Editor’s note: IMG MGMT is an image based essay series by artists. Today’s artist, Sara Ludy is a Los Angeles based artist and musician. She is a member of Computers Club and Tremblexy. You can view her work on her website and her blog.

Editor’s note: IMG MGMT is a series of image based essays by artists. A version of this week’s essay by Chris Collins originally appeared in the online exhibition site, STATE, curated by Adam Cruces.

This Facebook message was sent April 9th, 2011

Dear Mr Ron Tye,

This is going to be a strange email, both for me and for you. I have no idea how you’ll respond to me writing you out of the blue like this. So let me start off by assuring you that I am not a creep, a crazy person, or an internet troll.

Ron, I have been following your work for a long time.

A few years ago, while I was looking around the Jobs section of Craigslist, I found an ad describing a “Work from Home” job. Normally I would disregard a post like this, as these things are usually are flagged as spam as soon as they are posted. But for some reason I clicked.

I have seen many posts like it before and since. It usually says, in vague and optimistic terms, that there are mountains of wealth hiding just beyond the surface of your computer screen, and all it takes to capture your tiny piece is a little bit of hard work and a high-speed Internet connection. Usually it offers some sort of challenge to its audience, like “Do you have what it takes? If so, click here!” These posts feel stilted, detached, and artificial – a collection of buzz words loosely constructed into a sentence, as if a computer were talking to another computer through the vast vacuum of space.

I don’t remember what the actual body of the post said, and an archive of it is probably lost forever in the Internet ether. What I do remember is the promotional image that followed. Whereas all the other “Make money from home” posts I had ever seen had been mechanical, steeped in cliche, and lacking any sort of heart or sincerity, this was the opposite. It was one of the most unique pieces of graphic design I have ever seen.

The image title was “hope40.jpg.”

By tracing this image URL, I was directed to a folder that contained over 40 different images, all completely different, all with “hope” in the title all promoting “tyepilot.com,” and all signed by a mysterious person called Luzy.

Each image I found was more thrilling than the previous one, and I was struck by their breadth and intensity as a body of work. Each one used stock imagery typical to this type of industry: images of sandy beaches, exotic locations, piles of money, and “cyber” looking backdrops. Yet each was constructed in a way that seemed alien to all traditional conventions of design. Imagery was stretched, enlarged and compressed in odd ways, and the text on the images made it clear that English was not the first language of the images’ creator. They exploded with strange color choices. A graphic designer would look at the compositions and call them horrendous. I found them bizarre, perplexing, and beautiful.

hope7.jpg

hope26.jpg

hope16.jpg

I once had a friend who, as an adult, started playing piano. He had never had any formal training, did not know how to read music, and knew nothing about music theory. In spite of this, and I’d argue precisely BECAUSE of this, the compositions he created were some of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard. This was not because of some sort of innate ability, some sort of mythical muse or a genius built into his DNA. It was because he had enthusiasm and was not weighed down by the tethers of convention. He did not know how things were supposed to be done, so he found his own way.

hope44.jpg

hope57.jpg

hope67.jpg

hope74.jpg

This is what I saw in Luzy’s work. I could sense the enthusiasm, the belief in this product, and thus a belief in the power of the internet. Luzy, like my friend the pianist, was not held back by rules and convention and was free to just create. The results were sincere and poetic. One of the images said, “Everybody’s Wanted. Everybody’s Needed. Everybody’s Dream. Click Here to Find Out How!”

hope12.jpg

The strange thing, however, when I did click to find out how, I was redirected to tyepilot.com, where I found nothing. Whatever service you had set up to blast ads to Craigslist on a daily basis was not turned off after the site went down and you closed up shop.

This could have been the end of the story. The internet is forever growing and changing. New connections are made, and old connections die. Domain names expire every day – what’s the big deal? But for whatever reason, Luzy’s images stuck with me. I saved a copy of all of them to my computer, out of fear that they’d soon be deleted. I would forget about them for a while, but always returned.

hope10.jpg

hope29.jpg

hope30.jpg

hope37.jpg

hope66.jpg

hope78.jpg

hope82.jpg

I actually became quite protective of these images. I did not share them with anyone. I feared they would laugh at the spelling, the grammar and the unprofessional quality, and not see them as I did. I felt such an affinity toward these strange and beautiful pictures, and the more I investigated them, the more questions I had. Who is Luzy? What was tyepilot.com? I needed to dig deeper.

I was able to locate a cached version of tyepilot.com at archive.org’s wayback machine. This revealed the skeleton of a site scattered with dead links and images. The site promoted Global Domains International (or Worldwide Domains International, they seem to be the same company, I wasn’t sure.) When I tried to search for more about this company, I found it very hard to get a straight answer.

As far as I can tell, this company purchased exclusive rights from the Western Samoan government to distribute the country’s domain name extension “ws.” It seemed to operate as some sort of pyramid scheme, where you purchase a .ws domain name that encourages others to purchase a .ws domain, and so on and so forth, earning you residual income. Because of this army of affiliates, each with their own website rhapsodizing about the wonders of a domain through GDI (and why you should purchase a site through them,) any online research about the company seems to come up like the smartest investment in the world. Any criticism is whitewashed by the sheer amount of people using their websites to try and make a buck. If you google “Is GDI a scam?” all you get are sites from GDI affiliates saying “Of course it isn’t. Join Now!”

Also, while tyepilot.com was no longer active, additional research led me to a youtube account with the same username. The name listed on the account was Ron Tye. It was there I found your video love letters to Luzy. I found out that you met online and fell in love. You lived in the states, and she in Vietnam. You exchanged photos and eventually went to visit. You fell deeper in love. You made plans for her to move to the states with you, but things were taking longer than expected. In one video, you promise that “next christmas we’ll be together, and it will be amazing.”

These videos have since been deleted. But comments like “i hope you will fix your problem soon… your kids deserves to have mom and dad!” remain.

From these details, I began constructing a heartbreaking story in my head – one of love, the promise of wealth, and of bottoming out, coming up short. It goes like this:

Luzy and Ron met online. Despite a significant age difference, and thousands of miles between them, they fell fast and deeply in love. They made plans to be together, a plan to bring Luzy from Vietnam to California. They decided to go into business together. The internet seemed like such a magical place to them. After all, through it they’d accomplished the impossible and found each other. Because of this belief, they were seduced by the promises of GDI. Ron would handle the numbers and the technical aspects, and Luzy would create the graphics. They set up shop at tyepilot.com, and began attempting to sell .WS domain names. The images Luzy created, the hope.jpgs, not only served as promotion for their business, but as love letters to Ron, and as hopes and prayers for the future – a future that did not come.

After pouring a significant amount of time and money into it, Ron and Luzy declared defeat, and tyepilot.com was abandoned and left to expire.

I guess the whole reason why I’m writing you all this is to ask you how this story ends. I’ve spent years constructing my own story of Ron and Luzy and tyepilot.com and GDI and Western Samoa, yet I’ve neglected to contact you directly about it to get the truth. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe I was just concerned I’d freak you out.

Regardless, I’m also writing to tell you that I’ve purchased tyepilot.com and am offering it to you as a gift. I put up all of Luzy’s hope.jpgs up there, but I’ll give it to you and you can do whatever you want with it.

Sincerely, your Internet admirer,

Chris Collins

tyepilot.com

Epilogue

I never heard back from Ron Tye.

