ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [4 November 2010]

I’ve decided to start my blog again, mainly as I’m now doing another residency, but also because I’d been meaning to carry on with it regardless. I’ve got a bit more time on my hands as work has been slowing down already- and the cuts have only just begun…

Just to get the details of the residency out of the way, I’m near Barcelona, in the foothills of Monserrat mountain which takes its name from the ‘serrated’ look of the mountain top. The residency itself in is a rambling farmhouse called Can Serrat. The whole thing reminds me of Greece- the pine forest, the dirt tracks, the air, the powdery light.

Yesterday I went up to the monastery, which had fantastic views across the plains to the Pyrenees and up the bizarre rock formations lining the mountain top. There was the usual ornate décor associated with Catholic churches, plus about hundred variations on Christ on the cross and the virgin Mary- this place is famous for the black Madonna (emphatically NOT an African Madonna, according to the locals). Highlight of the day was the bells going off during Mass.

All these expressions of unwavering faith made me think of the book I have been reading- Ground Control, by Anna Minton. Amongst many other interesting topics she covers- including the erosion of local democracy through the encroachment of ‘private estates’ into public spaces and the manipulations of the property market in favour of developers, often to the detriment of existing communities- she talks about an area I'm really interested in: the intersection of political economy and emotional states. She suggests that the lack of an emotional sense of stability, security and ease in the world leads to an urge to find ways to protect oneself from the ‘dangerous’ outside world, hence private gated communities and endless CCTVs; but also the paradoxical finding that as security increases, so does the fear of danger, and therefore, in this scenario, the ‘strangers’ who make up the public.

  This obviously is exacerbated by the media, which feeds the paranoia compelling most people (something like 80% of the UK population) to be convinced that crime is rising, compared to the official statistics, which (though not infallible) point to the opposite. This is an example of Zizek’s big Other in action- things aren’t actually as ‘bad’ as they are perceived to be but we act ‘as if’ crime really were rising; the official discourse is not believed, precisely because it doesn’t match up with the perception of the situation- i.e. “Well the government SAYS crime is going down, but EVERYONE KNOWS its not, really”.

 The government has contested this attitude pretty weakly; is there something to be gained economically from a vague fear towards strangers, public space and society?

It makes sense that as society fulfills more and more of its needs, it becomes harder to sell stuff, so new deficiencies need to be played upon, new desires need to be aroused. What better than something nebulous, like a ‘sense of security’? This opens up a whole new economy, not just for private estates and gated communities (much more ‘secure’) but also for the technological infrastructure of surveillance and monitoring. This digression is just to make the connection between the emotional need for security, in Buddhism the seeking of ‘ground’ and one of the main roots of suffering, and its conversion into a desire for security at a practical level.

 Which is why I was thinking about this at the monastery. Once, we put our faith in God, to give a sense of ground, to feel that we are not (only) insignificant fragments destined to rot sooner or later. Now, what can we put our faith in, to give a sense of safety? This is the emotional need that is being played on- and being inflated rather than sated. This could sound like I’m advocating a return to religion to solve our problems, which I’m not. I’m just interested in the way that mental health and ill-health are reconstituted as economic opportunities- directly fuelling certain markets (pharmaceuticals etc) and also more subtly expanding others- those of private property development and surveillance.

# 2 [9 November 2010]

 Week 2 at Can Serrat, and I’m sitting alone in the studio, huddled close to the radiator, although the view outside is of partly cloudy, partly sunny skies. The sound of the trees rustling and the heaters making occasions clicks is the only noise. I’m mainly sat at my table, reading things and attempting to write things, but keep finding myself starting one text and then abandoning it halfway through and picking up where I left off on another. Either that or wandering off into the woods.

 One thing I wanted to mull over a little is a topic I’ve been thinking about alot- the rise of a new breed of images, which are necessarily encoded within language: the images and videos of the internet. These images, in order to be searchable, and therefore to be findable, within the digital drift of the internet, have to have textual elements embedded within them- the first layer being titles and subtitles, the second being metadata, i.e., tags and keywords, allowing them to be read as relative to other images of similar content. I first became aware of this when collecting the titles off stock videos sites; they have whole sections on the art of titling and key-wording which point out that if a customer can’t find your video after inserting their keywords, its game over- the video is worthless and might as well not exist.

