Anti-Media Studies in Network Cultures
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Anti-Media studies in network cultures Geert Lovink, Series Editor This series of books investigates concepts and practices special to network cultures. Exploring the spectrum of new media and society, we see network cultures as a strategic term to enlist in diagnosing political and aesthetic developments in user-driven communications. Network cultures can be understood as social-technical formations under construction. They rapidly assemble, and can just as quickly disappear, creating a sense of spontaneity, transience and even uncertainty. Yet they are here to stay. However self-evident it is, collaboration is a foundation of network cultures. Working with others frequently brings about tensions that have no recourse to modern protocols of conflict resolution. Networks are not parliaments. How to conduct research within such a shifting environment is a key interest to this series. Studies in Network Cultures is an initiative of the Institute of Network Cultures (INC). The INC was founded in 2004 by its director Geert Lovink and is situated at the Amsterdam Polytechnic (Hogeschool van Amsterdam), as a research programme within the knowledge centre CREATE-IT applied research. Since its inception, the INC has organized international conferences about the history of webdesign, netporn, the critique of ICT for development, new network theory, creative industries rhetoric, online video, search and Wikipedia research. For more information please visit: http://networkcultures.org The series Studies in Network Cultures is published by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with nai010 publishers, Rotterdam. Series Coordinator: Miriam Rasch, Institute of Network Cultures For more information please visit www.networkcultures.org/publications/studies-in-network-cultures Previously published in this series: Ned Rossiter, Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2006) Eric Kluitenberg, Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008) Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008) Vito Campanelli, Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010) Josephine Bosma, Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011) Anti-Media Ephemera on Speculative Arts Florian Cramer nai010 publishers Institute of Network Cultures Series editor: Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam Translations: Bonnie Begush (4, 5, 7, 17, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26), Gerrit Jackson (21), David Hudson (11) commissioned by the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam Editor: Miriam Rasch Series coordinator: Miriam Rasch, Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam Copy editor: D’Laine Camp Design: Studio Tint, Huug Schipper, The Hague Cover design: WOAU!, Rotterdam Type setting and printing: Die Keure, Bruges, Belgium Binding: Catherine Binding Paper: Munken Lynx 100 gr Project coordination: Mehgan Bakhuizen/Barbera van Kooij, nai010 publishers, Rotterdam Publisher: nai010 publishers, Rotterdam © 2013 the author, nai010 publishers, Rotterdam. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For works of visual artists affiliated with a CISAC-organization the copyrights have been settled with Pictoright in Amsterdam. © 2013, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam nai010 publishers is an internationally orientated publisher specialized in developing, producing and distributing books on architecture, visual arts and related disciplines. www.nai010.com [email protected] It was not possible to find all the copyright holders of the illustrations used. Interested parties are requested to contact nai010 publishers, Mauritsweg 23, 3012 JR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Available in North, South and Central America through Artbook | D.A.P., 155 Sixth Avenue 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013-1507, [email protected] Available in the United Kingdom and Ireland through Art Data, 12 Bell Industrial Estate, 50 Cunnington Street, London W4 5HB, [email protected] Printed and bound in Belgium ISBN 978-94-6208-031-7 Contents Introduction 7 Chapter I ANTI 1. The Foul Promises of ‘Interactivity’ and ‘Openness’. 20 Rereading ‘Art, Power and Communication’ 2. Anti-Copyright in Artistic Subcultures 24 3. The Fiction of the Creative Industries 39 4. Rhizomatic Blitzkrieg 43 Chapter II MEDIA 5. Literature in the Internet 54 6. Digital Code and Literary Text 68 7. Ctrl > Alt > Delete 75 8. The Creative Common Misunderstanding 82 9. Animals that Belong to the Emperor 90 10. $(echo echo) echo $(echo): Command Line Poetics 96 11. Peer-to-Peer Services: Transgressing the Archive 102 (and Its Maladies?) 