JOSEPHINE SKINNER
POSTPRODUCTION OF SELF USING YOUTUBE—A SOCIAL SEARCH FOR FEELING
A USB of video documentation accompanies this thesis
For additional material, please visit: www.josephineskinner.com
PhD Art, Design & Media UNSW | Art & Design March 2015
2 CONTENTS Abstract 5 List of Images 7
INTRODUCTION Postproduction 2.0 17
CHAPTER 1: USING UTOPIAS Introducing YouTopia 29 DIY Utopias 34 Feeling Feedback 40 Escape into the Screen 46 YouTopia: Spectacularly Banal 53
ARTWORKS The end and Needed to talk 59
CHAPTER 2: A SELF-REMIXING SCENARIO Introducing the Self as Medium 73 A Therapeutic Narrative of Self-Remix 79 Performing Convergence: Private Desires & Social Fictions 87 Feeling Intense: The (Media) Power of Now 94 An Aesthetics of Networked Narcissism 99 The Message is You 109
ARTWORK Alone Together 115
CHAPTER 3: IMAGINING COLLECTIVITY Introducing Collectively Shared Lives, Imaginations and Fantasies 125 A Social Media Imagination 130 Formalising Fandom 135 Feeling Social: A Digital Form of Fandom 144 Jamming Collectivity 148
ARTWORK Hopelessly Devoted 163
CHAPTER 4: PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION Introducing Overshare 179 Creatively Capitalising on Emotion 181 A Digital Junk Aesthetic 186 Soft Scratch 190 A New Concrete 196 Freezing Feeling 201
ARTWORK Love Story 211
CONCLUSION Banal Spectacles: The Use of You 229
BIBLIOGRAPHY 237 YOUTUBE-OGRAPHY 225 ARTWORK APPENDIX 261
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4 ABSTRACT This thesis argues that by selecting and transforming content found on the video- sharing site YouTube, my artwork projects demonstrate the ‘new role of art’ described by Nicolas Bourriaud in Postproduction (2002). However, by moving away from appropriating the products of spectacular, consumer culture to reusing the mediated, affective products of prosumers, I argue they also demonstrate that another profound shift has since taken place in artistic critiques of our relationship with media—one that requires an upgrade of Bourriaud’s thesis to consider the Postproduction of Self.
Drawing on both sides of the Media Studies 2.0 debate, my discussion aims to articulate, and through my artworks heighten, the coexistence of critical and digital utopian perspectives of our individual and collective present-day engagement with media. Expanding this theoretical field, I argue that we find the continuing legacies of two utopias—the utopia of the spectacle and digital utopianism—not only at the level of YouTube’s cultural system, but also in the relations of desire and lack expressed within its banal and ‘throwaway’, user-created content.
I propose that, as a new form of escapism, the active use of media within our everyday lives presents an evolving, conflicting and complex relationship between self, spectacle and networked society. YouTube’s searchable collections of remixed identities, sampled imaginations, and postproduced fantasies, I argue, make visible an ambiguity: do we inhabit the spectacle’s fictions or do they inhabit us?
Through historical and theoretical contextualisation and close analyses, I discuss how my artworks variously contribute to broader discourses, including the aesthetics of digital narcissism, and social media’s flawed potential to produce genuine communities and connections.
Situating my thesis in relation to ‘emotional capitalism’ and ‘Post-Internet art’, I propose that contemporary forms of collage that aim to make sense of online excess, and in particular, publicly shared private feeling, parallel marketing strategies such as ‘mood-mining’, which search, collect and utilise affective data.
I conclude that artistic formalisations of our digitised versions of self, allow us to reflect on the limitations and liberations, successes and failures, afforded by social media platforms, and the collectively shared affective language that they reveal.
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6 LIST OF IMAGES
INTRODUCTION Figure 1: Jason Rhoades. Installation view, Black Pussy, solo exhibition, David Zwirner, New York, 2007. Courtesy of the Estate of Jason Rhoades, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, and David Zwirner, New York/London.
Figure 2: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Alone Together, 2013, 21 looped videos, stereo sound, reused YouTube content, CRT TVs, street found furniture. Group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2 February – 13 March, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 3: Josephine Skinner. Video still, A Whole New World (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, HD video, stereo sound, reused YouTube content. Image courtesy of the artist.
CHAPTER 1 Figures 4 & 5: Screen grabs from YouTube Spotlight, Our YouTube Community, YouTube, May 1, 2013. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 6: Christopher Baker. Installation view, Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise, 2008. Photo: Chris Houltberg. Copyright Christopher Baker. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTWORKS The end and Needed to talk Figure 7: Josephine Skinner. Installation view (foreground), The end, 2013, multi- channel HD TV installation, reused YouTube content; (background) Needed to talk, 2013, vinyl text wall installation, reused YouTube content; both in the solo exhibition, The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 27 November – 13 December, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figures 8 & 9: Josephine Skinner. Video stills, (from top) The end Promo: It’s over; The end Promo: It was all a dream, 2013, 4:3 videos, sound, reused YouTube content, broadcast in the Tele Visions Project, Carriageworks, NSW, 2013, and live analogue broadcast, 681.25 MHZ UHF Band. Image courtesy of the artist.
7 Figure 10 & 11: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, The end (details), 2013, solo exhibition, The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figures 12 & 13: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Needed to talk, 2013, vinyl text wall installation, reused YouTube content, solo exhibition, The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 14: Source material for Needed to talk, 2013. Screen grab from jaydeman23, (Getting Dumped)|What to Do After (Getting Dumped), YouTube, November 26, 2008. See YouTube-ography.
Figures 15 & 16: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Needed to talk (details), 2013, solo exhibition, The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
CHAPTER 2 Figure 17: Vito Acconci. Video still, Centers, 1971. Copyright the artist. Image courtesy of Video Data Bank,
Figure 18: Selfie Syndrome Infographic. Copyright Best Computer Science Schools, 2013,
Figure 19: Jaimie Warren. Self-portait as Lasagna Del Ray by thestrutny, 2012, from Celebrities as Food & Food'lebrities, chromogenic print, 50.5 x 61cm, edition of 8. Copyright Jaimie Warren. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney.
Figure 20: Screen grab from izzi izumi, Girl Is Trying Too Hard to Take a Selfie for a Whole Minute, YouTube, October 11, 2014. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 21: Jackson Eaton. Installation view, Gallery Melfie, from Melfies, 2012-2013, digitally printed cotton t-shirts, edition of 20, group exhibition, Totally Looks Like, Stills Gallery, NSW, 2014. Copyright Jackson Eaton. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney.
8 Figure 22: Jackson Eaton. Massage Melfie (detail), from Melfies, 2012-13, digitally printed cotton t-shirts, edition of 20, group exhibition, Totally Looks Like, Stills Gallery, NSW, 2014. Copyright Jackson Eaton. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTWORK Alone Together Figures 23 & 24: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Alone Together, 2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figures 25, 26 & 27: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Alone Together (details), 2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
CHAPTER 3 Figure 28: John Baldessari. Video still, I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art, 1971. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Figure 29: Candice Breitz. Installation view, Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), 2006, solo exhibition, Bawag Foundation, Vienna. Shot at the Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK, August 2006. 25-channel installation, 25 hard drives, duration 39 minutes, 55 seconds, edition of 6 + A.P. Photo: Wolfgang Wassner. Copyright Candice Breitz. Image courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling / White Cube.
Figure 30: Phil Collins. Production still, the world won’t listen, 2004-07, part three: dunia tak akan mendengar, Jakarta and Bandung, 2007, three-channel synchronized video installation, colour, sound, duration 56 minutes. Image sourced online from Tanya Bonakdar Gallery,
Figure 31: Candice Breitz. Video still, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) (detail), 2005. Shot at Jungle Sound Studio, Milan, Italy, July 2005, 30-channel installation, 30 hard drives, duration 73 minutes, 30 seconds, edition of 6 + AP. Copyright Candice Breitz. Image courtesy of the artist.
9 Figure 32: Phil Collins. the world won’t listen, 2004-07, part three: dunia tak akan mendengar, Jakarta and Bandung, 2007, three-channel synchronized video projection with sound, poster installation, duration 57 minutes, editon of 3. Copyright Phil Collins. Image courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
Figure 33: Screen grab from gotyemusic, Gotye - Somebodies, YouTube, August 12, 2012. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 34: Screen grab from impeto, Ultimate Canon Rock, YouTube, June 2, 2007. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 35: Screen grab from Cory Arcangel YouTube Channel, Cory Arcangel – Paganini’s 5th Caprice, YouTube, June 15, 2011. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 36: Screen grab from kutiman, Kutiman-Thru-you - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords, YouTube, March 7, 2009. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 37: Photographic illustration of ‘mass ornament’ style dance choreography in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y Levin, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Figure 38: Natalie Bookchin. Video still, Mass Ornament, 2009. Copyright Natalie Bookchin. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 39: Screen grab from politicalremix, Lambeth Walk: Nazi Style – by Charles a. Ridley, YouTube, March 16, 2011. See YouTube-ography.
Figures 40 & 41: Natalie Bookchin. Video stills, Mass Ornament, 2009. Copyright Natalie Bookchin. Images courtesy of the artist.
ARTWORK Hopelessly Devoted Figure 42: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Hopelessly Devoted from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
10 Figure 43: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Hopelessly Devoted (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 44: Christian Marclay. Installation view, Video Quartet, 2002, four-channel DVD projection, sound. 243.8 x 1219.2 cm. Photo: Stephen White. Copyright Christian Marclay and White Cube. Image courtesy of the artist and White Cube.
Figure 45: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Take My Breath Away (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Still from video documentation: Nick Garner, Rococco Productions. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 46: Josephine Skinner. Video still, A Whole New World (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 47: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, A Whole New World, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figures 48 & 49: Josephine Skinner. Video stills, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (details), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 50: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, A Whole New World (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 51: Josephine Skinner. Video still, The Time of My Life (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 52: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Take My Breath Away, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 53: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Take My Breath Away (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
11 Figure 54: Josephine Skinner. Video still, A Whole New World (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 55: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 56: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
CHAPTER 4 Figure 57: Screen grab from Art Gallery of NSW, Unguided Tours, YouTube, May 14, 2011. See YouTube-ography.
Figures 59 & 60: Grant Stevens. Video stills, Crushing, 2009, digital video with sound, duration 4 minutes 13 seconds. Copyright Grant Stevens. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.
Figure 61: Grant Stevens. Installation view, Supermassive, 2013, four-channel digital video with sound, duration 11 minutes 19 seconds. Photograph: Jeff McLane. Copyright Grant Stevens. Image courtesy of the artist, LA Louver, Venice, and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney.
Figure 62: Penelope Umbrico. 541795 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 1/26/06 (detail), 2006-ongoing, detail of 2000 4" x 6" machine c-prints. Copyright Penelope Umbrico. Image courtesy of the artist, Mark Moore Gallery and Stills Gallery, Sydney.
ARTWORK Love Story Figures 62 & 63: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Love Story, 2010-2013, 2 looped videos, sound, reused YouTube content, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
12 Figure 64: Source material for Love Story, 2010-13. Screen grab from My channel, Poems About Lost Love, YouTube, March 16, 2008. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 65: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Love Story (detail), 2010-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Still from video documentation: Nick Garner, Rococco Productions. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 66: Screen grab from the making of a YouTube Video Editor version of Love Story, 2015.
Figure 67: Screen grab of ‘Best Movie Kisses-top10’ search results, YouTube, August 3, 2014, accessed January 30, 2015.
Figure 68: Source material for Love Story, 2010-13. Screen grab from thelegend10, How I Feel About U, YouTube, January 3, 2008. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 69: Source material for Love Story, 2010-13. Screen grab from Baileyhamster, Sweet Love Quotes - Angel of Mine, YouTube, May 9, 2010. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 70: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Love Story, 2010-2013 (YouTube Video Editor version, 2015).
Figure 71: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Love Story, 2010-2013 (YouTube Video Editor version, 2015), group exhibition, Love and Fear ARTBAR, Museum of Contemrpoary Art, February 27, 2015.
Figure 72: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Love Story, 2010-2013 (YouTube Video Editor version, 2015).
CONCLUSION Figure 73: Source material for Take My Breath Away, from Hopelessly Deovoted 2011-13. Screen grab from Yee Lee Moua, evo playing cover song “take my breath away”, YouTube, June 16, 2009. See YouTube-ography.
13 Figure 74: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Take My Breath Away (detail), 2011- 13, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013, group exhibition, The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW, 2013. Still from video documentation: Dominic Kirkwood. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 75: Patrick Pound. Portrait of the Wind (detail), 2012, giclée print on rag paper, 127 x 230cm, edition of 5 + 2AP. Copyright Patrick Pound. Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery, Sydney.
Figure 76 & 77: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Needed to talk (details), 2013, solo exhibition, The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 2013. Photo: Susannah Wimberley. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTWORK APPENDIX Figure 78: Source material for The end, 2013. Screen grab from RODALCO2007, TV cathode ray tube explodes, YouTube, January 21, 2012. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 79: Source material for Needed to talk, 2013. Screen grab from the comments thread responding to jaydeman23, (Getting Dumped)|What to Do After (Getting Dumped), YouTube, November 26, 2008. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 80: The installation-in-progress of Needed to talk, Firstdraft Gallery, 2013. Photo: the artist.
Figure 81: Source material for The end Promos, 2013. Video still from JAdridge86, Dallas Promo Collection (1978-91), YouTube, April 28, 2011. See YouTube-ography.
Figure 82: Source material for Alone Together, 2013. Video still from debpaulmal, Loving Yourself by Louise Hay Pt 1 YouTube, October 22, 2009. See YouTube- ography.
Figure 83: Source material for Hopelessly Devoted, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2010- 2013. Video still from lowflyer55, Hopelessly Devoted, Olivia Newton John, cover- Jonathan Finch, YouTube, May 6, 2007. See YouTube-ography.
14 Figure 84: Source material for Love Story, 2010-2013. Screen grab from My Channel, Sad Love Poem, YouTube, March 16, 2008. See YouTube-ography.
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16 INTRODUCTION Postproduction 2.0
The difference resides in the articulation.1
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002)
Back in 1990, John Wyver argued that audiences “use television in their lives, in their imaginations and in their fantasies”.2 Now, in YouTube’s vast mass of video content, private uses of spectacular media are not only more publicly visible, but our lives, imaginations and fantasies become, as Mark Andrejevic puts it, “storable, and sortable”3 collections of social data.
Three years prior to the launch of YouTube in 2002, Nicolas Bourriaud wrote Postproduction about a number of artists working in the 1990s, who “took their point of departure in the changing mental space that has been opened for thought by the Internet”. 4 Notably, Bourriaud didn’t discuss artists using the Internet as a new medium, such as those in the .Net movement including Vuk Ćosić, Olia Lialina, Jodi.org and Mark Amerika. Instead, postproduction artists were reflecting a shifting psychological space through the “common recourse to already produced forms”.5 Jason Rhoades, for instance, had begun creating his chaotic and excessive installations out of piles of merchandise, which according to Bourriaud were making “material the flows and relationships that have tended toward disembodiment with the appearance of online shopping”. 6 Those who weren’t reusing mass-produced consumer products were reconfiguring pre-existing artworks and recycling elements of popular culture, such as the transformation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Hollywood movie Psycho (1960) into the video installation 24 Hour Psycho (1993) by Douglas Gordon.
1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), p. 9. 2 John Wyver, “Coming to Terms with the Frightful Parent: Video Art and Television,” in At Arm's Length: (Taking a Good Hard Look at) Artists' Video, ed. Barbara Osborn, (New York: New York State Council on the Arts, 1990), p. 4. 3 Mark Andrejevic, “Social Network Exploitation,” in A Networked Self, ed. Zizi Papacharissi, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 88. 4 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p.14. 5 ibid., p. 16. 6 ibid., p. 29.
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Figure 1: Jason Rhoades. Installation view, Black Pussy, 2007.
These new configurations of social signs presented a significant progression from early forms of appropriation, such as Duchamp’s influential ‘ready-mades’ at the beginning of the 20th Century, Bourriaud argues. Expanding beyond the technical meaning of postproduction, artists were now considering all aspects of culture their ready-made materials, in a move to “reedit historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that compose them into alternative scenarios”.7 Marked by the ‘twin figures’ of the DJ and the TV programmer,8 this movement reflected a broad social shift to a new “culture of use”9 and a “collective ideal: sharing”.10 As Bourriaud explains:
This culture of use implies a profound transformation of the status of the work of art: going beyond its traditional role as a receptacle of the artist’s vision, it
7 ibid., p. 45. 8 ibid., p. 13. 9 ibid., p.19. 10 ibid., p.9.
18 now functions as an active agent, a musical score, an unfolding scenario, a framework that possesses autonomy and materiality to varying degrees, its form able to oscillate from a simple idea to sculpture or canvas. In generating behaviors and potential reuses, art challenges passive culture, composed of merchandise and consumers.11
By selecting and reconfiguring ‘already produced forms’ found on the video-sharing site YouTube, my artwork projects, which are both contextualised and directly analysed throughout this thesis, demonstrate both the technical meaning of postproduction and the new role of art described by Bourriaud.
The collective script of Love Story (2010-13), for instance, becomes an active agent when it inhabits the internal monologue of its reader; the pseudo cover bands in the Hopelessly Devoted series (2011-13) produce alternative musical scores, as YouTube users perform together the love songs from popular romantic movies; Alone Together (2013) creates a communal, unfolding scenario in which its audience is faced with a vision of its past and receives self-help affirmations for its future; in The end (2013), YouTube users challenge ‘passive culture’ by violently destroying their old TVs; and, in Needed to talk (2013), a YouTube comments thread turns the gallery walls into a canvas for an ‘expressionistic’ collective outpouring of hope and heartbreak. However, by drawing on these YouTube-found self-expressions as a source material, my practice also serves to demonstrate that the role of art has undergone another profound transformation in the years that have followed Bourriaud’s Postproduction.
Indicated in a range of theoretical responses to YouTube, including Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (2008), YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009), The YouTube Reader (2009), Watching YouTube (2010), and further expanded in this thesis, the increasing accessibility and affordability of media production technologies has vastly expanded the scope and scale of Bourriaud’s culture of use; and the participatory drive of Web 2.0 and social media has turned his ‘collective ideal of sharing’ into a reality, albeit a problematic one.
Bourriaud’s observations therefore remain highly prescient, both for today’s participatory culture and for contemporary artistic practices. In fact, his notion of
11 ibid., p. 20.
19 postproduction art can be seen as a so-far unheralded precursor to contemporary Post-Internet art practices,12 which have been defined as responding to the ubiquity of the Internet through gallery-based works, as recognising network culture’s broad social implications beyond its technological ones,13 and by significantly evoking our collective “internet state of mind”.14
Yet, it is also the pervasive nature of the Internet, and the commonplace production of media content, that mean certain ideas outlined in Postproduction require upgrading. Where Bourriaud proposes, for instance, that artists create alternative narratives, YouTube already offers myriad; where he discusses how artists had moved from the use of raw materials to the use of capital, defined as the industrial “product of labour”,15 now artists and commercial markets alike are motivated by emotional capital and the products of online over-sharing; and in an era when audiences are no longer considered “faceless blobs, sprawled on the couch” but creative, 16 what does it mean to assert that artists are no longer specialised producers but “specialised workers of cultural reappropriation”?17 Afterall, it seems that anyone who remixes anything now qualifies as an artist.
Underscoring each of these shifts is the convergence of the traditionally distinct roles of producers and consumers into the now-commonplace term, ‘prosumer’. 18 Postproduction art, Bourriaud had argued, demonstrated this “scrambling of boundaries” between production and consumption”,19 yet he nevertheless continued
12 ‘Post-Internet Art’ is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson in 2006. For an account of the development of the term, see Michael Connor, What's Postinternet Got to Do with Net Art, Rhizome, November 1, 2013, accessed September 12, 2014,
20
Figure 2: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Alone Together, 2013.
to assert a distinction between the two in everyday life, evident in his differentiation between ‘passive’ and ‘use’ culture:
It is the use of the world that allows one to create new narratives, while its passive contemplation relegates human productions to the communal spectacle.20
Bourriaud credits the mid-20th Century social revolutionaries of the Situationists, led by Guy Debord, as key historical pioneers of postproduction practices, precisely because of their artistic use of the ‘communal spectacle’. Just as the Situationists had critiqued the spectacle through the détournement of mass-produced images, and derives through the urban landscape, postproduction artists divert and hijack cultural signs—they are ‘semionauts’ who find new pathways through the digitally networked landscape.21 It is important to note, however, that Debord also pre-empted current critical perspectives of ‘prosumer’ culture by warning of “pseudo-use” 22 in The Society of the Spectacle (1967):
20 ibid., p. 46. 21 ibid., p. 18. 22 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 24.
21 … man is more and more, and ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.23
In Postproduction, Bourriaud’s more optimistic notion of ‘use’ is instead informed by Michel De Certeau’s description of “the art of using”,24 which he outlines in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984/2011). De Certeau famously argued that the creative use of culture enables tactical resistance to the strategies of dominant power by making its forms “habitable”. 25 Borrowing this terminology, Bourriaud writes in Postproduction: “To learn how to use forms as the artists in question invite us to do is above all to know how to make them one's own, to inhabit them”.26
Bourriaud’s approach marks a significant critical shift from the Situationists’ strategy of ‘use’, whose aim it was to negate spectacular culture and to devalorise traditional art forms. Postproduction art, he argues, is productive: its artists “positivize the remake”.27 Presenting an alternative artistic formula, Bourriaud indicates that mass- produced culture and its passive contemplation are negative, active uses of it are positive, and together they generate “a neutral, zero-sum process.”28 In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), Henry Jenkins notes that a sharp contrast between “passive old media” and “interactive new media” was indicative of 1990s rhetoric of ‘digital revolution’29—suggesting Bourriaud’s proposition aligns with a broader digital utopianism of the same era.30
Now, however, production and consumption have become entirely intertwined, and the academic rhetoric of ‘passive culture’ has become a little passé. For instance, certain theorists argue we should break from traditional media studies altogether, such as Geert Lovink’s infamous comment that ‘new media’ should divorce itself from
23 ibid., p. 24. 24 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F Rendall, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984/2011), p. xv. 25 ibid., pp. xxi-xxii. 26 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 18. 27 ibid., p. 43. 28 ibid., p. 37. 29 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), p. 5. Jenkins references Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995) as a key example, as it assumes that traditional broadcast media will be entirely displaced by new media. 30 This is underscored by the fact that Bourriaud attributes the birth of postproduction art to “the democratization of computers and the appearance of sampling,” p. 35.
22 ‘old media’ and go solo.31 My perspective aligns more closely with Jenkins’s (2006) notion of convergence culture, in which he recognises the continued significance of old media in our networked lives. “[T]he emerging convergence paradigm”, he writes, “assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways”.32
A special issue of the journal Interactions (2009) addressed this convergence paradigm through a discussion of ‘Media Studies 2.0’. Coined in 2007 by David Gauntlett and William Merrin,33 Gauntlett (2009) explains how the term ‘upgrades’ traditional media studies by incorporating three key shifts brought about by Internet- based technologies: the increasing range of places where users interact with media, the collapsing of ‘producer’ and ‘audience’, and “a turn away from ‘professional’ media productions, towards the everyday participatory and creative possibilities of today’s media”.34
Postproduction of Self expands the theoretical discourse of Media Studies 2.0 to art practice, exploring a ‘turn away’ from the artistic appropriation of ‘professional’ media productions. In this emerging artistic convergence paradigm, I argue that art’s role is no longer to challenge passive culture, but to apprehend and comprehend its active counterpart. In so doing, I consider how old and new media interact; both within user- created content, and, most significantly, within users, in ever more complex ways.
Just as Bourriaud saw the practices of postproduction as applicable to all ‘tenants of culture’, not just artists, so too the notion of the postproduction of self looks at the performative remixing of our identities found on YouTube. It also identifies a number of artists who, in heterogeneous ways, re-edit and rearrange the collective narratives of these data-selves and online “objects of intuition”. 35 While Bourriaud’s postproduction artists manipulate material that is “no longer primary” 36 — postproduction art 2.0 is at a second remove again, appropriating or responding to
31 Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011). 32 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 6. 33 The term was coined in separate instances by David Gauntlett and William Merrin in 2007. See David Gauntlett, “Media Studies 2.0: A Response,” in Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, (June 15, 2009), pp. 147-57, accessed June 9, 2013 from EBSCO Communication and Mass Media Complete - Publications database. 34 ibid., p. 147. 35 Bernard Stiegler, “The Carnival of the New Screen: From Hegemony to Isonomy,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vanderau, (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), p. 42. 36 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 13.
23 the already remixed, recycled, remade and remediated products of mass-produced popular culture.
My central research question, therefore, is two-fold. It engages with the changing nature of the self, as affective and intersubjective experiences converge with an increasingly networked and globalized society, and considers the parallel changing approaches to collage that seek not to fragment, but to construct new wholes from the digital chaos and excess.
A recurring strategic approach to this research enquiry, both in my practice and thesis, is my attempt to uphold both sides of dichotomies found in theoretical discourse on the subject. Gauntlett, in his concluding remarks on the Media Studies 2.0 debate, provides a pertinent warning in this regard, observing that theorists of social media still tend toward polarised perspectives of participatory culture:
It can be frustrating when commentators seem determined only to find the good, or the bad, in new technologies and their possibilities. To advance this debate, we need to find ways to hold more than one thing in the air at once— to move beyond entirely dismissive criticism, or starry-eyed celebration, to a sensible debate which can sift the nuggets of hope from the darkness, and suggest both possibilities for positive social change as well as analyses of social and environmental harm.37
Gauntlett may be oversimplifying Media Studies 2.0 discourse, but his analogy of ‘holding more than one thing in the air at once’ is useful for conceiving a 2.0 upgrade to postproduction art. In regards to new forms of monopolising media power, and new iterations of digital utopianism, Postproduction of Self forwards an approach of articulated ambiguity. YouTube, I propose, makes visible the convergence of digital and spectacular utopias; which comes hand in hand with the convergence of the art of using and pseudo-use. Encapsulating my research question, in “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life” (2008), Lev Manovich revisits De Certeau’s philosophy of use, to consider the complexities of prosumer power on YouTube:
Given that the significant percentage of user-generated content follows the templates and conventions set up by professional entertainment industry, or
37 Gauntlett, “Media Studies 2.0: A Response,” p. 157.
24 directly re-uses professionally produced content (for instance, anime music videos), does this mean that people’s identities and imagination are now even more firmly colonized by commercial media than in the twentieth century?38
While Manovich attempts to resolve this question, I aim to maintain the flux of his enquiry. In the collective sharing of our postproduced identities, sampled imaginations, and remixed fantasies found on YouTube, what becomes apparent, I argue, isn’t that we inhabit the spectacle or that it inhabits us, but rather a very real ambiguity between the two. This thesis proposes that the use of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media within our everyday lives presents an evolving, conflicting and complex relationship between self, spectacle and networked society.
In Chapter 1, I’ll introduce YouTopia, a real and imaginary space where the utopias of the spectacle and ‘digital revolution’ converge. I’ll argue that this space makes visible a new, two-fold form of affective escapism; firstly through the process of self- remixing identity using elements of pop culture, and secondly by sharing these self- remixes through the networked screen. In Chapter 2, I will look more deeply at the idea of self-remix to argue that this contemporary version of the ‘self as medium’ represents a new form of narcissism. In contrast to utopian notions of remix, I propose that the perpetual reinvention of the self invites a critical perspective on our active engagement with pre-existing social scripts. In Chapter 3, I’ll explore different ideas and formalisations of collectivity in relation to fan communities and social networks. I’ll argue that YouTube’s searchable collections of remixed identities reveal a globally shared language of desire and emotion, making ever more visible tensions between individuation and imitation, sameness and difference. Lastly, in Chapter 4, I’ll more closely consider artistic methodologies for postproducing digitised expressions of self, and, more broadly, attempts to make sense out of the glut of affective data. As artists navigate the excesses of networked culture, I will argue that new forms of collage parallel the emerging marketing strategies of mood-mining and sentiment analysis. Following each chapter, I will provide close readings of each of my artwork projects, discussing how they variously materialise and further this conceptual territory by creating banal spectacles that converge private realities and social fictions.
38 Lev Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, eds. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 36.
25 Throughout this discussion of the Postproduction of Self I aim to articulate, and, in the case of my artworks, heighten the coexistence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘hopeful’ and ‘dark’ aspects of our engagement with media that Gauntlett argued divides theoretical discourse. As arts writer Carrie Miller (2012) notes of my work with YouTube-found home performances: “the best and worst of participatory culture reveals itself under the harsh lighting of a suburban bedroom”.39
Figure 3: Josephine Skinner. Video still, A Whole New World (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011- 2013.
39 Carrie Miller, Josephine Skinner: Hopelessly Devoted, exhibition catalogue text, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, March 29 - April 15, 2012.
26
27
Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography.
Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography.
Figures 4 & 5: Screen grabs from YouTube Spotlight, Our YouTube Community, YouTube, May 1, 2013.
28 CHAPTER 1: USING UTOPIAS
Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes.40
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002)
Introducing YouTopia YouTube’s 2013 Brandcast Our YouTube community41 presents a dramatic vision of its role in emerging social democracies. Punctuating footage of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, it states that “Voices are heard”, and claims “What starts with a click … Becomes a shared experience.” This self-portrait capitalises on the rhetoric of digital utopianism, and yet, it is also edited like a gripping movie trailer with an evocative and climatic soundtrack. Its moving narrative—a montage of numerous YouTube clips featuring the ‘rags to riches’ true story of Justin Bieber, the romantic fairy tale of the royal wedding, and an array of happy families, emotional hugs, ecstatic music fans, and fireworks—tells us that video-sharing not only realises our hopes for freedom of expression, it also brings us closer to achieving happiness.