In the wider arena of the internet, a similar process occurs, since without this textual information, the visual material is lost in space, adrift with nothing to anchor it to the warmth of human interaction, without a specific address to connect it to. The unfathomable depths of the Internet are probably littered with these images, along with those that were once uploaded somewhere and then lost after your Flickr/ Facebook/ whatever account closed; images of relatively little use or value.

Hito Stereyl, in her essay ‘Poor Images’ talks about the hierarchy of resolution, which casts lo-res images “a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution”. She goes on to discuss the disappearance of “resistant or non-conformist visual matter” from the surface of culture and into an underground of personal archives, in which barter and exchange in and off-line allows the circulation of works otherwise prohibitively expensive for cinema screening and unsuited to TV broadcast. These works have now resurfaced as poor images- copied, compressed, ripped- due as she puts it, to the neo-liberal re-structuring of media production and digital technology, a process which designated certain material ‘low-value’.  This is especially relevant now as the UK turns ever more towards a neo-liberal model whereby the arts and humanities are devalued relative to ‘important’ (read money-making) activities such as science, technology and business- what else is going to disappear into the ether?

Although this is a different order of disappearance than the one I started talking about, it also touches on the way images move through the internet and the conditions that affect their smooth movement. The economics of this movement then comes to the fore, and this is something I’ve been thinking about recently- inspired by a passage in Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism.

He quotes Deleuze saying that capitalism is profoundly illiterate, in a passage on the ‘depressive hedonia’ of teenagers in education; “they process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read- slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane.”

Smooth traversal of this informational plane is, however, dependant on the textual elements that structure, name and organise this image-dense data. Its integral to the linking of one video/ image to the next which constitutes the movement known as surfing.

One of the most interesting aspects about uploading videos into YouTube is seeing what are deemed to be ‘related videos’; related of course by user-defined tags and definitions of content proclaimed through the video. The weary internet traveler is all too familiar with the state of digital drift into the maze of similar images and related videos which this textuality facilitates: the ‘how did I get here?” feeling after an hour of aimless clicking. You never really get where you were trying to go.

# 3 [11 November 2010]

Last night I was up late attempting to redesign my website, one of those bottomless pit activities that gobbles up the hours without feeling you’ve really done anything. What makes it interesting and worth doing though, is trying to imagine how (and if!) casual visitors to your site will make sense of your work in the way you’ve organised it- its easy to forget they mostly have no clue who you are and where your work has come from or is going. A coherent framework and easy navigation hopefully clears up some of that murkiness.

Anyway I’ve been reading more into the topic I posted on last time, and have re-visited some of the ideas I’ve had milling around, namely, language, communication and power. I continued researching into keywords, and their use in writing ‘sticky’ web content- that which is easily find-able by search engines and therefore delivers the web surfer-customer to your site. I discovered that content is written with specific keywords frequencies in mind, plus that there is an art of writing to accommodate ‘awkward key phrases’ while reducing ‘white noise words’ (the, and, as etc) and ‘filler phrases’ which distract the crawler bot. Language is optimised for maximum findability; again this connection between language, visibility and networked economy.

 Speaking of white noise words, and of the reduction of language to key phrases brought to mind an article (http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/06/orwell-language-newspeak) by Nina Power, in which she discusses the spread of “Nu-Language,” so-called due to its inverse relation to the Newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984. Well-known words like doublethink, thoughtcrime and unperson have a ‘flatness’ or lack of affect, which belie the punishments and consequences associated with their use. Newspeak is a language spliced and truncated for political ends; the less words there are in use, the less opportunity for thought, especially resistant thought. "Each reduction is a gain,” the appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four puts it, “since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.” Power continues: “It is, therefore, above all in the language of Nineteen Eighty-Four that Orwell’s deepest fears about the fate of human freedom are expressed”.

This linguistic reduction is eerily prophetic of today’s spliced, conjoined web words (defriend, YouTube) but also the ‘reduction as gain’ formula echoes the profit maximisation through language optimization method of content-creation.

