CATALOG OF INTERNET ARTIST CLUBS
by Paul Slocum, March 2016 |
My earliest encounters with online media sharing communities were Commodore 64 bulletin board systems in the 1980s. A computer bulletin board provided message boards and the ability to share files through a simple text-based interface that were typically run by a hobbyist with a Commodore and an extra phone line. Many of the files on these bulletin boards in Texas came from Europe through a makeshift network of disk and file trading. The "art" that was most commonly traded was pirated videogames, but there were also demos, photo scans, audio samples, and other media.
In the 1990s when bulletin boards were closing down and people were getting on the internet, it took a few years for the software to catch up and make it easy for non-professionals to create similar centralized forums and online communities. During this time, email lists and handmade homepages were a critical part of online communication and culture. Even Rhizome was initially just an email list and a static webpage.
One of the key pieces of technology that eventually allowed hobbyists to set up their own dynamic websites was the open-source programming language PHP and its database companion MySQL. PHP was originally created by programmer Rasmus Lerdorf simply to manage his own homepage, and the language is now used on the majority of all websites. Partly because PHP was open-source and free, it became standard after the turn of the century for web hosting companies to include the ability to run PHP software on all customer websites. As more internet users gained the ability to run PHP/MySQL software, new programs were continually created for the platform. First there were PHP-based forums which supplanted email lists, and later blog software and content management systems like Wordpress came into common usage. Almost every website in this catalog runs on PHP/MySQL including 4chan, YTMND, and the sites that run on Tumblr.
During the mid 2000s, this newly available website software—along with advancements in web audio and video standards, the expiration of the animated GIF patents, and the launch of user-friendly media sharing sites like Flickr, Delicious, and Youtube—led to a ripe time for artists to start creating their own internet-based media communities. This catalog is a selection of some notable online artist communities in the period between the early 2000s until now.
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Websites in the catalog are categorized as either surf clubs, art clubs, or related sites. The term surf club originated from the Nasty Nets group blog tagline "Internet Surfing Club," and is often used to describe group artist blogs where the prevailing subject is internet culture and aesthetics and where lines are blurred between the roles of artist, curator, and archivist. Art club or online art club is the term I'm using (for lack of a better or established term) to describe similar artist group blogs that do not actually have much to do with web surfing. Instead, they may explore digital illustration and collage, or use a group blog to explore connections between works of non-internet art. The section on related sites catalogs other websites that have similar artistic content but that have substantial differences in operation and are not using blogs.
All of the clubs use a group blog format that places authors' posts vertically adjacent to each other in a long scroll, and new posts are often made with careful consideration of the content in recent posts. Only members of the club can publish, but most of the sites allow anybody to comment. This structure is similar to an internet forum where only administrators can start topics. The surf and art clubs all use Wordpress or Tumblr, which have similar functionality except that cloud-based Tumblr has a stronger social network component and the native ability for people to 'like' and reblog posts. For Wordpress, comments function as 'likes' to some degree, but there isn't much of a social network component except maybe for RSS, which essentially enables users to 'follow' different blogs.
Because some of the sites in the catalog are offline or complicated to view, I included a set of screenshots for each site. Using still images obviously does not preserve animations or media (I encourage people to look at the actual websites), but screenshots are a relatively stable way of archiving a basic index of a website's aesthetics and mechanics. Many of the older sites are already becoming difficult to view due to changes in browsers and plugins, so it may eventually become necessary to render these sites through specially configured emulations.
The catalog includes detailed credits for the various clubs and websites which were gathered by talking to the creators and members of the sites and also by scraping posting statistics from the blogs using Python scripts. I don't intend these statistics to be a scoring system, but I thought it was interesting to list blog authors ordered by number of posts where possible. I also included total author and post counts for each site to indicate scale, because tiny communities have different mechanics from sites with hundreds or thousands of users.
In a short time, it's going to become even easier to create customized interactive websites. Although you can do a lot with Wordpress, it's especially exciting to see projects like Are.na and dump.fm where teams are building custom software for their online communities. There are new possibilities that are becoming accessible like threaded image forums, 3D art clubs, and realtime collaborative illustration. The sites in this catalog are only a hint of the diverse online artist communities that we'll see in the near future.
| NOBLOG / 544x378WEBTV / SCREENFULL (2003 - 2012) |
| Description: | The common element in this series of group blogs is the artist Jimpunk, and also the artist Rick Silva aka Abe Linkoln played a big role in all but the first blog. The content is often related to glitch or net.art, but there are also many pages that have a clear resemblance to surf clubs three years before the term was invented.