What the Google-owned site understands, and yet is missing from much of Media Studies 2.0 discourse, is the power of online video to evoke drama, intensity and feeling. The Brandcast’s spectacular rendering of everyday media productions demonstrates YouTube’s capacity to blur lived realities and idealised social fictions. YouTube, I’ll argue in this chapter, makes visible the contemporary convergence of spectacular and digital utopias.
Sir Thomas More coined the word ‘utopia’ in 1516. In a work of fiction, he described the discovery of an island called Utopia, which had an idealised and communalistic social order. Much later, in 1960, Guy Debord with fellow Situationist Pierre Canjeurs, described the spectacle as a utopia:
Present culture as a whole can be characterised as alienated in the sense that every activity, every moment of life, every idea, every type of behaviour, has a meaning only outside itself, in an elsewhere which, being no longer in heaven,
40 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 32. 41 YouTube Spotlight, Our YouTube Community, YouTube, May 1, 2013, accessed August 25, 2014,
29 is only the more maddening to locate: a utopia, in the literal sense of the word, dominates the life of the modern world.42
The word’s literal translation from Greek means both ‘no place’ [ou-topia] and ‘good place’ [eu-topia], an ambiguity that the Situationists were engaging to evoke a different fiction of perfection from More’s—a “fallacious paradise”,43 as Debord puts it later in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Promising unification, the spectacle governs society through turning reality into representation. The ‘one-way’ technologies of the mass media, Debord explains, present its “most stultifying superficial manifestation”:44
[I]t is the very heart of society’s real unreality. In all its specific manifestations—news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment—the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.45
Earlier in 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had described the culture industry as a “paradise” in their seminal text “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. 46 Writing from the perspective of German critical theory, they nevertheless evoked a similar image of a spectacular utopia as characterised by deception and drama:
The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers from what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws [sic] on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory47
Hollywood movies, art, radio and journalism comprise Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique, describing them as fuelling a “circle of manipulation and retroactive need”.48 Individuals actively seek the perfected image of life they see in these forms of
42 Pierre Canjeurs and Guy Debord, “Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program,” July 20, 1960. trans. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, n.d., accessed April 25, 2014,
30 entertainment, they explain: “the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its control of consumers is mediated by entertainment”.49 Like the identical objects of mass-production, the industrialisation of culture had turned people into “molded men”; 50 the ‘rush of facts’ in films automated imagination, the mass reach of broadcast programs reproduced mentalities, and the imitation of star performers standardised individuality. Mirroring Guy Debord’s later notion of ‘pseudo-use’, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry’s most significant products were pseudo-individuals.51
Observing this oppression of individuality and creativity in cultural industrialisation, Adorno and Horkheimer state that “A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself”.52 Yet a technological rationale would also become the rationale for liberation in the form of ‘digital utopianism’. Fred Turner coined the term in 2006,53 to account for the common association between digitally networked life and utopian ideologies of democratising social change. “As the Internet and the World Wide Web went public”, he writes, “a utopian near-consensus about their likely social impact seemed to bubble up out of nowhere.”54 In fact, Turner largely credits this bubbling up to writer and editor Stewart Brand, who in 1968 created the Whole Earth Catalog, by bringing together West Coast counterculturalists with technological entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. Later, as the Internet was emerging in 1993, Brand gathered the same group to produce Wired magazine, a publication Turner considers “more than any other, depicted the emerging digital world in revolutionary terms”.55
This countercultural movement, Turner observes, synthesised with cybernetic media- ecology theories that were simultaneously developing. Norbert Wiener’s (1961) biology-inspired model posited the necessity for animal and machine to ‘feedback’ to their environment; a process he argued maintains their physical and psychic health and survival. This notion was further developed by Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on
49 This quote is taken from a different translation: Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 108. 50 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 127. 51 ibid., p. 154. 52 ibid., p. 121. 53 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 54 Fred Turner, “How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons from the First Hackers' Conference,” in Critical Cyberculture Studies, eds. David Silver, Adrienne Massanari and Steve Jones, (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 257. 55 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, p. 3.
31 media ‘environments’ (1964/1994) and Gregory Bateson’s ‘systems-based’ approach (1972/2000). Combining these influences, the resulting ethos inspired “the image of an ideal society” 56 as an authentic and healthier alternative to the spectacle’s fallacious paradise. As if recalling the fictional island of Utopia, digital utopianism promised “personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers”.57
In sharp contrast to the broadcast era’s ‘top-down’ system, publicly accessible, peer- to-peer linked ‘computer pools’ were early instances of putting cybernetics into practice. In an issue of People's Computer Company (1975), for instance, Ken Colstad describes such a communal media environment as "a horizontal system [that] would allow the public to take advantage of the huge and largely untapped reservoir of skills and resources that resides with the people,” and “counteract the tendencies toward fragmentation and isolation so visible in today's society".58 Such utopian hopes that digital technologies would pierce through the monopolising media power of the broadcast industries prefigure Pierre Lévy’s Collective Intelligence (1994), and its later manifestation in Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (2006); texts which help us envision how this horizontal model plays out through online participatory platforms.
While Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry’s totalising power is often dismissed as hopeless, their comment that “no machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom” 59 might suggest otherwise. After all, YouTube has now been devised, and according to its original slogan “Broadcast Yourself”,60 it has realised this freedom.
Since its inception in 2005, YouTube has been commonly associated with a continuing digital utopianism. It was a key player in the emergence of Web 2.0, a term Tim O’Reilly popularised in late 2004 61 as Internet culture shifted toward
56 ibid., p. 1. 57 ibid, synopsis. 58 ibid., p. 115. 59 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 122. 60 The slogan “Broadcast Yourself” was used by YouTube between 2005 and 2012. 61 According to Wikipedia, the term ‘Web 2.0’ was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999, before being popularised by O’Reilly in the O’Reilly Media Conference in late 2004. See Web 2.0, Wikipedia, January 6, 2015, accessed January 7, 2015,
32 participatory web-based platforms.62 In 2006, TIME responded to the masses of people using social networks, blogs and media sharing by declaring their Person of the Year as “You”.63 As writer Lev Grossman explains:
It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million- channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world but also change the way the world changes.64
YouTube is convincing as the ‘machinery of rejoinder’. Not least because it is constituted by the multiple machineries now better known as ‘tools’; from the digital video cameras and Internet connectivity afforded by computers or mobile devices, to the easy-to-use editing software and apps that allow us to all postproduce video material. As YouTube’s 2013 Brandcast suggests, these tools bring with them a DIY utopian ethos that anyone can facilitate change if armed with the right equipment.
In this discussion, however, I aim to unpack this new breed of digital utopianism. Now that the utopia of the spectacle is no longer maddening to locate, but available to anyone with an Internet connection, does our collective rejoining with the means of broadcast truly serve to liberate us from the spectacle, or more fully join us with it?
After all, just as Debord famously wrote that “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,”65 YouTube too is not just a collection of videos, but is the locus of social relationships mediated by video sharing. Within it, I’ll go on to argue, the changes people facilitate are often less to do with democratic social revolution and more to do with self-remix and self-realisation; and, the DIY celebrity competitions, glossy music clips, advertising campaigns, and television and movie excerpts, which are shared by fans of consumer culture and commercial producers alike, serve to epitomise the
62 Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, Oreilly, September 30, 2005, accessed November 9, 2014,
33 ‘superficial manifestations’ of the spectacle, and provide modern-day representations of its fallacious paradise. From this perspective, YouTube’s call to “Broadcast Yourself” doesn’t so much invite as command the dissolution of the gap between self and spectacle, a process Adorno and Horkheimer had arguably predicted by writing that: “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies”.66
What I aim to highlight throughout this chapter is how the conflicting utopias of the spectacle and digital revolution converge in YouTube to create a uniquely paradoxical space—a YouTopia. There, I will argue, we see that the essential difference between these utopias isn’t the nature of their promises, which are in fact the same, but the intention to ever fully deliver. When it comes to YouTube, are its promises to produce more expressive identities and more connected communities manipulative or authentic; when put into practice, do they succeed or fail?
DIY Utopias YouTube is arguably the predominant online platform for making visible our everyday creative use of spectacular culture. Yet the ambiguous convergence of self and spectacle is rarely addressed in Media Studies 2.0 discourse. Instead the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of social media and participatory culture, as Gauntlett (2009) observed, comprises, on the one hand, the celebration of DIY media content production, and, on the other hand, a systems-based critique of behind-the-scenes forms of control, surveillance and marketing.
As Felix Stalder usefully puts it in “Between Democracy and Spectacle: the Front- End and Back-End of the Social Web” (2012), both ‘semiotic democracy’ and ‘Spectacle 2.0’ are currently being realised in social media.67 He argues that in theoretical discourse the ‘front-end’ is often considered in techno-utopian terms, while the ‘back-end’ is largely discussed as a “contemporary version” 68 of Guy Debord’s unreal reality of spectacular society. In this section, I will look at key theoretical examples that demonstrate Stalder’s notion of the ‘social web’, specifically in regard to the spectacular and digital utopias within YouTube. While pointing out
66 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 126. 67 Felix Stalder, “Between Democracy and Spectacle: The Front-End and Back-End of the Social Web,” in The Social Media Reader, ed. Michael Mandiberg, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), accessed August 18, 2014,
34 the valuable insights they contribute, I will also highlight the limitations of approaching convergence in ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ terms.
In “Still Fighting the Beasts: Guerilla Television and the Limits of YouTube” (2012), William Merrin writes that YouTube puts “the broadcast era into context”,69 and describes it as “the leading site and center of online video production and sharing”.70 While the ‘broadcast model’71 had controlled the delivery of information to mass audiences through radio, TV, print news and Hollywood cinema, YouTube’s diversification of media content demonstrates what he terms the ‘“post-broadcast” media ecology’. 72 Suggesting that YouTube has displaced broadcast era entertainment, he highlights its volume of ‘nonprofessional’ material by quoting the site’s claim in 2010 that:
… ‘more video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years,’ the equivalent of putting more than 150,000 new ‘full-length movies in theaters every week’.73
Expanding from Turner’s account of digital utopianism, Merrin argues that countercultural video activism is an important precursor to YouTube’s DIY media content production, which “fulfills many of the video activist hopes for a democratic, user-created and shared mode of video expression”.74
The Sony Portapak is key to Merrin’s history of YouTube. It was introduced to the market in 1967, and meant that video production became relatively affordable, accessible and portable, outside of the commercial broadcast organisations. In turn, the counterculturalist group Raindance Foundation came together, believing that video was a powerful political tool for alternative modes of communication.
The group’s ideas are outlined in Guerrilla Television (1971), written by Raindance
69 William Merrin, “Still Fighting 'the Beast': Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube,” in Cultural Politics, vol. 8, no. 1 (March 2012), p. 98, accessed July 26, 2012 from Project Muse database. 70 ibid., p. 98. 71 For a discussion on the ‘broadcast model’, see Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 72 Merrin, “Still Fighting 'the Beast': Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube,” p. 98. Merrin coined the term ‘post-broadcast’ in William Merrin, Media Studies 2.0—My Thoughts, Media Studies 2.0 Forum, January 4, 2008, accessed March 5, 2014,
35 Foundation co-founder Michael Shamberg, in what Merrin describes as a “democratic manifesto for the overthrow of the entire broadcasting system and the liberation of the productive capacity and voices of the people in all their diversity”.75 Shamberg was influenced by cybernetics theory, and describes how the broadcast industry was a ‘beast’, aggressively controlling the media so that individuals had “no capacity for feedback”. 76 In this environment, the Portapak was revolutionary. Video meant having a voice, and pre-empting YouTube’s DIY culture, Shamberg explains that ‘guerrilla television’ “gets cameras to the people to let them do it themselves.”77
Especially pertinent to my discussion of YouTube is how Merrin draws a parallel between the video sharing site and the liberating effects Shamberg imagined the Portapak would have on individuals, as well as culture as a whole. Individuals would produce a “video self and video grammar”,78 Shamberg argued, which collectively would create a “cultural data bank [through which] specific requests for skills and data could be serviced without geographical considerations”.79 Feeding images of the self back to the self, he wrote, allowed “a unique cybernetics of self indigenous to an electronic culture”, 80 which would contrast broadcast TV by permitting self- expression, self-control, and self-verification.81 Quoting Shamberg, Merrin writes:
Making tapes about yourself is ‘a tool for knowing who you are and combating the superstar behavioural patterns of the media. With tape, being yourself has value in itself.’82
In his conclusion, Merrin considers whether YouTube has fulfilled these digital utopian hopes, but he does so only in ‘back-end’ terms. YouTube is “less free than ordinarily thought”,83 he argues, as users have to “adhere to technical standards”,84 and the site’s “increasing allying with broadcasting concerns”.85 A truly free version, “YourTube”, as he calls it, would exist outside of commercial imperatives.86 However,
75 ibid., p. 103. 76 Shamberg quoted in ibid., p. 103. 77 Shamberg quoted in ibid., p. 104. 78 Shamberg quoted in ibid., p. 104. 79 Shamberg quoted in ibid., p. 106. 80 Shamberg quoted in ibid., p. 104. According to Merrin, Shamberg’s interest in the self- reflexivity afforded by video was influenced by underground video activist, and research assistant to Marshall McLuhan, Paul Ryan and his notion of “infolding information”. 81 ibid., p. 104. 82 Shamberg quoted in ibid., p. 94. 83 ibid., p. 114. 84 ibid., p. 114. 85 ibid., p. 114. 86 ibid., p. 116. Merrin points to the Freedom Box project as a key example, as it aims to provide access to “a personal server running a free software operating system, with free
36 without an attention to the nature of YouTube’s DIY ‘front-end’, Merrin fails to acknowledge that, if it indeed puts the broadcast media into ‘context’, it isn’t through cultural relegation but regeneration, seen through the extensive reuse of broadcast media content in our everyday, networked lives. I want to highlight that so-called ‘nonprofessional’ material doesn’t necessarily seek to counter the broadcast media, as was the case with video activism, but tends to show how users enjoy rewriting its language within their ‘video grammar’. Most users aren’t combating superstar behavior, but are enthusiastically re-doing it for themselves.
In YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009), Green and Burgess remind us that the “myth of DIY celebrity”87 arose in broadcast media, arguing that its mythology appears again in YouTube music talent competitions, such as ‘My Grammy Moment’. 88 These competitions exemplify Green and Burgess’s central theoretical premise; that “two opposing definitions of the popular are converging” within YouTube. Aligning with my discussion of the conflicting utopias of the spectacle and digital utopianism, they explain that popular culture is thought “often pejoratively—as mass commercial, consumer culture—reality TV, shopping malls, celebrity gossip, the Top 40, and computer games”, and, on the other hand, also means the “culture of the people”, “an authentic, homegrown culture, part of the long traditions of folk culture”.89 On YouTube, they valuably note, this latter notion further corresponds with De Certeau-inspired analyses of fandom by John Fiske (1992) and Henry Jenkins (1992), and that YouTube’s digital utopianism “surfaces repeatedly as part of the DIY ideology of participatory culture, the valorisation of amateur and community media, and hopeful ideas about the democratisation of cultural production”.90
In YouTube talent competitions, they argue, it might appear that the convergence of popular cultures has bridged the gap between the ‘ordinary world’ of contestants, and the ‘media world’, which Nick Couldry (2003) had earlier observed.91 Reality TV and
applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy”. See Freedom Box Foundation, accessed January 12, 2015,
37 celebrity ‘rags to riches’ stories promise to close the gap between the two, Couldry argued, yet due to an inequality of symbolic power this distance “can only be bridged when the ordinary person gains access to the modes of representation of the mass media”.92 Throughout this discussion I argue that the heterotopia of YouTube has succeeded in bridging this gap—albeit in a partial and provisional sense—and suggest that what is now more pressingly problematic, and at the same time potentially liberating, are the ways in which people actively and performatively converge with media to represent themselves.
Green and Burgess, however, evoke the ‘front-end’ and ‘back-end’ model, as they suggest that YouTube talent competitions ultimately reiterate the same inequality of power as Couldry observed, because participants still need to pass “the gate-keeping mechanisms of old media—the recording contract, the film festival, the television pilot, the advertising deal”.93 Not only do forms of DIY celebrity on YouTube serve to “reproduce the distinctions”94 between ordinary and media worlds, they propose, but they suggest that the commercialisation of user-created content might underscore YouTube’s entire ethos, by interpreting its slogan as: “‘broadcast yourself’ into fame and fortune”.95
Our perspectives diverge because Green and Burgess view the interaction of user- created content and commercialism primarily at a systemic level. YouTube, they write, is a “dynamic cultural system” co-created by commercial and noncommercial producers,96 who create categorically distinguished ‘User-Created’ and ‘Traditional’ content.97 While this approach has certain merit, they deliberately omit addressing the complex way that these two aspects of YouTube interact within the content, and, as I’ll establish, within users. Recognising that in-depth ethnographic analyses have provided vital insights by looking at “uses of YouTube by real people as part of everyday life and as part of the mix of media we all use as part of our lives”,98 they nevertheless claim that such analyses are misrepresentative, due to being situated
the social imagination. See Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 126-127. 92 Couldry quoted in ibid., pp. 22-23. 93 ibid., pp. 23-24. 94 Couldry quoted in ibid., pp. 22-23. 95 ibid., p. 22. 96 ibid., p. 7. 97 ibid., pp. 42-45. These categories are utilised by Green and Burgess in a statistical analysis of 4320 YouTube videos. 98 ibid., p. 8.
38 “outside of the commercial system”.99 YouTube studies that are situated on the extreme ends of the research spectrum, they argue, end up “trading scale off against nuance and complexity”,100 and instead aim to “address the missing middle between large-scale quantitative analysis and the sensitivity of qualitative methods”.101
These two different perspectives on YouTube’s DIY culture—one fighting for freedom, the other for fame and fortune—both support Stalder’s front-end back-end lexis by suggesting that the conflicting utopias of YouTube cross at the systemic level. In doing so, they reflect a tendency for media theorists to address convergence along the lines of Henry Jenkins’s often-cited definition as “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences”.102
Addressing this as a limited view, I want to highlight how DIY digital utopianism and Spectacle 2.0 also play out at the front-end, within the content—a notion which relates to another, overlooked definition by Jenkins:
Convergence does not occur through media appliances, however sophisticated they may become. Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others. Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which me make sense of our everyday lives.103
By considering how ‘old and new media collide’, to use Jenkins’s terms, in our internal, psychic lives, as well as at the level of YouTube’s vast and networked databank, I take a methodological approach that doesn’t avoid the extreme ends of Green and Burgess’s spectrum, but presents them looping back and joining together.
As I will argue in the next section, more in-depth attention to uses of YouTube within everyday life is vital, as it reveals how they aren’t situated outside of the commercial system, but incorporate its utopian imagery and narratives in complex and nuanced ways. What people are feeding back to the system, I suggest, isn’t simply motivated by the DIY production of celebrity and capital, or, on the flip side, social revolution,
99 ibid., pp. 8-9. 100 ibid., p. 7. 101 ibid., p. 9. 102 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 2. 103 ibid., p. 3.
39 but demonstrates the more ambiguous navigation of popular culture in the postproduction of self.
Feeling Feedback Our emotional and messy private lives now play out online as much as they do off. Whether posting videos of newborn babies, or declaring relationship break-ups, it is through social media that people celebrate their best moments and seek consolation for the worst. Writing back in 1984 in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Sherry Turkle argued that computers were not simply “tools” 104 but part of our social and inner lives. “Technology,” she wrote, “catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think.”105 The lasting influence of cybernetics in social media theory, however, prevails in the continued language of “tools”, and a techno-rational rhetoric of “intelligence”, “feedback”, “systems”, “skills” and “resources”. From my perspective, the incongruence between the role of social media in our everyday lives, and the language used to describe it, points to a larger tendency to understate the significance of affectivity in network culture—an effect of the theoretical limitations I’ve now identified in the way critical analyses of YouTube, and broadly social media, look past a nuanced consideration of content. In this section I introduce a common thread that runs throughout this thesis—addressing why the feeling side of feedback shouldn’t so quickly be dismissed.
Historically digital utopianism didn’t only promise a ‘democratised’ media ecology, but, as Fred Turner’s (2006) account reveals, a new relationship between technology and our emotional, psychic lives: “Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about.”106 Networked computing was not just about creating “a leveled marketplace”,107 Turner explains, “computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion”.108 This utopian vision promised
104 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), p. 3. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, New York, 1984. 105 ibid., p.18. 106 Turner, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”, p. 1. 107 ibid., p. 3. 108 ibid., p. 2.
40
Figure 6: Christopher Baker. Installation view, Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise, 2008.
41 more “psychologically whole” 109 individuals, and the establishment of “intimate” 110 communities. People were encouraged to imagine computers as ‘personal’ technologies—as tools, yes, but tools to discover “a more authentic self”.111 The digital revolution offered a feeling alternative, as well as a political and technological one.
Everyday media content, however, tends to be dismissed as “low quality material”112 unless it serves to validate ideas of digital democracy. As Bjorn Sorenssen poignantly argues of video diaries (vlogs) on YouTube: “[they demonstrate] the double-edged character of online society, vacillating between democratic potentiality and superficial vulgarity”.113 US artist Christopher Baker’s video installation Hello World!: or: How I learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise (2008) epitomises this duality. Presented as a vast grid of YouTube vlogs that play on screens simultaneously, the work creates a wall of sound that largely obliterates the individual voices. Collectively the vlogs produce a vision of plurality and personal expression, an embodiment of democratised production and the freedom of feedback. At the same time, the voices collapse into incomprehensibility, evoking what Fredric Jameson describes as the “noise and jumbled signals, the unimaginable informational garbage, of the new media society”.114
With this duality, Baker’s artwork also serves to highlight what I view as a real risk for current social media theory: even those commentators who claim to love the noise appear to have stopped listening. As Shamberg recently said of the legacy of Guerilla Television in social media, “The act of communicating is empowering whether or not people are being heard”.115 This view that voicing anything is better than nothing, simply because it demonstrates the capacity for feedback, and, by implication, the idea that what is being said doesn’t actually matter, is articulated throughout a number of digital utopian-inflected approaches to social media. Clay Shirky,
109 ibid., p. 1. 110 ibid., p. 3. 111 ibid., p. 3. 112 Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), p. 51. 113 Bjorn Sorenssen, “Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc's Caméra-Stylo: The New Avant- Garde in Documentary Realized?,” in Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 2, no. 1 (June 2008), p. 54, accessed March 6, 2013,
42 renowned for his utopian perspective on media literacy, is a prime example. He writes:
Let’s nominate the process of making a lolcat as the stupidest possible creative act … On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that gap.116
Shirky’s all-embracing attitude toward this spectrum of creativity contrasts the more critical work of Nicholas Carr, exemplified by their ‘for and against’ articles: Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ (2008) was followed by Shirky’s ‘Does the Internet Make You Smarter’ (2010). Carr argues that an excess of online information causes ‘shallow’ reading, and that our lazy reliance on machine-mediated information means “it is our intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”. 117 Shirky instead promotes an acceptance of “dumb stuff”,118 explaining that “Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible.”119 In Cognitive Surplus (2010) Shirky further notes that the printing press also brought with it “a whole lot of junk,”120 and argues “just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, that’s not how media works”.121
But, I would argue, perhaps it’s more the case that it’s not how humans work. Erotic novels say as much about our romantic, desiring lives as scientific journals say about our biological bodies, and without both isn’t it our affective, psychic capacities that are being flattened? Both Carr and Shirky’s perspectives focus on the ‘intelligent’ nature of our engagement with online media, and the ‘quality’ of the content, without considering what we might learn about our contemporary everyday lives from the junk and the throwaway material.
116 Clay Shirky quoted in Meikle and Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, p. 116. 117 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” in The Atlantic, July 1, 2008, accessed October 4, 2012,
43 While, like my argument, recognising that “Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels”, 122 Henry Jenkins similarly frames prosumer activities in regards to a politicised use of popular culture, rather than a personal one. Unbeknownst to us, he suggests, through producing junk material “soon we will be deploying those skills for more ‘serious’ purposes”.123 ‘Serious’, in his view, translates to new modes of activism, which are not only freeing audiences from the broadcast industry’s control of media power, but the tyrannous comfort of their living rooms: “The old ideal might have been the couch potato”, writes Jenkins, “the new ideal is almost certainly a fan”. 124 While both Jenkins and I centralise fan fantasies in our arguments, he focuses on this ‘new ideal’ through the ways people are “tapping into the fantasies of popular culture to find metaphors that are refreshing political speech”.125 As he explains of fan activism:
[It is] the capacity to move from the utopian fantasies which Richard Dyer and Frederic [sic] Jameson have argued are at the heart of the appeal of popular entertainment and towards an attempt to realize some of those goals in the real world through political and social movements.126
Yet, while disputing the contemporary relevance of these earlier notions of utopia and entertainment, Jenkins reveals his own utopianism in regard to fans by presuming that their fantasies are politically and socially driven:
… Dyer and Jameson’s somewhat different notions of entertainment as utopian discourse, both contain accounts of mechanisms of social control which they claim prevent fans from acting on these fantasies in the real world. But the theorists forgot to tell the fans because all over the world, fans are taking to the streets and demanding a reality more aligned to their fantasies.127
The Arab Spring of 2011, and the ongoing Occupy movement, have both demonstrated how social media can materialise action on the streets. Yet, like other
122 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 17. 123 ibid., p. 4. 124 ibid., p. 361. 125 Henry Jenkins, “Fandom 2.0,” in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, eds. Ted Gournelos and David J Gunkel, (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 215. 126 ibid., p. 215. 127 ibid., p. 215.
44 media theorists,128 I want to suggest that Jenkins’s notion of fandom is not indicative of everyday uses of popular culture. It remains true for the vast majority of us, as Mark Andrejevic puts it, that “the media revolution has not facilitated a social one.”129
While Jenkins’s notion of convergence culture is in certain ways fruitful to this discussion, his digital utopian perspective proves limited. He fails to pay attention to why far larger social ‘movements’ of fans aren’t taking to the streets but to their bedrooms, bathrooms, and dare I say it, couches, to perform pop covers and dance routines, to rewrite clichéd love and heartbreak sayings, and to share clips of self- help TV talk shows, as my artworks serve to reveal. This domestication of popular entertainment’s fantasies, and specifically its utopian representations of love and connection, is hardly the image of fans fighting for their political beliefs that Jenkins wants to evoke. Rather, such prosumer activities are more befitting of Zadie Smith’s mocking description of Facebook as “the wild west of the internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul”.130
Confounding Jenkins’s idea of what constitutes ‘serious’ media content, and Shirky’s argument that “the nice thing about throwaway material is that it gets thrown away”,131 I take the ‘suburban fantasies’ found on YouTube as a field of enquiry and artwork source material. Deeming this ‘low-quality material’ worthy of critical consideration, I forward the question of why, even with the indisputable freedom to feedback, we choose to voice the lyrics, scripts and narratives of mass-produced entertainment in our postproductions of self? In so doing, I share, and bring to creative practice, Ganaele Langlois’s perspective in “Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life” (2013), where he observes that:
… talking about psychic life is fraught with perils, the first one being the very real risk of sounding extremely corny by bringing to the fore affects and emotions (such as love, loneliness and yearning) that are usually not considered as part of any ‘serious’ political and critical projects. However, it would be a mistake to only see social media from the perspective of
128 See Meikle and Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); and Andy Ruddock, Understanding Audiences: Theories and Methods, (London: Sage Publications, 2001). 129 Mark Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” in Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (June 2009), p. 36, accessed June 9, 2013 from EBSCO Communication and Mass Media Complete - Publications database. 130 Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, p. 41. 131 Shirky, “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?,” accessed October 4, 2012.
45 information politics in the narrow sense: social media are not just tools for control, they are the platforms through which we live our lives, through which, increasingly and perhaps sometimes exclusively, we express our search for meaning and connection.132
Langlois, too, forwards the need for a greater critical understanding of the good and bad implications of participatory culture, at the level of our emotional and psychic lives:
Social media are both incredibly dangerous and incredibly liberating because their main investment is in lives being lived. What we need now is a framework to understand the relations between social media and life, and in particular, the ways in which social media operate within the realms of not only social or cultural life, but also psychic life: not only our practices and knowledge, but also our emotions, affects, desires and fears, both extraordinary and mundane.133
While Jenkins was quick to dismiss earlier ideas of utopia and entertainment, I will argue in the next section that Richard Dyer’s text “Entertainment and Utopia” (1977/1992) not only provides a framework that helps us understand broadcast era media as emotional escapism, but one that, in upgraded form, offers the framework Langlois is calling for—and that I will draw upon throughout this thesis. Within the garbage, junk and throwaway material of YouTube’s feeling feedback, I will argue that we find a new form of emotional escapism, one that better accounts for the relations between life and social media than the idea we’re all political activists in training.
Escape into the Screen It would be easy to dismiss outright Richard Dyer’s notion of broadcast era utopian escapism. “Entertainment and Utopia” (1977/1992) seems completely out of touch with the YouTube generation, not least because it offers a close analysis of the cinematised ‘show biz’ musicals of the 1930s. Jenkins isn’t the only commentator to suggest that the traditional approach to media studies that Dyer offers is irrelevant to
132 Ganaele Langlois, “Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life,” in Unlike Us Reader, eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), pp. 59-60. 133 ibid., p. 52.
46 the digitally networked era. David Gauntlett also writes that Media Studies 2.0 represents a “welcome end to the armchair ramblings of ‘textual analysis’.” 134 Certainly, their criticisms are valid in the sense that we now need to acknowledge the social context of media, and the connectivity, creativity and activity of present-day prosumers.
