Expanded Internet Art: Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu 9781501347771, 9781501347764, 9781501347801, 9781501347795

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Active Agents
1 No Center, No Object, Just Networks: Expanded Internet Art
2 Milieux, Then and Now
3 Resistance in the Domain of All Inputs, All Outputs: Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s Les Immatériaux
4 Parsing Attention: Image Circulation and Affect
Conclusion: Breaking Presence
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Expanded Internet Art

INTERNATIONAL TEXTS IN CRITICAL MEDIA AESTHETICS Vol. 13 Founding Editor: Francisco J. Ricardo Series Editor: Jörgen Schäfer Grant Taylor Editorial Board: Sandy Baldwin, Martha Buskirk, John Cayley, Tony Richards, Joseph Tabbi, Gloria Sutton, Gregory Zinman Volumes in the series: New Directions in Digital Poetry, C. T. Funkhouser Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory, Markku Eskelinen Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace, Martha Buskirk The Engagement Aesthetic: Experiencing New Media Art through Critique, Francisco J. Ricardo Software Takes Command, Lev Manovich 3D: History, Theory and Aesthetics of the Transplane Image, Jens Schröter Projected Art History: Biopics, Celebrity Culture, and the Popularizing of American Art, Doris Berger When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art, Grant D. Taylor The Internet Unconscious: On the Subject of Electronic Literature, Sandy Baldwin Between Film, Video, and the Digital: Hybrid Moving Images in the PostMedia Age, Jihoon Kim The Off-Modern, Svetlana Boym Witness to Phenomenon: Group Zero and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art, Joseph D. Ketner II

Expanded Internet Art Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu Ceci Moss

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Ceci Moss, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design © Nicole Ginelli All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moss, Ceci, author. Title: Expanded internet art : twenty-first century artistic practice and the informational milieu / Ceci Moss. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019. | Series: International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics ; vol. 13 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019010474 (print) | LCCN 2019010755 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501347788 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501347795 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501347764 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501347771 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Computer art. | Art and the Internet. Classification: LCC N7433.8 (ebook) | LCC N7433.8 .M67 2019 (print) | DDC 776–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010474 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4777-1 PB: 978-1-5013-4776-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4779-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-4778-8 Series: International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgmentsvi Introduction: Active Agents1 1 No Center, No Object, Just Networks: Expanded Internet Art9 2 Milieux, Then and Now43 3 Resistance in the Domain of All Inputs, All Outputs: Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s Les Immatériaux81 4 Parsing Attention: Image Circulation and Affect109 Conclusion: Breaking Presence137 Bibliography149 Index155

Acknowledgments One of the simple pleasures of book preparation, perhaps something not routinely mentioned, is the ability to revisit sources. During this process, I reread the following quote from Jean-François Lyotard’s “Gloss on Resistance,” where he states: “The labor of writing is allied to the work of love, but it inscribes the trace of the initiatory event in language and thus offers to share it, if not as a sharing of knowledge, at least as a sharing of sensibility that it can and should take as communal.”1 I am immensely grateful for the love and support I’ve received while I developed this project, which began during my PhD studies in Comparative Literature at New York University. I’ve never been a passive observer, and I’ve always felt it was necessary to actively work, talk, and learn with artists. Many of the ideas within these pages began in ordinary exchanges. Concepts hashed out over dinner or an art opening, studio visits, a reading group, etc. I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for the connections and kinship generated in these informal spaces and acknowledge their importance—their communal “sharing of sensibility,” if you will. I first read Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age in Professor Alexander Galloway’s “Politics of Code” class in fall 2010. The class was a game changer for me, and the papers I wrote during that seminar were the seeds for this project. I took almost all of my coursework with Professor Emily Apter, on everything from radical literature in 1970s France to pedagogy in theory. Her exhaustive knowledge of French philosophy spurred my own interest in the subject. Professor Lisa Gitelman’s course on “Print Media and Modernity” was another highlight of graduate school and a reminder of media’s own complicated history. I thank Alex, Emily, and Lisa for their insight, humor, and mentorship. Jean-François Lyotard, “Gloss on Resistance,” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans Don Barry, Berandette Maher, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 97.

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My experience at the groundbreaking arts organization Rhizome was also an inspiration, and I’m forever grateful for the ideas, connections, and people that I’ve encountered through this nonprofit. Rhizome introduced the brilliance of Lauren Cornell, John Michael Boling, Nick Hasty, Brian Droitcour, Jacob Gaboury, Zoe Salditch, Caitlin Jones, Zachary Kaplan, and Michael Connor to my life. My colleagues at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Dorothy Davila, Tesar Freeman, Susie Kantor, Katya Min, Rebecca Silberman, Martin Strickland, and John Cartwright championed the writing of this project on the sidelines of many exhibitions, public programs, tours, and the like. I thank my art family, near and far, Josh Kline, Rhonda Holberton, Dena Beard, Jasmine Pasquill, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Jessica Davies, Nick Hallett, Nate Boyce, Jeanne Gerrity, Paul Haney, Lauren Mackler, Lydia Brawner, Marcella Faustini, Nicole Ginelli, Sally Glass, Summer Guthery, Tim Steer, Victoria Keddie, Anna Frost, Sean Raspet, Kelani Nichols, Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, Russell Etchen, George Chen, Lori Cole, Ann Hirsch, Gene McHugh, David Horvitz, Zanna Gilbert, and Carlin Wing. And my family, Larin Sullivan, Michael Moss, Stacey Moss, Sandra Reed, Michael Reich, Ruth Donohugh, Asa Donohugh, John Minnes, Ted Minnes, and William Minnes. Special thanks to my Bloomsbury editors Francisco Ricardo, Jörgen Schäfer, Grant D. Taylor, and Katie Gallof, and Thera Webb for additional edits. Francisco, in particular, was immensely supportive of this project, and he was an instrumental figure in its final publication. I’m extremely grateful for his guidance and support in helping to develop the manuscript into a completed book. To more shared sensibilities, Ceci Moss Los Angeles, CA

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Over the past decade, network culture had a significant impact on contemporary art practice. Internet art, once considered its own subset of art practice, underwent a metamorphosis, operating in a more hybrid fashion. Thorny issues around medium and categorization, which shadowed this type of art practice from its beginning, took on more weight as internet artists chose to address web culture both online and offline, through websites as well as sculptures and installations. At the same time, art critics, art historians, theorists, and curators attempted to create metaphors to describe what an informational culture does to art under what some have called a post-medium or post media era. For example, Nicolas Bourriaud calls for art to become a “gas” while David Joselit views art as functioning like a “dynamic chain.” This book proposes the term “expanded” to describe how art functions under these conditions. Why expanded? Expanded is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action or process of spreading out or unfolding,” lending the term an active quality that precisely reflects how networked artworks themselves continuously unfold. It was this process-like aspect of the term that felt accurate for the turn in art production discussed in this book. The term “expansion” has a history within media art’s own past. Gene Youngblood’s seminal book from 1970 Expanded Cinema was definitely a reference and present in the early conversations that inspired this publication. While Youngblood provided a snapshot of experiments in cinema in the late 1960s that went beyond the screen, from the “cosmic cinema” of Jordan Belson to intermedia theater, the main impetus behind the book was truly what he saw as the emergence of “expanded consciousness.” His thesis, written very much in the spirit of his luminaries Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller (who also wrote the introduction to Expanded Cinema), is that

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expanded cinema is the manifestation of consciousness outside of the limits of the human mind.1 Youngblood points to technological advancement as a key component to a New Age that extends man’s communicative capacities, and to the computer films, holograms, and spherical projections of expanded cinema as an expression of that shift. He underscores the instrumentality of the “intermedia network” in that development—or the “service environment” of cinema, television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers “that carries the messages of the social organism.”2 While this book is quite far from the utopian rhetoric of Youngblood, his application of the term “expanded” to moving image echoed in some respects with the extension of the internet artwork onto other platforms discussed in this project. The writing of this book began in 2012, and during its production, the term “post internet art” exponentially took off within the art world. The focus of exhibitions, public programs, magazine articles, and blog posts, “post internet art” is an attempt to articulate what art looks like in a post medium era.3 As curator Lauren Cornell put in a roundtable interview about post internet art for Frieze, “its critical value is in the pivot it suggests not a movement it describes.”4 Whether it’s a movement or not is negotiable, but the popularity of post internet art speaks to a desire to name and understand web culture’s substantial influence on contemporary art practice. Elaborated in more depth in Chapter 1, all of these conversations are trying to work through what it means if art is always online. The pivot is more important than debates about vocabulary, and in many respects, the intention of this book is to understand the cultural significance of that shift. As many others have noted, post internet art may be a neologism Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1970), 41. Ibid., 54. 3 There is very little formal scholarship surrounding post internet art, and thus far, all the existing publications are anthologies. See: Ed Halter and Lauren Cornell, eds., Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015); Omar Kholeif, ed., You Are Here: Art after the Internet (London: Cornerhouse Books, 2013); and Phoebe Stubbs, ed., Art and the Internet (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2014). For the most part, the conversation has been limited to exhibitions, public programs, magazine articles, and blog posts, such as the exhibition “Art Post Internet” Curated by Robin Peckham and Karen Archey at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, blog posts and articles in Frieze, Mousse and Rhizome, and panels “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” at Frieze New York in 2014 and “Post-Net Aesthetics” at the ICA London (in conjunction with Rhizome) in 2013. 4 Lauren Cornell, et al., “Beginnings and Ends,” in Frieze, no. 159 (November–December 2013), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/beginnings-ends/. 1 2

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that will eventually be cast aside. “Post” carries with it a temporal indication and suggests paradoxically a shift after the era of the internet at a time when the internet has become much more ubiquitous than before. Introducing the term “expanded internet art” is not an effort to put forward yet another neologism but rather to find a more accurate description for what certain artworks are doing. Not beholden to the suggestion of a chronological order found in “post,” “expanded” sheds light on the action of the artwork—described here as a continuously multiple element that exists within a distributed system, a continual becoming. The qualities of expanded internet art are clarified by Gilbert Simondon’s concept of a “milieu,” which is updated and strengthened by Tiziana Terranova’s adaptation in her framework of an “informational milieu.” Reading Tiziana Terranova’s book Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age while in graduate school at New York University was a revelation, and her argument that cultural processes take on the attributes of information and are “increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics” spoke to expanded internet art’s promiscuous forms.5 But artworks designed for optimal informational legibility and networked circulation are not neutral entities; rather they contain within them important cultural and political quandaries, especially if art is understood to facilitate critique and resistance. Terranova’s valuable observation that traditional representation does not operate under an informational milieu leads to the central question that motivated this book, namely: how is an informational milieu affecting cultural production, and what kind of critical response does it necessitate? Terranova described informational space as “inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic” and these qualities are reflected in the terms “expanded” and “milieu.” Expanded internet artworks are designed to circulate in tandem with an informational flow, like Harm van den Dorpel’s Assemblages series (2011–12) or the many iterations of Seth Price’s Dispersion (2002–ongoing). On the other hand, milieu suggests not only a model for individuation but also a template for understanding a more pervasive informational culture, where the environment

Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (New York: Pluto Press, 2004), 7.

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itself becomes modulated and reorganized to be more legible as information.6 This book views expanded internet art as an expression of the move toward a more informational culture and, through its study, reveals how artistic practices are changing in its sway. It allows us to consider what contemporary artworks do within network culture. Are these formulations blindly symptomatic? Or do they point to valuable strategies? This text argues for the latter. To date, very little has been published on this extremely rich and compelling moment in the history of internet art, especially as it relates to technologies such as social media, smartphones, and faster bandwidth, among other developments in the 2000s that advanced a ubiquitous informational milieu. Thus far, only a handful of anthologies exist on this specific subject matter, providing a need for greater scholarship.7 The first, Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Ed Halter and Lauren Cornell, eds.) argues that the internet rose to a mass medium in the 2000s, and it brings together forty contributions by artists, curators, bloggers, etc., on this topic. The second, You Are Here: Art after the Internet (Omar Kholeif, ed.) uses first-person accounts by artists, curators, writers, etc., to document internet art practices from 2000 onward. The third, Art and the Internet (Domenico Quaranta and Joanne McNeil, eds.) takes a wider lens, beginning in the 1990s, with a chapter devoted to work in the 2000s. One suspects that the reliance on the anthology format reflects the native space of conversation around these works online in the form of blog posts, comments, Facebook threads, etc. The anthologies attempt to order and add a sense of permanence to these discussions. But in the rush to document what was said and what was seen, often parallel inquiries that ask why these forms in particular, how they engage with their context, and what they impart become minimized. This investigation hopes to fill that gap.

“This active power of information is everywhere: it is in the interfaces that relay machines to machines and machines to humans; it is in material objects including chairs, cars, keyboards, and musical instruments. It is in bottles and telephones in as much as they lend themselves in a particular way to the action of a hand. It is not an essence, understood here as a transcendent form, but it indicates the material organization of a possible action that moulds and remoulds the social field.” Ibid., 19. 7 There are quite a few publications on the more general topic of new media or digital art, where internet art is presented as a subject. Often these books are an attempt to catalog a vast number of individual artworks made with digital technology under organizing subheaders. For instance, Christiane Paul’s Digital Art, Mark Tribe’s New Media Art, Wolf Lieser’s The World of Digital Art and the dated but still helpful Internet Art by Rachel Greene. None of the above titles touch on internet art after social media, and their discussion of internet art is still focused on its emergence in the 1990s. 6

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This book is organized in four separate, but related, chapters. Chapter 1 titled “No Center, No Object, Just Networks: Expanded Internet Art” argues that artists are creating work that is intentionally “expanded” as a product of an informational milieu. Through this mode of practice, artists are not simply internalizing the conditions that surround them but attempting to articulate a persuasive response. The chapter is divided into four subsections. The first subsection tackles the history of the term “internet art” and reveals the problematic ways medium-based definitions have approached internet art as both an artistic practice and designation, which seems to resist traditional understandings of medium. The second subsection dives into specific examples of expanded internet art itself through the work of Harm van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann, and Artie Vierkant, and asks how its open-ended approach allows for an evolution within its networked situation, while also reviewing Terranova’s definition of an informational milieu. This leads to the following section that provides a synopsis of the varied ways critics and theorists attempted to describe how the internet has affected contemporary art practice from 2000 onward, including authors such as Nicolas Bourriaud, Lev Manovich, Rosalind Krauss, David Joselit, and many others. Finally, the concluding subsection takes stock both of the present “expanded” state of internet art and the body of criticism situating these types of practices in order to ask how art criticism reflects this situation. The question posed is, how do we infuse interpretation and criticism with the immersive, excessive, and dynamic qualities of an informational milieu? Chapter 2 “Milieux, Then and Now” provides a larger framing for Terranova’s notion of an “informational milieu” and its root within Simondon’s philosophy. The chapter explores the meaning of the term “milieu” within Simondon’s work, while reading this concept alongside his colleagues and contemporaries Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer who shared his criticism of cybernetics. Simondon, Canguilhem, and Ruyer all advanced a biologically informed concept of symbiotic ontology in their critical responses to cybernetics, which they understood as too often distilling complex biological organisms and processes to systems. Simondon’s model of a “milieu” came out of this work, and it is described as a dynamic field in which individuals and technical objects actuate into being, manifesting material and energetic agency inside and outside of being, instead of the traditional notion of “environment” in the sense of an external, surrounding influence. In recent years, media theorists like Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen

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have returned to Simondon and the notion of a “milieu” in order to address the role of technology in ontology. Through their adoption of “milieu” and read of Simondon, we find that the symbiotic ontology with technology that was once a radical departure from cybernetics is now a normative state with implications for representation and human experience. The informational milieu, described in depth in Chapters 1 and 2, is found to be very much a part of a larger postmodern experience in Chapter 3 “Resistance in the Domain of All Inputs, All Outputs: Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s Les Immateriaux.” The chapter reads Jean François Lyotard’s epic exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris during the spring and summer of 1985 alongside his profuse output (including writing, talks, and interviews) on technology and art during the mid-1980s. A groundbreaking exhibition and an inspiration for many curators and artists for its innovative design and concept, Les Immatériaux has very little scholarship to its credit.8 Both the exhibition and his writings focus on the cultural impact of new technologies and the postmodern condition, specifically how information technology influences language and temporality. By analyzing this work, it becomes clear that the informational milieu is a product of the inhumanity of development’s push toward optimum performance or, in other words, the postmodern condition. We see Lyotard develop a thesis about art and literature that advances the idea that art can resist the influence of the optimization of these new technologies through anamnesis or a non-resolved working through, where the artwork puts forth a drift, uneasiness and uncertainty or what he describes as a “breaking presence.” This proposition of a resistant stance speaks to the question of how to create meaning under an informational milieu, a product of the postmodern condition. Chapter 4 “Parsing Attention: Image Circulation and Affect” returns to artists who work in an expanded fashion, as described in Chapter 1, in order to The bibliography on Les Immatériaux is very short but slowly growing due to more work on exhibition history itself. The exhibition’s thirtieth anniversary was celebrated in the conference “Les Immatériaux: Towards the Virtual with Jean-François Lyotard” at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London March 27–28, 2015. See also: Hans Ulrich Obrist, “After the Moderns, the Immaterials,” in The Exhibitionist (January 2012): 12–15; Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Thinking Philosophy, Spatially: Jean-François’s Les Immatériaux and the Philosophy of Exhibition,” in Thinking Worlds: The Moscow Conference on Philosophy, Politics and Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 123–45; Antony Hudek and Marko Daniel “Landmark Exhibitions Issue,” in Tate Papers, no. 12 (Autumn 2009); Bruce Altshuler, ed., “Les Immatériaux,” in Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History (New York: Phaidon, 2013).

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think through how a subset of these artists is intentionally addressing images within an attention economy. As exemplified in the artist texts, interviews and work by artists and collectives Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, The Jogging, and Timur Si-Qin, there’s a clear objective to not only create artwork that drifts online and offline but to create work that grabs the attention of the viewer on a visceral, affective level, which can potentially go viral. A closer analysis of the “anamnesis” offered by Lyotard in Chapter 3 reveals that these attention-grabbing artworks must do more to resist complacency in the networks that enable them. Reading Lyotard alongside N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen, this chapter considers what Lyotard referred to as an “anamnesic resistance” within an attention economy informed by the networked circulation of images and its relevance for a “posthuman” (rather than “inhuman”) subject. Through both Hayles and Hansen, we see that human attention is enmeshed, embedded, and changing within its technological environment, and any artwork attempting to engage in “anamnesic resistance” would need to operate with these fluctuating modes for attention. Therefore, in order to achieve an “anamnesic resistance” artists would be tasked with crafting a multilayered and heterogeneous image catalyst that combines the uneasiness of Lyotard’s “breaking presence” with a Simondonian resonance that syncs into the conditions of its existence to open up new potentials, including attention formation. Chapter 4 asks more of expanded internet art practice and encourages artists to seriously consider the complex commercial reality of the internet and its influence. This project was propelled by the belief that artworks are active agents in contemporary culture. Following a statement from an interview with art historian David Joselit, it is this quality that lends art its futurity: We need to change our habit of thinking that art objects stand for something else; that their primary function is to represent. Instead, these objects act in various ways, including provoking future events or effects. Representing is always retrospective: something has to pre-exist the art object in order to be re-presented. I think art’s special capacity is, on the contrary, its futurity.9

Joselit is asking artworks to be prognostic and engaged, and a similar request is echoed throughout this book. David Andrew Tasmam, “David Joselit: Against Representation,” in DIS Magazine, http:// dismagazine.com/discussion/75654/david-joselit-against-representation/.

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People aren’t sure about what an image or object is anymore. They’re not sure how things are fixed or where they belong. If something can be a jpeg online, what is it when you print it out and put it up in a gallery? … For me, the only way out of this research problem is to proliferate those nodes, to extend them further and further out, so that what you get is a dispersed work. There is no center, and there is no object to look at as such; there’s just this nodal network that you’re in the midst of. You’re in this expanded field of sculpture that exists between the material and immaterial realms. That possibility for producing work seems really exciting. Mark Leckey from “Art Stigmergy” Kaleidoscope, Summer 2011 Artist Mark Leckey reveals a situation that is becoming commonplace in contemporary art practice. Internet-based art practices seem to be particularly responsive to the decentered quality Leckey describes, especially as the internet drifts far beyond the screen and filters into every aspect of our lives with this process accelerated by advances such as faster bandwidth, smartphones, and social media. Contemporary internet art is no longer determined solely by its existence online; rather, contemporary artists are making more art about informational culture using various methods of both online and offline means, which results in a type of expanded internet art. For artworks that volley between networked data files and physical materials, the internet is not seen as the sole platform for the production of a work but instead as a crucial nexus around which to research, assemble, transmit, and present data, both online and offline. Art in this manifestation is not viewed as hermetic but instead

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as a continuously multiple element that exists within a distributed system. In this sense, there is a keen attention to the dispersion and parcelization of the art object over a network. In artist interviews, essays, conference panels, and artist statements, several terms have come up in an attempt to describe this move—“internet aware,” “post-internet,” “dispersion,” to name a few. This chapter reviews these conversations in an effort to capture and contextualize this shift within contemporary art. The concept of expansion will be a recurring theme throughout all of these discussions. Expansion is described not as an outward movement from a fixed essence but rather, in light of data’s dispersed nature, a continual becoming. Internet art can be viewed as the ultimate form of an expanded artwork, drawing from the definition of expansion as “the action or process of spreading out or unfolding; the state of being spread out or unfolded.”1 This quality is not accidental but rather a product of informational dynamics or what theorist Tiziana Terranova calls an “informational milieu,” which guides the movement and flow of information. The production and transmission of digital information is progressively reorienting our environment, a fact that is apparent all around, in everything from car design to ATM machines. This chapter argues that artists are creating work that is intentionally diffuse, distributed, and “expanded” as a product of an informational milieu. Through this method of working, artists are not just internalizing these conditions but thematizing them.

Defining internet art The logical first step in this conversation is to address the question, what is internet art? The term has its origins in the 1990s with the term “net.art,” which has been used to categorize the practice of the first wave of artists working online in the mid-1990s. Artist Alexei Shulgin recalls on a post to the mailing list, nettime, which was an important forum for artists experimenting with work online in the 1990s, that the term originated with another artist Vuk Cosic in 1995. Receiving a message from an anonymous mailer containing Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “expansion” “expand.”

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a file that could not be opened by Cosic’s software, Cosic found the message turned up scrambled ASCII characters that contained the term “net.art” among the garbled letters. Shulgin sees the term “net.art” as itself a readymade, enabled by the unique conditions of the internet.2 Shulgin and Cosic were part of a global scene of artists experimenting with the internet, a conversation and community fostered by online discussion forums and exhibition venues like the mailing list nettime (1995), the BBS service THE THING (1991), the mailing list, website, and platform Rhizome (1996), the mailing list Syndicate (1995), the e-mail-based performance art mailing list 7–11 (1998) and the online art platform äda’web (1994). Early net.art evolved outside of the framework of the traditional art world, which provided a sense of unfiltered, fresh experimentation to the projects and conversations that occurred on these platforms and around them. As art historian and media theorist Dieter Daniels has noted, one thing that was very unique to artists working online in the 1990s as opposed to other eras of media art, like video art in the 1970s, was that it was not an intervention into an already existent form but rather a “simultaneous development and testing of a new medium and its mutual influence on technological, social and aesthetic functions of electronic networks.”3 As the internet became a widespread, globalized network and more readily accessible in the 1990s to a broader public, the websites and projects created by net.artists explored the political and cultural significance of that arena, helping shape net culture itself. Art historian and curator Rachel Greene identified six main net art formats between 1993 and 1996: e-mail, websites, graphics, audio, video, and animation. All of these often appeared in combination with one another, pushing the capacity of the browser as a space for artistic expression.4 For example, one of the most celebrated works of net.art from this period is Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996). The work follows the story of two lovers who reunite after a war through a nonlinear narrative

Alexei Shulgin, “Net.Art—the origin,” posting on nettime, March 18, 1997, http://www.nettime.org/ Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9703/msg00094.html. 3 Dieter Daniels, “Reverse Engineering Modernism with the Last Avant-garde,” in Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art, ed. Dieter Daniels and Gunther Reisinger (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 27. 4 Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 34. 2

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followed through nested frames containing animated gifs, hyperlinks, and linked images. Realizing an emotionally powerful narrative through html and gifs, the story unravels through the links selected by the visitor, and eventually ending on a mosaic of empty black frames. The work was very much native to the web, but its use of narrative and image adopted an almost cinematic quality (see Figure 1.1).5 One of the most well-known exhibitions exploring net.art during this period was net_condition curated by Peter Weibel for ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany. The exhibition was one part of a larger project titled Art and Global Media, which was a “networked, multimedia and multilocal” event involving many iterations from October 1998 through February 2000 in collaboration with several partners in Barcelona, Graz, Karlsruhe, and Tokyo. This umbrella project aimed to bring greater awareness to contemporary new

Figure 1.1  Olia Lialina, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, 1996. http://www.teleportacia.org/war.

Lev Manovich, “Behind the Screen/Russian New Media,” sd (1997), http://manovich.net/index.php/ projects/behind-the-screen-russian-new-media.

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media’s ability to “change and construct reality” and took place primarily in the media space in which they commented on, whether that space was a billboard, or on television, or in a newspaper, or online.6 The net_condition portion of Art and Global Media was also distributed, presented online as well as in the ZKM galleries and partner sites located at the steirischer herbst in Graz, the ICC Intercommunication Center in Tokyo, and the MECAD Media Centre d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona during the fall of 1999. The net_condition exhibition, which included over 100 individual artworks, was the first comprehensive overview of international net art and, in some respects, served as a capstone to many years of art production online. In addition, Weibel was very clear that he hoped the artworks in exhibition would bring attention to the social conditions enabled by the internet. In his accompanying essay, he specifically identifies “dislocation,” “nonlocality,” and interactivity as key aspects that differentiated net.art from previous forms of media art. Freed from the gallery or the museum context, online artworks can be viewed by the visitor anywhere at anytime. According to Weibel, this flexibility in both time and space for the artwork was something quite novel. Furthermore, net.art is interactive in nature and requires the viewer to engage by scrolling, clicking, etc. This enacts a feedback system between the image within the virtual space of the computer and the real space of the viewer.7 Through Weibel’s framing of the net_condition exhibition, we see that net.art is a practice-based online in a “virtual” space, whose flexibility, dislocation, and interactivity relate a new means of socially impactful communication and connection. net_condition was staged in a time when the term “net.art” seemed to be on the wane. One project included in the exhibition, Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin’s Introduction to net.art (1997), humorously captures the ennui surrounding the term at this moment (See Figure 1.2). As a text document online, and later realized in chiseled stone slabs in the gallery, the work is directed to the

Peter Weibel and Timothy Druckrey, net_condition: Art and Global Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 8. See the “Partners” table for a full list of the events associated with the art and global media exhibition, 374–84. 7 “In a computer-based net installation, for the first time the relation between the image and the viewer is reversible, i.e., it takes places in two directions: the information flow passes from the viewer to the image, from real space to virtual space, and from the image back to the viewer, from virtual to real space. Net activity in virtual space controls the sequence of events in real space and the events in real space control the sequence of events in virtual net space.” Ibid., 14. 6

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uninitiated viewer, and it presents in an outline format what net.art is, how it is made, how a net.artist can be successful, and what the world will look like after net.art. Although the tone is at times tongue in cheek, where the authors provide details such as the exact amount of memory on a computer necessary to become a net.artist, there is an element of seriousness regarding net.art’s political and activist thrust. Under “Net.art at a Glance” the subheader “0% compromise” cites net.art’s basis in the web as an element that allows the work to operate outside

Figure 1.2  Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin, Introduction to net.art, 1997. http://rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/48530/.

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of the traditional art world with a substantial audience and independence.8 Introduction to net.art reveals the context and attitude of a time with a touch of melancholy and skepticism about the future of net.art after institutional and media interest, which for some limited the anarchic and playful aspects of net.art. Unlike net.art, the term “internet art” is broader and more encompassing. Writers Rachel Greene’s Internet Art and Julian Stallabrass’s Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce tackle their decision to name these kinds of practices “internet art” in the first few pages of their books and both settle on “internet art” to describe artists working online. For Stallabrass, the struggle with terminology is associated with the quickly changing terrain of the internet, “To write about art on the Internet is to try to fix in words a highly unstable and protean phenomenon. This art is bound inextricably to the development of the Internet itself, riding the torrent of furious technological progress.”9 Greene sees this instability as a defining feature, stating, “By virtue of its constantly diminishing and replenishing medium and tools … internet art is intertwined with issues of access to technology and decentralization, production and consumption, and demonstrates how media spheres increasingly function as public space.”10 For both authors, “internet art” signals all work made online, spanning e-mail, online software applications (like Java applets), code, and individual websites, which all rely on the internet to function. Both Greene’s and Stallabrass’s accounts reveal the tension between the instability of the internet as a complex, evolving environment and a notion of medium identified through its stable, quantifiable qualities. Josephine Bosma, in her collection of essays about internet art Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art, similarly points to the change inherent to the internet in her answer to the enduring question, “what is internet art?” In her estimation, “net art is based in or on Internet cultures. These are in constant flux.”11 Bosma’s

Alexei Shulgin and Natalie Bookchin “Introduction to Net.Art (1994–1999),” http://rhizome.org/ artbase/artwork/48530. 9 Julian Stallabrass, Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 10–11. 10 Greene, Internet Art, 8. 11 Bosma also explains that she prefers “net” over “internet” art because it references the network, rather than the historically specific entity of the internet. Furthermore, she believes there’s still a need to qualify this type of practice because of its relationship to the network, instead of shuttling it under the larger umbrella of “art.” Josephine Bosma, Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011), 24. 8

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definition envisions internet art as an art responsive to internet cultures, one that can take any form, online and offline. Writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, both Stallabrass and Greene focus on internet artworks presented on a computer screen over a network in their discussions, and their specific examples follow suit. However Bosma, writing in the mid-to-late 2000s, accepts that internet cultures can and do exist outside of stationary desktop computers. Bosma turns to theory to develop an understanding of “internet” and “art” that moves away from medium specificity. Citing Gilbert Simondon’s argument from On the Mode of Existence of the Technical Object that the cultural and technical spheres will inevitably coalesce with the advent of what he labels the “ensemble,” a term that refers to the technologically enabled, symbiotic network of relations between humans and machines, Bosma reads the internet as the “ultimate ensemble” and “net art” as the “art of this environment.”12 Bosma also refers to Simondon and thinkers inspired by him, such as Brian Massumi and Gilles Deleuze, to elaborate a non-reductive approach toward matter in an effort to reconsider the role of medium—in other words, material that is employed in an artistic process. Rather than viewing matter, medium, and body as static objects, Bosma reorients the conversation toward an understanding that matter and, by extension, medium are constantly in a state of movement and change.13 Central to her argument is Brian Massumi’s definition of matter in Parables for the Virtual as a “form-taking activity immanent to the event of taking form.”14 Matter is not inert, but potential. When artists activate all the components that go into an artwork, they participate in what Simondon termed “resonance” where all elements—matter, technology, body—momentarily sync up with each other. For Bosma, it is this quality that makes artists so valuable, stating, “A close resonating with the medium and with technology is a powerful state of being, an awareness of which enables us to also develop responsible or meaningful strategies for an engagement with matter, technology, and the world.”15

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 54. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 55. 12 13

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Bosma defines internet art in its own terms and rightly does not reduce internet art to a simplistic understanding of material or medium. As we have discussed, over its short history many scholars and critics have strained to define internet art, primarily because of a struggle over a notion of medium across disciplines. Florian Cramer explains in the introduction to Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art, art history and communication studies possess a distinctly different understanding of medium. Art history, within Anglophone art criticism from the eighteenth century onward, sees medium as the “material or technical means of artistic expression” and communication studies sees medium as “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.” In Cramer’s account, video art turned mass communication devices, such as television, into a means of artistic expression, an individual artistic tool. Net art, however, does not merely redirect the channel of the network into an artistic tool but rather uses the network as an opportunity to, in Cramer’s words, “radically move art away from objects and individual practices.”16 Cramer sees internet artists as engaged in a different project than their media art forbearers in video and television, such as Radical Software, Nam June Paik, etc. He concurs with Bosma that what defines internet artists, or net artists, is their emphasis on the culture of the web. Cramer is not the first to speculate about these two competing understandings of medium and how they have shaped art discourse. Art historian Sjoukje van der Meulen dives deeply into the subject in her PhD dissertation “The Problem of Media in Contemporary Art Theory,” which masterfully takes up the split between the meaning of medium in the disciplines of art history and communication studies. Van der Meulen uses the methodology of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte to follow two strains in the postwar period, one concerned with medium beginning in the 1960s with Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” (1960) and ending with Rosalind Krauss’s A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Postmedium Condition (1999) and the other examining “media” beginning with Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) and ending with Friedrich

Ibid., 13.

