I hope I get a translation job this summer.
I hope I get a teaching job next year.
I hope I get a raise at work,
and benefits.
I hope I get a grant.
I hope I win a prize.
I hope I get a refund
on my taxes.
2017
I had a half-drunk conversation K., one of J.’s roommates, about our hometowns. I had a similar conversation on the balcony with S., who during his father’s military career, lived in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Georgia, among other states, before settling in southeastern New England. These conversations reminded me of the one I had at the punk show in the refurbished Providence Mill, with C. and the stick-thin gay man whose name escapes me, where we also discussed the places we lived and then remarked, in a metadiscursive fashion, on the popularity of personal geography as a topic of conversation between strangers as they locate one another in space and time. I’m from Rhode Island. I went to school in Minnesota. I’m moving to Russia in a couple of weeks. This information weighs more than descriptions of weather (which is also an affirmation of a common position in space and time) but it is still impersonal enough to be polite.
2002/2017
0.
Soon my new Moscow will stop being imaginary. I have already sensed this packing. I could feel Moscow in the clothes that had been there before as I got them ready to go back. It made me less excited. I fantasized less.
1.
The apartment I live in here belongs to Lydia and will still belong to her after I leave Moscow and it is filled with her things. The décor is vintage 1970s Soviet spinster. Pros: It’s a real period piece, with genuine local color. Cons: It’s ugly and depressing.
Catalogue of décor:
A 1975 radio without a tuner. The model is called “Surprise” which made me wonder if it would choose a new station at random every night. But it only plays one, and on my first night it broadcast American jazz and blues.
A round pelt that I initially mistook for a slice of felled tree. Was it a beaver? Was it a moose? I think of it as the Mystery Muff.
There is a second, smaller Mystery Muff which at first glance seems less mysterious than the first because there is a cardboard silhouette of a sleek antlered mammal mid-leap. But the fur feels coarser than that of any deer I’ve ever patted. How coarse are elk? Do they graze in the former Soviet Union?
There’s a rotary phone, which I expected, having been to Russia before. But this one is the color of lemon sherbet.
A framed photocopy from a book of ancient Egyptian art.
2.
Vladimir Yakovlevich tends to the apartment. When I asked if he’d always lived in Moscow, he readily shared that he was born in 1938 and got evacuated during the war, but his mother stayed behind to look after the family home. When he was three years old, a bomb fell on their two-story, wooden building, causing the building to catch fire and collapse, killing her.
2002/2017
{I was invited to teach a seminar at City College’s MFA program in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is the syllabus for the course I came up with. I wanted to share it as a resource for people who are interested in the topic, and also in hope that I’ll get some feedback on it, in case I ever have a chance to teach it again. Please leave comments if you have suggestions. I removed housekeeping stuff–program policies, assignments, deadlines–so if you are a student in the course DO NOT refer to this version of the syllabus because it’s missing information that’s essential to you. It’s fine for everyone else.}
Themed Workshop: Writing and Digital Media
Introduction
How is writing on a computer different from writing with pen and paper? How is text on a screen unlike text on a page? Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith has said that writing online is the same as archiving; the platforms for distributing writing on the internet—from Blogspot to Facebook—automatically add metadata, organizing entries with timestamps and user-defined tags. But “archiving” implies a purposeful preservation for the future, and the examples of Geocities and Friendster, among others, show that users’ digital writing can be deleted by the companies that own the platforms it’s on, and further steps must be taken to archive it properly. Furthermore, an archive maintains a standard of historical significance, and most of the writing produced online wouldn’t meet any such standard. Text messages, chat room transcripts and status updates have just as much in common with everyday speech as they do with the printed word, in that they have the most meaning at their moment of utterance, the moment they appear on the screen. But the enduring traces of the written speech of digital text have interesting implications for artists and writers, who have long tried to capture the immediacy of speech and physical presence in their work.
The relationship of digital media to speech and the archive will be the central question of this seminar, as we consider how writing—one of the most transformative technologies in human history—inhabits and adapts to other technologies of communication, and the possibilities of these developments for art. We will approach the issue from a variety of perspectives, reading critical and philosophical essays on literacy and orality by thinkers such as Freud, Derrida, and McLuhan, and studying recent works of art and literature that exploit various features of digital text, from the ease of appropriation with the word processor’s copy-and-paste tools and the “active” text of code to experiments with the short forms of blogging and poetic stylizations of chat vernacular.
How to Read
Over the course of the semester we will consider what digital media does to the idea of a text, both in our theoretical discussions and in our practical work as readers of blogs, twitter accounts, interactive fiction, and other forms of writing that pose a challenge to linear habits of reading. When I put a blog on the syllabus, I don’t expect you to read every post from beginning to end, but I do expect you to read enough to draw some intelligent conclusions about it. You should come to class prepared to share an excerpt that struck you as interesting—whether that is five tweets or three blog entries—and give a close reading of it.
For each meeting there will be a reading in critical theory in addition to artworks. Students are not expected to “apply” the week’s theoretical text to the artwork; rather, the readings should be seen as two parallel tracks. For the most part they will be discussed separately, but I expect the quality of our discussions of artworks will be influenced by an understanding of writing as a medium and a technology developed through the theoretical readings.