Jimpunk (whose real name I could not find) originally founded noblog on the Blogger platform with a group of European artists in 2003, and Abe Linkoln joined for Jimpunk's next blog project which forced the authors to work within a limited window of 544x378 pixels.
These blogs often play on the aesthetic of breaking things: starting file downloads, simulating errors, playing many sounds at once, and using unmanageable gigantic fonts. They can be considered as a missing link between earlier net art like JODI and later surf and art clubs. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Screenshots:
544x378WebTV screenshot 2004
SCREENFULL screenshot 2004
Triptych.tv screenshot page 15
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Authors from noblog and 544x378WebTV in alphabetical order (37 authors)
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| Description: | The term surf club was coined by the creators of Nasty Nets, and to some extent this is the blog that defined the surf club form as one that catalogs oddities and minutiae of the internet with a certain kind of dry humor. Nasty Nets embraced the aesthetics of "defaults"—the blog is based on one of the two original default Wordpress themes, and despite the fact that the blog is made up almost entirely of artists, the design style looked more like Yahoo than any art site.
Rhizome.org and the New Museum sponsored a Nasty Nets DVD release with content from the blog in 2008, and Nasty Nets had an installation and screening at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival (in addition to other screenings at various festivals). |
| Status: | Offline (hacked), archived by Rhizome |
| Screenshots:
Nasty Nets screenshot 2006
Nasty Nets screenshot 2009
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Authors in order of post count (39 authors, 1360 posts)
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| SUPERCENTRAL (2006 - 2010) |
| Description: | Launched in 2001, Supercentral originally functioned as Charles Broskoski's homepage and as a cultural forum related to skateboarding, but in 2006 he transformed the site into a series of surf clubs and eventually an open wiki. Many artists in this catalog followed this path: They started off using homepages and online communities for non-internet cultural interests (often music), and then gradually shifted their interest to internet and computer culture itself.
Supercentral's primary surf club, which started in 2006, was conversational, and content was occasionally still related to the site's past identity. But Supercentral's alternate group blogs, which also started in 2006, were primarily focused on internet surfing and found images. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Screenshots:
Supercentral LK screenshot 2006
Supercentral screenshot 2008
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Authors in order of post count (23 authors, 2389 posts)
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| DOUBLE HAPPINESS (2007 - 2015) |
| Description: | Double Happiness is a smaller surf club in terms of membership, but it's also one of the longest running at almost eight years. Like Jimpunk's blogs, Double Happiness sometimes employs a chaotic style with overwhelming tiled backgrounds, cutoff images, and inconsistent sizing.
A common feature of the blog is the diverse, cleverly selected photosets that feel randomized in ways that only the internet of the time could provide. Double Happiness is interesting to view over time as monitor resolutions increase since the authors, as an artistic effect, often posted found photos that were way too big for the page. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Screenshots:
Double Happiness screenshot 2007
Double Happiness screenshot 2010
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Authors in order of post count (5 authors, 963 posts)
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| Description: | Loshadka is primarily a surf club, but original content like photographs and digital illustrations are regularly mixed in. It's one of the few clubs to use tagging, but the blog is set up so that the tags appear as mysterious icons. The site also has a lightly used wiki and forum installed.
In real life, the Loshadka group participated in multiple gallery exhibitions and screenings including at Envoy Enterprises and Light Industry in New York. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Screenshots:
Loshadka screenshot 2008
Loshadka screenshot 2009
Loshadka landing page
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Authors in order of post count (15 authors, 525 posts)
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| THE GREAT INTERNET SLEEPOVER (2007 EVENT) |
| Description: | The Internet Sleepover was a public surf club meetup event at Eyebeam (New York) organized by Bennett Williamson of Double Happiness and attended by numerous founders and members of Nasty Nets, Supercentral, Double Happiness, Loshadka and also future founders of Are.na and R-U-In?s.
The event included a discussion panel and some organized events, but much time was also spent on computers and showing off ideas and software like a programmer demoscene meetup.
The included photos are courtesy of Bennett Williamson. |
| Event Wiki media: | Wiki page media (raw markup with partial list of attendees) |
| Photos:
Internet Sleepover photo 2
Internet Sleepover photo 3
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| MOUSE SAFARI (2007 - 2011) |
| Description: | Justin Kemp started Mouse Safari as an online sketchbook with artist friends to try out creative ideas and jokes in a group blog format. Unfortunately, the site is no longer online, but several pages were archived by The internet Archive's Wayback Machine. |
| Status: | Offline, partially archived on archive.org |
| Screenshots:
Mouse Safari screenshot 2009
Mouse Safari screenshot 2010
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Authors in alphabetical order (7 authors)
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| Description: | The Spirit Surfers surf club very loosely follows a theme that might be described as comic spirituality. It was founded by Kevin Bewersdorf and Paul Slocum (the author of this catalog), but Bewersdorf is by far the most active author.