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Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986). Van der Meulen charts two parallel discourses on medium, which, in their opposition, hinder the potential of contemporary art theory overall. Driving her dissertation is an effort to “work toward an alternative (or third) notion of medium that reconciles these two positions in the service of a tentative, media-reflexive theory of art.”17 The medium question is a huge and thorny topic, beyond the scope of what can be fully addressed here. Van der Meulen’s dissertation provides extensive insight to these competing discourses and attempts to formulate a way out. Both Cramer and van der Meulen discuss the fact that any effort to define internet art will inevitably be caught up in the gap between the two understandings of medium across the disciplines of art history and communication studies. This problem not only causes confusion surrounding a definition of the practice but also of its purpose and direction. One of the most useful contributions of Bosma’s Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art is her suggestion that artists operate in resonance with matter, where matter is again a “form-taking activity immanent to the event of taking form.” Through this unique position, artists can create greater awareness of the interrelation between matter, technology, and the world. The Simondonian model pivots away from a strictly art historical or communication studies informed concept of matter or medium by dismissing form and matter, or form and medium, toward an understanding of an artwork as an emergence that evolves from the conditions of its existence. (The “expanded” in expanded internet art refers to this unfolding emergence.) Furthermore, Bosma supports Simondon’s view that humans and machines are quickly moving toward an ensemble and that they are unified in symbiosis.18 Artists can instigate a meaningful dialog about this ensemble and its impact. Sjoukje van der Meulen, The Problem of Media in Contemporary Art Theory 1960–1990 (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2009), 16. 18 “The machine, as an element in the technical ensemble, becomes the effective unit, which augments the quality of information, increases negentropy, and opposes the degradation of energy. The machine is a result of organization and information; it resembles life and cooperates with life in its opposition to disorder and to leveling out of all things that tend to deprive the world of its powers of change. The machine is something that fights against the death of the universe; it slows down, as life does, the degradation of energy, and becomes a stabilizer of the world. Such a modification of the philosophic view of technical objects heralds the possibility of making the technical being part of culture.” Gilbert Simondon, “Introduction,” in Du mode d’existence des objects techniques, trans. Ninian Mellamphy (Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne, 1958), 16. 17

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Expanded internet art and the informational milieu Let’s return to the original concern here: internet artists working parallel to the rise in the internet’s ubiquity (from the technological developments occurring in roughly 2006–13) are increasingly making things that float back and forth between networked data files and physical materials. These works are nimble and flexible; they can be a sculpture, an installation, or a file. The adjective “expanded” in front of “internet art” calls attention to this open-ended approach and an acceptance that the artwork is not inert and closed but evolving within its networked situation, constantly negotiating the different supports that enable its movement. An expanded artwork reproduces, travels, and accelerates across different spaces and forms, always reconstituting itself—circulating, assembling, and dispersing. The following artworks speak to this decentralized fluidity and movement and serve as a short overview of expanded internet art. Made of Perspex plastic bands tied together in circular forms and suspended in the air by small chains, Dutch artist Harm van den Dorpel’s sculptures from the Assemblages series (2011–12) resemble tumbleweeds floating in space, a gesture that dramatizes the vast circulation of digital information (see  Figure  1.3). The images printed on the bands derive from van den Dorpel’s website, which he calls Dissociations (2011–ongoing). A programmer by training, the artist designed a predictive algorithm to organize the images on the site. Working intuitively, van den Dorpel manually selects groupings of images that the algorithm then learns and replicates.19 The images themselves include sketches for unrealized artworks, installation shots of completed artworks, and found images. Rather than a standard artist’s portfolio organized chronologically, Dissociations forges disparate, atemporal connections among

“I was looking for other ways to reflect an artistic practice online, to replicate a thought process, instead of reducing to the common fixed list of ‘selected works’ of portfolio sites. For me the art happens between the pieces, less in them, so it was evidence I wanted to develop some new system that would structure this. There are no underlying tags or taxonomies, but it’s ‘learning’ by ‘training.’ I get to click choices like ‘this thing relates to this, and that one to that,’ without ‘tags’ or other proxies that would force me to interpret with words what things are ‘about.’ From all these thousands of manual associations it generates these pages, of which some make more sense than others. Sometimes it comes up with surprising combinations; those are small eureka moments for me.” Harry Burke, “Interview with Harm van den Dorpel,” cmdplus (February 2013), http://www. cmdplus.info/interview/harmvandendorpel.html.

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Figure 1.3  Harm van den Dorpel, Assemblage (“About” press and reviews), 2012, and Artie Vierkant, Image Object Monday 26 March 2012 10:45AM, 2012. (Installation shot, manipulated by artist Artie Vierkant.)

the artist’s works and research material, a portrait of van den Dorpel’s creative process as well as an ongoing driver for his prints and sculptures. A product of this experiment, visually and conceptually van den Dorpel’s Assemblages sculptures express the constant reconstitution and flow of expanded objects.

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Like van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann’s website is the center of her practice. Here she builds upon an ever-expanding database of gathered images as well as produced and potential projects. Identifying herself as a “cloud-based artist,” Altmann views exhibitions as “another software, another medium that you have to export to.”20 Altmann’s approach establishes the artist as the custodian of a growing database, where she both dictates and responds to its organizational logic. For example, in her series Core Samples I (2011–ongoing), Altmann acted as a “mutated search algorithm” to aggregate the same orb design across images found online in order to recognize reoccurrences of certain motifs, especially in advertising and stock photography. Core Samples I (2011–ongoing) has been instantiated as a sculptural “floor model,” as videos, and as a blog post for the online fashion and culture magazine DIS. Two looped videos from Core Samples I, Black Hole (2008–ongoing), and Where Is the Blood? (2009–ongoing) create videos from these collected images (see Figure 1.4). Using a morph effect to seamlessly mutate images into each

Figure 1.4  Kari Altmann, Black Hole from the video series Core Samples I, 2008 (video still). Lexie Mountain, “Interview with Kari Altmann,” Motherboard (April 18, 2013), http://motherboard. vice.com/blog/ripe-for-capture-artist-kari-altmann-is-a-prophet.

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other, Black Hole focuses on a black orb as it appears in digital camcorders, perfume bottles, jewelry, and design for the showroom floor. Where Is the Blood? is crafted in the same way; Altmann calls out the reoccurrence of a similar shape—a red ball—and morphs into lizard eyes, a car gear shift, lens flash, and lava lamps. The morph effect in both videos yields a syrupy fluidity that parallels the massive, rapid circulation of images online. Altmann’s work focuses on the labor of aggregating content, where she constantly compiles and organizes images not only for Core Samples I but also across multiple sites like R-U-In?s and Garden Club. Her works are fluid and changeable and can be realized as websites, installations, concepts, and sculptures. By inserting herself into the stream and codifying it according to her own logic, she develops a vision that twists the rapid systemization of information. Similar to Altmann and van den Dorpel, image circulation is central to Artie Vierkant’s Image Object series (2011–ongoing). The works exist as both physical sculptures and altered documentation images. Vierkant begins the works as a digital file, which he then precision-cuts and prints on sintra in order to resemble the design, giving it the dimensionality of sculpture. When the prints are hung in a gallery and documented officially in the form of installation shots, he then alters that documentation to create derivative works and new forms posted online. This circular process between file and physical object and back again uproots the work, allowing it to exist somewhere in between. In a spin-off of his Image Object series, Vierkant used Google’s “Search by Image” option to produce the website Similar Objects.com (2012) in which he searched the Image Objects images to gather a slideshow of algorithmically determined “like” images that share the same basic arrangement and color scheme, such as photos of white shoes and post-it notes. Both Similar Objects and Image Objects do away with any notion of original and copy, equalizing all the instances into an assemblage of likenesses. By responding to and participating in the cyclic transformation of his output from .jpeg to sculpture to searchable image and back again, Vierkant’s work is very much in dialog with the means and ways of information distribution. By being keenly attentive to the dispersion and parcelization of their artworks over a network—allowing them to unfold, surf, drift—contemporary artists like Harm van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann, and Artie Vierkant are intuitively articulating strategies in ways that resonate with the peculiar

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way data collection and management are integral to the structure of our contemporary world. Their work is just a sampling of this mode of practice, which arguably represents a generational shift as well. The key issue in expanded internet art is not that internet art is online or offline, real or virtual, net or post, but that all art is increasingly embedded within what Tiziana Terranova called an “informational milieu.” In Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, Terranova develops her term “informational milieu” through a reading of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s concept of a milieu. During the advent of cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s, Simondon described how things emerge in relation to their environs as a type of becoming, one that explicitly presented itself in opposition to the hylomorphic and substantialist tendencies of dominant theories of information, such as the Shannon-Weaver’s sender/receiver model of communication.21 In contrast, Simondon posited that there is no content proper to any elements within a system, and form (as signal) is never abstracted from matter (as noise). For him, information is incessantly engaged in a continual process of exchange within a metastable milieu full of potential energy; communication always contains the terms of its metastable milieu and can’t be abstracted from it. For Terranova, Simondon’s ideas are compelling precisely because of his understanding that information is not the content of communication but an unfolding process within its material constitution. Informational processes exist in the environment in a way that is inherently “immersive, excessive, and dynamic” and that points toward an interpretation of information that is not reduced to mere signal and noise.22 In Terranova’s analysis, information therefore becomes something much more complex, stating: Information is not simply the content of a message, or the main form assumed by the commodity in late capitalist economies, but also another name for the increasing visibility and importance of such “massless flows” as they become the environment within which contemporary culture unfolds. See Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual.” Note, Simondon does name the Shannon-Weaver model explicitly but rather refers to a “technological theory of information.” Simondon’s notion of “becoming” was enormously influential for Gilles Deleuze; see Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 86–8 and Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 22 Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (New York: Pluto Press, 2004), 7. 21

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In this sense, we can refer to informational cultures as involving the explicit constitution of an informational milieu—a milieu composed of dynamic and shifting relations between such “massless flows.”23

Terranova’s “informational milieu” extrapolates from the processual dynamics within Simondon’s model to characterize a moment in which nearly all aspects of human environments exist in ongoing exchange with digital communication, and it asks us to consider how the logic and demands of information’s “massless flows” are integral to the reorganization of culture and representation. By embracing spread, circulation, and expansion artists are cleverly and self-consciously taking advantage of the means and conditions of digital communication. Expanded internet art is but one demonstration of the art of an informational milieu. As realities, experiences, and stories are increasingly structured by informational dynamics at greater speeds, art, like life, will morph and mutate accordingly. Of course, internet art from its inception was expanded to an extent because the structure of the internet itself required it to be mutable in form and in constant circulation. However, the difference between the internet of the 1990s and today is that it is now much more mobile, more ubiquitous, and more mainstream than it has ever been. And it’s not just the internet that has changed; we’ve also witnessed the rise of Big Data as well as an increase in our heavy reliance on software to do everything from navigating airplanes to stocking shelves and delivering packages. Artists and critics alike are responding to these shifts. The following section will review conversations and terminologies from the past ten years that categorize and describe this new terrain for art production in order to situate the notion of expanded internet art within the larger conversation.

Naming art’s networked reality in the early 2000s The following brief timeline of product launches illustrates the explosion of social media in the early 2000s: 2002—Friendster, 2003—MySpace, 2004—Facebook, 2005—YouTube, 2006—Twitter, 2007—iPhone and Tumblr. An increasingly Ibid., 8.

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mobile, networked world arose alongside the introduction of social media and smartphones, resulting in a new phase for contemporary art. The section that follows will examine the torrent of new terms developed by art historians, curators, critics, and artists in the early 2000s to explain this shift within contemporary art—including concepts such as post medium, formatting, dispersion, post media aesthetics, post media, radicant art, meme art, and circulationism—in an effort to illustrate how these changes are being contextualized and received. These conversations all acknowledge the shifting tides for art production in the wake of mainstream internet culture and agree that art is more fluid, elastic, dispersed, and expanded than ever before. While opinions vary between the problems and opportunities furnished by this situation, all of the writers discussed describe the characteristics of an informational milieu without naming it as such. Rosalind Krauss’s A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition, published in 1999, formulates the status of art within what she terms the “post medium condition.” Recognizing the decline of Clement Greenberg’s concept of medium specificity that understood art according to the essence of its medium as determined by its material properties, and the difficulty hybrid mediums (like the computer) present to the establishment of “pure” art forms like painting or sculpture, Krauss argues that instead artists must “purify” art itself away from the infringement of fashion or kitsch. This can be achieved through a serious reinvention and rearticulation of the medium as such or, as she terms it, “differential specificity.” Krauss’s main proposition is a move from medium specificity to differential specificity, which is aided through her close reading of artist Marcel Broodthaers’s work, whose practice is held up as an example of a successful, intermedia art practice within the “post medium condition.” In Krauss’s estimation, Broodthaers use of medium provides “an entirely new topographical structure.” For example, his film A Voyage on the North Sea (1973–4) adopts the form of a book to embark the viewer on a seabound voyage. Static shots of paintings depicting marine scenes, both in full view and in zoomed-in close-ups of the canvas, alternate with intertitles such as “Page 1.” Krauss is captivated by the means in which Broodthaers layers the book and the canvas through film, providing “the experience of a passage between several surfaces.”24 As opposed to medium specificity, which Ibid., 52.

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unites surface and support, the differential specificity found in the work of artists such as Broodthaers treats the medium as a “layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support.”25 Throughout the article, Krauss approaches the post medium condition, and the technological changes it encompasses, as a problem for art, one that she wants to find a solution for. Her issue stems from what she sees as the reductive monolithic “singleness” of technology, which makes a differential specificity more challenging. In Krauss’s usage, “technology” is a blanket term that encompasses computers, the internet, software, etc., and she does not dig deeper into understanding the ecology between these different types of technology. Furthermore, she views postmodernism as emptying the aesthetic autonomy of the artwork, making it “complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”26 For Krauss, the artist must turn away from the total saturation of images by capital while at the same time rearticulating the medium, through mediums themselves.27 Alongside Broodthaers, she cites James Coleman and William Kentridge as other artists who have achieved this within their work. The text has been instructive in its recognition of hybridity as a central aspect of art practice today by providing it with the name “post medium.” In what could be seen in as a rebuttal to Krauss, David Joselit’s book After Art, published many years later in 2013, recommends that both medium and post medium be swept aside entirely. Joselit instead sets out to reconfigure art toward what artist Pierre Hugyhe describes as a “dynamic chain that passes through different formats” that releases art from its traditional attachment to both site and object.28 The power of art lies in what it can do when it enters networked circulation, or in Joselit’s words, “Art now exists as a fold, or disruption, or event within a population of images—what I have defined as Ibid., 53. Ibid., 56. 27 In her book Under the Blue Cup, Krauss emphasizes the connection between this rearticulation and memory itself. She identifies a sort of amnesia within the post medium condition, which can be counteracted by a rearticulation attentive to the specificities of the medium and its implicit modernist history. “The artists who discover the conventions of a new technical support can be said to be ‘inventing’ a medium… Each of these supports allows the artist to discover its ‘rules,’ which will in turn become the basis for the recursive self-evidence of a medium’s specificity. If such artists are ‘inventing’ their medium, they are resisting contemporary art’s forgetting of how the medium undergirds the very possibilities of art.” Rosalind Krauss, Under the Blue Cup (Cambridge: MIT, 2011), 19. 28 David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 14–15. 25 26

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a format.”29 Joselit is primarily interested in how images can create links and relationships—the myriad of possible configurations enabled by networks.30 As an example, he points to artist Ai Weiwei’s use of his image, celebrity, and reputation globally to express his dissidence to the Chinese government’s policies on human rights and censorship, both within his artworks and through his presence on social media. This follows what Joselit sees as the art world’s unique placement and cultural hold, stating, “The art world links valuable cultural capital associated with sophisticated philosophical discourse to mass appeal and bald financial power.”31 Joselit’s position is that the art world possesses a distinct position as a nexus between mass culture, philosophy, and finance. Connectivity produces power, and artists like Ai Weiwei shrewdly navigate that power toward a political end. This position is leagues away from Krauss’s deep concern with “serious” art’s encroachment by kitsch or fashion and, rather, suggests that art is a platform and means of engagement across a variety of sectors. In Joselit’s 2011 essay “What to Do with Pictures,” which initiated After Art, he introduces two core concepts that reappear in the book, “formatting” and “epistemology of the search” through a close reading of artist Seth Price’s art project and essay Dispersion (2002–ongoing). “What to Do with Pictures” more explicitly credits the logic and behavior of data collection in aiding the conditions outlined in After Art. Formatting is defined as “the capacity to configure data in multiple possible ways,” which Joselit sees as a more useful term than medium, which he believes is too weighted in its implicit association with matter.32 Formatting becomes meaningful through the “epistemology of the search” where “knowledge is produced by discovering and/or constructing meaningful patterns—formats—from vast reserves of raw data, through, for instance, the algorithms of search engines like Google or Yahoo. Under these conditions, any quantum of data might lend itself to several, possibly contradictory, formats.”33 Ibid., 59. In his earlier essay “Painting beside Itself,” Joselit approaches this question in another way by asking how artworks, specifically paintings, belong to a network. Using the example of Jutta Koether’s Hot Rod (After Poussin) (2009), he sees artworks as actualizing the behavior of objects within networks by performing “transitivity,” which “expresses an action which passes over to the object.” Rather than a simple visualization of the network, transitivity allows the artwork to express the network’s behavior. David Joselit, “Painting beside Itself,” October (Summer 2009): 128. 31 Ibid., 61. 32 David Joselit “What to Do with Pictures,” October, no. 138 (Fall 2011): 82. 33 Ibid., 82.

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With the epistemology of the search Joselit reveals that his interest is not solely in art’s ability to create connections but also in how those links produce new knowledge. To return to his assertion in After Art that connectivity is power, “What to Do with Pictures” clarifies that it is connectivity’s capacity to make legible and produce new knowledge that yields it power. Seth Price’s Dispersion becomes both an inspiration and test case for Joselit’s thesis. Price’s essay argues that artists must invent strategies to occupy commercial distribution, decentralization, and dispersion facilitated by networks. The bootlegged and fluid means of the essay itself illustrates this point, and Joselit points to Dispersion’s seizure of circulation in form and content as a triumph.34 Dispersion’s attention to its own distribution also signals an awareness of an informational milieu, where an artwork is devised to circulate and, ideally, insist on Joselit’s “formatting” (or meaningful pattern making). On its own, Seth Price’s Dispersion stands as perhaps one of the most telling essays written in response to the decentralization of artwork in the early 2000s. Dispersion, in its many instantiations, is an attempt to create a document that inhabits the diffuse expanse of networked technologies while simultaneously commenting on the cultural significance of those technologies. In the essay, Price describes a new type of public art, one that responds to the spread of information and culture in the age of the internet and the rise of what he labels “distributed media” defined as “social information circulating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market, stored or accessed via portable devices such as books and magazines, records and compact discs, videotapes and DVDs, personal computers and data diskettes.”35 He argues that artists should create work that is compatible with this mode of production, work that consciously travels across multiple platforms and contexts, a model that “encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur.”36 While the text itself isn’t given a Creative Commons license, it is insinuated that it, too, is produced for broad distribution and open reinterpretation—the page on Seth Price’s site that hosts the PDF proudly showcases examples of bootlegged “This is an art devoted to seizing circulation as a technology of power: to disperse, to profile, and of effects.” Ibid., 94. 35 Seth Price, Dispersion, 2009, n.p. 36 Ibid. 34

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Figure 1.5  Seth Price, Dispersion, 38th Street Facsimiles, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

copies of the essay (see Figure 1.5). Price himself continually revises the essay, not to achieve an ultimate perfect version but rather to reflect the fluctuating conditions that inform its existence.37 Since he posted the first draft in 2002, Price has uploaded numerous editions of the essay to his site, modifying it as he sees fit. This means that there are many variations of the essay in circulation, spanning a decade’s worth of revisions.38 Additionally, he has created a sculptural version of Dispersion entitled Essay with Knots (2008) that was exhibited in Free at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in fall 2010. Price divided the essay up into separate panels, each cast in vacuum-formed plastic, a material widely used in the mass production of consumer goods. The plastic is a nod to the “repackaging” of the essay as it takes yet another form. Dispersion weaves the conditions it describes into its very structure and exists as a compelling fusion between artistic practice and criticism. “False trails and forked paths weave throughout Price’s practice as he seeks to both mirror and inhabit the circulatory and distributive systems of his own time. Even this signature text, ‘Dispersion’— devoted as it is to an extended contemplation of contemporary information technologies as they provide artists with a new context (or ‘scape’)—never remains totally the same. Rather, the artist continually returns to it, revising it, adding or subtracting ideas—always altering its potential meaning—as if in support of his assertion that every cultural endeavor is subject to perpetual permutation today, whether it is written about, photographed, printed, downloaded, forwarded and exchanged, filtered and animated, or bundled with so many other programs or files as to create an entirely new production out of the same material.” Tim Griffin. “The Personal Effects of Seth Price,” Artforum (June 2009): 288. 38 Ibid. 37

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All of the writers discussed so far—Rosalind Krauss, David Joselit, and Seth Price—are attentive to how art has shifted in response to a more networked world. However, while they frequently respond to, and make mention of, the terms and ideas derived from technology, none of them directly discuss the details of that technology. Lev Manovich’s short essay “Post Media Aesthetics” from 2000 (and the book that it later developed into, Software Takes Command) concentrates on the configuration of software itself in order to explain its sway on culture and art. Echoing Krauss, Manovich begins “Post Media Aesthetics” with the declaration that medium, as it has been traditionally understood, is in a state of crisis in the wake of cultural and technological developments that have fractured the specificity of medium. Instead of attempting to prop up old paradigms, Manovich suggests that a post media aesthetics substitute the category of medium by adopting “the new concepts, metaphors, and operations of a computer and network era, such as information, data, interface, bandwidth, stream, storage, rip, compress, etc.”39 Furthermore, cultural, media, and individual works should be thought of as a type of software that “organizes data and structures user’s experience of this data.”40 Some of the basic ideas sketched out in “Post Media Aesthetics” receive a deeper treatment in Manovich’s 2013 book Software Takes Command. Still interested in software’s effect on culture, Manovich embarks on an intellectual history beginning in 1960 of what he terms “media software,” which he identifies as a subset of application software for creating, interacting with, and sharing media.41 While “Post Media Aesthetics” recognized how culture becomes software, Software Takes Command examines how software becomes culture. Manovich adopts Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s opinion that the computer is a meta-medium capable of permanent extendibility, allowing Lev Manovich, “Post Media Aesthetics,” sd (2000–1), 5, http://manovich.net/content/04projects/032-post-media-aesthetics/29_article_2001.pdf. 40 Ibid., 6. 41 Manovich discloses more specifically the software that falls into this category in the following: “This book is concerned with ‘media software’—programs such as Word, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Final Cut, Firefox, Blogger, WordPress, Google Earth, Maya, and 3ds Max. These programs enable creation, publishing, sharing, and remixing of images, moving image sequences, 3D designs, texts, maps, and interactive elements, as well as various combinations of these elements such as websites, interactive applications, motion graphics, virtual globes, and so on. Media software also includes web browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, email and chat programs, news readers, and other types of software applications whose primary focus is accessing media content (although they sometimes also include some authoring and editing features).” Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 2. 39

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the production of a range of media, both existing and yet to be invented.42 Running through software’s development episodically—from invention and experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s, to mass commercialization and wide adoption in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally to “hybridization” in the 2000s— Manovich makes the point that the computer’s permanent extendibility through software disrupts “medium” by transferring the techniques and interfaces of all previous media technologies to software.43 Drawing a comparison to ecology, Manovich argues that media techniques start acting like a species in shared software environments, interacting, mutating, and making hybrids of themselves.44 This, in turn, influences how and what users can create in endless combinations. Manovich’s observations on user behavior in Software Takes Command in some ways set the stage for the artistic shifts that occurred in the mid2000s. Many artists at that time became interested in studying mainstream internet culture through user content, which took off with the spread of social media platforms. While Manovich’s Software Takes Command focused on how programmers and users were creatively producing or hybridizing new software, many of the internet artists working in the mid-2000s were in turn concentrating on how users navigated these basic presets. For example, an early DIY precursor to the blogging platform Tumblr, collaborative artist blogs dubbed “surf clubs” like Nasty Nets (2006–8) and Spirit Surfers (2007–9) explored the detritus of web culture. Contributors created a visual dialog, scrapbook, and archive of their discoveries online alongside their own creations, such as YouTube videos and animated gifs. In 2006, in the wake of this activity, curator Lauren Cornell organized an online exhibition for Rhizome entitled “Professional Surfer” that considered web browsing an art form and assembled a few of these websites as works in themselves. The artists/bloggers behind these projects like Kevin Bewersdorf, Marisa Olson, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, John Michael Boling, Chris Coy, Michael Bell-Smith, and Travis Hallenbeck approached massive user output through an almost anthropological lens. Their posts were an attempt to recuperate user content as something valuable, drawing attention to its artistic merit. Artist Ibid., 329. Ibid., 180. 44 Ibid., 164. 42 43

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Kevin Bewersdorf articulated this position when he said that the web findings within his posts for Spirit Surfers were “jewels publicly removed and reset.”45 This strategy also blurred into individual artists practices. For example, Nasty Nets blogger Guthrie Lonergan’s work Myspace Intro Playlist (2006) compiled video introductions to Myspace pages in a YouTube Playlist montage that captures the awkward, silly, stern, and bizarre videos produced by the Myspace community. The project documents how people perform their ideal selves online without any editing or bias. The dedication page of artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied’s 2009 book Digital Folklore reads, “To computer users, with love and respect.” A document of the “professional surfer” phenomenon in the mid-2000s, Digital Folklore captured how internet artists related to user-generated content through a collection of essays and artworks that encompass “the customs, traditions and elements of visual, textual and audio culture that emerged from users’ engagement with personal computer applications.”46 The book, designed by Manuel Buerger, is a colorful celebration of the weird and wonderful world of animated gifs, defaults, and memes, interspersed with thoughtful reflections on user culture. The same year as Digital Folklore, critic Ed Halter published his text “After the Amateur: Notes” in an attempt to name this flurry of artistic attention toward user-generated web content. Halter was particularly interested in the status of the “amateur” practitioner and how artists have assimilated such a designation over time, from avant-garde cinema to art photography. Halter argues that internet artists absorbing or mirroring mass user-generated content in their work present a different turn, that of the “sub-amateur.”47 Unlike the amateur photographer in decades past who aspired toward professionalism, the user is interested in the pure and immediate functionality of his tools, often realized through defaults. Internet artists responding to the user or “sub-amateur” prefer functions and content over form, favoring the “raw instrumentality” of images. For example, Halter points to Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (2007), which features the artist staring blankly at the camera while activating a series of default effects that crowd the Kevin Bewersdorf, Spirit Surfing (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011), 23. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Digital Folklore (Stuttgart: merz & solitude, 2009), 9. 47 Ed Halter, “After the Amateur: Notes,” Rhizome (April 29, 2009), http://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/ apr/29/after-the-amateur-notes/. 45 46

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screen, such as dancing pizza slices and lightning. The artist’s concentrated expression contrasts with the light-hearted nature of the animations, an effect that is both humorous and disarming. In the mid-2000s, internet artists took inspiration from user-generated content, responding to software’s cultural relevance through users’ real-world application. Many of the same artists within the “professional surfer” cohort like Nasty Nets were also the first to entertain the idea of a “post internet” art that encompassed web culture both online and off. Perhaps this is evidence that what began as an interest in user-generated content developed into a larger desire to excavate the web’s involvement in the everyday, one that coincided with a moment in which the internet became much more mobile than ever before. In a Rhizome interview from 2008, internet artist and Nasty Nets member Guthrie Lonergan described a move in his practice toward “Internet Aware Art” by saying: I’m scheming how to take the emphasis off of the Internet and technology, but keep my ideas intact. Objects that aren’t objects. I got a couple of books and a t-shirt in the works. Right now I’m really into text (not visually/typography … just … text … ), and lots and lots of lists … “Internet Aware Art.”48

Lonergan’s statement regarding “Internet Aware Art” can best be understood as works that depend on the internet for their transmission and, in some instances, reflect on that process itself but do not need to reside completely within that environment, and often go offline. A few weeks after Lonergan’s interview was published on Rhizome, artist and Nasty Nets member Marisa Olson echoed a similar shift in an interview with We Make Money Not Art blogger Regine Debatty, stating: There doesn’t seem to be a need to distinguish, any more, whether technology was used in making the work—after all, everything is a technology, and everyone uses technology to do everything. What is even more interesting is the way in which people are starting to make what I’ve called “PostInternet” art in my own work (such as my Monitor Tracings), or what Guthrie Lonergan recently called “Internet Aware Art.” I think it’s important to address the impacts of the internet on culture at large, and this can be Thomas Beard, “Interview with Guthrie Lonergan,” Rhizome (March 26, 2008), http://rhizome.org/ editorial/2008/mar/26/interview-with-guthrie-lonergan/.

48

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done well on networks but can and should also exist offline. Of course, it’s an exciting challenge to explain to someone how this is still internet art … If that really matters.49

For artists and curators at the time, these two interviews expressed a change in how internet artists were approaching their practice in a way that resonated strongly within the community. Under the designation post internet or internet aware, internet art was not required to be online. Rather, the work was much more involved with web culture at large, a definition that is much closer to Bosma’s understanding in Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art. Both Lonergan’s and Olson’s interviews became the first catalyst for thinking about how the conditions for art practice shifted in relationship to mainstream internet culture in the mid-2000s. Curator and critic Gene McHugh took Olson’s term “post internet” to name his year-long blog, Post Internet, which eventually became the 2011 book Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art. Funded by the Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Art Writers Grant, McHugh filed daily observations about internet art from December 2009 through September 2010 on Post Internet, in his words an effort to discuss “art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as Post Internet-when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality.” The project was an experiment in performative writing, one that mimicked what McHugh observed as the “net presence” of internet artists who were similarly constantly churning out work for an audience, he explains: Creativity is … not evaluated on the basis of an individual work of art, but rather on the basis of the artist’s ongoing, performed net presence. For better or for worse, a week ago an artist may have created a masterpiece work of art which in previous epochs would have been discussed for decades and even centuries; in the age of the CVS Pharmacy Twitter feed, though, the artist’s masterpiece will be quickly forgotten, at best sentimentally recalled or academically cited, but no longer felt. What will be felt, though, is the artist’s ongoing engagement with time—the molding of the NOW.50

Regine Debatty, “Interview with Marisa Olson,” we make money not art (March 28, 2008), http:// we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/how-does-one-become-marisa.php. 50 Gene McHugh, “Sunday, August 15, 2010,” in Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011), 240. 49

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His regular entries were an attempt to sync in with this “now,” to instigate conversation with the internet art community online concurrent with the rapid production of those works. His blog posts, which varied from quickly jotted notes about the art world and internet art, to close readings of works by artists such as Ryan Trecartin, Cory Arcangel, and Davis Horvitz, attempt to engage with these changes as they occur and, importantly, sort out what post internet might mean. Throughout, McHugh acknowledges that contemporary culture is more informational than ever before. The same year Gene McHugh produced his Post Internet blog, artist Artie Vierkant explored the notion of post internet art in his essay “The Image Object Post Internet” published on the rotating online gallery Jstchillin curated by Parker Ito and Caitlin Denny. While McHugh used the term “post internet” as a starting point for musings about the “existential condition” of internet culture, Vierkant defines it more directly: Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.51

Vierkant’s text then unpacks how these changes in authorship, attention, reproducibility, and physical space affect contemporary art production toward an understanding of post internet art as a new domain. All of these circumstances evolve from a more networked society as well as from new technological developments in hardware and software. Vierkant also addresses lineages within art history that inform but ultimately differ from post internet art, such as new media art and conceptual art.52 Like McHugh, Vierkant’s essay adds more nuance to the conversation regarding post internet art—looking

Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post Internet,” in Jstchillin, 2010 http://jstchillin.org/artie/ vierkant.html. 52 “Post Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it is most often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism. New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction. Post-Internet art instead exists somewhere between these two poles.” Ibid., np. 51

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beyond the fact that internet art is moving offline to a deep consideration of how a more informational culture shifts art production overall. While Vierkant and McHugh articulate a divergence between the new media art and post internet art of the 2000s, curator Domenico Quaranta takes the conversation in a slightly different direction in his PhD dissertation and subsequent book Media, New Media, Post Media (translated from Italian to English in 2013 as Beyond New Media Art). The book reflects on the historical marginalization of “new media art” within the mainstream art world and how post media is quickly changing these divides. Quaranta defines post media as a contemporary state after the digital revolution in which all art must contend with the media experience. There is no outside or beyond the media; it infiltrates everything.53 This status diminishes the exclusivity of the mainstream art world and erodes the separation of new media art from contemporary art.54 Echoing many of the authors discussed so far, Quaranta views the post media condition as a permanent, irreversible change.55 Artist Hito Steyerl, like Quaranta, is firm that something akin to a post media condition signals a dramatic change for culture overall. In Steyerl’s 2013 essay for e-flux journal, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” she asks if the internet is dead, a provocation that acknowledges not that the internet is actually dead but, rather, that it has become something else by moving offline and becoming more integrated into the everyday: The internet persists offline as a mode of life, surveillance, production, and organization—a form of intense voyeurism coupled with maximum nontransparency … The all-out internet condition is not an interface but an environment … Computation and connectivity permeate matter and render This understanding of “post media” is adopted from Peter Weibel’s 2005 exhibition Postmedia Condition. Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2013), 200–1. 54 It should be said that Quaranta takes a more sociological approach in Beyond New Media, examining how the variances in culture and outlook between “new media art” and “contemporary art” and how “post media” dismantled those differences. He reads “new media art” as a different culture and framework, not as a designation determined exclusively by medium. 55 “Recognizing that we are living in a postmedia age is not a point of arrival but a point of departure. It means recognizing that the digital revolution completely changed the conditions for the production and circulation of art and that it is slowly but inevitably changing the ways in which art is experienced, discussed, and owned. In these circumstances, art is becoming something completely different from what we were used to—and art worlds have to change accordingly, developing new values, new economies, new structures.” Ibid., 202. 53

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it as raw material for algorithmic prediction, or potentially also as building blocks for alternate networks.56

Steyerl is essentially describing a pervasive networked logic, one that touches on all aspects of life. Her essay acknowledges that the status of the image shifts in the face of a ubiquitous internet, stating: It has become clear that images are not objective or subjective renditions of a preexisting condition, or merely treacherous appearances. They are rather nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports, shaping and affecting people, landscapes, politics, and social systems.57

In other words, images become fluid and variable and, thus, the migration and mutation of these images take on greater social and political importance. Steyerl argues that artists, in response, need to make images that take hold of their fluctuation, naming this technique “circulationism.” Circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of postproducing, launching, and accelerating it. It is about the public relations of images across social networks, about advertisement and alienation, and about being as suavely vacuous as possible.58

Artists are called to inhabit that networked logic while also calling attention to the means and ways of its circulation. By declaring that artists create work suited to a dispersed mode of production, Steyerl’s proposition echoes both Joselit and Price and makes the case for an art practice cognizant of the “massless flows” under an informational milieu. Nicolas Bourriaud’s 2009 book The Radicant recognizes the need for a more dispersed mode of art production in response to globalization and advanced network technology, factors that increase heterogeneity across cultures and information. Art, therefore, becomes a radicant or “an organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances” in order to stay afloat, adapting to new scenarios.59 Comparing radicant art to a gas, he proposes that it become Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead.” Ibid., np. 58 Ibid., np. 59 “To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.” Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009), 22. 56 57

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“capable of filling up the most disparate human activities before once again solidifying the form that makes it visible as such: the work.”60 It seems that Bourriaud champions an art practice that remains somewhat cryptic, stating later in the book that “today one must struggle … for the indeterminacy of art’s source code, its dispersion and dissemination, so that it remains impossible to pin down.”61 Therefore, Bourriaud’s conversation is not about medium or medium specificity but art’s greater political potency within a post media condition—its ability to float across and infiltrate a variety of sectors. In this sense, his understanding of art is not far from Joselit’s, and like Joselit, he views this new era of art production as an occasion to rethink what art could be within a twenty-first-century context. Referencing Andy Warhol’s well-known statement from the 1960s that artists at the time “wanted to be a machine,” Bourriaud claims that within the early twenty-first century, the artist wants to become a network, explaining: “The modernity of the twentieth century was based on coupling the human to the industrial machine; ours confronts computing and reticulated lines.”62 Like the other artists, curators, art historians, and critics discussed in this section, Bourriaud recognizes a new networked paradigm for art production within the early twenty-first century, one that requires artists to create work attentive to the circulation and capture of information. Stated in various ways, there’s a general acknowledgment across the texts discussed that such a paradigm requires that all art becomes, on some level, legible as data to computers and a network. In addition, as Manovich’s book Software Takes Command makes clear, software is an important interlocutor and its rapid hybridization and proliferation is a determining factor in art’s digital legibility. This paradigm shift extends into writing and criticism as well, a subject of the closing section of this chapter.

