CyBeR-PLacE of THe SHe-CreEp and of THose WithOuts CybeR Space/FAce. TO sharE MUsicK and SOund S+A and ARTSfs witth uYOU
HELLO WORLD HELLO YOU HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO YOU HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO YOU HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO YOU HELLO WORLD HELLO WORLD HELLO YOU HELLO WORLD
HELLO WORLD: We have a very powerful model today that is, uncontrollably in our hands and very visible. It is the internet. Because media imagery has saturated many people by now, from an early age, it has created a kind of situated collective identity that is becoming more and more difficult to ignore. It is a model for the beginnings of a new kind of structuring of art within sociality or communication. It is a model for a new kind of objectivity for art, and it has become obvious. The explosion of representation, symbols and simulation occurring at a massive rate on the internet is changing our relationship to language completely and by default our relationship to identity. We write by hand less and less, instead we have keys on the keyboard and touch screens. We watch everything we say scroll away in chat forums, in the form of computer fonts. Text now saturates our self-representation. The meaning of text and written word is changing because we can image search on google; because a word can stand for an image of ourselves and we can say something in a chat room and watch the words scroll away, always with the option of being saved on hard drives, like we watch ourselves grow in photo albums. Many are aware of the expressiveness and newly structured temporality of the self on the internet. Ryder Rips has created a real-time image-sharing forum which is like a chat room but with images, text, glitter text, .giff s, animations, links to videos via youtube.com and anything that can be posted into the forum. “Its not only taking things out of context to show or to think about its meaning, its also being honest, its also saying that this is something in my consciousness, this is something that I am experiencing… why not just show it because that’s an expression in itself” -ryder ripps creator of dump.fm In addition, he created something called internet archaeology. It is forum which stores them for people to re-experience them and also features artists who work in web image-making today, somewhat of an opposite temporality as the fast paced disappearing medium of the dump.fm chat room. SEE YOURSELF FORMING/FORMATTING SEE YOURSELF FORMING/FORMATTING: FORUM FORM Sociality is changing. We are addicted to talking, to "chat rooms", in so far as we see ourselves, first and foremost represented and re-represented among others. We are able to watch ourselves chat with other ourselves. Many experience a different kind of comfort with virtual communication because, for this reason among other reasons, we are able to control our own self-representation much more than in another real world conversation where our bodies and their political identities are interpreted inseparably from what our minds may perceive its "body" to be. On the internet we can take on any identity not only in terms of body or political identity, but also in terms of ethnicity, way of talking, culture, sexuality, personality etc. One can adopt a culture from the internet without actually being engrained or alive in that culture at all. 1 2:53 PM MON 5/9 - IN DUMPFM Dump.fm allows vastly different people to see through images, to see images as aesthetically linked to the meaning attributed to their identity. With the change in the structure of sociality comes a change in the structure of art. Arts are starting to incorporate a have a time factor, a movement, a shared or interactive quality. Art must become.. the you (u) "you" in that it is your shared experience of it's meaning. The most active arts are the ones where the medium is primarily your consciousness. It is the forum-form of art, with the forum as it's structure, and in the case of dump.fm-art, it's medium. In any chat room format on the internet, we are able to see ourselves as we converse. However, we see ourselves in the form of text, or on image forums, as a collection of images expressed within a given time. we find a new kind of comfort. Our consciousness is changing into a kind of boolean logic, in the sense that meaning as becomes centered around "AND OR NOT." Search engines are like a collected consciousness of our total sum of associations. A collected data bank of associations. We have become subjects which are AND OR NOT. our subjectivity is AND OR NOT. Connected or not. The use of a machine to create expressions is proof that expression is a function. A tool is used to carry it out. This causes us to think of art as something not made individually, but made out of an algorithm or a code, made out of the world of forces not just an individual's soul, consciousness, interior. If mathematics is "logical" art is objective. Equations. The images on dump are like equations which are made like numeric values and variables, but the numbers are whatever imagery can be found or made. THE DEATH OF THE "ARTIST": The distinction between oneself as an identity and the "art" is collapsing. The internet is a place where identities are "tried on." "We have reached a post-body state….. any one can adapt [a culture,] a way of speaking or an ethnicity just from being on the internet" (Ryan Trecartin). So too, art is a space generative of trying on identities, which also reveals a kind of objectivity. In this whirlpool of representation art too becomes intertwined. THe meaning of words and images and our relationship to words and images are changing. Art, too, needs to become more intertwined with the structure of the internet in the sense that it needs to become more and more of an open forum, something which is generator of or recognized as the result of a situated objectivity; a collectivity of thinking. Something which everyone contributes to, as one massive project or stream of consciousness."in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose “performance”—the mastery of the narrative CODE—may possibly be admired but never his “genius” (Barthes, Roland, The