Posts are presented in a box frame, and Spirit Surfers includes the ability for authors to optionally divide posts into two vertically adjacent frames called the "boon" and the "wake." The terms are ambiguous and have been interpreted many different ways by Spirit Surfers members. |
| Screenshots:
Spirit Surfers screenshot 2014
Spirit Surfers screenshot 2010
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Authors in order of post count (17 authors, 833 posts)
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| YOU HAD BETTER KNOW (2008-2010) |
| Description: | You Had Better Know is a surf club that loosely maintains the theme of being a parody public information service website. Content varies widely and includes numerous screen captures and themed photo collections.
The visual design of the site places images and text of blog posts hovering above a tiled background that says "Knowledge is Open Source!" in giant isometric letters, which slowly animate between neon color palettes. This hilariously intrusive background is unique and immediately eliminates any notions of art's clean white space.
There was also a You Had Better Know chat room on IRC, which was advertised on the blog with meetup dates and times. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Founders and Engineers: | Jeff Baij, Bryan Geiger, Alex Lane |
| Screenshots:
You Had Better Know screenshot 2008
You Had Better Know screenshot 2009
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Authors in order of post count (14 authors, 199 posts)
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| Description: | VVORK was an artist-run group blog that primarily posted images of contemporary art and installations. Even though two of the four founders are new media artists, the focus was not computer or internet art. Instead, the blog was utilized for a new kind of visual group conversation about contemporary art at large.
The blog usually presented a single photograph of an artwork, accompanied by the title, date, and artist name below the media. No other context is included and this often leaves some mystery, but posts typically include a link to the artist's website or gallery.
Frequently, the blog features organic strings of posts cataloging many different artworks sharing the same look or idea. This is an example of how the blog differs from curating, because in most cases you probably would not want to show many artists together who happen upon the same visual trick or concept. The blog feels like a visual stream of consciousness by well-informed curators.
VVORK was predictive of how Tumblr would later be used by artists and creatives, and of how much of the art world now uses Instagram. At its peak, VVORK had 20,000 unique visitors per month. |
| Status: | Online but inactive, archived by Rhizome |
| Screenshots:
VVORK screenshot 2009
VVORK screenshot 2008
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| Description: | Krist Wood's Computers Club contains original 3D renderings, digital illustrations, animations, and collage. The blog has sometimes been called a surf club, but very little of the content is directly related to the internet or surfing.
The site also has a second blog called Drawing Society, which is operated by Robert Lorayn and has dozens of authors. Most online clubs in this catalog are essentially invitation-only, but Drawing Society provides a method for anybody to apply (although entry is not guaranteed).
Installed within the Drawing Society blog are several older Java-based painting programs which are used to create the content. The drawing tools are similar to MSPaint, but some versions are much more advanced with layers and a variety of tools. |
| Screenshots:
Computers Club screenshot page 9
Drawing Society screenshot 2011
Drawing Society Shi-Painter interface screenshot
Drawing Society Chibi-Paint interface screenshot
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Top authors in order of post count (94 authors, 1285 posts)
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| Description: | Jogging was a popular art collective and large-scale Tumblr operated by Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen. With approximately 5500 posts and 1000 authors, it's the largest of the included blogs. The majority of authors only have one or two posts, but there were about 50 people who posted regularly. All posts are presented as artworks with a title, date, medium, and a link to the artist's website or Tumblr.
Many of the blog posts are made by a rotating core group of authors, but Jogging also took submissions of original content and operated in a variety of different ways over its years of operation. For a period, Jogging paid up to one hundred dollars for accepted submissions based on how many likes a post received.
While the content ranges widely from illustrations to memes and jokes, many posts are ultimately photographs taken by Jogging authors. These photos frequently contain absurd conceptual sculptures that Troemel sometimes sold on Etsy, but the objects were intentionally made of perishable or unstable items (like Taco Bell tacos) such that the photograph is the only thing left of the original construction. Found internet images may be used in Jogging posts, but they are usually modified or used in collage rather than presented on their own.