Traditionally, cinematic escapism has been conceived in relation to a passive audience—physically and psychically disconnected from the reality of social life. For Richard Dyer MacCann (1966), the idea that cinema creates a ‘mental flight’ into the realm of imagination and fantasy traces back to Hugo Mauerhofer’s Psychology of Film Experience (1949), which describes the ‘Cinema Situation’ as “A voluntary escape from everyday reality”. 135 Dyer MacCann observes that, “instead of an instrument for social communication … Mauerhofer finds film to be a healing opportunity for withdrawal from everyday problems, a half sleeping acceptance of manufactured dreams”.136 That Hollywood cinema is a ‘dream factory’ was further argued by Hortense Powdermaker (1950), who accuses its “collective day-dreams” and “ready-made fantasies” of being “manufactured on the assembly line”.137 Like Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944/1979) image of molded men, these ideas insidiously imply that our desires, dreams and fantasies are not our own, but are the standardised products of our passive consumption.
Now, as my artworks aim to reveal, YouTube makes visible the “reservoir of common day-dreams”,138 that Wolfenstein and Leites (1950) describe are both the source and product of Hollywood cinema’s popular myths and stories. YouTube is, Simon Reynolds (2011) writes, “All our mundane and insane dreams, collected”.139 But rather than withdrawing from forms of sociality, these dreams are socially-shared; and while Hollywood continues to feed ‘ready made’ desires back to us in airtight packaging, it seems with YouTube we’re collectively tearing through the plastic wrap, gorging on the contents, and are left surrounded by the crumbs. Departing from Jenkins and Gauntlett, however, I believe that this active recourse to mass-produced
134 Gauntlett, “Media Studies 2.0: A Response,” p. 149. 135 Mauerhofer quoted in Richard Dyer MacCann, Film: A Montage of Theories, (New York: Dutton, 1966), p. 229. 136 ibid., p. 229. 137 Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory, (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1950), p. 12. 138 Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study, (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950), p. 13. 139 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, (New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2011), p. 84.
47 popular culture calls not for an end, but an upgrade of Dyer’s broadcast era ideas of entertainment, and a revisiting of the “taken-for-granted” ideas of ‘escape’ and ‘wish fulfillment’ that, he observes, qualify it as utopian.
What is specifically pertinent in Dyer’s argument is how he elaborates on the way utopianism functions through feeling:
Alternatives, hopes, wishes—these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized. Entertainment does not, however, present models of utopian worlds as in the classic utopias of Thomas More, William Morris, et al. Rather the utopianism is contained in the feelings it embodies. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.140
Dyer underscores this concept of utopian escape with the cultural production of emotion. In entertainment, he argues, a utopian feeling of ‘intensity’ can either be elicited through ‘representational forms’, such as narrative devices, or ‘non representational’ forms such as a film’s evocative soundtrack. Dyer credits this idea to Ernest Bloch’s work on historical utopianism in narrativity, which is interpreted by Fredric Jameson as corresponding “to dramatic and lyrical modes of the presentation of not-yet-being”.141 Both forms of utopia, Dyer explains, are constructed from an “affective code”,142 recalling Adorno and Horkheimer’s suggestion that the language of the entertainment industry is characterised by a detailed “syntax and vocabulary”.143
Significantly, however, Dyer moves away from the idea that entertainment is used to manipulate audiences through the production of false needs. Instead, he invokes Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and his article “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” (1970), in which Enzensberger argues:
The electronic media do not owe their irresistible power to any sleight-of-hand but to the elemental power of deep social needs which come through even in
140 Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Only Entertainment, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 18. First published in Movie magazine in 1977. 141 ibid., p. 33. 142 ibid., p. 18. 143 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 128.
48 the present depraved form of these media.144
Dyer expands this concept of media power to the utopia of entertainment, arguing that it offers “something we want deeply that our day to day lives don’t provide”.145 Dyer’s framework for how “entertainment works” 146 is determined by “the gap between what is and what could be”,147 a gap which emotional escapism helps to bridge. Taking a formulaic approach, which both serves to demystify the spectacle’s utopia and avoids the risk of sounding extremely corny, Dyer lays out specific categories of escape in table format, under the corresponding headings of ‘Social tension/inadequacy/absence’ and ‘Utopian solution’.148
Significantly, by avoiding Enzensberger’s terminology of ‘needs’, I want to argue that Dyer’s formula invokes (although doesn’t explicitly engage) a Lacanian relation of desire—in which lack and desire are inextricably linked. According to Jacques Lacan, it is the possibility for satisfaction that differentiates ‘need’ from desire, as “neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second".149 Corresponding with Dyer’s table, Lacan writes "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand rips away from need”,150 suggesting that desire resides between the two columns, and serves to connect ‘what is’ with ‘what could be’. With this interpretation of Dyer’s framework, emotional escapism is not a ‘half sleep’ that removes us from reality, but, rather, it is an intense experience of desire that directly relates to lacks in everyday life. An unending experience, Dyer notes, because it can’t be satisfied, at least not through utopian entertainment.
Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1979) had written earlier of the culture industry’s paradise, that “Both escape and elopement are predesigned to lead back to the starting point”,151 and Dyer forwards a similarly cyclic perspective, writing: “At our worse sense of it, entertainment provides alternatives to capitalism which will be
144 Enzensberger quoted in Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” p. 23. 145 ibid., p. 18. 146 ibid., p. 24. 147 ibid., pp. 25-26. 148 ibid., p. 24. 149 Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 580. 150 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 689. 151 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 142.
49 provided for by capitalism.”152 It is this apparent paradox of the unescapability of escapism—at essence, the unachievablity of utopian desire and fantasy—that Jenkins resists in his critique of Dyer, as he sees it overcome by media literate fan activists. My argument, in contrast, lies in the proposition that having access to the tools for media production and a platform for mass broadcast doesn’t in and of itself sidestep the relations of lack and desire.
In fact, I will argue throughout this discussion that two of Dyer’s categories of escape are particularly prescient in regards to our contemporary relationship with media. These are, firstly, “Dreariness (monotony, predictability, instrumentality of the daily round)”, which is escaped through “Intensity (excitement, drama, affectivity of living)”; and secondly, “Fragmentation (job mobility, rehousing and development, high-rise flats, legislation against collective action)”, which is escaped through “Community (all together in one place, communal interests, collective activity)”.153 What I want to highlight is immediately striking about these two categories is that, while Dyer is describing the ‘fallacious’ promises of spectacular utopia, they also align neatly with the utopian goals of digital utopianism; the hope that individuals would achieve psychic wellbeing through the freedom of creative expression, and that networked communities would form around communal skills and interests, and through the collective activity of media production.
Like Jenkins, I recognise that the goals at the heart of Dyer’s utopia take new form in participatory culture, and play out at the intersection where ‘old’ and ‘new’ media collide. However, adding a critical perspective to his digital utopian one, I suggest that social media power plays out through the same relation of desire and lack that characterised utopian entertainment; that as we continue to search for meaning and connection, it is social media that promises escape to experiences of intensity and communality. In the everyday media practices on YouTube, we find that the spectacle’s promise of escape doesn’t hinder fans’ imaginative world-making, but informs it. Just as Enzensberger wrote in 1972 that “Consumption as spectacle contains the promise that want will disappear”,154 now I argue the same is true for production as spectacle.
152 Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” p. 25. 153 ibid., p. 24. 154 Enzensberger quoted in ibid., p. 23.
50 In 1990, Arjun Appadurai prefigured this productive, active notion of escapism when he observed that the increasing flow of images from electronic and print media were creating what he coined “mediascapes”.155 According to Appadurai, mediascapes are transnational imaginary landscapes, which at the time established “a new role for the imagination in social life”.156 He explains:
To grasp this new role, we need to bring together: the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced images (as in the Frankfurt School sense); the idea of the imagined community (in Anderson’s sense); and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire), as a constructed landscape of collective representations, which is no more and no less real than the collective representations of Emile Durkheim, now mediated through the complex prism of modern media.157
YouTube’s ‘complex prism’ of mass-produced imagery, and forms of community and collectivity, no better encapsulates how mediascapes blur collective reality and spectacular fiction. It also makes visible Appadurai’s notion that imagination has become a ‘social practice’, which he suggests comes hand in hand with a more complex form of escapism:
No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice) and a form of negotiation between sites of agency ('individuals') and globally defined fields of possibility.158
In light of the networked and mediated ways in which people now attempt to bridge the gap between self and spectacle, Appadurai’s notion of mediascapes offers a viable alternative to Couldry’s earlier idea of situated, TV studio-based ‘media
155 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, (Spring 1990), p. 6, accessed September 5, 2014 from Duke University Press Journals Online. 156 ibid., p. 4. 157 ibid., pp. 4-5. 158 ibid., p. 5.
51 worlds’. In 1998, Abercrombie and Longhurst, for instance, expanded on Appadurai’s ideas to suggest that people were drawing on the mediascape’s flow of images to “blur the distinction between the real and the fictional”.159 The traditional, cinematic sense of escapism had become ‘misleading’, they write, “It is not precisely that the media provide the resources of escape from the mundane world but rather that they provide some of the material for living within it.”160 Like Jenkins’s later idea that convergence takes place within the brains of consumers, they observed how audiences were increasingly using the mediascape’s reservoir of images and narratives to “construct scripts of imagined lives”.161
Since the creation of YouTube, this ‘new’, active form of escapism has become evermore complex. As people are digitising the imagery of their imaginations, and adding their fantasies back into the flow, I propose there is now a new role of imagination in social media life.
Hardey and Beer’s case study “Talking About Escape” (2013), helps illustrate this argument. Using a software aggregator to search across various online sources, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, they found the terms ‘escape’ and ‘escaping’ were being commonly used, and noted the emotional nature of this online talk. Their findings poignantly indicate that, with social media, just talking about escape is a contemporary form of escapism—one that offers the same intensity and affectivity, community and collectivity that defined its ‘old media’ predecessor.
For instance, embedded within the “searchable talk”,162 Hardey and Beer found a shared dissatisfaction with mundane life, and a desire for escape from the “daily grind”.163 They observe that these online discussions demonstrate the “desire to express a shared sensibility”, in which hopes for escape serve as a “shared motif of everyday life that affords resonance between people”. 164 Like Dyer’s earlier observation that traditional entertainment promised a sense of community to counter a reality of social ‘fragmentation’, in this new, networked landscape, sharing the wish
159 Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences, (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 6. 160 ibid., pp. 7-8. 161 ibid., p. 6. 162 Mariann Hardey and David Beer, “Talking About Escape,” in Unlike Us Reader, eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), p. 170. 163 ibid., p. 171. 164 ibid., p. 177.
52 to escape became a solution to the users’ digitally “fragmented, decentered and individualized cultural setting”.165
This engagement with social media platforms is, therefore, two-fold: people voice their lacks and desires, while simultaneously escaping them through a sense of collectivity, albeit temporarily within a community of sufferers. This indicates that YouTube, for one, may genuinely succeed in delivering its digital utopian promises. Yet Hardey and Beer also observe a familiar inescapability. People, they found, were often using these connective platforms to express their desire for respite from a ‘culture of speed’ and constant connectivity.166 Whether through ‘old’ or ‘new’ media, it seems that escape may lead us back to the starting point.
The insatiable longing for ‘what could be’, I’ve argued, continues to inform our everyday engagement with media: what prosumers are digitally sharing doesn’t satisfy their hunger for intensity and community, as much as it expresses it. Looking more specifically at YouTube’s role in this contemporary form of escapism, I will consider in the next section how the spatial concept of heterotopia may advance our understanding of YouTopia.
YouTopia: Spectacularly Banal So far I have introduced a new, complex form of escape that takes place as we share our desires and fantasies within the social network. Expanding from earlier ideas of the mediascape, I will argue in this section that YouTube offers a uniquely paradoxical space for escapism, by inviting a greater level of convergence between self and spectacle.
In 1990, Jean Baudrillard described the totalistic convergence of American society as a whole and the spectacle, in a conversation with Nathan Gardel that was published later as “America After Utopia” (2009). In it, Baudrillard writes:
We anticipate reality by imagining it or flee from it by idealizing it. Americans merely radically implement everything we think about, from mass egalitarianism to individualism to freedom to fantasy. In so doing, ‘utopia achieved’ has transformed into the anti-utopia of unreason, weightlessness,
165 ibid., pp. 177-178. 166 ibid., p. 170.
53 value neutralism, indifference, the indeterminacy of language, and the death of culture.167
Rather than adopting such a bleak image of an entirely fictionalised reality, I perceive the convergence of self, spectacle and society that occurs in and through YouTopia, more as a manifestation of Foucault’s notion of heterotopia.
This connection between heterotopia and YouTube has been introduced by Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier in “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube” (2009), where they write:
If we wanted to define teenager’s bedrooms as heterotopias [as described by Foucault], they might be understood as equally private and public, actually existing and utopian, performative and transgressive spaces.168
In contrast to the ‘placelessness’ of utopias, according to Foucault heterotopias are real and localised ‘Other spaces’, which he describes as “effectively enacted utopia”. 169 Accordingly, Peters and Seier suggest that privately enacted performances are inherently heterotopic by nature, creating utopias that are located in the home: “Would not playing air guitar in a teenager’s room represent one of the most wondrous heterotopias?”170 It is here that our perspectives on the relationship between heterotopia and YouTube diverge. While they speculate whether uploading such performances to YouTube might jeopardise or enhance their utopian nature, I argue that the process of mediation is vital—operating as a form of escape that further blurs the real and fictional, the private and public, the embodied and the digitally mediated. In my opinion, YouTube is the most wondrous heterotopia.
For instance, expanding from Foucault, in Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics (1998), Kevin Hetherington uses the notion of heterotopic spaces to discuss the role of escape in processes of transformation, which he argues
167 Jean Baudrillard and Nathan Gardels, “America After Utopia,” interview, in New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 26, (Fall 2009), p. 97, accessed July 14, 2013 from Wiley Online Library. 168 Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier, “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube,” in The YouTube Reader, eds. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), p. 198. 169 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, (October 1984), pp. 3-4, accessed September 9, 2014,
54 allow articulations of identify and the affirmation of difference. Escape, he explains, is:
The process of removing oneself from the familiar space which one lives and travelling to be somewhere else, on either a temporary or permanent basis, is one which both the process of movement and the process of being somewhere else are important to the constitution of new identities and the communitas of identification with others.171
This two-fold escape aligns with the one I’ve described that takes place in the process of uploading a self-remixed performance to YouTube, and the subsequent presence within its networked archive. It also highlights how the space of heterotopia is transformative in two capacities, which align with the utopian promises of social media. For instance, Hetherington further writes that the articulation of identity and the sense of belonging offered by heterotopic spaces offers respite from everyday lacks:
For those people who find the conditions of everyday life routine, banal, morally unedifying and oppressive, or somehow perceive them to be inauthentic, the solution is often an escape attempt—an enthused re- centering of life and one’s identity around a particular, chosen and, usually, shared interest.172
This idea echoes the allusion that the production of more expressive, more authentic identities, within the digital archive of YouTube, can together construct an alternative community. As Zizi Papacharissi surmises of the networked self, “The ability to edit, or redact, one’s own, multiple self performances may afford a sense of place, even if temporarily so, for the individual.”173 Hetherington’s notion of heterotopia, therefore, beautifully encapsulates the critical interconnection between individual expression and collectivity, as it uniquely unfolds now within digitally networked culture.
In the context of YouTube as an online archive, Hetherington’s argument that new communities are constituted through processes of ‘identification’ and ‘sharing-
171 Kevin Hetherington, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics, (London: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 120. 172 ibid., p. 109. 173 Zizi Papacharissi, ed., “Conclusion: A Networked Self,” in A Networked Self, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 317, accessed June 24, 2013 from EBL E-Book Library.
55 interests’ becomes usefully ambiguous, connoting both affinity and metadata. That YouTube is a vast, online community is debatable,174 but its hyperlinking of videos that originate from various places and times corresponds perfectly with Foucault’s description that heterotopia juxtapose several incompatible spaces in a single site. Moreover, these places are heterochronies, he explains, because they are “linked to slices in time”.175
Such, albeit dubious, forms of community and collectivity on YouTube further align with Hetherington’s observation that heterotopia are paradoxical because they are ‘marginal spaces’ that simultaneously offer a sense of ‘social centrality’. This presents a “folded and crumbled topology”, 176 he writes, in which “the margins become centres, centres become margins, and the meaning of centres and margins becomes blurred”.177 Similarly paradoxical, YouTube has both “achieved mainstream media status” 178 and appears to exist on the mainstream’s margins. Within its content, too, we find that previously marginalised fans are “moving onto the center stage” ,179 and that top-down strategies and bottom-up tactics now appear to be the same thing.180 For Foucault, “Space is fundamental in any exercise of power”,181 and within YouTopia we find a folded and crumpled paradoxical politics exercised by social media power.
In his conclusion for “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (1967/1984), Foucault writes that “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.”182 As the “greatest reserve of the imagination” he explains, it is “closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea”.183 Without boats, “dreams dry up, espionage
174 See Chapter 3. 175 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” p. 6. 176 Hetherington, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics, p. 124. 177 ibid., p. 124. Also, see Gillian Rose, “A Politics of Paradoxical Space,” in Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). Rose informs Hetherington’s discussion, as she describes certain “complex and contradictory spatialities”, which intertwine ideas of geographical knowledge and the articulation of gender difference. In these spaces, she similarly proposes, “centre and margin, inside and outside” coexist in a space of resistance. 178 Green and Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, p. 36. 179 Henry Jenkins, “The Future of Fandom,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities, (New York: New York University Press, 2007), p. 362. 180 See Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life”. 181 Michel Foucault, “Space, Power and Knowledge,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edition, ed. Simon During, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 140. 182 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” p. 9. 183 ibid., p. 9.
56 takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”184
We might also imagine YouTube as a ship, given over to the infinity of the “Web’s choppy info-ocean”,185 a space for imagination and adventure, and of course for innumerable instances of micro-pirating. But, deliberately piercing his romantic picture, Foucault also describes how this boat docks at ports in order for its inhabitants to frequent brothels—a flawed reality, he reminds us, is never that far away. So, too, YouTube’s utopian potential is also partial and problematic, both at the broader level of media power, and at the level of its content, within YouTube users’ lives. As its conflicting utopias are simultaneously achieved, they necessarily fail.
In the next section, I will discuss how the banal and spectacular space of YouTopia takes spatialised form in my video and text installations The end and Needed to talk. These artworks heighten how, in this unique paradoxical space, people can blur their personal narratives with utopian social fictions, and reimagine their realities, but they can never fully escape them; at least not without a deus ex machina—a God from the machine.
184 ibid., p. 9. 185 Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, p. 78.
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Figure 7: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, (foreground) The end, (background) Needed to talk, 2013.
58 ARTWORK The end and Needed to talk The end (2013) is a column of identical widescreen monitors that reaches from floor to ceiling, visually referencing the YouTube ‘suggested videos’ list.186 Playing on the screens is YouTube-found content in which CRT TVs have been dramatically destroyed by their owners. Transformed through forms of postproduction, the TVs’ sad last moments are emotionally heightened. As dust and debris softly floats up into the air it’s as if we’re watching their last gasping breaths, or else their televisual spirits float away.
This bleak vision of collective dumping is combined with references to the soap opera genre, which arose when TVs became affordable and cherished additions to the everyday person’s living room. Soap operas are distinctive for their ensemble casts, interweaving character storylines, and a melodramatic spin on everyday relationships through plot twists and cliffhangers. This is mirrored in The end’s ensemble of monitors, and its cast of TVs. In postproduction, too, the video edits emulate the genre’s stylised dramatic zooms and close-ups, and the accompanying audio creates a sense of melodrama, using samples from YouTube-found classic soap opera scores.
The remixed soundtrack comprises a melody and a short piece of dialogue, which hauntingly ‘ghost’ in and out of the sound of TV static. The dialogue is edited from the YouTube video Dallas Bobby returns by Thore Spolwing,187 itself a fragment from an infamous episode in which the entire preceding season of Dallas is written off as a dream—an elaborate narrative device to bring the popular character, Bobby, back from the dead. Watching the deathly TVs in The end, we hear:
Pam: When I woke up I thought that you were dead … I dreamed that you were here and that you were leaving … and you died! … it seemed so real.
Bobby: It’s over … none of that happened.
186 This work was first exhibited in a solo exhibition The end, at Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 27 November – 14 December, 2013. It was reconfigured into a horizontal row of monitors for the group exhibition The Future’s Knot, This Is Not Art Festival, Newcastle, 3 October - 3 November, 2014. 187 Thore Spolwig, Dallas Bobby Returns, YouTube, uploaded July 30, 2013, accessed August 21, 2014,
59
Pam: Don’t ever leave me … don’t ever leave me.
This intense exchange dramatises the work’s underlying metaphor; the tragic end of a romantic relationship mirrors the equally dramatic ending of our relationship with a once-loved technology. However, like Bobby’s fate in Dallas, the deus ex machina is reimagined in The end, as the destroyed TVs are revived by digital intervention. In an equally fantastical narrative twist, the TVs’ violent endings are reversed—whether shot, burned, or bricked—bringing them back from the beyond.
Playing between analogue and digital technology, ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, the work appears to make visible Michael Strangelove’s notion of YouTube as ‘post-television’. In Watching YouTube (2010), Strangelove recognises the absorption, if not thriving existence, of ‘old media’ within YouTube, which he writes, “is based on delivering more, not less, television and commercial entertainment to its audiences.”188 Yet, despite its commercial business model, he argues optimistically that YouTube creates a new type of power for post-television audiences: “the power to affect the way distant others experience television and film.”189
Here Strangelove is referring to YouTube’s capacity for distribution, and the activity of remixing ‘old media’, both of which are no more evident than in the enthusiastic remediation of TV soap operas. However, this ‘new power’ takes on a slightly sinister tone when it is expressed through the violent death of ‘old media’ hardware—the ultimate act to signify the CRT TV’s powerlessness in the face of digital technology, and the human capacity to garner fun from destruction.
In 1990, Strangelove notes, TIME published an article titled “Goodbye to the Mass Audience” in which readers were told that “the era of the mass TV audience may be ending.”190 The end reimagines that same mass audience united around ‘the box’ one last time, albeit in a symbolic parting ceremony, before they disperse and fragment forever.
188 Michael Strangelove, Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), p. 170. 189 ibid., p. 162. 190 ibid., p. 168.
60
Figures 8 & 9: Josephine Skinner. Video stills, (above) The end Promo: It’s over; (below) The end Promo: It was all a dream, 2013.
61 From Air Cannon Vs Laminated Sony Trinitron CRT by Aussie50,191 to Lighting a TV on Fire by DangerDan2,192 to TV Smashed with Concrete Block – Slow Motion by DaveHax,193 innumerable YouTube users take pleasure in ridding themselves of the frustrations of broadcast era television; the unwieldy set, the unavoidable advertisements, the clunky remote, the limited selection of channels. These aggressive acts appear to fulfill futurologist George Gilder’s prediction in Life After Television (1994), which foresaw how ‘telecomputers’ would “spell certain death to traditional television”.194
The exhibition of The end at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney (27 November - 14 December 2013), corresponded with the final days of analogue signal in NSW. It was also affiliated with the Tele Visions project, which aimed to “engage artists, communities and the public in pulling apart the cultural and technological phenomenon of TV in its dying moments”.195 Two mash-up style ‘promos’, which aimed to provide teasers for the Firstdraft exhibition, were transmitted live via the airwaves as part of the Tele Visions analogue TV broadcast, and curated screening at Carriageworks, Sydney.196 These alternative versions of two classic cliffhangers comprise 30-second videos; remixing YouTube-found footage of original 1970s ‘promos’ for Dallas, with recent user-created content featuring the destruction of unwanted home TVs.
Yet, despite marking the end of analogue signal, and its cathode ray hardware, The end suggests that there is life after digital, at least in the sense that its content lives on in the collective imagination. As well as the work’s narrative component, the destroyed CRT TVs are reconfigured within the LED monitors to formally signal the reflexive incorporation of ‘old media’ within the new digital hardware.
191 Aussie50, Air Cannon vs Laminated Sony Trinitron CRT, YouTube, February 24, 2012, accessed August 18, 2014,
62 In certain cases, the smashed CRT TV monitors are deliberately placed within the viewing pane to create an incongruent illusion that the flat screens they’re shown on are also cracked and somehow cavernous. This visual interplay between form and content is evident in the work’s entirety, through postproduction effects, such as using a monochrome palette to reflect the hardware, and through the physicality of TVs, such as the visible, messy power cords that seem to materialise from the backs of the semi-fictional screens as much as they do the real ones.
This consideration of materiality heightens the inherently intertwined relationship between video and television that Strangelove observes. YouTube, he writes, “makes it difficult to discern where video practices end and television begins, and it also makes the power relations within and between these two media complex”.197
Figure 11: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, The end (detail), 2013.
197 Strangelove, Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People, p. 172.
63
Figure 10: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, The end (detail), 2013.
64 Accordingly, the flat screens are utilised as signifying cultural objects, invested in a broader technological and social power dynamic, rather than simply as a mode of presentation. Enhancing an awareness of their form not only brings to the fore aesthetic similarities with their analogue predecessors, but also aesthetic slippages. The sharp contrast between the identical and orderly digital screens, and the mishmash of shapes and sizes that gives the CRT TVs their unique characteristics, symbolically infers a further progression of the massification and standardisation that Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1979) warned diminished true diversity and individuality.
Accordingly, we might imagine the old sets have distinct personas and long if tragic ‘life’ stories. This almost anthropomorphic quality 198 imbues their lengthy death throes, which have already been extended from fleeting seconds to several minutes, with a more acute sense of sadness and nostalgia. From the evocative soundtrack to the romanticised, and intermittently violent, imagery, The end aims to elicit an affective perspective on our transition to a post-television era.
Needed to talk (2013), which spreads in vinyl lettering around the gallery walls, further explores online affectivity by immersing the viewer in a collective emotional outpouring. The text derives from a YouTube comments thread, found beneath the video (getting dumped)|what to do after (getting dumped) by jaydeman23,199 and has been edited and materialised into a new, spatial form.
YouTube-found text also appears in my artwork Love Story, 200 which similarly appropriates and re-presents online expressions of romance and heartache. However, the spatially immersive form of Needed to talk evokes the excesses of shared feeling in network culture. As a text ‘environment’ the work is prefigured by artists Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, who play with popular usages of language to question its role in mediating forms of power and democracy, and its capacity to simultaneously address the personal and universal. Holzer’s artworks that were made in the 1980s, have been described as speaking “to the great pain, delight, and
198 The anthropomorphic quality of CRT TVs appears in different form in Alone Together, see Chapter 2. 199 jaydeman23, (Getting Dumped)|What to Do After (Getting Dumped), YouTube, November 26, 2008, accessed August 21, 2014,
65
Figures 12 & 13: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Needed to talk, 2013.
66 ridiculousness of living in contemporary society”,201 a quality that Needed to talk aspires to within the context of a much altered contemporary society; one in which such private experiences are publicly shared over the Internet.
Needed to talk continues to explore the power plays between consumer culture and productions of self. But by appropriating user-created media, it speaks specifically to the implications of ‘emotional capitalism’,202 articulating the ambiguities of media power within prosumer culture. By presenting a ‘community’ connected by experiences of love, it literally materialises Clay Shirky’s (2008) digital utopian hopes for media democratisation: “we are used to a world where little things happen for love, and big things happen for money”, he writes; “Now, though, we can do big things for love”.203 YouTube, as Felix Stalder (2012) notes in response, exemplifies how “The technologies that allow love to scale are all easy-to-use by now”.204 The end only further epitomises this conflation of DIY utopia and DIY romance.
Interspersed between the intense and highly personal stories about getting dumped, the wall text is intermittently broken by the phrase This has been flagged as spam. Found in the original comments thread, this phrase is generated by YouTube’s automated filtering system that attempts to cut out product promotions and commercial website links. By incorporating this reference to spam within the installation, we’re reminded how this public landscape of private sharings marks ripe new territory for marketing schemes, both crude and sophisticated, which aim to cash in on mediated affectivity.
In this overwhelming accumulation of utterances from heartbroken, and occasionally hopeful people, the conflicting utopias of the spectacle and digital utopianism are presented through feeling; it is a communal demonstration of empathy, and, conversely, isolation. Within the mass of shared affective experiences, we find both instances of genuine dialogue and an evocation of the ‘lonely crowd’, as users often vent their voices without succeeding, or perhaps even attempting, to achieve any real engagement.
201 Miriam Stanton and Christine Hancock, Jenny Holzer, Falconer Gallery, Grinnell College, May 25, 2006, accessed August 21, 2014,
67
Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography.
Figure 14: Screen grab from jaydeman23, (Getting Dumped)|What to Do After (Getting Dumped), YouTube, November 26, 2008.
68 Excessive and overwhelming, the formal layout of Needed to talk doesn’t invite a reading from start to finish, but rather echoes the nature of online communication, and its heterochronic splices of incongruent time; the multiple threads and intermittent replies, sometimes posted months, even years later, altogether create an interwoven chaos of contact that folds back on itself in places, and reaches dead ends in others. In so doing, it speaks to both the promise and failure of online forums to provide alternative spaces for genuine social connection.
Together, the two works combine pathos and humour. It seems that people are painfully dumped just like analogue TVs, and, like the interweaving narratives of soap opera characters, their publicised private stories seek their own improbable happy endings. This formal and conceptual convergence of documentary and fiction, analogue and digital forms, asks if, despite the ending of our relationship with a once- treasured technology, the melodrama it made commonplace might live on through a shared desire for the dramatic, in our everyday, networked lives.