Schedule of Readings and Assignments
9/3: Introduction
Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, SAMSUNG
Oliver Laric, Still Available
9/10: Participation
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Introduction, Chapters 1-3 (pp. 1-76)
Douglas Davis, World’s First Collaborative Sentence
9/17: Interactivity
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Chapters 4-5 (pp. 77-135)
Mark Amerika, Grammatron
Olia Lialina, Agatha Appears
Imri Sandstrom, A While Ago I Decided to Eat
10/ 1: Code as Poetry
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, Chapters 6-7 (pp. 136-176)
Rosalie Hirs & Harm van den Dorpel, Family Tree
mez, _cross.ova.ing ][4rm.blog.2.log][_
mez, LiveJournal
Bjorn Magnhildoen, PlaintextPerformance
Pall Thayer, Microcodes
Stanford Code Poetry Slam finalists
Nick Montfort, Concrete Perl
Nina Freeman, untitled
Ryder Ripps, git-poetry
10/8: Text Adventures
Marshall McLuhan, “The Photograph: The Brother-without-Walls” (pp. 188-202) and “The Typewriter: Into the Age of the Iron Whim,” (pp. 258-265) in Understanding Media [PDF]
Matt Sheridan Smith, Play
Jeremiah Johnson, Wave Muse
Nina Freeman, Perishable
10/15: Conceptual Writing
Lev Manovich, “What Is New Media?” (pp. 18-61), The Language of New Media [PDF]
Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy [PDF]
Kenneth Goldsmith, Fidget [text] [Applet])
Tan Lin, BIB. [PDF]
Sheila Heti, “From My Diaries (2006-2010) in Alphabetical Order” [PDF]
Claude Closky, Welcome to My Blog and My Latest Things
10/22: Flarf
Sigmund Freud, The Mystic Pad [PDF]
Mainstream Poetry (esp. “Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism”)
Nada Gordon, “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas”
Sharon Mesmer, “The Swiss Just Do Whatever”
Ji Yoon Lee, “RE: Dear translationmachine,” from Foreigner’s Folly: A Tale of Attempted Project [PDF]
Brandon Brown, “99: Nine translations for the Flarf Anthology,” from The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus [PDF]
10/29: User Engagement
Jacques Derrida, “Exergue” and “Preamble” (pp. 7-32), Archive Fever [PDF]
Guthrie Lonergan, 3d warehouse
Joel Holmberg, Legendary Account
11/5: Modified Readymades
Jacques Derrida, “Exergue,” “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” and “Linguistics and Grammatology” (pp. 1-73), On Grammatology [PDF]
Jeff Baij, Everything U Stand 4
pvvq on Buzzfeed
11/12: Alt Lit
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” [PDF]
Tao Lin, “hikikomori” and “i’m going to touch you very hard”
Mira Gonzalez, selected poems (1, 2)
Bunny Rogers, Cunny Poem [PDF]
11/19: Internet Poetry
Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing” [PDF]
Steve Roggenbuck, i am like october when i am dead
Steve Roggenbuck, videos
Michael Hessel-Mial, Tweets Like a Lovebird
11/26: Robots and Aliens
Mikhail Epstein, “Reconfigurations of Textuality” (pp. 69-78) and “Scriptorics: An introduction to the anthropology and personology of writing” (pp. 117-129) from Tranformative Humanities [PDF]
Angelo Plessas, Robot Poetry
Oscar Schwartz, bot poet
Christian Bok, Xenotext [PDF]
Christian Bok, “The Piecemeal Bot is Deconstructed: Notes toward a potential Robopoetics” [PDF]
12/3: Case Studies
Bhanu Kapil, Was Jack Kerouac A Punjabi?
Kevin Killian on Amazon
12/10: Case Studies
Paul Chan, Wht is a Book?, Wht is Lawlessness? and Wht is a Kardashian? [ebooks]
Rob Horning on Buzzfeed Community
I really don’t like “post-internet art.” I don’t like the term and I don’t like the art that’s presented under its banner. Lots of people tell me that they don’t like it, either.
Whether people like it, or hate it, or feel indifferent, it seems like they all know what “post-internet” means but they can’t articulate it. The vagueness of post-internet, paired with the assumption that everyone knows what it means, is one of the most aggravating things about it. “I know it when I see it”—like porn, right? And it’s not a bad analogy, because post-internet art does to art what porn does to sex.
But let’s try to define it anyway.
I first came across “post-internet” when it was the title of the blog that Gene McHugh kept in 2009 and 2010. The use of “post-internet” as a label wasn’t common then—no one besides Marisa Olson really used it—and I misunderstood Gene’s choice of a blog name as a pun about blogging (a blog entry is a post, it’s on the internet). But he really did use “post-internet” as a term and he tried at length to describe what it means.
When the internet stopped being the domain of amateurs, programmers, and hackers—when it became an inseparable part of everyday life for people with no special interest in or knowledge about computers—it changed. That’s why Gene thought it was worth saying “post-internet.” He wrote: “What we mean when we say ‘Internet’ became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from… sigh… It became the place where business was conducted, and bills were paid. It became the place where people tracked you down.”
