The Immediated Now: Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality – Networked – Excerpts

[Excerpts related to Tactical Media Activism, Appropriation Art and Remix - LINK]

Tactical Media Activism

Tactical media activists have created politically progressive uses of infoviz. Spurred by Mark Lombardi’s elegant pencil drawings of networks of scandals in the late 1990s, they set out to reveal hidden power networks and critique in “counter-geographic” projects such as Bureau d’Etudes’ The World Government(2003) or Josh On’s They Rule (2004). Such works aim to unpack the complex weave of network power, nevertheless, if intriguing, such projects can be hampered by reducing network power to mere relationships. Agency and intentionality may remain unclear while the work remains an object of fascination.

Tactical media also engages in such fiction, for example, the Yes Men (one of whom, Igor Vamos, has also been involved with the Center for Land Use Interpretation) have produced fake Web sites and falsely posed as spokesmen for government entities and corporations to deliver their biting critiques. Examples include a parody Web site for the World Trade Organization (http://www.gatt.org/), a Web site on a fake Exxon product that would convert the bodies of billions of climate-change victims into oil (http://www.vivoleum.com, shut down by the ISP) and a fake printed issue of the New York Times (and accompanying Web Site, http://www.nytimes-se.com/) with the headline “Iraq War Ends.” Beyond delivering their messages in a subversive and humorous way, such work leads its audience to question how easily media can construct meanings for the purposes of dominant power.

Remix & Appropriation Art

Appropriation artists like Richard Prince, Sherri Levine, and (the early) Cindy Sherman critiqued how reality is constructed in media representation while questioning ideas of authorship and property. Simulationist artists like Allan McCollum and Peter Halley extended the idea of appropriation to create neutral works claiming to be void of emotion, originality or authorship, embracing instead the market and reproducibility in media.

Building on the artist as aggregator is artist as remixer. In the contemporary milieu of networked publics, the traditional relationship of consumer and producer is undone. Amateur-generated content — often based on remixing content from more traditional media sources — has proliferated on the Internet, particularly in the video sharing site YouTube and photo sharing sites like Flickr or deviantArt as well as on blogs. Such work is avidly consumed by other amateurs who, in turn may remix it to produce second-order remix projects.

If remix thrives on using appropriated work, unlike postmodernism, it takes appropriation as given. In postmodern appropriation art, reuse was ironic, undertaken with a high degree of Oedipal self-consciousness. As Sherri Levine reappropriated earlier photographs by Walker Evans or Richard Prince blew up magazine advertisements to display in museums, they hoped to critique the authorial status of past masters. But appropriation artists, most notably Duchamp, still worked within an established tradition of art, drawing on avant-garde models of appropriation and framing. In their method originality was still critical, both as an institution to critique and as a crutch — for Duchamp, after all, the urinal is nothing until it is signed. Thus, if Levine’s work questioned Enlightenment notions of the author and originality, those notions are long ago obsolete. For when pasting images from the Internet into PowerPoint or reblogging a favorite image on Tumblr is an everyday occurrence, appropriation becomes casual. Such postmodern works, then, were transitional. Relying on authorship and originality as departure points is no longer productive.

Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that this lack of regard for originality is precisely what makes art based on remix (his word for it is postproduction) appropriate to network culture. In contrast to postmodern artists, Bourriaud explains, artists like Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon no longer question originality but rather instinctively understand artworks as objects constituted within networks, their meaning given by their position in relation to others and their use. Like the DJ or the programmer, such artists don’t so much create as reorganize. Crucially, remix takes place at a moment when globalization and the spread of historical information is pervasive due to the spread of the Net. “The artistic question is no longer,” Bourriaud concludes, “”what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?”

Mark Leckey, who operates in the gallery and the museum, but also has a MySpace page, is a veteran of remix, producing a seminal video in 1999 entitledFiorucci Made Me Hardcore out of found footage of British dancers in the 1970s and 1980s, in which he uncovered the ritualistic aspects of dance culture. More recently his performances have consisted of lectures on theories of networked culture (such as Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail) that traverse a litany of references from high art to pop culture. Leckey’s goal, as he proclaims in the statement he filmed for his Tate prize nomination, describes the poetics of network culture in a nutshell: “to transform my world and make it more so, make it more of what it is.” In Made in ‘Eaven (2004), Leckey reproduces Jeff Koons’ mirrored Rabbit sculpture; as the vantage point zooms in on the sculpture, Leckey’s own studio is revealed in a computer-rendered three-dimensional model.

Remix can take many forms, not only in audio or video. In Diary of a Star (2004-2007) Eduardo Navas sampled The Andy Warhol Diaries on a blog as a means of reflecting on the role of celebrity and privacy on the Web. Concluding that in projects like The Last Supper, where Warhol’s brilliance shone as he mimicked the mimickers, Warhol would have made the “the perfect Web flâneur.” Navas links to the sites that Andy would have explored if he had been able to browse the Web based on the entries in the Diaries.

Its worth noting that there is no particular injunction against the use of material from any era but the elements artists choose to remix tend to be relatively contemporary. The nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone, the world still in the throes of modernization is long gone. Unable to periodize, network culture disregards both modern and premodern equally.

Besides just aggregating it, pro surfers also remix the web vernacular. Scarlet Electric’s MrsCoryArcangel.com, John Michael Boling’swww.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.comand Guthrie Lonergran’s The Age of Mammals are all examples of pro surfer creations.

Oliver Laric is one of the most adept artists working in remix today, elaborating on the genre as it emerges on Internet sites, most notably YouTube. Laric, who generally presents his own work online treats amateur videos as found media loops. In 50 50 2008 (2008), he remixes YouTube clips of amateurs riffing on hips by 50 Cent to form one continuous song, itself a remix of an earlier work he did. In 787 ClipArts (2006), he assembles 787 clip art images into a one minute five second loop, forming a continuous video-loop that brings together all races and activities in one fluid mix, demonstrating not only his ability but also hinting that everything that can already be done has been. In Stevie Wonder Duets (2007), he juxtaposes videos he finds on YouTube of Stevie Wonder songs, one instrumental, one vocal, allowing us to recognize the slippage of time between the renditions only to release them back onto YouTube. As Marisa Olson suggests though, it seems that Laric aims to send his work back into the Net, where it came from. Finally, in Versions (2009), Laric produces a narrative that seems a bit like Leckey’s performances, a theoretical work at times reasonable, at times perhaps a bit preposterous, ranging across doctored photographs of Iraqi missiles, illicitly videotaped and pirated movies, celebrity heads grafted onto porn stars and so on. Remix, Laric points out to us, allows an infinity of parallel worlds to proliferate. Nevertheless, what remix amounts to besides delirious production, be it in the vernacular Web production celebrated by the pro surfers or the carefully orchestrated work Laric does, is as yet unclear.

[Example Artworks]

Oliver Laric, 787 ClipArts, 2006

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2007

Video Link (.MOV)

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999