As DIY destruction meets DIY romance, these works make explicit the key points I’ve argued throughout this chapter: that the conflicting digital and spectacular utopias both play out within YouTopia, and that its complex interweaving of new forms of power can be found within the expressive content of ‘throwaway’ media productions.
69
Figures 15 & 16: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Needed to talk (details), 2013.
70
71
Figure 17: Vito Acconci. Video still, Centers, 1971.
72 CHAPTER 2: SELF-REMIXING SCENARIOS
The real, to really be thought, must be inserted into fictional narratives; the work of art, which inserts social facts into the fiction of a coherent world, must in turn generate potential uses of this world, a mental logistics that favors change.205
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002)
Introducing the Self as Medium So far I have introduced YouTopia, the heterotopic space of YouTube that converges everyday life with not one, but two, utopias: the spectacle and digital utopianism. While ideologically conflicting, I’ve argued that these utopias both promise to fulfill the same fundamental human desires—the feeling of intensity, drama and affectivity, and the sense of community, collectivity and meaningful connection. YouTopia reveals a new form of escape unique to our modern-day relationship with networked media. As imagination, fantasy and desire become a social practice, this escape is defined by productivity not passivity. Through the rise of social media, and particularly YouTube’s platform for video-sharing, escape has become a two-fold process; first taking place as we remix and rewrite our life scripts using material from the media flow, and secondly, through our collective-sharing of these self-remixes as we mediatise them via the networked screen.
This chapter will look more closely at the meaning and process of self-remix, both on and off screen. Expanding from the limited media theory on the subject, I will more broadly position self-remix in relation to postmodern ideas of performative identity and will argue that by treating ourselves as malleable media objects, we are enacting a new, mediatised form of narcissism; one not simply defined by self-love but the perpetual drive to remix and remake ourselves into new, better versions.
The subtitle for Bourriaud’s Postproduction—“Culture as screenplay: How art reprograms the world”—makes it clear that his focus was on the bigger picture. Through the artistic methodology of remixing and reprogramming the immaterial scenarios that dominate social life, as well as the objects and products within which
205 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 57.
73 they materialise,206 he suggests that artworks serve to present an endless stream of alternatives:
… the artwork functions as the temporary terminal of a network of interconnected elements, like a narrative that extends and reinterprets preceding narratives. Each exhibition encloses within it the script of another; each work may be inserted into different programs and used for multiple scenarios. The artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions.207
It isn’t however, just artworks that function this way. People also endlessly reinterpret dominant narratives within their life stories, and incorporate social scripts within their personal scenarios. Screenplays, I will argue, become form within our psychic worlds and everyday lives. However, Bourriaud only briefly explores this idea in his discussion of artist Dominque Gonzalez-Foerster’s work, and her notion of automontage.208
Gonzalez-Foerster’s work, he explains, “reveals the complex structures of the mental cinema through which this individual gives shape to his or her experience: what the artist calls automontage.”209 In her 1990s series Chambres, for instance, the artist recreated both fictional and personal rooms in gallery spaces, allowing visitors to temporarily inhabit them like actors in the scenes of movies.210 The visitors’ filmic experience of Chambres is not mediated via technology; instead the installation externalises the way that, in the artist’s words, “The technologization of our interiors transforms our relationship to sounds and images”.211 Through creating this scenario, Bourriaud indicates that Gonzalez-Foerster is rendering peoples’ lives and experiences open to remix, as she “turns the individual into a sort of editing table or mixing board, the programmer of a home movie, the inhabitant of a permanent film set”.212
While Gonzalez-Foerster uses the originally filmic terminology of ‘montage’, she evokes the same process of self-remix that now takes place through the digitising of
206 ibid., p. 45. 207 ibid., pp. 19-20. 208 ibid., pp. 54-56. 209 ibid., p. 54. 210 ibid., p. 54. 211 Gonzalez-Foerster quoted in ibid., p. 55. 212 ibid., p. 55.
74 our interiors and exteriors, as we share them online. We see this shift clearly, between Chambres and my series Hopelessly Devoted, in which the cinematic projection of YouTube users’ musical performances of movie soundtracks turns their real-life chambres into film sets. While Gonzalez-Foerster’s focus is the domestic sphere as “a site of confrontation between social scripts and private desires, between received images and projected images”,213 video-sharing via YouTube ambiguously reveals the increasing convergence of private and public realms, as we make our identities and bodies a site that absorbs and re-projects social imagery. Self-remix reprograms the world on an individual level.
In “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976), Rosalind Krauss describes video in a distinctly similar way, arguing that it enacts the dual-meanings of ‘medium’ as “the simultaneous reception and projection of an image; and the human psyche used as a conduit”.214 But rather than invoking a confrontation between technology and our interiors, Krauss warns of video’s potential to collapse the distinction between self and medium. Discussing examples of early video artworks by Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Linda Benglis and Joan Jonas, she argues that the combination of instant video feedback, and placing the body at the work’s centre, closes the gap between subject and object. Self-reflexivity is foreclosed, she argues, leaving only a state of self-reflection—“the narcissistic re-projection of a frozen self”.215 Significantly, Krauss contrasts the static scenario of self-gazing with the therapeutic situation in Jacques Lacan’s model of psychoanalysis:
Lacan writes, ‘I would say that the analysis consists precisely in distinguishing the person lying on the analysts’s [sic] couch from the person who is speaking. With the person listening [the analyst], that makes three persons present in the analytical situation, among whom it is the rule that the question be put: Where is the moi of the subject?’ The analytic project is then one in which the patient disengages from the ‘statue’ of his reflected self, and through a method of reflexiveness, rediscovers the real time of his own history. He exchanges the atemporality of repetition for the temporality of change.216
213 ibid., pp. 54-55. 214 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” in October, vol. 1, (Spring 1976), p. 52, accessed May 10, 2012 from JSTOR database. 215 ibid., p. 57. 216 Lacan quoted in ibid., p. 58.
75 In The Virtual Illusion (1995), Baudrillard writes how screen ‘real-time’ appears to locate the ‘moi’, producing a new media mirror moment he describes as “The pure and minimal form of identity: I exist, I met myself.”217 Here, Krauss’s unchanging image of closed-circuit video re-emerges for the newly networked screen—a seemingly paradoxical situation in which a ‘real’ time-based medium appears to freeze temporality. As Baudrillard explains, we become:
… objects transposed to the other side of the screen, mediumized (we don’t even enjoy the good old status of passive spectator anymore), hypostasized like these people transfigured in situ, on the spot, by aesthetic or mediatic decision, transfigured in their specific habits and ways of life, in living museal pieces.218
The idea of YouTube as a collection of these living museal pieces, not placed behind museum glass so much as encased within pixel-perfect windows, is fitting for an online platform that operates as an archive of objectified selves. Yet, the postproductions of self that appear on YouTube represent a more complex condition of narcissism than Krauss describes; they aren’t so much frozen reflections, as frozen versions of constantly altering selves. As Peters and Seier argue in “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube” (2009), all forms of ‘auto mediation’ permit a temporality of change:
By introducing a gap between self and world, media enable a distance required for any relation to the self. Various technical apparatuses—from the quill to the webcam—place the self at a distance and at the same time bridge that distance to the extent that they make it accessible and accessible to alteration. Processes of mediation are, thus, not only intimately linked to processes of subjectification; they are also its prerequisite.219
By permitting perpetual self-alterations and their public sharing, we might imagine YouTube as creating the therapeutic situation. As a user uploads a video, they might become aware of “the distinction between his lived subjectivity and the fantasy
217 Jean Baudrillard, “The Virtual Illusion: Or the Automatic Writing of the World,” in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 12, no. 4, (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 99, accessed June 27, 2012 from Sage Publications Online. 218 ibid., p. 100. 219 Peters and Seier, “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube,” p. 187.
76 projections of himself as an object”,220 a separation that Krauss notes is at the heart of Lacanian psychotherapy. So, too, the unspeaking ‘eyeballs’ of an invisible YouTube audience might be experienced as the silently attentive therapist.
In this chapter I will argue that these socially-shared identity performances now make apparent a new relationship between video and our private lives, one characterised not by the absence of change but defined by it. In keeping with Bourriaud’s DJing terms, the self as medium now takes form in the endless, productive process of self- remix. Prosumers, I will suggest, don’t simply produce video media; they are postproducing themselves.
YouTube demonstrates that the social role of video has dramatically changed since Krauss’s article, not least because it is no longer a small group of artists who use it to record and publicly exhibit their performances, but masses of prosumers. Yet, her critical perspective on the self as medium remains particularly poignant. Social media’s role in “selfie syndrome” 221 and an apparent "narcissism epidemic"222 is widely discussed. 223 From my perspective, as we ‘mediumise’ our subjective experiences into digital objects for the purposes of video-performativity, the concerns Krauss raises regarding self-reflexivity are growing more pertinent, the effects more pervasive.
Exploring the problematic, present-day relationship between subject and object throughout this chapter, I aim to question the romance of remix to suggest that change isn’t always critical, and production not necessarily progressive. If a contemporary version of ‘therapeutic’ self-reflexivity is found in the process of self- alteration, I will argue that this doesn’t foreclose the narcissistic condition as Krauss’s argument would suggest, but that its aesthetics have altered—now characterised by reinvention and remix, in a complex conundrum of being affective subjects and data objects of networked media.
220 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” p. 58. 221 Tina Costanza, Selfie Syndrome-How Social Media Is Making Us Narcissistic (Infographic), Silicon Republic, December 4, 2013, accessed December 5, 2014,
77 THE SELFIE SYNDROME How social media is making us narcissistic
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Figure 18: Selfie Syndrome Infographic, 2013. 78 A Therapeutic Narrative of Self-Remix Through YouTube, the role of video in remixed identities is linked to the pervasive drive to become different, and ultimately, more like you dream to be. Or, at least, what you dream to be today. In this section, I will explore how the digital utopian ‘do it yourself’ ethos, and self-help culture’s ‘improve yourself’ ethos, align and even converge in ideas of self-remix. The continual drive for ‘self-actualising’, and now, on YouTube, aesthetically factualising our deepest hopes and fantasies, is the essence of what Eva Illouz describes in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007) as the ‘therapeutic narrative of self’. Illouz traces the beginning of this narrative back to 1859, and a book by Samuel Smiles called Self-Help. While focusing on men who had risen to fame and wealth—the classic DIY celebrity scenario—Smiles’s book evoked the 19th Century’s moral responsibility towards progress through a “spirit of self-help in the energetic action of individuals”.224 Self-help was, at first, quite distinct from the field of psychological therapy, Illouz argues. Freud, for example, believed that psychic health required in-depth precognitive therapy with a professional analyst, rather than a ‘do it yourself’ attitude. For him, therefore, the need for “democratizing psychoanalysis”,225 as Illouz puts it, was desireable but unachievable.226 However, with an increasingly popular moral view “that people could shape their own destinies”,227 and aided by the 1940s “paperback revolution”, Illouz observes that the psychoanalytic and self-help sensibilities eventually converged—absorbed within popular culture, therapy became democratised. In the late 60s and early 70s, as the therapeutic movement took hold in Western mainstream consciousness, the techno-utopian precursors to the ‘digital revolution’ were also emerging. As authenticity, meaningfulness and connection were now sought within the self, or through technology, both social movements appeared to be offering alternatives to the search for God. In 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote in The Culture of Narcissism that “Therapy has established itself as the successor both to rugged individualism and to religion”,228 while Fred Turner (2006) writes that the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972) is remembered as “a sort of Bible of 224 Smiles quoted in Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 40. 225 ibid., p. 41. 226 ibid., pp. 40-42. 227 ibid., p. 43. 228 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), p. 13. 79 countercultural technology”,229 and that Stewart Brand had set up "the church of technology, telling people in technological society that people needed to learn to use tools".230 Later, the rhetoric of these parallel movements appears to converge in Collective Intelligence (1994), as Pierre Lévy’s description of a realised digital utopia, marked by “win-win strategies”, “a best that is always new and different” and a “path of collective apprenticeship and self-invention” 231 sounds more akin to one of the innumerable self-help videos found on YouTube than the stuff of media academe. Now, the religions of the self and technology are entirely intertwined and pervasive, as people have learnt to use democratised digital ‘tools’ on their identities and their bodies. As Illouz writes: … support groups, talk shows, counseling, rehabilitation programs, for-profit workshops, therapy sessions, the Internet: all are sites for the performance and retooling of the self.232 This brings us back to the current culture of remix. As the bricolaging, collaging and cut-and-pasting of self-remix joins with the innumerable therapeutic tasks that centralise the self—‘self-realisation’, ‘self-help’, ‘self-improvement’, ‘self-discovery’, and ‘self-invention’ among others—it seems that, in 1971, influential self-help guru Abraham Maslow was indeed prophetic when he predicted that: … the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self- actualising, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.233 Deriving from DJing, and the vinyl turntablism of hip hop culture that emerged in the late 1970s, the use of the word remix has expanded in media discourses. Now it describes a broad range of activities that involve the selection and reconfiguration of elements, transforming old to new. As Lawrence Lessig (2008) writes when describing a text made entirely of quotes, “Were it music, we’d call it sampling. Were 229 Turner, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism," p. 114. 230 Lee Felsenstein quoted in ibid., p. 114. 231 Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno, (New York and London: Plenum Trade, 1997), p. 251. 232 Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, p. 48. 233 Abraham Maslow quoted in ibid., p. 45. 80 it painting, it would be called collage. Were it digital, we’d call it remix.”234 Just as YouTube has made a proliferation of everyday remix practices public, from political parodies to ‘Top 10’ compilations, it has also made visible the psychological process of self-remix. As Patricia Aufderheide (2011) explains: Online social networks have made visible what was always true: the self is endlessly constructed with a constant stream of bits of culture that people use both to shape experience and relationships.235 Remix emerged as a popular prosumer practice along with the ‘digital revolution’, and along with its roots in alternative music culture has become somewhat synonymous with freedom of expression. Sampling and rearranging now signify something bigger and broader—a liberated capacity to assert choice and to effect change. So, too, when it comes to ideas of self-remix, theoretical discussions tend toward a digital utopian-inflected assumption that cultural recycling on a personal level demonstrates a form of productive resistance and critical self-reflexivity. Key examples of this tendency within the field of new media theory begin with Lev Manovich, who began laying the groundwork for the language of self-remix in 2001, when he wrote that “New media makes explicit the psychological processes of cultural communication … The shift from creation to selection externalises and codifies the database of cultural elements existing in the mind.”236 The following year he argued that remix had become the fundamental logic of cultural production, as people would “download images, code, shapes, scripts, etc.; modify them, and then paste the new works online - send them into circulation”.237 Significantly, in “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life” (2008), Manovich appears to converge these preceding ideas in his discussion of user-created videos on YouTube: People build their worlds and identities out of these readily available objects by using different tactics: bricolage, assembly, customisation, and – to use 234 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), p. 51. 235 Patricia Aufderheide, “Copyright, Fair Use, and Social Networks,” in A Networked Self, ed. Zizi Papacharissi, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p.274, accessed June 24, 2013 from EBL E-Book Library. 236 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 232. 237 Lev Manovich, Generation Flash, The European Graduate School, 2002, accessed July 14, 2014, 81 the term that was not a part of De Certeau’s vocabulary but which has become important today – remix.238 The shift in his articulations suggests that our private assemblages of identity are no longer simply materialised by the multiple windows of digital interfaces, as he’d observed in 2001—individuals are now making their psychological processes explicit by postproducing themselves as new media objects, rather than the other way around. Framing self-remix in relation to Michel De Certeau’s (1984/2011) philosophy of everyday resistance to dominant media powers, Manovich concludes that, “at the level of content”,239 it is a form of “tactical creativity”.240 Published in the same year, Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008) also presents an image of self-remix as inherently liberating. He focuses his discussion on broader remix culture, which he argues needn’t be seen as copyright infringement, but a vital form of creativity: “this right to quote—or as I will call it, to remix—is a critical expression of creative freedom”.241 In Lessig’s view, the critical nature of remix is evident in the way it allows a generation to speak, more than as a resistant repurposing of dominant culture. Remix “does not compete with or weaken the market for the creative work that gets remixed”, he writes, “These markets are complementary, not competitive”.242 Part of the justification for his argument is that our essentially creative use of language is an innate form of remix—rather than stealing it’s a fundamental form of self-expression. Conjuring the notion of self-remix, he describes the prevalence of such linguistic remixing in our daily lives: “We don’t notice it as such, because this text-based remix, whether in writing or conversation, is as common as dust”.243 The evocation of self-remix as primarily linguistic, arises in “Dark Carnival”,244 in which Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) credits Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Of Originality and Quotation (1875) with prefiguring present-day remix ideology. Miller quotes Emerson’s account of a spontaneous form of psychic remix: 238 Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life,” p. 37. 239 ibid., p. 40. 240 ibid., p. 40. 241 Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, p. 56. 242 ibid., p. 56. 243 ibid., p. 82. 244 Paul Miller, “Dark Carnival,” Dj Spooky, c.2004, accessed July 3, 2014, 82 Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant—and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing—that in a larger sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warf and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not the twist of these two strands.245 Significantly, Miller acknowledges that Emerson was bemoaning what he saw as a “cultural inertia” in literature, and that “people’s minds were too burdened with the weight of previous creative work”.246 Yet Miller adopts his observations to support an opposing perspective—that remixing isn’t lazy but inherently creative—the new version transcends any previous ‘original’. Putting his own spin on self-remix, he summarises: “The turntable’s needle in dj culture acts as a kind of mediator between the self and the fictions of the external world.”247 In a markedly sophisticated and developed discussion of self-remix, Mark Amerika forwards a notion of ‘Source Material Everywhere (SME)’, which he discusses in conversation with David Gunkel (2012). Positioning digital self-remix practices in a historical trajectory of critical creativity, he frames it as potentially transgressive and reflexive: For the contemporary twenty-first-century remixologist who employs a kind of cut-and-paste-as-you-go digital lifestyle practice, this intuitively generated creative act is all about the postproduction of presence and can be connected to the avant-garde lineage of artists, writers, philosophers and other innovators of creative de[con]struction who methodically play with the source of creativity, but do so in a self-consciously transgressive way.248 Referring to innovators of literary remix, writers Gertrude Stein, Jorges Borges, William Burroughs, and Kathy Acker, Amerika expansively approaches the role of language in self-remix, and forwards it as a process of writing the self. “Writing is where remixed personae get processed (are processing or always becoming)”.249 Here we find parity with the self-help language of becoming what we dream to be and 245 ibid. 246 ibid. 247 ibid. 248 Mark Amerika and David J Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, eds. David J Gunkel and Ted Gournelos, (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 61. 249 ibid., p. 65. 83 shaping our destinies, as Amerika’s largely optimistic perspective of self-remixing proposes that through the process people “prophesize their future tense”.250 In tangent with this discussion, Amerika underscores self-remix with the notion of the “artist-medium”. 251 However, indicative of his predominantly hopeful outlook, he contextualises it with Marcel Duchamp’s discussion of the artist as a medium in his 1957 lecture “The Creative Act”,252 rather than Krauss’s critical perspective of the same subject, which forms the starting point for my argument. Amerika makes a point of distancing the process of remixing the self from ideas of narcissism. “Daily remix practice is not a self-centered ritual of dissipating the ego”, 253 he writes. Nevertheless, Amerika and Gunkel’s discussion of self-remix provides invaluable insights into the shifts that I have already pointed to, which have taken place since Krauss’s discussion of the narcissistic aesthetics of video. Frozen and fixed by video’s instant feedback loop, the artist-mediums Krauss observed, for instance, were caught by “the leveling out of the effects of temporality”.254 Gunkel instead suggests that, in networked culture, self-remix creates an altogether different type of “collapsed present”, as Krauss termed it. He writes:255 Remix—a specific, embodied, and finite practice—continually feeds itself producing more possibilities for additional and virtually endless remixing. Source Material Everywhere (a spatial dimension) but also, and in addition, for all time (a temporal dimension). Cut loose from all anchors and authorities—gods, the author, truth, etc—remix is cast adrift in an infinite sea of becoming.256 250 ibid., pp. 65-66. 251 ibid., p. 59. 252 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act”, ed. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, (New York: Paragraphic Books, 1959), pp. 77-78, accessed January 7, 2015, 84 Open to the influence of the network, rather than Krauss’s image of “self- encapsulation”,257 Amerika notes that digital self-remixing practices are “like what Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) refers to as “persona as shareware”.258 US artist Jaimie Warren personifies Amerika’s ideas by remaking images from memes that she finds on the Internet as self-portraits. Presenting herself as an open medium of pop culture, Warren’s work demonstrates how the art historical task of portraiture—to visually describe or reflect a person’s likeness or true essence—is being redefined. In contrast to the early video artists discussed by Krauss, Warren is one of a current generation of artists indebted to the likes of Cindy Sherman, by again centralising themselves in their work with ‘self-portraits’ that are dissolving any sense of an authorial presence, or ‘true self’. Figure 19: Jaimie Warren, Self-portait as Lasagna Del Ray by thestrutny, 2012. 257 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” p. 53. 258 Amerika and Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” p. 65. 85 Significiantly, Warren isn’t performing, at least not in a simplistic sense. In a conflation of pop and personality that is distinctly devoid of cynicism, her ‘self- portraits’ suggest that, just as she inhabits public ‘personas’, they also inhabit her. Warren embraces the convergence of the ‘real’ and the manipulated. In her series Celebrities as Food & Food’lebrities, for instance, she remakes digitally merged pictures of food and celebrities from a popular Internet meme. For example, in Self- portrait as Lasagna Del Ray by thestrutny (2012), she is, all at once, herself, a lasagna, and pop singer Lana Del Ray. With her head on a plate, face covered in sauce, and hidden behind lips the size of sausages, Warren’s total immersion in her work and in popular culture seems truly as physical as it is psychological. The beauty of Warren’s gruesome self-portraits is that you come away with absolutely no idea of what she looks like. Nevertheless, they do produce a highly sophisticated portrait of a free-flowing and fragmented contemporary self that is as malleable and messy as the unsophisticated make-up and materials that she uses. Like a grown up kid who’s been allowed to let rip with the contents of the craft cupboard, Warren embodies Amerika’s idea that the ‘artist-medium’ lives a “cut-and- paste as-you-go, digital lifestyle practice”,259 as she quite literally glues together her identities, fabricates her facial features, and sculpts her numerous selves. Just as the essential identity of the memes that she mines are conversely defined through the construction of new versions, iterations and copies, Warren wittily and reflexively reveals that, like a meme, our identities are now defined through endless self- reinvention. But, in aiming to articulate the two-sided nature of networked culture, I want to probe the implications of this ever-greater merging with commercial pop culture. Is it truly a liberating way to re-define ourselves, or are we, like Warren’s actual identifying features, lost to the allure of alteration? When self-remix takes place in everyday life, I propose we need to look beyond a notion of the ‘artist-medium’, inspired for Amerika by the transgressive, avant-garde critical thinkers of times past, to consider what it means today for the anyone-and- everyone-medium. The media theory accounts I’ve noted in this section, from my perspective are nuanced with digital utopian idealism. While their optimism is vital and not altogether invalid, they are in danger of collapsing criticality by suggesting that everything is critical—all thoughts and conversations are creative expressions of 259 ibid., p. 61. 86 freedom; all user-created media content on YouTube is tactical; and all ‘postproductions of presence’ intuitively self-reflexive. Notably, Amerika does this to a far lesser degree. Recognising that the process of daily remix practice is “heavily politicized” and always a “risk”,260 he calls for a “com-passionate agenda” through “nurturing feelings back into the mix”.261 In the next section I want to tease this risk out more fully, to present a less idealistic and more nuanced notion of the politics at play in self-remix. Looking at broader discourse on postmodern identity performance and, more specifically, certain feminist critiques, I will show that our daily sampling of social fictions can equally be viewed from a critical perspective as a digital utopian one. Amerika writes of the transgressive nature of self-remixing, “Sometimes it’s as easy as just being yourself, or at least the latest remixed version thereof.”262 But for a lot of us, a lot of the time, being transgressive, in a social or politicised sense, isn’t actually what we want. Performing Convergence: Private Desires & Social Fictions The convergence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ takes places within the minds of consumers, as we select fragments from the media flow and bricolage them into our public image of ourselves. Just as remix culture refutes the very notion of the original, postmodern ideas of performative identities have also demanded that we reassess the idea of an essential, fixed self—discourses which fuse within the notion of perpetual self- remixing. Embracing our personas as continually enacted, and comprising multiple identities, brings those very ideas that remix challenged—originality, authenticity and authorship—to present-day notions of self. The question of: “Who is ‘the true you?’” becomes: “What samples do you choose to use in the latest version of you?” In the previous section, I argued that discourse on self-remix tends to focus on the liberating potential of selecting and reconfiguring the mix of elements that make the self. This tendency is mirrored in media theory discourse that addresses online identity performances as inherently healthy, progressive and empowering. The main subjects of critique in social media theory—as I’ve already noted—tend to exist outside the content, in faceless forms of surveillance, control and marketing. In this section, I want to introduce the flipside of the self-remix coin, taking a cue from second-wave feminist critiques of identity, which served to philosophically liberate us 260 ibid., p. 65. 261 ibid., p. 65. 262 ibid., p. 68. 87 from oppressive notions of gendered identity, but also observed that, in practice, our identity choices don’t always fit this image of freedom. The collection of texts in A Networked Self (2011) exemplify a prevalence of notions of performativity in current social media theory, and the conflation of postmodern ideas of identity with self-remix. Theatrical terminology arises throughout the publication; for instance, in Malcolm Parks’s discussion of virtual communities, he argues that “users themselves are really seeking theater, or at least something more akin to a mass medium. The behaviour of [a] large portion of participants more closely resembles that of passive viewers or audience members than of active participants.” 263 The publication editor, Zizi Papacharissi, takes an opposing perspective, arguing that social network sites reposition the audience as performers, a “theater of personal and collective identity”,264 which provides “a stage for self- presentation”265 on which photographs, text or videos are the “props”.266 While, in ‘Copyright, Fair Use, and Social Networks’, Patricia Aufderheide asks if remixed identities, when seen as cultural performances, should be protected by copyright law. Performed and multiple identities as discussed in this publication are by-and-large embraced as relatively healthy and positive, albeit for the rather narrow account of “narcissistic tendencies” observed within teenagers’ Facebook photographs. 267 Papacharissi notes in her conclusion that online “identity performance contain[s] both remixed and remixable properties”.268 However, the publication as a whole fails to extend to identity performances her earlier observation that remixed and remixable media is both “the product of institutions and independent socio-cultural agents”.269 Rather, networked selves are, she writes, “relatively autonomous social agents pursuing social goals”.270 263 Malcolm R Parks, “Social Network Sites as Virtual Communities,” in A Networked Self, ed. Zizi Papacharissi, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 119. 264 Zizi Papacharissi, ed., “Conclusion: A Networked Self,” in A Networked Self, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 315. 265 ibid., p. 304. 266 ibid., p. 304. 267 See Andrew L Mendelson and Zizi Papacharissi, “Look at Us: Collective Narcissism in College Student Facebook Photo Galleries,” in A Networked Self, ed. Zizi Papacharissi, (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 251-73. 268 Papacharissi, “Conclusion: A Networked Self,” p. 316. 269 ibid., p. 305. 270 ibid., p. 316. 88 Critiquing the limitations of online self-profiling in “Facebook, Anonymity, and the Crisis of the Multiple Self” (2011),271 Geert Lovink also argues for the benefits of multiple performative identities. Just as self-help guru Gail Sheehy claims “the most healthy and successful [people] now develop multiple identities, managed simultaneously, to be called upon as conditions change”,272 with a poignant parity Lovink too embraces the idea of managing multiple online selves, arguing it is a strategic form of obfuscation. In contrast, to being restricted to a single identity on Facebook, which he sees as “a pathological dimension of commitment to the Real Self”,273 Lovink calls for the reemergence of a creative and mutable form of online identity that was common to early cyber cultures: “There is no true Self, only an endless series of interchangeable masks … left without a core, the personality can engage in never-ending play”.274 Replacing the ‘real self’ with anonymity might serve as the most viable way forward, he suggests: “As a way out it is fine to admit “I am not who I am.” It is a step in the right direction—modern people as the people who try to (re-)invent themselves.”275 Such discussions of identity performance in social media owe much to Ernest Goffman, who in 1959 wrote The Presentation of Self. Using theatrical symbolism to discuss social interactions as complexly constructed performances, Goffman argues that identity presentations, like dramatic ones, are differentiated by front and back stage activities. According to Goffman, the image of ourselves that we present to the world is like the well-rehearsed characters on the stage, performing with the illusion of flowing dialogue, slick choreography and contrived costumes, while our psychic and private lives resemble the backstage preparations of rehearsals and laboriously reworked scripts. Significantly, Goffman argues that, as idealised versions of the self, ‘fronts’ aren’t inauthentic or superficial. Rather, anticipating the language of self- remix, he writes, “fronts tend to be selected, not created”,276 and precisely for this reason, “this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be”.277 The notion that our ‘true self’ is something we actively create is discussed by Carl Elliot in his chapter on “The True Self” in Better Than Well (2003). Framing a 271 This is a chapter in Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, pp. 38- 49. 272 Carl Elliot, Better Than Well, (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), p. 47. 273 Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, p. 40. 274 ibid., p. 40. 275 ibid., p. 44. 276 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 22. 277 ibid., p. 249. 