I’m sympathetic to Gene’s approach to developing a historical framework. It seems similar to an attempt to think about how radio or television changed how people live and how art is made, or how newspapers changed things when printing and reproducing images became cheap and easy. Cultural shifts like these are impossible to quantify but they become visible in art and historians have used art to describe them.
The kneejerk negative reaction to “post-internet”—“How can we be post-internet when internet is still here? Shouldn’t it be during-internet”—doesn’t seem to hold up under scrutiny. Gene covered a response already. And yet, I have a problem with Gene’s response—with his “sigh” at what the internet has become.
Think about it through analogy to post-modernism. Post-modernism doesn’t mean modernism doesn’t exist anymore. Modernism penetrates all aspects of life: any big new building in any city owes a debt to modernist architects. Modernism infiltrates domestic life via Ikea. Everybody loves abstract painting now—it decorates the walls of banks and hotels. Modernism’s infancy was the period when it had the most potential, but that ended and now it’s living a dull adult life. Post-modernism doesn’t mean that modernism is gone. It means that modernism is familiar. It’s complete. It’s still alive but its features are recognizable, and that’s precisely why it can be repeated and reused. Scholars may continue to argue about the particulars of modernism, about the facts of its infancy, but they can do so because they have a handle on its general contours, which are out in the world in plain sight.
Post-internet says the same thing about the internet that post-modernism says about modernism. But isn’t that a little presumptuous? “What about what we mean when we say ‘Internet’ changed so drastically that we can speak of ‘post Internet’ with a straight face?” asked Gene on his blog. I’d agree that it changed drastically but I’d also ask: Why assume that it can’t change again? The internet is always changing. The internet of five years ago was so unlike what it is now, to say nothing of the internet before social media, or the internet of twenty years ago, or the internet before the World Wide Web. Why insist that the changes are over?
Artists who begin with the proposition that the phenomena of their world are boring and banal, who begin with an exasperated sigh, are going to produce art that is boring and banal, art that produces exasperated sighs. That was the case with a lot of conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, when artists explored the aesthetics of administration, producing charts and diagrams and photocopy texts that presented viewers with the particulars of bureaucracy. Sigh.
What’s the new equivalent of the aesthetics of administration?
The post-internet art object looks good in the online installation view, photographed under bright lights in the purifying white space of the gallery (which doubles the white field of the browser window supporting the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop. The post-internet art object looks good online in the way that laundry detergent looks good in a commercial. Detergent doesn’t look as stunning at a laundromat, and neither does post-internet art at a gallery. It’s boring to be around. It’s not really sculpture. It doesn’t activate space. It’s frontal, designed to preen for the camera’s lens. It’s an assemblage of some sort, and there’s little excitement in the way objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the mass-market products in it. It’s the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive and proliferate images in networks, awe at the way networks are ruled by brands. It’s like a new form of landscape painting, a view of the world as it is, and that’s why its visual vocabulary is hard to distinguish from that of advertising and product displays. An artist’s choice to make art that way—as a plain reflection of reality and the power systems that manage it—shows a lack of imagination, when there are so many other ways of making art available. Post-internet artists know what the internet is for, and it’s for promoting their work. Post-internet art flaunts a cheap savvy of image distribution and the role of documentation in the making of an art career. Post-internet art seems like art about the idea of art world success—the art one would make to become a well-known artist if one doesn’t care about anything else.
Should I name names? What’s the point of an angry rant if I don’t even call anyone out? I don’t want to do that, mainly because discussing the body of work of a particular artist or critiquing certain pieces would require a level of research, attention, and thought that I’m not willing to spend on post-internet art. It also seems futile because post-internet isn’t necessarily a permanent identity for any given artist; an artist can make post-internet art sometimes and another kind of art, for better or worse, at another time. Post-internet is an outfit that can be worn and discarded. So it’s better to call it out as a trend, or to call out the scenes and social groupings that do the most to popularize the trend. The Jogging—the people closely associated with it and the people who want to be closely associated with it—abuse post-internet most egregiously. The scenes that have been cultivated around Berlin galleries Kraupa-Tuskany and Societe are bad, too. If it’s at Higher Pictures gallery in New York I probably won’t like it. If it’s in a group show curated by Agatha Wara I’m sure I’ll hate it. If it’s on a cool Tumblr I can’t be bothered.
So post-internet is bad. But if we’re not post-, then where are we, when are we? What prefix can people who love labels use to situate themselves in history? Recently I’ve become enamored with Mikhail Epstein’s writing on proto-, which supposes that the modern age of humanity is over, and that sweeping changes to nature and technology herald the onset of a new, still nebulous era. Epstein writes:
“The period we are entering is no longer a period after something: postcommunist, postmodernist, ‘postthis,’ or ‘postthat.’ The present era is ‘proto,’ but a preface to what, we do not know. Proto- is noncoercive, nonpredictive, and unaccountable: a mode of maybe. The future is a language without grammar, an unconscious without dreams, pure nothing. Inescapably the future becomes everything so as again and again to remain nothing.”