Jogging also functioned as an art collective separate from the blog. Troemel, Christiansen, and other key Jogging members did gallery exhibitions at Stadium and Still House in New York and commissions for Dis Magazine and MoCA TV. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Software platform: | Tumblr |
| Screenshots:
Jogging screenshot page 50
Jogging screenshot page 390
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Top authors in order of post count (1000 authors, 5500 posts)
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| Description: | Kari Altmann's R-U-In?s project uses Tumblr, but it works across many separate blogs on Tumblr and extends to other platforms like standalone websites, gmail, Skype, online and printed publications, and gallery exhibitions. The numerous R-U-In?s projects and blogs are often authored by a subset of participants in the collective.
The content sometimes feels related to web surfing, but
R-U-In?s projects have their own cultivated futuristic aesthetic. Like Jogging, blog authors sometimes mix in photos of their own physical artwork. The collective makes use of images related to globalization, branding, CGI, human interface devices, ergonomics, industrial design, fashion, and the body.
R-U-In?s offline collaborations include an exhibition at Atelier 35 in Bucharest and a screening at PPOW Gallery in New York. Online they have worked with Rhizome and Dis Magazine. |
| Software platform: | Tumblr |
| Screenshots:
R-U-In?s screenshot page 110
R-U-In?s screenshot page 40
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Authors in alphabetical order (22 authors)
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| Description: | This group blog created by Parker Ito and Jon Rafman consists almost entirely of painterly abstractions created with contemporary graphics tools. At the time, graphics software was getting closer to realistic simulated painting effects and could also render non-realistic bubbles, lines, and blurs that resemble paint. Some of the software packages used were Corel Painter, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Art Rage, Z Brush, and Mudbox.
On PaintFX individual posts are not attributed at all, allowing for a clean style with nothing but white space between posts. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Software platform: | Tumblr |
| Screenshots:
PaintFX screenshot page 20
PaintFX screenshot page 50
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Authors in alphabetical order (5 authors, 690 posts)
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| Description: | Each month Cloaque founders Claudia Mate and Carlos Sáez invite an artist to fill a large section of the blog, which is often many pages long and comprised of multiple Tumblr posts strung together. The posts overlap in a way that make it difficult to detect where one starts and another begins. Most authors only have one or two large sections rather than many independent posts like most blogs.
Cloaque includes a variety of media from found images to animated digital illustrations, which are usually arranged as a towering pile of content. The site takes advantage of the recent advances in bandwidth and processing power to display gigantic scrolling animations and images. |
| Software platform: | Tumblr |
| Screenshots:
Cloaque screenshot page 4
Cloaque screenshot page 35
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Authors in alphabetical order (70 authors, 97 posts)
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| Description: | Christopher Poole originally set up 4chan as an English-language anime trading board based on a similar image board in Japan. 4chan has a number of forums for a wide variety of discussion and image subjects, but the forum designated for "random" content grew to be the most popular, spawning famous memes like Rickrolling, rage comics, LOLcats, and Pepe the frog.
This is by far the biggest community in this catalog with 22 million unique visitors per month and a million posts each day. The site has often been difficult to sustain financially. The most active threads move at the speed of a chat room, and the site has an option to automatically reload the page every 10 seconds.
The majority of posts on 4chan are only attributed to the default name "Anonymous," and it's not necessary to create an account to post. Users who don't post anonymously are often subject to ridicule. While sometimes brilliant, 4chan is not for the faint of heart. It's common to encounter extreme porn, gore, racism and other things you might expect from the anonymous and unmoderated internet.
4chan does not archive its content, although there are now independent projects creating partial archives. Threads on 4chan get deleted after a few hours or days depending on how many people post within the thread. |
| Software platform: | proprietary, heavily modified version of Futallaby PHP imageboard software |
| Stats: | 22 million visitors per month, 1 million posts per day |
| Screenshots:
4chan /s4s/ balance meme screenshot
4chan Medusa screenshot NSFW
4chan /fa/ discusses Vaporwave screenshot
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| Description: | YTMND is an acronym for You're The Man Now Dog, an internet community where users create minimal single page websites that usually consist of a tiled image with a sound loop and large zoomed text. This style of meme originated in 2001 as a placeholder for the internet domain yourethemannowdog.com, a phrase that YTMND founder Max Goldberg heard in an advertisement for a Sean Connery film.
As his original site and meme grew in popularity, Goldberg created a new interactive website in 2004 at ytmnd.com that allowed anybody to make their own webpages in the same style as the original. The site included leader boards, a rating and favoriting system, comments, and a discussion forum. YTMND's peak in popularity was from 2004—2007, but the site is still running today and has 320,000 registered users and over a million pages created.