89 discussion of transformative ‘enhancement technologies’ of the body, such as plastic surgery, he describes a historical shift in the concept of authenticity in psychological theories. According to psychologist Jerome Bruner, writes Elliot, before the 1970s there was the idea of an ‘essentialised self’, demarcated by a fixed, stable and immutable identity. Psychological theory treated the self as if it were a “real object that could be discovered and inspected”.278 No longer considered an inherent fact of the ‘self’, authenticity became a moral ideal, “something we must attain if we are to be true and full human beings”.279 Elliot’s book is written prior to Web 2.0, but we can relate it to the transformations of self that take place through YouTube, which are both performative and technological. For instance, as YouTube-shared remixed identity performances converge an individual’s lived reality and their projected fantasies, they appear to demonstrate a line by Agrado, a transsexual character in Pedro Almodavar’s movie All About My Mother (1999) who Elliot quotes as saying “A woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she dreamed for herself.”280 However, I will also go on to argue that, in the process of becoming media objects on YouTube, we materialise a state of self that is discoverable within the digital archive and rendered open for inspection. Elliot highlights a key ambiguity in the moral drive for the management of self and, as Nikolas Rose puts it, “the governance of the soul”.281 While Elliot writes, “Altering your identity has become a way of challenging the status quo”,282 the overarching enquiry of his book asks, “Where do we draw the line between self and society? Why do we seek self-realization in ways so heavily influenced by cultural conformity?”283 I aim to highlight how this pervasive belief system, in which we are driven by moral duty to become, and keep becoming, our most authentic selves, plays out in the transformative practice of self-remixing. We can observe it, for instance, within Mark Amerika’s notion of Source Material Everywhere, which I introduced in the previous section. Amerika optimistically describes how the ‘artist-medium’ actively samples and manipulates source material. However, he also agrees with Gunkel’s description of himself as medium: 278 Elliot, Better Than Well, p. 48. 279 ibid., p. 30. 280 ibid., p. 30. 281 Rose quoted in ibid., pp. 52-53. 282 ibid., p. 51. 283 ibid., book summary. 90 I (if it is even possible to retain and reuse such subjective pronouns) am only a nodal point in a network of information that is already in circulation and that uses and speaks through me. I am the medium of the remix and not its source.284 Here, Gunkel distinctly echoes Krauss’s more critical notion of the artist as a medium, a conduit in the video circuit, and seems, perhaps inadvertently, to evoke the modern-day individual as a ‘passive’ instrument of networked life. Accordingly, a critical theory perspective might observe that Amerika’s rejection of the authorial subject in place of a “pseudo-autobiographical ‘I’”285 recalls Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944/1979) insidious notion of ‘pseudo-individuality’. Being a nodal point in a network that speaks through you sounds much like their description that “individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now merely centres where the general tendencies meet”.286 This ambiguity between Krauss’s notion of self as medium and the one Amerika forwards as Source Material Everywhere arises again in relation to the body, where she observes “the paradigm situation of video as a body centered between the parenthesis of camera and monitor”,287 and he describes remix as an embodied praxis that uses “the body as a platform for remixing the data”.288 The perspective of self-remixing that I want to advance here actively articulates both notions of the self as medium—an individual’s psychic life and embodied practices are both instrumental in mixing their identities from the media flow, and equally serve as instruments for it, as conduits for their samples. Feminist theory on gendered identity has probed this double-sided nature of performative identities, and proves productive in developing a more complex notion of self-remix. For instance, if the platform for the remix is the body, it becomes an ambiguous site for contesting and colluding with cultural norms in light of the philosophy of Susan Bordo. Like Amerika’s notion of remix as ‘embodied praxis’, Bordo earlier argued that 284 Amerika and Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” p. 61. 285 ibid., p. 61. 286 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 155. 287 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” p. 61. 288 Amerika and Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” p. 61. 91 knowledge is embodied. However, in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), which considers the impact of popular culture on the shaping of the female body, Bordo also recognises how common cultural practices can influence gendered homogeneity. Significantly, Bordo appropriates Michel Foucault’s theories on self-surveillance and self-correction to move away from presenting women as victims, and highlight both their “collusions with patriarchal culture and their frequent efforts at resistance”.289 Writing that popular media “impose models of bodily beauty that get construed as freely chosen options”, 290 Bordo presents a view of choice that is key to practices of self-remix. The active selecting of samples and identity reconfiguration, which feeds the prevailing assumption that self- remix is an inherently liberating act, becomes from this perspective far more complex. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) is also particularly key in this discussion, as she challenges the “social fictions”291 of gender norms such as a “natural sex” or a “real woman”, 292 which we can imagine constitute examples of the “ideological fictions”293 Bourriaud refers to later in Postproduction. Butler argues that, “Gender reality is created through sustained social performances”,294 and considers such performances as “parodic repetitions”,295 which within the logics of remix we could call sampling. Significantly, she argues that performative parodic repetitions have the potential to both reaffirm cultural norms of behavior that constitute broader “social dramas”,296 and also can be used for subversion and agency, through enacting variations.297 Drag performances are often subversively successful, Butler explains, because they create a double parody: “The notion of gender parody … does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original”.298 This gendered critique of originality echoes the ideology of 289 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 23. 290 ibid., p. 17. 291 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 178. 292 ibid., p. 178. 293 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 50. 294 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p. 180. 295 ibid., p. 177. 296 ibid., p. 178. 297 ibid., p. 185. 298 ibid., p. 175. 92 remix theory. As David Gunkel writes of the potential success of mash-ups in “Audible Transgressions: Art and Aesthetics after the Mashup” (2012): … we may say that what makes a mashup “good” is not something that can be measured on the Socratic scale. In fact it is quite literally and deliberately off the scale. What makes it “good” is the extent to which a particular mashup intervenes in this legacy system and facilitates its deconstruction.299 For Gunkel, a “bad” remix might only be bad in the sense that it just makes us want to dance,300 but Butler’s feminist critique of identity encourages us to think more deeply about the way that self-remix may not be, as digital utopianism would have it, inherently resistant, critical or self-reflexive. “Parody by itself is not subversive”, she writes, “and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.”301 In the public and theatrical context of the networked screen, performed and remixed identities might present a subversive ‘double parody’—the performance of self- performance—or they might equally serve to demonstrate the recirculation, or reinvention, of oppressive cultural fictions and social dramas. What is important to take from these gender theories is the idea that choice does not equate to being critical. In self-remixes, the freedom to select and create doesn’t mean that people are free; the question is what are people selecting and sampling, and why do they create what they create? Extending from Amerika’s optimistic perspective to articulate one of ambiguity, I want to suggest that the feelings people, as he puts it, “nurture back into the mix”302 may often convey the desire for intensity, affectivity and drama offered by capitalist and conformist social fictions. A truly ‘com-passionate agenda’ might not look past these “bad” self-mash-ups, but try to better understand them. As self-remix is an intuitive and emotional process, then according to Duchamp’s notion of the ‘creative act’ it is at least partially, or passingly, disconnected from 299 David J Gunkel, “Audible Transgressions: Art and Aesthetics After the Mashup,” in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, eds. Ted Gournelos and David J Gunkel, (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 54. 300 ibid., p. 52. 301 Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, pp. 176-177. 302 Amerika and Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” p. 65. 93 consciousness, opening a space where we may not know why we do what we do. The result, as Duchamp sees it, is that: … art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.303 In the same sense, self-remix can be good, but it can also be bad and anywhere on the spectrum in between. When criticality and self-reflexivity don’t factor into our selection of self-samples, other than as a form of self-correction and self- surveillance, what is revealed tells us as much, if not more, about the social fictions that determine our contemporary condition, as when they do. In the next section I will unpack a deeper level at play in our self-remixing—the part of us that knowingly or unknowingly desires becoming a conduit for the social fictions of commercial popular culture—that desires becoming media. Feeling Intense: The (Media) Power of Now In our era of Internet ubiquity, the line that separates our selves from the media with which we self-express has dissolved, and the distinction between medium and maker is confused. As we publicise our private stories, and perpetually alter, rebrand and repaint ourselves to the world, performances of self are status quo and everyone is an artist. This new form of self as medium is informed, I’ve proposed here, by the desire for intensity. Just as our self-remixes sample the heightened emotion and drama found within the social scripts of commercial pop culture to escape from a banal and flawed reality, in this section I suggest that looping ourselves back into the media flow promises to heighten that intensity further—through the experience of becoming media. In 1997, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment was first published, and has since become a worldwide phenomenon. This self-help guide by Eckhart Tolle offers to improve day-to-day life by stressing the importance of living in the present moment. Our past and future, Tolle writes, are created by our thoughts and produce only worry and anxiety. Instead he counsels how we can find peace in the present moment through chapters such as “The State of Presence”, and “Moving Deeply Into the Now”. We find these spiritual notions paralleled within our current 303 Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” accessed January 7, 2015. 94 relationship with social media. Beyond our possibly pathological desire for constant connectivity, certain media theorists recognise the intensity and presentness promised by digital self-remixing. As I’ve noted earlier in this chapter, Mark Amerika (2012) describes remixed personae through rhetoric of “becoming”—an experience he describes as “intense”.304 He further explains: The writing ‘I’ is always pseudo-autobiographical: a remix-in-process continually cohering into what Whitehead (1978: 279) would call ‘an aesthetic fact,’ although he was referring quite explicitly to ‘an intense experience’ as an aesthetic fact. This resonates with my theory of remix because it’s only by becoming an aesthetic fact that I can experience concrescence … 305 Concrescence derives from process philosophy meaning “becoming concrete”, and in its simplest terms has come to be discussed as a complex synthesis of the ‘factualised’ past self and the immediacy of subjective experience. 306 Although Amerika doesn’t delve into the role desire plays within this process, earlier in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) David Bolter and Richard Grusin highlight the significance of desire in their notion of the “remediated self”.307 Aligning with my perspective, Bolter and Grusin suggest that remediating the self within network culture heightens a pre-existing and deeply fundamental desire: “This fascination with media works as the sublimation of the initial desire for immediacy, the desire to be present to oneself.” 308 The immediacy sought through self- remediation corresponds to the ‘intensity’ Amerika later describes, as both offer a form of subjectification conversely through the process of aesthetically factualising the self. As Bolter and Grusin explain: 304 Amerika and Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” p. 65. 305 ibid., p. 58. 306 See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, (New York: The Free Press, 1978). Also, see Robert C Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking: Self Development in Zen, Swordmanship, and Psychotherapy, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1981). 307 See the section on ‘Self’ in Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 230-265. 308 ibid., p. 356. 95 As these media become simultaneously technical analogs and social expressions of our identity, we become simultaneously the subject and object of contemporary media309 Our desire to seek out a sense of immediacy, through inserting ourselves into the media flow, can be further understood, they suggest, through Stanley Cavell’s philosophy on painting. Traditional painting seeks to connect with reality, Cavell wrote in 1979, attempting to bridge the gap between our isolated realities and “a sense of presentness” 310 to the world. “The route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgement of the endless presense [sic] of self.”311 While people can’t step into paintings to close what Bolter and Gruisin call the “critical viewing distance”, 312 people are now able to immerse themselves in interactive media environments—providing a new strategy, they suggest, to “reduce this distance and so to heighten the sense of immediacy”.313 Even as they were writing before Web 2.0 took hold, the technological shift to online interactivity meant that “Instead of trying to be in the presence of the objects of representation, we then define immediacy as being in the presence of media.”314 According to Bolter and Gruisin, this new form of immediacy—‘hypermediacy’—creates both the immersive experience of interaction and a removed self that navigates the network. Recalling Shamberg’s digital utopian hopes for video-selves, they optimistically propose the remediated self provides new opportunities for ‘self-definition’, and greater self- knowing.315 However, this self-distancing effect also prevents the possibility of being fully present with media; “that utopian state is certainly not available to us today,”316 they write. Over a decade later, social media suggests that our continued efforts to become media have progressed ever further. The intensity of converging self and spectacle is, I have proposed, more fully achieved than ever before in YouTopia. Yet, our rejoining with media is also more dubious than Bolter and Gruisin allow—the utopia YouTube makes available to us today is, I’ve argued, distinctly double natured. 309 ibid., p. 231. 310 Cavell quoted in ibid., p. 234. 311 Cavell quoted in ibid., p. 234. 312 ibid., p. 235. 313 ibid., p. 235. 314 ibid., p. 356. 315 ibid., p. 232. 316 ibid., p. 236. 96 From a surveillance theory angle, Mark Andrejevic also argues for the problematic nature of adding ourselves into the media mix. In “Critical Media Studies 2.0: an Interactive Upgrade” (2009), for instance, he claims that the digital utopian ideology of liberation through media feedback, and new digital forms of monitoring and surveillance, amount to the same thing. Norbert Wiener, who first theorised cybernetics, did so, Andrejevic reminds us, in relation to “feedback-based control”,317 having observed how market research conducted “psychological investigations with the common man as their object”.318 Now, as we voluntarily feed our psychic lives back into the flow, Andrejevic warns that: We might go so far as to propose an interactive repressive hypothesis: whenever we are told that interactivity is a way to express ourselves, to rebel against control, to subvert power, we need to be wary of powers’ ruse: the incitation to provide information about ourselves to participate in our self- classification, to close the cybernetic loop.319 The ‘cybernetic loop’, then, is the perversion of Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘machinery of rejoinder’. Abstracted from Andrejevic’s surveillance framework, it strikingly evokes the looping of our new, networked form of escape; the endless sampling and removing of fragments from the media’s flow and their return within our mediatised remixed identities. In my broader activation of cybernetic looping, the problem with interactivity that Andrejevic presents becomes analogous with ‘the problem of self-transgression’,320 as it has been called in Lacanian discourse. Where Andrejevic warns that interactivity serves as “willing and unknowing submission to increasingly detailed forms of monitoring”,321 Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis (2008) argue that the problem of self transgression relates to the question of “Why are we are so willing and often enthusiastic—or at least relieved—to submit ourselves to conditions of subordination even when we are consciously opposed to them?”322 317 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 43. 318 Weiner quoted in ibid., p. 44. 319 ibid., p. 41. 320 See Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory,” Subjectivity, vol. 24 (June, 2008), pp. 256-74, accessed June 6, 2013 from Palgrave Journals database. 321 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 44. 322 Glynos and Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory,” p. 267. 97 As the Internet has ‘augmented’ our realities beyond previous physical and cultural limitations, the term ‘transgression’ arises within current media discourse, often through the lens of personal and social liberation.323 However, from this Lacanian perspective, the subject as lack is central, and Glynos and Stavrakakis argue that our attempts to eliminate this lack often fuel fun-seeking behaviours at the level of fantasy. 324 We can bring their arguments, via the cybernetic loop, back to our contemporary relationship with media, and the ambiguity, I’ve argued, that is at the heart of the way we select and reconfigure dominant popular culture by making it us. As they write: The problem of self-transgression, then, calls for a critical explanation of why and how a subject is often complicit in the contravention of an ideal, which she nevertheless affirms. Fantasmatic enjoyment is just one way of trying to understand the problem. YouTube’s so-thought trashy and fun media content makes explicit our recourse to the emotional intensity of commercial pop culture’s utopian forms, and the feeling of immediacy promised by becoming ourselves forms of media. But I hope to highlight this is also fuelled by our shared sense of lack and our collective desire to overcome it. Jon Davies pertinently observed, in 2006: The lived reality of this corporate-imperialist standardization of fantasy and desire is a dark and disturbing one, but at a microcosmic level it plays out through small daily experiences of joy – a fun song, a tasty glass of Coca- Cola – that cannot be written off simply as false consciousness.325 As the machinery of rejoinder, YouTube demonstrates that our convergence with the spectacle’s modes of media production and dissemination has not defeated it: instead empowering us to create and feedback has empowered it too. The culture industry is no longer tasked with ‘retroactively’ creating consumer needs when we are enthusiastically looping our desires straight back into its hands. By promising the feeling of intensity, the media power of Now is, to reframe Andrejevic’s observation, 323 See Ted Gournelos and David J Gunkel, eds., Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, (New York: Continuum, 2012). 324 Glynos and Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory,” p. 261. 325 Jon Davies, “Somebodies to Love,” in Candice Breitz: Same Same, ed. Gregory Burke, (The Power Plant, 2009), p. 91. 98 “more than just the nightmare fantasy of an old-media curmudgeon who can’t put down The Dialectic of Enlightenment”.326 The cybernetic loop also returns us to Rosalind Krauss, who established video as the ‘aesthetic of narcissism’ based on the collapse of distance between subject and medium. Now, as we creatively negotiate our role as both subjects and objects of social media, the distinction becomes evermore slippery. Our concretised expressions are digital fragments within the evolving Photoshop picture we’re ‘painting’ of ourselves, and, with the ‘critical viewing distance’ this separation allows, we’re aesthetically altering our deepest hopes and fears as pixelated facts. In the next section, I will expand from Krauss’s art theoretical framework, to consider how narcissism takes form in a networked culture pervaded by DIY therapy. An Aesthetics of Networked Narcissism Three years after Krauss (1976) wrote that the self-reflexive ‘therapeutic situation’ of psychoanalysis served to break the narcissistic, static state of self-reflection, in 1979 Christopher Lasch critiqued the ‘therapeutic movement’ in The Culture of Narcissism, arguing that its pervasive injunction to alter the self was not psychologically healthy, but, conversely, was contributing to a normalisation of pathological narcissism. Lasch argues that self-help culture’s centralisation of the ‘analytic self’ presupposes an unfulfilled or unhealthy individual—one, like the pathological narcissist, who objectively appraises their self-image for flaws, and needs constant external validation. Just as DIY therapy came with a dark side, I’ve proposed in this chapter that so does self-remix. Where the cybernetics ideology that ‘feedback’ is vital for psychic health meets with the self-improvement ethos that we can attain authenticity and self- actualisation through transformation, our efforts at becoming what we desire to be via social media ought to create healthier, happier individuals. However, I have argued that feminist critiques of gender identity remind us to question the politics of choice that accompany our sampling from dominant culture, and that, by looking at the deeper level of desire at play, our performative ‘feedback’ and self-profiling improvements may not always be so beneficial. 326 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 43. 99 Returning to recent discourse on narcissism inspired by Lasch’s earlier critique, in this section I will propose that self-remixing necessarily aligns with narcissistic tendencies when we consider that, in our networked era, self-reflexivity and mediatised objectivity feed rather than cure them. As the broad scope of self- actualisation is limited only by an individual’s ‘dreams’, an expansive critique becomes necessary—one that extends beyond specific cultural ideals, such as gender, beauty or romance, and moves toward a critique of the cultural idealisation, commodification, and now social-mediatisation of change itself. When digitally networked culture was in its infancy, Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) presciently observed, that the new mediascape meant narcissism was becoming ever more prevalent as “the treatment of self as spectacle”.327 Extending from Lasch, who claims a narcissist “cannot live without an admiring audience”,328 they argue that we’re now constantly performing as the mediascape provides us with a perpetual, diffused audience.329 Identifying parity between this contemporary narcissistic situation, and social theories addressing the ‘project of the self’, they pertinently observe that self-reflexivity is closely related to narcissism:330 They both involve a reflection on the self in relation to others in imagination, whether that is by means of a narrative or a single image. People are presenting themselves to others and, in doing so, are imagining how others will see them.331 Self-reflection becomes self-reflexivity, they suggest, when it permits the knowing construction of identity through the reordering of the self. In Giddens’s (1991) work on the ‘reflexive project of the self’ he argues, they note, that the construction of an individual’s identity is a process of “the reflexive ordering of self-narratives”,332 as well as “a systematic ordering of the body – the control of shape, fitness and diet”.333 The idea of ‘reworking versions’ of our biographies and our bodies presents a clear connection between the self-reflexivity of contemporary narcissists and the process 327 Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, p. 96. 328 Lasch quoted in ibid., p. 90. 329 ibid., p. 94. 330 ibid., p. 94. 331 ibid., p. 95. 332 Giddens quoted in ibid., p. 95. 333 ibid., p. 95. 100 of self-remix. Giddens sees this as creating “a trajectory of the self”,334 terminology that recycles De Certeau’s notion of “tactical trajectories” that are created as people “select fragments taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose new stories with them”.335 Significantly, however, by activating Giddens’s ideas of self-reflexivity in relation to narcissism, Abercrombie and Longhurst highlight an ambiguity that corresponds to my position on self remix; self-reflexivity is not necessarily—as Krauss argued—the critical remedy for the condition of narcissism, but, in contemporary life, may constitute it. The selfie provides a good example of this self-reflexive narcissism, having become symbolic of the smartphone generation’s love of spontaneously taking and sharing its own image. Recently, for instance, a young woman’s painstaking attempt to take a good selfie was surreptitiously recorded, and went viral via YouTube. The video, titled Girl Is Trying Too Hard to Take a Selfie for a Whole Minute,336 presents a clear example of the ‘systematic ordering of the body’, capturing a battery of performed slimming poses and flattering angles used to achieve the satisfactory selfie—a routine, according to Rachel Corbett in The Daily Telegraph, displayed “all the moves you’d expect from The Idiot’s Guide to Narcissism”.337 The girl has been ridiculed, and common responses express disdain at the utter superficiality and vanity of our times. Yet, her highly refined exercise of composing the perfect self-image reflects the same considered construction of commercial images that disseminate through social media. While casting the young woman a ‘fool’, Corbett also observes that “it’s easy for even the most emotionally intelligent individual to get caught up in the ‘perfection’ of what they see online and judge their life according to that unrealistic standard”.338 334 ibid., p. 95. 335 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 35. 336 izzi izumi, Girl Is Trying Too Hard to Take a Selfie for a Whole Minute, YouTube, October 11, 2014, accessed October 19, 2014, 101 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 20: Screen grab from izzi izumi, Girl Is Trying Too Hard to Take a Selfie for a Whole Minute, YouTube, October 11, 2014. Significantly, the careful construction of the selfie exposes far more than a preoccupation with surface, but the depths of our concern with how we look to other people, and the capacity for self-loathing, as much as self-love, that might accompany the critical remixing and ‘re-working’ of our own reflections. If the selfie has indeed reimagined the self-portrait, then Australian artist Jackson Eaton has reimagined the selfie. Insightfully reflecting on the social construction of narcissism, Eaton’s series Melfies (2012-2013), meaning ‘mirror-selfies’, aren’t in fact taken in the mirror. Instead, wanting a reflection of himself based on how other people saw him, he handed his camera over to other people. A gallery director, his mum, and a photolab attendant are among the real characters from his everyday life who got to tell Eaton where and how to pose as himself. Like the admiring audience 102 Lasch describes is essential for any modern-day narcissist, in Eaton’s Melfies “the world is a mirror”.339 Marina Galperina, co-curator of the National #Selfie Portrait Gallery, wrote of the selfie: “It’s less about narcissism—narcissism is so lonely!—and it’s more about being your own digital avatar”. But Eaton’s materialisation of a “collectively-formed idea of self”340 suggests that contemporary narcissism is not about solitary self- gazing, but is fundamentally social. Afterall, the networked self, constituted by constant connectivity, begs Lasch’s declaration that “The narcissistic self is constructed and maintained only in the reflections received from others”.341 As a cyclical gesture that aims to return his images back into the public realm, Eaton’s Melfies are digitally printed on low-cost t-shirts and made available to buy online. Where artist Marcel Duchamp famously challenged traditional ideas of art by placing a urinal in a gallery and calling it a ‘ready-made’, these ‘ready-to-wear’ Jackson Eatons shift questions of originality and authorship a step further—as neither originator nor author of his self-image, he is the product of the people around him. His ironic commodification of the self, and nod to current discourse on ‘self- branding’, might well invoke the assumption that Eaton is parodying the narcissistic tendency of self-love—but his critique is more sophisticated. The deadpan images are markedly awkward, oddly intimate, and genuinely funny, both an over-share of Eaton’s private world, and our shared over-preoccupation with, as he puts it, “how we see others seeing us”. 342 Through their candor and imperfections, Eaton presents his own self-remix as an awkwardly self-conscious ‘work-in-progress’, poignantly reminding us that the notion of narcissism as ‘self-love’ is a common simplification of the original myth. Narcissus killed himself when he realised he could not possess his own image, and, as Abercrombie and Longhurst point out, psychoanalytic literature also focuses on the ‘self-hate’ generated by “unmet—and impossible—desire”.343 In comparison with Krauss’s critique of video art, exemplified by Vito Acconci’s resolute gaze and pointing finger, pinning him to the centre of the screen, there is an 339 Lasch quoted in Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, p. 90. 340 Jackson Eaton, artist statement, 2014, courtesy of Stills Gallery, Sydney. 341 Lasch quoted in Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, p. 90. 342 Jackson Eaton, artist statement, 2014, courtesy of Stills Gallery, Sydney. 343 Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, p. 89. 103 Figure 21: Jackson Eaton. Installation view, Gallery Melfie, from Melfies, 2012-13. almost tangible vulnerability in Eaton’s centralisation of himself. His melfies evoke how, as Abercrombie and Longhurst put it, “Contemporary narcissists are condemned to a lifetime of unfulfilled yearning”.344 The title of the article “Sharing the (Self) Love: The Rise of the Selfie and Digital Narcissism” (2014), written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, appeals to the commonly held belief that narcissism is simply a form of self-love. Yet, within the article, Chamorro-Premuzic points to the fact that narcissism is equally indicative of self- hate. Arguing that social media and the Internet have exacerbated narcissistic 344 ibid., p. 89. 104 behaviours to the point of compulsion—“social media is to narcissists what crack is to crack addicts”—he observes that digital narcissism might ultimately be “little more than a self-presentational strategy to compensate for a low and fragile self- esteem”.345 The solution, Chamorro-Premuzic proposes, is that social media should be used as a “therapeutic tool, at the service of the public and society”,346 through algorithms of online behavioral analysis that provide customised feedback to consumers, assessing their mental wellbeing. Where he suggests this includes their “growing grandiosity, excessive self-promotion, [and] pathological self-love”,347 it’s hard to tell the extent to which he is being tongue-in-cheek. In either case, his therapeutic ‘solution’ of looking for mental failings and psychic flaws would have us going round in circles. According to Illouz (2007), “The narrative of self-help is thus not only closely intertwined with a narrative of psychic failure and misery, but it is actually put into motion by it.”348 Updating Lasch’s critique of the therapeutic movement to a context of networked media and global commercial enterprise, she observes the role of online culture in contributing to this double-natured narrative: The Internet is the latest development in this process, as it presupposes a psychological self which can apprehend itself through texts, classify and quantify itself, and present and perform itself publicly … In this process of inventing and deploying a wide battery and range of texts and classifications to manage and change the self, they have also contributed to creating a suffering self, that is, an identity organized and defined by its psychic lacks and deficiencies, which is incorporated back into the market though incessant injunctions to self-change and self-realisation.349 Illouz warns that this not-so-healthy desire for self-change becomes emotional capital when absorbed by a consumer culture benefitting from our continual self- 345 Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, “Sharing the (Self) Love: The Rise of the Selfie and Digital Narcissism,” The Guardian, March 14, 2014, accessed October 19, 2014, 105 Figure 22: Jackson Eaton. Massage Melfie, 2012-13, from Melfies, 2012-13. 106 dissatisfaction. The network has further progressed the “transformation of the public sphere into an arena for the exposition of private life, emotion, and intimacies”,350 which she notes was made popular and normalised by TV programs like the Oprah Winfrey Show, and its therapeutic style of interview. Now, as Andrejevic wrote of the cybernetic loop, online culture opens up our self-narrated autobiographies and psychological sharings to data mining—not for therapeutic but commercial ends. In an inversion of Krauss’s (1976) argument, Illouz warns that the cultural injunction to objectively alter the self produces a form of self-alienation, by moving us further away from ourselves. Referencing Georg Simmel’s theory of social alienation, she writes: … the gradual impoverishment of personal life is a consequence of the growing separation between objective and subjective culture, between our experience and the world of objects and ideas produced outside us … when we create a complex objective culture, we lose the unity needed for it to be meaningful.351 Now, the objectification of our intimate lives in network culture has resulted in disunity on a personal level, Illouz argues, and we experience life in extremes: We are increasingly split between a hyperationality which has commodified and rationalised the self, and a private world increasingly dominated by self- generated fantasies.352 This problematic duality is no better materialised than in the work of video artist Ryan Trecartin. Frenetic, semi-improvised scenarios, larger-than-life personalities, and multi-layered visuals collide within his videos, which appear crafted from a digital ‘raw’ material—what writer Patrick Langley calls “hyperactive intensity”.353 Embodying Illouz’s image of a ‘hyperational’ self, Trecartin’s performers are like malleable media objects, along with his superimposed graphics: “Flesh is post-production plastic”,354 Langley succinctly notes. With smartphones glued to their ears, and reciting brazen, 350 ibid., p. 108. 351 ibid., p. 111. 352 ibid., p. 113. 