NEEN/Concepts/ManetasTimeline

THE NEEN STORY AS TOLD TO MOUSSEMAGAZINE

something that we agree is Neen

Chiara Moioli: Miltos Manetas, a painter, yet also a pillar in the development of what will later be dubbed #Postinternet art 🔺️MM: My definition of Neen is something that we agree is Neen when we see it but we can’t explain why. 🔺️ I did not make Neen. I encountered it. 🔺️ What I wanted was to actually see a new landscape and to represent it. 🔺️ “Why don’t we do a new art movement?” The idea for a new art movement was in me since the exhibition Traffic, curated by #NicolasBourriaud, when he coined the term “#RelationalAesthetics,” which I thought did not sound cool but sounded more like a scientists’ thing. 🔺️ I wanted a name that was fresh, like Dada. 🔺️ I was on an airplane reading a magazine, and I saw that there was a company in California called @LexiconBranding that made names 🔺️ Except it cost $100,000 to get a name from them. 🔺️Yvonne Force found the money. We hired Lexicon, organized a meeting 🔺️I had slides with all the Relational aesthetic stuff and contemporary art. I told them, “Look and look and look. I don’t want nothing to do with that at all 🔺️ I showed them [the work of Lucio Fontana and I told them the word “screen” and talked about the landscape of the computer screen. All of this was happening inside a wooden antique luxury boat docked in the waters of Sausalito, California, as the office of this place, Lexicon, was a yacht and their workplace a bar.🔺️Three months later came a fax🔺️@MaiUeda, went, like, “I want to be Neen. I like this Neen, Neen! I want to be a Neenstar.” 🔺️The Americans were embarrassed; they could not even pronounce it 🔺️It sounded as if you were hearing something annoying 🔺️We did this presentation at Gagosian Gallery 🔺️everybody freaked out completely. 🔺️ From there it started a magic where the computers practically took existence between us. Neen came.

the database materializing!

🔺️ The presentation started with Pinker saying “This word, which now you will hear about, will never have success. It is a word destined to fail.” 🔺️ the word #NEEN evoked things like nina, nana—all the embarrassing kind of things in English. 🔺️And the projection came out greenish. The whole projection was lime green. All wrong. Everybody was embarrassed. Me? I was incredibly happy. That was Neen. The computer was fucking up something. 🔺️I said to Sushi Matsuda, “Mr. Matsuda, please press the button.” He pressed the button, and a Sony computer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the new name for contemporary art is Neen, N-E-E-N. I hope that you like it. Have a nice evening.” 🔺️I realized that (NEEN) was not just a landscape, it was like a spirit: a new kind of spirit going around into the world. 🔺️An informatic creature, like we are. 🔺️It would produce little accidents. It would enact things that were not predicted. 🔺️I was not breeding a cultural meme, I was trying to breed an essence of something. So I didn’t care for the success, I cared for existence. It was not memetic. 🔺️People, when they would say “Neen,” would smile. That smile was important because it guaranteed that it would not attract the type of unsmiling people, but it would get only a few selected ones.

we parked a sofa outside

Evian Desktop Pattern

Strawberries and

🔺️#TheNeenStory, Part- 5 From: "Make a Wilderness", Miltos Manetas interviewed by #ChiaraMoioli for @Moussemagazine _____________________________ 🔺️Then Mike made an animation that was called Strawberries and Pizza...

Rafael Rozendaal

Neensters

There Is No Glory

we lost the whole Neen World

🔺️ There was #AFTERNEEN, the first Neen exhibition in #CASCO, a place in Holland, where we showed the #NeenWorld by #Angelidakis. The day after the opening, a computerized car that was parking outside broke through the storefront of CASCO and destroyed the computers, everything. The first Neen show disappeared because of a computerized car. Those days, because it was costing a lot to host these Worlds on servers, we decided to host them on the computers, so we lost the whole Neen World. The gallery called me, and I was in heaven: “Yeah, that’s it. That’s Neen. Neen accident, Neen thing.” There was a series of Neen calamities where the computer rebelled as Neen did not want to be captured. This was the first, and for me the last show, even though many other great exhibitions were made; but for me, that was the end of Neen.

spirit of Neen captured me

🔺️MM: I was immediately accused of being the posh artist who just wanted to profit from computers, and I was completely clueless about what was happening in the Internet art scene. They were absolutely right, these accusations. These net.art people were right: I had no idea what Internet art was. I had seen some Internet art, but it did not attract my interest because it did not look to me like it was glossy, glamorous, sparkling, moving around. CM: None of it was. Early net.art was the opposite of glamour. MM: For those reasons, I have never watched it. Since the beginning of Neen, the spirit of Neen captured me, took me from the inside.