Post- presupposes finitude, closure, knowing retrospection. Proto- points to multiplicity and possibility. An art that is proto- would approach the internet’s ubiquity not as a boring given but as a phenomenon ripe with transformative potential for the mediation of people and art (or people and people), for the creation of new genres from the microforms of texts or tweets, or from game design, from karaoke and fan art, and so on. Proto- is okay with not knowing or not working. As Epstein says, we don’t what proto- is a preface to, and so there’s no way to append it to a root and complete a buzzword. Proto- sucks for promo. But as a starting point for an artist, as a disposition for art, proto- is a lot better than post-.
{NOTE: I wrote this essay in winter 2011 for “Read/Write,” an exhibition curated by Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn. It was a revision of “The Chill Zone,” a post for Rhizome about jstchillin.org, the online curatorial platform run by Caitlin and Parker. It’s been a long time since I thought about the text and when I happened upon it recently while organizing some files I was a little surprised by it. I remember this essay as the first time I wrote about language’s phatic function and how I think it relates to net art and other kinds of media shared online, which I’ve been writing about in connection to selfies in the last year. But I didn’t remember that I’d written about the body’s relation to art in the museum, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in connection to Yelp and my ideas about vernacular criticism. So that was kind of cool. Anyway, I’d thought I’d put the text here because it was published in a zine for “Read/Write” and it’s not online anywhere (excluding the earlier version on Rhizome, but I think this version is much better). It was on my old web site as a writing sample but when I got a new web site in Fall 2012 it got deleted from the web. Now it’s back, here it is.}
Let’s start with a few new media moments!
1. The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles screens video art in its restaurant, Cafe Hammer. The first work to be so shown was William Kentridge’s Automatic Writing, in fall 2010. The animated film’s duration exceeds the probable patience of a visitor strolling through the museum. But maybe it will catch the eye and penetrate the mind of the visitor as he eats. Café Hammer offers high-brow ambient television, a rarefied counterpart to ESPN in a pub or FashionTV in a Eurotrash espresso bar.
2. In spring 2010 the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh opened a long-term display of moving-image works by its namesake. A labyrinth of scrims presents seminal film works, starting with Sleep, the first Warhol ever made. Another gallery is gridded with television screens, collectively showing hundreds of hours of footage taken for Warhol’s channel, from fashion critiques to an aborted soap opera. The visitor is impressed by Warhol’s devotion to living a life behind and beside and in front of cameras. He left the rest of us looking at screens.
3. “Time doesn’t exist when you’re… just chilling!” The headline on an administrative page on the site of curatorial collective Jstchillin rephrases a familiar, folksky phenomenology—time flies when you’re having fun!—while taking it down a notch. Having fun is active. Chilling is slow. The slogan situates the presentation of artworks in the temporal and physical environment of a regular internet user, while suggesting how one might describe that environment. I’ll give it a shot. Chilling entails an awareness of parallel threads of messages, ordered by clock-time sequence (the sequence of clock-time) and subjective assignments of importance (as in Facebook’s toggled feed settings “Top News” and “Most Recent”), and the knowledge that each discrete parcel of information can wait for your next connection to your e-mail, your RSS aggregator, your Tumblr and whatnot. But they might lose relevance if you wait too long. The chilling body is motionless except for a few minor gestures: typing, clicking, shifting the direction of its gaze. Chilling is simultaneity of recent past and lagging present, with a furtive hope for updates in the near-future: the sum of attempts to follow a track or two into the past and push others toward forward. Awareness of physical surroundings gets fuzzy as old layers of digital sediment are sifted through, new ones deposited. Jstchillin says: “To chill is to live in a constant state of multiplicities, a flow of existence between web and physicality.”
We’ve moved from numbered introductory paragraphs into the essay proper. Hey, what’s up? Jstchillin encompasses several initiatives—including the exhibitions “Read/Write,” at 319 Scholes in Brooklyn in March 2011 and “Avatar 4D” in San Francisco in April 2010—but its flagship project is “Serial Chillers in Paradise,” an online exhibition that featured a different artist about every other week from October 2009 to February 2011. It had thirty-three projects, in all forms and looks. Video games are the subject of an illustrate short story/film treatment by Jon Rafman, and Jonathan Vingiano’s Space Chillers is a browser toy. Ida Lehtonen’s piece folds soothing ocean sounds into a video of exercises that desktop laborers can do to stay limber during breaks, while Eilis MacDonald’s work sends you scrolling through tidbits of New Age-y advice to a starry screen with an audio track of meditation instruction. Zach Shipko and Tucker Bennet’s feature-length movie “Why Are You Weird?”, parceled into ten-minute YouTube uploads, is a story of art-school students who spend almost all of their onscreen time at parties or hanging out in their dorm rooms, rehashing crits. And so on. Chilling as a rangy theme that contributors incorporate in their work now and then coincides with chilling as the state of the viewer when s/he encounters it. “Serial Chillers” often affects a unity between the art itself and conditions of its consumption. Another Jstchillin slogan: “We are the slackers of the art world!”