12. What Is Interface Aesthetics, or What Could It Be (Not)? 112 Chapter III EPHEMERA 13. BNADJT PD 124 14. Ultimate Manifesto of Neoism 124 15. self.pl 129 16. Action Melancholia 129 17. Pop Culture and the Aesthetics of Connection 132 18. Floppy Films 139 Chapter IV SPECULATIVE 19. Language and Software Studies 142 20. Poetic Art of Wisdom: Quirinus Kuhlmann’s 148 ‘41st Kiss of Love’ 21. Alternative Porn and Aestetic Sensibility 162 22. mez, _Viro.Logic Condition] [ing] [1.1_ 167 23. Notes on the Nature of Conspiracy 186 24. In Some Respects Reversed: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s 193 Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele Chapter V ARTS 25. With Perhaps the Exception of Rhythm 200 26. Pataphysical Music Machines 211 27. Social Hacking, Revisited 220 28. Post-Digital Writing 227 Small Museum of Obsessions 240 Notes 243 Also available in this series 261 Introduction Anti While this book was in the making, an article in the online arts journal Triple Canopy almost destroyed it. ‘Speculative’ turned out to be one of most fashionable buzzwords in what authors Alix Rule and David Levine call ‘International Art English’ (‘IAE’).1 Rule and Levine analyse the lingo of ‘the art-world press release’, particularly on the e-flux mailing list, and recon- struct how in the 1970s, French structuralist and German Frankfurt school jargon was imported into the canonical American arts journal October. From there, it mutated into today’s globalized, pseudo-scholarly contemporary art English. Rule and Levine predict the ‘implosion’ of this ‘decadent period of IAE’ along with art biennials and the globalized ‘curatorial’ art discourse. I hope that their prediction will be correct, although a renaissance of some naive or reactionary expressionist art could be the collateral damage. Brad Troemel, What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan, 2010 Reproduced with the artist’s kind permission 7 Rule’s and Levine’s paper is illustrated with a photograph of Liam Gillick’s 2008 installation Rescinded Production (whose title is a great example of IAE). Artist Brad Troemel took a picture of the same work and superimposed the lettering: ‘ART PRODUCED FROM THE SOCIAL INTERACTIONS OF A NETWORK OF PARTICIPANTS – YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.’ The first part of the sentence is a quote from Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, the book that canonized the diffuse art practices that had risen, along with the curator as the new central figure of contemporary art, in the aftermath of October’s discourse since the 1990s. People familiar with popular Internet culture will instantly recognize the format and typography of Troemel’s image/text montage: it is one of the countless ‘macros’, or ‘memes’, that are produced every day (if not every minute) on ‘imageboards’ like 4chan.org, the breeding ground of the Internet’s most vibrant popular culture, a culture best known for having created the Anonymous movement. Beyond the Internet, imageboard memes and the Anonymous move- ment have arguably become the most vital popular visual culture phenomena of this time. This shows the relative powerlessness of ‘cu- ratorial’ contemporary art concerning almost anything outside its own discourse. It was not always like that. 1960s and 1970s counterculture drew on audiovisual and performative forms of expression from hap- penings, Fluxus, underground experimental film, avant-garde electronic music and free jazz; punk aesthetics drew on Dada, lettrism and body art. The Guy Fawkes masks of the Anonymous movement, however, came from the Hollywood-adapted comic strip V for Vendetta, and most memes refer – in semantics that are often no less complex than Renaissance emblems and allegories – to mass cultural pop music, films or TV shows, while imageboards themselves originated in Japanese manga culture. Next to 4chan, the rampant popularity of street art is another exam- ple that outside its own small universe, contemporary visual art has lost its edge for the larger contemporary culture. Which is a shame; because there is much to be criticized in the often simplistic and visually con- ventional notions of subversion both in imageboard memes and street art. In comparison to other arts – music and film, for example – the visual arts are an odd exception to the general convergence of former avant-garde and former popular culture, and former Western and for- 8 introduction mer non-Western arts. Any issue of music magazine Wire,