BEFORE NEEN: RELATIONAL AESTHETICS & "BEIGE"

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

"An entrepreneur/politician/director", writes Nicolas Bourriaud: "Today’s artist appears as an operator of signs, modeling production structures so as to provide significant doubles.”

Read full text

“When Nicolas Bourriaud invited me to participate to TRAFFIC, (CAPC, Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1996), the exhibition that launched his RELATIONAL AESTHETICS, I was fully immersed -like all of us- into Contemporary Art. Still, I was hoping for something different, something that will come upon us out of the blu and will change the game! Why? Because "Art" was an easy game... All of us-the artists pictured on this photo, had an easy and smooth career already: from the art-school to the Museum. We were all very young, still so terribly "well-positioned", that I could see our future clearly already: it felt just a revival of the recent past.. From Neo-Geo to Arte-Povera and from Conceptual Art to Nouveau Réalisme, society seamed flooded by the strong river of Academic Contemporary Art and I was just a drop in it!

Relational Art with OLD aesthetics?

“I was happy to be included in such a great group, still, I was dreaming to become part of something else instead, something I couldn't figure out at all and this is why I was dreaming of a name.. A term, a word, some sequence of letters.. In such mood I was when we met with Nicolas at Bordeaux, to discuss the exhibition. He had already the first copy of the catalogue and showing it to me, he start telling me about Relational Aesthetics. This WAS a new Art Term, for sure it was, Nicolas theory around it was sounding perfectly alright, what he was describing it was exactly what we were all doing. There wasn't any space left thought for what WE WERE NOT DOING, for what COULD BE DONE if suddenly, everything around us start changing and reality will never come back to be the same place no-more.. Why I would bother thinking about such futuristic scenarios? It was just because I had just purchased a laptop, an APPLE computer branded as PowerBook. Not only.. I had a digital camera now.. A QuickTake Apple camera that could look around and turn everything into pixels! Evenmore, I was also hooked already in two strange parallel realities: the World Wide Web -lunched just two years earlier- and DOOM, the first strongly immersive computer videogame. I remember saying to Nicolas that I was sure, we would be soon start doing some kind of strange art. We would be definitely start doing it through Relational Aesthetics but wasn't he interested to also think of a name that we could use to call the most strange-and poetic-of the strange art we would be soon doing?

BEIGE BY PURPLE INSTITUTE

Looking back at the arts and lifestyle of the last ten years, I can see four distinct trends: 1. “Relational Aesthetics” coined by Nicolas Bourriaud. 2. “Beige” created by Olivier Zahm and Elein Fleiss, (Purple Institute, Paris). 3. “Telic” coined by Miltos Manetas and Lexicon Branding 4. “Neen” coined by Miltos Manetas and Lexicon Branding

These 4 art trends, form a square with each trend on each corner. Most of the art and style that started in the late 90's, can be found in that square. Takashi Murakami for example, is a combination of Relational Aesthetics and Otaku-Neen. Some of the artists he promotes are a new flavor of Manga-Beige. Matthew Barney is a Telic-Futurista, while his ex-wifeBjork is Beige-meets-Neen-meets-television. Martin Margiela is Telic but sometimes he is also Beige-for-the Pope and Bernhard Wilhelm is Neen-Naive. Nike is Telic-goes-to-the Analyst, while Adidas is classy Telic. Doug Aitken is Telic-Relational-Spectacular, while Mariko Mori dreamy Telic. The magazine Dazed and Confused is a "Relational Pizza", the Italian Vogue a Telic Fashion Miracle while Butt- the gay magazine- is gay in such a Beige way that it is actually Neen!