We’re familiar with many instances of conceptual chilling from art’s recent history. Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer Is the Highest Form of Art and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s soup dinners are just two of the best known. These rely on a temporary transformation of the gallery, from a sanctuary for sober contemplation of rare objects to a site of convivial sharing of food, drink, and experience. They have more-or-less distinct beginnings and endings in time and space. They starts at the gallery’s threshold. The number of participants and the duration of the event are limited by the gallery’s budget. The physics of hanging out has laws! But chilling online transcends most of them. The byte-to-weight converter that Michael Giudetti made for “Serial Chillers” coolly asserts an awareness of the physical conditions of internet fun: the big slowness of you, the viewer, in comparison to the infinitesimal tininess of the content.
“Serial Chillers” had a few spectacular, math-free visualizations of this idea. Two of the earliest projects, the ones by Mitch Trale and Cody Blanchard, were moving three-dimensional environments, where the slight movement of a finger on a tracking pad or a twist of a mouse would cause a swoop or leap of perspective. Michelle Ceja’s Silicon Velocity and Tabor Robak’s Mansion, both reminiscent of sci-fi visions of travel through the insides of a computer network, also subtly reinforced the immobility of the viewer by simulating rapid movement in a realm “behind” the screen.
I started off by talking about museums and how they handle the increasing amount of moving images they want to show. Museum-going is almost the opposite of chilling. Museums make you keep moving. Standing in one place and contemplating a single work for a long time is uncomfortable. Your legs get tired. There are only so many times you can shift your weight from one foot to the other. When you’re chilling you can get cozy in your chair. You can slouch. The screen is what has to keep moving. What’s a screen saver? It’s a device that keeps things moving on the screen, because when an image stays in one place too long the pixels harden: digital cramps.
The Warhol Museum presents you with a chaotic surfeit of footage. In the hall of television, each monitor has a seat in front of it with headphones, probably to help you immerse yourself in that content. But the very presence of the grid is a constant and silent reminder that there is much more to see. It impels you to finish up watching, to get up and move. Cafe Hammer, on the other hand, wants you to relax and eat stuff while glancing at a single screen. The contemporary art museum, like the airport or the mall, is a site of ambulation. But Cafe Hammer is like the airport lounge, where you cool your heels and watch CNN.
In the museum the viewer’s presence is a given. Online a connection needs to be made. The point of contact is a discrete action in the otherwise fuzzy, slippery experience of time I tried to describe above. Because the internet is first and foremost a communications technology, a way to talk about the moment of contact can be found in the study of language. Roman Jakobson’s 1960 essay “Linguistics and Poetics” names six functions of language that all operate in any act of communication, although one might dominate it. An utterance like “Can you hear me?” affirms that the channel of communication is still open; its primary function is what Jakobson called the phatic. He took this term from anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowki, who introduced it in the 1920s in his studies of small talk. Jakobson and Malinowski were discussing two aspects of the same action—confirming contact—though Jakobson was more concerned with the physical conditions that establish the possibility of communication (again, “Can you hear me?”), while Malinowski was interested in the social ones (“How are you?”, “Nice weather we’re having,” etc.).
“Hello?” confirms a working connection at the beginning of conversation over the telephone. The internet started out in phone lines and expanded their potential as vehicles for communication, effectively spawning millions of ways to say “Hello?”—from “A/S/L” in AOL chat rooms to tweets documenting the contents of the tweeter’s lunch. The latter barely count as vehicles of information. They are there to remind the tweeter’s network of his existence, reaffirming the connection they share.
Gareth Spor brought the idea of contact to the foreground with devices of exaggeration and extremity in his project, which directed users to a video chat with a NASA space station. He focused on communication via internet as transcending the void of space, but other contributors to “Serial Chillers” introduced the dimension of time, singling out moments of contact within the diffuse temporal experience of chilling. Ivan Gaytan offered a menu that called up windows of looped visual and sonic noise. Over the course of the two weeks that his work was featured on the Jstchillin homepage, Duncan Malashock released six tableaux, where classical busts, candles, and other objects appeared in varying configurations depending on when you chose to visit the page; they could also be moved by a touch of the mouse. Ben Vickers linked chat sessions to a calendar, and marked the intersections of these different rhythms for measuring time with three-dimensional models that spun, suspended in the page’s white space.
Guthrie Lonergan’s 3D Warehouse demonstrates a deeper concern with the social conditions of contact. He collected Google Sketchup drawings of environments that their makers said (in the accompanying descriptions) that they had seen in their dreams. The sharing of dreams is an odd kind of small talk, as meaningless as discussions of weather but more intimate, something you’d only do with a close friend. But the Google Sketchup users assembled by Lonergan put their dreams out there for anyone. The discomfort you feel from this distortion of social convention is exacerbated by the images, which for all the modeling skills of the artists who drew them come at you as cartoonish, awkward, thin shadows of a stranger’s mind.
Lonergan interviewed his subjects and included the resulting text in his project. He was a ghostly interloper, and his subjects were usually confounded by his interest.
For them, the making of the model was an impulse, an ephemeral need. By investigating and preserving these drawings, Lonergan hits on a central paradox of online communication: it’s dominated by the phatic function, an aspect of language commonly associated with speech, but it happens primarily in writing. Chatter meets the archive. Another succinct expression of this condition is Martin Kohout’s “Watching Martin Kohout,” a YouTube channel of videos of Kohout, recorded with his webcame as he watched YouTube videos. YouTube creates an illusion of endless choice. One video leads to another. There is never a dead end. Kohout, however, is motionless. The act of watching is almost always identical. Andy Warhol, we learn at his museum, took a camera almost everywhere he went and captured what he saw. Kohout’s camera is the fixed webcam, and he transposes the cameraman’s motion to surfing YouTube. The result is an archive of chilling: a record of the videos he watched, and his inert body watching them.