353 Patrick Langley, Ryan Trecartin: The Real Internet is Inside You, online exclusive, The White Review, April 2012, accessed June 27, 2014, 107 inane comments, his characters are walking talking clichés of Gen-Y narcissistic technophiles. Coming to life in these anxiously camera-conscious, self-promoting personas, is the narcissist’s desire for aesthetic objectification. As Langley writes, “The ‘real’ world of people in space in time is secondary to the virtual afterlife of these acts. Trecartin’s characters aspire to be images.”355 Trecartin caricatures not only contemporary narcissism, but also the worst of network culture. Brought to digitally enhanced life are the common critiques of pathological connectivity; we’re driven to distraction with information overload, are dumbed down by ‘shallow’ reading and ‘low-quality’ proam productions, and are spiritually vacant beneath the profiles and performances that constitute our multitude of selves. Not satisfied with simulation, the success of Trecartin’s work lays in part in its capacity to arouse in its audience feelings of anxiety, incomprehension and confusion. It is also because this parodic portrait of networked narcissism effectively extends the subversive ‘double-parody’ Butler observed in drag to the broader critique I earlier called into play—of our idealisation of perpetual change, our rejection of stolid absolutes. As Langley writes: Trecartin’s films reject the binarism of real and virtual, male and female, self and other, gay or straight, rationality and madness, surface and subtext, style and content, time and space. What matters here is not the search for structure in a disordered, disorientating world, but the free-form energy of self-invention.356 However, self-invention doesn’t redeem Trecartin’s grotesque world. Rather Langley suggests it represents a fundamental tension in our relationship with technology: “The love/hate nature of this relationship arises from the mix of liberty and alienation … [which,] with the invention of the internet, entered an era of unparalleled anxiety and opportunity.357 As we’ve become increasingly intertwined with technology, the love/hate relationship we’ve long-had with it converges with a love/hate relationship with ourselves. Through self-remixing and self-invention, we become not just subject and object of 355 ibid. 356 ibid. 357 ibid. 108 digital media, but our own harshest critics, and, as self-help ‘inspirational teacher’ Louise Hay champions, our own best friends. In this section, I’ve proposed that our narcissistic uses of media go well beyond the simplistic self-gazing that Krauss’s (1976) art criticism evoked, and are as likely driven by self-loathing and a pathological dissatisfaction with the present. A new aesthetics of narcissism for networked culture is one not limited to selfie-love, but put into motion by life’s lacks, and the desire to make our realities look a little closer to our dreams. However, as we become malleable media objects by choice, by desire, I suggest in the next section that Krauss’s framework for the aesthetic of narcissism isn’t dead in the water, but, like Trecartin’s work, takes on a new, free flowing form. The Message is You YouTube allows us to glimpse a new dynamic relationship between our expressive subjectivities and our mediatised objective culture: one that is complexly therapeutic and problematic. While our present-day engagement with video may be characterised by self-change, the question Krauss (1967) raised regarding the loss of critical self-reflexivity when subject and media object converge remains vital when brought to play within this shifted cultural context. In networked culture, when it is commonplace for medium and maker to be confused, how does this affect the distance needed for self-reflexive criticality; a distance vital not just to better reconfigure our identities, but to reflect on that very practice? In “America After Utopia” (1990), which I reference in regards to the concept of YouTopia in Chapter 1, the picture of anti-utopia that Baudrillard paints extends Krauss’s (1976) critique of video to the conditions of contemporary life. Beyond her examples of contained, closed-circuit video art that invoked an aesthetics of narcissism, Baudrillard observes a collapse of lived subjectivity and fantasy projection in American culture as a whole. Effectively extending Adorno and Horkeimer’s comment that “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies”358 to a point after the fact, he writes: There is no self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the civilizing level of unhappy consciousness, which comes with history and which places a distance between the symbolic and the real. It is this lack of distance and incapacity for 358 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 126. 109 ironic reflection that accounts for America’s naïve and primitive qualities. Without knowledge of irony, the imaginary and the real are fused and indistinguishable. Disneyland is authentic! Television and movies are real!359 Writing now After YouTopia, we find there exists a global space for the convergence of fantasy and media reality, the performative and the imaginary, the social practice of utopian desires. Just as Baudrillard observed that “Americans inhabit true fiction by giving it form in reality”, on YouTube we observe the reprogramming and remixing of the self, as we make screenplays of our lives. Written on the cusp of the digital ‘revolution’, Baudrillard’s account of America is prescient, but it provides only a partial portrait of globalised networked life. Rather than a cultural absence of self-reflexivity, I’ve argued in this chapter that we are now excessively self-reflexive; as a product of both DIY digital technologies and the cultural injunction to constantly analyse and alter ourselves. As Mark Andrejevic (2009) argues, in contrast to ‘old media’, the Internet allows “users to step outside the flow”:360 It is the perfect medium for an era of media reflexivity—one in which the populace is increasingly savvy about the constructed nature of representation.361 So, too, modern-day audiences are acutely aware of the construction of their own self-representations. In contrast to Baudrillard’s vision, it is precisely this self- reflexivity that permits critical distance from our own performances as ‘fantasy projections’, and allows us to knowingly invent new versions of our identity. However, Baudrillard was correct that self-reflexivity comes hand in hand with an unhappy consciousness. As I’ve argued in this chapter, our ‘prosumer’ performances navigate both collusion and resistance to cultural ideals and norms; and as Illouz further suggests, our current complicity with the injunction to better ourselves conversely perpetuates the rationalisation of our emotions by consumer culture, which thrives on us being experts on our own lacks, failings and flaws. 359 Baudrillard and Gardels, “America After Utopia,” pp. 96-97. 360 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 41. 361 ibid., p. 41. 110 This chapter has aimed to flesh out theoretical ideas relating to self-remixing, in order to suggest that the self-reflexivity and criticality afforded by ‘democratised’ media production and the digital ‘revolution’, are not inherently conducive to progressive politics and cultural resistance, nor, as cybernetics would have us believe, a more psychological healthy existence. Presenting a similar picture, Andrejevic observes that in an era of multiplying narratives, in which we construct our own realities and choose our own truths, “Critique is turned back upon itself.”362 As it plays out on the broader level of political campaigning, he explains that: … in the current conjuncture, there is no clear-cut political opposition between strategies of naturalization and techniques of reflexive deconstruction: both can serve regressive ends and be deployed as strategies for manipulation, obfuscation, and the reproduction of power relations.363 In the shift from closed-circuit video art to video-sharing self-remixes, I extend this observation to argue that self-reflexivity has also turned back on itself. It is worth remembering that in De Certeau’s (1984/2011) ‘art of use’, the ‘cracks’ he argues ‘use’ creates provide only a contingent space for criticality: … the consumer cannot be identified or qualified by the newspapers or commercial products he assimilates: between the person (who uses them) and these products (indexes of the “order” which is imposed on him), there is a gap of varying proportions opened by the use that he makes of them.364 The critical ‘art of use’, then, really is an art, or to use remix terminology, as David Gunkel states, “All mash-ups, therefore, are not created equal.”365 So, too, with identity mash-ups the nature of the gap between the symbolic world and our lived realities is ambiguous and changeable; in some cases we may hope to pry it open, but we’re often the ones trying to close it. In this chapter, I’ve argued that the freedom to express ourselves through our self- remixes on YouTube makes visible an often fascinating, complex and contradictory psychological dimension that goes deeper, and sometimes darker, than ideas of 362 ibid., p. 39. 363 ibid., p. 39. 364 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 32. 365 Gunkel, “Audible Transgressions: Art and Aesthetics After the Mashup,” p. 54. 111 postmodern ‘identity play’ and cut-and-paste persona creativity. We might imagine in this new, global scenario that the symbolic and the real are perpetually parting and re-fusing within our multitude of postproducing selves. While we may be hyper critical of our flaws, we might be far less critical of that criticality. Nor might we be self- reflexively aware that our desire to overcome those flaws takes shape by sampling pieces of commercial pop culture for use in our digital life scenarios, and by looping them back into the social media mix. In the upcoming section, I will discuss how my artwork Alone Together, offers one response to the question, how might we aesthetically critique networked narcissism’s obsession with self-reflexivity? It suggests that selecting and reconfiguring samples from the phenomenon of self-invention presents a form double-parody, and that the artistic use of YouTube’s ‘Yous’ might offer one possibility for cutting though this current critical stalemate of reflexivity. As digitised selves are not only remixed but remixable, my artworks invite the idea that the medium is no longer the message, as McLuhan famously proposed366—now, the self as medium is the message. 366 This term is coined and widely discussed by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Also, see Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967). 112 113 Figure 23: Installation view. Josephine Skinner, Alone Together, 2013. 114 ARTWORK Alone Together Alone together beyond the crowd Above the world We're not too proud to cling together We're strong as long as we're together Lyrics by Howard Dietz, music by Arthur Schwartz, ‘Alone Together’ (1932) The title for my artwork Alone Together (2013) is borrowed from media theorist Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together (2011), which borrows its title from a 1932 Broadway song ‘Alone Together’. The song now has numerous versions, most recently including one performed in Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall (2007)—a Rufus Wainwright cover of Judy Garland’s earlier cover (1961), which both now appear on YouTube. This spiraling, cultural recycling makes the title fitting for an artwork that converges spectacular entertainment and networked media across its hardware and within its already-recycled YouTube content. Utilising this new, aesthetic form, I join Sherry Turkle in reimagining how the term’s oxymoronic meaning applies to our networked era. Connectivity, we both suggest, paradoxically produces isolation while promising communality. “People are lonely. The network is seductive”,367 writes Turkle, summarising her core argument in Alone Together, which warns that we turn to technology as a solution for the lack of intimacy and meaning in our human relationships. Suggesting as I do that our digitised lives offer a new way to “escape”,368 her discussion supports my digital culture upgrade of Richard Dyer’s (1977/1992) framework for the emotional utopia of spectacular entertainment. “The emotional charge on cyberspace is high”, she observes, “People talk about digital life as the “place for hope”.369 While this thesis considers what we can learn from the remixed identity performances on YouTube, Turkle similarly reflects on Second Life: 367 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 3. 368 ibid., p. 160. 369 ibid., p. 153. 115 When we perform a life through our avatars, we express hopes, strengths, and vulnerabilities. They are a kind of natural Rorschach. We have an opportunity to see what we wish for and what might be missing.370 Accordingly, by foregrounding the self-help ethos that underscores YouTube's philosophy and proliferates in its content, my artwork Alone Together makes visible what we’re collectively missing in a scenario that heightens what we collectively wish for. Filling a large, darkened space, Alone Together presents an accumulation of unwanted CRT TVs, piled up on graffitied and broken street-found furniture like a heap of dumped domestic junk. On the TV screens are the blinking faces of audience 'close-ups', taken from televised self-help shows found on YouTube. Also appropriated from YouTube’s pool of profundities are audio affirmations of love and connection that sound intermittently from the sets. At times they build into a cult-like crescendo, or otherwise dissipate into lonely repetitive bleats, such as "I am connected" and "I am loved, I am valued". Now that digital technology has left analogue TVs obsolete, the work playfully suggests that it is the CRT TV, and its outdated mass audiences, that are desperately in need of self-help. But, by drawing from the wealth of cultural material that we continually recycle from the past and remake in the present in the pursuit of self-invention, it reveals that: so too are we. Making a tongue-in-cheek critique of our quest for self-actualisation and its connection to an increasingly narcissistic culture, Alone Together pays homage to the work of Nam June Paik. Considered the founder of video art, Paik was recently referred to as the "patron saint of the YouTube generation",371 yet as digital media and the pursuit of self-invention have, it seems, replaced religion, we might better deem him one of this generation’s countless self-help gurus. Two of Paik’s early works, Zen for TV (1963) and TV Buddha (1974), prove particular pertinent, as they converge CRT TVs with symbols of spiritual enlightenment from Eastern philosophy. 370 ibid., p. 212. 371 Alastair Sooke, “Nam June Paik, Tate Liverpool; FACT Review,” in The Telegraph, December 21, 2010, accessed November 13, 2014, 116 Figure 24: Installation view. Josephine Skinner, Alone Together, 2013. Zen for TV was a ‘happy accident’ when Paik found a broken TV set that was emitting only a horizontal line of light. Turning it on its side, he displayed it alongside other TVs he had deliberately tampered with in the disorderly art installation TV Room (1963).372 His interventions into the medium’s materiality, and distortions of the analogue signal, inverted the broadcast industry’s goal to generate a perfect image.373 Along with fellow pioneer of video art Wolf Vostell, Paik was using the domestic TV set as a symbol for the broadcast industry’s power. As John Hanhardt observes, “The achievements of Paik and Vostell were to strip television of its institutional meanings and expose it as a powerful co-optive force in capitalist society.”374 Now, TVs litter roadsides and collect in dumpsters, brought only to the peripheries of public consciousness as the analogue TV signal is being progressively terminated375 in favour of digital transmission. As the materiality of the medium is again breaking down certain artists are salvaging CRT TVs, rather than seeking to interrupt their 372 TV Room was exhibited in Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963. 373 Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video, trans. Marie-Genviève Iselin, Karin Koppensteiner and George Quasher, (New York: Barrytown Ltd, 1998), p. 36. 374 John Wyver, “TV Against TV: Video Art on Television,” in Film and Video Art, ed. Stuart Comer, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), p. 124. 375 In Australia the analogue signal was shut down state-by-state, beginning in 2012, and was fully completed when Perth’s signal was switched off in April 2013. 117 function. They are saved from complete obsolescence thanks to the sets’ video input capacity and their new semiotic value as symbols of the broadcast era’s long-gone heyday; qualities that invest CRT TVs with a renewed yet distinctly different cultural significance. In this poetic cycle of technological life and death, the box TV’s contemporary role in the gallery no longer critically warns of their insidious power and future social impact, but serves as a vehicle for nostalgia, helping us comprehend contemporary digital media through its relationship to the past. In this sense, Alone Together revisits the jumbled motif of Paik’s TV Room (1963) in a new manifestation, which puts into practice William Wees’s claim that collage collects fragments from a “cultural ‘garbage heap’”.376 In addition to the TVs, ‘couch potato’ audiences, we find, have also been added to the trash. Looking into the audiences’ unspeaking, vulnerable faces, it is as if we are looking back at our theoretical past: a time we were hypnotised by mesmerising messages and Technicolor glow. In engaging with the artwork as “the people formerly known as audience”, 377 the installation produces a scenario which unifies its audience; in relation to what they once were, but are no longer. This asymmetric ‘reflection’ of the gallery audience is like a time-delayed version of early video works, which used closed-circuit feedback to confront visitors with an image of themselves. Presenting an illusory collective audience rather than a ‘real’ one, the work materialises Raymond Williams’s point that, while we often refer to the ‘mass media’, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses”.378 Yet, like its historical predecessors, Alone Together serves to heighten the gallery audience’s experience of time’s passing, and create awareness for the dual roles we all play as actors and audience; in this case, within the narrative of self-realisation. Paik also took an alternative approach from his closed-circuit video peers with TV Buddha (1974). Substituting an antique Buddha for the live feed audience as its subject, he was making an ironic comment on the culture of narcissism. As Edith Decker Phillips explains of the Buddha: 376 William C Wees, “Found Footage and Epic Collage,” in Desmontaje: Film, Vídeo / Apropriación, Reciclaje, (Valencia: IVAM, Centre del Carme, 1993), p. 156. 377 Jay Rosen, The People Formerly Known as the Audience, Press Think Archive, June 27, 2006, accessed November 13, 2014, 118 The goal of his meditation was absolute emptiness, beyond time and space, but the picture which appeared on the monitor returns him to his physicality which he cannot escape. Buddha, the symbol of Oriental wisdom, was thus forced to become a modern Narcissus.379 Bringing this scenario to a contemporary context, Alone Together similarly considers whether self-reflexivity has come full circle to produce the same stultifying effects as self-reflection. It asks, have the narratives of self in digitally networked culture, which similarly aim to transgress physical, psychological and emotional limitations, turned back on themselves to trap us by the perpetual desire for transformation—the desires to be more loved, more connected, more present? Paik avoided narrativity in the videos he recycled, inviting Fredric Jameson’s comment that “only the most misguided museum visitor would look for the ‘art’ in the content of the video images themselves”.380 Instead, Alone Together heightens the complex dynamics between the CRT TV’s form, and the literal ‘message’, which emerges from the YouTube-found remediations of broadcast era entertainment. Reflecting the convergence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, here the CRT TV becomes a medium for its ‘democratised’ successor—and embodies YouTube’s heterochronic nature, in which old and now are positioned side by side. This interplay materialises a relationship Michael Newman describes: TV has provided a model both of a different temporality—the illusion of immediacy and real time—and the possibility of a relation to a wider audience—a possibility that has been realized by the internet, although at the cost of fragmentation.381 On the brink of this fragmentation, the old TV show audiences in Alone Together maintain this illusion of immediacy. Their fleeting camera close-ups have been elongated through editing into an indefinite ‘now’; their occasional twitching and shuffling only adding to the sense that their ‘real time’ corresponds with ours. The looping also serves as a “narrative engine”, a term Manovich (2001) uses to fittingly describe the loop as “a metaphor for human desire that can never achieve 379 Decker-Phillips, Paik Video, p. 75. 380 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 162. 381 Michael Newman, “Moving Image in the Gallery Since the 1990s,” in Film and Video Art, ed. Stuart Comer, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), p. 88. 119 Figure 25: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Alone Together (detail), 2013. resolution”.382 In this specific manifestation, form mirrors content, as the affirmations are also caught in a perpetual present tense. Underlying their “I Am … ” statements is the principle that you construct your own reality by becoming what you say as you’re saying it—an idea that converges spiritualism and self-help with ideas of identity performance and perpetual self-remixing. According to Mark Amerika, for instance, with ‘Source Material Everywhere’ “The idea is to simultaneously become what you are writing as you write it, as it feels w-r-i-t-e.”383 Presenting a parallel between the promise of temporal progression and the self-help narrative that promises self-progression, Alone Together anticipates a future happy moment at the same time as it forestalls it, echoing Newman’s claim that: The loop thus simultaneously exposes (through its negation of linearity) and traps (through its repetition) an unrealised utopian possibility—the ‘promise of happiness’ encapsulated in Proustian involuntary memory.384 382 Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 321. 383 Amerika and Gunkel, “Source Material Everywhere [[G.]Lit/Ch RemiX]: A Conversation with Mark Amerika,” p. 65. 384 Newman, “Moving Image in the Gallery Since the 1990s,” p. 90. Here Newman is referring to the circular structure of Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927). 120 The enactment of utopian promises and their inevitable failure is heightened by the cult-like ‘chanting’ that variously ebbs and dissipates, evoking the ‘dark side’ of positive thinking, which Geert Lovink calls a “Religion of the Positive”.385 Lovink underscores this notion with Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (2009), in which she argues that endless positivity requires “deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and ‘negative thoughts’”.386 Alone Together engages this excessive positivity as a parodic strategy to reveal the negative underside of the therapeutic narrative, and its creation of a psychologically suffering individual. As our fundamental desire for connection risks perversion in social media through a pathological drive for constant connectivity, the work further materialises Ganaele Langlois’s comment that “social media suffer from an excess of positive connectivity: the assumption is that a happy individual is one who is constantly connecting with others online”.387 In contrast to artworks, such as Ryan Trecartin’s or Australian Heath Franco’s, which imitate and intensify a psychological condition of digitised anxiety and overload, in Alone Together it is the passivity and placidness of the audiences that is disorienting; the meditative and hypnotic audio that is intense. Centeralising our culturally prescribed, self-administered cures, reveals them to be as symptomatic of the problem as the frenetic symptoms themselves. As people are now mediumised to the screen, voicing their inner hopes, vulnerabilities and failures, we find that they are simultaneously voicing an emotional and embroiled relationship with technology. It seems that, despite networked culture presenting a plethora of ways to feel more loved and less alone, our current connectivity hasn't yet fulfilled its promise for connection. As the statement “I am connected” endlessly echoes around the Alone Together installation—like someone trying a little too hard to convince—the need to affirm, conversely, reveals a reality of fragmentation, loneliness, and a human capacity for persistant positivity. 385 Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media, pp. 43-44. 386 Ehrenreich quoted in Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: a Critique of Social Media, p. 43. 387 Langlois, “Social Media, or Towards a Political Economy of Psychic Life,” p. 55. 121 Figures 26 & 27: Josephine Skinner. Installation views, Alone Together (details), 2013. 122 123 124 CHAPTER 3: IMAGINING COLLECTIVITY To produce an alternative space and time, that is, to reintroduce the multiple and the possible into the closed circuit of the social … the artist must go back as far as possible in the collective machinery.388 … the unconscious, according to Lacan, is neither individual nor collective; it exists in the middle, in the encounter, which is the beginning of all narrative.389 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002) Introducing Collectively Shared Lives, Imaginations and Fantasies Claiming to be “the largest worldwide video-sharing community”,390 in 2014 YouTube was localised in 61 countries and across 61 languages. Within its vast repository of user-created content, I’ve argued that we can observe the process of self-remixing: a way to actively escape everyday life by bridging the gap between self and spectacle. I’ve proposed that this phenomenon of networked culture is in fact informed by the same fundamental desires for intensity, drama and affectivity that ‘old media’ promised but failed to deliver, at least in our everyday lived realities. Looping back into the screen, we sample bits from the flow of media to remix within our private lives, before transforming them into objects of media that we can reflexively and inventively postproduce. The theatrical platform of YouTube, and its ever-present audience, provides this process a sense of spectacular and social validation—vital for any networked narcissist. In this chapter, I will look at YouTube’s social role from a different angle: as a digital archive of hopes, dreams and desires. Looking at the self-publicising of private worlds from the perspective of online forms of collectivity reveals the shared desire for a sense of community and meaningful connection. Playing out on the stage of social media, we find utopian entertainment’s escapism in new form, which, as Richard Dyer (1977/1992) argued, temporarily treats us to the feeling—rather than the lived reality—of community, collective activity and togetherness. 388 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 65. 389 ibid., p. 74. 390 YouTube quoted in Merrin, “Still Fighting 'the Beast': Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube,” p. 98. 125 Previously, I’ve established that the individual choices of media we sample and select in our life mixes do not inherently present prosumer liberation from dominant social scenarios and cultural fictions, but that we often freely embrace dominant culture as a resource for our everyday lives, fantasies and imaginations. Now, I will look to articulations of sameness and difference within YouTube’s social collections of video-selves, and our contemporary relationship between individuality and collectivity. As Glynos and Stavrakakis (2008) put it, we need to “think the relationship between privately held individual fantasies and collectively shared fantasies”; and ask “… what forms can such social fantasies take?”391 YouTube’s ‘Community Guidelines’ enthusiastically invoke a welcoming community that values the contribution of each individual user: Remember that this is your community! Each and every user of YouTube makes the site what it is, so don't be afraid to dig in and get involved!392 But this can also be read another way. Each user makes the site what it is because YouTube’s community is customisable, defined by our individual navigations and interactions. As Malcolm Parks notes in “Social Network Sites as Virtual Communities” (2010), the concept of ‘virtual community’ “depends on one’s perspective and definition”.393 In 1993, as the Internet was emerging, Howard Rheingold captured the spirit of digital utopianism by defining virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on ... public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace.”394 This vision imagined that the qualities of traditional communities and folk cultures could be found within a virtual environment, a legacy that continues today within YouTube’s rhetoric: Let folks know what you think. Feedback's part of the experience, and when done with respect, can be a great way to make friends, share stories, and 391 Glynos and Stavrakakis, “Lacan and Political Subjectivity: Fantasy and Enjoyment in Psychoanalysis and Political Theory,” p. 270. 392 YouTube Community Guidelines, YouTube, n.d., accessed November 4, 2014, 126 make your time on YouTube richer. So leave comments, rate videos, make your own responses to videos that affect you, enter contests of interest— there's a lot going on and a lot of ways to participate here.395 Subhasish Dasgupta’s (2006) definition of ‘virtual community’ in the Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies similarly describes “a collection of people sharing common interests, ideas, and feelings”.396 But when taken literally there is a telling ambiguity in this definition that deserves attention, afterall, it could as easily apply to the results of every single YouTube search. What I want to stress is that collections of people (let alone videos) don’t necessarily equate to communities; and sharing ‘tags’ is quite different to sharing meaningful dialogue. In the virtual world of data-selves, having something in common does not a community make. The potential for individuals to genuinely contribute to collectivity, and to experience a sense of community, is now at the heart of social media discourse. In 1997, Joseph Lockard wrote that ‘virtual community’ is “a confused oxymoron”;397 a confusion that is now mirrored by a general divide within critical media theory. Commentators tend to see virtual communities as offering either authentic alternatives or inauthentic simulations of their more traditional versions. Underlying this debate is the question of whether digital utopianism has achieved in networked culture what the broadcast media industries promised but failed to deliver: collectivity, collaboration and communality. The Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives (2013), for instance, presents as a given the failure of social media to provide a viable alternative to the monopolising power of the broadcast era media industries.398 Just as this thesis proposes that Bourriaud’s neutralising view of ‘use culture’ is evidently problematic,399 the book’s co-editor Geert Lovink warns that we shouldn’t dismiss social media sites as “neutral platforms”,400 and should instead be aware of their 395 YouTube Community Guidelines, accessed November 4, 2014. 396 Subhasish Dasgupta, Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies, (Hershey and London: Idea Group Publishing, 2006), preface. 397 Joseph Lockard, “Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism and the Myth of the Virtual Community,” in Internet Culture, ed. D Porter, (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 224. 398 For instance, the book summary states: “We know very well that monopolies control social media, but what are the alternatives?” 399 See the Introduction, p. 22. 400 Geert Lovink, “A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader,” in Unlike Us Reader, ed. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), p. 11. 127 ‘double-natured’ power dynamic. Claiming that monopolies control social media, Lovink invokes Guy Debord’s criticism of the “monopolization”401 of media in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), while he is quick to differentiate their arguments: The critique of the Situationists is running empty here. In this Society of the Query, Facebook is anything but spectacular. In the closed-off social media sphere the critical apparatus of representation theory only has limited range.402 Remembering, however, that the spectacle is relational as much as representational, we find there are distinct similarities in Lovink’s critique of social media; the inescapable allure of the spectacle’s fallacious paradise arises again in his vision of ‘luring’ “corporate ‘walled gardens’”;403 the same emotional promises of spectacular media arise in his articulation that social media’s ‘faith’ is to “recreate community feelings of a lost tribe”; 404 and, just as utopian entertainment simplifies real-life complex feelings,405 Lovink argues that Facebook’s popularity is due to “reducing complex social relationships into a flat world … in which there are only ‘friends’.”406 Lovink’s accented use of inverted commas on ‘friends’ also recalls Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1944/1979) critique of the culture industry, in which they state that a citydweller “can now imagine friendship only as a ‘social contact’: that is, as being in social contact with others with whom he has no inward contact”.407 In “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8” (2006), on the other hand, danah boyd argues in support of MySpace’s ‘friending’ process. She argues that it allows users to create “an imagined egocentric community”, 408 meaning they “choose people first and interests second”.409 Aligning with Dyer’s (1977/1992) formula for utopian escapism, boyd suggests that ‘friending’ on MySpace was “established out of a need to resolve social tensions that emerged due to technological limitations”,410 and, in contrast to 401 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 19. 402 Lovink, “A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader,” p.12. 403 ibid., p. 10. 404 ibid., p. 12. 405 Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” p. 23. 406 Lovink, “A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader,” p. 14. 407 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 155. 408 danah boyd, Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8, First Monday, December 4, 2006, accessed May 24, 2014, 128 Lovink, suggests that it succeeds in achieving the utopian solution of creating community: From the flow of text in chatrooms to the creation of Profiles, people are regularly projecting themselves into the Internet so that others may view their presence and interact directly with them. Social network sites take this to the next level because participants there write their community into being through the process of Friending.411 As these opposing perspectives demonstrate, writing is a recurring motif in discourse on collectivity in networked media. The web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned it from the outset as a “collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write”, 412 while Yochai Benkler later coined Web 2.0—“the writable Web”.413 Just as self-remix, in its most fundamental form, is predicated by an individual’s use of language and the spontaneous quotation that underlies every thought and conversation, so too, forms of shared language determine the nature of our online collectivity; whether the limited ‘vocabulary’ of social communication that Lovink critiques, or boyd’s view that the same writing mechanisms free users to construct their own communities. In the last chapter, I explored how mediating self-remixes through YouTube represents a new aesthetic of narcissism, and that, in the process, our subjective lives become social media objects. I pointed out that our desire to perpetually change and improve our performed identities by converging lived reality and utopian commercial media opens up questions regarding the freedom the ‘digital revolution’ offers us, as we use it to both express difference and to reproduce social norms. Moving from a consideration of the individual as an “aesthetic fact”, I will explore in this chapter how forms of collectivity reveal a shared language of pop culture. Extending beyond the pros and cons of social media’s writing mechanisms, such as ‘friending’, I argue that YouTube’s tags and metadata serve to form collections of content that reveal another form of limited vocabulary—the restricted range of samples with which we self-remix en masse. In the collectively shared fantasies and 411 ibid. 412 Berners-Lee quoted in Will Richardson, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, (California: Corwin Press, 2009), p. 1. 413 Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, p. 217. 129 desires that at least appear to unite these searchable, virtual communities, I aim to highlight the convergence of digital utopianism and the utopia of the spectacle—a complex meeting of individuality and collectivity. A Social Media Imagination Paving the way for my argument, Bernard Stiegler and Henry Jenkins discuss how networked forms of collectivity are mediated through a shared audiovisual language. YouTube, Stiegler (2009) argues, offers a new, digital audiovisual stage of ‘grammatisation’—originally the spatialisation of spoken word into alphabetised writing. Grammatisation is, he explains, a pharmakon—both poison and cure—as historically it has empowered individuals as citizens within written law and has also been misused. The Ancient Greek Sophist teachers were “accused of exploiting psychopower—the power over young souls, constituted by writing”, he explains.414 YouTube, and more broadly social networks, according to Stiegler (2009; 2013) spatialise and formalise social relations. Simultaneously poison and cure, like the written word, he argues that this form of grammatisation can potentially create “disindividuation”, or its opposite, “the intensification of individuation”.415 ‘Collective individuation’ through sites such as YouTube, writes Stiegler, is essentially ambiguous—the very term ‘social network’, he claims, is “a paradoxical appellation”.416 Like Lovink, he warns how the limitations of what he calls “relational technologies”, 417 risk foreclosing meaningful connection with others. Significantly stressing the importance of affect, individuation can only take place, he explains, in relation to those who: … are affected by love, desire, and absence—of which the desired object (conceptualized by Lacan as ‘le manque’, ‘the lack’) is always an experience. And from there, [people] individuate themselves in this affection… 418 Without this opportunity for affective differentiation, his image of social networks evokes the spectacle’s “real unreality”,419 they are: “ersatz, simulacra, make-believes 414 ibid., p. 46. 