Miltos Manetas, "The Square (4 Art trends)", 2005, Read full text

»no space left for what we were NOT DOING«

»for what COULD BE DONE«

»if suddenly everything around us would start changing«

2000, year of SCREEN AND NEEN

May 31, 2000 : Presentation of Neen at the Gagosian Gallery in NY. Partecipants : Yvonne Force - Producer, Miltos Manetas - Artist, David Placek - President of Lexicon, JC Herz - Writer and giornalist , Peter Lunenfeld - Writer , Steven Pinker - Author of and WORDS with RULES, Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, MIT Professor dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences , Joseph Kosuth - Artist

AT GAGOSIAN

“Art movements are almost always named by critics or historians after the fact. But on a recent evening at the Gagosian Gallery on West 24th Street, Miltos Manetas, who creates computer paintings, staged ''Project: ?Word,'' a happening in the form of a news conference to introduce a term for today's contemporary art and style. ''Neen'' describes visual culture inspired by or based on computer technology, including fine art, Web design and video games, as well as by any number of things sleek, portable and plastic. ''No one knows exactly what it refers to,'' said Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...” The New York Times

NEW YORK -- New media art has a brand new name: Neen. Artist Miltos Manetas was frustrated by the lack of appropriate terms his community had developed to describe his work, so he started the Name for Art project earlier this year. Manetas said critics and art historians, not artists, have generally named art movements, citing the Renaissance, and the Baroque and Impressionist movements as examples. "Artists usually do nothing but observe and represent. Sometimes, though, when reality is not inspiring enough, you need to push it." Manetas said he asked corporate branding firm Lexicon to get involved because the artist community failed to come up with a successful name. Manetas approached Lexicon, hoping that the group responsible for inventing such monikers as Pentium, PowerBook, Compaq, and AirTouch could deliver a term more insightful and creative than "contemporary" or "Net" art. "Names are rock and roll: They bring friends to the party," Manetas said via e-mail. The name, which intentionally rhymes with "screen," was revealed at a New York city press conference Wednesday. Other finalists included. "Telic" and "Esc." "'Neen' transcends art. It's more a state of mind than a form or school of art," said Lexicon CEO David Placek. "The screen is becoming ubiquitous, we can make art for it and we can play games on it. It's this transcendent thing that entertains us," Placek said. He hopes that artists will quickly adopt the Neen moniker, appropriating the term in their own way. "I've often wished for a better name for my work," said Internet artist Erik Loyer. "There are so many vocabulary problems in the medium that it becomes tough to discuss anything in common terms." But Loyer thinks creating an artificial name is not the best course of action. "My gut reaction is that a corporate entity should not be responsible for the name. Frankly, I would be surprised if it took hold," said Loyer. New media artist Jon Winet agreed. "There is something somewhat grotesque about this, as it seems like an inversion of how cultural movements should evolve. Ideally, things would evolve from the bottom up, being developed organically by artists and technologists, not a company with focus groups." Winet called the project "a brilliant example of the power of the dot com environment." Winet concedes that trying to resolve the lack of a unifying identity for computer-based art has some merits. He said it is symptomatic of the art world's difficulty with finding a place for this type of work. Developing a name, he thinks, is a sign that a hybrid arts/engineering/corporate culture is developing. Glen Helfand, curator and freelance art critic, thinks that Name for Art is a great conceptual project because its industry roots give it more cultural capital. By contrast, Matthew Mirapaul, the online arts columnist for The New York Times called the project "the same kind of conceptual endeavor that so many other of today's new media artists are engaged in. It's amusing, but it's unlikely that any sort of new coinage cooked up as a conceptual exercise will take hold." "Rarely has an assignment been so engaging," recalls Placek, who has never taken an art course. "We are a stronger company creatively because we worked on this assignment." Placek said Lexicon learned more about name creation and branding from artists and architects than the marketing world. Placek said Lexicon had previously hired consultants for studies of the work and vocabulary of Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Cezanne. While four Lexicon staff members were chiefly responsible for coming up with the Name for Art candidates, the final choice was Manetas' and he is very pleased with Neen. "This is about philosophy and surface: It's completely superficial but it also gives you a simulation of a philosophical notion. "A good name for art precedes the art world. It becomes information about time. It gives a connotation of the visual but also of the psychological landscape. A name is like an artificial island: You step on it for a while and you search the horizon."

https://www.wired.com/2000/06/art-by-another-name-neen/

DUST SHADOWS

PAPER KEYBORD

SPEAKERS

Art Production Fund

"I hope that you like it"...