Alive, in the sea of information The internet has evolved; so has its art. In the era of ubiquitous computing and smart objects, of the mass infiltration of the information milieu, expanded Ibid., 54. Ibid., 138. 62 Ibid., 132. 60 61

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internet art has surfaced. This chapter argues that expanded internet art is a product of an informational milieu, where informational dynamics optimize the production and transmission of digital information within the immediate environment. Expanded internet art is a continuously multiple element that exists within a distributed system, a continual becoming, an artwork without an object or center, without an autonomous singular existence. The “continual unfolding” relayed by the term “expanded” expresses the notion that internet art has co-developed with the internet and that it is an emergence in concert with the conditions of its existence, brought together by a milieu. It is always in movement, always circulating, assembling, and dispersing. It is a snapshot of information in motion, like Harm van den Dorpel’s suspended Perspex circular forms or Artie Vierkant’s Image Objects; or it is in motion, like the many versions of Seth Price’s Dispersion inhabiting file-sharing sites, discarded hard drives, and bootlegged print copies. By making work that is a flow in order to compete with the other flows of the informational milieu, artists find one strategy, one way to respond. But we should be reminded that these massless flows are not randomly decentralized; rather they are deliberately dispersed according to what Alexander Galloway once described as protocol.63 The continual becoming of expanded internet art is a product of protocol, and it abides by an informational logic. Whether it’s the diagram of protocol announcing itself or the infiltration of an informational milieu, it’s a paradigm shift resulting in art, and culture itself, evolving to become more legible and functional as information. Such a situation requires new modes of writing, reading, and interpreting symbiotic with these changes. Terranova touches on this in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, where she makes the claim that an informational milieu radically usurps the production of meaning itself, stating: Information is no longer simply the first level of signification, but the milieu which supports and encloses the production of meaning. There is no meaning, not so much without information but outside of an informational milieu that exceeds and undermines the domain of meaning from all sides.64

Alexander Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Boston: MIT Press, 2004). Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, 9.

63 64

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The informational milieu demands a reengineering of meaning such that a traditional perspectival position assuming a “homogenous space where different subjects can recognize each other when they are different and hence also when they are identical” gives way to an interpretative experience that is “inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic.”65 In light of this, Terranova sees a need for modes of understanding outside of the representational, which take into account the “field of displacements, mutations and movement” of informational space. Terranova’s point bears on the critical potential of all forms of creative expression under an informational milieu—art, literature, music, etc. It also requires that critics and writers rethink how art is read and interpreted. Critic Michael Connor addresses this topic in his essay “What’s Postinternet Got to Do with Net Art?” which elaborated a generational divide between artists involved with the original net art community of the 1990s and that of the younger, more millennial post internet art community. After discussing his ideas and citing example artworks to defend them, he admits that his whole structure and approach seems out of sync with the art he wants to describe: I wanted to write this text in a way that would appeal to olds like me (I’m not really an old, except in internet years), and so I assumed a serious voice, I tried to stick to the facts, I tried not to make too many grand and unsubstantiated claims. But, this kind of writing somehow feels inadequate for a discussion of postinternet practice; it assumes a critical stance outside of art and internet and even neoliberalism, when in truth I am immersed in all three.66

Connor’s point also captures how, in a way, criticism becomes collapsed within the work itself, seeming to almost swallow it. For example, Artie Vierkant’s Image Objects series is a demonstration of his text “The Image Object Post Internet” while Seth Price’s Dispersion illustrates the main thesis of his essay through the form of the work itself. Connor’s reflections echo Terranova’s argument that an objective, exterior position no longer holds. The question then becomes, how do we infuse interpretation and criticism with the immersive, Ibid., 37. Michael Connor, “What’s Postinternet Got to Do with Net Art?,” in Rhizome November 1, 2013, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/1/postinternet/.

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excessive, and dynamic qualities of an informational milieu? How do we create a language for this space? These questions dovetail with the primary question driving this book, namely: how is an informational milieu affecting cultural production, and what kind of critical response does it necessitate? Through the case study of expanded internet art, we worked toward answering the first half of this question. In order to address how we develop a critical response, it is necessary to delve deeper into Simondon’s original notion of a milieu and its influence on contemporary media theorists contextualizing information’s influence on culture, like Tiziana Terranova. In the next chapter, we find that Simondon, alongside his colleagues Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer, advanced a biologically informed concept of symbiotic ontology in their critical responses to cybernetics. Simondon’s model of a “milieu” was a product of this work. Contemporary media theorists, like Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler and Mark B. N. Hansen, have returned to Simondon and the “milieu” in recent years in order to think through the role of technology in ontology, especially in our hyper-networked world. Through their writing, we find that a symbiotic ontology with technology—realized so succinctly in the Simondonian model of a milieu—is now a normative state. The example of expanded internet art discussed in this chapter makes clear that art has the power to express this scenario and might even illuminate ways to articulate a critical response.

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Milieux, Then and Now

I have made work using the internet space and image, because it has become complicit and at the same time it is acting as a new commons. Obviously surveillance has happened since marketing, profiling, tracking communities started, but now it is global and faster than it ever has been. More and more the internet has become a lens for capital to watch us, Google now works with governments to turn our “self expressions” and “social connections” into data that they can use to market to us. The stream and matrix of this means we all feed this “autocracy of choice machine”, our speeded up discourse immediately becomes surplus. Hannah Sawtell, “Interview with Hannah Sawtell” in Relief Press, June 2013 http://relief-press.co.uk/re-sawtell/

Figure 2.1  Hannah Sawtell, ACCUMULATOR, 2014. Courtesy New Museum, New York. (Photo by Benoit Pailley)

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A stream of random images—stock photos, CGI-rendered images of yachts and flaming baseballs, nature shots of seedlings and icebergs, charts from the NASDAQ—freeze-frame in Hannah Sawtell’s 2014 installation for the New Museum, ACCUMULATOR (See Figure 2.1). Contained within airy boxshaped steel structures, each image is printed on a board that can be moved back and forth by the visitor, like an adjustable flat screen. Interspersed between the sculptures are speakers enclosed in cement blocks, which emit a low rumble, a distinctively digital white noise. Like the title of the work itself, the installation presents a quick snapshot of the rapid accumulation of digital images. In ACCUMULATOR, the fluidity of digital images is brought to a complete halt, but sound fills the room—a soundtrack to the dramatic speed and movement of these images over networks and an indication of the undercurrent of larger systems of production that flow beneath them. In interviews, Sawtell states that in her approach the “screen becomes a lens” in that she excavates the collapse between a screen transmitting informational content and one that registers the world around it. ACCUMULATOR can be read as a response to the pervasiveness of what Philip Agre termed “capture.” In his article “Surveillance and Capture,” Agre discusses how information technology evolves in order to more effectively register human activity through “grammars of action” that interpret it as a language.1 Through the strategic reorganization of human action and the techniques used to trace it, human behavior increasingly becomes more legible to computers, allowing the computer to better track that behavior. In ACCUMULATOR, the pivoting function of the printed boards formally references the flat screen as much as the tactile surface of a touch screen on a mobile phone. However, these nonfunctional, dummy screens are unplugged and floating, creating a sense of unease for a viewer accustomed to responsiveness. Sawtell has said that her installations “create an arrested visual and spatial proposition” or in other words, they exact a restless, forced stillness.2 Sawtell alludes to capture between the computer and human action by creating an artificial halt to these processes, while deconstructing the screen itself. Philip Agre, “Surveillance and Capture,” in The New Media Reader ed. Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 245. 2 Hannah Sawtell, “Interview with Hannah Sawtell,” in Relief Press, June 2013. http://relief-press. co.uk/re-sawtell/. 1

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Like many of her past exhibitions, a free printed broadsheet accompanies ACCUMULATOR. Rather than an expository essay by the curator or an interview with the artist like those found in a typical exhibition takeaway, the broadsheet presents a long list of unique hashtags authored by the artist; see below for an excerpt: #NASCENTSURPLUS, #LABOURMATTER #CRYPTOMINERAL #MININGRAPHENENAOID #PREFOSSILISEDWIREFRAME #DORMANTPOOL #ACCUMULATEDPIXEL #BROKENTABLET #HYBRIDCARBON

Sawtell created the twitter account “@hs_accumulator” during the run of the exhibition to put these made-up hashtags into use, which would then be retweeted by the official New Museum twitter account. While a quick search reveals that the hashtags did not spread widely, this layer of the exhibition cleverly circulates the artist’s language and distilled ideas directly into the stream of information it attempts to address. The artist is still introducing new hashtags on the @hs_ accumulator account, extending the project long after the closing of the exhibition. ACCUMULATOR does not neatly sit online or offline. As a strongly affective visual and sonic gallery experience greatly inspired by the internet, as well as ongoing experiment with language online, it operates on multiple levels. In the last chapter, we described expanded internet art as a method of practice that continually unfolds through networked distribution and does not contain a fixed essence. ACCUMULATOR stands as an example of this type of art practice. We also discussed how, through Josephine Bosma’s adaptation of Simondon, artists operate in “resonance” with matter, technology, and body as opposed to on, in, or through a static medium. The many dimensions to the ACCUMULATOR project speak to this more nuanced understanding of how the artwork engages with the conditions of its existence, as both resonance and emergence. Sawtell’s attention toward informational dynamics in her practice is indicative of how artists are indeed working within what we have described as an informational milieu, which is dramatically restructuring creative expression and challenging notions of an artwork as possessing a fixed essence, center, or object. In this chapter, we will address Simondon’s understanding of a milieu in depth and his efforts to formulate a critical response to the Shannon-Weaver model of communication and Wienerian cybernetics through a non-reductive theory

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of individuation. In Simondon’s work, the milieu is described as a dynamic field in which individuals and technical objects actuate into being, manifesting material and energetic agency inside and outside of being, instead of the traditional notion of “environment” in the sense of an external, surrounding influence. His colleagues working in France in 1950s and 1960s, philosophers Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer, were also suspicious of cybernetics and, similar to Simondon, relied on biological analogies like “milieu” to think through its shortcomings. All three thinkers, Simondon, Canguilhem, and Ruyer, describe a process of symbiotic ontology in response to what they viewed as the tendency for cybernetics to distill complex biological organisms and processes to systems. This open, symbiotic form of individuation as well as a concept of a milieu are also present in the work of Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen, all contemporary media theorists writing in the 2000s who have adopted Simondon’s notion of milieu in order to theorize information’s influence on culture. These contemporary writers, grappling with the ubiquity of informational capture and the omnipresence of an informational milieu, see technology as an integral part of ontology. However, in their discussions, they all share the position that a symbiotic ontology with technology is not a radical departure but a normative state. Using Simondon’s work as a jumping point, Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen describe the pervasive effect of an informational milieu and its impact on representation and human experience. Reading all three authors together, it becomes clear that there is no “outside” of the informational milieu. Artists must create meaning within the conditions they describe, producing work symbiotically in relation to an informational milieu that restructures the production and existence of creative expression. The continual unfolding of expanded internet art is one response to this scenario and can be read as an example that illuminates how an informational milieu feeds through all levels of cultural production.

Gilbert Simondon’s milieux The French philosopher Gilbert Simondon published sparingly within his lifetime and his dissertation, published initially in separate segments, stands as his main work. His dissertation, defended in 1958, L’individuation à la

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lumière des notions de forme et de l’information (Individuation in Light of the Notions of Form and Information), was not published in its entirety in French until 2005. His supplementary thesis, however, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects), was published in 1958 and was a key vehicle for introducing his ideas to the Francophone world. The first part of Simondon’s main dissertation was published later in 1964, and again in 1995, as L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (The Individual and Its Physico-biological Genesis). The second part of his thesis, L’individuation psychique et collective (Psychic and Collective Individuation), was only published posthumously in French in 1989 and again in 2007. Simondon’s work was especially influential for Gilles Deleuze, who engaged his writings in The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Difference and Repetition, as well as a short article “On Gilbert Simondon.”3 Deleuze’s connection to Simondon’s philosophy was an important vehicle for introducing more readers to Simondon’s work, in both French and English. In the Anglophone context, Simondon’s work resurfaced in the 1990s and 2000s, primarily through Deleuzian studies and media theory. (Deleuze was also a central touchstone for Anglophone media theory in the 1990s.) Actual English translations of his work are sparse and have remained so for many years. English excerpts from L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l’information have appeared in the anthology Incorporations from 1992 and the journal Parrhesia. Univocal published an English translation by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove of Du mode d’existence des objets techniques in 2017, but prior to it only the first two chapters of Du mode d’existence des objets techniques were translated in June 1980 by Ninian Mellamphy through the University of Western Ontario, while another section appeared in the anthology Interact or Die! in 2007. Anglophone media theorists Brian Massumi, Mark B. N. Hansen, Adrian Mackenzie, and Matthew Fuller addressed many of Simondon’s ideas in their own writing, which generated more interest in this somewhat obscure intellectual figure. Brian Massumi, in particular, was an For more on Deleuze’s debt to Simondon, see: Sean Bowden, “Gilles Deleuze, a Reader of Gilbert Simondon,” in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology eds. Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 135–53; Andrew Iliadis, “A New Individuation: Deleuze’s Simondon Connection,” MediaTropes IV, no. 1 (2013): 83–100and Alberto Toscano “Gilbert Simondon,” in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, eds. Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 380–98.

3

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early advocate for Simondon and attempted to realize an English translation of L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l’information in the 1990s to no avail.4 Bernard Stiegler’s reading of Simondon in his Technics and Time series was also key for introducing English-speaking readers to Simondon, and the first English volume of the series appeared in 1998 through Stanford University Press. As Brian Massumi points out in an interview for a special issue of Parrhesia on Gilbert Simondon, this resurgence of interest by contemporary media theorists in recent years was also the result of the conditions being “right” intellectually and culturally. As Massumi explains, Simondon’s effort to formulate a critical response to information theory, such as the Shannon-Weaver model of communication, and his non-reductive theory of individuation were instructive for theorists attempting to grapple with technology’s dramatic filtration into human life: Technology had come to be seen to be a constitutive factor of human life— and with biotechnology, in life itself. The question of technology was now directly a question of the constitution of being—in a word, ontology. Or more precisely: because given the juncture, the question of being had to be approached from the angle of becoming; it was a question of ontogenesis … What makes all this relevant to the question of Simondon is that his work was already there … He recognized technological innovation as a key theater of thought materializing in matter becoming, in ways imbricated with life transformations.5

In other words, Simondon’s legacy is rooted in his efforts to link technology to ontology and to propose new models for thinking ontology itself. The introduction to L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l’information, translated into English in 1992 as “The Genesis of the Individual,” outlines his theory of individuation, especially as it relates to what he terms the “technological theory of information.” Simondon’s project is unique in that he develops his own principle of individuation—a subject that has a long history in philosophy—through the lens of informational theory and quantum physics.

Brian Massumi, “Technical Mentality Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon,” Parrhesia Number 7 (2009): 36. 5 Ibid., 37. 4

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Overall, his reconfiguration of individuation is ambitious and wide-ranging in scope, as he aims “to take the different regimes of individuation as providing the foundation for different domains such as matter, life, mind and society.”6 On a basic level, Simondon is attempting to think through the individual as consistently engaged in a state of becoming within a metastable milieu.7 His focus is not on ontology itself but ontogenesis, which he describes as “the development of the being, or its becoming—in other words, that which makes the being develop or become, insofar as it is, as being.”8 His project is an effort to embrace the “entire unfolding of ontogenesis in all its variety” and it explores individuation through the perspective of its process.9 This endeavor sets out to critique a few things: the existence of a stable equilibrium (which is opposed to a metastability), the fixity of essences or substances (or substantialism wherein the individual is intrinsically constituted), and hylomorphism (or a total distinction between form and matter, which posits that matter is inert and shaped by form). Inspired in part by the logic of quantum physics, he proposes that being be considered “not as a substance, or matter, or form, but as a tautly extended and supersaturated system.”10 Potential energy activates that being toward continual emergence, a process that he terms “transduction.” The process of crystallization within a supersaturated solution is one of the primary examples he uses to illustrate the process of individuation, and it serves as a helpful visual: The simplest image of the transductive process is furnished if one thinks of a crystal, beginning as a tiny seed, which grows and extends itself in all directions in its mother-water. Each layer of molecules that has already been constituted serves as the structuring basis for the layer that is being formed Ibid., 312. This concept echoes with the work of Albert North Whitehead, who also considered subjectivity as an ongoing process embedded in the world, one that is irreducible and not outside of experience. (Like Simondon, Whitehead was tackling Aristotelian hyle.) Although Whitehead’s work proceeded his own, Simondon does not mention Whitehead directly in his writings. It is interesting to note that contemporary philosophers in recent years, such as Steven Shaviro and Isabelle Stengers, are also returning to Whitehead in order to engage new ontological understandings in relation to scientific and technological development. 8 Gilbert Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” in Zone 6: Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 300. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 301. In another section of the text, he’s even more explicit: “The notions of substance, matter, and form are replaced by the more fundamental notions of primary information, internal resonance, potential energy and orders of magnitude.” Ibid., 312. 6 7

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next, and the result is an amplifying reticular structure. The transductive process is thus an individuation in progress.11

Being is constituted within and through an energetically charged and supersaturated system that is the transductive process or individuation itself. This image of crystallization illustrates his project, which is an effort to elaborate an ontogenesis that embraces metastability while resisting substantialism and hylomorphism. Simondon’s theory of individuation was greatly a response to what he terms the “technological theory of information” or, more precisely, the ShannonWeaver model of communication. Devised in 1948 by Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, the original model imagines information as traveling through a channel between sender and receiver (See Figure 2.2). The message is encoded into signals, like waves or binary data in order to be transmitted through a channel, such as a cable or satellite. Noise, in this context, is interruptive and prevents transmission. In order for the message to be decoded and received on the other end, noise must be minimized. Simondon’s theory of information goes against the implicit hylomorphic assumptions present in the Shannon-Weaver model in that there is no content

Figure 2.2  Wikipedia, s.v. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” last modified November 5, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_ Communication. Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 313.

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proper to any elements within a system, and form (as signal) is never abstracted from a material process (as noise). For him, information is continually engaged in a process of exchange within its milieu: The piece of information acts in fact as an instigation to individuation, a necessity to individuate; it is never something that is just given. Unity and identity are not inherent in the information because the information is itself not a term. For there to be information presupposes that there is a tension in the system of the being: the information must be inherent in a problematic, since it represents that by which the incompatibility within the unresolved system becomes an organizing dimension in its resolution. The information implies a change of phase in the system because it implies the existence of a primitive preindividual state that is individuated according to the dictates of the emerging organization.12

Information is therefore never fully distinguished from its metastable milieu, and it proceeds in phases or layers, functioning like an immanent imperative of exchange between entities. Information itself has no significance for Simondon within a closed system in terms of a structural relation or pattern or entropy; it is something that populates what he calls the pre-individual field. To return to the crystal example, information is the necessity to individuate; it is the switch, the turning point of the supersaturated solution that sparks the formation of the crystal. Simondon’s notion of individuation is not just limited to the realm of nonliving things, such as crystals and molecules; he also hopes to advance a concept of individuation applied to living beings. Here, individuation is qualified slightly. The living being is a “theater of individuation” and thus more complex than the crystal. Simondon recognizes a “genuine interiority” within the living being, whose modulation occurs in concert with its milieu: The living being resolves its problems … by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems. The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system and also a system that individuates itself.13

This position also impacts the milieu. For the crystal example—or what he calls physical individuation—the milieu is a sea of potentials within the mother Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 311. Ibid., 305.

12 13

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water, with the result of a crystal or molecule. With the living being, the milieu and the living being exist in permanent individuation, which is productive and ongoing. In this sense, the milieu is integrated and constitutive to the living being, whose ongoing existence is a type of individuation. Simondon is careful to express what the living being’s individuation is not—the living being is not engaged in the maintenance of equilibrium with its milieu, nor is it assimilating its functionality from the exterior, nor is it a functioning object that results from a previous individuation.14 Through this list, we can see how Simondon is attempting to contemplate a notion of the living being against a stable equilibrium, or definitive exterior, or a discrete individuation. Embedded within this argument is Simondon’s theory of information, again, as well as his theory of change. The spark to individuate, or information, is part of the living being: The living being can be considered to be a node of information that is being transmitted inside itself—it is a system within a system, a containing within itself a mediation between two different orders of magnitude.15

Thus, the living being is engaged in a continual interchange within itself and its environment. It acts to mediate between two orders of magnitude, which Simondon defines in a footnote as a scale between a larger cosmic level, such as the energy of the sun, and a smaller molecular level.16 The living being has a scalar quality in that by virtue of its own existence it can mediate between various magnitudes. Furthermore, it exists in a state of permanent individuation where metastability is both constitutive of the living being, as well as a precondition of life. Through this position, Simondon rereads the concept of adaptation away from a model in which the living being establishes stability to the order of one’s exterior environment. Instead, he asserts the living being’s integration into an organic development as well as its capacity to invent internal structures.17 The living being is internally and externally generative, as well as deeply embedded in its milieu. Ibid. Ibid., 306. 16 See “Footnote 5,” ibid., 318. 17 “The living being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself—which is to say, by modifying its relationship to its milieu (something a machine is equally able to do)—but by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems.” Ibid., 305. 14 15

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Within his framework for the living being’s individuation as well as physical individuation, one sees Simondon’s theory of change. Drawing an analogy to quanta in physics, Simondon sees individuation as a process that does not exhaust or resolve all of the potential factors that result in an individuation. Instead, he understands that individuation is both a product and an agent of metastability, making it continuously productive. Returning to the concept of an ontogenesis, the process of individuation is an ongoing genesis, and this perpetual movement is constitutive of being. In some sections, Simondon discusses this concept as a phasing, a term that illustrates his position on change quite well in that it captures its variability. For change—individuation—is indefinite, and it occupies a unique temporal space that simultaneously pulls in past potentials, and generates future potentials, while also operating in resonance with factors around it that are always shifting. Again, information is the spark or prompt to individuate existent within this metastable milieu, and it delivers a movement without itself being a structure. In a sense, information is the event of individuation but not the entire process. We see in the “Genesis of the Individual” a formulation of a concept of milieu that translates to physical individuation and the individuation of the living being. The metastable milieu detailed in this text envisions a milieu that is complementary to the individual and not exterior to it or the process of individuation. Importantly, within the French language “milieu” has two meanings—it is both environment and middle. Simondon collapses these two meanings into one, such that the metastable milieu is simultaneously around and within. In footnote 6 of the text, Simondon provides this clarification of a milieu: The relation to the milieu cannot be envisaged, either before or during individuation, as relation to a unique and homogenous milieu. This milieu is itself a system, a synthetic grouping of two or more levels of reality that did not communicate with each other before individuation.18

Again, we see Simondon’s aversion to a closed system and his efforts to work against thinking of a system as a hermetic whole. Instead, he reads “system” as a synthetic group brought together through the ongoing process of individuation, and milieu as an eternally fluctuating, open system immersed and constitutive with individuation, with ontogenesis. Simondon, “The Genesis of the Individual,” 318.

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For his other work, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon develops another interpretation of the term “milieu,” which he names an “associated milieu.” The purpose of the text, as Simondon explains in the introduction, is to assert the importance of a technical reality on culture and to do away with any presumed division between the cultural and the technical, man and machine. Simondon defines culture as that by which the human being regulates its relation to the world and its relation to itself and, in order to reconcile culture with technics, he supports the introduction of a technical culture that encourages a widespread cultural consciousness of the systems through which machines function and the underlying values implicit to those workings.19 In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, the technical object comes into being in a process similar to individuation. The technical object itself is a “unit of becoming” (not a “mere utensil”), which changes according to “mutations which are oriented.”20 As such, it evolves “through convergence and self-adaptation; it unifies itself internally according to a principle of internal resonance.”21 Thus, it undergoes an ontogenesis not dissimilar to physical individuation or the individuation of the living being. The technical object responds to an “associated milieu” that “mediates the relation between technical, fabricated elements and natural elements, at the heart of which the technical being functions” where the technical being or technical object is never fully artificial or organic, but adaptive.22 While the milieu presented in “Genesis of the Individual” provides a more general theory of change and individuation, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects the “associated milieu” is explicitly tied to the production of the technical object. Like individuation within a metastable milieu, the technical object and its associated milieu are symbiotic. One of the primary examples Simondon provides in the text to illustrate the technical object in operation, as well as its relation to the associated milieu, is the Guimbal turbine, which was an underwater combined turbine and

Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 15. 20 Ibid., 43. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 Ibid., 59. 19

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generator developed for hydroelectric plants by Jean-Claude Guimbal in 1949. The invention allowed a generator to be placed in the water pipe containing the turbine, which was a feat never accomplished before. Furthermore, Guimbal’s turbine successfully directed oil and water in harmony with each other, such that they were mutually beneficial. The water supplies the energy that activates the turbine and its generator, while evacuating heat produced by the generator. The oil lubricates the generator, insulates the gears, and conducts heat from the gears to its casing, and is eventually flushed out by the water. Working together, the combination of oil and water improved the cooling mechanism of the turbine, while at the same time permitting it to function underwater (see Figure 2.3).

Figure. 2.3  Jean-Claude Guimbal, “Combined Turbine and Generator Unit United States Patent Application,” November 3, 1950, Serial No. 193, 851. In France, November 7, 1949.

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Guimbal’s turbine is an example of a technical object, and Simondon analyzes the factors that yielded this machinery and, importantly, reflects on its connection to all of its surrounding factors. Technical objects never operate or come into being in isolation but are part of a larger continuity or, as Simondon puts it, “The technical object is that which is not anterior to its coming-into-being, but is present at each stage of its coming-into-being.”23 There is never a discrete point of arrival with invention of the technical object, but rather it progressively converges toward its concretization.24 Both the oil and the water in the Guimbal turbine contain multifunctional potentials that are set off once the two elements meet within the machinery. Invention is the moment in which these two sets of potential couple into a continuous system, and a synergy goes into effect. Before the Guimbal turbine, the potentials inherent to oil and water did not have the opportunity to synergize and existed in what Simondon calls disparity. Invention—the oil and water in the turbine clicking into effect after the machine’s installation at the hydroelectric plant— allows something new to burst into existence, a novel synergistic apparition. The process echoes that of the crystal in his discussion of individuation. But the scientist or the inventor does not act entirely alone, nor do the inventions themselves, nor does the environment in which the invention is placed. Rather, Simondon reads the process of invention as one guided by concretization where all of these potentials click into place. The Guimbal turbine is an apt example of Simondon’s larger project in that the turbine instigates a relation between oil and water where there was not one before, which when placed in the context of the hydroelectric plant generates electricity from the landscape by way of the water flowing through it. The invention has its own internal resonance to its natural surroundings and gradually merges with its surroundings: The concrete technical object, which is to say the evolved technical object, comes closer to the mode of existence of natural objects, tending toward internal coherence, toward a closure of the system of causes and effects that exert themselves in a circular fashion within its bounds, and moreover

Ibid., 26. Simondon makes a similar point in his discussion of the oil lamp for an interview with Jean Le Moyne, see Gilbert Simondon, “Entretien sur la mécanologie: Gilbert Simondon et Jean Le Moyne,” By Jean Le Moyne in Sur la technique (1953–1983) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 434–7.

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incorporates a part of the natural world that intervenes as a condition of functioning, and is thus part of the system of causes and effects.25

The Guimbal turbine as a technical object then, as such a “unit of becoming,” arrives into the system of causes and effects by adopting and improving aspects of previous inventions, while also bringing into play the potentials of oil and water joined in the unique cooperationality of the turbine. As one can see, technical objects have a particular dependence on and relation to an associated milieu. Clearly, the associated milieu here is in part the environment in which the Guimbal turbine is placed. However, it is not only spatial, which is what Simondon is driving at when he says that “it is this associated milieu that is the condition of existence for the invented technical object.”26 As such, the associated milieu both influences and is influenced by the technical object.27 In an interview, philosopher Brian Massumi stresses this same point in Simondon’s overarching program: The associated milieu is not fundamentally a spatial concept. Simondon defines it as the ‘regime’ of energy transfer between the technical object and its environment, across the boundary, by virtue of which the technical object takes on the autonomy of self conditioning operative solidarity … The associated milieu is the pattern of energetic exchange that kicks in when the schema of concretization snaps to … The concept of the associated milieu is a philosophically loaded one, spiked with references to time, recursive causality, coming potential, and the immanence of the technical object’s schema of concretization to matter’s becoming. If it is simplified into a synonym for the environment, the force of its Simondonian complexity is lost.28

Massumi’s argument is to fully embrace the complexity of an associated milieu and resist a temptation to read it solely as environment. Again, in the associated milieu we see echoes of Simondon’s attempt to understand a milieu as both environment and middle, as a condition that does away with the duality between an interior and an exterior. The associated milieu as the

Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 49. Ibid., 59. 27 Ibid., 58. 28 Massumi, “Technical Mentality Revisited,” 28–9. Note: this version of the interview is a lengthier version of the original one that appeared in Parrhesia Number 7, 2009. 25 26

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“condition of existence” of the technical object is a “mediator” between the manufactured and the natural. It is both spatial and conditional. In addition, there’s an implicit circular causality in which the invention when it syncs into place pulls in factors from the past and present, creating new potentials for further invention, a situation Simondon reads as “a conditioning of the present by the future.”29 Simondon is not laying out a linear progression here but more a self-populating field of possible convergences, which is continually enriched by the event or jump of technical objects and their associated milieus. Simondon envisioned technical objects as proliferating exponentially, especially during the period in which he was writing On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects in the 1950s. The cultural dimension of the work is related to what he viewed as a need to create greater awareness of the ensemble of technical objects that act in concert with man, not autonomously.30 If the ensemble of technical objects becomes more complex and abstract, Simondon acknowledged a need to universally educate the public about the workings of machines, and their human interdependence, through a technical culture.31 Without this, there was a risk of alienation through misunderstanding, and he felt his work was in many ways an effort to clarify the meaning of machines, their ontology, and significance for humanity, technical progress, and the environment. Simondon’s philosophy has been thoroughly revived for a new audience in the 1990s and 2000s, propelled by media theorists who have found his ontological framework to be particularly relevant for thinking through new technologies. The milieu is a central concept in Simondon’s philosophy, in both his discussion of technical objects in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 60. “Man’s presence to machines is a perpetuated invention. What resides in the machines is human reality, human gesture fixed and crystallized into working structures.” Ibid., 18. 31 In his text “La mentalité technique” written approximately in 1961 and published posthumously, he also makes the case that a technical mentality, alongside this technical culture, is coming into fruition within the twentieth century, stating: “In conclusion, one can say that the technical mentality is developing, but that this formation has a relation of causality that recurs with the very appearance of postindustrial technical realities; it makes explicit the nature of these realities and tends to furnish them with norms to ensure their development. Such a mentality can only develop if the affectivity antimony of the opposition between the artisanal modality and the industrial one is replaced by the firm orientation of a voluntary push towards the development of technical networks, which are postindustrial and thus recover a continuous level [of operation].” Simondon, “Technical Mentality,” 13. In French: Gilbert Simondon, Sur la technique (1953–1983) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 312. 29 30

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Objects and his introduction to his theory of individuation in “The Genesis of the Individual.” As noted previously, the milieu in both instances is a dynamic field in which individuals or technical objects actuate into being, manifesting material and energetic agency inside and outside of being. Importantly, Simondon is describing a sort of immanence that is not wholly tethered to space or time, milieu as a “condition of existence.” It is this point that makes his philosophy compelling for media theorists trying to grapple with a technological, informational milieu. Before we turn to the efforts by Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen to bring Simondon’s milieu into dialog with technologies of the twenty-first century, we must contextualize the intellectual currents running through Simondon’s model for individuation while he was writing L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l’information and Du mode d’existence des objets techniques in the late 1950s. Not only was he responding to the tide of cybernetics in France, he was also pulling from the lineage of biology and life sciences, as well as quantum physics. The next section will situate Simondon’s theory of ontogenesis and milieu alongside the work by his colleagues and contemporaries Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer, who also grappled with the philosophical and metaphysical implications of cybernetics in France during the 1950s and 1960s.

