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Urbanhonking and Ultimate Blogger: A medium that demands a new understanding

For many, blogging is a controversial medium. In her essay A Blogger's Blog: Exploring the Definitions of a Medium, Danah Boyd explains that the lack of understanding of the medium's form and content relationship has for years set up narrow interpretations of the medium's potential. Consequently, bloggers and blogging in general have appeared to change guises, morphing many times over. From personal diary to collaborative contest, "it has become obvious that the metaphors we use to understand blogs are antiquated and a new examination of the medium on its own terms is necessary." (Boyd 2006)

Urbanhonking.com is a blogging collective from Portland, Oregon who host an annual contest called Ultimate Blogger. An episodic, tongue-in-cheek, "Reality TV" game show with a international cult following, the collective is both invisible in mainstream off-line culture and unavoidable in the indie weblog world. Those worlds merged when the collective and their contest were included in the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time Based Arts Festival this past fall.
Kristan Kennedy, PICA's Visual Arts Curator found the performative nature of blogging a good fit for the festival.

"Essentially I saw it as an engaging collaborative project, which successfully subverted, commented and participated in a "reality" "TV" format all at once. It pushed at the sides of all definitions and exists somewhere in between. I was initially intrigued by the format, its ability to form a new community, and the video segments or challenges, which seemed to look like a lot of video art I had been looking at all year."

Ultimate Blogger's inclusion into a international arts festival does much to legitimize the new medium. Blogging's unusual relationship with its audience — a wholly interactive one — locates Urbanhonking as a new kind of arts collective, one that exists within the lineage of social practices but extends it forward, the intersection of which evidences a convergence of both blogging and new media arts.

Traditionally, we view blogs only as a variation on other familiar text-based media like newspapers, or diaries. Standard styles and forms frame the content and the audience's interaction, but that is all.

Blogs are often seen as a genre of computer-mediated communication that can be evaluated in content and structure terms. Variations on styles are viewed as sub-genres; these sub-genres are typically devised by drawing parallels to preexisting genres of textual production, such as diaries and journalism. A study of blogs must draw from the practice of blogging, not simply analyze the output. By re-conceptualizing blogs as a medium and byproduct of practice, it becomes possible to understand the diverse intentions that produce diverse output and analyze blogs even when the output itself is inconsistent in terms of style and content." (Boyd 2006)

In the past, artists working in new media and social practices experienced similar kinds of criticism. In all three: blogging, new media and social practices, the form and structure are in constant need of re-examination as new technologies emerge and are incorporated.

The Den, An Exposition Of The Group As A Collaborative Art-Polemic

Steve Schroeder, Jona Bechtolt, and Mike Merrill founded Urbanhonking in 2001. They are the world's first blogging collective, although some refer to Urbanhonking as a "web zine." An intimate group of writers, artists, friends and musicians hand-picked by the founders, Mike Merrill remarks:

"We knew we could create a magazine that was worth reading, and by putting it online we'd have the ability to look more professional than the New York Times at the time, the year 2000. Eventually we moved from articles to blog, and it was a really unplanned and organic move. As for why... man, I don't know... it was a project that just took on a life of its own. I really look at it in the way I imagine one thinks about the art they make. "Why" is a really hard question."

As of December 2007 the site hosted 86 blogs, 123 authors and 16,249 posted entries. Providing the framework for this community space to exist Steve, Jonah and Mike helped popularize the potential of online social media, reminding Internet pioneers what "The 'Net" community was promised to be and introducing younger audiences to its potential.

Examples
daniel petersons photography
It Won't Fucking Kill You
Features the harsh documentary style photography of Daniel Peterson.
http://www.urbanhonking.com/kill

one of jude's photographs

Judesays
Sparse and often opaque home movies and music videos by Judah Switzer.
http://www.urbanhonking.com/judesays

All of these examples have similar kinds of output in that they are all classified as blogs. Yet the format, content and medium are rarely the same. The only similarities lie in the practice of blogging itself. Publicly displayed evolving work mimics art's reciprocal discourse between artist, critic and audience. In this instance, we are the audience and critic granting bloggers an (often but not always) subjective viewpoint on their work. In Boyd's terms, the boundaries of blogs are socially constructed, not technologically defined. In blogging and in art, as new kinds of mediums emerge, they are folded in. Technologies and tools play a heavy role in shaping the resulting forms and therefore our understanding of the media.
Urbanhonking is a set of blogs. Yet upon further examination it is much more mellifluous and layered. It is collaborative art-polemic, a new form of performative making. Matthew Stadler, an author and a contestant in this year's Ultimate Blogger, speaks to exactly this notion of productions in his writings about Red76 Arts Group:

"The ascendancy of surface and complete unintelligibility of depth goes some way toward explaining why art practices, once comfortably confined by conceptual and even formal boundaries, now spread ravenously outward, indifferent to locale, staging themselves serially across a vast horizontal plane of interchangeable opportunities: The museum, a storefront, your bedroom, online, even a toilet — all blossom as sites of meaning when the artist arrives, bringing his beaming face with him. These actions leave little trace and have generated corresponding crises in the discourse around them." (Artforum 2006)
An Internet Cage-Match

Ultimate Blogger evolved from The Associates Club, a gaming society started by a member of Urbanhonking originally intended to be made up of only people from the community. The application to participate in the event was somehow linked by Blogger.com and typical of the immediate, viral nature of the Web the group was flooded with applicants. The contest has increased in popularity and competitiveness every year. Bodycity, a dance troupe based in L.A., Matthew Stadler, a novelist based in Portland, Oregon, G-rad, another blogging community from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and artist/curator T.J. Norris based in Portland, Oregon are four of the eight contestants participating in this, the third year of Ultimate Blogger. Contestants in the game are often (if not always) artists, performers or collectives. As a result the submissions are elaborate and multifaceted, poking at the boundaries of the contest, blogging, and performance.