”A Vaio laptop presenting the new name: “Ladies and Gentlemen. May I have your attention please? The new name for contemporary art is ‘Neen.’ Shall I repeat? N-E-E-N. I hope that you like it. It is made by a computer program. Have a nice evening”

Neen is...

“Neen is a two-faced word. Neen like Janus contains the circle of time and life, therefore the future of Art” Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, 2006

»computing is to NEEN what fantasy is to Surrealism«

»and freedom to Communism«

»it creates the context but it can also be postponed«

THE ELECTRONICORPHANAGE in Los Angeles

ElectronicOrphanage

THE ORPHANS

The ElectronicOrphanage was used to hiring people. You got paid $8 per hour to do nothing really, just look at computers and the Internet and play video games. You were free to do anything you wanted to, but if you created stuff that looked like contemporary art, or design, you would lose your job. If instead you tried strange visual things with the computer, that was encouraged. So finally, some of the “Orphans” started making what soon became the first Neen pieces, while some other ones started discovering such Neen pieces on the Net and in video games.

HIRE THEM TO DO NOTHING

The E.O. was part of the Los Angeles Chinatown scene; it was situated at Chung King Road and was surrounded by art galleries. During the openings of these galleries, there would be a projection at the E.O. The public could look inside from the windows and the open door, but entrance was not allowed. It was like looking at a giant monitor. Miltos Manetas, electronicorphanage.com,

ElectronicOrphanage Sticker

CHUNG KING ROAD

ElectronicOrphanage Shows

The first (quite Neen) artwork

EO SHOWS

Strawberries and Pizza

After two years of E.O. activities in Los Angeles, I missed New York and went back there. New York was not Neen at all. Things have to have business outlets or academic explanations to survive. Neen does have those, but it is so avant-garde you have to be even more advanced to make immediate connections to it. After two years of fighting, suffering, and going to therapists, all the Neen went to Europe. Mai Ueda, Mai Ueda Times, 2006

EO SHOWS

ROZENDAAL'S FIRST WORK

Angelidakis Architecture

ElectronicOrphanage is a space designed like a desktop interface, a storefront that changes function with a single click: office by day and exhibition space by night. The workstations are configured as ceiling-mounted columns on wheels, and when you fold up the seats and push back the columns, they form a projection wall in the back of the space, turning the storefront into a screen. Andreas Angelidakis, 2002

graffiti and internet graffiti

Beautiful Losers next to the ElectronicOrphanage graffiti next to Internet Graffiti in Chung King Road

UEDA/ANGELIDAKIS

AROUND NEEN

People around Neen

Oneaftertheother.com

Oneaftertheother.com, 2003

INTERVIEW BY OLIVIER ZAHM

NEEN PARADISE

"They are professionals. They find names for whatever. They charge an average of $ I00.000 to $150,000, and they offer different names from which to choose and to purchase. "

INTERVIEW WITH MILTOS MANETAS BY OLIVIER ZAHM, from Purple, no. 11, Spring 2002

Read full interview

NEEN PARADISE

To become a public persona not only using the available media but transforming oneself into media, which is more than being a popstar or a flaming sun. A NEENSTER is a producer, not a product. NEENSTERs do things not as a job and not even for creativity or self-expression.

INTERVIEW WITH MILTOS MANETAS BY OLIVIER ZAHM, from Purple, no. 11, Spring 2002

Read full interview

NEEN PARADISE

"You mean that your paintings look better as JPEG pictures on the Net than they do in a living room in Paris's 16th arrondissement?"

INTERVIEW WITH MILTOS MANETAS BY OLIVIER ZAHM, from Purple, no. 11, Spring 2002

Read full interview

NEEN IS THE OPPOSITE OF TELIC

Between other terms, Lexicon proposed "Telic", a very convincing and sophisticated term invented by the human stuff of the company. Telic, a name appropriated from linguistics, means "something directed or tending towards a goal or purpose; purposeful". For example "I am driving to Los Angeles" is a Telic statement. "I am driving" is not. Telos, in Greek, means "the end" or "the purpose".

