Introducing Artie

I love to sign the praises of HragVartanian.com & Hyperallergic interns to people when I see them but I don’t do it nearly enough online.

So ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to one of them…Artie Vierkant.

Artie’s an MFA student, artist and writer based in San Diego, California, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I first met Artie on Twitter, where he started a fight with me over my critique of Cory Arcangel’s “Photoshop CS: 72 by 110 inches, 300 DPI, RGB square pixels, default…” (2009) and, well, I like people who have a strong opinion and can intelligently argue their point–even if we choose to disagree.

His Hypermedia column on Hyperallergic isn’t even two weeks old and it is already taking off. He’s already written about the idea of “Exposure” online and its role in new media art, and today he’s published a great interview with artists Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas, better known as AIDS-3D.

Here’s a taste:

AV: So this sort of brings me to another point I wanted to raise, which is to what degree does your art engage with research? It seems like a number of your examples in your recent IMG MGMT essay [on Art Fag City] (William Blake’s “Newton,” Ruth Schwartz Cowan, &c.) are derived from the field of the history and sociology of science. Perhaps I’m asking for how much things like this inform your work, or whether they simply inform AIDS-3D’s general philosophy.

AIDS-3D: Well we are researching stuff all the time on the internet. I think that our work has gotten more research based in the past year. We were really reacting against our experiences in academia and maybe feeling a little bit too apathetic towards art theory.

Artie also regularly publishes his musings and great Internet finds on HyperallergicLABS.

If you want to learn more about Artie, check out artievierkant.com.