Examples

Episode #03 Video Challenge: Passion Ultimate Blogger Crew: Steve, Jonah, Mike, Judah Switzer Episode 3: Passion

(COM)PASSION by G-rad Compassion by G-rad | G-rad website

WikiDance by BodyCity Wikidance | Bodycity on vimeo

Episode #08: Prizes Comments from contestants, judges and audience members Episode 8: Prizes

The game is a pun on Reality TV contests, with contestants fighting against each other to be the "Ruler of the Internet." They form allegiances, fight underhandedly and poke fun at themselves at the same time. Each "episode" of the game is announced in an elaborate and thematic video post. The posts contain a meta-narrative worthy of its own essay. Responses arrive in variable forms: video posts, PDFs, songs, dance performances and websites have all been submitted. Comments and flame wars create momentum around contestants and submissions, changing the dynamic of the contest, causing the mood of the event to fluctuate, which on any given day could vary from pleasant to insulting. Here, as elsewhere on the Internet, what's popular or notorious garners attention quickly, while less-interesting responses fade from view.
Contestants are also expected to judge each other's submissions and "vote off" fellow contestants. Political alliances and subversive techniques have emerged as a recognized part of the game, making the sport not only in submitting quality work but also in navigating the game. The only fail-safe to avoid getting voted off is to be awarded immunity by the judges who claim audience approval isn’t considered, which seems quite doubtful.

Collective blogging

Kristan Kennedy(2007) again on her inclusion of Ultimate Blogger 3 in the festival:

"I sought to include projects this year that fit under the wide banner of "fake space." The Internet as a space for art has yet to be really defined, its temporal nature, its lack of physical mass, structure, population - renders it a sort of illusion. Participating in an Internet art project requires a certain suspension of disbelief and this is what I was interested in. I feel like the artists, musicians, and computer whiz's behind Urban Honking and ultimately Ultimate Blogger were addressing the same issues as the studio artists I had included in the festival and whether they defined the project as art was not really a concern of mine- that was my job as the curator- to fit it into the conceptual framework of a whole slew of projects and to have their ideas live in the space of art- if only for a short while."

Should Ultimate Blogger be defined as art? Or as Kennedy wonders, does it even matter? The event defies strict definitions of art. The contemporary concept of art has shifted dramatically. The same kinds of questions are being asked now as when Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July began their project Learning to Love You More in 2002. Their project was another activity-based contest with no concise aesthetic prerequisites, at an undetermined location (or lack of location) on the Internet. Much has been made of the project and it was even included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The similarity to projects like Fletcher and July's Learning to Love You More proves that the question of defining this work as art and whether or not the definition matters are at the crux of each since both projects will continue to exist outside the art-world, regardless. Performing, community, games and blogging are themes running through both projects. The intersection of conceptual art, social practices, interaction, technology, and community is where projects like these exist.
Our understanding of new mediums is always contingent on translating metaphors of the old into the new. Blogging (and hypertext in general for that matter) is new media improving upon older forms of text-based communication, and an example of remediation. "Remediation" is defined by Paul Levenson as the anthropotropic process by which new media technologies improve upon or remedy prior technologies. Urbanhonking is remediating the understanding of blogging and its potential as an artistic medium. Blogging collectives are remediating the look and "feel" of Internet art. Off-line in prior media these changes were traceable. The flattening of time online means that all of this is happening immediately and simultaneously.

Urbanhonking and Ultimate Blogger are, respectively, a collection of blogs and a blogging contest. Prior understandings of blogging as a medium have interfered with our ability to see the medium's potential. Urbanhonking's use of the medium exemplifies what blogging can be. In addition to this novel use of blogging, their commitment to creating collectively presents new means of understanding the practice of artists. Art processes are now publicly collaborative, be they blogs or not. It has been said that no truly new art can or will be made. But as artists redefine making, clearly new forms can evolve.



to Susan Farrell, Anselm Hook, Mike Merrill, Steve Schroeder, Jonah Bechtolt.


Definitions

Anthropotropic

Used to describe devices, media, et al, which are becoming more suited to human use/consumption. May be used generally to describe anything that moves toward human use. Paul Levinson, from "The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium and How It Changed EVERYTHING!" 2003

Collaborative art-polemic

A developing socio-political art form/language, facilitated by creative, multi-user, multimedia workspaces situated on the Internet. These provide a platform for the unmoderated emergence of cross-fertilized, grass-roots concerns, expressed by a multitude of distinct, individual voices in an array of local cultural languages.

Sources Cited