ART FOR HUMANS ONLINE UPDATE. Like many long-time Net Art practitioners, we view the current situation of pervasive surveillance and monopoly media co-opting and silo-ing the web as thoroughly FUBAR. In response to disturbing trends in the virtual domain (read NSA + partners), and significant authoritarian pressure coming in the form of rolling (pro) hacks of many areas of our network, AFH has undergone major changes over the past several years, including shifts away from web 2.0 satellite sites/apps like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Flickr, etc. .......Visible, virtual AFH exists at present in a cloudier, substantially reduced, configuration. We still maintain the image archives more or less, and sometimes use thoroughly compromised social media apps, but only rarely and strategically or tactically, for show announcements and whatnot. AFH online activity has been greatly curtailed. Where necessary, for practical purposes and on projects that will benefit from use of ubiquitous network tools, we will use them periodically on a case-by-case basis. We've been reconfiguring our ops to primarily analog arenas again, for the first time since the late 90s. Like many longtime, committed digital/network artsy users, we've decided to step back. You won't be seeing AFH on Instagram any time soon, most likely. We're exploring and developing other options, through Novads and other Dark Matter systems. Oh! ....another incidental note, while I have it in my head: Between September 2011 and October 2012, I was co-organizer of Occupy with Art . In case you were wondering, much of the work I did with OwA entailed production management, & was not credited as it would have been in, say, a professional context, per fluid OWS collective protocols, and is now archived offline or through other portals, maintained by creative partners like Low Lives. We realize such a program makes data/content availability precarious and inconsistent. It's a bummer juggling act. Sometimes even seemingly good options are undermined by bad methodologies. For example, we did not database a version of OwA site with Tamamint (NYU), due to their protocol involving opening a big backdoor in our site, by installing CSS code changes to facilitate their downloading/transfer of content. In August 2012, I co-founded Occupational Art School in Bushwick, NYC, and in 2013, I launched Good Faith Space in Williamsburg/Brooklyn. We temporarily appropriated one of the main sites for OAS, and eventually built a Tumblr for archiving OAS materials. GFS has its own SS6 site, but our development is slow and minimal at present. We have to consider options with every project now in order to maintain some level of creative autonomy and still maximize user access. We haven't chosen to go completely old school protectionist, but it's on the table, as Dick Cheney might say.The PJM solo exhibition at SLAG Contemporary here in Brooklyn slated for June 2013 precipitated the re-organization of my virtual AFH content, which includes dozens of unlinked sites. So, to make a long story short, AFH is now pretty much limited to a couple of Squarespace sites (www.artforhumans.com and www.4dpop.com) , one a nexus, the other for major exhibits, and the thousands of old links on our server are cloaked. AFH Blog, brutally and repeatedly hacked, is dark, the AFH Wiki abandoned and dozens of online exhibits curtained, and so on. That's why some of the older links here in the bio areas may not transport you to the old social media sites or online HTML exhibits, and you might encounter other such zombie-stuff in click-thrus. In general all my online content dating to 1991 exists in archive form, on my servers. If you can’t find something you’re searching for in particular, drop me a line & I’ll let you know where it is, if it’s still online [almost all of it is - e.g., all the Tumblrs (over two dozen), and many of the early HTML, Flash, QTVRs, animated gifs, etc., etc. projects, too). - Paul
Art for Humans navigation interface, ca. 2006