A response to cybernetics: Exploring symbiotic ontology in the work of Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer, and Gilbert Simondon As mentioned previously, Simondon developed a philosophical program posited against the existence of a stable equilibrium, substantialism and hylomorphism. Cognizant of the weaknesses he identified in the mathematical theory of communication that he felt maintained all three of the above qualities, his understanding of information embraced metastability while resisting substantialism and hylomorphism through the process of individuation.32 In the essay “Information Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation,” its author Andrew Iliadis identifies the qualities of interoperability and indeterminacy as the key points of Simondon’s reconceptualization of information in response to the mathematical theory of communication. Iliadis’s reading presents one way to interpret Simondon’s unique understanding of information, and his conclusion that Simondon supports a more open notion of system parallels

32

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Simondon’s theory champions a symbiotic emergence, where the milieu acts a dynamic field of the individual’s actuation. His work covers an impressive intellectual terrain, pulling in aspects of Greek philosophy, biology, mathematics, physics, and engineering to expound his ideas. This subsection will focus more narrowly on the response and critique of cybernetics put forth by Simondon’s contemporaries and colleagues Georges Canguilhem and Raymond Ruyer. Like Simondon, in their philosophical reposts to cybernetics, Canguilhem and Ruyer identified a form of symbiotic ontology of the individual or organism. Canguilhem and Ruyer share Simondon’s aversion to the tendency within the Shannon-Weaver model of communication and Wienerian cybernetics to distill complex processes to system.33 Like Simondon, they envision a co-relational, symbiotic development between technology, organism, and nature. Examining the biological thread of symbiosis present in Canguilhem’s and Ruyer’s writings in response to cybernetics provides more contextual depth to Simondon’s own philosophical framework and his understanding of “milieu.”34 Simondon was a student of the philosopher of science and physician Georges Canguilhem. According to Simondon’s biography, written by his daughter that made here: “Where the MTC [mathematical theory of communication] notion of information is associated with a closed system of positive and negative types of feedback (the transmission model), Simondon approached information from a perspective that allowed for the interoperability of different types of information, leaving space for indeterminacy that would remain a fundamental component of Simondon’s open informational schema. These two factors—interoperability and indeterminacy—would allow him to apply the notion of information to fields beyond mathematics and engineering.” Andrew Iliadis, “Information Ontology: The Meaning of Gilbert Simondon’s Concept of Individuation,” in communication +1 2, Article 5 (2013): 5. 33 This biologically informed critical response to cybernetics is rarely told in relationship to intellectual histories of French philosophy written during the postwar period. Rather, like their colleagues in America and Britain, French intellectuals like Claude Levi-Strauss widely adopted a cybernetic approach in their work. For more on the introduction of cybernetics and its relationship to theory in France see: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” in Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011); Céline Lafontaine, “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory’” in Theory, Culture & Society 24 (September 2007) and Céline Fontaine L’Empire cybernétique: Des machines à penser à la pensée machine (Paris: Seuil, 2004). 34 Henri Bergson was another major touchstone for Simondon in particular, as well as Canguilhem and Ruyer. Simondon adapted the notion of Bergsonian intuition and its quest for symbiosis, outlined in Creative Evolution (1907). However, Simondon sought to apply it more widely and to do away with the dualism present in Bergson’s account between matter and spirit and the technological and philosophical. See Gilbert Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964), 267. For more on Bergson’s influence on Simondon’s work, see: Elizabeth Grosz, “Deleuze, Ruyer and Becoming-Brain: The Music of Life’s Temporality,” in Parrhesia no. 15 (2012); Pascal Chabot The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation, trans. Aliza Krefetz (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 148–51; and Anne Fagot-Largeault, “L’individuation en biologie,” in Gilbert Simondon: Une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 19–54.

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Nathalie Simondon, he participated in a seminar run by Canguilhem from 1964 to 1970 on the history of science and technology at the Rue du Four. But the two were acquainted well before this, as Canguilhem served as an advisor to Simondon’s thesis, which was defended on April 19, 1958, before a jury of Georges Canguilhem, Jean Hyppolite, Raymond Aron, Paul Ricoeur, and Paul Fraisse, and included a defense attended by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl, Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, and Mikel Dufrenne. As an interview with his former assistant Anne Fagot-Largeault reveals, Simondon was quite solitary in his efforts and his work was not associated with a larger school or movement.35 However, Canguilhem and Simondon share a biologically informed perspective that asserts the individual’s co-constitution of a milieu, a position that is most noticeable in Canguilhem’s essays “Machine and Organism” and “The Living and Its Milieu” both of which appeared in the essay collection La Connaissance de la vie (The Knowledge of Life) in 1952. In Canguilhem’s “Machine and Organism” he argues that technique is no longer only an intellectual operation by man but a universal biological phenomenon. Inspired in part by French ethnographers Andre Leroi-Gourhan’s Milieu et Techniques (1945) and Georges Friedmann’s Problemes humans du machinisme industriel (1946), he claims that mechanical and technical models that attempt to reduce organism to machine are misguided. Instead, his position shows man “in continuity with life through technique prior to insisting on the rupture for which he assumes responsibility through science.”36 Leroi-Gourhan and Friedmann bring biology and technology together, wherein technical inventions are not the demonstration of a progressive rationalization that subordinates the biological to the mechanical but rather views the irrational, chaotic circumstances of the living as a primary driver.37 With this in mind, Canguilhem’s argument is perhaps best summed up in the following:

“Simondon was very rarely read. He is being read a little more these days, and so it is difficult to know how he is being understood. Simondon wasn’t part of a school. He was quite solitary.” Thierry Bardini, “Simondon, Individuation and the Life Sciences: Interview with Anne Fagot-Largeault,” in Theory, Culture & Society, published online March 17, 2014 http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/ early/2014/03/17/0263276413508450. 36 Georges Canguilhem, “Machine and Organism,” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 97. 37 One can also see echoes of Leroi-Gourhan and Friedmann’s position that biology and technology coevolve in Simondon’s “concretization.” 35

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It seems to us, then, that it is an illusion to think that purpose can be expelled from the organism by comparing it to a composite of automatism, no matter how complex. So long as the construction of the machine is not a function of the machine itself, so long as the totality of an organism is not equivalent to the sum of its parts (parts discovered by analysis once the organism has already been given), it seems legitimate to hold that biological organization must necessarily precede the existence and meaning of mechanical constructions. From the philosophical point of view, it is less important to explain the machine than to understand it. And to understand it is to inscribe it within human history by inscribing human history in life, without, however, neglecting the appearance with man, of a culture irreducible to simple nature. Thus we have come to see in the machine a fact of culture expressing itself in mechanisms that, for their part, are nothing but a fact of nature to be explained.38

Canguilhem maintains the primacy of nature, both within technological and cultural realm, and furthers the idea that science and technology were permanently in a reciprocal relation. For him, it is misguided to read the structure of the organism through the analogy of machines; rather, one should begin with the structures and functions of the organism to understand machines.39 His position takes an interesting turn in the last footnote, which champions the fields of bionics and bioengineering in the United States in the 1940s as a promising development, one he deems more compelling than cybernetics, which he views as too tethered to the preeminence of the technological. Canguilhem is intrigued by the use of biological structures and systems as models that can be adapted by technology, whether it is the equilibrium of flight demonstrated by the housefly or the viper’s ability to detect blood temperature at night through thermoception.40 As others have noted, “Machine and Organism” seems to be in direct response to both the introduction of cybernetics to the French context with the publication of Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948 by the Hermann Press in Paris, as well as the Ibid., 91–2. “Almost always, the attempt has been to explain the structure and function of the organism on the basis of the structure and function of an already-constructed machine. Only rarely has anyone sought to understand the very construction of the machine on the basis of the structure and function of the organism.” Ibid., 76. 40 Ibid., fn 68, 175. 38 39

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rise of molecular biology with the discovery of the isolation of DNA by O. T. Avery and his team in 1944.41 Canguilhem’s “The Living and Its Milieu” extends some of the insights of “Machine and Organism” even further by advocating not only for the primacy of the biological organism but of the milieu in particular. The essay provides an intellectual history of the concept of milieu from the 1800s until the 1950s, charting the stages in the progression of the concept from Newtonian mechanics through nineteenth-century geography and evolutionary biology, ending with the work of biologists Jakob von Uexküll and Kurt Goldstein. Canguilhem is particularly interested in what he describes as the “various reversals” of the relationship between the living being and milieu within the sciences, which he hopes to evaluate from a philosophical perspective. Newton understood the milieu as a fluid in the form of ether that acts as intermediary fluid between two bodies, a space that is designated as its milieu.42 Newton’s mechanical definition filters into the work of nineteenth-century biologists, such as Lamarck and Comte. As Canguilhem points out, Comte made the milieu a universal notion of biological explanation, thus pushing Newton’s idea of milieu as a “fluid in which a body is immersed” into “the total ensemble of exterior circumstances necessary for the existence of each organism.”43 Comte is also deemed responsible for putting forth an understanding of milieu that eludes a fixed center of reference or, as Canguilhem so elegantly states it, “a pure system of relations without supports.”44 The milieu, then, developed into a See Henning Schmidgen, “Thinking Technological and Biological Beings: Gilbert Simondon’s Philosophy of Machines,” in Revista do Departamento de Psicologia—UFF, 17, no. 2, 11–18, July/ December 2005, 12, and Dominique Lecourt, “The Question of Individual in Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon,” trans. Arne de Boever in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 176–7. 42 This first understanding also comprises the definition supplied in Diderot’s Encyclopedie. As Canguilhem notes, Diderot’s definition is entirely derived from Newton. 43 Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” in Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola Marrati and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 101. 44 “But there is still one lesson to be taken from the use—absolute and without qualification—of the term milieu as it was definitely established by Comte. The term would henceforth designate the equivalent of Lamarck’s ‘circumstances’ and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s ‘ambient milieu’ (in his 1831 thesis at the Academie des Sciences). These terms, circumstances and ambience, point to a certain intuition of a formation around a center. With the success of the term milieu, the representation of an indefinitely extendible line or plane, at once continuous and homogenous, and with neither definite shape nor privileged position, prevailed over the representation of a sphere or circle, which are qualitatively defined forms and, dare we say, attached to a fixed center of reference. Circumstances and ambience still retain a symbolic value, but milieu does not evoke any relation 41

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universal instrument that dissolves individual organic syntheses into universal elements and movements. During this same era, geography also developed its own adaptation of milieu with the work of Carl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. The milieu became part of a totality, explored through an attempt to discover the whole of humanity on the whole of earth through mapping. The milieu, with this development, gained an anthropo-geographical component, alongside its mechanical one. With this perspective, the living being was subjected to a sort of determinism, reduced to its mechanical and technical qualities, and dissolved into the anonymity of their mechanical, physical, and chemical environment. Caguilhem takes issue with the instrumentalization of milieu as a totality, a development Caguilhem locates with the lineage of Newtonian mechanics within the work of biologists and geographers in the nineteenth century: Newtonian space and ether maintain an absolute quality, which the scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were not able to recognize: space, as the means for God’s omnipresence, and ether, as support and vehicle of forces. Newtonian science, which was to underlie so many empiricist and relativist professions of faith, is founded on metaphysics. Its empiricism masks its theological foundations. And in this way, the natural philosophy at the origin of positivist and mechanicist conception of the milieu is in fact supported by the mystical intuition of a sphere of energy whose central action is identically present and effective at all points.45

The main observation and impetus behind Canguilhem’s short essay is to acknowledge the fact that the totality of this milieu is still present in contemporary science and to advocate a position in which the living retains some intentional agency vis-à-vis its milieu, as he explains in the conclusion: But if science is the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlightened by knowledge, if science is a fact in the world at the same time as it is a vision of the world, then it maintains a permanent and obligatory relation with perception. And thus the milieu proper to men is not situated within the

except that of a position endlessly negated by exteriority. The now refers to the before; the here refers to its beyond, and thus always and ceaselessly. The milieu is truly a pure system of relations without supports.” Ibid., 103. 45 Ibid., 118.

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universal milieu as contents in a container. A center does not resolve into its environment. A living being is not reducible to a crossroads of influences.46

Given Canguilhem’s argument that the living organism participates and indeed helps shape its milieu, one could see how this argument parallels Simondon’s theory of individuation, where the individual is co-constitutive of its milieu. While “The Living and Its Milieu” is certainly less directed at cybernetics than “Machine and Organism,” we find that Canguilhem’s emphasis on the organism as a central driver and component is maintained.47 Raymond Ruyer, in his 1954 text, La cybernétique de l’origine de l’information, echoes Canguilhem’s emphasis on the primacy of the biological. In the introduction, Ruyer states he is interested in the assumed postulates of cybernetics, not all of cybernetics itself.48 Namely, he sees that cybernetics, and the theory of systems on a whole, carries over mechanicist tendencies from the nineteenth century, in particular the notion that the entire universe functions like an automaton.49 Similar to Friedmann and Leroi-Gourhan, Ruyer proposes that technology and humanity coevolve and that the technical itself has always been intrinsic to all living beings.50 Transmission, and information itself, on its own is meaningless without the interlocutor of the living being:

Ibid., 120. As Anne Fagot-Largeault discusses in her interview regarding her experience as a research assistant with Simondon, both Simondon and Canguilhem belonged to a generation of French intellectuals operating in the shadow of the French zoologist J. B. Lamarck. His work is championed throughout both of Canguilhem’s essays, and as Fagot-Largeault notes, he was also an important figure for Simondon. Chief among Lamarck’s ideas is that living things have some autonomy in choosing their inherited characteristics, giving them more independence than a Darwinian view that sees the environment as wholly responsible for development changes. Unlike Darwin, Lamarck believed that organisms inherit acquired characteristics, rather than adapting by way of natural selection. These characteristics evolve through the innate tendency in all living things toward the progressive structural complexity. The autonomous choice of the living organism is exacted through the initiative of its own needs, efforts, and reactions, therefore the organism adapts to its environment through its sensibility, which helps dictate its characteristics. Thus, Lamarck views a state of reciprocity between the conditions of the environment, the needs of the organism, and the development of characteristics that can be inherited. We see in both Canguilhem and Simondon an acknowledgment of the corelation between the milieu and the individual, where one is not dominant over the other. Bardini, “Simondon, Individuation and the Life Sciences.” 48 Raymond Ruyer, La cybernétique de l’origine de l’information (Paris: Flammarion, 1954), 17. 49 “In the nineteenth century science thought it could prove that the entire universe was in this pseudotime and functioned only in the manner of an automaton. Cybernetic theories and the application of cybernetics to human societies, which is called the theory of systems, prolongs this idea still.” Raymond Ruyer, “The Status of the Future and the Invisible World,” trans. R. Scott Walker, Diogenes 28, no. 37 (1980): 40. 50 Ibid., 81. 46 47

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The transmission itself, insofar as it remains mechanical, is only the transmission of a pattern, or of a structural order without internal unity. A conscious being, by apprehending this pattern as a whole, makes it take on form … If the physical world and the world of machines were left completely to themselves, everything would spontaneously fall into disorder; everything would testify that there had never been true order, consistent order, in other words, that there had never been information.51

Order, then, is yielded by the presence of the living being. Furthermore, the meaning of that information takes shape because of the living being’s own consciousness, a consciousness emergent from what he terms the transpatial realm. In Ruyer’s view, organisms, unlike machines, occupy both an organo-physical and a transpatial dimension. Cybernetic machines can replicate the organo-physical side but cannot access the transpatial existence specific to the organism. This is because the transpatial realm is an absolute, nonempirical domain specific to self-replicating, equipotential organic beings. Organic living beings derive their consciousness and, hence, their ability to determine information from their access to this transpatial dimension that escapes the empiricism of the machine.52 Like Simondon, Ruyer possesses a theory of individuation, which he develops in more detail in Neo-finalisme (1952) and La genese des forms vivantes (1958) but is influential to his argument in La cybernétique de l’origine de l’information as well. The phenomenon of “equipotentiality” is a term taken from embryological studies, wherein researchers found that grafting cells from one section of an embryo to another resulted in those cells taking up the function appropriate to the new location in the embryo. This scientific finding indicates that embryotic cells are capable of developing and mutating in a number of ways and, as such, are equipotential. In Ruyer’s philosophical framework, organisms singularly possess a constitutive equipotentiality. Organisms build themselves and are self-replicating forms. The course of the organism’s individuation is a genuine process of invention, not fully English Translation: Mark B. N. Hansen New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 80–1. Original: Ruyer, La cybernétique de l’origine de l’information, 11–12. 52 “The conscious support can, at the most, give a meaning, or an expressivity, that is to say a semantics in the broad sense, to a physical form that has none. Consciousness transforms every form, and even every appearance of form, into information.” Ruyer, La cybernétique de l’origine de l’information, 221. Translation by the author. 51

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predictable but open to disturbances, improvisation, and adjustment.53 This process of formation, rooted in a generative chaos, echoes facets of Simondon’s theory of individuation.54 In their philosophical response to cybernetics, both Canguilhem and Ruyer remained suspect of the reductionist aspects of cybernetics and gravitate toward biological metaphors and concepts. They both take issue with the totality of Norbert Wiener’s probabilistic universe, wherein all information is the measurable probability of one message transmitting over a range of messages given the relational differences between elements in a controlled, mechanized field. For Ruyer, information cannot exist on its own without the meaning generated by the living being, and for Canguilhem, any technological invention (including information) emerges in reciprocity with the needs and experience of the living being. Canguilhem and Ruyer share Simondon’s perspective that technology, organism, and nature are mutually constitutive in their development, where genesis is symbiotic. The problem with cybernetics is its basis in probability and control as the central determining factor in its ontology. The biological thread of symbiosis in the work of Simondon, Canguilhem, and Ruyer presents an alternative by asserting the primacy of a generative chaos that eludes the quantifiable uncertainty or entropy within a cybernetic understanding of system. The agency of this event assumes a different name within each philosopher’s program; for Canguilhem it is the primacy of the biological and the living’s co-constitution of its milieu; for Ruyer it is the transpatial realm and the equipotential of all organisms, and for Simondon it is the event of individuation—or information itself. The indeterminate, immanent conditions for individuation key to the Simondian milieu emerge out of a

Raymond Ruyer’s influence on Deleuze is apparent here, specifically Deleuze’s philosophy of biology and his notion that “the entire world is an egg” contained of virtual, actualizing self-forming forms. Deleuze mentions Ruyer in Difference and Repetition, and his work is referenced in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and What Is Philosophy? For more on Ruyer’s influence on Deleuze, see: Ronald Bogue, “Raymond Ruyer,” in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 300–20. 54 Interestingly, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer engaged in a dialog regarding human progress and technological advancement in 1958 and 1959, where Simondon uses Ruyer’s theory of individuation as a jumping point to describe concretization in detail for the journal Revue de métaphysique et de morale. See Raymond Ruyer, “Les limites du progrès humain,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 63 (January 1, 1958): 412–27. Gilbert Simondon, “Les limites du progrès humain,” in Sur la technique (1953–1983) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), 269–78. 53

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similar, biologically informed, understanding of symbiosis shared by Ruyer and Canguilhem. In the following section we see that, half a century later, contemporary media theorists are still turning to a notion of symbiotic genesis in order to contemplate information and its effects.

Informational milieux: Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen Grappling with the impact of informational technologies on culture and subjectivity, contemporary media theorists Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen have returned to Gilbert Simondon’s ontology, and his understanding of milieu, as a key theoretical framework. We find that the open, adaptive, and symbiotic quality of ontogenesis identified by Simondon captures the symbiosis between contemporary informational technology and environment, a point that makes his work particularly constructive to these three theorists, as well as our discussion regarding contemporary art. The term for technology’s infiltration into environment differs with each theorist: for Tiziana Terranova it is the informational milieu, for Bernard Stiegler it is the inorganic organized being, or technical object, and for Mark B. N. Hansen it is the system-environment hybrid (SEH) realized in smart environments. Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen all share a concern about informational technology’s ubiquity in modern life and its influence on human experience and environment. While Ruyer, Canguilhem, and Simondon adopted an open, adaptive notion of genesis in their critical response to the mechanistic quality of cybernetics, in the work of Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen this same notion becomes descriptive of the pervasive—and normative—spread of the contemporary informational milieu. By illuminating the impact of an informational milieu on contemporary life, these conversations by Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen can help situate the larger query regarding how an informational milieu restructures the production and existence of creative expression. In her 2004 book Network Culture: Politics in the Information Age, Tiziana Terranova sets out to examine the formation of a network culture characterized by the abundance of informational output and the acceleration

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of informational dynamics or, in other words, information overload.55 Her concept of an informational milieu—a central idea in the book—is elaborated in the first chapter “Three Propositions on Informational Cultures.” Here, she adopts Simondon’s theory of individuation in order to describe change in a culture overtaken by informational dynamics. She begins by debunking two flawed understandings of informational dynamics: first that information is the content of communication, and second that all information is immaterial toward a larger effort to outline the cultural politics of information. To do this, she goes back to Claude E. Shannon’s 1948 paper and closely reads the following three definitions of information contained within it: “Information is defined by the relation of signal to noise; information is a statistical measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system; information implies a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and macroscopic levels of a physical system.”56 (The three subsections “Information and Noise,” “The Limits of Possibility,” and “Nonlinearity and Representation” delve deep into each of Shannon’s definitions.) As Terranova explains, through Shannon’s lens, information is the determination of a probability of a clearly transmitted signal between sender and receiver. In other words, communication is crucially concerned with the establishment of contact between sender and receiver, through the uncertainty of noise in a system and nonlinear, nondeterministic variances within that system. Under this setup, meaning is not about signs but signals, suggesting a substantial paradigm change.57 As Terranova is careful to point out, this ushers in a shift that requires a deeper understanding of information not simply as content or a clear signal but of the influence of informational dynamics described as “the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuations and microvariations, entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic processes.”58 With this in mind, Terranova adopts Simondon’s concept of a milieu in order to Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, 1. Ibid., 9. 57 Theorizing meaning production under this new paradigm is one of Terranova’s primary aims in this chapter. “The appearance of a modern informational problematic, then, is related to a conception of communication as an operational problem dominated by the imperatives of the channel and the code rather than by a concern with exchange of ideas, ethical truth, or rhetorical confrontation (a definition that dominates the liberal and enlightened concept of communication). It is not about signs, but about signals.” Ibid., 16. 58 Ibid., 7. 55 56

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place greater emphasis on the turbulence and metastability of informational dynamics on the micro and macro level and its impact on cultural processes and meaning formation: Information is no longer simply the first level of signification, but the milieu which supports and encloses the production of meaning. There is no meaning, not so much without information, but outside of an informational milieu that exceeds and undermines the domain of meaning from all sides.59

Simondon’s model of a milieu allows Terranova to reject information as solely the content of communication and to think beyond the hylomorphic assumptions present in Shannon’s theory of communication that focus too squarely on the establishment of a signal without acknowledging the many factors (or potentials) involved in transmission. This important point is crucial to Terranova’s primary argument that the informational milieu is an “immersive, excessive, dynamic” entity in which contemporary culture unfolds, one that usurps traditional means of representation and meaning production, requiring new models native to an informational culture. As such, like Simondon’s milieu, the informational milieu is the immanent and porous “condition of existence” of contemporary culture. Simondon’s theory of change and individuation are also quite central to Terranova’s discussion of the virtual in the “Three Propositions on Informational Cultures” chapter. Not only is she attempting to describe an informational milieu and its affect on representation, she also wants to imagine potential outcomes for what she describes as the cultural politics of information. As she points out, information as an expression of probability permits the possibility of the virtual. If information expresses the determination of probability, it does not wholly exclude the improbable or the virtual; in fact it empowers it to be realized: The cultural politics of information … open up the question of the virtual, that is the relation between the given and the (allegedly) unlikely; that information flows displace the question of linguistic representation and cultural identity from the center of cultural struggle in favor of a problematic of mutations and movement within immersive and multidimensional informational topologies.60 Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11.

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Again, Simondon views individuation in a milieu as a jump or event, one that results from potentials within a system, while dually producing new potentials for future outcomes. Terranova sees the random irruption of the virtual as a compelling and potentially potent aspect of the informational milieu, whose open, indeterminate, and adaptive nature yields many possibilities, capable of changing the cultural register in unforeseen ways. Like Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, in his Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, is deeply concerned with technology’s role in culture. This first volume, which is one of three, describes the dynamics and temporality of the technical object. A repost to Heidegger’s claim that the “essence of technics is nothing technical,” Stiegler pronounces the fundamental importance of technics on the human experience of time, where the book itself is a call “for a new consideration of technicity.” Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is a key text for Stiegler’s argument, and much of his argument rests on Simondon’s insights. In particular, Stiegler adopts Simondon’s understanding of a “technical object” as an entity that is not entirely artificial or organic when he argues for a third type of being between the “inorganic beings of the physical sciences” and the “organized beings of biology,” that of irreducible “inorganic organized beings” or technical objects.61 He goes on to claim that these inorganic organized beings are constitutive of temporality as well as spatiality. In the first chapter, “Theories of Technical Evolution,” Stiegler ends with a close reading of Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects in order to describe how the technical object evolves and interfaces with nature and humanity. He agrees with Simondon’s point that the technical object is correlational with nature in that the technical object snaps to its environment, concretizing in conjunction with the potentials present in a milieu. (Stiegler points to Simondon’s description of the Guimbal turbine to elaborate this notion.) Following Simondon, Stiegler describes a scenario that is symbiotic, where the existent factors in nature, human beings, and the technical object all snap into place, through an internal resonance or concretization. The problem Stiegler grapples with is the process of permanent innovation, what he sees as a divorce between the “rhythms of cultural evolution” and the Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Times, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17.

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“rhythms of technical evolution” that results in technics evolving more quickly than culture.62 The speed of technical evolution ruptures temporalization and what he describes as the “event-ization” or the “taking place of time as much as the taking place of space.”63 Such a situation calls for a close consideration of Dasein’s coevolution with technology. Like Simondon, Stiegler is concerned with a human alienation from technology, where technology itself is viewed as removed and abstract from human experience. Simondon’s impetus for a calling for “technical culture” is to educate humankind on the true correlational, interdependent, evolving relations between man and machines and to get away from a position that deems technology as purely utilitarian or a threat to man. As Simondon explains in the introduction, his book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is an effort to change culture’s attitudes toward technology through a greater awareness of the significance of technical objects, especially in his demand for the study of technics within general education. Stiegler, too, shares Simondon’s worry about the lack of awareness surrounding the technical object, but moreover, he is focused on the alienation that ensues when technics develops faster than culture. Thus, Stiegler’s project is not just about educating the public about technical objects but also about understanding humanity’s co-relation and codependence on technologies whose rapid evolution disrupts “event-ization.” Alienation is not about ignorance or fear of the technical object by the culture at large, as much as a lack of discussion around technics’ effect on time, in relationship to as well as beyond the human register. In Stiegler’s discussion, the emergence of the technical object involves a production of a new milieu. The process of concretization, the invention of the technical object is an act of individuation in which an event or leap is accomplished. This act introduces a new technical object while transforming the milieu, and again Stiegler points to Simondon’s description of the Guimbal turbine as an example of this relation between a technical object and its milieu. However, as Stiegler mentions at the end of the first chapter “Theories of Technical Evolution,” it is important to consider what this invention might look like given the “informational dimension of present-day technics” and its effect on human Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16.

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experience. Perhaps even more dramatically than Simondon, Stiegler seems to stress humankind’s close relationship with new technical objects. For him, man is codetermined alongside technical objects and is not just an operator.64 When new technical objects are introduced, it has ramifications for the environment and humankind, not as a foreign or alien entity but as something that is both with and part of these elements. The milieu, then, is generative and cogenerative with nature, the technical object, and humankind. When the creation of organized inorganic beings—technical objects—accelerates due to permanent innovation and invention, it affects human experience on multiple levels, such as experience, memory, labor, etc. This situation is especially heightened if these same organized inorganic beings are constitutive of space and time, which Stiegler argues. In his account, the liveness, immediacy, and rapid production of new technologies—their “light time”—are unprecedented and suggest a new industrial model.65 The charge, therefore, is to examine how accelerated production corresponds to its milieu and how these quickly proliferating organized inorganic beings affect the natural and human worlds. Similar to Stiegler, Mark B. N. Hansen is interested in how the explosion of new technologies impacts human experience, specifically human consciousness. In a two-part series of essays that extrapolate from Simondon’s theory of individuation and environment, “System-Environment Hybrids” and “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st Century Media,” Hansen argues for the existence of “system-environment hybrids” (shortened as SEHs) that engender the environment with a kind of “agency” as humans enter into complex alliances with the sophisticated computation technologies of twenty-first-century media, such as ubiquitous computing, smartphones, smart objects, RFID tags, etc.66 SEHs presume that

“The technical object submits its ‘natural milieu’ to reason and naturalizes itself at one and the same time. It becomes concretized by closely conforming to this milieu, but in the same move radically transforms the milieu. This ecological phenomenon may be observed in the informational dimension of present-day technics, where it allows for the development of a generalized performativity (for example in the apparatuses of live transmission and of data processing in real time, with the fictive inversions engendered therein)—but it is then essentially the human milieu, that is, human geography, and not physical geography, that is found to be incorporated into a process of concretization that should no longer be thought on the scale of the object, but also not on the scale of the system.” Ibid., 80. 65 Couze Venn, et al., “Technics, Media, Teleology: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler,” in Theory, Culture, and Society 24, no. 334 (2007): 335. 66 Hansen, “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality,” 32. 64

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humans continually act together with cognitively sophisticated machines embedded in an environment, a scenario that is far too complex to be reduced to the mere function of a system. Aligning his position with theorists like N. Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark, and Felix Guattari, Hansen embraces a viewpoint that goes beyond the polarization implicit in a notion of open and closed systems and rather focuses instead on “the negotiation of multiple, diverse boundaries made necessary by the hypercomplexification of the environment.”67 Like these other thinkers, he wants to complicate the notion of closure in a system toward an understanding of the “technical distribution” of cognition and perception that underlie these complex couplings between humans and machines. He maintains that when humans interact with smart environments, they lack cognitive and perceptual access to the computational functions that inform them when they occur; thus humans possess an “operational blindness” to the technologies that inform their present and future experience. It is this dimension that is definitive of twenty-first-century media, as Hansen explains: Rather than furnishing a recorded surrogate for that experience, as nineteenthand twentieth-century recording media certainly did, twenty-first-century media exercises its force by influencing how experience occurs. Rather than intervening at the level of memory itself, twenty-first-century media impacts the distinct and quasi-autonomous microagencies that underlie memory’s integrated function, as well as other environmental dimensions that bear on that function. In a world increasingly supported by twenty-first-century media, the direct impact of media on human experience is thus massively overshadowed by its indirect impact; accordingly, instead of furnishing prostheses that expand experiential capacities beyond the various inbuilt limits of our sense organs and memory, today’s media directly impact the very sensible continuum, the source of potentiality, from which delimited, agent- or faculty-centered, higher-order experience springs.68

Hansen shares Stiegler’s concern about the state of memory in relation to the rapid pace of new technologies, namely how memory becomes the object of industrial exploitation. However, in his analysis of SEHs, Hansen focuses Mark B. N. Hansen “System-environment Hybrids,” in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 114. 68 Hansen, “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality,” 56. 67

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more narrowly on the influence of new technologies on human experience as it occurs in addition to its effect on memory. Hansen takes Simondon’s theory of individuation and refines it in order to distinguish the quasi-independent status of the environment itself. Hansen sees that individuals experience a two-tiered coupling with their environment in which there is an actual coupling with the associated milieu (or the technical object’s condition of existence) and a virtual coupling with the domain of the pre-individual (or the sea of potentials prior to individuation). In Hansen’s view, this two-tiered coupling more accurately describes the intricate relation between the individual and the environment, explaining: Such a two-tiered coupling better captures the complex imbrication any individual enjoys with the environment, and it moves the conceptualization of the environment from something exclusively in the service of the individual to which it is coupled in actuality (including coupling to what is both exterior and interior to the individual’s operation), to something that can embrace the quasi-independent cognitive and perceptual operation of the environment itself.69

Individuals are thus energetically and informationally coupled to their milieu through this two-tiered process, and we see how it shapes both the individual and the environment. Importantly, this understanding provides the grounding for Hansen’s larger argument that twenty-first-century media engineers the potentiality of the pre-individual, stating: I would suggest that twenty-first-century media directly engineers the potentiality of the pre-individual, and thus comes to impact ongoing and future individuations not as a repository of content to be drawn on as an immediate source for consciousness’s imagining of a viable future, but rather as a far more diffuse, multi-scalar and heterogeneous subjective power— intensity—that operates across all dimensions of the total causal situation and predetermines the future (where “predetermines” has the positive sense of enabling or facilitating) not just through the imaginings of a phenomenological subject, but in a whole host of materially-consequential, causally efficacious, and non-subjectively subjective ways.70 Ibid., 33. Ibid., 57.