The Telic spirit

“Telic is our relationship with the tools that help us to design the World, and helps us to see things in perspective. Telic is in mobile phones and computers, and even in the way our houses and clothes are manufactured. Our times are Telic.”

»Neen is a name to evoke a movement. It’s not only art. It’s also social and philosophical/lifestyle. Actually, there are two names: Neen and Telic.” «

The man from Neen, salon.com (READ)

2003: "TELIC" IS USED BY THE UK MILITARY.

“ Operation Telic (Op TELIC) was the codename under which all of the United Kingdom's military operations in Iraq were conducted between the start of the Invasion of Iraq on 19 March 2003. Telic means a purposeful or defined action (from Greek τέλος, telos). They too employed a computer program to pick the name for them: The British Ministry of Defense uses a computer to generate its names so that they carry no overtly political connotations. The meaning was initially unknown but as initial planning took place over the Christmas 2002 period, the term became jokingly known amongst personnel as a backronym for Tell Everyone Leave Is Cancelled.”

»Telic is described as “something directed or tending towards a goal or purpose; purposeful”. For example, “I am driving my car to Los Angeles” is a Telic statement, while “I am driving my car” is not, as there is no destination. Telos, in Greek, means “the end” or “the purpose” «

The man from Neen, salon.com (READ)

THE TELIC ART-SPIRIT

Telic is serious: It makes sense. People recognize it easily and trust it.

»Sometimes Telic-people produce a bit of Neen... Its usually something they hide inside the nightmare of their job«

The man from Neen, salon.com (READ)

AGAINST THE ELEPHANT: THE WHITNEYBIENNIAL.COM

WHITNEYBIENNIAL

A month before the opening at the Whitney Museum, I noticed that they had not registered the domain name, and so having nothing else to do, I decided to buy it and to do an exhibition online that would be more interesting than their exhibition. from an interview by Vito Campanelli with Miltos Manetas, boilermag.it

WHITNEYBIENNIAL

And now you’re doing this project with the U-Haul trucks and WhitneyBiennial.com. Why? Because the domain was available. It was the official show’s unconscious desire. I see all this as a commission by them. Like a Coca-Cola advertisement where they left a little window open: You can put your mark there. SALON.COM, THURSDAY, MAR 21, 2002 , John Glassie: "The man from Neen"

WHITNEYBIENNIAL

whitneybiennial.com is dedicated to the Italian artist Gino De Dominicis (1947–1998) other inspirations: Forgotten Silver, New Zealand, 1995 a documentary by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes and When We Were Kings, USA, 1996 a documentary on Muhammad Ali, directed by Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford

WHITNEYBIENNIAL

There was a lot of confusion and everyone was talking about the whitneybiennial.com instead of the official exhibition, and today the story has become some kind of urban legend. In other countries, the press referred to how the U-Haul trucks had circled the Museum, which is true in a certain sense because the U-Haul trucks of the whitneybiennial.com are invisible and omnipresent vehicles: you can see their Web sites everywhere. from an interview by Vito Campanelli with Miltos Manetas, boilermag.it, 2003 http://www.boilermag.it/article.php?sid=173 WHITNEYBIENNIAL.COM

WHITNEYBIENNIAL

GENERATION FLASH

This generation does not care if its work is called art or design. This generation is no longer interested in the “media critique” which preoccupied media artists of the last two decades; instead, it is engaged in software critique. This generation writes its own software code to create its own cultural systems, instead of using samples of commercial media. The result is the new modernism of data visualizations, vector nets, pixel-thin grids, and arrows: Bauhaus design in the service of information intelligence. Instead, the Baroque assault of commercial media, Flash generation serves us the modernist aesthetics and rationality of software. Information intelligence is used as a tool to make sense of reality while programming becomes a tool of empowerment. Lev Manovich, whitneybiennial.com/theories, 2002

FIRST (AND LAST) NEEN SHOW: AFTERNEEN

AFTERNEEN

And then, a miracle happened. A computerized Mercedes, driven by a drunken kid, collapsed at the space of Casco and destroyed everything. It was a cruel accident because one of the people who was working there was seriously injured, but it was also significant: a real crash between our World and the World of the computer screen.