Death of the Author). The removal of the Artist-function "utterly transforms the modern text (or—which is the same thing—the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent). The temporality is different." (Barthes, Roland. The Death Of The Author). With the death of the artist-function, temporality changes and the audience changes. WHAT IS A "CONVERSATION:" THE ART-CONVERSATION Dump.fm is an example of the web of associations within consciousness, communication and thinking in visual thinking which is what makes up an aesthetic. Today this kind of creativity, which is in the root of visual arts, can be achieved by many people who considered themselves artists or not. Because Dump.fm is like a stream of consciousness but at the same time a conversation with other streams of consciousness, images and words are put together in a way that would otherwise not be possible. "a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call ["artist."] Critics doubtless try to give this being of reason a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a "deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a "design," the milieu in which [art practice] originates." (Foucault, Michel. What is an Author?) If today, the "milieu" in which art practice originates can be experienced by anyone with internet access and some free time, what does this say about the "artist" the construction of "Artist" and "Art" today? It is becoming re-structured. "difference is theorized…as situational, not intrinsic…….thereby fundamentally changing the…. politics of [art]" (Harraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges) In Dump.fm as an art form, its participants are also its artists; the one's doing the active work of making associations. If one is looking at dump.fm as one "looks" at art work traditionally, one mostly has to also be a user of dump.fm. It is a conversation which moves in time. "the birth of the [conversation] must be at the cost of the death of the A[rtist]." (Barthes, Roland. The Death Of the Author). Dump.fm is a site where art is being used, it is being art. The idea that art does not serve a purpose other than an individual who is specialized and particular is a severe blow to our creative potential to engage in collectivities of thinking and of associating shared meanings. Dump .fm is a real-time image sharing site. The users on dump.fm are primarily anonymous characterized by a screen name. They can choose to expose images of themselves or not. They can recycle images of any medium, they can also create their own images from scratch. Dump.fm uses primarily .giffs , images and image-text which is text that is used as an image or bejeweled in some way, as well as normal text which is just like chat room text. However, the crux of dump.fm creative potential is that it is understood as a conversation, in that images or any kind of posting are meant to be reactions to other postings. Those reactions can be a simple association, a subjective association however obscure or however obvious. In this kind of (virtual) space, aesthetics are created together art as an associative process becomes simultaneously experience, chance, and collective reactions to chance posts. The use of the internet on dump.fm, in particular the google search engine, means that there is constantly a potential random pool of images that are associated with words that one can choose from. There is a new relationship between images and words, because one can associate something and translate it from an image into a word, and then from that word into other images. It is almost like a model of the internet in that it is an infinite scrolling of associations with meanings like a stream of consciousness. ON dump.fm, one has a username in which images that they have liked and images which they have posted get stored. One associates one's identity with their own collection of images. However, often the resulting portfolio of images which a user has created is full of things that they otherwise would have never thought of, they will often respond with "i did_______ because someone else posted an image of ______." The dichotomy between artist and audience is disposed of here. Much in the way that Galison describes that changing of objectivity in science which moved from being valued based on the credibility of a singular "genius" figure, to the credibility of a group of people agreeing "mechanical objectivity." Art now is also moving in the direction of becoming more about groupings of people and shared experiences of meanings, then the "artist's" singular genius. On dump.fm we literally virtually witness our situated objectivities the more we can generate shared associations between existing meanings, experiences, facts, mediums so the users are all involved in the "artistry." Is dump.fm the work of art? Rather than it's contents? It doesn't really matter. The point is that a re-structuring is occurring because of forums like dump.fm and the internet as a whole. It is causing something to happen, a refiguring of our relationships to meaning and each other. Effects of this are felt in many different areas. Bruce Sterling has picked up on a similar idea in the world physical objects and objects-relations theory. "this would have customer-relations theory, in an earlier era, but in a Spime world it's something more intimate. It's collaborative, and better understood as something like open-source manufacturing…….Whenever you use a spime, you're rubbing up against everybody else who has that same kind of spime. A spime is a user's group first, and a physical object second." (Sterling, Bruce. http://amal.net/blog/links/bruce%20sterling%20-%20spime.PDF) Indeed, in art it is the experience of the work which matters more and more today, rather than the work as itself which can only be an object. This is why, work which has a time variable added to it, seems to be more effective and provocative then those which don't consider temporality as an element in the work. But temporality is a broadly interpreted element. The possibilities are still so unexplored. "loops within loops. Cycles within cycles" (Sterling, Bruce).
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