69 70

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In Hansen’s estimation, then, the effect of ubiquitous computing and “smart” technology is absolute. Hansen and Stiegler argue that new technologies—by producing in “light time” or by engineering the potentiality of the pre-individual—influence the temporal (and experiential) register in unprecedented ways. Let us remember that Simondon viewed the milieu as the “condition of existence” for individuation, one not tethered to space or time. Individuation is the manifestation of material and energetic agency inside and outside of being, and the milieu is the conditions generative of individuation. However, Hansen and Stiegler seem to offer that this is changing—that technology’s influence is so profound that the milieu is no longer an immanent generative zone. Terranova makes much the same point in her discussion of an informational milieu that is “immersive, excessive, dynamic” in order to enable the capture and transmission of information. In the 1950s and 1960s, the symbiotic ontology illustrated in the work of Simondon, Ruyer, and Canguilhem stood as a radical position in the face of the mechanistic undertones of a cybernetic worldview. Porous, flexible, adaptive, it suggested an open state not determined solely by a mechanistic, cybernetic, systematic control. In the work of Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen, symbiosis rises as the normative state, as everything is swept up into the logic and function of information technologies in the twenty-first century, creating an informational milieu. Their writing reflects on the significance of this shift, how it affects representation and culture (Terranova), human experience and temporality (Stiegler), and human consciousness vis-à-vis smart environments (Hansen). How does one respond to this situation and, importantly, create meaning in this context? This is precisely the question facing contemporary artists today. As evidenced by Hannah Sawtell’s ACCUMULATOR as well as the examples provided in the previous chapter, a number of contemporary artists are indeed productively working with and within this symbiosis between information technology, environment, and human experience. The genre of art practice described here as “expanded internet art” is one such response. Artists are operating with the knowledge that images and objects not only begin as data (in the form of files, etc.) but act like data once in circulation, becoming scalable, infinitely reproducible, dispersed, and networked.71 Creating work in Some thinkers also theorize how this data-ifying effect might contribute to a new understanding of the object itself, creating a “digital object.” See Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

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this way is not only a reaction to information overload but also the pervasive proliferation of the mechanisms of informational capture. Perhaps this type of work could come under the header of what artist Hito Steyerl termed “post representational” in her article “Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation” that considers the images represented in image spam, which is a form of spam that avoids detection filters by presenting its message as an image file. Advertising pharmaceuticals, body enhancements, get-rich-quick schemes, and the like, and built to bypass other computers and potentially attract the occasional human eye, the “image spam is our message to the future,” Steyerl claims. Image spam is a product of massive image production and circulation, where viewers are both machines and human beings with the latter far outnumbered.72 Steyerl argues that the surveillance imparted by new technologies changes the political weight of traditional notions of representation, which become upended: Within a fully immersive media landscape, pictorial representation—which was seen as a prerogative and a political privilege for a long time—feels more like a threat … … As we register at cash tills, ATMS, and other checkpoints—as our cellphones reveal our slightest movements and our snapshots are tagged with GPS coordinates—we end up not exactly amused to death but represented to pieces.73

Much like Terranova, Steyerl acknowledges that in the face of omnipresent surveillance yielded by new technologies, traditional representation itself is in crisis, ushering in an era of the “post representational.” Steyerl is concerned about the effect this has on humanity, particularly political representation.74 “Visual representation matters, indeed, but not exactly in unison with other forms of representation. There is a serious imbalance between both. On the one hand, there is a huge number of images without referents; on the other, many people without representation. To phrase it more dramatically: A growing number of unmoored and floating images corresponds to a growing number of disenfranchised, invisible, or even disappeared and missing people.” Hito Steyerl, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation,” in e-flux journal no. 32 (February 2012) http://www.eflux.com/journal/the-spam-of-the-earth/. 73 Ibid. 74 “While visual representation shifted into overdrive and was popularized through digital technologies, political representation of the people slipped into a deep crisis and was overshadowed by economic interest. While every possible minority was acknowledged as a potential consumer and visually represented (to a certain extent), people’s participation in the political and economic realms became more uneven. The social contract of contemporary visual representation thus somewhat resembles the ponzi schemes of the early twenty-first century, or, more precisely, participation in a game show 72

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Again, as Terranova noted, we are dealing with signals not signs, where our environments have become reengineered to enable the capture and transmission of information. Aware of how their work has coevolved with the technologically informed circumstances that enable it, artists making deliberately dispersed and parcelized work—again, expanded—occupy this situation. We’ve entered an era where technology is a key aspect of ontology. This was Simondon’s original argument, especially in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, and why his work has remained so relevant for thinkers like Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen whose arguments follow Brian Massumi’s statement, made at the beginning of this chapter, that “the question of technology was now directly a question of the constitution of being.”75 With this, the milieu—which under Simondon’s original philosophical program was a means to imagine individuation and information itself outside of the regulatory strictures of cybernetics—is now informational. Some, like theorist Benjamin Bratton, describe the ubiquitous computing of an informational milieu as a type of totality, explaining: Planetary-scale computation takes different forms at different scales—energy and mineral sourcing and grids; subterranean cloud infrastructure; urban software and public service privatization; massive universal addressing systems; interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand, of the eye, or dissolved into objects; users both over-outlined by self-quantification and also exploded by the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Instead of seeing all of these as a hodgepodge of different species of computing, spinning out on their own at different scales and tempos, we should see them as forming a coherent and interdependent whole. These technologies align, layer by layer, into something like a vast, if also incomplete, pervasive if also irregular, software and hardware Stack.76

Bratton, borrowing from Paul Virilio, imagines that as the Stack grows and proliferates, it generates accidents that can entirely shift its path and contour.77 with unpredictable consequences. And if there ever was a link between the two, it has become very unstable in an era in which relations between signs and their referents have been further destabilized by systemic speculation and deregulation.” Ibid. 75 Massumi “Technical Mentality Revisited,” 37. 76 Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 4–5. 77 Ibid., 13.

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The accident—or in Terranova’s writing, the random irruption of the virtual—offers a possibility, a potential to envision a resistance to the totality of informational logic. As all surfaces become legible by machines, artists must find a way to navigate this terrain to generate a visual vocabulary that corresponds to this situation, envisioning our current reality and a possible beyond. In the next chapter, we will see that the informational milieu as described in depth here is very much a part of the larger postmodern experience. Using Jean Francois Lyotard’s epic exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris during the spring and summer of 1985 as a case study, the next chapter will situate an informational milieu as an aspect of postmodernism. As a curator, Lyotard was not interested in exploring postmodernism as such but rather aimed to accurately create the experience of it within the gallery space through design, concept, and content. The unique design of the show, which activated sound, architecture, visitor orientation, and space to dizzying affect reflects Lyotard’s keen attention to the state of temporality and language in relation to new technologies. A large segment of this chapter will examine Lyotard’s treatment of temporality and language in “Les Immatériaux” in order to understand the effect of informational dynamics on these two subjects and ways of creating a resistant response to this scenario.

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Resistance in the Domain of All Inputs, All Outputs: Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s Les Immatériaux

When you drive from San Diego to Santa Barbara, a distance of several kilometers, you go through a zone of conurbation. It is neither town, nor country, nor desert. The opposition between a center and a periphery disappears, as does the opposition between an inside (the city of men) and an outside (nature). You have to change the car radio wavelength several times, as you go through several different broadcasting zones. It is more like a nebula where materials (buildings, highways) are metastable states of energy. The streets and boulevards have no facades. Information circulates by radiation and invisible interfaces. This is the kind of space-time, hardly sketched out here, which has been chosen for The Immaterials. The eye will be deprived of the exclusive privilege it enjoys in the modern gallery. Neither will there be a clearly signposted itinerary, given the uneasy reflection that the exhibition hopes to provoke. Indeed, it is not a question of presenting an exhibition but rather an overexposition, in the sense employed by Virilio when he speaks of an overexposed city. And neither is it a question of arranging the objects shown according to subject matter or discipline, as though the delimitations from which these resulted were still intact today. —Jean-François Lyotard Les Immatériaux in Les Immatériaux: album et inventaire (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/CCI, 1985), p. 20 (translation by the author).

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Figure 3.1  Installation view of Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985

(photo by Stéphane Couturier). This chapter provides an in-depth review of the pioneering 1985 exhibition Les  Immatériaux, curated by Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput. Ambitious in scope and innovative in its use of design and scenography, the exhibition proposed to produce the experience of postmodernism while showcasing the many applications of new technology. Lyotard imagined the exhibition as a work of art, and it became a testing ground for many of the philosophical ideas he developed at the time. This chapter reads Les Immatériaux alongside Lyotard’s profuse writing, talks, and interviews on technology and art produced in the mid-1980s, paying attention to his understanding of the cultural impact of new technologies and the postmodern condition and, in particular, how the logic of information technology impacts language and temporality. In this body of work, Lyotard develops a thesis about art (and literature) that proposes that art can resist the influence of new technologies on expression through a non-resolved working through or anamnesis. Lyotard’s understanding of the potential of resistance through art is applicable to the question of how to create meaning under an informational milieu, a product of the postmodern condition.

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What was Les Immatériaux? The exhibition Les Immatériaux curated by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and design historian and theorist Thierry Chaput from March 28 until July 15, 1985, was, fundamentally, an experiment. One of the biggest and most expensive exhibitions to be staged at the Centre Pompidou up to that date, the show’s diverse and eclectic collection sprawled across the entire fifth floor of the museum—from photos of Egyptian bas reliefs from the Temple of Karnak, to pictures of a computer chip, to sculptures by Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, and music videos by Elvis Costello.1 In some respects, the show drew from Lyotard’s celebrated 1979 essay La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir in that it attempted to create the physical and sensuous experience of elements emerging from that postmodern condition. Moreover, the exhibition was an investigation of the state of matter in a world marked by techno-science, computers, and the general reliance on advanced physics to produce new technologies, a situation which Lyotard argues dematerializes space and yields a dispossession of the human body. Described by the Centre Pompidou’s press office as a “non-exhibition,” a “mise en temps/mise en scene” and a “new sensibility,” the immersive aspect of the show was as much an exercise in scenography as it was in exhibition production. Thierry Chaput began planning the show in 1982 through the Centre Pompidou’s department for architecture and design Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI), and Lyotard was later brought on to the project in 1983. The various titles proposed for the exhibition, before the decision in 1983 to name it Les Immatériaux, reflect the development of the show’s focus: Création et matériaux nouveaux (Creativity and New Materials), Matériau et creation (Materials and Creativity), Matériaux noveaux et creation (New Materials and Creativity), and La Matiére dans tous ses etats (Matter in All Its States).2 When Lyotard began work on the exhibit, the title was Matériaux noveaux et creation or New Materials and Creativity, but Lyotard felt that “new,” “materials,” and “creativity” as categories had all undergone a considerable shift in meaning John Rajchman, “The Postmodern Museum,” Art in America (October 1985): 111. Antony Hudek, “Over to Sub-exposure: Anamnesis of Les Immatériaux,” Tate Papers (Autumn 2009): 1 http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/over-sub-exposure-anamnesisles-immateriaux.

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and introduced the idea of “Les Immatériaux” to uncover those changes.3 In the accompanying text “Les Immatériaux,” published in the exhibition catalog, Lyotard clarifies that the term “immaterial” refers to “a material which is not matter for a project.” At issue is how new technologies determine the relation between matter and mind, as Lyotard explains: In the tradition of modernity, the relationship between human beings and materials is fixed by the Cartesian program of mastering and possessing nature. A free will imposes its own aims on given elements by diverting them from their natural course. These aims are determined by means of the language which enables the will to articulate what is possible (a project) and to imposes it on what is real (matter). The ambition of the exhibition entitled “The Immaterials” is to make the visitor realize how far this relationship is altered by the existence of “new materials”. New materials, in a wide meaning of the term, are not merely materials which are new. They question the idea of Man as a being who works, who plans and who remembers: the idea of an author. The aim of the exhibition is to bring this interrogation into the limelight and intensify it.4

Lyotard was intrigued by how these technologies actively parse the world and their role in the human being’s relation to and image of matter. Contemporary techno-science—for example, particle physics, genetics and biochemistry, electronics, data processing, phonology, etc.—operates on a scale that is “no longer a human one” in both its smallest and largest state and can only be grasped as information.5 Key to the concept of “immaterial” is not that the “material” disappears entirely, but that it ceases to be an independent entity based on a stable substance, legible by the human register. With electronic “The idea of “immaterials” and “non-materials” was a little bit different at first, since I’d been asked to do this exhibition under a different title. It was supposed to be called Matériaux noveaux et création—New Materials and Creativity. But then I slightly shifted the subject by trying to give it a somewhat different range; I said to myself “Creativity? What is that supposed to mean.” And again, “What is ‘new’ supposed to mean?” Thinking about “materials” today, I thought, “But what does that imply for an architect, or for an industrialist?” I came to the conclusion that all of these words have undergone considerable shifts in meaning, and I thought that the question had to be approached from a different point of view.” Bernard Blistène, “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” in Flash Art (March 1985): 32. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux,” trans. Paul Smith in Art + Text 17 (April 1985): 47. 5 “The scale on which the structure is operation in contemporary techno-science and artist experimentation is no longer a human one. Humans are overwhelmed by the very small, which is also the only means to information about the very large (astrophysics). This change of scale is required by particle physics, genetics and biochemistry, electronics, data-processing, phonology.” Ibid., 50. 3

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waves, elementary particles, light waves, etc., in mind, Lyotard argues that the operational structure for material is now an “unstable ensembles of interactions,” not a stable substance, which is now legible as information. As such, Lyotard boldly proclaims, “The model of language replaces the model of matter.”6 Lyotard made sure this emphasis on language was central to the design and architecture of Les Immatériaux, closely integrating it into the overall visitor experience. Language and communication determined the main organizing thread within the exhibition’s design, which were arranged around five terms that Lyotard believed addressed a new situation for materiality. The five terms—matériau (material), materiel (materiel), maternité (maternity), matière (matter), and matrice (matrix)—represent one moment in the communication of information. “Material” is the support of the message; “materiel” is the hardware that handles the acquisition, transfer, and collection of the message; “maternity” is the sender of the message; “matter” is its referent; and “matrix” is the code of the message.7 All of these words contain the root word “mât”—derived from the Sanskrit mâtram—which means to make by hand, to measure, to build.8 Lyotard then ties these terms to Harold Lasswell’s theory of communication, providing the following list: Material = through what medium does it speak? Materiel = to what end does it speak? Maternity = in whose name does it speak? Matter = of what does it speak? Matrix = in what does it speak? (“it” = the message: the signification = what it says)9

Lyotard explained that the main target of the exhibition was to “arouse the visitor’s reflection and his anxiety about the postmodern condition, by means of our five questions derived from the root mât and applied to domains where they are most critical.”10

Ibid. Ibid. 8 Ibid., 48. 9 Ibid., 51. 10 Ibid., 51–2. 6 7

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These terms—matériau, matériel, maternité, matière, and matrice— separate out five adjacent pathways in the exhibit, which pass through sixtyone sites divided by gray gauze screens. Visitors were invited to pass through from one zone to another, engaging in a type of drifting. The audio experience was also central to this effect; before coming into the exhibition, visitors were provided wireless Phillips headphones that received radio signals from thirty transmitters distributed throughout the gallery, which provided readings from French theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes, to writing by Samuel Beckett and Émile Zola, to music from advertising jingles and even “cosmic echo”11 (See Figure 3.2). This audio information was then paired with an overwhelming amount of visual information located in the sixty-one sites. Works by Dan Graham, Dan Flavin, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, László Moholy Nagy, and others were positioned alongside a futuristic Japanese Sleeping Cell, supermarket shelves, a monochromatic light, laboratory footage of the life of stars in fast-forward, holograms, among other artifacts informed by techno-science12 (See Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.3). Each site concentrates on an inquiry without dictating a signpost or itinerary. For example, the “Site of Neon Painting” (Site de la peinture luminescente) in the “Material” section would focus on the move from the chemical color of paint to the physical color of light, thus contemplating neon light as a means of painting or support of painting.13 In this section, Dan Flavin’s Four Neons was on display next to Moholy Nagy’s Telelumiere with audio of a reading of Goethe’s writings on light. In the “Maternity” section, which again considers the origin of a message, the “Site of the Forgotten Soil or Orphan Home” (Site du terroir oublié ou du bâtiment orphelin) reflected on nonorganic building materials within architecture, thus putting forth the question of origin in building if its materials do not derive from the earth. Images of computer-generated architectural drawings were on display, alongside an audiovisual show on building materials of the past, such as grain, finish, texture, with audio of readings by Kahn and F. L. Wright.14 In the “Matrix” section that examined the code of a message, the “Site of the Game of Draughts” (Site du jeu de damés) allowed visitors to play checkers Ibid., 55–7. Ibid. 13 Ibid., 55. 14 Ibid., 56. 11 12

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with a computer through their movement on a checkerboard projected onto the floor, situating the visitor within the game. The intent of the site was “a transcription of the matrix of a mathematical game: an element exists if it is authorized by the rules of selection chose by the operator of the matrix.”15 As museumgoers wandered around the sites their pathway through the exhibit was recorded on a magnetic memory card, and their track could be printed out upon exiting the space as a takeaway.16 As stated in the press release, the novel application of technology, the exhibition’s design, and the auditory and visual sensory overload was intended to leave visitors with a looming “curiosité inquiète” about these new materials.

Figure 3.2  Installation view of Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985 (photo by Stéphane Couturier). Ibid., 57. Ibid., 54.

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Language within Les Immatériaux In a conversation with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, artist Philippe Parreno relayed the difficulty in communicating, many years later, the experience that was Les Immatériaux, “If you haven’t seen Les Immatériaux, it’s hard for me to describe it. If I tell you how it was, it will sound like a dream.”17 This statement, which captures an experience that deeply registers within the memory of the visitor but cannot be accurately relayed in language, was in many respects a result of the intentional design and interface of the exhibition itself. As we shall see, the maze of sensations that was Les Immatériaux encouraged a type of reading that was in step with Lyotard’s work on technology and writing, particularly in the essays and lectures produced by the philosopher around the same year as the exhibition. Les Immatériaux was an avenue in which to experiment with those ideas, to enact the modes of reading and remembering, which Lyotard understood as entwined with technology and the postmodern situation. A year after Les Immatériaux in October 1986, Lyotard participated in the conference “New Technologies and the Mutation of Knowledge” organized by Bernard Stiegler for the College International de Philosophie and IRCAM in Paris. For this event, Lyotard presented a paper entitled “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” in which he attempted to draw out the present state of “techno-logos.” Stiegler put forth three points in the preparatory notes for the conference: that technology is not science’s means to an end, “techno-science” is the completion of tekhnologos, and new technologies invade public space and common time on a global scale. Lyotard begins his talk with these bulleted themes, while also referencing Bernard Stiegler’s argument that technique is a type of inscription, before launching into a conversation about technology’s influence on memory. Lyotard distinguishes three memory effect types of technological inscription—breaching, scanning, and anamnesis, which, although dissimilar in structure, parallel the psychoanalytic trilogy of repetition, remembering, and working through. Discussing these three moments of “techno-logos” in depth, Lyotard reflects on the impact of new modes of inscription and memoration brought on by new technologies in the Hans Ulrich Obrist, “After the Moderns, the Immaterials,” in The Exhibitionist (January 2012): 15.

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wake of “tele-graphy”—or the break from place and time that occurs in the process of digitalization and simulation, a topic entangled with language.18 This “writing at a distance” involves a type of memorization “freed from the supposedly immediate conditions of time and space.”19 His essay reflects on the memory effects that arise as a result of telegraphy. The first memory effect he describes, “breaching,” was traditionally understood as a putting into a series or attraction. With the detemporalization and delocalization of new technologies that translate the data of the world into information, the close cultural contexts that grounded breaching in the past are removed. Thus, Lyotard reflects on the cultural impact of breaching at a distance, one that complicates how culture was transmitted in the past in situ.20 The term “scanning” refers to the process of remembering, given this delocalization. Lyotard observes that in language “every inscription demands the selection of what is inscribed,” therefore underscoring how language is finite because of this selection and exclusion.21 In contrast, Lyotard sees inscription under techno-logos as infinite because of its conquest of the unknown through experimentation and technological development. Scanning is therefore a remembering that absorbs, not excludes.22 The last memory effect is anamnesis, which Lyotard understands as a “working through” that is never resolved. Through its non-resolution, anamnesis abandons all syntheses, maintaining a neutral, free-floating space

“Any piece of data becomes useful (exploitable, operational) once it can be translated into information. This is just as much the case for so-called sensory data—colors and sounds—to the exact extent that their constitutive physical properties have been identified. After they have been put into digital form, these items of data can be synthesized anywhere and anytime to produce identical chromatic or acoustic products (simulacra). They are thereby rendered independent of the place and time of their ‘initial’ reception, realizable at a spatial and temporal distance: let’s say telegraphable.” Jean-François Lyotard, “Logos and Teche, or Telegraphy,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 50. 19 Ibid. 20 This conversation is also very much one about the responsibility of educating the public about telegraphy. As Lyotard asks, “What is a body (body proper, social body) in tele-graphic culture?… What institution has responsibility for teaching tele-graphy? Can the ideal pursued by such an institution still be the citizen?” Ibid., 51. 21 Ibid., 52. 22 “Technologos therefore remembering, and not only habit. Its self-referential capacity, reflection in the usual sense, ‘critical’ reflection if you like, is exercised by remembering its own presuppositions and implications as its limitations. And by the same token, the technologos opens up the world of what has been excluded by its very constitution, by the structures of its functioning, at all levels. This is how new denotative linguistic genres are invented: arithmetic, geometry, analysis. This is how science is generated, the sciences, as a process of conquest of the unknown, of experimentation beyond traditional cultural experience, of complexification of the logos beyond the received technologos of breaching. This is the process I am calling scanning.” Ibid., 53. 18

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of passing through. He provides, as an example, the metaphor of the mirror from one of the treatises of Eihei Dôgen’s Shobôgenzô, the Zenki. In it, a mirror can detect a presence that it cannot reflect but is so powerful that it breaks the mirror. This “breaking presence” is never inscribed, nor memorable, nor does it ever appear in the mirror. It is this “breaking presence” outside of representation or writing that Lyotard is attempting to describe. As such, he envisions anamnesis as a potential resistance to the breaching and scanning of techno-logos, as well as older forms of writing. He ends the essay with this discussion of an “anamnesic resistance,” wondering if it is in fact possible given the uncharted territories of new modes of inscription and memorization generated by new technologies.23 We see in Les Immatériaux the split from time and space that typified all three modes of technological inscription: breaching, scanning, and anamnesis. However, Lyotard’s primary goal with the exhibition seemed to be a state of anamnesis, one activated by the visitor’s ambling through a boundless expanse of simulation (and stimulation). The architect behind the exhibition, Philippe Delis, worked closely with Lyotard and Chaput to dramatize this wandering, a process he describes in an article for Modernes et Après: Les Immatériaux, one of two publications (the other being 1984 et les presents de l’univers informationnel) produced in conjunction with the exhibition outside of the Les Immatériaux catalog.24 Much like the linguistic mapping of the space through the variations on root word “mât,” Delis drew comparisons to a type of limitless reading provoked by drifting from site to site, in saying: It is the loss of the same reading plan that is at play here, the loss of a global, totaling vision, where the stakes are no longer in rapport with dichotomy of full/empty, built/unbuilt, inside/outside … It is also the loss of a reading in space, towards an accident in space of which one knows nothing—one does not know the correspondence to neighboring areas, because there are no longer legible, knowable frontiers. This is the domain of all inputs,

Ibid., 56–7. The Les Immmateriaux catalog itself was quite unique in that it comprised three separate volumes: the “Album” comprised of notes, sketches, drawings, etc., leading up to the exhibition, the “Inventaire,” which collected seventy loose-leaf pages that corresponded to sites within the exhibition, and the “Épreuves d’écriture,” which was an experimental writing game and dictionary.

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all outputs, the space is not nameable, designed, destined. It goes as such, and randomly, from one surface to another, from a space-surface to a surface-space.25

The screens, the passageways, and the diverse and eclectic assemblages of this “surface space” suspended one’s sense of time and space, yielding a dizzying and deeply somatic experience, one akin to the drive from San Diego to Santa Barbara described by Lyotard at the beginning of this chapter. How can and does such an experience become inscribed into memory? Perhaps this is why Philippe Parreno was so challenged in remembering and relating Les Immatériaux decades later. The attention to the sensual aspect of the show puts forth a query regarding the body’s role in anamnesis and the body’s evolution vis-à-vis new technologies. The first room begins with the question of the body, as it was entitled “The Theater of the Nonbody” (Le théâtre du non-corps), a mirrored vestibule that opened onto five paths, each of which features a diorama in a window display prepared by Samuel Beckett’s set designer, Jean-Claude Fall, while a fragment of Beckett’s The Unnameable played on one’s headphones. As an introduction to the show, “The Theater of the Nonbody” forefronts the affective, corporal response to a postmodern experience, an intention realized through the exhibition creators’ decision to lead the visitor through the space by sensory stimulation. On the other side of the show, in the last room of the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with the role of language and new technologies in the section “The Labyrinth of Language” (Labyrinthe du langage) where sites such as “Modulated Stories and Songs” (Contes and chansons modulaires) and “Screen of the Book” (Ecran du livre) reflect on language as manipulated by electronic devices, including a number of computer terminals featuring the “Épreuves d’écriture” section of the catalog. The decision to place these two sites at opposite sides of the exhibition presents an interesting question, namely does one loose a body while navigating the language of technology, or is something else activated or arrived at in the process? How does the body aide a “working through” when it is simulated and extended by new technologies? These driving questions, present in the exhibition, also surface in “Logos and Philippe Delis, “Architecture: L’espace-temps autrement…,” in Modernes, et Après? “Les Immatériaux” (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1985), 21–2. Translation by the author.

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Techne, or Telegraphy,” where Lyotard asks, “What is a body (body proper, social body) in tele-graphic culture?” In other words, what happens to the body when writing is detached from time and space? In his review of Les Immatériaux for Art in America in October 1985, John Rajchman interpreted the focus on the body as a “phenomenologist’s nightmare” in which “everywhere one was shown the replacement of the material activities of the ‘lived body’ with artificial ones, or with formal or immaterial languages.”26 In Rajchman’s view, the corporal aspect draws out Lyotard’s intense focus on language in which the exhibition is an exercise itself in reading through movement in space and, as such, a declaration that the electronic world is indeed rooted in language. Referencing Lyotard’s statement in Le Monde on May 3, 1985, that the exhibition was “a reduced monograph of the Library of Babel” as a departure point, Rajchman notes, “But the notion that the show, like Borges’s story, was about the infinite library is more than a metaphor; it is also the best way to think about the show: to see it as a book and to ask, what sort of book about our postmodern condition was it?”27 Making one’s way through the maze of Les Immatériaux was a type of reading, and at every turn the visitor was reminded of the centrality of language, especially as a mechanism for new technologies. Rajchman plays close attention to the installation and publication “Épreuves d’écriture” in his article. Featured as a station in the “The Labyrinth of Language” (Labyrinthe du langage) and as a volume in the catalog, “Épreuves d’écriture” was a publication project in which Lyotard and Chaput invited thirty philosophers and writers to define fifty words related to the concept of Les Immatériaux, such as “Simulation” and “Mutation,” on an Olivetti M20 computer loaned to them by the Centre Pompidou. These messages were then transmitted through PTT to an Olivetti M24 at the Centre Pompidou in a rudimentary form of e-mail. The responses, penned by Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and many others, were collected into a database that visitors could access within the exhibition, and formatted for the published catalog.28 This unconventional structure allowed the editors Rajchman “The Postmodern Museum,” 116. Ibid., 114. 28 In the introduction, Lyotard and Chaput claim that the standard format of an exhibition catalog disinterested them; rather they wanted this publication to act as a “workshop of divergence” with a multiplicity of voices. It also allowed them to stress—in a very deliberate, explicit way—language’s 26 27

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to present a semblance of a “real time” catalog and experiment with new technology, while also reflecting on writing itself.29 Intrigued by the indexical order presented by the installation “Épreuves d’écriture,” Rajchman concludes that this exhibition, interpreted as a monograph of Babel, is a reflection on a book remediated by technology, whose linguistic order perpetuates even as language itself becomes a means to simulate and diagnose the world. For Rajchman, the fact that Lyotard relies on the framework of the library—and especially Borges’s infinite library—to express this position underscores the modernist tendencies at play within the show, and perhaps the “postmodern reader-flaneur” ambling through the exhibition is perhaps not so different from his/her nineteenth-century counterpart. At base, Rajchman shares Lyotard’s position that language— electronic or otherwise—is a deterministic force. Johannes Birringer’s review for the Performing Arts Journal in 1986 also takes up Lyotard’s activation of language within the exhibition but, rather than describing it as a modernist project, he expresses concern about the impact of language as a form of calculation, a topic Rajchman does not address in depth. In Birringer’s read, Les Immatériaux stages a condition in which specifically code—not the general language of techno-science—dictates a reality in which consciousness and bodies disappear into the space of technology, a situation dramatized by the drift encouraged by the exhibition and the somatic meandering of the visitors: Lyotard is able to equate “contemporary techno science and artistic experimentation” because they are on the same order of dispersed “language interface with technology, a theme that stretched through every aspect of the show. Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput “La raison des épreuves,” in Les Immatériaux: épreuves d’ écriture (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/CCI, 1985), 6–7. 29 Within the print publication of “Épreuves d’écriture,” the authors’ last names were abbreviated and identified by numbers, which appear in the margins. (For instance, Jacques Derrida becomes “Derr 096.”) This design focuses the reader’s attention to the text over its author. The answers to the one word prompts are disjointed, tangential, and meandering. Rather than standard dictionary definitions, they feel like jumbled notes or stream of consciousness writing. This structure elicits responses that can be both serious and playful. For example, under the prompt “Ecriture,” Bruno Latour exclaims that “Tout le monde devient scribe. Triomphe et généralisation de Gutenberg. L’audiovisuel disparait, absorbe part cet hybride: la page à l’écran” while a few pages later, Paul Caro invited his 5.5-year-old daughter to respond: “ECRITURE SANS ECRITURE. Contribution de Celine-Agathe Caro, cinq ans et demi, a l’expérience ‘Immatériaux’: carowsxdcfvgbrtyuopxzsw qaiujhtgfrcxacaro£«‘azegdu ioklof gdq (wdfc kkoiuyhjhhssqqhbbw ncn,jghfuzudhhttttttujhgfdez »‘(xjuéytfgtyhujvn, w:(;w.w.wgsyzuioseuze…… m………. c.!” Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput “Ecriture,” in Les Immatériaux: épreuves d’écriture (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/CCI, 1985), 55 and 63.

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games” and synthetic processes that have displaced all the older unifying theories of knowledge claiming control over physical reality. The “material,” he suggests, “disappears as an independent entity.” Both mind and matter, in other words, have become part of a general code of rational abstraction (a new metaphysics of the perpetual absence of reality in the code?) which replaces subjective or objective “reality” with a cybernetic pattern of circulation.30

The visitor, bombarded with computer-enabled simulation within the exhibition from images of synthesized skin in a laboratory or computer-generated designs for cars, is not reminded of the foundation of language per se but rather of a world legible as code. Birringer interprets this not as the wild and infinite Library of Babel but as a demonstration of the wide reach, even to mind and matter, of the deterministic, calculable operations of computer technology. The sense of discomfort described by Birringer within the theater of Les Immatériaux was Lyotard’s deliberate intention, and it is one related to the state

Figure 3.3  Installation view of Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985

(photo by Stéphane Couturier). Johannes Birringer, “Les Immatériaux,” in Performing Arts Journal 10, no. 2 (1986), 10.