She goes on to describe the contemporary equivalent, which expands rather than attenuates language, filling it with a kind of ‘white noise’ of jargon, a junk syntax used across bureaucracy, managerial literature, academia, pubic services and the art world, where verbs, nouns and adjectives are interchangeable. It operates like a ‘linguistic fog’, obfuscating meaning with an ‘oppressive vagueness’, making resistance difficult since the listener has no clear sense of what is being promoted or advocated- which is precisely its aim.

Different means of acheiving the same ends: the slippage between what is being said and what is being done. Mark Fisher’s latest post talks about exactly this in relation to the current narrative being propagated by the UK government. As he puts it, the current linguistic doublethink is ‘we’re all in this together’, conveniently taking off from where ‘there is no alternative’ left off. He explains it far more coherently so I’d advise reading the post if you’re interested. (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org)

As for my work, this led me to experimenting with methods of attenuating language or reducing existing texts to create new ones. Textalsyer, for example allows you to analyse the frequency of words and phrases in your text (especially handy for working out if you've hit the target percentage of key phrase frequency when writing web copy). I tried it out on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind: ‘consciousness’  was the most common word and it scored fairly low on the readability index- no surprise there then. I’m interested in working with digested, digested reads- the pics I’ve attached are of 3 works of philosophy, auto-summarised into one sentence and rendered in sticky letters: pop philosophy at its ‘stickiest’.

# 4 [20 November 2010]

 The joys of UBUWEB when you’re up a mountain can’t be over-estimated. Last night, unable to sleep, I watched a video by Alex Bag, Untitled Fall '95 (1995), a sly, funny take on the stereotypes surrounding artists and consumer culture where she “plays” herself going through art school. The video includes surreal interludes involving Hello Kitty and Ronald McDonald puppets and other consumer culture detritus which (as UBU puts it) “teeter on the divide between parody and complicity” and points to the difficulty of critique in a totally co-opted landscape.

This surreal aspect made me think about the ‘dry’ nature of some of my projects, deriving from a kind of canonical conceptualism, the bland literalness of what Benjamin Buchloh called an “aesthetic of indifference” of “random sampling and aleatory choice from an infinity of possible objects”. While being drawn to the task-like, boring and deadpan, I’m occasionally repelled by the lack of visual pleasure or surprise that results from this aesthetic. It would be interesting to see whether these can overlap as strategies- task-like literalness crossed with surreal associations.

Talking of associations, I’m still thinking about keywords as a route to new image-text relations; to find ways of using language that interrogates it, without simply reproducing, quoting, or collaging it. Sam Thorne, at a talk at this year’s Frieze Art Fair identified a kind of “intensified collage” (thoroughly explored 30 years ago by artists like Dara Birnbaum), as the dominant methodology, used by advertisers and teenagers on YouTube alike. Besides the cooption of once-radical strategies, his talk made me wonder what other methodologies artists can use to make sense of a socially constructed and mediated self. While the idea of trying to say something ‘new’ is as obsolete as the idea of an avant-garde, I still ask myself: could this have been made 10 years ago? Not from a technical point of view, but from the perspective of how technological and social shifts affect subjectivity and the functioning of language.

Cherry Smyth touched upon this desire for new approaches in her article about “Dead Fingers Talk” at IMT Gallery, an exhibition that had artists responding to Burroughs’s unpublished tape experiments. She observed that despite the embrace of intertexuality evident, the techniques used have been around since the early 70s, and its true that videos such as Jorg Priniger’s Sorted Speech, 2010, which recuts then reorders Obama speeches, utilise a very-well established method. Indeed patterns of collection and ordering of archives are a staple feature of found footage videos, from Matthias Müller’s Home Stories (1990), in which women from disparate Hollywood melodramas go through the same series of actions, to Volker Shreiner's Counter, which counts down clips from Hollywood films showing numbers. Not to mention The Clock, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour installation, which orders found footage showing clock times and synchronises it with the viewer’s lived time. Impressive effort aside, the logic is the same- and, as numerical and alphabetical ordering are hardly new, it could have been made 20 years ago.

The review closes with a reminder of Burroughs instruction: “Smash the control images. Smash the control machine”. But how? I’m interested in ways of working that organise things in ways that allow you to glimpse a different order, or else opens up new ways of communicating.