AFTERNEEN ACCIDENT

A NEEN VIRTUAL (AND LOST) WORLD

NEEN WORLD

Some of these buildings were inspired by Neen works such as Mai Ueda’s philosophyinthebedroom.com, Rafaël Rozendaal’s whywashesad.com, and Angelo Plessas oneaftertheother.com.

NEEN WORLD

Other buildings like Blue Wave and Teleport Forest were inspired as a natural landscape for the Web, and others were just a psychological profile of the NEENSTAR, like Miltos Manetas’ tower or Nikola Tosic’s cave.

NEEN WORLD

A SHOW OPENS FOR A MINUTE: NEENTODAY

NEEN TODAY

this show stayed open only for a minute, on April 4, 2004 at 4:44 pm, and closed just 60 seconds later.

NEEN TODAY

this show stayed open only for a minute, on April 4, 2004 at 4:44 pm, and closed just 60 seconds later.

NEEN TODAY

this show stayed open only for a minute, on April 4, 2004 at 4:44 pm, and closed just 60 seconds later.

NEEN TODAY

this show stayed open only for a minute, on April 4, 2004 at 4:44 pm, and closed just 60 seconds later.

NEEN IS JUST A NEEN DAY: NEEN DAY IN LONDON

NEEN DAY

The exhibition was commissioned by Alexandre Pollazon.

NEEN DAY

The exhibition was commissioned by Alexandre Pollazon.

NEEN DAY

NEEN DAY from MILTOS MANETAS on Vimeo.

The exhibition was commissioned by Alexandre Pollazon.

NEEN IS DEAD, LETS DO SUPERNEEN TO CELEBRATE IT!

SUPER NEEN

The simulation of the virtual world is questioning the meaning of reality. Are we real? Are we in real space? Is somebody moving us with the mouse? Screens, projectors, and computers are installed in different spots of Angelidakis’ architecture, and these display Neen pieces at random. Some of them are interactive and need the “user.” The computer and the laws of probability completely control the SuperNeen show, and nobody exactly knows when and what can be seen or done. Every single “real avatar” is exposed to all possible Neen accidents that can happen at any moment. You can stop it only if you “log out.” Nina Vagic

SUPER NEEN

There are no gallerists, there are no artists, there are no curators, and there are no museums. There are people that play with these illusory things. It is not a system; it is a mess; it is like fog, a fog where things appear and then disappear. It is something almost metaphysical. Miltos Manetas, in Vito Campanelli, L’arte della Rete, l’arte in Rete. Il Neen, la rivoluzione estetica di Miltos Manetas. Aracne editrice, Rome, 2005

SUPER NEEN

what in a Japanese garden may look like rocks and sand in a well-arranged composition is, for a better-trained intellect, black holes and chaos. The Web came from this chaos, in a certain way, directly out of the Trojan Horse, described in Homer’s Iliad. And now we are all again Ulysses lost in the ocean. Miltos Manetas, in Emma Reves (ed.), “Beyond Borders,” Another Magazine, no. 6, spring–summer 2004

SUPER NEEN

You find a script, you test to see if you can start a fire. from an interview by Isabelle Arvers with Angelo Plessas, fluctuat.net, Paris, August 2002

SUPER NEEN

There no longer exists real space and digital space. Right now, you are meeting me here, but at the same time, someone is clicking on my Web page and meeting the other Miltos Manetas. So what are we doing? We are not making art, we are making a new style, charming, beautiful, and intelligent, in order to dress our other body that is found on the Internet. Miltos Manetas, in Vito Campanelli, L’arte della Rete, l’arte in Rete. Il Neen, la rivoluzione estetica di Miltos Manetas. Aracne editrice, Rome, 2005

SUPER NEEN

You can find some cool places to hang out on there and create a certain behavior as in real-life situations. It is very interesting to see how easily social relations are changing there, too. If you get the chance to play with famous online players, then it feels like being in a V.I.P. Hollywood party. These stars, as in every kind of society, have their ups and downs. The death of an online player in a role-playing game can be a bigger headline on Google News than, for example, if Tom Cruise is gay or not. I don’t know if these societies are better places, but we can surely give it a try.

SUPER NEEN

A video from the Superneen exhibition at galleria Pack in MIlan, where I made lots of furniture and "structures" and screentrees to create an environment for the neen pieces that were projected.