415 Bernard Stiegler, “The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies,” in Unlike Us Reader, eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), p. 26. 416 ibid., p. 17. 417 ibid., p. 27. 418 ibid., p. 18. 130 and make-dos for the absence of social reality. They are a ‘cure’ for the lack of social relations.”420 In this sense, the “digital script mechanisms”421 of social networks, as Stiegler terms them, beg comparison with what Debord calls the spectacle’s “common language”422 through which: Spectators are linked by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from each other. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.423 Presenting us with the ‘hopeless’ perspective, Stiegler pictures social networks like swarms of ants; banding together individuals without creating communities, in the same way that ants are only ‘sub-individuals’ to the ‘vital unit’, offering “no possibility of disjunction”.424 Our participation in social media’s restrictive scripts means for Stiegler: “If inclined to pessimism, one might fear that they inevitably will lead to a new form of computer-assisted, self-inflicted slavery—a digital anthill.”425 YouTube, like all social networks, has the potential to be poisonous. But Stiegler also argues that digital forms of collective individuation can potentially become collective intelligence. Especially productive for us is his argument that YouTube’s ‘curative’ nature lies in the production and dissemination of imagery: “At this moment, a collective intelligence of transindividuation through images is indispensible for the renaissance of political as well as economic life”,426 he writes. Supporting my argument for the affective significance of everyday media content, Stiegler argues that YouTube spatialises not only its users’ utterances, gestures and actions, but also “techno-logically reproduces perceptions and sensual fantasies”.427 Beyond narrowing digital mechanisms, such as the categorising use of ‘Tags’ on YouTube, this affective audiovisual language afforded by YouTube recalls Pierre Lévy’s own expansive vision for collective intelligence, which “includes not only facts 419 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 13. 420 Stiegler, “The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies,” p. 28. 421 ibid., p. 22. 422 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 22. 423 ibid., p. 22. 424 Stiegler, “The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies,” p. 19. 425 ibid., p. 25. 426 Stiegler, “The Carnival of the New Screen: From Hegemony to Isonomy,” p. 56. 427 ibid., p. 44. 131 but everything imaginable, imagined, possible, feasible”. 428 YouTube’s form of collective individuation, Stiegler writes, is: … a process of collective imagination, if one believes that the imagination is the movement through which mental images and object images forge transindividual relations.429 Audiovisually ‘writing the self’ into the collective imagination is a notion fundamental to this discussion. However, Stiegler’s argument is also limited because it fails to observe how the imagery and narratives of mass-produced popular culture play a key role in transforming individual imaginations into a collective one. De Certeau (1984/2011) had likewise written that the social imagination is “what was earlier called ‘popular culture’”,430 inferring its connection to traditional folklores and legends, which combine mythical elements and the everyday rituals of social life. Throughout this chapter, I will argue that YouTube’s social media imagination converges the mundane everyday with the mythologies of mass-produced popular culture. As Baudrillard once wrote, film stars and cinema idols are “… the only important constellation of collective seduction produced by modern times … our only myth in an age incapable of generating great myths.”431 Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture (2006) proves useful in this regard, as it marries Lévy’s notion of collective intelligence with fan uses of commercial pop culture. “Consumption has become a collective process” he writes, “and that’s what this book means by collective intelligence.”432 Again demonstrating his digital utopian- influenced outlook, Jenkins describes how Convergence Culture discusses “how collective meaning-making within popular culture is starting to change the ways religion, education, law politics, advertising, and even the military operate”.433 For instance, in his 2008 Updated Afterword, he argues that DIY political parodies allow fans to find a “shared language of borrowed images that mobilize what they know as consumers to reflect on the political process”.434 Instead, I want to highlight an 428 Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, pp. 250-251. 429 Stiegler, “The Carnival of the New Screen: From Hegemony to Isonomy,” p. 55. 430 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 41. 431 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1990), pp. 94-95. 432 Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 4. 433 ibid., p. 4. 434 ibid., p. 293. 132 unmistakable parity between the role of images in Jenkins’s notion of convergence culture, and their role in the spectacle. The spectacle is, according to Debord: As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated—and precisely for that reason—this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of separation … it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.435 It seems that both the utopia of the spectacle, and digital utopianism, converge individuals’ thoughts and imaginations in a perceived unity that is mediated through mass-produced popular culture. Despite Jenkins’s overwhelming tendency to advocate the politically progressive potential of present-day pop culture, he does concede (in the New Afterword, 2008) that: By contrast, too many of the parody videos currently circulating on YouTube do the opposite—promoting traditional authority, preserving gender and racial hierarchies, fragmenting communities, discouraging diversity, and refusing to imagine any kind of social order other than the one that has long dominated American government.436 Expanding from Jenkins’s afterthought, I aim to foreground this ambiguity within online fan cultures. Earlier, in Postproduction (2002), Bourriaud had observed the darker side of the collective imagination within the scenarios of dominant culture: “In our daily lives, we come across fictions, representations, and forms that sustain this collective imaginary whose contents are dictated by power.”437 Looking today to the scenarios of social media, the contents of the collective imaginary converge within our daily remixes and digitally networked identities, and it is the searchable, shared languages of commercial pop culture that challenge us to ask—who now is dictating the power? From my perspective, within the communal spectacle of YouTube, collective seduction and collective intelligence are two sides of the same coin. 435 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 12. 436 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: Updated and with a New Afterword, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2008), pp. 292- 293. 437 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, pp. 93- 94. 133 Figure 28: John Baldessari. Video still, I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art, 1971. We might keep in mind at this point John Baldessari’s artwork I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), which presciently evoked the double-edged potential for a ‘democratised’ video language. In Video Vortex: Responses to YouTube (2008), Martha Kinder claims the work offers both an obvious nod to YouTube through its early use of the Portapak, while also referencing Alexander Astruc’s alternative vision for film as caméra-stylo.438 Certainly, with the Portapak looking over Baldessari’s shoulder, and literally recording the ‘authorial hand’,439 it recalls how Astruc called for filmmakers to develop a free, aesthetic expression, “as supple and subtle as written language”.440 But Baldessari equally evokes the classroom discipline of rote, as he 438 Marsha Kinder, “The Conceptual Power of On-Line Video: 5 Easy Pieces,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 57. 439 This work has several iterations, including the original video performance, a framed copy of the paper on which Baldessari wrote, and reenactments that have been performed according to his instructions. 440 Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo,” New Wave Film, n.d., accessed January 13, 2015, 134 tediously writes, over and over: ‘I will not make any more boring art’. This tongue-in- cheek “punishment piece”441 teases the excitement that was welling up at the time about the new artistic and political possibilities of video technology. Baldessari’s gesture, I would argue, manifests the Sophist teachers’ oppressive use of writing as much, if not more than, the liberating potential of an alternative audiovisual language—it is, as Marcia Tucker writes, “a paradoxical statement”.442 Baldessari’s performance of caméra-stylo offers an early, video form of the ‘selfie’, which according to Jerry Saltz is conventionally earmarked by the presence of the photographer’s arm.443 Now we find this practice expanded and multiplied online, as Lovink (2008) notes: “Every situation and thought is YouTube-worthy. The cinema- verité generation’s wish for the camera to become ‘stilo’ has become true: the billions are scratching away with abandon.”444 If the ‘poison’ and ‘cure’ of YouTube is found not only in the structure and syntax of digital scripts, interface and network, but, as I propose, within the performative uses of our popular culture’s affective scripts, narratives and lyrics, this chapter aims to ask: has the ‘democratisation’ of creative production, and access to social media platforms, freed us to better express our differences, or resulted in an excess of tediously repetitive video-selfies? Formalising Fandom In 2005, the year of YouTube’s quiet birth, artists Candice Breitz and Phil Collins both exhibited entertaining and engaging video installations that used karaoke style set- ups. In Breitz’s four works—Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley), King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) (all 2005), and Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) (2006)—fans sing and dance to the same karaoke filmmaker. This laid the groundwork for auteur theory, which proved a revolutionary concept at the time. 441 WhitneyFocus, Curator Chrissie Iles on John Baldessari's ‘I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art’, You Tube, December 13, 2013, accessed November 23, 2014, 135 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please view the image online, Figures 29 & 30: (Above) Candice Breitz. Installation view, Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon), 2006; (below) Phil Collins. Production still, the world won’t listen, 2004-07. 136 track, appearing to perform together across synchronised screens and projections. Collins instead created his own karaoke machine for the trilogy The world won’t listen (2005). He collaborated with musicians to make a new instrumental version of the Smiths’ 1987 compilation album The World Won’t Listen, before filming Smiths fans as they performed favourite tracks. In gallery presentations, their solos and duets are projected in succession like the music video for a collectively reimagined album. These artworks are significant, as they offer poignant examples of formalising collectivity through fan performances. They capture karaoke’s fun and emotionally freeing qualities, but by presentating performances in accumulation they ultimately highlight the tensions between individuality and imitation that arise when people inhabit pop. By revealing this duality, their gallery presentations prefigure my broader, ambiguous approach to digital identities and remixed performativity, and more specifically, the pseudo-cover bands that comprise my series Hopelessly Devoted, which I’ll discuss at the end of this chapter. The karaoke scenario, I want to argue, is a symbolic manifestation of self-remixing. Translated from Japanese 445 to mean “orchestra minus one”,446 karaoke grandly invokes a spectacle-waiting-to-happen. But far from a 16-piece band, it is often-tinny electronic beats and animated lyrics that create the skeletal structure waiting to be brought to life by a singer. Karaoke uniquely converges cultural and self-production— socialising our private desires by transforming the process of self-remix into a kind of public ritual. Like my proposition that YouTube-shared self-remixes present a new form of active and social utopian escape, in his ethnographic study In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America (1996), Casey Man Kong Lum observes that the liberating effect of karaoke intertwines the individual’s experience of escapism within the collective’s. Karaoke’s “personal and social webs of significance”,447 as he puts it, offer examples of the traditional ‘real-life’ communities that virtual versions aim to emulate. Participants construct fictional scenarios, he 445 See Casey Man Kong Lum, In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America, (New Jersey: LEA Publishers, 1996). According to Man Kong Lum, karaoke as we know it originated in Japan, extending from a centuries-long tradition of folk songs, and singing in turns at cultural occasions. In the early 1970s, the first karaoke machines appeared in bars, playing Japanese love songs (enka) and Western-style pop music, before being taken-up worldwide as a popular pursuit. 446 Man Kong Lum, In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America, p. 1. 447 ibid., p. 17. 137 writes, “as a temporary social and symbolic heaven where they can escape from a sense of entrapment, the everyday repetition and hundrum routine and the reality of being in isolation”.448 In karaoke communities and YouTube alike, the dual roles of performer and audience temporarily converge the emotional intensity of personal transformation, and the feeling of being part of a community. This offers a blurring of reality and fantasy. For instance, Man Kong Lum describes witnessing two strangers perform a duet titled ‘Lover’, as “a melodramatic digression from everyday reality”, observing, “the spontaneous and imaginative use of mass-produced popular culture products to construct and maintain a fantasy relationship”.449 As the ‘couple’ imitated the karaoke video’s on-screen lovers, Man Kong Lum notes, they “used popular culture products—that is, karaoke, music and videos—to write their script on the spot”.450 This creative transformation of a socially shared script into, as Man Kong Lum describes it, their script, enacts on a personal level how traditional notions of authorship and originality are upended by forms of remix. Karaoke, this suggests, makes a spectacle of our often-implicit daily self-remixing. However, while Breitz and Collins capture this personally liberating and socially connecting experience of inhabiting the scripts of mass-produced culture, their constructed formalisations of karaoke communities also expose a broader truth. Beyond the fun and fantasy of karaoke, as Breitz explains: We are to some extent condemned to living scripted lives, scripted in the sense that we must work with the language that pre-exists us and try to make it specific to our own experience.451 While self-remixing with language is, as I’ve established, a status quo, the artists use the reductive language of commercial pop music to demonstrate a troubling ambiguity. While pop music affords a spectacular vehicle for transformation, what is aslo made spectacular in accumulation, is that we’re often doing the same thing. Breitz’s aggrandising titles poigniantly evoke this tension. On the one hand, they suggest the fans are elevated from the banal to become their idols, pointing to the 448 ibid., p. 97. 449 ibid., pp. 94-95. 450 ibid., p. 96. 451 Breitz quoted in Gregory Burke, ed., in “Candice Breitz: Same Same,” in Candice Breitz: Same Same, (Toronto: The Power Plant, 2009), p. 7. 138 emancipating potential of imitation and inhabitation. On the other hand, however, by qualifying the works as portraits of the stars—not portraits of the performers—Breitz equally suggests the fans are subsumed by their idols. In either case, this is suggestive of a strangely symbiotic relationship; just as a star isn’t made without fans, fans aren’t fans without somebody to love. In “Somebodies to Love” (2006/2009), Jon Davies expands on this ambiguity within Breitz’s work. Using the harsh terminology of ‘somebodies’ and ‘nobodies’ to conjure a gaping gap between stars and spectators, he also notes how Breitz confounds this distance by exploring, as she puts it, how “pop gets woven in a complex way into biography”.452 Davies writes: Projects like these take a decidedly ambiguous stance on pop cultural products as both sweet and toxic, an ideological position nicely summed up by Breitz’s suggestion that the avant-garde’s dream of uniting the world with one aesthetic language has actually been achieved by a globalised American monoculture.453 This evocation of a unified ‘aesthetic language’ is key to the power of these artistic formalisations of collectivity. As numerous fans escape their diverse lives by inhabiting the same pop track, Breitz’s works reveal through audiovisual similarities and differences the ‘sweet’ uses of mass-produced culture as creative expression, and the ‘toxic’ connotations of its limited ‘aesthetic’ vocabulary. From the shy, awkward daydreamer to the Michael Jackson look-a-like, the performers in her works offer an array of approaches to escaping their worlds and, as Jackie Stacey (1991)454 puts it, closing “the gap between star and audience”.455 Echoing a key conceptual thread that runs throughout this thesis, Stacey describes a spectrum of ‘extra-cinematic’ behaviours, including pretending, resembling, imitating and copying, which conflate individual experiences of pleasure and empowerment with consumer culture. These various acts of consumption, she writes, attempt a 452 Breitz quoted in Jon Davies, “Somebodies to Love,” in Candice Breitz: Same Same, ed. Gregory Burke, (The Power Plant, 2009), p. 92. 453 ibid., p. 91. 454 Jackie Stacey analysed female responses to Hollywood cinema during the 1940s and 1950s. 455 Jackie Stacey, “Feminine Fascinations: Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Relations,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill, (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150. 139 Figure 31: Candice Breitz. Video still, Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) (detail), 2005. “merging with the ideal on the screen”.456 Like the Madonna ‘wanna-bes’ in Queen (A Portrait of Madonna), for instance, the real and ideal fuses at “an intersection of self and other, subject and object”,457 as fans purchase cosmetic products and clothing to take on star qualities they feel they lack and desire. The accumulative power of Breitz’s work means the act of consumption is rendered symbolic and extreme. It’s not simply products the fans are consuming, but, according to Davies, the fans are “enthusiastic nobodies who absorb and consume the ‘somebodies’”.458 However, despite this image of collective empowerment, these ‘virtual’ fan communities also present an image of ‘intersection’ beyond fan and star, to fan and fan, as the prolific performances all eventually overlap and merge through the synchronised rendition of the same song. What makes this unified aesthetic language so powerful, I want to propose, is that it is a distinctly emotional one. In pop music, the shared dance moves, song lyrics and 456 ibid., p. 152. 457 ibid., p. 155. 458 Davies, “Somebodies to Love,” p. 92. 140 clichéd romantic narratives make up for their apparent limitations in an ample offering of affectivity—specifically feelings of intensity and communality. Simon Frith (1996), for instance, argues that music is “key to identity because it offers, intensely, a sense of self and others, of the subjective in the collective”.459 For Frith, the fusion of imaginative fantasy and bodily practice that fan performances reveal marks an “integration of aesthetics and ethics”.460 As many of the performers in both Collins’s and Breitz’s works are not singing in their ‘mother tongue’, they collectively embody his claim that: … what makes music special—what makes it special for identity—is that it defines a space without boundaries (a game without frontiers). Music is thus the cultural form best able to cross borders—sounds carry across fences and walls and oceans, across classes, races and nations.461 However, the ‘ethics’ of this are somewhat murkier than Frith allows if we consider the emotive quality of mass-produced entertainment from Richard Dyer’s (1977/1992) perspective. Dyer argues that utopian entertainment utilises music to elicit and mould an “intensity” 462 of feeling. Referencing Peirce’s terminology of semiotics, Dyer argues that a resemblance between signifier and signified can take place at the level of emotions, not just representations, which explains our capacity to be greatly moved by music even though it doesn’t directly reproduce reality.463 Susanne K. Langer, who Dyer credits on this subject, explains: “The tonal structures we call ‘music’ bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling … Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life.”464 In post-broadcast times, this point of view explains pop music’s capacity to generate utopian feelings of intensity and collectivity on a global scale. Repetitions, remakes and remixes of its limited ‘aesthetic’ language make visible what Dyer describes later in Pastiche (2007) as: … the fact of the human condition: that we think and feel for ourselves and yet only by means of the frameworks of thought and feeling available to us, 459 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 170. 460 ibid., p. 124. 461 ibid., p. 110. 462 Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” p. 19. 463 ibid., p. 19. 464 Langer quoted in ibid., p. 19. 141 Figure 32: Phil Collins. Production still, the world won’t listen, 2004-07. frameworks that limit what can be thought and felt but are also the only things that make it possible to think and feel. Beyond the specific lyrics and scripts of pop culture, it seems what connects us most profoundly is our desire for utopian feeling—it is the glue that joins the sweet and toxic sides of fandom. Made on the cusp of Web 2.0, Breitz and Collins’s formalisations of fan collectivity help us understand what has and hasn’t changed since. The universal struggle between imitation and individuation that they reveal within mass-pop performances remains prescient for networked culture. Making our collective inhabitation of pop music spectacular, they show, makes visible the inherent bind of the cultural construction of emotion and the shared language of affect. En masse, it becomes clear that we seek differentiation within the social collective. At the same time, we’re drawn to imitate and copy, which affords us a sense of unity, and even hope. As Davies writes, the fans’ mass worship: 142 … may seem the very embodiment of global capitalist ideology and the sublimation of lived personal experience into pre-packaged narratives and identities, yet … their imitation is a vital survival strategy and vehicle for imaginative world-making that permits “nobodies” to navigate a path through a harsh public sphere.465 Taking cue from this observation, however, we can also reflect on what has changed. Thanks to the rise of social media, the public sphere is no longer a harsh place for enthusiastic nobodies to navigate. In this sense, the production of Breitz and Collins’s artworks—rather than the performances—points to a significant shift in the media power of fandom. It is striking, for instance, the lengths both artists went to find their ‘webs’ of global fans in contrast to the ease of a World Wide Web search. Breitz travelled to Jamaica, Germany, Italy, and the UK, while Collins travelled to Colombia, Turkey and Indonesia, where both recruited fans using forms of ‘old’ media—printed ads and flyers, and appearances on radio and TV. Collins’s choice to remake the Smiths’s The World Won’t Listen (1987) is particularly fitting in this regard, as the title is said to reflect Morrissey’s frustration that mainstream radio and record buyers weren’t paying the band attention.466 In 2005, Smiths’ fans would have equally gone unnoticed were it not for Collins’s artistic intervention. Breitz and Collins’s artworks attest, therefore, to the recent marginalisation of fandom, and the artists’ aim to find ‘die-hard fans’ in order to reveal “an almost cult- like world-wide phenomenon” 467 —notions of fandom, as I’ll discuss in the next section, that are now a thing of the past. The niches of pop sampling that Breitz and Collins’s laboriously materialised are, I’ll argue, now the stuff of self-indexation; their worldwide ‘virtual’ fan communities can take shape digitally, as searchable formalisations of fan performances. In this new mediascape of fandom, I’ll argue that articulations of sameness and difference become evermore confused. But, on the upside, as YouTube provides a DIY platform that promises the world will listen, it seems that becoming a ‘somebody’ is as simple as uploading a song. 465 Davies, “Somebodies to Love,” p. 93. 466 The World Won't Listen, Wikipedia, May 3, 2014, accessed November 4, 2014, 143 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 33: Screen grab from gotyemusic, Gotye - Somebodies, YouTube, August 12, 2012. Feeling Social: A Digital Form of Fandom On August 12, 2012, Belgian-Australian musician and songwriter Gotye uploaded the YouTube video Gotye – Somebodies: A YouTube Orchestra.468 It remixes together numerous YouTube user-created covers of his hit song ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ (2011) into a collectively performed music video of the track. Not only does Gotye’s title suggest that nowadays ‘being somebody’ is more important than ‘having somebody’—the subject of the song—but it highlights the mainstream absorption of significant conceptual shifts relating to the notions of fandom and originality. This is no better evidenced than in the current culture of music covers, spearheaded by reality television talent competitions that gained prominence in the early 2000s and remain widely popular, such as the Idols TV series (originating in Britain, 2001) and later The Voice (originating in the USA, 468 gotyemusic, Gotye - Somebodies, YouTube, August 12, 2012, accessed November 4, 2014, 144 2011). These shows award expressions of individualism by making pre-existing pop songs new; feeding a celebration of the remake, not only as a valid form of creativity, but as a cool one. This cultural embrace of covers comes hand in hand with a major shift in the perception of fan culture. When it comes to pop music, as Gotye’s music video tells us, being a fan no longer equates to being an “obsessed loner”.469 By sharing your cover online you become the new version of a ‘somebody’, you become social. In current media discourse, Gotye’s ‘somebodies’ are more likely to be referred to as prosumers and proams than fans—terminology that converges the very binaries within which fan studies in the 1990s had initially articulated itself. This convergence not only includes the roles of producer and consumer, professional and amateur, but a dissolving of the values that had been thought to divide so-called fanatics and non- fans. As Joli Jenson outlines in “Fandom as Pathology” (1992), these include: ... the rational over the emotional, the educated over the uneducated, the subdued over the passionate, the elite over the popular, the mainstream over the margin, the status quo over the alternative.470 Early fan studies were broadly split between theorists who focused on the pleasure and affective attachments fuelling fan identifications, such as Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby’s Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life (1995), and those who explored fandom as a form of resistance or ‘struggle’, such as Camille Bacon Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992) and Henry Jenkins’s canonical Textual Poachers (1992), which looked to the production of new texts in science fiction fandom. 471 Now, in convergence culture, Jenkins writes that “we are all fans”,472 and describes prosumers as “a less geeky version of the fan-fans who don’t wear rubber Spock ears, fans who don’t live in their parents’ basement, fans who have got a life”.473 However, the full effect of fandom having a new lease on life became evident six months after Gotye’s YouTube release, when American musician and songwriter 469 Joli Jenson, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A Lewis, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 13. 470 ibid., pp. 24-25. 471 See Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, pp. 121-157. 472 Jenkins, “The Future of Fandom,” p. 364. 473 ibid., p. 359. 145 Beck released his album Song Reader on December 11, 2012. The album includes no recordings by Beck, but consists solely of sheet music, with the persuasive invocation that “bringing them to life depends on you”.474 The entire premise of the Song Reader project is that fans perform the tracks themselves and upload their versions to the official website, www.songreader.net, 475 via YouTube and SoundCloud. A far cry from poaching cultural texts, these fans are openly invited to mix, make and interpret (rather than remix, remake and reinterpret) Beck’s tracks. Quite literally putting into play Jenkins’s observation that fans are “moving onto the center stage”,476 they are seemingly replacing the star performer altogether. The Song Reader is an example of the music industry’s absorption rather than resistance to the pervasive culture of music covers, exemplifying Lev Manovich’s claim that today De Certeau’s strategies look like tactics and tactics look like strategies. 477 This collaboration between fans and the commercial mainstream equally confuses Bourriaud’s invocation of De Certeau in Postproduction (2002), when he describes consumption as a form of ‘micro-pirating’; “To use an object is necessarily to interpret it. To use a product is to betray its concept”.478 After all, what does it mean when the product concept, like Beck’s sheet music, or even a simple karaoke video, is reinterpretation and reuse? Certainly nothing is betrayed. Taking a critical perspective it could seem that, however diverse individual remakes and renditions prove to be, it is the shared effort for differentiation through imitation that ultimately makes them all the same. We can observe this as a further step in Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1944 critique of the culture industry. As if preempting the current conflation of imitation and individuation through fan activities, they write “the popularity of the hero models comes partly from a secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve individuation has at last been replaced by the effort to imitate.”479 Manovich marries this thought to YouTube, noting that “if the twentieth century subjects were simply consuming the products of culture industry, 21st century prosumers and ‘pro- ams’ are passionately imitating it”.480 Expanding on this pessimistic viewpoint, the apparent shift to a virtual culture 474 Song Reader, McSweeney, n.d., accessed February 15, 2013, 146 industry serves to make more visible what Adorno and Horkheimer had the foresight to see. YouTube, for instance, reveals with a single search term that “Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy.”481 Further evoking Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum, songreader.net no better demonstrates how people, like objects, are copies with no original. This loss of an ‘original’ performance, which so clearly comes to the fore in these collections of digitised fans, is key to comprehending the complex relationship between self-remixing and consumption. On the one hand, it is truly liberating. The vast majority of fans, it seems, don’t want to be somebody else—to entirely ‘consume’ their heroes or live as ‘tributes’ to their role models. Instead they pick and choose pieces of pop to creatively customise themselves, producing a new ‘you’ that is a different version from anybody else’s. But, on the other hand, when this individual process is viewed collectively, we see that people are doing exactly what the commercial industries want, whether it’s mix-and-matching new cosmetics, or uploading their pop performance to YouTube—the production of difference within the pervasive parameters of consumption has lost its revolutionary edge. As once-marginalised fans and the commercial culture industries increasingly work together toward mutual ‘prosumer’ goals, the field of fan studies has had to reposition itself too. As Henry Jenkins’s articles “The Future of Fandom” (2007) and “Fandom 2.0” (2012) clearly indicate, fan theorists have even felt the need to justify the field’s validity. He writes: None of [the] commentators on the new economy are using the terms ‘fan’, ‘fandom’ or ‘fan culture’, yet their models rest on the same social behaviours and emotional commitments that fan scholars have been researching over the past several decades.482 If fandom is now so commonplace in the prosumer economy that it potentially loses meaning as a differentiated category, as Jenkins suggests, I propose we can also see this from the other way around—the pathological perspective. The historical justification of fans as different, and ‘Other’, as Jenson here articulates it, might equally apply to us all: 481 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 145. 482 Jenkins, “The Future of Fandom,” p. 359. 147 The literature on fandom, celebrity and media influence tells us that: Fans suffer from psychological inadequacy, and are particularly vulnerable to media influence and crowd contagion. They seek contact with famous people in order to compensate for their own inadequate lives. Because modern life is alienated and atomized, fans develop loyalties to celebrities and sports teams to bask in reflected glory, and attend rock concerts to feel an illusory sense of community.483 While we may not consider ourselves the way this early fan literature had perceived, perhaps we are like “frenzied” fans in our incessant friending, liking and subscribing, and “deranged” from the mass contagion of viral trending—all of which aim at overcoming the alienation and atomisation common to the broadcast era. From my perspective, we’re all still seeking through social media the feeling of community— albeit often a virtual feeling. In the commercialised fan collectivity noted here, I’ve argued that individuals appear evermore intensely individuated by their affective sharings and media productions, and, at the same time, all the more lost within the mass of copying, imitating and mashing-up of pop and personality. In the next section, I will consider how certain contrasting artistic approaches to mashing-up these digitised fan performances serve to present one side, or the other, of this inherent ambiguity. Jamming Collectivity In Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life (2012), Meikle and Young write, “mash-ups are now easier to make, and to make visible.”484 Convergent technologies have also, I’ve argued, made our collective identity mash-ups more visible. But, looking to artistic rather than commercialised appropriations of these new, personified cultural ‘products’, I want to consider whether their sweet and toxic nature is so easily revealed. Or, to put it another way, I want to consider the artistic mashing-up of digitised fan performances in light of Lawrence Lessig’s following question: … what happens when writing with film (or music, or images, or every other form of ‘professional speech’ for the twentieth century) becomes as 483 Jenson, “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization,” pp. 18-19. 484 Meikle and Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, p. 83. 148 democratic as writing with text? As Negativland’s Don Joyce described to me, what happens when technology ‘democratiz[es] the technique and the attitude and the method [of creating] in a way that we haven’t known before … [In] terms of collage, [what happens when] anybody can now be an artist?’485 For instance, how is YouTube user impeto’s “act of iterative vernacular creativity”486 Ultimate Canon Rock487 (2007) any different from artist Oliver Laric’s video 50 50 (2007)? And is artist Cory Archangel’s Whitney Museum of Art commissioned Paganini Caprice No.5 (2011) any artier than pop singer Gotye’s music video mash- up that was made the following year? In fact, I would argue that they are all distinctly similar. Not simply because each one mashes together numerous YouTube videos into a ‘master’ video clip using Scratch- style speed-montage, but because they do so in a complementary way. According to Meikle and Young, there is a clear opposition between ‘complementary’ and ‘counterpointing’ forms of the aesthetic strategy of mashing-up media texts. In this section, I consider the critical significance of both of these approaches in relation to recent examples of artistic mash-ups of YouTube-found fan covers. Meikle and Young establish the first category of ‘complementary’ mash-ups, in relation to Israeli musician Kutiman, who Gotye credits as his inspiration for his YouTube orchestra. Kutiman makes genuinely pleasurable and harmonious YouTube music mash-ups by amalgamating a multiplicity of YouTube videos. His newly created tracks perfectly illustrate how digitised fan performances can, as Meikle and Young write, be “brought together to complement each other by bringing together discrete texts which share complementary elements or themes”.488 In 2009, his online funk album ThruYOU (2009) was named by TIME as one of “The 50 Best Inventions of 2009”. Poignantly, TIME’s accolade celebrated the album’s success at 485 Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, p. 54. 