I tried everything. I sent a facebook message. I sent an email. I attempted to join his linkedin network. I even sent tweets to the tyepilot twitter account, a spambot that just sends out nothing but links to news articles that no longer exist (presumably, another failed business venture.) I was just looking for some sign of life. Some sort of confirmation, anything, to tell me that this whole story isn’t all in my head.

It’s worth noting that although I haven’t heard from Ron, since posting this to STATE I have received several emails from people pointing out additional information. For example, Luzy is no where to be found among Ron Tye’s facebook friends. She does have a LinkedIn profile, though, and it says she is attending a Junior college in Southern California for “Medical or Industrial Engineering.” Though I’d hate to spin any additional yarns with regard to this story, I’m beginning to believe that Ron and Luzy are no longer together.

My grand gesture, my quest for truth, ended up being fruitless. I have constructed this great mythic fiction in my head about the hope.jpgs, of Ron, Luzy and GDI, and was hoping against hope that I would receive some sort of reply, anything to confirm or deny my perspective. A tidy end to my epic internet poem, we were to exchange email correspondence, perhaps joke about “isn’t the internet funny like that?” and I would get some answers. I’d apologize for creeping him out with my long, melodramatic email, and he’d open up to me about some of the tough times in his life. I would finally uncover the reality of the story behind these images that I have obsessed over for so long, and the story would be wrapped up with a nice little bow.

So there’s no real resolution to this story. And I’ve come to grips with the fact that I’ll never really know the truth.

Ron has had a rough few years. A single father raising children by himself, struggling through several failed businesses and a long distance marriage that may or may not be finished. But it appears that Ron Tye has become involved in yet another affiliate-based venture, this time without the help of Luzy’s graphic design. It’s called “Stemtech INC.” The company bills itself as the “world’s first all-natural supplement documented to support the release of adult stem cells from bone marrow.” The promotional material (provided by the company this time) revolves around this literal and figurative concept of renewal. Renew your body. Improve your life. Start over.

Artist’s biography: Through humor and intervention, artist Chris Collins navigates the divide between folk internet culture and the history of fine art, casting a critical eye on both. Working in sculpture, video, animated GIFs and performance, he has exhibited extensively in group shows nationally and internationally, and has had solo shows in Berlin and Cincinnati, OH (his hometown.) His immensely popular website badpaintingsofbarackobama.com was featured in the New York Times, who called the work “inevitable.” He studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and carries this diploma on his person at all times, for proof. He lives and works in Chicago, IL.

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is a semi annual image based essay series by artists.]

preamble:
this essay consists of a series of files taken from computer backups, and then uses them as a starting point for riffing on concerns about “medium” as they relate to the production of artwork with computers

c:\G\ (1996)

c:\Desktop\images (1998)

c:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files (1999)

c:\desktop\pbd\beige\random (2001)

f:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\IMAGE BANK\dog plates (2004)

c:\dos\graphics (2005)

like most everyone who reads this, i hold a huge number of image files stored on cd’s, hard drives, dvd’s, zip disks, floppies, usb keys and the like…and i don’t even consider myself particularly concerned with images. i searched through tens of thousands of them for this essay, all from backups i made of a previous computers’ hard drive when i got a new computer. i then selected some directories and simply displayed each file in each directory as they were backed up with slight adjustments where i removed duplicates or files that wouldn’t upload correctly.

the c:\Desktop\images (1998) directory seems to be almost entirely “random” internet images that must have struck me when i saw them. in contrast, every image file in the f:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\IMAGE BANK\dog plates (2004) directory is specifically related through subject and color, and it was obviously my intention to keep it contained in this way. the c:\G\ (1996) directory, the oldest one in this essay, contains results of interacting with a particular graphics software when i was in high school. “ozone troop” was my high school techno band, and “joeboy”, a character in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, my dj name at 16. created 9 years later, the c:\dos\graphics (2005) directory contains the backed up contents of the c:\G\ (1996) directory plus the results of returning to the same software when i made work for a show in 2005.i didn’t want to include anything too recent, like the contents of the \phd\ folder on my desktop that’s been staring at me for the past few years, as part of the pleasure in going through old backups is to look again. looking again at c:\desktop\pbd\beige\random (2001) directory is a saccharine dose of pure nostalgia for me, a time before i’d thought to consider how career and commodification might effect a collaborative practice.

you can see there is a distinct autobiographical element to these images, and perhaps a voyeuristic element for those viewers so inclined. however, those who wish to explore a more critical context might start at the decision to expand the post from my original idea of displaying just the c:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files (1999) directory. these are images that were stored without my intention, by a system of which i was mostly unaware, and only discovered on a backup cd years later.

in the context of images on art blogs or tumblrs, this initial idea would’ve sat nicely. it all looks a bit messy-formal, and one could ponder what these images depict and hence what i might have been doing so they were stored in the cache (searching for images of soccer players on rosh hashanah perhaps??). and since i didn’t intentionally store any of them, yet found myself retrieving and appropriating them years later, we’d get to play a game i like to call “fun with agency!”. most importantly, it has that certain knowing distance of a work created by some separate system or agenda – in this case a Microsoft technology running silently under my nose/fingers – which is reclaimed by the artist and displayed in a way unintended by either Microsoft, Intel, or any of the other various authors of the original images.

this all sounds defensible enough, contextually relevant and certainly easy to digest, and the more i thought about it, trite. to support an artwork of online file aggregation simply because it uses appropriated content is analogous to saying “i love this sculpture because it exists in three dimensions.” it’s only doing something that the thing in question already does by definition. sculptures are 3d and (i’m not really going out on a limb by suggesting that) large portions of the http protocol are designed to display and link content located and derived from other sources. so to me, to post up a bunch of images “reclaimed” from the man…errr, i mean discovered in a temporary cache…started to appear similar to lots of other artist led image aggregation that – as art – i don’t rate. dear readers, i really wanted to do something better for you.

so, what to do, as i still had a photo essay to sort out. i chose to expand the essay to include not only unintentionally stored and backed up files, but also files that i stored intentionally and backed up for a variety of reasons. some of them thematic, some of them psycho-sexual (the blue dog plates folder) but most for reasons i can’t really explain. this i think is helpful, because now we have a more interesting question to start from: an artist has made something entirely with a computer that isn’t a one-liner. how do we evaluate it?

here we are also presented with the twin threads of the photo essay: the hugely varying intentions behind the content and collection of each image file, and the single storage technology and mechanism of the backup. they are obvious threads in the sense that they would exist for every possible IMG MGMT: BACKUPZZ post i might have made: that mess of meaning, possibly non-computable, and the computable but increasingly intricate machine system that contains its symbols. but i don’t have much to say about the first thread – image files that i don’t even know why i posted. it’s probably not the greatest semantic thread in an artwork, although as an artist i’m lucky that not being able to explain parts of my work has little to do with its status as art. and as we all know a “viewer bringing their own meaning to a work” is a logical tautology – it’s true in all possible worlds, and hence all possible artworks. so in this case i’d have to say it’d be a pretty boring topic to write about, although i do enjoy looking at the images as i hope you do to.

what about the second thread? the guts, the means, the system, the material, the backup, the thing that it actually is made from. you know, “the medium”? this is what i’d like to consider.