SUPER NEEN

To come to an agreement without being able to explain why: this is the only guarantee that what we do is worth doing. Miltos Manetas, boilermag.it, 2003

FUTURE OF ART

Neen like Janus contains the circle of time and life, therefore the future of art.

NEEN MANIFESTO

NEEN MANIFESTO designed by Experimental Jetset

DESIGNED BY

Computing is to Neen as what fantasy was to Surrealism and freedom to Communism. It creates its context, but it can also be postponed. Neenstars buy the newest products and they study how to create momentum. They glorify machines, but they get easily bored with them. Sometimes they prefer just watching others operating them

EXPERIMENTAL JETSET

PUBLISHED BY PACK

Galleria Pack, Milan, Italy

"Writing everything in a book is like leaving a sword in a child's hand"

INTRODUCTION

“ An art movement for the computer age, couldn't be better introduced by anyone but Jorges Luis Borges. I met Borges on Sept 3 1983. I was walking down the Panepistimiou Street toward Omonoia Square and he was slowly - assisted by Maria Kodama- walking his way to the opposite direction, towards Syntagma. Our eyes and bodies met for just a second but that second was to last- as memory- for the rest of my life: one of my most precious and vivid memories of an encounter that could have happened, but never did.. I know now it didn't, because a few years ago, I happen finding between the books I keep in Athens, a literary magazine containing the account of our encounter! Everything described in that account, is exactly the way I remember it, only that I am not mentioned.. Someone else di met Borges and wrote about it, his version of their meeting is different than mine only to the fact that he actually start talking to Borges - I did not.. The way I remember it, I am descending the Panepistimiou after spending my whole afternoon sipping "Frape" coffee at Zonar's, an elegant Cafe where we all used to go back then.. On the table next to mine, a few people are talking about Borges: " He is in Greece- they say- in Crete, receive a honorary degree from Crete's School of Philosophy". Then, they start reading to each other bits and pieces from texts of Borges and from texts about him. I realize that these people are a few of Borge's Greek translators, some of them important poets and writers themselves. Then, noticing that its getting late, I leave Zonar's and about 10 minutes later, I see the old man and the beautiful woman coming towards me. Borges and Maria Kodama! There's also a photograph of them-published at that magazine- for me its a picture stolen from my memory, Borges and Kodak are posing for some woman who also recognized them. I believe it was on that day- I was 19 years old then- that the a possibility for NEEN start existing for me..

https://www.wired.com/2000/06/art-by-another-name-neen/

THIS BOOK

This book is not a Neen book. Alas, Neen is not what it looks like when you see it in pictures; neither can it be described by words. Risking appearing mystical, I would say that the whole of Neen is larger than the sum of its parts. That’s also because Neen started from the word itself—it was only a sound without sense when we bought it from the Lexicon company, it was just a feeling really, and later it met some of its expressions in the works and the activity of the people who are included in this volume.

Most of these works are animations and Web sites, but Neen can also be found in industrial design and fashion, in music and poetry, or in certain contemporary life coincidences such as looking at your watch and noticing that it’s 4:44 am. Even some people’s style can be Neen (such as: “This person is very Neen!”).

Last century’s concepts of cyberspace, contemporary art, fashion, and style slipped together with us into our present and they are now the same they were before, but still a bit different. This universe is animated in a different way than the one before 2000, and Neen is definitely an element of this newly Animated World.

This book describes the first steps of Neen, how it all started with a presentation at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, how a group of foreigners who found themselves playing together with some native guys in Los Angeles discovered the first sides of Neen, and how these people and their friends began showing these findings by using art galleries and the museums around the world as temporary Neen hotels. Miltos Manetas, Milan, March 2006

Neen book

“Neen is a two-faced word.”

Neen book

“Neen is a two-faced word.”