Which is where my interest in text-image relations in the space of the internet comes in. Using the titles, subtitles and tags that others have inserted means harnessing the power of crowd-sourcing: the ‘associations of amateurs’, as Jeff Howe in Wired magazine put it, who create the internet . Sarah Browne, in her article ‘Crowd Theory Lite’ observes that corporations like Amazon and EBay have embraced crowd-sourcing for content creation, feedback, and even R & D. These volunteer labourers each contribute to the overall functioning of the site; likewise the multitude of images that appear for any search reflect the effort of thousands of users, uploading, naming and tagging their images. Using this layer of language is attempting to tap into that pool of man-hours, to discover the modes of naming and speech native to the internet, and to work with the text-image relation inherent to the web’s logic of keywords.

# 5 [3 December 2010]

Yesterday was my last day in Barcelona, which I spent going to MACBA for the second time, to see Are you Ready for TV, a show of moving image works about television. The suspicion that the rise of net-worked technology dates the theme a little is echoed in the press release which states (complains?): “just when it seems that television as we have know it is over, we are asked if we are ready for more”. Its an attempt to “deceive the senses in order to escape the emitter-receptor duality”, a description seemingly more fitting for the internet than for TV, in this age of fan art, prosumers and content creators.

The exhibition implicitly acknowledges the self-directed mentality of the internet through its design, which encourages a twitchy, distracted mode of attention. Consisting of 10 sections (or “episodes”)- each with at least two interactive screens, with an average of 3 works to choose from, many with lavish running times, plus numerous large screen scattered about- meant that watching even a fraction of the works on offer took two visits. Like a night spent flitting through UBUweb, the viewer becomes curator, necessarily making a cut and hoping for the best; the emitter-receptor duality is certainly breached, with the viewer/ receptor being burdened with the responsibility (freedom?) of making their own choices. It is unclear whether this completist approach is a curatorial strategy or a result of technological advances, with a similar format for viewing video used at MOVE at the Hayward, and at CCCB in Barcelona; the encyclopedic scope is dazzling, but is the viewer willing to put the hours in?

Despite these quibbles, the show provided a good opportunity to catch ‘classics’ of the genre in the same space. In the ‘Site-Specific TV’ section, dealing with the sculptural and material properties of the TV set, was David Halls’ This Is a TV Receiver, whereby a TV presenter making a statement about the appearance and function of the TV box deteriorates over repeated re-screenings, emphasising the objecthood of ‘the box’ through dry description. While the technology described is now obsolete, the anti-illusionist sentiment of the line “this is NOT a man’s voice” remains true regardless of the particular apparatus used, unlike for some of the other work. Peter Weibel’s TV Aquarium casts the TV as a fish-filled aquarium, being drained of water; Jan Dibbets’s video TV as a fireplace does just that, and so on. These suffer a little from their reincarnation in a flat screen world, where boxiness and depth are almost forgotten, not to mention 4:3 formats; when works depend on the frame of the video matching the frame of the TV, awkward black strips ruin the illusion.

Some works lose their site-specific punch through their re-constitution as single screen works in a gallery setting, as opposed to unannounced TV inserts, a practice which seems amazingly radical by today’s standards. David Hall’s TV interruptions, a series of 7 inserts, cut into the smooth fabric of TV with no titles or explanations, catching the viewer unawares. Similarly, Bill Viola’s Reverse Television consists of 15 seconds inserts of people sat in their living rooms, staring, presumably, at their tellies in an echo of the viewer at home. Situated in the same room as Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s TV Delivers People on the big screen, the two works seem to be in conversation, with the protagonists of Viola’s video having the unvarnished truth about the machinations of TV explained to them. The lines of vaguely threatening, accusatory, and still spot-on observations about TV, like “ The product is the audience”, “You are the end product delivered en masse to the advertiser” seemed to be directly addressing them in their silent, private stupors.

Collective experience as simultaneous private experiences distributed across the field of media culture, as Seth Price puts it. Maybe, despite the added interactivity, not that much has changed from the shift from TV to internet- and we are still being ‘delivered en masse’ to the advertisers, more accurately thanks to profiling and consumer feedback loops than the scattergun approach of TV.