although the concept of a medium is often stigmatized by it’s association with our long-departed notion of “medium-specificity”, in a general sense it has historically been useful towards the development of various evaluative criteria. a major difficulty for evaluation then is when computers confront our concept of a medium. i’m sure, dear readers, that you intuitively understand how this happens as it has been an ongoing part of the “new media” discourse for decades. but let me briefly illustrate it with a thought experiment:

hypothetical artist A, let’s call her Paddy, sits down at a computer and generates a set of data – a file – as most all software does. maybe Paddy programmed in Java, maybe she used Microsoft Paint. it doesn’t matter. Paddy then translates this set of data so it controls the colors of static pixels on the computer screen – it generates a picture. Paddy doesn’t really like it on the screen, so she prints it out. she doesn’t like the printout either and she gets rid of it. Paddy then translates the same set of data so it controls the values of a digital to analog audio converter – it generates sound. she doesn’t like the sound, and she gets rid of that. finally Paddy translates the data so that it controls a sequence of pixels on the computer screen – it generates a “moving image”. Paddy likes that, and she shows it in a gallery. probably a non-profit.

now – what medium is Paddy working in? if someone said “data” would they be wrong? what about “moving image”, “code”, “computer”, “cinema” or even “print” or “sound” – based on the earlier attempts at a fixed piece? let’s suppose she liked the print and exhibited that – would her medium really be much different than when she exhibited the moving image considering that 99% of her work was done before she hit that final button that said PRINT instead of PLAY?

more to the point – why is it that a medium in Paddy’s process is vague to us (or is it just me)? one would think it’d be just the opposite as computers are so open to inspection. we can know everything about the functioning of Paddy’s work when she makes it on a computer, so shouldn’t we be able to at least identify what its medium is?

a simple way we can see the disconnect is how we discuss visual art displayed on/by a computer. you don’t often hear someone expressing appreciation for an “image” when viewing a painting, they usually appreciate the “painting”. yet how often do you hear appreciation for the “jpeg” when the thing people are looking at is a jpeg? not so much. we usually say “image”, and it’s reflective of how computer based art is removed from specific supports of the work when we discuss it.

we can see the disconnect more systemically is in our literature, which almost exclusively defines the computer as a type of hybrid media device or some sort of multimedia machine. in a typical article (and i need to apologize here for dropping an obscure reference – i only came across it because i’m doing my doctorate at the same institution and i think it’s a representative example), 2002 Whitney Biennial participant/game artist/professor Mary Flanagan devoted all of one sentence of her quite good PhD dissertation on feminist/activist computer gaming to the nature of computers. her single sentence described the computer as a “hybrid media” that contains many other, presumably more static, media. while we can easily debate the validity of Ms. Flanagan’s definition (which other media is it, exactly, that the computer contains and hybridizes?), what’s more important is how it represents the state of current discourse, academic or otherwise, which mostly ignores questions about what computers “are” and instead focuses intently on what they can “do”. hence, while there has been a surge in the number of critical and theoretical texts about computers in the arts, especially since the “new media” dawn of the early 90s, few if any have been true medium-centric investigations of how the computer functions in art practice.

so let’s think about it :)

i’m not sure anyone cares about Mcluhan‘s “medium is the message”, it seems to come back every few years and we might be in a downturn, but consider it for just a second: messages contain information (Shannon), and information has meaning (Floridi). mediums are messages (Mcluhan), therefore mediums have meaning. that’s easy enough. but now take a computer – it’s definition requires that it can be perfectly simulated, and it is limited only in that what it can contain must be computable (Turing)
(the range of things we know to be computable constantly grows, this year for the first time it includes Jeopardy champions). so how would we begin to define the message, and hence meaning, of this more or less universal medium?

obviously Mcluhan’s ideas have plenty of problems, i can remember LOLing when i read about “hot” and “cold” mediums years ago [the real Paddy asked why the LOL – i remember thinking that it contradicts Mcluhan's claim that content doesn’t matter when he’s rating mediums based on how well we understand a given medium’s transmitted content]. but Mcluhan’s ideas are nevertheless helpful as a model for how we’ve thought about mediums, especially considering that some artists have explicitly claimed the computer as their medium for over 40 years (A. Michael Noll named the “digital computer” as his creative medium in 1967, i’m sure there are earlier examples).

however we have two basic problems. one – as our thought experiment shows pinning down the computer in terms of medium isn’t being done. two – medium-specificity, as an evaluative criteria, was destroyed by post-modernism. familiar examples of medium-specificity are Greenberg’s flatness, Kuleshov’s development of Soviet montage theory and the “Materialgerechtigkeit” (literally doing “truth to materials”) of mid 20th century architecture. but as we know, pomo demonstrated that ticking boxes A, B and C in your piece to show you’ve conformed to some accepted definition of how your materials should work really didn’t have a whole lot to do with how good your piece was.

well, why not get rid of mediums then? that’s exactly what happened next. negating a definition of medium, as Rosalind Krauss did, puts us in what she famously called the “post-medium condition” almost a decade ago. a combination of Ms. Krauss’ idea with our Mcluhan-based model of two paragraphs back suggests what? our messages no longer hold meanings? we no longer have messages? it’s an interesting contradiction, especially because in making my photo essay i found my backupzz to be bound to what i understood as the medium i was working with. a thing called a backup is what ties these images together, and i think my experience of using a computer and feeling like i’m working with a distinct medium and not just a simulation of another one is extremely common.

most of the “post-medium” type arguments rely on equating a medium with a material, suggest that digital technologies have stripped materiality from artwork, and conclude that as a result any relationship to the concept of medium must now be some weird anachronism. this is what theorist Mary Ann Doane does in her version of Krauss’s post-medium: “With the advent of digital media, photography, in particular, has seemingly lost its credibility as a trace of the real, and it could be argued that the media in general face a certain crisis of legitimization.” and specifically regarding photography, “…the digital offers an ease of manipulation and distance from any referential grounding that seems to threaten the immediacy and certainty of referentiality we have come to associate with photography…”. Mcluhan would certainly have agreed with that, but i’m not sure he would have concluded that digital photography has no medium, he’d likely have suggested it’s just a rather different one.

in the end what the “post-medium” argument puts forth is simply this: because of emulation, digital artifacts aren’t real. Krauss argues for the term “technical support” instead of medium for just this reason. yet while they easily notice emulation’s effects on cultural forms, no one in the post-medium room seems interested in discovering where emulation comes from or why it exists as a fundamental property of the Turing-machines (computers) that run our art. perhaps this is unfortunate, a reality defined by assumptions of what computers can’t yet do is a strange one. and instead of refuting the existence of any contemporary medium, in the sense that if a digital photograph isn’t a photograph it then has no ties to any sort of material, they might also consider a perspective where Turing-machines, as the vehicles of emulation, are themselves the medium through which artists are now working – perhaps even unaware.

so what does post-medium give in exchange? why the hilarity of Nicolas Bourriaud explaining the breakdown of mediums by writing about how artists are now really like dj’s, cutting and scratching their way through cultural artifacts to arrive at a historically informed practice of globalized sign manipulation! you know, like this. or maybe like this. so while it’s actually quite easy to agree with many of the tenets of the post-medium argument, and it is a pure pleasure to read someone like Rosalind Krauss’s writing, Bourriaud demonstrates that post-medium conclusions often sound just as silly as before. [Paddy asked me to discuss this more: it's not really fair to interrogate an analogy, but as it's all we have scope for consider how his notion of a DJ is romanticised: at the time Bourriaud wrote Postproduction the best DJ's were universally acknowledged to be the DMC champions – `i.e. the ones with the most technical, material skills and not “semionauts”. also i would point to DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid as the literal embodiment of Bourriaud's analogy of a sign-spinner. Spooky is a truly abysmal DJ and while i'm sure he's still off “remixing culture” somewhere right now as Bourriaud would have him do, does anyone really care? the old criticisms of “artists using signs” being nothing new (Bourriaud complains about this) and it being hypocritical to claim that someone like Tiravanija challenges “authorship” and “origin” in his work when he's the only one who gets paid still stand.]