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of anamnesic “working through” entertained by the exhibit. In an interview for Flash Art in March 1985, Lyotard explains: I keep telling myself, in fact, that the entirety of the exhibition could be thought of as a sign that refers to a missing signified. And this missing signified is what I was just explaining, in the sense that it’s a question of the chagrin that surrounds the end of the modern age as well as the feeling of jubilation that’s connected with the appearance of something new. But it’s also, perhaps, a question of trying to underline something that concerns the identity of what we are and of the objects that surround us as it comes to expression through the material and through the immaterial.31

Visitors, like Birringer, were to come away with this sense of “chagrin” and uneasiness. To return to the subject of language, this “missing signified” Lyotard describes in the quote above was precisely the lack Birringer acknowledged of a subject/object orientation. The exhibition exists entirely in signs founded in simulation, what Jean Baudrillard would term a “hyperreality.”32 Toward this end, Lyotard explains that both he and Chaput worked closely with designers to attend to time and space in the exhibition. The traditional structures and framing devices used in exhibitions—such as pedestals, moldings, walls, explanatory text, etc.—were jettisoned aside. Seeking a “fluid” and “immaterial system” for organizing space, they arrived at a solution to create gray webbings stretching from floor to ceiling. Working with the lighting designer Françoise Michel, the gray material allowed them to modify the appearance of distance or depth, and the level of opaqueness.33 This presented an ideal scenario for the Blistène, “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” 35. “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… No more mirror of being and appearance, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivitiy: it generates miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere… It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.” Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–2. 33 Ibid., 34. 31 32

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“sites,” which were less cordoned-off spaces than intersections that allowed the visitors to land and then continue on in a number of directions. In an interview with Élie Théofilakis, Lyotard explains that he did not want to stage a pedagogical exhibit but rather to create an exhibition that was in itself a work of art; if there was an artwork, it was in the experience and sensation created by the environment.34 A few months after the closing of Les Immatériaux, in October 1985, Lyotard presented the lecture “Enframing of Art. Epokhe of Communication” at the Sorbonne for a conference on art and communication in which he expounded on a theory of a successful artwork in the age of telecommunications. In this discussion, one can see not only his outlook on art in relation to communication technologies but also what he was trying to achieve within Les Immatériaux as an artwork. Turning his attention again to the impact of new technologies on memory, he asks how art is capable of creating an era when all culture is delocalized. Much like his discussion of “breaching” in “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy,” he is concerned about the power of new technologies to inscribe a collective memory, while the time and space of that inscription becomes deterritorialized.35 Art, then, is open to these new, differential powers, and in Lyotard’s estimation, it must address them. Similar, if not identical, to his description of anamnesis, the ideal artwork allows the reader to suspend him- or herself in a form of non-resolved working through: Every work of art is epoch-making; it is a suspension of the probable, and as fiction first and foremost. It can only be epoch-making as epokhe (in a sense of this word that is of course neither Cartesian nor Husserlian), that is to say, only as a reading in which the reader in the work suspends himself (Blanchot).36 Élie Théofilakis, “Les petits recits de Chrysalide: Entrien Jean-François Lyotard—Élie Théofilakis,” in Modernes, et Après? “Les Immatériaux” (Paris: Editions Autrement, 1985), 7: “Our team did not seek to create a pedagogical exhibition—to explain, for example, new technology—but rather we sought an exhibition that was itself a work of art” (translation by the author). 35 “The electronic technologies of telecommunication are machines that inscribe, store, process and disperse collective memory. In this, they are not at all radically new: writing is already such an instrument. If there were any novelty, it would rather reside in the fact that the movement of deterritorialisation entailed by these mnemotechnologies has become global, a movement that is already inscribed in writing (science, taken as universal, is one of its signs.). Deterritorialisation here signifies the underling erasure of ethnic differentiation and the feeling of a loss of idiomaticity, which is naturally referred to the ethnic, to the ground of territorial community.” Jean-François Lyotard, “Enframing of Art. Epokhe of Communication,” in Miscellaneous Texts, Edited by Herman Parret, trans. Vlad Ionescu, Erica Harris and Peter W. Milne (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 183. 36 Ibid., 187. 34

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The epokhe of art invokes a suspension, while simultaneously the cultural anchor (in time and space) of art is deterritorialized. Reading “Enframing of Art. Epokhe of Communication” and “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” side by side, we see that Lyotard wants to put forth a drift in response to drift, to incite both epokhe and anamnesis, to answer the probable and calculable of new technologies with the improbable and incalculable. One could interpret the design of Les Immatériaux, which takes the five moments of the communication of information—matériau, materiel, maternité, matière, and matrice—and disperses them into a maze as an artwork. Lyotard does not draw a linear line between these five moments but permits them to coexist, intersect, and layer on top of one another. The installation is an intervention into the theory of communication by presenting all stages, all at once, with multiple slippages between them. Like anamnesis itself, the floating movement of Les Immatériaux was not intended to teach or impart knowledge in a direct way but to present an experience that dramatizes the current condition. If, like Rajchman, one were to attempt to read the exhibition like a book, it might be similar to a “good book” Lyotard described many years earlier in his 1971 text Discours, figure: A good book, in order to give free rein to truth in its aberration, would be a book where linguistic time (the time in which signification evolves, the time of reading) would itself be deconstructed—a book the reader could dip into anywhere, in any order: a book to be grazed.37

Les Immatériaux and the experience of a postmodern temporality In an interview promoting Les Immatériaux for Flash Art in March 1985, Lyotard states that one primary motive in the exhibition was to dissect the impact of techno-science on the human condition without falling into a fully anthropocentric point of view:

Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 13.

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Our attempt, as you’ve put it, is to appropriate a whole series of things and try to see the problems they pose from a philosophical point of view: we’ll look at them within a context where they don’t begin by positing what the human sciences or liberal arts always begin by positing, which is to say the Human Being. It seems to me that these technologies are interesting, and at the same time so troubling, to the extent that they force us to reconsider the position of the human being in relationship to the Universe, in relationship to himself, in relationship to his traditional purposes, his recognized abilities, his identity.38

The exhibition itself is an exercise in this reconsideration of the human being’s position in relationship to new technologies but through the vantage point of the dilemma created by this new, non-anthropocentric situation. The experience of chagrin, melancholy, and unease by the visitor is a result of this scenario. We see Lyotard’s efforts to describe the influence of technoscience, and its immateriality, on human experience in the collection of talks written and delivered from 1980 to 1988, The Inhuman (originally titled in French, L’Inhuman: Causeries sur les temps). Lyotard makes clear in the introduction to The Inhuman that his use of the term “inhuman” is a reference to two simultaneous situations: the inhumanity of a system oriented toward techno-capitalist development, and the resulting circumstances of this system, which infiltrate human experience from the inside (“the soul is hostage”).39 Time—and man’s position within it—is altered by the efficiency of this development, which privileges speed and its own logic of control above all else. Rapidity becomes a goal in itself, transforming reading and writing, which occur at a faster pace, allowing little time to look backward toward the unknown. Blind to the past and propelled into preprogrammed futures, the inhuman subject loses the lived time of the present. This temporal mode colors the direction of the exhibition, which was planned and executed during the period in which he wrote The Inhuman. In his talk “Matter and Time,” delivered as part of the seminar “Matter and the Immaterials” organized in conjunction with Les Immatériaux in April 1985 and later published in The Inhuman, Lyotard turns his focus to what he Blistène, “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” 33. Jean-François Lyotard, “Introduction: About the Human,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2.

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views as a new relationality between matter and mind, one that relays a new sense of time. Arguing that the Cartesian model wherein matter and mind are distinguished no longer holds, as new technologies do not perform a break between the two, the essay sets out to elaborate a kind of “immaterialist materialism” amid technological advances such as the transformation of elements in nuclear reaction, a fact that has greatly rearranged our image of, and relation to, matter. Additionally, he finds fault with Cartesian mechanics’ dependence on human observation and its understanding of transformation as analogical to human experience and believes nuclear physics, for example, do not line up to this human-centered approach as they present another paradigm for thinking about matter.40 In order to elaborate the current position between humans and matter, Lyotard turns to points made by Henri Bergson on energy, perception, and time in his book Matter and Memory. Here, matter is thought of temporally and becomes a site of transformation, rather than existing as pure substance. Lyotard devotes a few pages to Matter and Memory to draw out these issues and relates them back to changes ushered in by techno-science. Matter is transformation, not substance in Bergson’s theory, where each “image” is a “material point in interaction … with all the other material points.”41 Mind, as an image that exists among other images, is differentiated by its position as an interval between received and executed movements.42 In Lyotard’s reading of Bergson, “we must imagine that from matter to mind there is but a difference of degree, which depends on the capacity to gather and conserve. Mind is matter which remembers its interactions, its immanence.”43 There exists continuity between mind and matter, and Lyotard uses the analogy of waves or frequencies to understand this scale. Matter, as fluid transformation, is energetic and can be mapped out in time as a wave or frequency. “Matter and Time” is thus an attempt to describe an “immaterialist materialism” responsive to the modes of relation to matter put forth by microphysics and cosmology, Jean-François Lyotard, “Matter and Time,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 37. 41 Ibid. 42 “There are then, in short, different tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life.” Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 14. 43 Lyotard, “Matter and Time,” in The Inhuman, 40. 40

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where “matter is energy and mind is contained vibration.”44 The nervous system acts as a “transformer” in this configuration, which transcribes and inscribes the rhythms of vibration around it.45 Lyotard also argues that new technologies expand the human capacity to register and memorize, therefore meaning that humans no longer possess a “monopoly of mind.”46 This point, one that is potentially provocative, can “cause joy or despair.”47 As “Matter and Time” argues, the human (and particularly the mind) is more a conduit of energy than its master, yielding a different dynamic between matter and the mind and upsetting a human-centered notion of movement found in Descartes’s definition. New technology is a sign of this shift, as it “pursues and perhaps accomplishes the modern project of becoming master and possessor. But in so doing it forces this project to reflect on itself: it disturbs and destabilizes it.”48 Mind and matter no longer operate on opposing planes but are both open and responsive to immateriality.49 The essay brings another dimension to the argument made in “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” that the “tele-graphy” of new technologies results in the cultural context becoming unmoored from time and space. If the human mind is “contained vibration” and matter is energy, the human capacity to experience and remember the present is also disrupted, as new technologies extend our capacity to memorize while operating on a scale outside of human perception.50 With this, we see yet again Lyotard’s concern regarding the way in which new technology has reconfigured the connections between matter, the mind, time, and memory. “Matter and Time” illuminates how new tools extend the human capacity for memorization (through writing and remembering) while also operating outside of a human register. This relation not only impacts how humans 46 47 48 49

Ibid., 45. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 51. “The mind of man is also part of the ‘matter’ it intends to master; and that, when suitably processed, matter can be organized in machines which in comparison may have an edge over mind… The relationship between mind and matter is no longer one between an intelligent subject with a will of his own and an inert object. They are now cousins in the family of ‘immaterials’.” Ibid. 50 “The new technologies, built on electronics and data processing, must be considered… as material extensions of our capacity to memorize, more in Leibniz’s sense than Bergson’s, given the role played in them by symbolic language as supreme ‘condenser’ of all information. These technologies show in their own way that there is no break between mind and matter, at least in its reactive functions, which we call performance-functions. They have a cortex, or a cortex-element, which has the property of being collective, precisely because it is physical and not biological.” Ibid., 43. 44 45

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relate to matter but also how they experience temporality. As stated in the introduction to The Inhuman, temporality is not influenced by techno-science on its own but rather the rationality of its development: Development imposes the saving of time. To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information that is useful afterwards, as in “rapid reading.” But writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing “within” are slow. One loses one’s time seeking time lost.51

In other words, development entails a productively expedited time. In addition, Lyotard sees that development, rooted in pure rationality, lacks a grander ambition or an idea: Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason or of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. It assimilates risks, memorizes their informational value and uses this as a new mediation necessary to its functioning. It has no necessity itself other than cosmological chance.52

Development lacks a responsibility to Enlightenment ideals, such as reason and human freedom. It is precisely this factor that Lyotard identifies as the “inhumanity of the system.” This position echoes that made in his earlier text from 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Here, he argues that new technology has changed the form and status of knowledge, which is now judged by its performance over any intrinsic value. Performance is understood as the economic value, efficiency, and programmability of knowledge. Under this rubric, culture, like the capitalist system itself, follows a principle of “optimal performance” wherein success is achieved through “maximizing output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expended in the process).”53 Thus, technical principles, in agreement with capitalism, transform culture from within toward efficiency or, to use Lyotard’s vocabulary, they push forward through development to achieve optimum performance.54 Lyotard, “Introduction: About the Human,” in The Inhuman, 3. Ibid., 7. 53 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 44. 54 “Technology is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc., but to efficiency: a technical ‘move’ is ‘good’ when it does better and/or expends less energy than another.” Ibid. 51 52

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The inhuman subject and the immaterial condition both posit that man is neither its center nor its aim. As Lyotard explains in the accompanying catalog essay for Les Immatériaux, new materials and technology question “the idea of Man as a being who works, who plans and who remembers.”55 Time rapidly and optimally moves forward according to the rationality of the system without emancipation or an idea. Writing and remembering becomes displaced by tele-graphy, which provokes a type of drift dislocated from time and space. Is this Philippe Parreno’s dream or a nightmare? Does it “cause joy or despair”56? Is it the “chagrin that surrounds the end of the modern age” or is it “the feeling of jubilation that’s connected with the appearance of something new”57? The suspension between these two poles is the experience of a postmodern temporality, a scenario that the exhibition Les Immatériaux attempts to stage and actualize.

Resistance The term “resistance” comes up in many of Lyotard’s writings within the mid-1980s, and it was also the subject of a never realized exhibition to follow Les Immatériaux. In his interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artist Philippe Parreno recounted a talk Lyotard gave in 1985 at his university, the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, in Paris. Delivered during the run of Les Immatériaux, Parreno recalls that Lyotard imagined a follow-up exhibition on the topic of resistance: Lyotard wanted to do another exhibition. Resistance. Which isn’t a good title. You immediately think about a series of moral issues. But when I met him, I understood that he meant in fact resistance in another way. In school when you study physics you are told that frictional forces are not important—the forces of two surfaces let certain axioms become uncertain. I think that’s what Resistance was supposed to be about.58

Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux,” 47. Lyotard, “Matter and Time,” in The Inhuman, 46. 57 Blistène, “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” 35. 58 Philippe Parreno and Hans Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series 14 (Cologne: Walter Konig, 2008), 17. 55 56

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The productive uncertainty described by Parreno matches the unease instigated by Les Immatériaux. In it, we see that Lyotard hopes to achieve some sort of resistance through the exhibition’s inquiry into language and temporality. Thus, not only do we see the condition and reality of the postmodern dilemma on display in the exhibition’s design and visitor experience, but Lyotard also demonstrates a means of resistance through an exhibition that was itself a work of art. What is resistance for Lyotard? He goes into the subject in his text “Gloss on Resistance” from June 21, 1985, which begins with a reading of Orwell’s 1984.59 Lyotard is interested in how the novel wields language and desire in resistance to totalitarianism and concludes with a reflection on what resistance might look like today. Through the character of Winston (and his diary) we see that writing contains an “uncontrollable contingency,” and Winston’s love of Julia reveals a desire to share experience or existence with others. In the last section of the essay, Lyotard shifts his focus from 1984 and reflects on modern-day resistance in the face of development and the waning of Enlightenment ideals, where both writing and love encourage a shared sensibility: The labor of writing is allied to the work of love, but it inscribes the trace of the initiatory event in language and thus offers to share it, if not as a sharing of knowledge, at least as a sharing of sensibility that it can and should take as communal.60

Art, such as Orwell’s 1984, bears witness to the “irremissible distress” of the impossibility of Enlightenment ideals in the face of development. Again, as explained in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge develops according to the needs of corporate and rationalized development, not emancipatory ideals that better humanity or progress. Lyotard is quick to qualify his description of resistance, reminding the reader This text appears in the collection The Postmodern Explained, which was originally titled in French Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (The Postmodern Explained to Children). Originally published (in French) in 1986, it collects letters written between 1982 and 1985 to the children of Lyotard’s friends and colleagues. The quirky nature of the project reflects Lyotard’s impatience at the time with debates around postmodernism after the publication of his book The Postmodern Condition; however, the letters themselves quite seriously address the issues raised by the notion of the postmodern. 60 Jean-François Lyotard, “Gloss on Resistance,” in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 97. 59

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that he is not calling for art to pursue a universal principle of reason or that he is unaware of the difficulty and missteps of past avant-garde movements.61 Instead, he asks that resistance be realized through art’s ability to “bear witness” to the present, while also remaining aware of thorny complications surrounding any notion of an avant-garde or universal principles given the postmodern situation. What I want to say to you is simply this: following this line does not mean shutting ourselves away in ivory towers or turning our backs on the new forms of expression bestowed on us by contemporary science and technology. It means that we use these forms in an attempt to bear witness to what really matters: the childhood of an encounter, the welcome extended to the marvel that (something) is happening, the respect for the event.62

In other words, resistance is an art that bears witness without preconception or bias, one generated not in reaction but in an almost pure relation to contemporary circumstances (like science and technology). When Lyotard speaks of the “childhood of an encounter” it is in reference to this relation, a statement that relays an innocence or vulnerability to that encounter, one that does not immediately pass judgment. If the artist or writer is tasked with “bearing witness” what is to be made of the result or reaction of their work? As mentioned previously, Lyotard values art’s ability to incite productive uncertainty and uneasiness. In a statement made during a two-day conference on postmodernism at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (ICA) in London from May 25–26, 1985, Lyotard describes this productive uncertainty more explicitly as a “disturbance” specifically in response to the culture industry: The question everybody raised was that of knowing how to introduce resistance into this culture industry. I believe that the only line to follow is to produce programs for TV, or whatever, which produce in the viewer or the client in general an effect of uncertainty and trouble. It seems to me that the thing to aim at is a certain sort of feeling or sentiment … you can produce a feeling of disturbance, in the hope that this disturbance will be followed by reflection. I think that’s the only thing one can say, and obviously it’s up Ibid., 96–7. Ibid., 97.

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to every artist to decide by what means s/he thinks s/he can produce this disturbance.63

The effect of this disturbance is a reflection prompted by sentiment. We again see the emphasis Lyotard places on the “working through” of anamnesis (such as that made in “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”) in his discussion of resistance. Art produces a non-resolved working through that is uncomfortable and generative through feeling. Its epokhe suspends the reader or viewer. Thus, one’s reaction to an artwork “bears witness” in this way, just like the work itself. Importantly, Lyotard does not seek new knowledge through resistance. In fact, his project is not about the creation of new knowledge at all but rather a continuous, unresolved working through. His talk, presented at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in April 1986, “Rewriting Modernity,” is a rejoinder and clarification of the arguments made in The Postmodern Condition. For the purpose of the discussion here, in this text he again champions the free association of working through in regard to an aesthetic response to the present condition of (post) modernity. The aesthetic grasp of forms is only possible if one gives up all pretension to master time through a conceptual synthesis. For what is in play here is not the “recognition” of the given, as Kant says, but the ability to let things come as they present themselves. Following that sort of attitude, every moment, every now is an “opening oneself to.”64

This working through is not guided by a distinct purpose or direction but by the allowance of openings for both reader and writer, artist and viewer. It bears a type of awareness and, in its most significant moments, a “breaking presence,” but not new knowledge.

Jean-François Lyotard, “Brief Reflections on Popular Culture,” in Postmodernism: ICA Documents, edited by Lisa Appignanesi (London: Free Association Books, 1989), 181–2. For a detailed report on this conference, see Glyn Banks and Hannah Vowles, “Zones of Anxiety: A Question of Post Modernity at the I. C. A., London, 25–26 May 1985,” in Studio International Issue 198, no. 1010 (1985): 38–9. 64 Lyotard, “Rewriting Modernity,” in The Inhuman, 32. This text originally appeared in the autumn 1986 issue of SubStance, and the original wording of this section is somewhat stronger: “This aesthetic access to forms is made possible only through the withdrawal of any claim to master time in a conceptual synthesis. What is at stake is not the recognition of what is given; it is the ability to let things come up, whatever they are. This attitude lets each moment, each ‘now’ be an opening.” Jean-François Lyotard, “Re-writing Modernity,” in SubStance 16, no. 3, Issue 54 (1987): 8. 63

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In the concluding statement of “Rewriting Modernity” Lyotard ends with a discussion of information technology and the threat it poses to the free association and free formation of sentiment, imagination, and feeling so integral to a working through: My last observation concerns the questions born of that spectacular introduction of what are called the new technologies into the production, diffusion, distribution and consumption of cultural commodities. Why mention the fact here? Because they are in the process of transforming culture into an industry … It seems to me what is really disturbing is much more the important assumed by the concept of the bit, the unit of information. When we’re dealing with bits, there’s no longer any question of free forms given here and now to sensibility and the imagination. On the contrary, they are units of information conceived by computer engineering and definable at all linguistic levels—lexical, syntactic, rhetorical and the rest. They are assembled into systems following a set of possibilities (a “menu”) under the control of a programmer.65

The aspect of working through which makes it so powerful—its free association—seems less likely when information technology acts as an interlocutor. His concern, again, is how information technology parses language and the overarching influence of the culture industry. As his previous statement from the ICA conference makes clear, he still possesses a belief in disturbance as a method for resistance despite the diminishment of a freely formed working through. Again, Les Immatériaux itself expresses a resistance through the unease it elicits and presents a number of examples of artists and writers speaking through or with information technology (such as the installation and publication “Épreuves d’écriture”). Lyotard’s closing thoughts in “Rewriting Modernity” bring us back to the question of an informational milieu. Like Tiziana Terranova, Bernard Stiegler, and Mark B. N. Hansen, Lyotard is concerned about the rationality and logic of information technology transforming cultural expression. Furthermore, for all of these writers, that transformation is tied up in human subjectivity and experience, where memory, perception, and communication become responsive to the means and ways of information technology. As we can see, Ibid., 34–5.

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the informational milieu is a product of the inhumanity of development’s push toward optimum performance or, in other words, the postmodern condition. Reading Lyotard alongside Terranova, Stiegler, and Hansen, the question becomes, what can or should art realize given these circumstances? It seems that Lyotard’s suggestion of a continual working through, an “anamnesic resistance,” offers the possibility of moments of “breaking presence” that draws on sensibility—moments that recall the accident or Terranova’s discussion of the random irruption of the virtual. Art can engender both anamnesis and the potential for accident. As such, it is resistance.

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Parsing Attention: Image Circulation and Affect

This chapter leads with a discussion of artists who work in the “expanded” fashion described in Chapter 1 but who have begun to specifically address images within an attention economy. A number of artists and collectives like Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, The Jogging, and Timur Si-Qin are not only generating work that continually unfolds both online and offline but are seeking to create artworks that grab the attention of the viewer on a visceral, affective level that can potentially go viral. As exemplified through both artist texts, interviews, and the work itself, we see that in addition to creating art that can expand and float through networks, artists are actively thinking about the consumption of images and objects (filtered by search optimization) within those networks by a continuously partially aware audience and attempting to articulate a responsive artwork to that scenario. In Chapter 3, Lyotard offers anamnesis, or a non-resolved working through, as a means of resistance to the pervasive, efficiency-driven logic of information technology. But how does “anamnesis” operate when, as Mark B. N. Hansen states in Chapter 2, “twenty-first-century media exercises its force by influencing how experience occurs”? Reading Lyotard alongside N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen, this chapter considers what Lyotard referred to as an “anamnesic resistance” within an attention economy informed by the networked circulation of images and its relevance for a “posthuman” (rather than “inhuman”) subject. Through both Hayles and Hansen, we see that human attention is enmeshed, embedded, and changing within its technological environment, and any artwork attempting to engage in “anamnesic resistance” would need to operate with these fluctuating modes for attention. This requires more of the artworks cited

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at the beginning of this chapter so that they can shift the behaviors of a system or, as described by Josephine Bosma and Gilbert Simondon, operate in “resonance” with the conditions of its existence, where one of those conditions is attention itself.

Image attractors: Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, The Jogging, and Timur Si-Qin Thus far, we discussed the example of “expanded internet art” or a mode of art practice that exists on and through networks, designed to float and drift as data, and continually unfolds. Chapter 1 explained how this mode of art practice disturbed the line between images and objects. Artist Mark Leckey captured this situation succinctly by stating, “There is no center, and there is no object to look at as such; there’s just this nodal network that you’re in the midst of.” Reviewing the practice of a few select artists, such as Harm van den Dorpel, Kari Altmann, and Artie Vierkant, we saw examples of artworks built to evolve and circulate within their networked environment. We described how this type of artwork is the result of a widespread technological capture of information, a situation Tiziana Terranova termed an “informational milieu” that reorients cultural production in line with the logic of informational dynamics. Within this next section, through discussions of artists and collectives Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, The Jogging, and Timur Si-Qin, we see an example of artistic practices, which are specifically a response to not only an increased focus on work that circulates online and offline but also to an attention economy guided by the commercial reality of analytics and performance on the internet. Kate Steciw’s collages, videos, and sculptures derive their imagery from online sources, which are then layered, altered, and rotated into visually arresting compositions. Trained and employed as a professional photo retoucher in fashion and advertising, Steciw is intimately aware of the means and tools used to manipulate images and the role that desire plays within the final output. In an interview, she reflects on how images and desire become conflated, stating: In a social system in which so much culturally relevant information is transmitted via images, it is in the form of images that we most often encounter the objects of our desire. The image is representational of both

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the desire and the desired, and if/when the object does materialize it is often represented and disseminated again as an image (documentation).1

In a sense, her practice is an effort to actively interrogate her skill set as a retoucher against the backdrop of Google search, photo-sharing social media platforms such as Instagram, and stock photography. The images that circulate online are not neutral entities but a product of algorithms that advance their ability to be found as well as our own drive to find them. Steciw’s practice is attempting to operate within this to and fro.2 The titles of her collages reference the search terms used to discover the images embedded within them. These images are then cut up, layered, and processed through digital compositing and printed. Depending on the composition, Steciw sometimes will layer imagery printed on adhesive paper or plexiglass on top of the digital compositions or will add sculptural elements like wheels, hooks, and chains. The decals and plexiglass generate a tangible, textural level to the digital compositions, while the wheels, hooks, and chains suggest an image in movement. Steciw says that, in general, she selects the search terms and final images used for her collages intuitively. The final compositions are kaleidoscopic and abstract, where flashes of the hem of a cloth or the surface of tire remain recognizable to the viewer, drawing them in (See Figure 4.1). Common filters and techniques used in image editing applications are also easily identifiable, such as a blurred businessman in Composition 011 (2014) (See Figure 4.2). Often, the works are presented in vibrantly painted frames that look like they, too, are Photoshopped. The works relay an awareness of the commercial reality of digitally manipulated images as they travel online from the perspective of someone whose occupation it is to make images more palatable. The video Popular Options (Yellow Diamonds in the Light) (2012)

Lucas Blalock, “A Conversation with Kate Steciw,” in Lavalette, March 5, 2012, http://www.lavalette. com/a-conversation-with-kate-steciw. 2 “The conceptual drive in the work both online and off, two dimensional and three, has a lot to do with the ways in which photography creates appetites for physical objects that are then fulfilled to varying degrees of success or failure by the objects themselves—in particular, commercially manufactured objects. In a way, I see the objects and materials I use in the sculptural work function as images themselves. Similar to the tools used in Photoshop or other editing software, many of the objects we interface with on a daily basis come with prescribed uses. I believe that hidden in these prescribed uses are assumed ideologies that through misuse, omission or recombination can be revealed, reconsidered, or at the very least, interrupted.” Yin Ho, “Artist Profile: Kate Steciw,” in Rhizome, March 28, 2012, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/mar/28/artist-profile-kate-steciw/. 1

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Figure 4.1 Kate Steciw, Composition 073a (4 × 4, Adventure, Background, Cloth, Grocery, Growth, Navy, Textile, Tire, Tuber), 2014.

Figure 4.2  Kate Steciw, Composition 011, 2014.

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reveals an anthropological thread through Steciw’s interest in search terms (See Figure 4.3). Produced in 2012, the video presents select images based on the most popular American search terms in 2011. Using a free web-based slideshow tool to assemble the images, along with a soundtrack of Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” the most searched song of 2011, the video is a unique time capsule of the year. In an accompanying artist statement, Steciw relates the cultural import of search terms: Search terms arise from a confluence of world events, individual curiosity and algorithmically generated preference; these forces come together to encapsulate a cultural phenomena in a single word or grouping of words optimized to retrieve the most relevant data. Google Search presents a crossplatform search allowing results that span media and application to deliver a plethora of information at once exhaustive and absurd (i.e. one can retrieve “shopping” results for Osama Bin Laden). The search has revolutionized the way in which we seek and receive vital cultural information.3

The images that appear in Popular Options (Yellow Diamonds in the Light)— from a portrait of the singer Amy Winehouse, to the devastation after the Tohoku earthquake in Japan, to planking—are offset by the defaults in the slideshow tool, which allow Steciw to transition from image to image using animated swirls, hearts, and fades. The clash between the kitschy effects, the images themselves, and the soundtrack is jarring. One sees a randomized parade of current events and memes bound only by their online performance, a factor promoted by skillful optimization in conjunction with the moods and desires of groupthink. The search algorithm flattens images into quantifiable content, a fact the video emphasizes through the generic style of the slideshow. Artist Katja Novitskova shares Steciw’s concern with image circulation given the influence of search algorithms and the desires of its users. Her practice, however, is not as focused on reworking images found online but in creating new sculptures that can become memes themselves. In her ongoing series Approximations (2012–ongoing), Novitskova creates three-dimensional cutouts of colorful, slick images depicting cute animals such as a sloth, “Kate Steciw: Popular Options (Yellow Diamonds in the Light),” Press Release from the exhibition at KLAUSGALLERY.net, January 31–February 13, 2012, http://www.klausgallery.net/ebooks/steciw. html.

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Figure 4.3  Kate Steciw, Popular Options (Yellow Diamonds in the Light), 2012 (still).

nuzzling giraffes, a pudgy manatee, and a baby calf (see Figure 4.4). Not unlike LOL cats or YouTube videos of sleeping pandas, these images taken from search engines have an immediate, affective impact on the viewer. They can also operate as camera-ready props for the gallery goer to take selfies with and then repost those images to their Instagram and Facebook accounts. In this way, Novitskova’s sculptures are sets attuned to their own circulation. Unlike Steciw, she is not generating her own visual vocabulary to dissect or rework these images but rather momentarily takes them offline to put them online once again. Novitskova claims that her decision to use adorable animals has another intention as well, to forefront the natural within the technological. As she explains in a group interview for Mousse Magazine on the theme of “TechnoAnimism,” she sees the instinctual impulse to coo over a cutout giraffe as part of a long tail of codeterminant evolution: The awareness of “things acting and evolving” on their own is one of the main inspirations in my work. Somehow I like to start with a cosmology. The current scientific understanding of our world is that innate properties

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Figure 4.4  Katja Novitskova, Approximation II, 2012. Courtesy the Aldala Collection of Diamond-Newman Fine Arts LLC.

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of matter allowed it to self-organize into galaxies, organic life, dinosaurs, humans and eventually via us into books, microchips and digital images. Life is a never-ending run of form-finding procedures based on variability and selection, both sexual and environmental. Our modern civilization is an emergent result of the survival challenges our ancestors had been facing for millions of years. This cosmology allows me to look at human-made artifacts like computers, consumer brands, and the expanding digital environments as forms equally material with rocks, trees and animals, co-existing in complex ecologies of matter and value.4

By taking an image of an animal offline in a sculpture, and presenting it in such a way that it can easily go back online again, Novitskova attempts to make this connection between the human-made and the natural. She also uses her evolutionary argument to naturalize the persuasive influence of brands and commerce in a way that has troubled some.5 Novitskova sees her artwork as part of a much larger “cosmological soup,” where some images can take off or take hold due to the instinctive psychological impulses of the viewer. While Novitskova tries to make memes with Approximations, the art collective The Jogging actually succeeds in creating images that heavily trend outside of the art context. The Jogging is a collectively authored Tumblr site, begun in 2009 by artists Brad Troemel and Lauren Christensen. The constant stream of images, videos, and animated GIFs posted to the site are witty, irreverent, and surreal. One of their most popular posts, featuring a piece of bacon in a hair straightener, received over 40,000 notes, a calculation of the times the post was either liked or reblogged by other Tumblr users. Each post is accompanied by a tagline similar to an artwork’s object label within an exhibition, with a title, year, materials, and an abstract symbol that links back to the author’s own site. Thus, HAIR STRAIGHTENER USED TO COOK INDIVIDUAL PIECE OF BACON was dated 2012, described as a “performance” and attributed to Aaron Graham. Beyond the reblogs and likes, the image by

Lauren Cornell, “Techno-Animism,” in Mousse Magazine no. 37, http://moussemagazine.it/articolo. mm?id=941. 5 “Commerce, similar to biology, is based on selection and competition where environment and attraction play a crucial role. Brands are real, singular entities with their own histories and capacities. Although extensions of ourselves, they have material bodies, they impact our imaginations and emotions. Commerce has become a huge ecological and geological force, and today the Internet is where it is culturally liquefied in images, in social and financial transactions.” Ibid. 4

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itself surfaced on the humor site College Humor and the user-submitted news site Reddit. There are a number of rotating contributors, and a means for readers to submit their own posts, but artist Brad Troemel has become a default spokesperson for the project and authored a number of essays describing the intent. In his essay for The New Inquiry, “The Accidental Audience,” he explains what it’s like to produce art for an audience who may not recognize it as such. In it, he reflects not only on the reaction The Jogging has received but what it indicates for authorship, new art audiences, and democratic art practices. By presenting perplexing, humorous, and strange images in a large volume to a diverse audience, many of the images that appear in The Jogging are eventually picked up and repurposed. In many instances, images become stripped of their context online, and authorship or provenance is ignored. Troemel terms this “image anarchism” and explains that it is a position where intellectual property is not seen as property at all and one that stems from file sharing and extends to decontextualized Tumblr posts.6 It is also partially a result of online users becoming prosumers, who both consume and make images. Constant appropriation is key to online dialog, a fact that The Jogging contributors are no doubt aware. In engaging an audience of prosumers, The Jogging’s style and format have drawn comparisons to forums like There I Fixed It and 4chan’s/b/board.7 Troemel sees The Jogging as an instance of popular, if not populist, art. In “The Accidental Audience,” Troemel recounts the general reactions to the Tumblr, from confusion, to mocking, to anger. But it is within these wavering emotions and responses that he sees an opportunity for art and asks the following: For artists using social media like Tumblr, the question is not whether their involvement constitutes an act of curation or artistic production, but whether the specificity of those aims (curating, art making) are tenable according to their present definitions when placed in front of audiences

Brad Troemel, “The Accidental Audience,” in The New Inquiry, March 14, 2013, http://thenewinquiry. com/essays/the-accidental-audience/. 7 Rob Walker, “The Jogging: A Tumblr at the Intersection of Buzzfeed, 4chan and Weirdo Experimental Art,” in Yahoo News, October 13, 2013, http://news.yahoo.com/jogging-tumblr-art-wtf-181450893. html. 6

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who hold such wide ranging motivations for their own spectatorship. At what point do artists using social media stop making art for the idealized art world audience they want and start embracing the new audience they have? To a certain extent, Jogging has attempted to do this by downplaying authorship, maintaining a post rate for original content that’s as fast as other Tumblrs’ image-reblogging, and producing works that draw inspiration from general Web content.8

Troemel sees an occasion to speak to a new audience, while also putting forth something that remains “other” and unfamiliar. At the same time, the strange juxtapositions of objects that have become The Jogging’s signature now seem reminiscent of viral marketing campaigns; think of Wieden + Kennedy’s bizarre Old Spice commercials and the genre of advertisements that have come after it. As Troemel explains, the rapid output of The Jogging is reflected in the title of the Tumblr itself: “The name Jogging refers to a work flow. Constantly moving, and not really focusing on any one thing, but rather to just continue forward.”9 In another text for The New Inquiry, “Athletic Aesthetics,” he explains the need for artists to persistently produce content in an age of competitive viewership online. The focus shifts from singularity of individual artworks to a cult around the artist’s brand, which is strengthened by consistent output. The Jogging’s frequent posts are an example of this practice, but Troemel also refers to artists like Nick Faust who posts multiple photo albums of his Photoshopped images to Facebook each day. He explains that in the era of social media, fandom is expressed directly through likes and shares, such that viewers feel an investment in the artist. This immediate approval (or disapproval) propels the artist to produce more. This results in an audience supporting the brand of an artist, rather than individual works, where “the artist’s personality becomes the sellable good.”10 In an attitude that in some ways echoes Novitskova’s, Troemel argues that artists should embrace the attention economy fully, incorporating its immediacy and rapid production within their practice.