# 6 [3 January 2011]

Coinciding with MOVE at the Hayward Gallery, the BFI devoted its Studio Space to Yvonne Rainer’s work and influences, in a programme of videos which explored the interaction of moving image works with choreography, with work by international artists accompanying pieces from Rainer’s series, Five Easy Pieces. Two themes emerged from the selection I saw: language and linguistic structures in video, and movement, in physical and social space. These areas are linked through the logic of the score, prominent in experimental music and dance as well as in conceptual art, exploring the political and aesthetic implications of art based on instructions. Thus the linguistic is inscribed within the works, despite the absence language in the form of voiceovers, dialogue or subtitles, through the score that sets them up.

 Exploring movement on a human scale were videos such as Prune Tourne, by Michel François, which followed a woman with long reddish hair spinning; plus two videos of ‘obstructed’ piano playing, the first showing a hand playing while wearing splints, the second, Audience by Bea McMahon following a recital on a piano covered by slobbering snails. These, along with Rainer’s video Volleyball, used a score, or instruction, for the video and followed it through in a deadpan, unvarnished manner reminiscent of her interest in ‘task-like’, quotidian actions. Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) also comes to mind, a video which shows hands moving in a continuous flow, so that  "No part ...is any more important".

In contrast, some of the videos rejected detached coolness, instead using the body to expressive or political ends. Head Hand, by Sonia Kurana showed the artist’s hand caressing and pummeling a black man’s head, supposedly representing a multi-layered negotiation with race, gender and sexuality. Rainer spoke of being opposed to the exhibitionism and narcissism of the body as it is used in most dances, but stressed it was “also true that I love the body- its actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality." These videos brought out the idea that the corporeal, fleshy aspect of the body could act as limit, an opposition to the “pseudo-world” of the spectacle, as Carrie Lambert puts it, acting politically against the endless production of images. She quotes Rainer: “My body remains the enduring reality”, a phrase which suited the screening, with its focus on bodies spinning, touching and feeling their way through physical space.

 Another thread running through a group of other video was the human mass, and its movement through physical and political spaces. Yael Bartana’s well-known piece Kings of the Hill silently observes men in Israel driving gas guzzlers up and down steep sand dunes, in an improvised collective dance of negotiating the uneven terrain.  Movement here appeared at first to be unconstrained, almost playful, with no boundaries, roads or officials in place to control it, but within that was an ominous undercurrent of containment, a sense of movement only within the allocated space. The Flag, by Koken Ergun, shows the effectiveness of modern brainwashing at mass youth rallies in Turkey, in good socialist realist style: little bodies choreographed from childhood into their allotted place in the dance and in the wider culture. Language in this video was exposed as an instrument of nationalism, fully exploited for its powers of persuasion, emotive storytelling and nation-building. 

The capacity of language to create and solidify national identities obviously includes its capacity for activating the opposite impulse: exclusion, segregation and singling out due to language differences. Anri Sala’s video Lak-kat showed young boys in Senegal trying to pronounce words in Wolof which  related to variations in skin hue: from dark black to whitey, all words associated with colonialism and its implicit valuation of these colours. Language here sets people apart, and values them accordingly; naming becomes a function of social positioning.

 Seen in relation to MOVE: Choreographing You, the moving image works seemed to cast a more sombre shadow, as if to remind the viewer that despite the playful aspects of participation and dance, bodies are equally subject to exclusion, coercion and separation; but also that possibly this is where their agency also lies, as capable of generating their own language against the social and political structures which would limit its movement.

# 7 [11 January 2011]

How important to the understanding of their work is an artist’s political and spiritual stance? Reading an article about Gilbert & George in that quality publication ES Magazine, I was reminded how easy it is to dislike someone on discovering their political views. Apparently they have always been staunch Tories, sticking it to ‘the man’, meaning the art world, with whom they assure us it’s impossible to discuss politics. Maybe they have a point, as Mark McGowan’s Facebook work at the election showed, in which a spat broke out between him and other artists who felt his (presumably insincere) support of Tory politics was one step too far.

Gilbert & George share their ‘rather deferential attitude to statesmen’ with another artist who has been claimed for the liberal left, despite the evidence to the contrary- Andy Warhol. His coke argument has been understood by some as socialist/ egalitarian, since if ‘the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest’ it means in some way we’re all equal: regardless of material wealth, the Queen and the bum on the street are the same in death, and Coke.