i actually don’t mean to be so terrible to Bourriaud; for me his analysis of individual artists worked up to a point and there’s no way he could have foreseen how the internet, the “central tool” of his remixed-up framework, would morph into a giant, continuous pay-per-click. his proposition that “Do-It-Yourself will reach every layer of cultural production” now seems strangely idealistic as our very idea of self becomes controlled by Google. so while on one hand Bourriaud was completely correct and ahead of the curve (for a curator) when in 2001 he described artists as working with “data”, on the other you might think it an opportunity for a medium, and a related art theory, to somehow be grounded in the connections to process, information, and logical truth that data as a form provides. when so many artworks are about systems, networks, interactivity or otherwise, you’d think that in order to truly place value on a system you’d want to understand it.

at this point i’m going to give a quick shout-out to everyone’s favorite common-sense philosopher Aristotle. in his Poetics, written 2,300 years ago, Aristotle invented art criticism and based much of it on a concept that we translate into English as “medium” (Butcher, 1902 translation). not only that, Aristotle was criticizing things like the rather immaterial art form of lyric poetry; that is to say an artwork consisting of a program of discrete instructions (lyrics and notes) stored in a digital format (an alphabet and music scale system), and executed (played) in real-time so that it does not exist as an object (immaterial). over two millennia later that sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it? we can see then that for a long, long time material vs. medium either wasn’t an issue or was an issue that we were happy to ignore. computers didn’t bother the de-materialized art soup of the late 60s and 70s: there weren’t loads of computer art exhibitions, but there also weren’t loads of computers and the few exhibitions that did happen are now seen as seminal (Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA, London in 1968 being an archetype). it’s only years later when computers go mainstream that they become a real problem regarding materiality and a “post-medium” view emerges.

of course the post-medium stuff hasn’t been the only attempt to theorize computer/medium questions. in the 90′s resurgent post-structuralist theory provided a lot of wishful thinking about what the internet was going to be (Paddy wants a reference here, so i suggest reading any critical text written between 1990-1994 that has the word “Hypertext” in the title). the early 2000′s brought a “new media” theory that slathered vocabulary and analysis of other media, usually film and cinema, onto computers i.e. something that ontologically is not film or cinema (Bolter – “remediation”, Manovich – everything). and all this against the backdrop of “computer art”, whose origin pre-dates both video art and conceptual art, but since then has been ghettoized into the various centres and festivals we’re familiar with, often deservedly so.

so here we are now, 2011, and the very idea of bringing up medium in relation to computer-based art makes me feel old. perhaps it is my own stupidity for being interested in medium. i hope it more likely that the easy solution was for ‘medium’, as a concern, to be largely glossed over in the production of contemporary art. no one is to blame for this given our current conditions; computers’ have a nebulous relationship to material, stifling mediocrity defines so much “new media” artwork of the past 20 years, and a general fearfulness of lapsing back into the old ways of “medium-specificity” pervades. but consider the effects of writing down an understanding of an artwork’s medium – its processes, what it is – as a component of evaluation. we simply can’t call bullshit like we used to. if i exhibit some computer-based work, and it actually doesn’t do what i claim, no one notices. likewise if i say something stupid about computers in an art context, who’s really going to call me on it? (quick example of the latter, and this book is full of them: in The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich writes that computers “rely uniformly on lossy compression” (pg.54) when using digital images. don’t tell that to anyone who’s ever made an animated GIF!).

what strikes me as bizarre, however, is how in the face of theory and practice that flaunt the concept to be irrelevant we still use our old word “medium” ALL THE TIME. the term has now become such a high-frequency, low-content phrase that we don’t even notice it any more, since its meaning has disintegrated. do we really only use the word historically then, just another 404 link to an art context of the past that should be binned? i want to say no for two reasons: one, the concept is still formative for artists, two, regardless of how the term “medium” has been used (Noel Carroll even suggests that the status of “film” as a specific fine art media was driven not only by the celluloid material, but by artists wanting jobs in subsequently-needed film departments) understanding an artwork’s means of representation – its medium – is a valid component of its evaluation. that is not going to change, ever, whether computers are involved or not.

one scene in which artists have been trying to crack the computer/medium question is the glitch/compression artifact/general fucking digital things up community. it makes intuitive sense that to investigate a medium, you might rip it apart — it’s worked that way before, anyway. i like a lot of this stuff, but a glitch isn’t anything more than any other computable action. we see the outcome of certain actions as glitch only because of the way various software or hardware constructs have become normalized in our lives. in any event, an artist using glitch as a way to explore some sort of “aesthetic of the medium” is not going to find anything. mediums don’t have aesthetics, people do. what glitch does do is remind us that meaning exists in a continual state of potential simulation. i happen to think this is important, and that once in a while we need the mirror shattered. glitch accomplishes this feat, despite its other limitations.

artists also explore the computer/medium question through interactivity – Dominic McIver Lopes recent book “A Philosophy of Computer Art” is even based on a definition that “computer art” must be interactive. what is this interactivity, then, that drives the work and arguably give it meaning? Claire Bishop offers a textbook definition:

“Many artists and critics have argued that this need to move around and through the work in order to experience it activates the viewer, in contrast to art that simply requires optical contemplation (which is considered to be passive and detached). This activation is, moreover, regarded as emancipatory, since it is analogous to the viewer’s engagement in the world. A transitive relationship comes to be implied between ‘activated spectatorship’ and active engagement in the social-political arena.” (Bishop, Installation Art)

but take two of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Relational Architecture works, one produced in Yamaguchi, Japan in which SMS messages are converted to control signals for spotlights, and one in Toronto, Canada which senses the heart-rates of passersby to do the same thing. what is interactive in any meaningful way here? imagine being in Yamaguchi, sending a SMS, and seeing the spotlights move. now imagine trying to relate those movements to your SMS among hundreds. difficult to do. now imagine the work with no one participating at all – the spotlights still look just as awesome. now imagine being in Toronto and wandering by a sensor and seeing some other spotlights move. could you tell a difference between a heart-rate spotlight and an SMS spotlight? it’s hard to see what’s interactive about a system that runs with or without you or where any composed input is aesthetically indistinguishable from simple randomness. what happens in reality is that the ‘activation’ Lozano-Hemmer’s work is designed to provide is meaningless.

there is no interaction with the system that a viewer can have that’s unique to that viewer, and the importance of a piece based on interactivity seems to fade away when you can’t distinguish your own actions from noise. i think the real question to ask is: even with this interactivity being meaningless, would these works have been funded without it? this demonstrates a limitation that we can intuitively detect in “interactive” work but is difficult to make sense of: just because the thingamabob moves when you step in front of the webcam, it doesn’t actually mean the piece is interactive. when the system is a one-liner, bothering to trigger it is “analogous to a viewer’s engagement with the world” (Bishop) only so far as any engagement with our Western social-political arena is already pretty darn empty. but i don’t think that’s what Lozano-Hemmer means.