“Serial Chillers” was announced with an IM screenshot, a fragment of a bigger chat between Caitlin and Parker. That set the tone for the whole project. There have been other web-based curatorial initiatives with distinctive approaches to the internet. Netmares & Netdreams was about creative perception, the artist’s agency in the interpretation and contextualization of media objects found online, and made the dream a metaphor for the uncertain fluidity of the net. Club Internet, with its guerilla curatorial philosophy and hidden or deleted past, was about looseness of location, transfer and transience. Nasty Nets and dump.fm conformed to the speed and flow of the internet, with a rapid and regular creation of images in the tempo of a blog and a chat room, respectively. “Serial Chillers” slowed things down a bit, featuring labor-intensive projects with a frequency more familiar from print than the internet. But through the projects themselves and the statements of the curators, Jstchillin got at the way art is viewed away from the museum: moving images and inert viewers, slacking and browsing, the extended presence of the artifact and the chat-quick speed of the encounter with it.
This essay originated as a post to Rhizome’s blog in July 2010. My development and resolution of certain ideas presented in that text is deeply indebted to Boris Groys’ essay “Comrades of Time,” published in Going Public (Stenberg Press, 2010) and his related lecture “Time-Based Art,” delivered at New York University in December 2010. My discussion of movement in the museum is informed by comments in statements and essays by Ilya Kabakov. Thanks to Caitlin Denny and Parker Ito for the opportunity to revise and expand the text.
{NOTE: This post is distilled from notes for a lecture I gave at Outpost Artist Resources in Ridgewood, NY, in June 2013, for an event series organized by David Wightman. I prepared this version for Next Time, a publication edited by David Geer and Isaac Pool, and I’m giving a related presentation at the Next Time Symposium, organized by Colin Self, taking place Nov. 14-17 at Envoy Enterprises in New York.}
“i told you… i wanna get my dick stuck in a whisk,” the poet Steve Roggenbuck says in one of his videos. “i don’t know how its gonna happen but i know that’s what i want.” And, elsewhere, he writes: “i hope a bird peck’s my dick.”
“i could smash this computer with my dick,” writes Spencer Madsen in a poem posted to his Tumblr, but equivocates: “i could smash my dick with this computer”
Jordan Castro starts his poem “weak” by describing his failure to suck his own dick and ends with these lines:
i have tried giving a piece of my penis to everyone,
so as not to be discriminatory or
hierarchical or
something
but my penis was not strong enough.
‘is my penis inadequate’
‘who will nurture an inadequate penis like mine’
All of these guys are affiliated with alt lit. Alt lit means different things to different people. Last time I checked the Wikipedia definition highlighted the following features, all of which seem pretty uncontroversial:
“social media-based creative community”
“sharing of Gmail chat logs, memes, macros, screenshots, and computer generated art are also popular”
“the harnessing of the possibilities offered by internet for the creation and publication of literature, and by extension, the associated surrounding community and standard culture”
I would define somewhat more specifically, as a kind of writing that affirms an embodied presence in social media. It’s a kind of writing that understands language as a fundamental material aspect of how humans live in the world—a sensibility that connects it to other, older kinds of writing concerned with language’s materiality. But alt lit not only collapses distinctions between language and bodily functions—it also projects said collapse into the telecom technologies used to convey words across great distances at high speeds. Alt lit inscribes bodies into social media.
Alt lit tends to look unpolished, which produces a double impression of language’s physical immediacy and the immediacy of how social media spreads it. Alt lit can be silly, stupid sounding, flatly phrased, or just plain bad. Roggenbuck’s signature move is intentionally misspelling a lot of words, as if they’re just pouring out as fast as he can clumsily move his fingers on the keyboard—as if he doesn’t have the time or the need to use spellcheck. When he’s talking in his videos he blurts crazed phrases like the ones I quoted above—as if they spurt from his mouth like so much spittle. Words are abject emissions from the body—like drool, shit, or sweat—and social media is where words leave visible traces—like those fluids do on bodies or clothes.
Why do Roggenbuck & co. talk about their poor dicks so much? To me, it conjures the specter of the “crisis of masculinity”(AKA the “end of men”) that we keep hearing about. I think the sense of crisis stems from the bourgeois white guy’s loss of his status as political subject par excellence. Not because women, blacks, queers and the rest have gained visibility—but because the ideal political subject now is not a human at all. It’s a corporation. (An aside: The shift to corporate power has made visibility available to non-white-male persons on the condition that they make themselves available as consumer demographics.)
Of course white guys still occupy most of the positions of power reserved for humans because corporate power is an apotheosis of characteristics that bourgeois society long ago linked to whiteness and maleness—things like reason, calculating intelligence, emotionless “objectivity,” competitive strength, and so on. By embodying these characteristics, anyone can align themselves with corporate power. Though straight white men seem to do it most effortlessly. Technology is rationality. Rationality is a phallus.