As he was reputedly a ‘good Catholic’ it could also be considered a spiritual position- didn’t Jesus stress that in the eyes of God all men are equal? But here’s an interview with Peter Gidal illustrating his (affected?) nonchalance towards social inequality: 

AW: So how is everything in England?
PG: Everyone’s poor, things are real bad
AW: It would’ve been better if England had kept the colonies, then things would be ok.
PG: Are you kidding? The rich were even richer, and the poor poorer...
AW: Oh, but then England had all those colonies....

It’s as though, having made that realisation of a basic spiritual equality, we can all relax- if everyone is equal in the eyes of god, why bother changing anything? Improving your quality of life while on this earth isn’t going to make you a better human being or facilitate a smoother passage into Heaven. But that’s no excuse for accepting social divisions and uneven sharing of wealth and resources.

Another way of understanding some of Warhol’s quips could be through Buddhist thought: “If you didn't have fantasies you wouldn't have problems because you'd just take whatever was there” (attachment- to material goods as well as thought forms- and desire, lead to suffering). He also claimed not have a self and wanted a blank tombstone, echoing the Buddhist path towards dissolving the ego, whose lifeblood is desire and individuation.

This leads me onto Zizek’s take on Zen, which he sees as completely opposed to the pernicious doctrine of ‘Western Buddhism’. The latter, according to him, is best summed up by the title of a self-help book, ‘Self Matters’: a self-centered notion of an inner journey, towards a more authentic, integrated self, with the built-in promise that the pay off for taking the trip is a more ‘successful’ life.  His main gripe is that it allows you to fully participate in capitalism, while maintaining a perception of being outside of it, being able to coolly see the worthlessness of the spectacle but remaining calm in the knowledge of the “peace of the inner Self”. 

Also, the self-help movement often advocates the ‘we’re all freelance now’ attitude championed by neo-liberalism that assigns all the responsibility for living, working and surviving in the capitalist game to the individual. Social factors, plus the role of government and corporations are thus rendered incidental when compared to the ability of each person to rise above limitation if they really wanted to.

Anyway according to him, this 'inner journey’ of self-discovery is almost the complete opposite of Zen proper: if anything it’s “a total voiding of the Self, no “inner truth” to be discovered. What Western Buddhism is not ready to accept is thus that the ultimate victim of the journey into one’s self is this self itself.”

If there’s no ‘inner’ depth in Zen, maybe all there is ‘outer’: surface, exterior, or no self at all. Following Zizek’s logic, Warhol’s blankness and self-proclaimed complete superficiality could therefore be considered strangely native to Zen and against the cult of individuality which capitalism thrives on.

# 8 [4 February 2011]

It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who has found themselves trapped in an endless cycle internet browsing- somewhere, out there, is the article, text or information that’s going to make sense of it all and make something click, as it were. My new year’s resolution for the second year running- having finally managed to quit smoking- was to stop wasting time in this manner, along with the even more pointless activity of reading the comment boards of blogs. Amongst many others, this topic was covered during a workshop at the ICA lead by Mark Fisher and Nina Power addressing the way the internet has affected the dissemination of artworks and looking at how artists and writers have used the web, especially blogging. 

  More of an informal dialogue with comments and questions actively encouraged throughout, the talk took in themes like the continuous displaced attention typical of the web, the illusion of infinite time it conjures up and the politics behind a switched-on culture. Thankfully free of the usual tips to success, networking and branding that often characterize ‘artists and websites’ discussions, the speakers instead talked about the personal reasons behind starting a blog in the first place and the strangeness of suddenly addressing a public- even if no one is reading. Mark asserted, and Nina concurred, that for him and others of his acquaintance, starting a blog coincided with some sort of loss or otherwise difficult period, in his case depression following the ending of his PhD. It takes some guts to offer up this kind of detail to a crowd of strangers, and it set the tone for an almost intimate (in a good way) discussion.

 The tension between the printed word and on screen text was another theme, since most people prefer to read long articles in book form; on screen, with other tabs constantly attracting your attention, the pull to keep scanning and moving to the next article is too strong. This continuous displaced attention, a kind of distracted roving in which the ‘labour is the look’ and eye-balling accrues value, is apparently integral to what Jodi Dean called “communicative capitalism”. As I understand it, the utopian dream of increased quantity of and access to information does not lead to a more democratic situation, but to a state of confusion and distrust, where the endless stream of publicity, op-eds, wikipedia entries and blogs “produce searching, suspicious subjects ever clicking for more information, ever drawn to uncover the secret and find out for themselves". The excess and lack of meaning creates a kind of whirlpool intensity of information, which the subject gets swept up in, unable to decide who to trust.