so to summarize what’s been laid out so far:
- medium is a well-worn concept and we use the word in imaginative ways, but computers going mainstream still freaked people out because one single computer can emulate multiple media
- new media is wishy washy and easy and relies on critical frameworks that were developed for other media to discuss computers
- post-medium is interesting, but doesn’t allow for the possibility that Turing-complete machines (computers) could themselves be a medium
- as they both either refute the idea of medium, or refuse to explicitly define computer as one, they fail to address unique ontological issues that arise when using a computer to produce art
- artists are giving it a crack, glitch and interactivity being two ways of looking at computers, although both have limitations
- in general we’re losing a way to talk about computer based work (even popular artfagcity subjects like dump.fm and gifs which aren’t explicitly “about” their computer-based nature)
- i went to art school

taking all that on board, i’d suggest that some kind of “Turing-informed” framework might be a fruitful option. specifically, a perspective from which we apply knowledge of an artwork’s computational processes to it’s reading as an artwork. we do some of this naturally anyway, two examples i can think of are the XYZ art thread from a few years back and last year on this blog with mashups. i don’t think a Turing-informed perspective is the only one to use, and i also don’t mean something “Turing-informed” in the ars electronica/ITP/eyebeam-funded “i’ve made a crowd-sourced and/or arduino controlled piece of pop culture ephemera with no endgame” sense. rather, i mean that by foregrounding the nature and functions of these machines and systems and showing how we can make them intrinsic to our interpretations of work, we create a very powerful tool. with computers as a medium being something artists have pursued for 4 decades, this also isn’t a new idea. an even better example might be Noah Wardrip-Fruin, co-editor of the New Media Reader (a book i would have killed for when i was an undergrad) who wrote in 2006 that “we are only beginning to consider how we might interpret such [computational] processes themselves, rather than simply their outputs”. five years later – an age in internet time – it still rings true.

Paul B. Davis is an art lecturer at Goldsmiths College, and PhD candidate at Central St. Martins. Paul pioneered hacking techniques and video games as fine art and formed the programming collective BEIGE in 2000. He writes his own operating systems and video codecs as art, and works in video, performance and sculpture with every piece having a computer in it somewhere. Paul is represented by SEVENTEEN Gallery in London and his thesis is titled “Turing-completeness as Medium: Art, Computers and Intentionality”, as you probably could have guessed. Read his full bio here.

[Editor's Note: IMG MGMT is a semi-annual image-based artist essay series. Today's invited artists, A.L. Steiner and Z. Drucker, live in New York and Los Angeles respectively. Their full bios can be read at the end of this post.]

[A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. She is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder/organizer of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her work is represented by Taxter & Spengemann.

Drucker holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2007), and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2005). Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, Drucker disarms audiences using live performance, film, video, and photography. Keeping normative culture on the periphery, Drucker uses her body to illicit desire, judgement, and voyeuristic shame from her viewer.]

The lead image from Deborah Kass’ IMG MGMT essay The Cube Show last year.

In response to the growing number of images stored on artist hard drives we’ve decided to publish our IMG MGMT series more frequently! Launching tomorrow, our latest series of image based essays will include contributors, Chris Collins, Paul B. Davis, Sara Ludy, Virginia Overton, Roger White + Dushko Petrovich,  Z. Drucker + A.L. Steiner, and Tommy White. What’s contained in these essays will mostly remain top secret till the series launch of course but we can tell you that Roger White + Dushko Petrovich promise to e-volutionize art criticism as we know it. That’s happening tomorrow and Thank God for that. I don’t think I could wait another day.

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today's invited writer, Josh Kline, is a New York-based artist. Working primarily in Photoshop, installation, and video, Kline's work is concerned with the diffusion and confusion of brands and mass-media communication strategies. His work has been exhibited in New York at spaces including 179 Canal Street, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, X Initiative, Taxter & Spengemann, and Guild and Greyshkul, among others; at Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich; and various project spaces in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Kline is a founding member of the art collective Circular File. In fall 2009, he produced a three episode cable access television show with the collective as a commission for the PERFORMA09 biennial. Originally from Philadelphia, Kline graduated with a degree in film and media art from Temple University in 2002. You can find more of Josh's work on Youtube and Vimeo.]

If you see something, say something. Orange alert. Bondi Blue alert. A big thank you to the Internet from CU & SC, GW & MA, Oral B, Design Within Reach, Steve Jobs, Sarah Palin, and AMC. “Thank you for providing us with easy access to limitless amounts of inspirational information, especially information from the 20th Century.”

The Internet’s first decade as a mass medium was a time for digestion and regurgitation. Information filled the expanding network and overflowed back into the minds of its users. In the wake of this relentless and overwhelming flood of influence, the past has become a conveniently located mental refugee camp for everyone having trouble coming to terms with the 21st Century and The Economist magazine’s predictions of America’s lackluster place in it. If the forecast for Your Future is coming up #scary, the world wide web provides the ultimate manual for living it up in the decade of your dreams while holding down a day job in 2010. Time-consuming research into the furniture design, art, or music of the last century offers the perfect distraction for the thinking classes from America’s 21st Century troubles. Why concern yourself with the future when DFA keeps churning out disco-punk dance hits from 1979?

Where, though, does Dr. Who’s TARDIS take America’s caring, cultured, progressive liberal Democrats? Even with Obama in office, America’s center-left-leaning intellectuals can’t get enough of “Mad Men”. Is it just the attention to period detail and the brilliant writing or is it the thrill of watching pregnant women drink cocktails and smoke cigarettes while the Black housekeeper does the dishes? The New York Times wants to know. The 2000s and the stunning traumas of Bush Cheney & Co. ushered in an era of extreme escapism. Sitcoms specializing in social surrogacy like Friends have been replaced in our hearts and on our screens by period dramas like “Mad Men”, “Rome”, and “Battlestar Galactica” and by laptop DVD cultural safaris in the wilds of “Big Love” and “The Wire“.

The success of “Mad Men”, however, correlates with a wider Shout!-style revival party going on in the upper echelons around Mid-Century Modern culture. In New York’s multi-million-dollar glass-curtain-walled condos, it can be a challenge distinguishing between the furniture and art from 1960 and the decorations designed back when The Strokes were still maxing out on Red Bull and vodka at Bar 13 in 2001. The Aeron chair and the Mizuno running shoes are obvious computer babies, but what about the coffee table and the chaise lounge and the toilet bowl brush? Unless you’ve done your research, the line between Mid-Century Modern and New Century Modern is a blurry one. Especially since Design Within Reach is making all the classics in updated colorways for “Today.”

Photoshop can change the color of the Barcelona Couch to match the grayscale conceptual painting on the wall and a 3D modeling program can take the gleaming Mies van der Rohe crystal building and twist it into a pleasing shape that evokes “movement” and fractals. The Titanium Macintosh iComputer, “designed in California”, rests in peace easily on top of the glass desk designed for Herman Miller. The Modern surface is back in force. What else has come along, Back To The Future, with it?

Much of the contemporary art created by young artists during the Bush years is also locked tightly in orbit around Modernism’s collapsed star. Reinterpretations of Modern Art’s greatest hits have been wildly popular in institutional group shows and art fairs for some time now. If we ignore the press releases and take the objects at face value, we are confronted again with time-travel anachronisms–black and white abstract paintings that would look almost right in 1919 or 1955, formal sculpture perfectly at home alongside minimalist works from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Is it really Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodernism, a Modernism reloaded with a globalized, internet-reliant population’s preference for non-linear culture or does it just look good on the walls of a nouveau moderne apartment with a view of The High Line? The role of period-specific market forces as an engine for selection cannot and will not be ignored when looking back at the successful art of the 2000s. Who was inflating the art bubble and where was their money coming from? Stepping away from theory into the realm of economics and geopolitics, the dots are there to be connected with Richard Meier, the glass condos in the Lower East Side, DWR, and all the Nth-wave Modern art on display in Chelsea in 2007 and 2008.