Troemel, “The Accidental Audience.” Walker, “The Jogging.” 10 Brad Troemel, “Athletic Aesthetics,” in The New Inquiry, May 10, 2013, http://thenewinquiry.com/ essays/athletic-aesthetics/. 8 9

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For an artist like Timur Si-Qin, the popularity of certain images online over others is a demonstration of an older, biological impulse. His work is an effort to mine those images in order to seek out how they reflect cultural, biological, economic, and material tendencies. In a text written for Artforum in relation to his installation for the 2014 Taipei Biennial, Si-Qin explains: I’m interested in the way commercial images reveal the processes by which humans interpret and respond to the world around them—these are the fingerprints of our cultural image-search algorithms. The interesting question is no longer whether or not the image is a construction, but rather in what ways this process is structured. Common and repeated “solutions” to commercial imagery—cheesy stock photos, pop music, and formulaic Hollywood movies—are all ingrained modes of culture that can tell us something about its materiality and tendencies.11

While he is primarily focused on the affective quality of commercial images, there’s an acknowledgment that this extends to all images. Commercial images, such as stock photography, are easier fodder for his research as they are specifically designed to captivate and sell, but in an age of meme culture, all images have an opportunity to gain a response and go viral. Si-Qin elaborates a theory of “image attractors” initially in conjunction with his 2013 exhibition Basin of Attraction at the Bonner Kunstverein (see Figure 4.5). The installation consisted of stock photos of tomatoes, coffee beans, and a young woman, presented on lightweight PVC and aluminum structures normally used in trade fairs. In front of this display, Si-Qin placed 3D-printed Paleolithic hominid fossils on pedestals, whose surfaces were covered with camouflage, supermarket advertising, or cosmic nebula under a clear case. In a text of the same name, he explains that his practice is an attempt to seek out attractors within a system. Referencing Manuel DeLanda, he defines the meaning of an “attractor” and how art possesses that functionality: The technical definition of an attractor from its origins in mathematics is the set towards which the state of a dynamical system evolves over time … It is attractors within the complex systems in which art is imbedded, that give rise to thematic patterns: “The key is to think of phase space as a space Timur Si-Qin, “500 Words,” in Artforum September 9, 2014, http://www.artforum.com/words/ id=48153.

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Figure 4.5  Installation View of “Basin of Attraction” at Bonner Kunstverein September 10–November 10, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.

of possibilities for a dynamical system (whether geological, biological or social) and attractors as special places in this space that trap systems and hence reduce the number of possible behaviors.” While it may not be possible or even very useful to make a phase space diagram of the systems an artwork is imbedded in, it would not be a stretch of imagination to suggest that attractors do exist in such systems and are deeply relevant. For if all complex systems have under-the-hood patterns, structures and tendencies, then the complex systems of culture, history and cognition would also not be exempt.12

Through this statement, Si-Qin is essentially arguing for two related applications of the concept of an “attractor” to art. One, the attractor is an element that can shift the overall behavior of a system. Two, an attractor builds upon tendencies or “thematic patterns” that already exist within that system. Si-Qin’s work with stock photography attempts to create an attractor by placing commercial Timur Si-Qin, “Basin of Attraction,” 2011, self-published: http://timursiqin.com/2011/ basinofattraction.html.

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photography outside of its normal usage in advertising and dropping it in the contemporary art context. By selecting stock photos depicting popular themes, such as a woman’s face, he reveals thematic patterns that are already apparent within that system. Thus, there is a convergence between creating an attractor that can change the system, while also tapping into patterns already apparent within that system. This is the conceptual mode underlying Si-Qin’s practice. Si-Qin’s understanding of an “image attractor” is directly related to his reading of Manuel DeLanda. Si-Qin has an ongoing dialog with the philosopher, and he worked with DeLanda on a publication in 2012 entitled “Manuel DeLanda: In Conversation with Timur Si-Qin.” Within this conversation, SiQin discussed the notion of a phase transition and dynamical systems central to his discussions of image attractors and asks the question, “Do you foresee current societies approaching any critical thresholds? If so can you make any predictions on what those future states may resemble?” DeLanda responds with a reflection on the importance of connectivity in critical thresholds and cites the internet as possessing a “kind of connectivity … that has no precedent in human history.”13 Through Si-Qin’s read of DeLanda, he models culture as a phase space within a larger dynamic system, where art acts as an attractor that can shift the behavior of the system.14 He relies on a mathematical theory of change as a framework for understanding how an artwork corresponds to a system. By essentially creating memes, the other artists and collectives discussed in this section—Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, and The Jogging—cite an understanding of the term that can be traced back to etymology of the word “meme” itself. Novitskova argues that there are evolutionary, genetic impulses that underlie the magnetism of certain memes, while Troemel sees The Jogging’s unexpected juxtapositions as an “other” that demands attention through surprise and Steciw also “others” by repurposing the most Timur Si-Qin, Manuel De Landa: In Conversation with Timur Si-Qin (Berlin: Societe, 2012), 3–4. DeLanda is himself importing the concept of the “attractor” from Deleuze. In his book on Deleuze’s concept of virtuality, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, in Chapter 1, “Mathematics of the Virtual: Manifolds, Vector Fields, and Transformation Groups,” DeLanda stresses that while the attractor may sway a dynamical system as a “sphere of influence,” it is never actualized: “The trajectories in this space always approach an attractor asymptotically, that is, they approach it indefinitely close but never reach it. This means that unlike trajectories, which represent the actual states of objects in the world, attractors are never actualized.” Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002), 31.

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searched images online. The etymology of the word “meme” goes back to Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene where he made an analogy between a unit of cultural transmission and a gene. Like the inheritance of a gene, a meme passes along a cultural trait. Dawkins provides “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches” as instances of such cultural traits.15 Memes, understood as internet memes, travel in a similar fashion. A concept, image, or activity spreads, from person to person online. The analogy of the meme, and its etymological root in genetics, effects how one understands the transmission of culture. Stronger or weaker traits persevere, permitting the inheritance of certain traits. In attempting to create artworks as memes, these artists inadvertently work within this particular definition of the word and its implicit model of change. All the artists discussed in this section are invested in the idea that their images are shifting a system as they traverse the networks that enable their movement. Whether they import a model of change from mathematics such as Si-Qin and envision the artwork as an attractor, or from genetics, such as Steciw, Novitskova, and The Jogging, and view the artwork as a meme, these artists are attempting to grapple with what their images are doing and how they can affect an evolution or change within the systems they inhabit. This returns us to the symbiotic ontology described in Chapter 2 as a pervasive and normative state. Again, artists are working within and not outside the conditions described, a fact that brings about questions regarding their work to aide or disrupt or exist otherwise within the cultural dominant of a symbiotic ontology. The examples provided in this subsection suggest a new development for expanded internet art. In addition to creating works intended to continuously unfold within network, we now see works that operate with the internet’s attention economy in mind and thus strive to create an affective resonance with the viewer. One is reminded of an excerpt from the essay discussed in Chapter 1 by Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” where Steyerl declares: It has become clear that images are not objective or subjective renditions of a preexisting condition, or merely treacherous appearances. They are rather Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Meme.”

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nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports, shaping and affecting people, landscapes, politics, and social systems.16

The genre of circulationism, as Steyerl termed it within her article, sees artists taking hold of the circulation of images in order to understand the patterns and tendencies of affect in an attention economy. Whether it’s the drive that draws one toward a display of ripe tomatoes, such as in Timur Si-Qin’s work, or the top images retrieved by a search term in Steciw’s, it becomes quite clear that the internet is not an impartial space but one deeply influenced by commerce and desire. In another section of the same article, Steyerl declares, “The all-out internet condition is not an interface but an environment.”17 As newly mobilized images act as migrating nodes with increasing sway, Steyerl’s

Figure 4.6 AIDS 3D, Outperformance Options ATM Partition, 2012, UV printed images from Contemporary Art Daily on perforated window film, SOLYX Ice Galaxy window film, SOLYX Cut Glass Drops window film, safety glass, stainless steel. Courtesy of the artists and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” in e-flux journal, no. 49 (November 2013), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/. 17 Ibid. 16

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article and indeed the practices exemplified in this section require a greater reflection on the change these images enact, as well as question whether they work as a strategy or as a symptom of the networks that enable them.

Attractor images: Anamnesis and the posthuman subject An artwork by the arts collective AIDS 3D (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas), Outperformance Options ATM Partition (2012) takes images from the popular blog Contemporary Art Daily, which aggregates installation shots from museum and gallery shows around the world and prints them on glass ATM dividers (See Figure 4.6). The joke is straightforward but revealing for the art market in the 2010s—artworks gain cache (and potentially real monetary value) depending on their online viewership, a reality these artists forefront by printing the Contemporary Art Daily images on actual ATM partitions. The title Outperformance Options ATM Partition signals the market aspect, suggesting that the artwork itself can operate much like a stock, one inflated or deflated by its performance online. The blog Contemporary Art Daily and its strong influence on contemporary art practice received a long treatment in art historian Michael Sanchez’s essay for Artforum “2011: Art and Transmission.” Sanchez coined the term “meme art” to suggest that artists have begun to create work that looks good on an iPad or laptop screen, where the majority of their audience will encounter the work. As evidenced on Contemporary Art Daily, Sanchez argues that artists are creating work for its documentation and subsequent audience online, over its experience in space. For example, he cites the predominance of gray and gray brown paintings as a direct response to the fact that it looks good on screen, where most people will see the work. He also outlines the signature Contemporary Art Daily “look” of artworks displayed in clean, white cubes with high-wattage fluorescent lighting. This exhibition design, which creates both crisp professional installation shots as well as optimal lighting for on-the-fly iPhone shots by visitors, is now pervasive in many galleries. For Sanchez, these developments demonstrate that “the informational form and the affective content of contemporary art are optimized for an apparatus that is increasingly dominated by

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feedback between the iPhone interface, the feed, and the aggregator, not the institutional structures of the gallery and museum.”18 While Sanchez is somewhat ambivalent about the impact and stakes of “meme art,” as he describes it, Brian Droitcour is more direct about why artwork posing for Tumblr, Instagram, or Contemporary Art Daily falls flat. In his essay “The Perils of Post-Internet Art” in Art in America he takes on the term “Post-Internet Art” and charts how it originated with artists such as Marisa Olson and Guthrie Lonergan earnestly thinking through the internet’s impact on art at large, beyond the online context, to a genre of practice where “installation shots” are “presented as art.” Gravitating toward the later category, galleries in the 2010s have codified the term “Post-Internet” to create a narrative to sell art. Droitcour takes issue with this development, and citing a few of the artists discussed in this chapter such as Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin, his argument is simple—just because an artwork looks good on screen does not mean it has anything to say about the internet, technology, or networks, even if it purports to.19 The essay is a provocation (and intentionally so) where Droitcour asks that art actually engage its networked condition, while also challenging the art market itself.20 If Brian Droitcour chastises “Post-Internet Art” for a weak politics, critic Ben Davis sees political memes as outpacing the typical domain of art in his essay for ArtNet “After Ferguson: A New Protest Culture’s Challenge to Art.” Reviewing the political memes of 2014, such as the Twitter hashtag campaign #YesAllWomen, which launched awareness about misogyny in the wake of Michael Sanchez, “2011: Art and Transmission,” in Artforum, 51 no. 10, (Summer 2013): 301. “Post-Internet art preserves the white cube to leech off its prestige. The same supporters might also say that Post-Internet art offers a critique of how images of art circulate online in service of the art market. But unless the artist does something to make the documentation strange and emphasize the difference between the work’s person online and its presence in the gallery (and here I’m thinking of Vierkant’s smudged, tinted and distorted shots of his ‘image Objects,’ 2011–ongoing) it’s hard for me to believe that anything close to a critique is happening.” Brian Droitcour, “The Perils of PostInternet Art,” in Art in America, November 2014, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/newsfeatures/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/. 20 Droitcour refers to Josephine Bosma’s definition of net art, explored in Chapter 1, in order to elaborate what he thinks “Post Internet Art” should become: “Bosma’s definition of Net art—which rejects medium specificity, the idea that Net art only happens in a browser—is rather close to the definitions of Post-Internet art found in the writings of Olson and McHugh. But her emphatic disinterest in the art world’s institutions puts her far from what Post-Internet art has become. Bosma is an impassioned advocate of engagement in online communities, and the Net art she champions is never going to set auction records or adorn the homes of top collectors. Post-Internet art, by contrast, is wholly compatible with art markets and art-world detachment—an “over it” attitude signaled by “Post-.” Ibid. 18 19

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the Isla Vista shootings and the photos of “die-ins” after the Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, Davis sees “powerful vehicles of collective experience … that traditional forms of culture can’t top.”21 Davis wants artists to take a cue from protest culture in order to not only to create memes as resonant as these successful grassroots social media campaigns but also to “to find a new language to respond in present cultural conditions of omnipresent urgency.”22 When events like this arise, these campaigns create an opportunity for a greater discussion about issues like misogyny or systemic racism, and Davis would like to see artists become part of that dialog. His essay is less concerned with the art market of any level, or an aesthetics that either reflects or rejects its whims, but rather would like to see artists create “vehicles of collective experience” that can galvanize the public on urgent political issues. Davis and Droitcour are both wrestling with the politics of memes and what artists can learn from them. Droitcour wants artists to thoughtfully engage the technological circumstances that enable the movement of images, while Davis is asking for artists to create memes that are politically provocative. Whether the focus is on the tenor of die-ins on social media or the allure of Contemporary Art Daily’s spotless installation shots, what drives the acceleration of certain images over others? At the heart of these discussions is an enduring question regarding attention and the reception of art vis-à-vis new technologies. In the last chapter, Lyotard offered anamnesis, or a non-resolved working through, as a means of resistance to the logic and optimization of information technology that limits free association. But, as we shall see, technology’s influence on attention itself has received a deeper treatment by theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen, who are both greatly inspired by Simondon’s model for individuation. Reviewing Hayles and Hansen, and their work on attention for a posthuman subject, one might ask how Lyotard’s “anamnesic resistance” could potentially operate within an attention economy and with viewers who are themselves posthuman subjects. Lyotard’s concept of “anamnesis” builds upon certain assumptions about a new form of subjectivity, which he has a described as the “inhuman.” For the introduction to his collection of essays and talks, The Inhuman: Reflections Ben Davis “After Ferguson: A New Protest Culture’s Challenge to Art,” in ArtNet, December 16, 2014, http://news.artnet.com/art-world/after-ferguson-a-new-protest-cultures-challenge-to-art-194601. 22 Ibid. 21

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on Time, he discusses how the optimization of development is rapidly constraining the human being to the inhuman. Furthermore, this development is taking over “what is ‘proper’ to humankind” such as education, language, and time.23 The experience at risk of being sacrificed by the inhuman is that of “childhood.” This term is used as an umbrella to describe the unstructured time, free association, learning, and imagination associated with childhood— experiences that Lyotard claims are at risk with the takeover of development, which parses language and restructures time toward optimization. Within this framework, one finds Lyotard’s assumptions about what technologies do to human awareness and, importantly, his concept of an ideal human subject who retains the child’s curiosity, openness, and inquisitiveness. Anamnesis itself is described by Lyotard as a “breaking presence” that is never inscribed nor memorable. In other words, as he discussed in “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy,” anamnesis is an experience unknown to “breaching” or inscribed cultural memory rooted in time and place and “scanning” or delocalized remembering. In its most basic form, Lyotard is seeking to rehumanize the inhuman, not as a return to a previous state, which he deems impossible, but in the random fits and spurts of a “breaking presence.” Literature, writing, and art are seen as the vehicles in which this can occur, ones that would turn toward the elements of a “childhood” that outline Lyotard’s ideal human subject. Lyotard defines technology in broad strokes as the behemoth “techno-science” that propels the efficiency and optimization of “development” or what he’s termed the “computerization of society” in other texts.24 Theorists N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen are much more specific about technology’s logic and function in their analyses, and perhaps the insights from Lyotard’s “inhuman” could be complimented by reviewing Hayles’s and

“The ‘talks’ collected here—they are all commissioned lectures, mostly destined for a nonprofessional audience, and the rest for confiding—have neither the function nor the value of a manifesto or treatise. The suspicion they betray (in both sense of this word) is simple, although double: what if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?”Jean-François Lyotard, “Introduction: About the Human,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 2. 24 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 7. 23

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Hansen’s arguments about a “posthuman” subject.25 Both Hayles and Hansen ask what human consciousness looks like when it is extended by technology, and one might ask how Lyotard’s anamnesis could be rethought for this posthuman subject. In her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles describes the posthuman subject. She argues that the Enlightenment liberal subject has been pushed aside in the wake of virtual technologies and that the autonomous self with exterior boundaries associated with this notion of subjectivity is incongruous with this new situation. In her view, the emergence of a posthuman subjectivity is a positive turn, and it can be defined as a subjectivity that is part of a distributed system, one in which an embodied awareness is extended by new technologies, expanding cognitive capabilities. In order to chart the advent of this scenario, Hayles recounts how information became immaterial through paradigmatic changes in science coming from information theory, the study of artificial life, cybernetics, and autopoiesis, and the creation of the cyborg, as both a technological artifact and cultural icon.26 Central to her argument is that, with the emergence of systems theory, there has been a shift from understanding the human within the framework of presence/absence to pattern/randomness. A posthuman subjectivity posits a divide between pattern/randomness, where meaning is construed not from a stable origin but an effort to seek out patterns in chaos. In contrast, the presence/absence position entails a stable origin and a direct, linear input of In his essay “Re-programming Lyotard: From the Postmodern to the Posthuman Subject” author William Martin also attempts to update Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman through the guise of the posthuman. His argument, however, is weighted toward a re-evaluation of Lyotard’s read of Habermas. In it, Martin argues that the privatization of knowledge as information does not lead to the demise of the public sphere (an argument of The Postmodern Condition) but rather leads to a new configuration that increases the possibilities of public communication as users of information and communication technologies become directly socialized by these new technologies. “According to the double meaning of the concept of the inhuman, the expansion for the information network can either bring about the privatization of scientific knowledge or the publicization of interpersonal communication. In truth, the two possibilities are never simply opposed, but rather interwoven with one another… Rather than simply taking a positive or negative view of the role of the information network as socializing post-human subjects, I would suggest that the technology of the inscription remains essentially ambiguous, either contributing to the rationalization of society (through the development of communicational infrastructure) or to the unification of the life-world (through the formation of interpersonal networks and virtual communities).” William Martin, “Re-programming Lyotard: From the Postmodern to the Posthuman Subject,” in Parrhesia no. 8 (2009): 68. 26 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2. 25

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information or, as Hayles terms it, “front-loaded meaning into the system.”27 Presence/absence assumes that the human is either there or not there, whereas pattern/randomness allows for a larger set of possibilities that can potentially yield significance or pattern. Furthermore, the posthuman advances alternatives to problems inherent to a liberal humanist subject, opening the door to the following transformations, “emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject’s manifest destiny to dominate and control nature.”28 Coming out of the technological, scientific, social, and cultural conditions of the information age, posthuman subjectivity presents new grounds for thinking of the human in relation to new technologies. Human consciousness is also reconsidered under Hayles’s analysis. In a key passage, she states, “When the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on the splice rather than being imperiled by it.”29 A posthuman subject allows an expanded understanding of cognition, one extended through technology, becoming a “distributed cognition.” In many ways building upon her work in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, her book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis considers the future of the digital humanities in regard to “epigenetic” changes, which are changing how we read and decipher information. The book champions a Comparative Media Studies approach to scholarship, which does away with an assumed divide between print based and digital by exploring the synergies of both. This discussion is an entrée to one of the main threads within the book, that of a coevolution of technics and humans or a “technogenesis” where the human neurological framework adapts to environmental changes or “epigenetic” change. She argues that the Comparative Media Studies approach is imperative because of the changing modalities for reading, particularly the rise of “hyper

Ibid., 285. Ibid., 288. 29 Ibid., 290. 27 28

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reading,” which is a result of a “hyper attention” developed as a strategy to quickly move through massive amounts of information.30 Hayles’s How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis significantly advances the concept of “distributed cognition” central to her elaboration of a posthuman subjectivity. Humans and machines engage in a multilayered, syncopated dance, informed by one another. Within that, cognition is not a stable entity but is in flux and complex.31 Using Simondon’s notion of an ensemble as grounding, Hayles elaborates what attention looks like for the posthuman subject: Attention is not, however, removed or apart from the technological changes it brings about. Rather, it is engaged in a feedback loop with the technological environment within which it operates through unconscious and nonconscious processes that affect not only the background from which attention selects but also the mechanisms of selection themselves. Thus technical beings and living beings are involved in continuous reciprocal causation in which both groups change together in coordinated and indeed synergistic ways.32

The question is how we adapt alongside, and with, machines. Attention is not only a result, but also a factor, within that evolution. Through this text, Hayles furthers her discussion regarding the “distributed cognition” of the posthuman This question of the magnitude of information and its legibility to consciousness is a subject Hayles has addressed in other texts. Citing the predominance of information-intensive environments and technologies like RFID, in her essay “RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments” she makes the point that “sub-cognitive and non-cognitive processes” are “not just as contributing to conscious thought” but are “themselves… acts of interpretation and meaning.” This underscores the ethical weight of these sub-cognitive and noncognitive processes, and their contribution to interpretation and meaning, a point that serves as a prelude to her argument in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis and Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). N. Katharine Hayles, “RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments,” in Theory, Culture & Society 2009 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), 26 no. (2–3): 68. 31 Hayles references Nigel Thrift’s concept of a technological unconscious in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, a text also mentioned by Hansen in “System-Environment Hybrids.” Like Hayles and Hansen, Thrift recognizes a fundamental shift in the computerization of the environment or as he calls it “the standardization of space.” In Thrift’s essay cited by both Hayles and Hansen, “Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position” he describes a new “technological unconscious” that through its unilateral prevalence yields a performativity to infrastructures, while also informing how a position toward the subject is constructed. See Nigel Thrift, “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 175–90. 32 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis and Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 103–4. 30

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by elaborating the constantly changing assemblages that enmesh attention, as well as cognition overall.33 Like Hayles, Mark B. N. Hansen is working toward an understanding of a technologically extended human conscious. Through this, he is not asserting an ideal human subject but rather elaborating the complexification of human consciousness through and with a technologically advanced environment. Hansen calls out Hayles as a direct inspiration for this work, and in his two essays on his concept of a system-environment hybrid (SEH), “SystemEnvironment Hybrids” and “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st Century Media,” he describes how humans (or the “human bodymind”) unavoidably rely on the agency of informational complex environments to achieve cognitive tasks. This distributed extension of consciousness into the environment puts forth a “technical distribution” as humans and machines become entangled. He argues that a separation exists between operationality and awareness, such that when we act within smart environments our actions are coupled with computational agents functioning beyond our awareness. This offers a mixed form of agency, as Hansen explains: In a world increasingly supported by twenty-first-century media, the direct impact of media on human experience is thus massively overshadowed by its indirect impact; accordingly, instead of furnishing prostheses that expand experiential capacities beyond the various inbuilt limits of our sense organs and memory, today’s media directly impact the very sensible continuum, the source of potentiality, from which delimited, agent- or faculty-centered higher-order experience springs.34

Humans remain operationally blind to the microprocesses of the technologically enabled environments they inhabit, while remaining informed In an article by Hayles, “Speculative Aesthetics and Object-oriented Inquiry (OOI)” begins to articulate an aesthetics with this distributed cognition in mind. Hayles asks, “What would it mean, then, to imagine an aesthetics in which the human is decentred and inanimate objects, incapable of sense perceptions as we understand them, are included in aesthetic experience?” She proposes that in order to sidestep the inherent anthropocentricism of traditional aesthetics, rooted in human perception, one should call upon human imagination to render a “more nuanced understanding of the world as comprised of a multitude of world views, including those of other biological organisms, human-made artifacts, and inanimate objects.” N. Katherine Hayles, “Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (OOI),” in Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century, edited by Ridvan Askin, Paul J. Ennis, Andreas Hägler, and Philipp Schweighauser (May 2014): 158–79. 34 Mark B. N. Hansen, “Engineering Pre-Individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st Century Media,” in SubStance #129, 41, no. 3 (2012): 56. 33

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by them. Attention or awareness is thus complicated by this push and pull between a human bodymind and its smart environment.35 Hayles, Hansen, and Lyotard are all attempting to account for a subjectivity informed by information technology. That said, echoes of a liberal human subject persist in Lyotard’s analysis of an inhuman, in that he hopes anamnesis can rehumanize (to an extent) the subject by eliciting the features of childhood. In contrast, Hayles and Hansen would offer that the human has fundamentally shifted toward a posthuman, barring the possibility of a return to a previous understanding of a human. Rather, they describe how cognition itself has fundamentally shifted toward a hybrid between human and machine and how cultural expression and transmission move within that. Despite this difference, the quality of non-resolution within anamnesis and its random occurrence can still carry over to Hayles and Hansen’s understanding of a posthuman subject. Anamnesis is a “breaking presence”—an experience that “explores the senses of the given present”—but in the case of a posthuman subject, those senses are extended and multilayered.36 Hansen maintains that twenty-first-century media directly impacts the sensible continuum, again influencing not only how experience occurs but memory as well. Hayles recognizes attention as a feedback loop or continuous reciprocal causation between technical and living beings. Thus, if a posthuman subject “explores the senses of the given present” through an anamnesic experience, they are doing so unconsciously and consciously with technology. Anamnesis allows an opening outside of a synthesis, but Hayles and Hansen seem to say that our experiences are already opened up. One is reminded of the questions Lyotard concludes with in his text “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”:

Hansen, in his book Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, also explains how in addition to cognition, subjectivity itself becomes distributed: “More precisely, Crandall’s work exemplifies and performatively elicits how such propensity breaks fundamentally with the core phenomenological commitment to the principle of subjective transcendence: the subjectivity it extracts from the propensity of the total situation is not a subjectivity that withdraws from the world, but one that expresses the creativity of the total situation understood exclusively in and of the universe. This subjectivity, which may be ‘anchored’ in a human bodymind, does not however belong to that bodymind. Indeed, far from constituting the interiority of a transcendental subject, this subjectivity is radically distributed across the host of circuits that connect the bodymind to the environment as a whole, or, more precisely that broker its implication within the greater environment.” Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 253. 36 Jean-François Lyotard, “Anamnesis of the Visible,” in Qui Parle 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1999): 23. 35

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The whole question is this: is the passage [of a resistance to synthesis—Ed] possible, will it be possible with, or allowed by, the new mode of inscription and memorization that characterizes the new technologies? Do they not impose syntheses, and syntheses conceived still more intimately in the soul than any earlier technology has done? But by that very fact, do they not also help to refine our anamnesic resistance?37

The discussions by Hayles and Hansen indicate how these syntheses “refine” anamnesic resistance through multi- (and micro-) layered processes that shape the attention and, moreover, the cognition of a posthuman subject. If an artwork were to engage in an “anamnesic resistance” it would need to operate in tandem with an attention that is enmeshed, embedded, and changing. Following Droitcour, this means that the artwork must not only be more responsible to its networked condition, but with a nod to Steyerl, it should also factor in the energetic and material components of circulationism. As The Jogging demonstrated, creating memes is easy. The difficult part is to consider how an image engages the unconscious and conscious ways attention is formed and influenced by the feedback loop within a technological environment, as Hayles has described. In How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, Hayles considers specifically how literary works can successfully navigate changing modes of attention, which could offer a model for critical visual artworks. She points to the Steve Tomasula’s electronic novel and downloadable app TOC, which is a patchwork narrative interweaving different short stories on the passage of time through a combination of sound, video, images, animation, and text. One of the main menus “The Island” is split into the past, present and future, thus bringing a temporal logic to structure the narrative itself. Hayles finds in TOC a “circularity of a work that both produces and is produced by its aesthetic possibilities.”38 In an argument fed through Simondonian logic, Hayles seeks literary examples that incorporate a heterogeneity that allows for continuous transformation of the work through the conditions of its existence. In another section she states that TOC gestures toward a new context where “a

Jean-François Lyotard, “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 57. 38 Hayles, How We Think, 121. 37

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work that is more abstract than concretized … consequently possesses a large reservoir of possibilities that may be actualized as the technological milieu progresses and as technical objects proliferate.”39 She proposes that a work take its technical supports into account, while remaining open to interpretation and translation. It seems that she champions artworks that function similar to a malleable musical score, which can be played and reinterpreted over time.40 One might read Hayles’s analysis and ask how this translates to visual art. Meme-like by design, the artworks mentioned at the beginning of this chapter offer opportunities for reinterpretation, while largely not addressing their own technical condition. Hayles might conclude that these artworks should do more on that end and actively include or work toward a “reservoir of possibilities” that engage their role in attention as well as their own technical conditions. Hayles’s account of the productive possibilities of creative expression can be traced back to Catherine Malabou’s What We Should Do with Our Brain. Hayles considers quite seriously Malabou’s question “What should we do so that consciousness of the brain does not purely and simply coincide with the spirit of capitalism?” Thus, when Hayles speaks of feedback loops for attention, she is deeply aware of how a “spirit of capitalism” can potentially influence that construction. She refers to what Malabou describes as “flexibility” vs. “plasticity.” Flexibility is the brain’s adaptability or ability to change with ease in order to adapt oneself to surrounding circumstances, whose form receiving disposition Malabou places within global contemporary capitalism. In contrast, Malabou views plasticity as creative as well as adaptive and, as such, resistant to capitalism. Malabou puts it this way, “What flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, the power to create, to invent or even to erase an impression,

Ibid., 120. We can also see echoes of Hayles’s earlier writings on “work as assemblage,” in My Mother Was a Computer. Here she presents the idea of “work as assemblage” where the text would be allowed to take on many forms and would be thought of in terms of both conceptual content as well as physical embodiment. Therefore, the text is understood in situ informed by both its physical qualities and means of signification, rather than as a stable, authentic object that can be excavated. This is a move away from an essentialist conception of the text, and by opening up the text to variation, there can be multiple, coexisting versions, which can be organized into what Hayles terms “clusters.” See N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 103–5.

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the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius.”41 Malabou believes that humans have the power to make their own brain, in other words, to veer toward plasticity over flexibility. Folding this point into her discussion of attention, Hayles cites the heterogeneity of the literary (or artistic) work—that is, the ability to evoke responses at multiple levels of engagement, conscious, unconscious, and nonconscious—as the element that can push the attentionforming feedback loop toward plasticity over flexibility.42 Hayles makes the bold claim that creative expression can actually influence the human brain and encourage greater plasticity. The heterogeneity of expanded internet art could operate on the multiple levels of engagement described by Hayles. Designed to drift and float across different supports, this type of artwork could potentially address the formation of attention. This capacity rests on the intention and realization of the artwork by the artist and their ability to create a project that can engage an audience on multiple levels as well as the artwork’s own technical conditions. Again, the concern is what artworks do and how they provoke a change within the systems they inhabit. Returning to the subject of anamnesis, it seems artists could craft a “breaking presence” that is also a resonance (in the Simondonian sense), which syncs into the conditions of its existence and feeds forward to open up new potentials, including that of attention formation. Over the talk of memes or image attractors, this image catalyst could be multilayered and heterogeneous, devised with a posthuman subject in mind.

Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 12. 42 Hayles, How We Think, 101, 106. 41

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Conclusion: Breaking Presence

This book began with the question: how is an informational milieu affecting cultural production, and what kind of critical response does it necessitate? Tiziana Terranova stressed that the informational milieu is an “immersive, excessive, dynamic” entity in which contemporary culture unfolds. In consequence, art, and culture itself, is evolving to become more legible and functional as information. As this book has described in detail, the open-ended approach of expanded internet art is one response to this scenario, where artists have designed works that evolve within their networked situation through circulation, drift, and dispersion, constantly negotiating the different supports that enable their movement. Chapter 3 discussed how the informational milieu is a product of the postmodern condition, where development pushes toward optimum performance and efficiency. Lyotard argues that development absorbs everything in its path, including culture, toward this optimization, stating: Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason or of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. It assimilates risks, memorizes their informational value and uses this as a new mediation necessary to its functioning. It has no necessity itself other than cosmological chance. It has thus no end.1

Performance is understood as the economic value, efficiency, and programmability of knowledge. This was also the concern discussed in Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, where he warns: Jean-François Lyotard, “Introduction: About the Human,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 7.

1

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Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.”2

Anamnesis, or a non-resolved working through, is introduced as a means of resistance to this situation by its own non-productivity, while also inciting uneasiness in the beholder that bears witness to the present. Art, literature, and creative expression are viewed as a means of anamnesis and central to provoking this nonproductive thought and feeling. Chapter 1 began by a quote from artist Mark Leckey, where he recommended that in response to greater fluidity artists should “proliferate those nodes, to extend them further and further out, so that what you get is a dispersed work.” With the introduction of the concept of anamnesis, Chapter 3 shows that researching these nodes may not be enough; rather there needs to be an active engagement with the beholder or what Lyotard describes as a “breaking presence.” Chapter 4 took this as a point of departure to consider what anamnesis might look like given that attention itself is changing vis-à-vis a more posthuman audience, a situation elaborated in depth by N. Katharine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen in their work inspired by Simondon. This chapter ended with the recommendation that the anamnesis offered by Lyotard should intersect with Simondon’s resonance, such that the artwork would engage the conditions of its existence, including attention formation. Thus, this book began with a question regarding the effects of an informational milieu on cultural production and looked to expanded internet art as a case study to examine this inquiry. In Chapter 4, we end with a question about the kind of knowledge produced by a specific type of expanded internet art when knowledge itself becomes swept up by development. This section stressed the potential for artists to realize a heterogeneous type of expanded internet art that can push forth a non-productive anamnesic resistance. Alongside this story, we’ve also heard much about how (digital) images themselves have changed under an informational milieu to become more optimized. Within the expanded internet artworks discussed in this book, Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 4–5.