 Not to mention the fact that despite the liveliness of online debate, the endless ‘Support this or that protest’ Facebook group thousands join, there is little actual, real-world activism to back it up. I started writing this before the uprising in Egypt, and I wonder how much events there disprove this theory- some have suggested that its precisely the Wikileaks episode which lead to the uprooting of the Tunisian regime, which consequently spurred on the Egyptian people into action. Mubarak’s decision to disable the internet suggests there is real fear from authoritarian regimes of protestors using it to communicate and organize; it undeniably also presents us, the online observers, with a captivating ‘breaking news’ drama to keep abreast of and endless debate to engage in.

 Mark mentioned the crucial role of debate to culture as well, since the debate- the buzz, hype, discussion around it, the participation of the viewer- is the product; that’s what is being produced (and guarantees its success). This is obviously integral to reality TV, a pseudo-participation better described as interpassive rather than interactive, and as he said, with the whole ethos of ‘inclusion’ as practiced by the government and corporate interests. I’ve seen this ‘Have Your Say’, ‘Join the debate’ culture in action in Redbridge where I live: posters saying “£3 million must be cut, have your say where from” but the decision to cut at all, is of course, closed to debate. As Mark said, if your opinion made a difference, they wouldn’t want to know it!

# 9 [13 February 2011]

I’m suffering post-holiday loss of bearings in relation to my work, and trying to get my head back into it by going to film screenings and talks. As part of this re-immersion drive I went to Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s screening and talk at the Whitechapel, which showcased new work made for Nick Cave’s forthcoming DVD, alongside old work and videos that had influenced them, all focused on the talking head format. I don’t know their other work very well, though the event convinced me to go to the South London Gallery to rectify that, but from this selection it seemed primarily concerned with the foibles of human nature- obsessions, passions, attachments- filtered through the lens of music.

While talking heads are standard in documentaries and YouTube videoblogs, Mike Sperlinger, who was chairing the talk, pointed out that when utilised within ‘cheap’ TV clip-shows the people talking are treated as merely a means of content delivery- to say the things the progrmame editors require so that a coherent narrative can be pieced together from multiple voices. Jane pointed out how easy it is prompt certain answers, comparing this type of cynical interviewing to handing out a script- an instrumentalised mode of interview that their work is clearly in opposition to.

Their use of talking heads also differs from mainstream manifestations by rejecting name-titles, depriving the viewer of the framing device that identifies the interviewees, and thereby affords authority and prestige to them and to the interviewers, particularly when dealing with famous personalities as in the Nick Cave videos, for being able to secure such ‘big names’. Without names, everyone is leveled and hierarchy is eliminated, in a kind of gesture towards fundamental equality (unless they're so famous you recoginse their faces).

Another interesting thing Jane said concerned their editing process, which is done according to the spoken word, much like a radio edit. This type of work is seemingly much more a literary/ writerly form of art since the text has primacy over the visual content, with the visual elements almost entirely determined by the text.  One could argue that the individual speakers are similarly subordinated since their individual voices and stories are not as important as the overall narrative the artists construct from them.

My video Reality Life (2009), which featured teenage girls reading out a script written entirely from the titles of ‘unscripted’ TV programmes, attempted to foreground the potentially exploitative aspect of this practice; un-named and cut into wherever it suited the rhythm and flow of the video, the girls were simply ‘delivering’ their lines to camera for my use.

Of course the difference is that it was scripted beforehand, whereas documentaries are constructed from the (supposedly) unpredictable stuff people come out with. But- and this is something I’ve pondered a lot in relation to my own text-based work- where does carefully manipulating other people’s language leave the artist? Contrary to the positing of the work screened as oppositional, with their collaborator Nick Cave acting as a credible signifier of ‘alternative’ culture, the artists still have total authorial control and edit the content to create their own unique, individual response out of it.