The i-bankers and successful real estate developers who can afford to enjoy Mad Men’s rich Mid-Century colors on Sony’s $4000 Bravia HD TV are not immune to the psychic gloom that the last decade blew in from Washington, Crawford, and Baghdad. The cultural fallout shelters that they’ve added to the skyline look to and believe in a postwar golden age of American innovation and creativity. They’ve literally bought into it. The warped digital geometry of the buildings distracts the eye from the glass curtain walls and the harmony of lines and angles. These are buildings that want to lock our imaginations onto the 1950s and ‘60s, a simpler time when the issues presented on TV were less complex and the news was black and white.

On both sides of the American political divide, Republican economic liberals and Democratic cultural liberals are furnishing their homes and businesses in an imperial American revival style. During the 2000s, the creative classes came to believe that surface has been evacuated and style depoliticized. This is the thinking that allows the left to vote for the first Black president, while at the same time beatifying the country’s Cold War power style and the last gasp of a monolithic mass culture.

Thanks to the web, with enough spare time and dedication, you can bone up on any topic enough to out-expert the original participants. Rock bands of the 2000s abandoned ship on the present to colonize any number of obscure lost histories–‘60s Garage Rock, ‘70s No Wave, ‘80s Post-Punk, ‘90s Acid House, and so on. Napster, Soulseek, Bittorrent and countless mp3 blogs reopened the lost worlds of the last century. Millions of teenagers and twentysomethings filled their iPods with the music, put on the clothes, and built a lifestyle out of recreating various obscure moments from the past. Temporal defection. Large numbers of artists from this same cohort, born in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, have followed this same approach with 20th Century art history, finding spiritual homes in the exhumed surfaces of Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, and all the other avant-garde utopias. Pick a period in art history and pick up where it left off. Step #2 after earning your Wikipedia certification is updating the sneaker design, adding the designer’s touch and preserving the ebay value of the deadstock originals.

Las Vegas is perhaps the only place on Earth where architecture followed this approach. Every new casino there has been ripped out of a different place and time and tenderly replanted in the radioactive desert. Among the urban moneyed elite, however, living in kitschy versions of Ancient Egypt or Venice never caught on. A single architectural style has dominated the urban construction sites of the G20 since Y2K.

Looking out across the Pacific, it’s clear that the Chinese can’t wait to bulldoze Beijing and upgrade to the newest of the new. This imperative is most obvious in the bleeding-edge architecture that the Chinese commissioned for Beijing’s Olympic redesign. In Asia, New Century Modern architecture is being used to erase the past rather than to wallow in it. For Beijing and Shanghai, it’s an imported luxury good whose references and antecedents are irrelevant to the locals. China didn’t have a Mid-Century Modern period. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, China had Chairman Mao’s thousand flowers and the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese (and most of the planet) find little excuse for nostalgia in the 20th Century. If the past is a gangrenous dead limb, you lop it off and move on with your life.

Even with syndicated reruns of Japan’s 1990s lost decade playing to a captive audience in the States, pixelated glass shibboleths are still under construction all over Manhattan Island. Computer-aided Contemporary Modern architecture, art, and design continues to flood the worlds of aspiration and luxury. The flows of wealth initiated by the Bush administration (RIP KIT BFF 2001-2009) determined the tastemakers. Surface Magazine sold them on an updated Phillip Johnson lifestyle and the neo-con beneficiaries decorated their new privacy-optional lofts accordingly. Millions of Americans are experiencing culture shock in their own country and they are seeking refuge in the past. What looks good on those walls? Your Safe Institutional Nostalgia Shrine, brought to you by West Elm, Wallpaper, GWB, DC, PW & CR, the Internet and 9/11. Feel better, New Century Modernism.

Some creative highlights/milestones along the road to/of the New Century Modern style so far:

$5 auto-cad toothbrushes with color changing indicator bristles and ergonomic grips are today’s default dental hygiene choice at the drug store. Toothbrushes led the way into the home for the resurgence of “good design” after the Ramada Inn Beige/Mauve period whose apotheosis was Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). Which came first, though, Oral-B’s chicken or the iEgg “flavors” that Steve Jobs laid for us in the late ’90s? Maybe it was the ergonomic Aeron chair designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf in 1994.

Surface Magazine, i-D, ID, Wallpaper: the interchangeable, indispensible coffee table accessory of the early 2000s whether your career interests lay in fashion, graphic design, or IDM music. These magazines and their “Avant Guardian” photographers convinced thousands of people to make design a key criterion in their consumer lives. Surface Magazine promoted the designers who favored the ergonomic task-chair and iMod styles of the 90s and early 2000s. There was also plenty of room within its pages for all the antler chandeliers and Williamsburg Victoriana coming out of Brooklyn.

Ska music comes from Jamaica and was the forerunner of Reggae. Ska’s first wave happened in the 1960s and gave us Desmond Dekker. Two-tone, Second Wave Ska, emerged in England in the ‘70s and gave us bands like The Specials and The Selector. In the ‘90s, Third Wave Ska gave us bands like Skankin’ Pickle, Mephiskapheles, and The Mighty Mighty Bostones.

Right around the time that 9/11 sent traumatized twenty-something New Yorkers running for the safety of ‘80s music and LCD Soundsystem, Apple took the color out of its iMac line of lucite computers and released a line of mod products that would look right at home in Space: 1999 or 2001: A Space Odyssey. These computers also match everything in a new Ian Schrager condo loft furnished by Design Within Reach, West Elm, CB2, and/or Ikea.

Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction franchises have an uncanny knack for distilling the architectural and technological aesthetics of their times and creating a 100% contemporary universe with them. The original Star Trek (1966-69) presents a Mid-Century Modern fantasy in space–with avocado walls on alien planets and blue-gray talking computers. Star Trek TNG (1987-1994), as mentioned above, takes the beige computer and beige hospital from the late ‘80s and flies around the galaxy in it, visiting planets full of lavender vases, mauve corporate carpets, and static electricity orbs from Spencer’s circa 1986. Roddenberry’s posthumous series Earth Final Conflict (1997-2002) is an Aeron chair merged with toothbrushes and running shoes and has alien human hybrids and FBI agents with brain implants. The saga continues in the latest Star Trek movie (2009). The sets of the new and improved starship Enterprise offer a vision of interstellar exploration charted from the bridge of the Apple Store.

Airports are architecture’s most extravagant sketch pad. In the terminals of Schiphol, Frankfurt, JFK, Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, and all the rest, architecture and design create immersive contemporary environments on a grand scale.  Jet Blue’s Terminal 5 at JFK comes complete with a Muji store and a Jamba Juice and connects seamlessly with Eero Saarinen’s landmark 1960s terminal, the Transworld Flight Center (i.e. TWA Terminal 6).

With The Wire off the air, Mad Men is the current gold star standard-bearer of the new golden age of television. For viewers who either lived through the ‘60s or grew up amid its ruins in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the show can generate intense nostalgia and longing. In the second season when Don Draper runs off to Palm Springs (episode 24: The Jet Set), you can smell the chlorine in the pool and feel the sunburn on your back. Mad Men cunningly portrays America’s transition from socially conservative monolithic culture with legislated discrimination to the dysfunctional, fragmented, lifestyle-oriented consumer culture that we enjoy today. As much as some people tell themselves that the ’50s and ’60s were a hideous time to be alive, televised fantasies involving sexually harassing secretaries with no consequences, drinking and smoking in the office, or getting married and quitting your job provide vicarious thrills for millions.

