Surf Club

サーフ・クラブ / 2006–2012 / Style / Digital Art

A movement that made the collaborative blog itself the site of the work. Nasty Nets, founded in 2006 by John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, Marisa Olson and others, was the first to popularize the term surf club, and other collectives took the label up. It grew out of link sharing on del.icio.us, so found images, screenshots of searches and targeted ads pile up in date order inside a default blog template.

A default blog template left alone, with posts stacking in date order and no design applied / Screenshots of web searches, targeted ads and stock gradients posted as found / Posts answering other posts, so the same image returns altered by another member / Amateur material sitting in the same column as work, with nothing marking the difference

Images at the source page

Dictionary entry

Best used for: Showing what the late 2000s web felt like through a run of images left exactly as found · Running a project where the shared posting space is the work, and holding the line against tidying it
Type: Do not choose a typeface. Leaving the default in place is part of the meaning, and replacing it makes something else.
Composition: One vertical column in date order. No editing and no curation, just the order things were posted in.
Material: Leave found material as found. Keep the compression artefacts, the low resolution and the stock gradients.
Caution: Cleaning up the found material and arranging it well removes the found state that the style is actually made of, leaving only collage.
Further study: Rhizome の Net Art Anthology にある Nasty Nets の再構成アーカイブ / Paul Slocum がまとめた Catalog of Internet Artist Clubs / リンク共有の場から共同ブログへ移った経緯と、そこに集まった作り手の顔ぶれ

Related entries

Cite this entry

The dictionary is meant to be linked to. Take whichever form fits where you are writing.

Link: https://indexstyle.org/styles/surf-club
Markdown: [Surf Club — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/surf-club)
HTML: <a href="https://indexstyle.org/styles/surf-club">Surf Club — IndexStyle</a>

Back to index position