Look at the NSA—using the technological apparatus developed by America’s corporate subjects to penetrate the private life of the multitude. Any threat to the authority of this dick reads as terrorism. (Roggenbuck: “my cock keeps growing and the government is not happy about it.”) Last summer, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, I saw a tweet about some pro-government article titled “Why Leaks Hurt”—the tweeter joked that it could have come from a urology journal. Leakage is a compromised dick—the cheesy, burning discharge of the NSA leak externalizes the corruption within the body of the state.
Leaking is a gonorrheal model of political resistance. Those of us without security clearances can’t be bugs in the body of the state, like Snowden or Chelsea Manning, but we can be bugs on and around the body of the state. There’s gonorrheal resistance and there’s the pubic lice resistance. Look at Occupy—power was effectively frightened by a parasitic relationship that made privately-owned public space (the site of collusion of corporate and state power) into a host to be infested.
Isn’t that something like what happens when people fill the bright fields of social media with the sad details of their slob lives?
(Crispin Best: “she said i kissed like i’d never kissed anyone”)
Eileen Myles wrote a critique of conceptual poetry in the May 2013 issue of the online poetry journal Volta, which included the line: “Poetry’s where men get to feel like women always feel.” Feeling like a woman means feeling the vulnerability of being alive. (Andrea Dworkin: “The stigma, finally, is in that alone: the old-time weakness of the flesh; needing and wanting alive like exposed nerve endings, desire being coldly demanding, not sloppy and sentimental.”)
The perfect Facebook user isn’t fleshy. He becomes exchangeable, bodiless, a source of data and little else, without the friction or resistance produced by bodies—just a linear timeline of events like jobs and easily described relationships (the progression of the drop-down menu from “single,” “in a relationship,” “engaged,” “married,” preferably without dabbling in the messy options below them, i.e. “It’s complicated”).
A disavowal of this apparatus is a disavowal the hardon—an abnegation of dick. So it’s no coincidence that alt lit—a kind of writing that reminds us that utterances issue from the body like abject emissions, a reminder of the sensitivity of words and flesh—is full of tormented dicks, tiny dicks, limp dicks.
Selfies may be taken promiscuously and gratuitously but that doesn’t mean that the word “selfie” should be too. A selfie is not any picture of yourself but a picture of you that you’ve taken yourself, with your phone, or maybe looking into your computer’s webcam—the picture is taken with a device that is capable of distributing it on a network almost immediately, and the picture shows the same device (if it’s a phone pointed at a mirror) or at least reveals the body’s relationship to the device through a certain shape of posture: the face tilted toward the laptop’s surface, an arm outstretched as it holds the phone at a distance, or a bent shoulder if the phone is held more closely. This is how the selfie inscribes a body into a network—this is how it asserts a body’s connection to others through a network via their respective devices. “Receiving a photo of the face of the person you’re talking to brings back the human element of the interaction, which is easily misplaced if the interaction is primarily text-based.” Jenna Wortham wrote in “My Selfie, Myself,” a recent feature in the New York Times. The selfie is phatic: it’s an image that establishes immediate contact, by introducing gesture and mimicry—both components of face-to-face interactions—to telecommunications.
A selfie is not a portrait. A portrait is a flat monument. Like a bust or a full-body statue, a portrait (whether painted on canvas or shot by a photographer) partially extracts the sitter from her life. Portraiture asserts the sitter’s significance—it says she deserves to be inscribed in history. A great portrait, whether painted or photographed, conveys its maker’s awareness of his task and the contradictions inherent in it this task: the promise and the impossibility of immortality. A great portrait reveals the ripeness and vulnerability of the sitter’s body, both in the way it depicts his flesh and in the inclusion of a memento mori, wilting flowers, or some fruit about to rot. Time will kill him. His image will outlive him. The same is true for the self-portrait: the artist has to find a distance from herself, to step outside her body in order to think about its mortality.
A selfie is not monumental. It doesn’t inscribe its maker in history; it inscribes him in a networked present. Can a selfie be art? I think so, but it would entail discarding the conventions of subjecthood of the public sphere both for artists and for art—the artist as a singular figure creating singular works of art—and instead thinking of art as an everyday activity. Even as an everyday activity, though, art would still have to retain a certain complexity and openness of relations—the qualities that allow an image to outlive the body in it, integrated in life. I think Jessica Ciocci’s selfies on Instagram are art. Her face and body acquire grimaces, poses, wigs and outfits in in her selfies, and she posts five or six or a dozen of them consecutively; the angles are weird, mirrors and frames cut her off. Charlie Chaplin made his movements stiff and distinct, to mimic the way film breaks reality into many still images and then reconstitutes them as motion—but Jessica Ciocci’s selfies do the opposite, revealing a fluidity of the body against the cut squares of Instagram and in doing so she situates social media in the movement of ordinary, everyday life. Jesse Darling’s selfies are art, too. She tends to take them in airports or airplanes or gallery bathrooms or chain coffeehouses—a liquid embodied presence in the junkspace of the global city, a grim expression and a gaze directed at the phone (not the receiver of the image) speaking to an anxiety about the affective labor demanded of her and her resigned acquiescence.