The characteristics of New Century Modern architecture are discussed in the paragraphs above. Here are some images of notable buildings from the Neo-con decade in New York City:

Piero Manzoni - Base of the World, Magic Base No. 3 by Piero Manzoni 1961 Homage to Galileo (1961)

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artist Deborah Kass is a Broadway baby whose paintings examine the intersection of art history, popular culture and the self. She received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie- Mellon University, studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Art Students’ League. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Cincinnati Museum, the New Orleans Museum, The Weatherspoon Museum, as well as numerous public and private collections. Her work has been written about extensively in doctorates and theses, the New York Times, art press, and books. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. She considers Jonathan Schwartz to be the most important living public intellectual and George W. Bush, the scourge of civilization. She is a Senior Critic in the Yale University M.F.A. Painting Program. She will soon be conducting a Glee Forum to theorize the most important TV show ever produced with similar minded Gleeks. Kass's work can currently be seen at the Jewish Museum in the show "Shifting the Gaze." It will also be included in the show at he Smithsonian Museum , "Hide/ Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" that opens at the end of the month. She is represented by Vincent Fremont and the Paul Kasmin Gallery, where a show of her work, "MORE feel good paintings for feel bad times," is currently on view through October 30, 2010.

Deborah is making her artfagcity debut and would like to thank her wife (love you, Pattie!) friends and family (thanks, Mom and Dad, sis, bro and nieces and nephews!) and of course, her personal savior, Stephen Sondheim.]

Tony Smith - Die (1962)

Hans Haacke - Condensation Cube (1963)

Andy Warhol - Brillo Box (1964)

Paul Thek - Meat Piece With Warhol Brillo Box (1965)

Joseph Kosuth - Box, Cube, Empty, Clear, Glass-A Description (1965)

Tetsumi Kudo - Votre Portrait - T (1965)

Robert Morris - Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1965)

Tony Rosenthal - Alamo (1967)

Eva Hesse - Accession II (1968)

Larry Bell - 20" Untitled 1969 (Tom Messer Cube) (1969)

Sol Lewitt - Cubic Construction (1971)

Donald Judd - Untitled (Six boxes) (1974)

Dan Graham - Public Space/Two Audiences (1976)

Carl Andre - Trabum (1977)

Jackie Winsor - Burnt Piece (1977-8)

Richard Serra - Berlin Block (For Charlie Chaplin) (1978)

Charles Ray - Ink Box (1986)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres - "Untitled" (The End) (1990)

Cildo Meireles - Thread (1990-1995)

Franz West - Cubi Carini (1991)

Janine Antoni - Gnaw (1992)

Rachel Lachowicz - Sarah (1992)

Rachel Whiteread - Untitled (Room) (1993)

Jim Isermann - Cubeweave (0396) (1996)

Cornelia Parker - Mass (Colder Darker Matter) (1997)

Patricia Cronin - Tack Room (1997-8)

Tara Donovan - Toothpicks (2001)

Tom Friedman - Untitled (pedestal with flies) (2002)

Jean Nouvel - Monolith (2002)

Rebecca Warren - Cube (2003)

Yayoi Kusama - Passing Winter (2005)

Jeppe Hein - Burning Cube (2005)

Jedediah Caesar - Untitled (Hollow Box) (2007)

Roni Horn - Pink Tons (2008)

Carlos Estrada Vega - Carlitos (2008)

Ai WeiWei - Light Cube (2008)

Urs Fischer - from Service à la française (2009)

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited artist Sean Raspet lives and works in New York and San Francisco. Raspet has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. His most recent projects include As If Written In, a solo show currently on view at The Kitchen NY, A Brief History at Art Basel Miami Beach (2008), and The Ones We Work For at Daniel Reich Gallery. Raspet has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including A Relative Expanse at Renwick Gallery, New York, and The Morning News (curated by Lumi Tan) at BE-PART Contemporary Art Center, Waregem, Belgium – both of which were held in 2010. This Tuesday, October 12th, at 7pm, Raspet will screen his new video 20/02 at The Kitchen. The feature length film is a frame by frame rearrangement of the 2002 film Drumline]

I.   In the past one might have imagined that were they to break/puncture a photograph that it would shatter like a mirror, or exhibit a literal rupture—i.e., tear like a piece of paper. In the present, a viewer is more likely to imagine that a semi-intelligent semi-transparent liquid would seep out, itself both a lens and a healing balm. It would subtly reconfigure the image’s silvery surface layers, and implement slight adjustments, making it more palatable to the viewer. It might then become a point of interfacing with a second layer—a portal rather than a punctum.

II.  Our daily life is peppered with little dabs of the sublime. Images increasingly depict a luminous hybrid space of pure [image] circulation—frozen or fleeting abstractions that refer to their own looping trajectories through time. Partially originating in the sped-up long exposure photos of motorways common to the 80s and earlier (while implicitly evoking the contemporaneous build up of the US’s missile program, along with neon signage, the Nike swoosh, the Esprit squiggle, et al.), streaking light effects now augment a substantial portion of production logos, web pages, computer backdrops and advertisements of all sorts. Sometime after their initial depiction of the acceleration within the every day, they became more abstract in form. They began to visualize the nascent information architectures and the implementation of fiber optic cable networks that were carrying this information (images) to various corners of the earth “at light-speed” along an “information super-highway”. In this liberated form (liberated in part by new techniques of digital image production) they served also to visualize and proliferate certain neo-liberal, utopian ideas of the 1990s that heralded a globally-integrated, post-conflict, post-historical epoch (a la Francis Fukayama)—a perpetual now, buoyantly illuminated and weightlessly incorporating all previous stages of development. Arising in this rhetorical climate they formed the backdrop for these attempts to tie the new phase of unfettered capitalism with the liberating promise of geographically unfettered information.

While their motion may conjure to mind quantum collisions, satellite orbits, or a tendril-like, swarming algorithm, the underlying impetus and guiding principle of each jet of light is that of global circulation. It presents itself as one path in a virtual topography of real and imagined networks of information and commerce (presumably, at each given instance, as the suggested path of the individual consumer/viewer—a guiding light in a labyrinthine terrain). It is one component in a complex composed of innumerable points of light, and from the act of pointing, incorporating, and touching upon outside masses. From this continual absorption, it derives its energy and libidinal charge—like a mercurial electron of desire (or a liquefying capital flow). Tellingly these depictions often exhibit a circularity of orbit; a feeding back into themselves in an elliptical (and often slightly erratic—therefore presumably intelligent) self-referentiality. This structure parallels the increasingly self-referential autonomy of financial markets and the information economy as divorced from material production (though not quite).

As a beam of light jumps metonymically, capriciously, from object to object in an advertisement for Sprint Wireless, we can (and indeed we are prompted to) extrapolate each instance of this common motif as part of a larger whole: we imagine that this luminous tendril continues to flow into the Nightline logo, where it then branches off into a Canon and a Windows advertisement before looping around into a glowing Hermes ribbon, which is made from the same spectral plasma as the University of Canterbury’s web page and the iPhone’s screensaver. These images present single facets of an integrated ad campaign/network/mass vision that is continually branching out and incorporating all relevant details and entities into its fold. Each image is a marker that says: “this has been incorporated” or “this is participating” in conjunction with its individual logo.

