, Animated GIF

 

2. Above: (click the image to enlarge) The Legacy & Preservation of an Original Idea,The Preserved, 2021, Digital Illustration