- Venue
- a-n Degree's Unedited
- Location
The Internet is very good at making old things look new. Documents hang around and you don’t say things just the once. It is almost as if once online, your voice is added to an ever-growing script, like a massive play that will never be performed. I’m not very comfortable with that and I have begun to make a habit of removing my character’s lines from this giant play in order to maintain more of a temporary existence rather than a continuous one.
I recently removed a fairly extensive blog I had written whilst in the final year of my BA from the degrees unedited section of the a-n website [1]. I knew when writing the blog that I would eventually do this, although I never quite knew when. Writing the blog was extremely useful; every fortnight in less than 500 words I made myself declare what I was doing. It was a process of confirming thoughts and formulating questions about my practice. However, a year on I felt that the blog I had written was no longer something that I wanted to be represented by.
I blogged because I thought that it would help me to promote myself, which it did fairly well; my work was subsequently included within two publications. I had work and sections of my blog printed in a-n magazine a couple of times and I was also asked to make a text work for the publication Project Biennale [2]. It was only about a month before my degree show that I started to realise that the blog was part of me, it was part of what people saw to be Tom Duggan.
As an artist, it’s your job to decide what to show to people. But so often I feel that artists forget to remove things, they forget that removal, deletion and abstaining from presenting anything at all, are also important gestures. Deciding what you won’t show is perhaps more important than deciding what you will.
The blog put a context and a background onto my work; it was like a public sketch/workbook. I had left it online for a year after I stopped using it because a few people had told me that they found it interesting. But I’m not the person who wrote that blog anymore; a lot of the ideas within it are irrelevant now and were misrepresenting me, so keeping it online seemed misleading and unnecessary.
Regular writing is an invaluable process, which can help artists gain clarity, but whether or not what is written needs to be published is a completely different matter. Blogs can be a really naff place to find something out, a bit like reading a detailed synopsis to a film you are about to watch; they can ruin surprises. But whether or not blogging works or is appropriate for an individual can ironically only be found out by blogging. I’ve tried it and it worked very well for me. The public and private debate was ongoing while I blogged and has now reached a conclusion in my gesture of removal. I don’t think blogging – as opposed to keeping a diary – did any harm, but I’m not convinced that it was necessary for me to have made those pieces of writing public.
I see the Internet as this deafeningly loud place where nobody can be heard because everyone is already busy talking. It’s people trying to shout over one another and most of the time I can’t make any sense of it. The Internet also manages to behave timelessly: what I had said in my blog was still being said with the same voice a year later. There’s nothing temporary about it.
Very little is removed from the Internet; new announcements are always taking over the foreground and pushing yesterdays news further down the page. This results in a culture of noise and the precedent that if something isn’t announced then it isn’t happening. I wish that more people were in the habit of deleting themselves, of cleaning up old and irrelevant information. The Internet doesn’t need to be an archive.