Not surprisingly these light effects tend to be especially prevalent where the commodity being offered is information, entertainment, or experience as in the case of television news or motion picture production. As such this imagery has done a great deal to develop a public perception towards the idea of a commodity as a pure abstraction. It has helped to map a change in the spatial imaginary and to form an understanding of (and desire for) the experience economy as a visceral sensation. In doing so, it transfers the site of the commodity’s allure from an imagined inner essence to a supporting network that surrounds and propels it. The desire is located not inside but outside in the act of participation within the network, and the accompanying potential for overflowing frisson.

While the network that these images ostensibly refer to is a conflation of a commercial network (i.e. of global shipping patterns and financial transactions) and that of information architecture (both its physical installation and its abstract, imagined pathways, or animating spirit), the unstated prize is, of course, the viewer/consumer’s ability to take part in a social network. From this exchange, a shared economy of experience and knowledge is offered back to the viewer. However, the operation which mediates these activities exists alongside and somehow in between these conceptions: that is to say the parallel network by which images refer to themselves and include other compatible images; acting in ways that are semi-autonomous and distinct from the networks of commercial circulation and information topology. It is for this process that the vast array of light imagery serves as both example and metaphor.

In short, the image of the commodity has been superseded by the image of its channels of exchange, or furthermore by an abstraction for pure exchange (social, informational or commercial). If we imagine these images not separately, but (as is their demand) as part of a continuous phenomenon (or epiphenomenon) the overall effect is to imply an ever-expanding, ever consolidating network of self-reflexive images—images that are about this ever expanding network and that through their proximity to other images, draw them into the network as well. Put another way: rather than a commodity being replaced by its image, the current shift is towards an image being replaced by an abstraction of the imagined network in which it circulates.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

III. Increasingly, images must have the ability to refer to multiple alternate images within a densely layered proximity. Images are selected and reproduced for their swap-ability, mutability, and modularity—their ability to sit side by side with strangers without disagreement. [1] Color schemes, lighting conditions, et al must be compatible across multiple platforms of dispersal.[2] The specific qualities of images  are progressively more interlinked, moving towards an automatic consensus (or averaging) that defines the neutral terrain through which subsequent images are refracted. [3] In line with the critique of contemporary art that in order to be recognized/successful it must look like contemporary art, an image’s (paradoxical) foremost criterion is that it must resemble an image.

Images that exhibit these qualities of neutrality, sociability, and recognizability are more likely to be copied/dispersed/linked to, creating an environment suitable for themselves and further setting the parameters of future images. The shifting consolidation of image parameters of course does not occur in a linear fashion, but rather happens simultaneously, (and unfathomably) across a network of dispersed images and their derivatives. Increasingly an image refers not to its subject, but to its parameters, it’s meta-image. Multiple images across various platforms spontaneously point to a kind of self-supporting mise-en-scene: an internally consistent, though externally fragmented, microcosm containing a particular on-screen worldview. (This is not necessarily new, but has become a progressively more tangible operation, in light of the increasing rootless-ness of images and their accelerating speed of circulation.)

Like an anamorphic projection, a single image when, viewed from the proper angle, aligns with an assortment of related images to form a momentary, cohesive whole. Here, the angle of view is not spatial, but temporal—it occurs in the flash of recognition upon first encountering the image, and just as quickly fades into the background as a given; the logic of its world having been taken on by the viewer. In this fleeting glimpse the viewer sees reflected within the image the set of all other images that share its parameters and of which it is in some way composed—those images that are ‘cut from the same cloth’. [4] This world-on-screen consists as much of its ostensible subject as of its own specificity as image (or more specifically, of the ad-infinitum reproduction of its particular image parameters).

An image is thus more the result of a process of alignment (with other images) than of reflection (of a given subject in the world). Whereas previously a photograph was believed to offer a fragmentary window onto the world, it now offers an interlinked network of related images that form a semi-autonomous image-world—a partially-enclosed mise en abyme, largely freed from the earthly duty of depicting events (but never the less beholden to its own particular set of parameters as an event in itself). The rootless-ness of images—which are no longer to be situated in a specific stratum—furthermore requires that they are able to carry their world with them (somewhat like their flesh and blood brethren). If images are mirrors dispersed in a circular fashion, pointing inward and reflecting each other, the meta-image is the vacant center that is formed as a result and to which these points collectively refer. It is their realm of (and limitation on) possibility.

IV. A CERTAIN QUALITY

[2] An image is taken here to mean not only a photograph or illustration, but also a web template or other background within which it appears—in short anything that appears on screen or within a frame, which then may have further images nested within it.

[3] Naturally, this is a simplification, and there are numerous areas of resistance or indifference to a more general trend towards consolidation.

[4] This is of course a subjective operation, shaped by the individual viewer’s prior experience.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today’s invited is New York and Berlin based artist Anton Vidokle.]

New York Conversations
A film by Anton Vidokle

16mm film transfer to DV, sound, 1:06
e-flux films, 2010
Distributed by Sternberg Press, Berlin

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public. The talks, lunches, and dinners were organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nico Dockx, and Anton Vidokle in response to an invitation by Brussels-based art journal A Prior to be the subject of their new issue. Instead of commissioning essays or producing artwork to be printed in the journal, the artists decided to rethink the structure by which an art publication is produced and to attempt to do this discursively in a public setting.

The film is a subjective record of these conversations, which explored various topics ranging from questions concerning precarious and immaterial labor in the field of art, possibilities for non-alienated life and working conditions, the feasibility of artistic freedom, and possible means of reclaiming dignity in the work of art criticism, to more immediate questions concerning whether what was actually taking place throughout the course of the event was in fact an artwork. In the tradition of underground cinema, essay films, and experimental language-based films from the conceptual era, New York Conversations insists upon a certain degree of participation from the audience—by way of critical reading—over passive spectatorship.

With: Francisca Benitez, Nico Dockx, Daniel Faust, Media Farzin, Liam Gillick, Egon Hanfstingl, Jörg Heiser, Steven Kaplan, Shama Khana, Anders Kreuger, Miwon Kwon, Valerie Mannaerts, Sis Matthé, Hadley Nunes, Saul Ostrow, Marti Peran, Simon Rees, Els Roelandt, Dieter Roelstraete, Martha Rosler, Joe Scanlan, Maxwel Stephen, Monika Szewczyk, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Andrea Wiarda, Louwrien Wijers and others.

[About Anton Vidokle: Vidokle's work has been exhibited in shows such as the Venice Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Lyon Biennial, Dakar Biennale, and at Tate Modern, London;  Musée d’art Modern de la Ville de Paris; Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; UCLA Hammer, LA; ICA, Boston; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; P.S.1, New York; among others. With Julieta Aranda, he organized e-flux video rental - an artwork in the form of a free traveling video rental shop. As a founder of e-flux, he has produced projects such as "Do it, Utopia Station poster project", and organized "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life and Martha Rosler Library". Vidokle initiated research into education as site for artistic practice as co-curator for Manifesta 6, European Biennial for Contemporary Art, which was canceled. In response to the cancellation, Vidokle set up an independent project in Berlin called "Unitednationsplaza"—a twelve-month experimental school involving more than a hundred artists, writers, philosophers, and diverse audiences, a version of which travelled to the New Museum under the name "Night School". Most currently, Vidokle is collaborating with Julieta Aranda on Time/Bank - a platform where artists, curators writers and others in art community can trade time and skills.]