theory

alex bacon - the standard essay

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@ to concerned artists

i see alex bacon as court stenographer-in-waiting for various galleries showing post internet-style abstract painting. he had a group of favorite artists (jacob kassay, parker ito, etc) and when invited to do the brushes panel at the newmu he clearly wasn't very conversant with michael connor's chosen artists (laura brothers, michael manning). so he adapted and expanded his boilerplate theoretical essay about painting in the digital age to include brothers, beef up his discussion of manning, and add some newbies. his theory is ultimately elastic, but not elastic enough to include outsiders/outliers from the gaming or geek spheres, such as andrej ujhazy, a brushes panel artist bacon omits from his rhizome essay

^Written a few weeks ago -- to flesh it out a bit:

Bacon's modus operandi seems to be roping standard gallery abstraction styles into "digital" discourse, or vice versa. During Bacon's slide talk for the Brushes panel, you could almost feel the collective wince when he described some window-mounted panels as "physical jpegs." His defense of 303 Gallery hot artist du jour Jacob Kassay is similarly "off." Kassay's paintings have a reflective silver surface; some discussion could be had about the materials -- paint vs plated silver, support vs surface, "presence," etc -- but there is nothing intrinsically "cyber" about this work.

kassay

Yet in a 2014 interview, Bacon trowels on the digital metaphors to make the work seem relevant to the Facebook era:

They are about the fragmentary and contingent nature of vision and, insofar as this relates to our forging of identity through the endless stream of images we seamlessly upload and download, they have a contemporary valence. We expect for the Kassay to mirror us back, but instead we are faced with a caesura of vision, a literal blurring out. A Kassay constructs a complex visual system, because you want to move around them to resolve the image, but it’s an impossibility. Nor can the autofocus of a camera map one of these paintings, which is radical considering the sinister potential of technologized forms of spatial mapping and image profiling. The work is not “about” that technology, but it has that valence.

The au courant techno-connections -- autofocus, uploading -- offer flimsy, ex post facto justifications for material work. When Georg Herold used a mirrored surface back in the dot com era, it was in the context of a show called "compu.comp.virtual visualities.equivacs.bitmapdyes," so a critic could sort of legitimately talk about mirrors as "screens."

For his Brushes panel essay for Rhizome.org, Bacon recycles the same Kassay apologetics:

Jacob Kassay’s silver paintings, which are canvases coated in acrylic that the artist sends to be commercially plated with silver, are about our expectations of how vision operates—what we see, and our engagement with our own image. People talk about how they absorb their surroundings, but of course they are not mirrors, they are plated silver. You have to burnish the silver to make it reflective and Kassay doesn’t do that, he just takes them as they’re made in the plating process, which gives them very interesting surfaces. Up close the reflection is hazy, but as you go back it gets clearer, and if someone walks by you see them very clearly, while they see themselves as a blur. They are a very concrete commentary on a certain type of perception. These paintings are a suggestion about the fragmentary and contingent nature of vision and, insofar as this relates to our forging of identity through the endless stream of images we seamlessly upload and download, they have a contemporary valence. This is embedded in the functioning of Kassay’s surfaces, which solicit our desire to see ourselves, which has found the apogee of its contemporary expression in the obsession with taking and sharing of selfies. Indeed, people love to try to take their picture as it appears in a Kassay painting, but they find that their individuality is all but melted by the distortions of the plated metal. We expect for the Kassay to mirror us back, but instead we are faced with a caesura of vision, a literal blurring out. A Kassay painting is a construction of a complex visual system, because a viewer wants to move around them to resolve the image, but it’s impossible. Nor can the autofocus of a camera map one of these paintings, which is radical considering the sinister potential of technologized forms of spatial mapping and image profiling. The work is not “about” that technology, but it nonetheless speaks to it obliquely.

as you gaze into the social media abyss, so the...

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This book will be available in the US in late June:

Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Culture and the Force of Negation, by Geert Lovink

In this fifth volume of his ongoing investigations, Dutch media theorist and internet critic Geert Lovink plunges into the paradoxical condition of the new digital normal versus a lived state of emergency. There is a heightened, post-Snowden awareness; we know we are under surveillance but we* click, share, rank and remix with a perverse indifference to technologies of capture and cultures of fear. Despite the incursion into privacy by companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, social media use continues to be a daily habit with shrinking gadgets now an integral part of our busy lives. We are thrown between addiction anxiety and subliminal, obsessive use. Where does art, culture and criticism venture when the digital vanishes into the background?

Geert Lovink examines the symbiotic yet problematic relation between networks and social movements, and further develops the notion of organized networks. Lovink doesn’t just submit to the empty soul of 24/7 communication but rather provides the reader with radical alternatives.

Selfie culture is one of many Lovink’s topics, along with the internet obsession of American writer Jonathan Franzen, the internet in Uganda, the aesthetics of Anonymous and an anatomy of the Bitcoin religion. Will monetization through cybercurrencies and crowdfunding contribute to a redistribution of wealth or further widen the gap between rich and poor? In this age of the free, how can a revenue model of the 99% be collectively designed? Welcome back to the Social Question.

English/UK edition (Polity Press, Cambridge)

*What do you mean "we," social media man?

Lovink on social media alternatives

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A new Geert Lovink interview has been posted on his site, expressing his ongoing struggle to imagine alternatives to iPhone/Facebook zombie culture. The Q&A below is "curmudgeonly" but still should be read aloud daily, like a church catechism:

Q: Why are you critical of the regular social network sites (SNS)?

A: Because I am part of a generation that fought for decentralized networks, an open internet in which the user wasn’t just a consumer of some product. Developments of the past ten or so years have meant that regular social media users have traded a lot of the earlier complexities and freedom [for] simplicity and speed.