The YTMND format is like an early version of image macro memes, which started to became popular around 2007 and are now common even on Facebook. YTMNDs are more immersive and complex, but image macros are much more portable. |
| Status: | Active (most active 2004-2007) |
| Software platform: | proprietary (PHP/MySQL) |
| Stats: | 320,000+ registered users, 1 million+ sites |
| Founder and Engineer: | Max Goldberg |
| Screenshots:
YTMND main page interface
YTMND Corn on the Cob, Corn on the Kabob screenshot
YTMND Lindsay Lohan doesn't change facial expressions GIF
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| CLUB INTERNET (2008 - 2009) |
| Description: | Harm van den Dorpel organized a series of online group exhibitions by rotating curators called Club Internet. The exhibitions are no longer available, but the website still contains a landing page with information about the project. The participants included many founders and authors of surf and art clubs.
Unlike a blog, each artwork in a Club Internet exhibition was its own independent webpage, some of which were not even hosted on the Club Internet site. Exhibition pages were linked by an inconspicuous navigation bar that Van den Dorpel created.
Deli Near Info is Van den Dorpel's more recent project which also deliberately avoids the linear blog format and places "posts" on their own separate pages. |
| Status: | Offline (catalog page still exists) |
| Software platform: | website (not a blog) |
| Screenshot:
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Artists in alphabetical order (88 authors, 10 online exhibitions)
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| Description: | Jstchillin is the online curatorial project of Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito. It included 34 online exhibitions that typically featured just one artist or artist group. Many members and founders of surf clubs participated. Each artwork got its own full page (or pages) on the Jstchillin site.
Jstchillin also had a real life group exhibition at 319 Scholes and did a live performance at NOMA Gallery and Reference Gallery. |
| Status: | Online but inactive |
| Software platform: | website (not a blog) |
| Screenshots:
JstChillin catalog screenshot
JstChillin Duncan Malashock screenshot
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Artists in alphabetical order (46 artists)
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| Description: | Dump.fm operates as a real time image chat room rather than a blog or forum. The basic mechanics are similar to an image blog; but dump.fm refreshes automatically when new content is posted, and most of the interface is designed around real-time interaction. Each image that a user posts to the chat is added to the user's history, which can be viewed in their profile as a continuous blog. Multiple chat rooms are available, but typically only the main room is active with users.
The site is full-featured with a favoriting system, leader board, image manipulation tools, user profiles, and webcam support. The chat rooms support embedded animated gifs, images, and text, but not video. Images can be uploaded or linked from the web, and the chat interface makes it easy to arrange multiple images together in various ways.
The content has similarities to surf club and Tumblr aesthetics with a bit of 4chan and Reddit mixed in, and the quality is impressive considering that registration is usually open to the public. This is one of the larger sites in the catalog with 150,000 registered users and millions of posts. The main chat room usually has between 3 and 60 people online.
Like any community of size, there are occasionally problems with trolls and bad content, so you may occasionally see extreme porn, gross images, or low-effort memes. But moderators ban abusive users and sometimes close new user registration to prevent trolls from returning.
The proprietary software that runs the site was conceived by Ryder Ripps and implemented by Ripps with programmers Scott Ostler and Tim Baker. The gallery 319 Scholes hosted an exhibition of dump.fm artists in 2010. |
| Stats: | 150,000 registered users, hundreds of active users, millions of posts |
| Screenshots:
dump.fm chat screenshot 1
dump.fm chat screenshot 2
dump.fm directory screenshot
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Top users ordered by favorite count (counts were reset in late 2015):
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| Description: | The default Are.na interface is superficially similar to Pinterest with large thumbnails arranged in a grid, but Are.na is designed for different purposes and has fewer social media components. It's easy to import images and media of all kinds into Are.na, which then turn into "blocks" in folders called "channels." Channels can contain other channels as links, allowing various methods of complex organization. Blocks support comments, and users can subscribe to both channels and users, but Are.na does not include the ability to "like" or "favorite" blocks.
Channels have permission settings allowing users to create a channel that everybody can see but only they can change. It's also possible to extend a channel's viewing or editing privileges only to specific users.
Although some Are.na channels are similar to surf clubs or Tumblrs, the project can also be used to store and organize research materials or as a replacement for centralized link services like Delicious. It even has an API and can be used as a content management system for dynamic websites.
Most of the founders of Are.na were previously founders or participants of surf clubs. |
| Stats: | 10,000 users, hundreds of active users, 500,000 blocks |
| Screenshots:
Are.na Spirit Animals screenshot
Are.na main feed screenshot
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Top authors in order of block count:
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James Whipple
Tommy McCutcheon
Ben Ellis