Jesse Darling was one of the artists included in “National #Selfie Portrait Gallery,” a project organized by Kyle Chayka and Marina Galperina for the Moving Image Art Fair in London. I like the coinage “selfie portrait.” It sounds to me like a suggestion of an image that draws its characteristics from both the selfie and the portrait, but isn’t quite either one, or maybe it’s a new kind of portrait, where the conventional signifiers of fleshly vulnerability and fleeting life are replaced by references to the ephemeral, phatic time of social media. And maybe that’s what was happening in the works featured in “National #Selfie Portrait Gallery.” But that’s not how Chayka presented it in his statements about the project. “The concept of the selfie is as old as art history—selfies are simply self-portraits, the same as works created by Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Masaccio and others,” he told the British newspaper Metro. “The original selfies were painted or drawn self-portraits. Albrecht Durer created his own as early as the 15th century. From there, selfies evolved with the different media used to make art.” Chayka’s equation of selfie with self-portrait is as stupid as Blake Gopnik’s identification of Picasso’s Cubism with an Instagram filter, on the basis that both change the way one sees an image, which naturalizes the conventions, respectively, of realist painting and cell-phone photography—but I digress. Chayka’s erasure of distinctions among mediums makes does a disservice to the artists he’s showing—he fails to identify what makes their work special. It’s also a disservice to himself as a curator—why is he showing these works? In Chayka’s explanations, the selfie becomes meaningless beyond its instrumentalization as an engine of attention, a buzzword that draws coverage. Something similar is happening in art magazines, as they use the selfie to leech some of the excitement of social media, and delay their own deterioration as organs of mass media. Art in America recently asked me to submit a selfie for a “mass portrait” of the art world (I refused, rather obnoxiously, because the request didn’t recognize me as a maker or theorist of selfies, they just wanted me to be one face among many), and I heard that Art Review’s upcoming “Power 100” issue will feature pictures of the members of its list with “staged selfies.” Spontaneity is discarded, and what’s left? A plea for attention. Most of the time when you read about selfies in the mass media you learn that every selfie is narcissistic, that every selfie says “look at me.” But that’s just what happens to the selfie when it’s taken out of context.
{In August 2013 I was a resident at the Shandaken Project. I made some sketches and notes on the wall of my studio there. These are the notes}
the corporate subject grasps the
public sphere, it is his
Property,
he wants to establish its/his
Vectors in the Common Blob of
Social Media but it absorbs
and dissolves them..
Rather, it cannot dissolve them
but it dirties them—sullies
them with its slop
the vectors are the apparatus…
the apparatus establishes relations
the apparatus—
the technophallic subject—
penetrates privacy
(rather than absorb
and dissolve and dirty
like the blob)
the corporate subject
is fucking privacy
to get access to
bodies
to manage bodies—
to reassert its vectors
of control at an individuated
individualized scale
DISCOURSE (the halo of
discourse sheltering
and nurturing
the public sphere)
[the public sphere is full of brands]
[vectors emanating from the public sphere establish: history; expertise, connoisseurship, judgment; policing discourses in general; social bonds, social relations]
[the Common Blob connects bodies to the public sphere and to privacy:]
the
common
blob
encroaching on the
corporate subject—
it is its abject
does it
encroach?
it emits from—
but it is always
perceived as coming
from without—
alien
[postscript: this is the nature of the abject, the subject is horrified by what its body produces]
the common blob assaults
both the public sphere and privacy
(because the concept of privacy
is incumbent upon the public sphere)
the blob dissolves the distinction between them—
and them with it
the common blob is not
the body but it is
a projection an
emission of bodies
just as the corporate body
is not a body—but a
projection
a sum
(a multiplication)
of relations
among bodies
the common blob
is the abject
of the incorporated
body
the common blob is not heroic
its people but its nothing
[things that are on the border between the territories of the body and of the public sphere:]
cognition
speech
[drawing of a body with a limp dick and things that pertain to it:]
taste
equality
sensory perception
pleasure
pain
the abject
taste belongs to the body
taste is a sense
[on Art:]
art is
a projection of a body
into the public sphere
or any public
even
the common blob—
even though there
it is difficult
to recognize
as art
(as we know it)
there, in the blob, art becomes stripped
of the discursive forms
of art
art is revealed as
an equitable relation
ART IS
what a body makes
to commicate
with other bodies
by means that outstrip immediate
restrictions on presence
(in time & space)
the things that bind
speech, gesture,
mimicry, movement }
all of which
become
choreographed
framed
ritualized
if they
are to enter
the field of art
when art is
incoporated—
when it is made by multiple
bodies
for an ideological purpose
it enters the sphere of
inequitable social relations
money and technologies
of public presentation
such as the
museum
but—like a
person who enters
that sphere
it still has places
of vulnerability
that reveal equality
otherwise—
its not real art
otherwise—
they are not real people
some may think
the BRAND is
the same as art—
an improvement, an
upgrade
but it’s something else—not art
BRANDS can be used
by art or people
to become something lese
to operate like
the corporate subject
to imitate it, the rules of its discourse
[notes on the drawing:]
the smudge
is the abject
of writing
enjambment is
the limit
of the hand
when writing
on a wall
while standing
so is stanza length
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