And at the end of the church service, parishioners would read these words of Lovink's in unison, before filing out of their pews:

It is my dream that Facebook will close shop as soon as possible, preferably because its users massively walk away and abandon the service. I am saying this because such sudden exoduses have happened in the past. Amen. [Amen added --tm]

The stumbling block is alternatives. Lovink mentions homegrown attempts at Facebook such as Lorea, Diaspora, Friendica, Crabgrass, and Unlike Us. These are terrible names and that's half the problem. Who says we need another "scalable" connection service? Forums exist all over the web, to this day, for specialized discussion, and there are myriad ways to have conversations using the Net without crawling up Mark Zuckerberg's bum.
Lovink also bemoans "the (conceptual) stagnation of Linux." That may or may not be true, but he shouldn't shrug off that new-ish companies (such as Think Penguin) make it possible for non-geeks to have PCs and laptops that aren't running Windows or the Apple OS. One doesn't have to be "part of a generation that fought for decentralized networks" to appreciate their value. Lovink mentions TOR as an alternative browser; that's a subject for another post but suffice it to say, short of that, there are other ways to increase privacy from ISP and advertiser snooping, such as VPNs, that anyone can install.
The solution is individual choices. Or small groups, making use of available resources. As opposed to another "top down" site that "brings people together."

addendum to Lovink post

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Earlier we quoted Geert Lovink's criticisms of the mindless forced brevity of current social media "updates." Among other things he says "there is a reason why Twitter is limited to 140 characters. There was no technological limitation (not enough bandwidth, computing power, interface etc.)." The reason being, implicitly, to keep us mindlessly consuming.

Twitter didn't start out as an instrument of the devil, however. Seven years ago those little blurts of text were fun and for some, as Jules Laplace reminds us, they actually served a purpose:

Twitter is limited to 140 characters because that's the size of a text message. It was designed for "dumb phone" communication, and came out in 2006, a year before the iPhone. You could text tweets to the number 40404 and have them broadcast out. This might still be the case.

One of the people who built Twitter made something called TXTMob before, which was used to organize with "dumb phones" during the DNC/RNC protests in 2004 - - "it told me where the cops were and where I could rest" - Of course, I'm not arguing that these ideas haven't been perverted by marketing and "analytics" since then.

Facebook, on the other hand, lets you post long comments, but makes you look like a ranting lunatic by cutting them off after 3 lines. It is definitely repressive.

lovink again, this time on social media's non-role in the arts

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In a previous post we noted that Geert Lovink's response to the question, how can social media be used in education? was that it can't. Now he has a post up where the same question is asked about the arts, and gets the same response.

Max Ryan: Art involves a great deal of interpretation, so how does the gallery’s presence on Facebook or other social platforms enable visitors to voice their own interpretations about art and what does this add to an understanding of the work? How is artistic interpretation benefited through comment culture?

Geert Lovink: It doesn’t. Art galleries cannot compensate for the current poverty of the dominant social media platforms that were neither built to expand on details and provide insight nor to spark debate beyond likes and short remarks. Social media platforms as we know them are deeply commercial ‘machines of loving grace’ that aim to provide other machines with valuable data (clicks on adds etc.). The arts are not operating outside of the ‘clickbaiting’ mechanism. The museum sector is completely part of the advertisement ecology in which Google and Facebook play a dominant role.

It's refreshing to read this naysaying after Rhizome's attempt to shame us into using Facebook. Can thoughtful discussions be had on Facebook and Twitter about art, ones that preserve a record of the back-and-forth discussion, so that a year, two years, or six years later, a fair consensus can begin to emerge? No, they can't.

MR: Does the ‘openness’ to external voices exemplify democracy in action or just the rhetoric of tech companies when taking place on social media?

GL: There is no ‘openness’ whatsoever. Social media were not designed to foster debate. All they do is ‘monitor’ short exchanges and impressions. The platforms are used as measurement tools in marketing campaigns. The related ad firms in the background measure likes and retweets and clicks and sell these data profiles to third parties. It does not matter what people say on Facebook or Twitter, and the actual work on social media has been delegated to interns inside PR departments. There are large offices that do the ‘twittering’ for celebrities and CEOs and give constant feedback about the latest ups and downs.

And

MR: In an interview John Stack, the former head of digital transformation at the Tate, said it was the responsibility of the museum to go to where the audience is and prompt conversation online. They saw the where as existing on social media platforms. What do you think of the idea of social media as a discursive space? Can it exist in the same way that is associated with arts spaces? Does the context of the platforms effect this?

GL: Social media as we know them right now are not discursive machines. The internet in general might be, in theory, but the current social media architectures do not facilitate extensive exchanges. There is a historical reason for this. Social media grew out of a specific part of web culture of the blogs, in the early 2000s, after the baroque and excessive dotcom period of e-commerce had fallen to pieces. Social media picked up on the ‘updating’ part of blog culture, and stripped off the content bit. There is a reason why Twitter is limited to 140 characters. There was no technological limitation (not enough bandwidth, computing power, interface etc.).* The same can be said of Facebook’s aversion to discussion and debate. For a good decade already Facebook has been repressing the user’s need for community tools. There is no value in it for them. People need to like and share, say something fast and move on.

The arts do not need quick responses but thorough reflection and then debate about the positions people have formulated. Criticism presumes careful observation. This is then filtered through a rich vocabulary which every discipline has developed over the past decades and even centuries. Believe it or not, this even exists in the case of the internet...

What's needed is long-form writing (with illustrations and diagrams) that stays up reliably in one place for a few years. That's all we ask. Instead we get "shifting sand land."

*See addendum