Neen book

“Neen: Netherlands/English dictionary ”

NEEN HERE AND THERE

Talking about Neen

“Neen at The Webby Awards, 2009 ”

Documentary about Neen

“Short documentary on Neen by Arte program "Tracks". Featuring Miltos Manetas, Mai Ueda and Rafael Rozendaal,2007 ”

Ueda DomainPoem

“mai ueda's domain poem @mediamatic NL ”

Neen at SYNC

“A Neen demo by Angelo Plessas featuring Andreas Angelidakis, Mai ueda, Rafael Rozendaal, Miltos Manetas”

Neen at SYNC

“A Neen demo by Angelo Plessas featuring Andreas Angelidakis, Mai ueda, Rafael Rozendaal, Miltos Manetas”

Rozendaal iamveryverysorry book

“Rozendaal iamveryverysorry book ”

MANETAS SuperMario Rolling

“MANETAS SuperMario Rolling”

MANETAS SuperMario Sleeping

“MANETAS SuperMario Rolling ”

MANETAS ABSTRACT SUPERMARIO

“MANETAS ABSTRACT SUPERMARIO ”

Rozendaal websites

“This is a film of all my websites up to now. It is a screen recording of a browsing session. I visit these 103 websites and talk. I talk about making the websites and how they should work, as a reference document for future preservation.”

MANETAS MIRACLE, 1996

“MANETAS SuperMario Rolling ”

MANETAS/HOWIE B. VJ THE INTERNET

“04 September 2009, CIRCUITO OFF - VENICE International short film festival : Howie B. / MANETAS at Prato Grande, isola di San Servolo, animations Rafael Rozendaal,Miltos Manetas ”

NEEN THEORIES

»Islands in the ocean of time. Moments such as 11:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, are somehow remarkable events . We start keeping calendars and see what that means. We don’t know yet«

Fourfortyfour Theory

»Try substitute in words and names the letter M with the letter N and the vice versa and you will see how horrible that universe is! Miltos, becomes "Niltos", New York "Mew York", Mai "Nai", Miuccia Prada, "Niuccia Prada", the singer Eminem, becomes "Enimen"«

EMINEM THEORY

»A Neen way to dedicate ourselves to the development of ventures that are closely related to our own concepts and life. Alienation from the actors and directors of such ventures, is NOT allowed, Irony is not allowed either (unless it is "Socratic"), Negotiation can't be interrupted, for any reason. Transparency is a MUST in every actions we undertake. NEEN Re-construction, is the technique to recover and energize events that went all wrong and to turn them instead into a Perfect Past which we can use to build our Ideal Future«

XENAKIS THEORY

NEEN AGAINST INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND COPYRIGHT

iamgonnacopy logo

“One of the most beautiful aspects of contemporary life is emulation. It makes from life an open project, a work in progress. But our freedom to emulate is limited.” Miltos Manetas, 2001

iamgonnacopy poster & Sticker

“PIRACY MANIFESTO & IAMGONNACOPY STICKER by Miltos Manetas, designed by Experimental Jetset, commissioned by MAXXI National Museum of Art of the 21st Century in Rome for its inaugural exhibition in June 2010.

iamgonnacopy.com

“iamgonnacopy.com on 21 MAY 2001

LOOKING AT OLD NEEN, INTERNET PAVILION, VENICE BIENNALE 2015

Looking at OLD neen..

“2015: NEEN is old and forgotten. in the occasion of the Internet Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennial (BEFORE TOGETHERNESS: Looking at the Internet), I am looking at Rafael Rozendaal's "FataltotheFlesh.com”

Looking at OLD neen..

“2015: NEEN is old and forgotten. in the occasion of the Internet Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennial (BEFORE TOGETHERNESS: Looking at the Internet), I am looking at Van Den Dorpel’s horse”

»2015: NEEN is now old and forgotten. I am "looking at it" for Venice Biennial's Internet Pavilion«

http://beforetogetherness.com

Looking at OLD neen..

“2015: NEEN is old and forgotten. in the occasion of the Internet Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennial (BEFORE TOGETHERNESS: Looking at the Internet), I am looking at Angelo Plessas' "heelssanballs.com”

Looking at OLD neen..

“2015: NEEN is old and forgotten. in the occasion of the Internet Pavilion for the 2015 Venice Biennial (BEFORE TOGETHERNESS: Looking at the Internet), I am looking at Miltos Manetas' "Maninthedark.com”

Looking at OLD neen..

OLD FLASH OF NEEN

»Internet's TELIC invented and then killed the most beautiful way to make NEEN: Flash Animation«

See the old NEEN .SWF

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