It reminded me of something Steven Ball said at the curator’s talk at Banner Repeater in relation to one of my videos. He mentioned Marjorie Perloff, a theorist of conceptual poetics, who has espoused the notion of ‘unoriginal genius’, which as the name suggests, hardly destabilises the old romantic/ individualist idea of the artist as genius- albeit one who displays their virtuosity through re-using and re-ordering existing texts. She gives Benjamin’s Arcades project as a paradigmatic example but also champions the work of contemporary artists like Caroline Bergvall, who has worked with re-written found texts like lyrics and titles of pop songs, for example.

I think she is proposing this as a definitive break from the idea of ‘original genius’ in the age of the internet and simulacrum but I wonder whether using existing texts does anything to challenge the authority and control of the artist since what they formulate from them is still unique and individual - words often associated with ‘genius’, original or otherwise.

# 10 [24 February 2011]

Something I have been meaning to rant about for a while is the prescribed individuality that is integral to the creation of our digital identities on social media platforms. Facebook, Youtube, but also to a lesser extent art sites Artslant, re-title, not to mention dating sites, all involve at least some self-definition within parameters they set out (taste in movies, music, books, religious/ political beliefs etc).  

It’s another case of choice but within a structure where the more significant choices have already been made; for example, belonging to a social media platform is more of a necessity than a choice, and for those who do opt out, part of their identity is then defined by this choice. Last year I had been thinking about how self-definition works in personality tests and the industry of self-help/ self-actualisation that depends on classifying one’s personality- stuff like are you an optimist or a pessimist? A leader or a follower?  

There is an almost comical adherence to the notion of personality as a rigid entity rather than one that fluctuates according to surroundings and circumstances. The cult of personality is also well suited to the process of self-definition through consumerism, in which our particular personality type must find expression through our consumer choices- one of my favourite tests was the Indie test, to determine how ‘alternative’ you are, mainly based on what clothes and music choices you make. Talk about cooption of dissent!

Tying in (maybe) with some of these ideas is an essay by Janet Kraynak, which I re-read today, ostensibly about Bruce Nauman’s sculptural practice but hinging on ideas of participation as submissive and dependent. She develops this idea from the writing of Alain Touraine, who first coined the term ‘programmed society’ 40 years ago, a loaded term synonymous with the rise of post-industrial technocratic society.

Put simply the technocratic society valorizes efficiency and productivity (as opposed to ‘old’ ideals like freedom, self-determination), a ‘business-ontology’ (as Mark Fisher puts it) currently being implemented by the Con-Dems. ‘Optimum’ performance, in the mechanistic meaning of the term, becomes the desired model for subjects and institutions as well as corporations.

 Another important aspect is repression through inclusion, rather than exclusion –not enforced by the police but through comfortable conformity, through fully participating in the systems of consumption and social life, where, however, ‘opting out is not a possibility’. Closely related to inclusion is participation, which is actually the central theme of her essay: drawing on Tourlaine’s, notion of ‘dependant participation’, where the subject, although ostensibly ‘free’ to participate in society, is actually to a large extent obligated.

 She uses this framework for understanding Nauman's work within this tension of participation and control, where the viewer is both ‘beseeched and thwarted’, becoming willing yet not exactly free participants in his installations.  Joining the chorus of grumblings about relational aesthetics she also contrasts this with the supposedly benign, democratic aesthetic of inclusion which masks both the potentially problematic power relationship between artist and viewer within RA practices and the economic arrangements allowing them to thrive.

Amongst many strands that I’m trying to tease out is the relationship between programming/ rationalization and the performance of identity within contemporary culture. As she points out, programming is all about a scientific, rationalised process of information gathering which is then subjected to number-crunching in order to enable its parsing as information, and not just a jumble of facts and figures. This analysis creates a statistically accurate picture of past behaviour and can to a certain extent predict the future.

Then its just a small step to prescribing (programming) the future, as users of Facebook and Google have found- advertisers don’t just place ads in your profile based on your previous inputs for the hell of it, but because its a fair predictor of future activity, i.e. future consumption.

This is the closed-loop variation of capitalism in its networked phase, personalized ads targeting you with ever increasing precision, where any response further shades out that picture and thereby feeds back into the loop. “Free’ internet services, along with ‘free participation” are both apparently underwritten by a contract with hidden costs, one that we are seemingly quite happy to pay.