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we’ve witnessed one variation of the power this new breed of image has to activate across different platforms and spaces. This conclusion will reflect on the predominance of optimized images with an insistence that, like the data-reading logic machines that created them, they do not have a representational association with the world. As such, these optimized images require new tools for understanding and interpretation by their increasingly posthuman audience with an emphasis on the image catalyst described in Chapter 4. Versions (2009–12) by artist Oliver Laric might shed some light on the ways and means of the digital image, a topic this series of films explore on multiple layers through both its structure and narrative. The films, which take the form of a visual essay, reflect on the circulation of information online and emphasize the move toward hybridization and pastiche. Toward this end, each film is a “version” comprised of fragmented images and texts. A visual essay on the proliferation of digital images in the form of a film, Versions was produced thrice by the artist, one in 2009, another in 2010, and yet another 2012—three separate films with the same title. Several spin-offs of the 2009 film exist, where artists and curators have riffed on the original, either by writing their own voice-overs or modifying the existing one. The 2009 film encourages viewers to use it as a template for “open interpretation,” and indeed, other artists have used the text and the images as the basis for various spin-offs. The 2010 film contains no “original” material and is entirely comprised of texts authored by other people read over a stream of images and videos found online. The 2012 film picks up on the topic of translation, again using quotes and images from elsewhere as its basis. Versions puts pressure on any notion of an “original” work by emphasizing its own state as a pastiche while also opening itself up to alteration and reinterpretation (see Figure 5.1). Laric sees the 2009 Versions as “an interpretation open to interpretations.”3 The original voice-over for the 2009 film begins with a discussion of the Photoshopped images of the Iranian missiles released in 2008, which lead to an internet meme in which people mockingly changed the image to poke fun at Iran’s declaration of force. Laric then goes on to examine “cam” versions of films, which are bootlegged versions captured in a theater and then uploaded Domenico Quaranta, “The Real Thing: Interview with Oliver Laric,” ARTPULSE Magazine October, 2010. Access electronically May 2011: http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-real-thing-interview-witholiver-laric/.

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Figure C.1  Oliver Laric, Versions, 2012 (video still). Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; and Metro Pictures, New York.

to the internet. He connects the copyright regulations that prohibit bootlegs to the longer history, in monotheistic religions, banning idolatry as a sin. Other examples of a pirated likeness aided by technology are provided—the genre of “celebrity fakes” in pornography in which celebrity heads are grafted onto the bodies of pornographic actors; the collection of user-made iPod models added to the Google 3D Warehouse; an open storehouse for 3D models; and the meme coming out Zidane/Materazzi headbutt in the 2006 World Cup, where Zidane was replaced by everything from Pikachu to the Monty Python foot. The film ends with a quote from Momus, “Every lie creates a parallel world, the world in which it’s true,” suggesting that all these bootlegged duplicates exist in constellation, not in opposition, with the original. The 2010 Versions picks up on this point, but instead of crafting a new essay, Laric pulls together a cohesive text using sources from elsewhere, quoting figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Susan Sontag, and Jorge Luis Borges. In an interview, Laric explains that in the year he spent developing the film he was “always reading with a pen, taking down parts that were relevant. What I ended up using is a fraction of the collected text fragments.”4 Peter Nowogrodzki, “Interview with Oliver Laric,” from Back and Forth: Incite Interviews on Incite! Access electronically April 2011: http://www.incite-online.net/laric.html.

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The images accompanying the voice-over are, again, evidence of various changes and modifications to an original image in culture, from the reuse of animated action sequences across multiple Disney films by their directors, to multiples of the same figures within Greek sculpture, to the reuse of the same stock photographs in numerous contexts by corporations and the general public. The film closes with a quote from Sculpture and Its Reproductions by Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft that accurately sums up Laric’s position: “Multiplication of an icon, far from diluting its cultic power, rather increased its fame, and each image, however imperfect, conventionally partook of some portion of the properties of the original.”5 The last film in the series, Versions (2012), also utilizes a voice-over essay compiled of found texts by Laric, similar to the 2010 version. These quotes, from writers such as Gayatri Spivak, Sol Lewitt, Italo Calvino, and many others, are slightly reworked by Laric to reflect on hybridity and translation in relation to the passage of images online.6 In one section, a 3D model of the Ise Shrine in Japan, which has been torn down and rebuilt from scratch many times since it first arose in the seventh century, rapidly reconstitutes itself plank by plank in a short animation (see Figure 5.2).7 Over this, a voice-over reads, “a ship that returns to its port of destination after decades, after having all its parts exchanged throughout continuous repairs … upon those stepping into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow,” associating the Ise Shrine building’s structure to a rebuilt ship. What is the original, or is there an original, for a structure reconstituted over and over again? This is the question posted by Laric through a narrative made of other’s modified quotations. The 2012 Versions ends with the simple statement, “hybridize or disappear”—a sentiment that reverberates throughout the series. One could think of the organizing principle behind the fragments in Versions as a score, and indeed, Laric references the idea of a score in the 2010

Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft, Sculpture and Its Reproductions (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 38. 6 One reader took the time to identify all the sources used by Laric and produce a transcript of the entire narrative for Versions (2012); see Joao Abbott-Gribben, “Tracing the Material in Versions,” in line magazine, May 5, 2013, http://blog.linemagazine.co.uk/post/31345064500/tracing-thematerial-in-versions-versions-is. 7 Hirshhorn Museum, “Hirshhorn Presents: Black Box: Oliver Laric,” May 15, 2014, http://newsdesk. si.edu/releases/hirshhorn-presents-black-box-oliver-laric. 5

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Figure C.2  Oliver Laric, Versions, 2012 (video still). Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; and Metro Pictures, New York.

Versions. In a segment of the 2010 film, Laric layers a quote over examples of variations of the same figures in Greek sculpture such as Athena and Aphrodite, “A sculpture cannot merely be copied but always only staged or performed. It begins to function like a piece of music whose score is not identical to the piece, the score being not audible but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed.”8 While the quote is in reference to the images of Greek sculpture, it can also be taken as a self-reflexive remark on Versions. The score pops up as a theme in some of Laric’s other work as well, indicating that this is an ongoing method in his practice. As a member in the collective VVORK, Laric and others put on a series of performances entitled Variety Evening that included instructions scripted by a number of artists including Wojceich Kosma, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Kristin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Pierre Bismuth, and Claire Fontaine. These instructions were then delivered as a set to local actors to play out in locations such as New York and Amsterdam. The quote derives from Boris Groys’s “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction” except Laric switched out “digital image” for “sculpture.” The quote in question from “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction” is as follows: “By extension, a digital image that can be seen cannot be merely exhibited or copied (as an analogue image can) but always only staged or performed. Here, the image begins to function like a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the piece—the score being not audible, but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed.” Boris Groys, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” e-flux journal, March 2009, http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/view/49.

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Laric’s suggestion that digital images operate like scores is a perfect entrée into the topic of digital images themselves. What is a digital image? Boris Groys would offer that “the digital image is a visible copy of an invisible file— the invisible data.”9 As such, Groys likens each iteration of the digital image as a performance, stating: One could say that digitization turns the visual arts into the performing arts. To be seen, a digital image should not be merely exhibited but performed. But to perform something means to betray or distort it. Every performance is an interpretation and every interpretation is a betrayal.10

Hito Steyerl would echo this account, emphasizing the digital image’s own distortion with each iteration: The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.11

Both Groys and Steyerl share the position that digital images do not have a representational association with the world.12 Designed by optimizing machines that only read and “see” data, and being themselves data, digital images suggest a new nonrepresentational relationality for images in general. Boris Groys, “File—and Back,” in After the Digital Divide? German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Media (Rochester: Camden House, 2009), 24. 10 Ibid. 11 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” in e-flux journal No. #10 (November 2009) http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. 12 While both Groys and Steyerl argue that the digital image does not have a representational function, their approach to the subject differs slightly. For Groys, the performance of the digital images lends it a nonidentity, becoming not one single image but a multiplicity of variations on an image that becomes an idol: “But digitization of the image makes it dependent on at least one history—the history of its own visualizations—as an individual appearance among many other such appearances of the same invisible digital data. To reflect on this history means to practice the more subtle iconoclastic strategy… to turn the image back into an illustration… We see images as perfectly incarnated, as being there—even if the depicted object is absent. Thus the image becomes an idol. But the digital image is not present; rather it documents and illustrates the absence of the invisible original.” Groys, “From the Image to the Image File—and Back,” 29. Steyerl also picks up on this multiplicity but rather looks at how the circulation of a poor image engenders new publics and a shared visual bond: “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.” Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” 9

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In one section of the 2010 Versions, Laric quotes Jorge Luis Borges, “What are the many versions if not diverse perspectives of a movable event, if not a long experimental assortment of omissions and emphases?” One of the few instances where Laric self-consciously calls attention to the work’s title “Versions,” this question recalls Steyerl’s poor image, as it partially or fully travels, accelerating and deteriorating along its path. The reference to a “movable event” is key too—as the digital image itself is exactly that, a performance, an event, a phenomena. The complex orientation between the digital image and representation might require a new consideration of “imagination” itself, a subject philosopher Vilem Flusser looks at in depth in his short essay on digital images “A New Imagination.” As the title indicates, Flusser’s aim is to describe a new type of imagination introduced by computers. Traditionally, imagination or the creation of images involved a human subject that abstracts his four-dimensional experience of the world into an image and, in this act, retreats into the self. With this move, the human orients and comprehends the world. Prohibitions against idolatry and the introduction of criticism were means in which to combat distortions of the signified world by the human-produced signifier. Flusser argues that Western civilization within the last 3,500 years of history is a progressive attempt to enlighten imagination or explain images that emerge out of this distrust.13 This practice, however, becomes dramatically altered with the advent of computer technology. For Flusser, the computer can be described very simply; it is “a calculating machine equipped with memory.”14 It, however, has a very different relationality to the world, and it is here that a “New Imagination” comes into play. Computers do not abstract the world by retreat, like the human, but rather they compute it, and as such, its images signify calculations, not images within a lifeworld.15 Therefore, the “calculated image” is not four, three, two, or one dimensional but zero dimensional: It is a concretizing gesture: it collects zero-dimensional elements, to spread them out in a surface, thus bridging the intervals. In this manner, this gesture differentiates itself from the other gesture of image creation Vilem Flusser, “A New Imagination,” in Writings, trans. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 112. 14 Ibid., 114. 15 Ibid. 13

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mentioned earlier: it neither abstracts, nor steps backwards; just the opposite, it concretizes, it projects. Certainly, both gestures lead to the creation of images (and both can therefore be called imagination), but then one is really dealing with a different sort of images. The images created by the traditional imagination are two-dimensional, because they have been abstracted from a four-dimensional life-world. In comparison, the images of the new imagination are two-dimensional, because they have been projected from zero-dimensional calculations. The first type of images signifies the life-world; the second type signifies calculations. The first type of images represents the life-world; the second type represents calculations.16

The concretizing, projective quality of digital images lends it a different orientation, one that is not associated with the lifeworld of the human. The meaning of “signification” and “representation” thus undergoes a turn toward calculation itself. Much of the motivation behind Flusser’s essay “A New Imagination” is to overturn the relation between reality and the image. By arguing that the digitally produced image is an event or phenomenon, rather than an imagined “image,” Flusser eliminates the distance separating “imagination” from “reality.” Key here is the placement of the human; digitally produced images are “zero dimensional” because they are the product of algorithms, not people. Therefore, they are not an attempt to represent reality but an event that possesses its own existence. (Furthermore, they are not driven by an effort to replicate reality but to optimize their programmability.) According to Flusser, therefore, a “new imagination” needs to be thought of as the projection of image into the world without the intermediary step of representation, an argument that reiterates those already made in this conclusion by Steyerl and Groys. The term “imagination” stems from the classical Latin imāginārius, meaning “consisting of a mere semblance, unreal” and in postclassical Latin “also concerning images or pictures.”17 The problem lies between these two understandings of the word—on the one side, imagination’s departure from reality, and the other, imagination as an image. Following Flusser, imagination for much of Western civilization has been considered at a remove from reality, an element contained within the Ibid. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Imaginary.”

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human mind. As such, its resulting images are an abstraction, false, “unreal.” Flusser affirms that digitally produced images are the product of algorithms, not people, and require a reconsideration of the relation between reality and image. Zero dimensional by nature, digital images are events, performances, and phenomena optimized for programmability.18 This turn away from the paradigm of representation might sound familiar, and indeed, it was a major focus of Terranova’s “Three Propositions on Informational Cultures” discussed in Chapter 1. In line with observations made by Flusser, Steyerl, and Groys here, Terranova acknowledged that representation no longer functions under an informational milieu, and behind her demand for a “cultural politics of information” is an effort to seek out how signals function over signs. So again, what do digital images do? Even if they do not hold a representative affiliate with reality, Steyerl proposes that they actually possess great power stating in “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”: Images become unplugged and unhinged and start crowding off-screen space … They spread through and beyond networks, they contract and expand, they stall and stumble, they vie, they vile, they wow and woo.19

Digital images are thus active agents.20 To sum up the conversation thus far, we found that digital images are events, phenomenon, or active agents that do not have a representative relation to the world as pure calculation. For

These qualities are also related to the (material and media) history of digital images themselves, which tie into how computer-generated images relate to representation. See Elizabeth Marjorie Paterson, Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007, and Jacob Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object,” in Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (April 2015): 40–60. 19 Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” 20 Steyerl would follow this by stating that these digital images require new forms of participation: “But what if the truth is neither in the represented nor in the representation? What if the truth is in its material configuration? What if the medium is really a message? Or actually—in its corporate media version—a barrage of commodified intensities? To participate in an image—rather than merely identify with it—could perhaps abolish this relation. This would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it accumulates. How about acknowledging that this image is not some ideological misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and fears—a perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence? As such, the image is—to use yet another phrase of Walter Benjamin’s—without expression. It doesn’t represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any other—a thing like you and me. This shift in perspective has far-reaching consequences.” Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” in e-flux journal no. 15 (April 2010), http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/a-thing-like-you-and-me/. 18

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artists, this means they must wrest that event-ness and calculation toward a nonproductive end in order to counteract the optimization of development carefully described by Lyotard. In Chapter 4, we proposed the concept of an image catalyst or a multilayered and heterogeneous artwork that combines the momentary “breaking presence” of Lyotard’s anamnesic resistance with a resonance (in the Simondonian sense) that syncs into the conditions of the artwork’s existence, such as its technology and material, to open up new potentials, including attention formation. This might sound abstract, but we see this realized through Versions cited at the beginning of this section. In an interview, Laric said that he thought of the Versions series as an ongoing art project, hoping it could also become “a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a song, a novel, a recipe, a play, a dance routine, a feature film and merchandise” in addition to the short videos. 21 In this, we see yet another layer of pastiche, in an artwork that is already a hybrid of many re-mixed and re-worked images and texts. It seems Laric embraces heterogeneity while actively engaging the conditions of its existence, embedding the intent of his project into its very design and execution. In addition, the artwork yields itself up to further remix and translation, allowing other openings for it to persist and change across multiple platforms. The concept of an image catalyst brings us back to the mode of temporality suggested in Simondon’s model. As discussed in Chapter 2, the syncing aspect of resonance relates to his understanding that each new invention pulls in factors from the past and present, creating new potentials for further invention, a situation Simondon reads as a conditioning of the present by the future. A catalyst has a similar imperative and association with the moment. Furthermore, when paired with the concept of a “breaking presence” or anamnesic resistance, we see a momentary but weighty present. If time itself becomes optimized, which no doubt is part of Lyotard’s argument (as well as others discussed in this project; see the section on Bernard Stiegler in Chapter 2), then the present moment becomes charged. The impetus of the present is what art historian David Joselit would see as an instantiation of art’s effects: “To make art today is thus to participate Quaranta, “The Real Thing: Interview with Oliver Laric.”

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in a project as old as human life, which is nonetheless directed towards the condition of the present. While from a certain perspective this dimension of art is so obvious as to be banal, its significance is enormous, and I think, often overlooked.”22 There needs to be a consideration of this present in relation to an awareness of the knowledge produced by art in an era when all knowledge is usurped by production. As images have changed to become more optimized and part of the development described by Lyotard, we need to continue to encourage questions about what these images do and to seek these potent moments of non-productive accidents, incursion, and insight.

David Joselit, “The Art Effect,” in The Cairo Review of Global Reviews, July 6, 2014, http://www. aucegypt.edu/GAPP/CAIROREVIEW/Pages/articleDetails.aspx?aid=614.

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Index Agre, Philip 44, 44 n.1 Altmann, Kari 5, 110 Black Hole 21–2 Core Samples I 21–2 Exhibitions, views on 21 Where Is the Blood? 21–2 Anthony Hudek 6 n.8, 83 n.2, 97 n.37 Arcangel, Cory 35 Aron, Raymond 61 Art and Global Media (exhibition) 12–13 art history communication studies and 17–18 medium and 17–18 post internet art 35 art practice. See also expanded internet art contemporary 1–2, 5, 9, 124 bandwidth 4, 9 Bardini, Thierry 61 n.35, 65 n.47 Barthes, Roland 86 Baudrillard, Jean 86, 95 “The Precession of Simulacra” 95 n.32 Beckett, Samuel 86 The Unnameable 91 Bell-Smith, Michael 31 Belson, Jordan, cosmic cinema 1 Bergson, Henri 60 n.34, 99–100 Bewersdorf, Kevin 31, 32 n.45 Spirit Surfers 32 Birringer, Johannes 93–5, 94, 94 n.30, 95 Bismuth, Pierre 142 Blistène, Bernard, “A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard” 84 n.3, 95 n.31, 98 n.38, 102 n.57 Boling, John Michael 31 Bookchin, Natalie, Introduction to net.art 13–15, 15 n.8 Borges, Jorge Luis 92–3, 140, 144 Bosma, Josephine 15–18, 15 n.11, 110, 125 n.20 internet art, definition 17 Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art 15, 18 reference to Simondon 18

Bourriaud, Nicolas 1, 5, 37 n.59, 38 The Radicant 37 Bratton, Benjamin 78, 78 n.76 Broodthaers, Marcel 26 A Voyage on the North Sea 25 Calvino, Italo 141 Canguilhem, Georges 5, 41, 46, 59–68, 60 n.34, 76 “The Living and Its Milieu” 63, 65 “Machine and Organism” 61–3, 65 Centre de Création Industrielle (CCI) exhibition projects 83 Chaput, Thierry, 95 Les Immatériaux 79, 81–3, 90, 92 Christensen, Lauren 116 Comte, Auguste 63 Connor, Michael 40 n.66 “What’s Postinternet Got to Do with Net Art?” 40 Contemporary Art Daily 123–5 Cornell, Lauren vii, 2, 4, 31, 116 n.4 “Beginnings and Ends” 2 n.4 Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century 2 n.3, 4 “Professional Surfer” 31–3 “Techno-Animism” 114, 116 n.4 Cortright, Petra on VVEBCAM 32 Cosic, Vuk 10–11 Coy, Chris 31 Cramer, Florian 18 on Nam June Paik 17 Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art 17 on Radical Software 17 crystallization 49–50 cybernetics. 5–6, 23, 41, 45–6, 59–60, 62, 65, 67–8, 78, 128–9 Daniels, Dieter 11, 11 n.3 Davis, Ben 125–6 “After Ferguson: A New Protest Culture’s Challenge to Art.” 125, 126 n.21

156

Index

Dawkins, Dawkins Selfish Gene, The 122 Debatty, Regine 33, 34 n.49 DeLanda, Manuel 119, 121, 121 n.13 Deleuze, Gilles 16, 23 n.21, 47 n.3, 60 n.34, 67 n.53, 121 n.14 Anglophone media theory 47 The Logic of Sense, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Difference and Repetition 47 “On Gilbert Simondon” 47 Delis, Philippe 90, 91 n.25 Denny, Caitlin, Jstchillin 35 Derrida, Jacques 92, 93 n.29 Dôgen, Eihei, Shobôgenzô 90 Droitcour, Brian 125, 125 nn.19–20, 126, 133 “The Perils of Post-Internet Art” 125 Druckrey, Timothy, net_condition Art and Global Media 12–13 Dufrenne, Mikel 61 Espenschied, Dragan 32 n.46 Digital Folklore 32 expanded cinema 1–2. See also Youngblood, Gene expanded internet art attention formation 135 expansion, concept of 10 informational milieu 19–24, 39, 46, 138 online and offline methods 9, 23 open-ended approach 5, 19, 137 Fagot-Largeault, Anne 61, 61 n.35, 65 n.47 Fall, Jean-Claude 91 Flavin, Dan, Four Neons 86 Flusser, Vilem 144, 144 n.13, 145–6 “A New Imagination.” 144–5 computer, definition 144 Fontaine, Claire 142 Fraisse, Paul 61 Friedmann, Georges 65 Problemes humans du machinisme industriel 61 Frieze 2 Fuller, Matthew 47 Fuller, R. Buckminster 1

Gaboury, Jacob, “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object” 146 n.18 Galloway, Alexander 39 Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization 39 n.63 Goldberg, Adele 30 Goldstein, Kurt 63 Graham, Dan 86 Greenberg, Clement medium, concept of 25 “Modernist Painting” 17 Greene, Rachel 4 n.7, 11, 11 n.4, 15–16, 15 n.10 Internet Art 15 Groys, Boris 142 n.8, 143, 143 n.9, 143 n.12, 145–6 Guattari, Felix 74 Guimbal, Jean-Claude 55 turbine 54–7, 71–2 Hallenbeck, Travis 31 Halter, Ed 2 n.3, 4 “After the Amateur: Notes” 32, 32 n.47 on VVEBCAM 32 Hansen, Mark B. N. 5, 7, 41, 46–7, 59, 66 n.51, 68, 73–6, 78, 106–7 “Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics, Transindividuation, and 21st Century Media” 73 n.66, 74 n.68, 131 n.34 Feed-forward: On the Future of Twentyfirst-century Media 132 n.35 on posthuman subject 109, 128, 132–3 on Simondon’s theory of individuation 75, 126–8, 138 system-environment hybrid (SEH) 68, 73–4, 131 on Thrift’s concept of a technological unconscious 130 n.31 Hausmann, Raoul 83 Hayles, N. Katherine 7, 74, 109, 126–35, 133 n.38 How We Became Posthuman:Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,Literature and Informatics 128 n.26

Index How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis 130, 130 n.32, 133, 135 n.42 on Malabou’s description of brain 134 on posthuman subject 127–8, 132–3 on presence/absence to pattern/ randomness frameworks 128–9 “RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environments” 130 n.30 Simondon’s model for individuation 126, 138 “Speculative Aesthetics and Objectoriented Inquiry” 131 n.33 on Thrift’s concept of a technological unconscious 130 n.31 on TOC app 133 “work as assemblage” 134 n.40 Holmberg, Joel 31 Horvitz, David 35 Hudek, Anthony “Landmark Exhibitions Issue” 6 n.8 “Over to Sub-exposure: Anamnesis of Les Immatériaux” 83 n.2 Hugyhe, Pierre 26 Hui, Yuk, On the Existence of Digital Objects 76 n.71 hylomorphism 49–50, 59 Hyppolite, Jean 61 Iliadis, Andrew 47 n.3, 59–60 n.32 informational culture 1, 3–4, 9, 24, 36, 69–70, 146 internet art. See also expanded internet art; net.art medium-based definitions 5, 10–18 net.art, use of 10–11 technological development 4, 19 web culture 2 internet artists 1, 17, 19, 31–4 collaborative blogs 31 user-generated content 33 Ito, Parker, Jstchillin (online gallery) 35 Jogging, The 109–10, 116–18, 121–2, 133 Joselit, David 5, 7, 27–8 After Art 26–8 on art’s dimension 130, 37–8, 147–8

157 “The Art Effect” 148 n.22 “Painting beside Itself ” 27 n.30 “What to Do with Pictures” 27 n.32

Kay, Alan 30 Keller, Daniel, AIDS 3D, Outperformance Options ATM Partition 123–4 Kentridge, William 26 Kholeif, Omar, You Are Here: Art after the Internet 2 n.3, 4 Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 17–18 Klein, Yves 86 Kosma, Wojceich 142 Kosmas, Nik, AIDS 3D, Outperformance Options ATM Partition 123–4 Krauss, Rosalind 5, 25–6, 26 n.27, 30 A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition 17, 25 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste 63 Laric, Oliver 143 Variety Evening 142 Versions 139–42, 144, 147 Lasswell, Harold, theory of communication 85 Latour, Bruno 92, 93 n.29 Leckey, Mark 9, 110, 138 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre 65 Milieu et Techniques 61 Lewitt, Sol 141 Lialina, Olia 12, 32, 32 n.46 Digital Folklore 32 My Boyfriend Came Back from the War 11–12 Lin, Tao 142 Lonergan, Guthrie 31, 34, 125 on “Internet Aware Art” 33 Myspace Intro Playlist 32 Lucas, Kristin 142 Lyotard, Jean-François 89 n.18, 98 n.39, 99 n.40, 101 n.53, 127 nn.23–4, 133 n.37, 137 n.1 on activation of language 85, 88, 93 anamnesic resistance 102–4, 109, 126, 128, 132–3, 138, 147 on childhood of an encounter” 104

158

Index

Discours, figure 97 “Enframing of Art. Epokhe of Communication” 96–7 five terms of materiality 85–6 “Gloss on Resistance” 103 ideal human subject, concept of 127 immaterial, notion of 84 The Inhuman:Reflections on Time 98–9, 126–7 interviews 95–6, 102 La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir 83 Les Immatériaux 79, 81–2, 84–5, 87–8, 98, 102–3 “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” 88, 91–2, 105, 132 Matériaux noveaux et creation 83 Matter and Memory 99 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 101, 103, 105, 107, 127 n.24, 128 n.25, 137 “Rewriting Modernity” 106 Malabou, Catherine on “flexibility” vs. “plasticity. 134–5 What We Should Do with Our Brain. 134, 135 n.41 Malaspina, Cécile 47 Manovich, Lev 5, 30, , 31, 39 “Behind the Screen/Russian New Media” 12 n.5 “Post Media Aesthetics” 30 Software Takes Command 30–1, 30 n.41, 38 Massumi, Brian 16, 47–8, 57, 101 n.53, 127 n.24, 138 n.2 Parables for the Virtual 16 “Technical Mentality Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon” 48 n.4, 57 n.28, 78 n.75, McHugh, Gene 34–6, 34 n.50, 35–6, 125 n.20 Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art 34 Post Internet (blog) 34–5 McLuhan Marshall 1 Understanding Media 17 medium categorization and 1 material properties 25

technological development 16 traditional understandings 5, 17 Mellamphy, Ninian 47 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 61 Michel, Françoise 95 Nasty Nets 31–3 neologism 2–3 exhibitions 12 feedback system 13 future 14–15 internet conditions 11 net.artist 11, 14 net_condition 12–13 network culture 1, 4, 68 Newton, Isaac, idea of milieu 63 Nikolic, Vladimir 142 Novitskova, Katja 109–11 Approximation II 115–16 artwork as meme 121–2 sculptures 114, 116 “Techno Animism” 114 three-dimensional cutouts 113 Nowogrodzki, Peter 140 n.4 Obrist, Hans Ulrich 88, 102 “After the Moderns, the Immaterials” 6 n.8, 88 n.17 The Conversation Series 14 102 n.58 Olson, Marisa 31, 33–4, 125 We Make Money Not Art 33 Parreno, Philippe 58, 88, 91, 102–3, 102 n.58 The Conversation Series 14 102 n.58 Piper, Adrian 142 Pornography, “celebrity fakes” 140 post internet art 2, 33, 35–6, 40, 125 Price, Seth 3, 28–30, 28 n.35, 37 Dispersion 27–9, 39–40 Essay with Knots 29 Quaranta, Domenico 4, 36, 36 n.53, 139 n.3, 147 n.21 Art and the Internet 4 Media, New Media, Post Media 36 Rajchman, John 83 n.1, 92–3, 92 n.26, 97 on “Épreuves d’écriture” 93 “The Labyrinth of Language” 92 review of Les Immatériaux 92

Index Ranfft, Erich 141, 141 n.5 Rhizome 2 n.3, 11, 31–3, 40 n.66, 111 n.2 Ricoeur, Paul 61 Rihanna, “We Found Love” 113 Ritter, Carl 64 Rogove, John 47 Ruyer, Raymond 60 n.34, 68, 76 on cybernetics 5, 41, 46, 59–60, 67 La cybernétique de l’origine de l’information, 65–6, 65 n.48, 66 nn.51–2 La genese des forms vivantes 66 “Les limites du progrès humain” 67 n.54 Neo-finalisme 66 “The Status of the Future and the Invisible World” 65 n.49 Sanchez, Michael 125 “2011: Art and Transmission” 124, 125 n.18 Sawtell, Hannah 43–4, 44 n.2, 45 ACCUMULATOR, 43–5, 76 Schuhl, Pierre-Maxime 61 Shannon-Weaver’s sender/receiver communication model 23, 45, 48, 50–1, 69–70 Shulgin, Alexei 10–11, 11 n.2, 13–15, 15 n.8 internet experiments 11 Introduction to net.art 13–15, 15 n.8 Simondon, Gilbert 5–6, 16, 18 n.18, 23, 23 n.21, 41 , 45–8, 47 n.3, 48 n.4, 49, 49 nn.7–8, 50 n.11 on concept of phasing 53 culture, definition 54 Du mode d’existence des objets techniques 47, 54, 58–9, 71–2, 78 Genesis of the Individual, The 23 n.21 informational milieu, concept 3, 5–6, 23, 41, 45–59 Interact or Die! 47 L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et de l’information 46–8, 59 L’individuation psychique et collective 47 L’Individu et sa genèse physicobiologique 47 On the Mode of Existence of the Technical Object 16, 18 n.18 principle of individuation 48–53

159

on Shannon-Weaver model 23 n.21 theory of change 70 Simondon, Nathalie 61 Si-Qin, Timur 7, 109–10, 119, 119 n.11, 120, 121 n.13, 122, 125 Basin of Attraction 119–20, 120 n.12 “500 Words” 119 n.11 “Manuel DeLanda: In Conversation with Timur Si-Qin” 121 theory of “image attractors” 119, 121 2014 Taipei Biennial 119 smartphones 4, 9, 25, 73 social media 4, 9, 24–5, 27, 31, 111, 117–18, 126 Spivak, Gayatri 141 Stallabrass, Julian 16 Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce 15, 15 n.9 Steciw, Kate 109–11 artwork as memes 121–2 Composition 011 111–12 Composition 073a 112 on image circulation 113 Popular Options (Yellow Diamonds in the Light) 111, 113–14 on search terms 113, 123 Stengers, Isabelle 49 n.7, 92 Steyerl, Hito 36–7, 77, 122–3, 133, 143–6 “A Thing Like You and Me” 146 n.20 “The all-out internet condition is not an interface but an environment” 36, 123 “In Defense of the Poor Image” 143 nn.11–12 “Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation” 77 n.72 “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” 36, 37 n.56, 122, 123 n.16, 146 n.19 Stiegler, Bernard 5, 41, 46, 59, 68, 71–3, 71 n.61, 73 n.65, 76, 78, 88, 106–7, 147 Technics and Time series 48, 71 substantialism 49–50, 59 Terranova, Tiziana 3, 3 n.5, 5, 10, 23, 23 n.22, 39, 39 n.64, 40, 41, 46, 59, 68–9, 69 n.55, 70–1, 76–8, 106–7, 110, 137, 146 informational milieu, definition 5, 10, 23–4, 41

160 on informational space 3, 40 Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age 3, 39, 68 on Simondon’s theory of individuation 69–70 Theofilakis, Elie 96 “Les petits recits de Chrysalide: Entrien Jean-François Lyotard— Élie Théofilakis” 96 n.34 Tomasula, Steve 133 Trecartin, Ryan 35 Troemel, Brad 116–18, 121 “The Accidental Audience” 117 n.6, 118 n.8 The New Inquiry, 117–18 van den Dorpel, Harm Assemblages series 3, 19–20 Dissociations 19 image circulation 22, 39 Van der Meulen, Sjoukje Begriffsgeschichte 17 medium, notion of 18 “The Problem of Media in Contemporary Art Theory” 17 Venn, Couze 73 n.65 video art 11, 17 Vierkant, Artie 5, 20, 22, 35–6, 110 articulating strategies 22

Index Image Object series. 20, 22, 35, 39–40 on post internet art 35–6 Similar Objects.com 22 Virilio, Paul 78, 92 von Humboldt, Alexander 64 von Uexküll, Jakob 63 Wahl, Jean 61 Warhol, Andy 38, 86 web culture 1–2, 31, 33–4 Weibel, Peter 12–13, 13 n.6 net_condition Art and Global Media 12–13 Postmedia Condition 36 n 53 Weiwei, Ai 27 Wiener, Norbert 45, 60, 66–7 Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine 62 Woodward, Ashley 47 n.3 Youngblood, Gene 1–2 1970 Expanded Cinema 1, 2 n.1 ZKM galleries 12–13 Zola, Émile 86