Neoism

[Cain]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoism

Neoism refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists and more generally to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization....

Neoists refer to their strategies as "the great confusion" and "radical play". They were acted out in semi-private Apartment Festivals which took place in North America, Europe and Australia between 1980 and 1998 and in publications which sought to embody confusion and radical play rather than just describing it. Consequently, both Neoist festivals and Neoist writing experimented with radical undermining of identity, bodies, media, and notions of ownership and truth. Unlike typical postmodern currents, the experiment was practical and therefore existential. Monty Cantsin, for example, was not simply a collective pseudonym or mythical person, but an identity lived by Neoists in their everyday life....

In the early 1980s, the Neoist Reinhard U. Sevol founded Anti-Neoism, which other Neoists adopted by declaring Neoism a pure fiction created by Anti-Neoists. The Dutch Neoist Arthur Berkoff operated as a one-person-movement "Neoism/Anti-Neoism/Pregroperativism". Similarly, Blaster Al Ackerman declared himself a "Salmineoist" after Sicilian-American actor Sal Mineo, and John Berndt was credited by Ackerman as having given Neoism the name "Spanish Art," circa 1983. In 1994, Stewart Home founded the Neoist Alliance as an occult order with himself as the magus. At the same time, Italian activists of the Luther Blissett project operated under the name "Alleanza Neoista"....


Neoist plays like multiple names, plagiarism and pranks were adopted, frequently mistaken for Neoism proper and by mixing in situationist concepts, in other subcultures such as the Plagiarism and Art Strike 1990-1993 campaigns of the late 1980s (triggered largely by Stewart Home after he had left the Neoist network), Plunderphonics music, the refounded London Psychogeographical Association, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, the Luther Blissett project, the Michael K Project, the German Communication Guerilla, and, since the late 1990s, by some net artists such as 0100101110101101.org. Other artists who explicitly if vaguely credit Neoism are The KLF, Luther Blissett, Alexander Brener/Barbara Schurz, spart and Luke Haines (of The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder).

Neoism is also mentioned briefly in David O. Russell's 2005 film I ♥ Huckabees. Dustin Hoffman's character says the word under his breath in response to Jason Schwartzman's experience to "the blanket thing," which is a method of understanding the universe derived from being zipped up in a body bag.

The California-based tech-pop band Brilliant Red Lights also applies the word in the song "Neoism," the first track off their second album, Actualism. The band imagines a literal--albeit applicable--definition of the word, defining it as "the culture of the new."

http://www.neoism.info/
http://neoist.org/
http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/neoism_index.html
http://anti.neoism.info/
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Neoism
http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/neoism/neoman.htm

[Triple Zero]

i came across the <binary>.org site long time ago when i was subscribed to a generative art mailinglist.

would the art-project/troll called Netochka Nezvanova also belong to this movement?
(a "shared" troll that posted on art mailinglists and newsgroups, using some sort of very vague half computer generated l33tspeak, but also a multimedia artist mystery figure .. very weird)

[Cain]

It does seem very similar, going by the Wiki article on "her".

[Triple Zero]

unfortunately the article doesn't state if "she" is still "active" .. i would have loved to see "her" in confrontation with some actual trolls [though on this board it would probably get dismissed as 23pinealfnordery]

i always found "her" very intriguing somehow. though that was in my early days on the internet, i think today i'd be slightly too jaded to pay much attention to it

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

This seems like some sort of prank held by a bunch of weirdos (like us) to fake a past countercultural movement.  And now I'm confused, but in a  kind of way.

[Jasper]

Just printed this off on my company printer.

[rygD]

What is the quality of the companies after you print them?