486 Jean Burgess, “'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us'?,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, eds. Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), p. 107. 487 impeto, Ultimate Canon Rock, You Tube, June 2, 2007, accessed November 2, 2014, 149 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figures 34 & 35: Screen grabs (above) impeto, Ultimate Canon Rock, YouTube, June 2, 2007; (below) Cory Arcangel YouTube Channel, Cory Arcangel – Paganini’s 5th Caprice, YouTube, June 15, 2011. 150 producing an improbably unified, and therefore, complementary musical sound: [Kutiman] took footage posted on YouTube by amateur musicians and mixed it together (drums, piano, synth, theremin, vocals, whatever he could find) into video jams of amazing funkiness, in the process creating an all-new art form that combines DJing, video montage and found art. Some of the players are just goofing around. Some aren't even very good. What makes it work is the performers' unjaded enthusiasm, the hypnotic effect of the looped samples and the sheer serendipitous grooviness that brings it all together as if it were meant to be.489 As Kutiman’s work demonstrates, a complementary approach to mashing-up invariably aims to unify vast numbers of musical samples into a greater whole, which we can note aligns with the utopian notion of collective intelligence. Jean Burgess, for instance, writes how YouTube user impeto’s mash-up “captures the ways in which small contributions from a large number of participants collectively add up to much more than the sum of their parts”, 490 echoing Henry Jenkins’s description of ‘collective intelligence’: “None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.”491 Laric’s artwork 50 50, is described by Vera Tollman along similarly skill-oriented terms. She notes the “immense quantity”492 of YouTube users, rapping to a hit by American musician 50 Cent, which collectively combine within Laric’s work to give rise to “a kind of master video clip”.493 While Tollman suggests this “puts forward an analysis of what typical YouTube material offers”,494 the analysis appears to take place through sheer volume—it is more quantitative than critical. 489 Jeffrey Kluger, The 50 Best Inventions of 2009: YouTube Funk, online special, TIME, November 12, 2009, accessed November 2, 2014, 151 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 36: Screen grab from kutiman, Kutiman-Thru-you - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords, YouTube, March 7, 2009. David Gunkle underscores this perspective in “Audible Transgression: Art and Aesthetics after the Mashup” (2012), as he argues that the quality of a mash-up is all too often associated with the perceived skill of working with large numbers of video clips. He illustrates his case by invoking why ‘star remixer’ Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk) is commonly admired: For many fans, journalists, and music critics, it is his virtuosity and skill in assembling what are arguably impressive remix compositions. He is, for example, often credited for the sheer number of samples he is able to assemble and bring together in a single work.495 For Gunkel, focusing on the number of samples to distinguish ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mash- ups is missing the point. Instead—as I’ve noted already in regards to self-remixes— 495 Gunkel, “Audible Transgressions: Art and Aesthetics After the Mashup,” p. 50. 152 he posits that a mash-up is good only to the extent that it deconstructs or intervenes with the specific system within which it operates. Gunkel favors an approach of critical reflexivity, which aligns with Meikle and Young’s notion of ‘counterpointing’ mash-ups. In contrast to Kutiman’s complementary ‘video jams’, they describe the subversive use of existing ‘texts’ as “self-reflexive media activism”,496 also known as culture jamming. Negativland coined this term in 1984, they note, to describe what happens “when a population bombarded with electronic media meets the hardware that encourages them to capture it”.497 Accordingly, a subversive mash-up, Meikle and Young explain, produces “a political or cultural statement”498 through the way media texts are brought together to “counterpoint each other, juxtaposing often radically different texts to exploit the possibilities of their incongruous realignment”.499 Natalie Bookchin’s video installation Mass Ornament (2009) provides a recent example of culture jamming—in which incongruent juxtaposition complexly plays out between YouTube home dances, the overlaid sampled soundtrack, and the aesthetic form of her edited composition. At first encounter, however, Mass Ornament appears to demonstrate a complementary approach. In a stunning accomplishment of artful synchronisation, innumerable YouTube user’s dances are combined to create a singular, collectively performed routine. The result is as captivating as the elaborately staged, kaleidoscopic dances performed in the Broadway-inspired 1930s films that Bookchin is referencing. Materialising collective intelligence in dancing form, the work presents a unified aesthetic language; one constructed with a shared vocabulary of repeated gestures, poses and moves, and a grammar of embodied rhythmic expression. However, what is so deceptive and at the same time so poignant about Bookchin’s work is how she engages the beguiling nature of ‘show biz’ to belie an insidious subtext. Turning Jenkins’s image of fans more actively pursuing their political and social goals on its head, she engenders, quite literally, ‘social movement’ as a form of social submission. 496 Meikle and Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, p. 84. 497 Negativland quoted in ibid, p. 85. 498 ibid., p. 84. 499 ibid., p. 84. 153 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Figures 37 & 38: (Above) photographic illustration in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, 1995; (below) Natalie Bookchin. Video still, Mass Ornament, 2009. 154 Reimagining Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament (1930) for the digital era, Bookchin offers a critical perspective on the way collective intelligence has been realised in social media, and the utopian belief that everyone can now freely contribute to the bigger social picture. Kracauer’s text scathingly reflects on the highly-choreographed 1930s dance form, arguing that these ‘mass ornaments’ were symbolic of the social problems he saw arising as a result of early capitalism: The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of the entire contemporary situation. Since the principle of the capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as means or as resistance. Community and personality perish.500 By utilising the mass ornament, both as a symbolic motif and tool for producing affectivity, Bookchin too presents a scathing perspective on the YouTube genre of home dance, and the wider social implications of participatory culture—in which she warns, community and personality might equally perish. Her remixed soundtrack, for instance, is evocative, affective and upbeat, belying the sinister implications of its two film sources. She samples music from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933 (1935), a mass ornament-style musical film, which takes prostitution and the desire for capital as its key themes. The second source is the soundtrack to Leni Riefenstahl's infamous Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), which depicted the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.501 This film was considered revolutionary due to the emotively powerful way it combined music, Hitler’s speeches, imagery of troops and the fervor of the mass audience. Presenting a show-girl style mash-up to the soundtrack of Triumph of the Will, makes reference to one of the earliest political mash-up films—Charles A. Ridley’s Swinging the Lambeth Walk Nazi Style (1942).502 Ridley made a mockery of Riefenstahl’s film, 500 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y Levin, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 78. 501 An excerpt is available to view at Nuclear Vault, Triumph des Willens (1935) – Triumph of the Will, YouTube, September 22, 2011, accessed November 2, 2014, 155 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 39: Screen grab from politicalremix, Lambeth Walk: Nazi Style – by Charles a. Ridley, YouTube, March 16, 2011. editing Hitler and the Nazi soldiers to kick and dance like burlesque showgirls, and revealing an unlikely parallel between the way spectacular show biz and military regimentalism both seek to produce an image of unification. Ridley’s film prefigures the innumerable political parodies found on YouTube, not least including the mash- ups and remixes of Bruno Ganz’s performance as Hitler in Downfall (2004). 503 However, Bookchin’s work doesn’t add again to this succession, but instead is a double parody. The YouTube home dance genre appears to be the subject of her critique, and with it hopeful perspectives for the democratising potential of everyday media production. 503 For a more detailed discussion of Downfall parodies, see Meikle and Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life. 156 Drawing a parallel between the affective appeal of utopian entertainment, and the highly persuasive methods of political and cultural indoctrination, Bookchin presents fans’ emotional engagement with the products of pop culture as problematic. Mass Ornament effectively evokes a point that Gray et al. make in Fandom: Identities and Communities (2007), when they write: ... war, ethnic conflicts, widening inequality, political and religious violence, and ecological disasters are to most of us, most of the time, experienced through the same patterns of mass mediation, and, crucially, often related to by the same mechanisms of emotionally involved reading as fan objects.504 In “Entertainment and Utopia” (1977/1992), Richard Dyer observed how, in addition to the affective intensity of music, large numbers of performers create a utopian feeling through a “shift from the real to the non-real”. 505 In Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, the numerous dancers are also materialised as ‘numbers’ in the additional sense that they are represented as data within YouTube’s archive—beneath each dancer’s video clip appears its number of ‘views’. Like the complementary mash-ups by Kutiman and Goyte, Bookchin foregrounds YouTube’s database structure in an aesthetic approach described by Lev Manovich (2001) as ‘spatialised narrative’.506 Moving away from cinema’s singular frame and use of montage-style editing, multiple videos appear simultaneously, making explicit the work as interface.507 But while Manovich describes the database as “the center of the creative process in the computer age”, 508 Bookchin’s use of incongruous juxtaposition repositions the online database as central to contemporary questions of power. As the majority of the dancers are young women, Bookchin’s mass of collectively- shared but often privately enacted imaginative-worlds, gives gendered form to Jurgenson and Rey’s comment that we’re in the midst of “a new cultural movement of 504 Jonathan Gray, C. Lee Harrington and Cornel Sandvoss, Fandom: Identities and Communities, (New York: New York University Press, 2007), p. 10. 505 Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” p. 26. 506 For a visual reference of a ‘spatialised narrative’, see Lev Manovich’s art project Soft Cinema (2002-2005, 157 mass publicity”.509 The work’s invitation to an omnipotent view into the private realm might invite the feminist critique of a voyeuristic and disempowering ‘male gaze’. Yet, Mass Ornament’s panoramic composition of video clips reflect Green and Burgess’s (2009) observation that surveillance theories on women’s ‘webcam cultures’ shifted with the creation of YouTube “from a vertical to a horizontal or participatory model”.510 No longer viewed simply in terms of exploitative participation and voyeurism, Green and Burgess suggest that cam-girls are thought to have “greater control over the conditions of both production and consumption of their own representation”.511 With a similarly Foucaultian-inflected perspective of self-governance, in “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube” (2009) Peters and Seier suggest that home dance routines present: ... a specific ambivalence of self-control and self-forgetting, discipline and pleasure. For social discipline and aesthetic subjectification are equally dependent on practice, on repetition, the setting of different levels and the production of difference.512 The production of difference takes effect, they explain, when these quoted pictures, gestures and poses flow back into “a pop and media-culture archive,” producing “new aesthetic forms”. 513 However, what these theorists fail to note is that, once disseminated in the digitally networked archive, the cam-performers have little to no control over the ways their videos and data are reused. Recalling Kracauer’s description that female bodies in the 1930’s mass ornaments are turned into “mere building blocks, nothing more”,514 Bookchin’s fast-paced edits turn tiny fragments of the originally heterogeneous YouTube performances into a single dance ‘number’—an effect that denies the creative nuances that can shift imitation into individuation. 509 Jurgenson and Rey, “The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity,” p. 62. 510 Green and Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, p. 27. 511 ibid., p. 27. 512 Peters and Seier, “Home Dance: Mediacy and Aesthetics of the Self on YouTube,” p. 199. 513 ibid., p. 201. 514 Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, p. 76. 158 Figures 40 & 41: Natalie Bookchin. Video stills, Mass Ornament, 2009. 159 Bookchin is staying true to form. Transforming YouTube cam-girls and -boys into 1930s ‘showgirls’ who are subservient to her artistic vision, she reproduces the power dynamic of broadcast era entertainment, which according to Dyer presents “women—and men—as expressions of the male producer”. 515 While Green and Burgess suggest that on YouTube “tensions between ‘expression’ and ‘exhibitionism’, performance and surveillance are actively negotiated by the participants themselves”,516 we find in Bookchin’s Mass Ornament that the dancers aren’t actively negotiating their self-presentation, but are passively manipulated in postproduction by the artist. As the individuals are transformed into a living ‘ornament’, she presents YouTube as a dancing ‘digital anthill’. The complementary and counterpointing mash-ups discussed here align with the conflicting utopias that I’ve argued converge in YouTopia. While one approach uses unification to celebrate individual expression and difference in an aesthetic of collective intelligence, the other uses unification critically, to suggest that in a globally networked pop culture true individuation is ultimately as illusory as the utopia of the spectacle. Therefore, despite representing opposingly optimistic and pessimistic outlooks, we see in these mash-ups that the aesthetic strategy of unification is common to both the ‘digital revolution’ and spectacular entertainment. In the next section, I will propose that my video series Hopelessly Devoted uniquely combines the complementary and counterpointing approaches to unification. Presenting simultaneously the sweet and toxic sides of musical covers found on YouTube, I will explore how this artwork heightens the unification and spectacularisation of fandom to transform the banality of everyday environments into a deformed utopia. 515 Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” p. 28. 516 Green and Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, p. 27. 160 161 Figures 42 & 43: Josephine Skinner. (Above) installation view, Hopelessly Devoted; (below) video still, Hopelessly Devoted (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. 162 ARTWORK Hopelessly Devoted Artist Christian Marclay once said: “Working with found material is due to my inability to play instruments. I take found sounds and transform them to the point where I feel that they’re mine”.517 This same, subjective process of transformation—the moment when, if, someone else’s creation becomes uniquely your own—is both the nature and subject of my video series Hopelessly Devoted (2011-2013). Like Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002), which brings together more than 700 movie clips featuring sound and music, Hopelessly Devoted, on a much smaller scale, also asks us to rethink historical forms of collage and our relationship to popular music. Through a careful construction of screen time and a panoramic frame, both create the semblance of a singular musical ‘narrative’, despite being pieced together from numerous independently recorded acts. But where Marclay was drawn to the beauty of film and its spectacular onscreen musical performances, Hopelessly Devoted draws together amateur, and often very average musical acts, which may have aspired to the magical, utopian world of Hollywood, but were in fact located in a mundane and imperfect reality. Set against the unromantic backdrop of bedrooms, kitchens, and laundries, the five video works in Hopelessly Devoted each bring together YouTube performances of the same love song, from the soundtracks of popular romantic movies. Much like Marclay, each of the YouTube users were drawn to these intense and evocative soundtracks, and transformed them to make them theirs. Ranging from stoic instrumental accompaniment to dramatic and gestural vocal renditions, improvised a cappella to rigidly followed karaoke, the selected performances offer a spectrum of creativity, musical ability and performative flair. The highly varied new versions are laboriously synchronised into a semblance of unison and elevated beyond the small screen to the cinematic. From Top Gun's (1986) climatic 'Take My Breath Away' to Disney Aladdin's (1992) saccharine duet 'A Whole New World', the Hopelessly Devoted videos transform cacophonies of clashing vocals and instruments into deceptively coordinated, though often painfully tuneless, pseudo-cover bands. 517 Christian Marclay in “Michael Snow & Christian Marclay: A Conversation”, in Replay: Christian Marclay, (Zurich: JRP| Ringier, 2007), p. 127. 163 Figure 44: Christian Marclay. Installation view, Video Quartet, 2002. Glimpsing into the homes of otherwise dispersed and disconnected people, these banal and imperfect covers converge moments of personal transformation to reflect the collective desire for love and meaningful connection, and reveal a common drive to harness the magic, tragedy and drama of the big screen for our own lives and countless small monitors. While Hopelessly Devoted pays homage to Marclay’s celebration of the filmic archive, and the powerful affect produced by spectacular fictive time, by appropriating the already appropriated forms of spectacular music within self- remixes, it also aligns with Mass Ornament, Natalie Bookchin’s critique of YouTube home performances. Holding both celebratory and critical approaches in the air at once, therefore, Hopelessly Devoted aims to materialise the double-meaning Meikle and Young observe in the word ‘jamming’: ... jamming is obstruction and this is one way to think about it—culture jams turn regular signs into stop signs. But the musical sense of ‘jamming’ is also important here. From this perspective, jamming also suggests collaborative creation around an existing theme—experimental, exploratory and above all, playful.518 518 Meikle and Young, Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, p. 84. 164 Figure 45: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Take My Breath Away (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. This ambiguous analogy is particularly appropriate for the pseudo cover bands, as we might imagine the performers jamming away together. But just as this image of collaborative creation aligns with the digital utopian notion of collective intelligence, Hopelessly Devoted also aims to culture jam the communal spectacle; not by putting a ‘stop’ to mass-produced culture, but its second remove—our self-remixes. Hopelessly Devoted, however, creates a distinctly different culture jam to Bookchin. Its collective formalisation of digital fan performances presents the fans in groupings like small communities, rather than collections of search results. Singing, playing and dancing their way through their entire renditions together, side-by-side, we also hear their individual voices, quirky musical contributions, and get a feel for their distinct personalities. The mutual articulation of individuality within the collective recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of the joyful and liberating ‘carnivalesque’—a notion which also provides a useful analogy for the heterotopia of YouTube as a whole. As Kevin Hetherington (1998) explains: … heterotopic space and the activities that frame it can be seen as a political manifestation associated with performances that are affectual, transgressive, 165 Figures 46 & 47: Josephine Skinner. (Above) video still, A Whole New World (detail); (below) installation view, A Whole New World, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. 166 excessive and associated with what has become known as the carnivalesque.519 The parity with YouTube is clear. Users’ musical cover acts, like those comprising the Hopelessly Devoted source material, demonstrate carnivalesque performances, which Hetherington writes articulate “a monstrous ‘heteroclite’ identity which comes to be defined by its hybrid, uncertain and multiple forms”.520 Like a multitude of Frankensteinian monsters, for instance, the musical self-remixes and covers are sliced and diced versions of once perfect pop cultural products. So, too, while YouTube’s ‘political manifestations’ are multifarious, if not problematic, the site “produces alternate modes of social ordering” like a carnival,521 in this case by offering an alternative to the broadcast era—a social media order. Where YouTube’s dual levels of social system and remixed identity performances meet, it is affective, excessive, and transgressive,522 if we consider the excess of making public what used to stay behind closed doors. As microcosms of this heterotopic carnival, the Hopelessly Devoted videos make spectacular the infusion of the private with the public, and vice versa. Just as Dostoevsky used carnivalisation as a fictive device “to glimpse and bring to life aspects in the character and behavior of people which in the normal course of life could not have revealed themselves”,523 the large-scale projection of Hopelessly Devoted up-sizes the individual YouTube performances from the small screens of digital devices to a public event akin to the movies or a gig. This larger-than-life scenario heightens something we’ve come to take for granted—that our laundries are now literally aired to the public, along with our thoughts and feelings. Exaggerating networked culture’s convergence of private and public space poignantly contrasts Breitz and Collins’s studio-recorded spectacularisation of fan performances. Filmed in front of non-descript curtains, Breitz’s fans could be 519 Hetherington, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics, p. 142. 520 ibid., p. 142. 521 ibid., p. 149. 522 The meaning, potential, and even desirability of ‘transgression’ in social media is a debated subject. See David J. Gunkel and Ted Gournelos, eds., Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture and Politics in a Digital Age, (New York: Continuum, 2012). According to Hetherington (1998), it is the “process of symbolically inverting the meanings associated with the established binary codes that make up culture,” p. 147. 523 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 163. 167 Figures 48 & 49: Josephine Skinner. Video stills, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (details), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. 168 anywhere, just as Collins’s cactus-filled deserts and leafy green forests are, as Liz Kotz notes, “artificial backdrops and incongruous props that emphasize the sense of placelessness”. 524 Hopelessly Devoted is instead situated within the milieu of YouTube users’ lives. Resident pet cats, cluttered surfaces, laundry powder, occupied beds and yellowing PCs provide the backdrops; ‘incongruous props’ range from a hairbrush-microphone, to straw hats and sunglasses that would be more appropriate against Collins’s picture-postcard vistas. The aesthetic differences between these earlier karaoke works and mine reflect changing notions of media space, from the broadcast era belief that it was “relatively placeless”,525 to the Internet’s multiplication of social realities, which Shaun Moores (2004) proposes creates “place as pluralized”. 526 The postproduction of a heterogeneous medley of everyday ‘proam’ productions into singular panoramic windows means the fans’ individual space transform into a social one. 527 Materialising the latest stage of Joshua Meyrowitz’s 1985 observation, that “Electronic media affect us ... by changing the “situational geography” of social life”,528 the fans are not only arranged in an order that creates the illusion of mutual awareness, they are also vocally panned according to their position within the bands. The unified space and time in this alternative reality further merges with the audience’s—like watching a live band the performers’ voices and instruments are more or less audible depending on where the spectator stands. The result, as Carrie Miller (2012) writes, is that “The viewer becomes so immersed in the performances that entirely arbitrary relations between isolated individuals start to seem like meaningful connections.”529 524 Liz Kotz, “Live Through This,” in Phil Collins: the world won't listen, (Dallas Museum of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 59. 525 Joshua Meyoritz quoted in Shaun Moores, “The Doubling of Place: Electronic Media, Time-Space Arrangements and Social Relationships,” in Mediaspace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, eds. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 22. 526 ibid., p. 23. 527 This unification is enhanced through subtle alterations of colour, orientation, positioning and cropping, along with the considered aesthetic curation of the individual videos in order to heighten the compatibility of the groupings. 528 Joshua Meyoritz quoted in Shaun Moores, “The Doubling of Place: Electronic Media, Time-Space Arrangements and Social Relationships," p. 22. 529 Carrie Miller, Josephine Skinner: Hopelessly Devoted, exhibition catalogue text, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, March 29 - April 15, 2012. 169 These improbable cover bands elicit a quality of utopian optimism through the hope that personal transformation can become a bonding, communal experience, as Miller evokes: [The videos] elevate the status of each individual performance—themselves reflections of a desire for self-overcoming—to a level of quality and worth they would fail to realise alone. Like the sentiments contained in a popular love song, [the] videos create a sense that we can all only hope to achieve something—at least for a fleeting moment—if we do it together.530 Playing to the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, Hopelessly Devoted draws a parallel between Bahktin’s ideas of the carnivalesque and collective intelligence. For instance, in Take My Breath Away, YouTube user Elon’s once kitchen-bound performance is supported by a 5-piece band and backing singers; in The Time of My Life, stephenpeters1’s basement guitar skills get the appreciation they deserve when rredsoz92 rocks out to his solo; and in A Whole New World, Sebie and Katsikides’s call-and-response vocals are only fully realised as a duet when they are brought together in postproduction. As this ‘togetherness’ plays out through the fans’ shared language of romantic film soundtracks, the work materialises Henry Jenkins’s idea that YouTube permits ‘collective meaning-making’ through reuses of popular culture, and makes visible Stiegler’s assertion that YouTube’s public mediation of ‘mental images’ creates “a process of collective imagination”.531 Through an exaggerated spectacularisation of these utopian ideas of collectivity, Hopelessly Devoted brings its performers closer than ever to their desires, as they rejoin with the big screen that first inspired them. However, this ‘sweet’ image of our collective pop inhabitations presents only one side of the story, as Hopelessly Devoted also articulates the more ‘toxic’ aspects of global consumer culture, and its manifestation in social media. Heightening the illusion that YouTube has delivered the digital revolution’s promise for meaningful connection, the videos simultaneously reveal the constructed nature of that illusion. As inherently imperfect ensembles, the cover bands intensify the duality of desire and failure that Phil Collins here insightfully observes is intrinsic to the act of karaoke: 530 ibid. 531 Stiegler, “The Carnival of the New Screen: From Hegemony to Isonomy,” p. 55. 170 Figures 50 & 51: Josephine Skinner. (Above) installation view, A Whole New World (detail); (below) video still, The Time of My Life (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. 171 As a format, karaoke offers a promise of completion—this act will somehow make me whole—but at the same time it’s predicated on the idea of vulnerability and failure … 532 In Hopelessly Devoted, the intentional undoing of the artifice of unity, and foregrounding of failure, is most apparent in the cover bands’ intermittent disharmony. The individual performances were pitch-corrected following their synchronisation, but only to restore them to their original melodic quality, or lack thereof. Due to an array of fluctuating tempos and various versions, the YouTube performances don’t naturally play in time together. Instead the videos were cut up, each bit stretched or shrunk by changing its speed, before being pieced back together into a puzzle of collective syncronicity. Correcting the individual songsters’ pitches, rather than creating falsely harmonious bands, means the series doesn’t always make for comfortable listening, but it does stay true to their essential incongruity. The point of articulating this process isn’t to establish the Socratian values of skill or aesthetic originality, which Gunkel would warn is missing the point, but serves to highlight the artistic strategy of making apparent the failure to achieve a perfect communal performance. Allowing not only the flaws of the performers to emerge, but also the apparent failure in technical skill needed to overcome their disharmony, might arguably achieve Gunkel’s claim that a ‘good’ mash-up intervenes in a system’s assumed values. In this case, the series upturns the common belief that a music mash-up must be harmonious, like Kutiman’s and later Goyte’s, in order to succeed. Instead, the Hopelessly Devoted videos provide a reminder that the ideal of complementary collectivity, whether of music tracks, visual imagery, or YouTube users’ pop performances, might at times be glimpsed through the collective individuation of social media, and fictionally constructed through postproduction—but nevertheless remains an ideal. While enacting Lévy’s belief that collective intelligence is a realistic utopia that “has begun”,533 these by all accounts flawed, if not awkward, cover bands also exemplify 532 Collins quoted in Kotz, “Live Through This,” p. 65. 533 Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, p. 250. 172 Figures 52 & 53: Josephine Skinner. (Above) installation view, Take My Breath Away; (below) video still, Take My Breath Away (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin’s pessimistic perspective in “Collective Individuation: the Future of the Social Web” (2013), that the atomisation of users means “the spontaneity and innovation within their collective intelligence is deformed.”534 After all, the bands didn’t form as the result of meeting each other and finding a shared musical affinity, but rather as the search results from shared metadata. From this critical standpoint the videos mirror Hui and Halpin’s sentiment that social media 534 Harry Halpin and Yuk Hui, “Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web,” in Unlike Us Reader, eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), p. 107. 173 Figure 54: Josephine Skinner. Video still, A Whole New World (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011- 2013. sites create “an almost cruel mockery of being together”,535 by reminding us that virtual communities might simply be collections of standardised samples, cut-and- pasted into our not-so-original self-remixes. As the performers appear on screen alone, and at the end disappear into disconnected realities, we see again the artifice that produced any sense of a greater whole. There is no magic mathematical formula when it comes to data-selves: “If there is any collectivity at all”, Hui and Halpin suggest, it is no more than “the sum of the individuals and their social relationships”. 536 As the somewhat-dated word ‘alienation’ that appears in Debord’s critique of the spectacle reappears in social media, according to Hui and Halpin, as a “new form of alienation”,537 the ‘machinery of rejoinder’ has indeed brought us back to the starting point. 535 ibid., p. 107. 536 ibid., p. 105. 537 ibid., p. 107. 174 A series of ‘deformed spectacles’, Hopelessly Devoted articulates the ambiguities arising where the utopias of entertainment and digital democratisation meet. Like each of my artworks, it does so by heightening an awareness of the way popular culture constructs affect, and how this manifests within our networked lives. This approach sharply counterpoints the perfected, spectacular nature of Bookchin’s Mass Ornament. Her critical strategy of affectively distilling her dancers into decorative digital objects eschews any real opportunity for the audience to sense apathy or identification. Hopelessly Devoted, in contrast, aims to engender criticality precisely by eliciting a felt sense of connection to the performers. The articulated success and failure of the conflicting utopias of YouTube creates an oscillation between an emotional connection to each individual, and a critical knowing of the communal artifice. As Miller observes of the series: We become genuinely involved in the imaginary lives of the performers who populate the videos. Simultaneously, the technical complexity of the work pulls the viewer out of this fantasy realm from time to time, creating a distance in which any idea of authenticity seems as farfetched as the plot to a romantic movie.538 Just as we imaginatively identify with movie stars and their fictional, filmic worlds, the dramatisation of YouTube users’ intimate over-sharings in Hopelessly Devoted, invites us to see ourselves in them. Intermittent identification and detachment means that, for most, the unavoidable humour in these accumulations of amateur acts is less a cruel mockery than a way to laugh at ourselves, and the foibles of being human. In this sense, Hopelessly Devoted, and each of my works, operates through pastiche rather than parody, by making us critically aware of our emotions through emotion. According to Richard Dyer in Pastiche (2007), certain Hollywood films cultivate the audience’s understanding for how their personal emotions are culturally and historically constructed. Pastiche he explains: 538 Carrie Miller, Josephine Skinner: Hopelessly Devoted, exhibition catalogue, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney, March 29 - April 15, 2012. 175 … imitates formal means that are themselves ways of evoking, moulding and eliciting feeling, and thus in the process is able to mobilise feelings even while signaling that it is doing so.539 Admiring the fans’ bravado, their vulnerability, their theatricality and their authenticity also unites the gallery audience—as fans of fans. So, too, by creating mash-up style artworks, artists such as myself are aligned with the innumerable prosumers publically-sharing theirs. As Henry Jenkins (2007) poignantly asks, regarding the future of fandom: “as fandom becomes such an elastic category, one starts to wonder—who isn’t a fan? What doesn’t constitute fan culture?”540 No longer the realm of basement-bound hobbies, fandom is now as ubiquitous as the Internet. While ‘Post-Internet art’ is a term criticised for the breadth of practices it encompasses—what isn’t touched by network culture?—perhaps we can broach within it a more focused critique of postfandom. To remain a meaningful category of analysis, I propose we look beyond the limited view that fan activities, including self- remixing, present a form of liberated productivity, and remember also the affective complexity of their like/love/hate relationship with commercial pop culture. A more nuanced approach, as Hopelessly Devoted aims to offer, might better reveal the ambiguities and tensions between sameness and difference, individuation and imitation, that concern us all as creative, affective individuals within a networked collective. As Gray, Sandvoss and Harrington (2007) offer: Perhaps the most important contribution of contemporary research into fan audiences thus lies in furthering our understanding of how we form emotional bonds with ourselves and others in a modern, mediated world.541 By heightening the convergence of Hollywood’s lyrical social scripts and our private worlds and imaginations, Hopelessly Devoted aims to present an entertaining and intimate collective portrait of the shared desires, and failures, that underlie our everyday performative identities. 539 Richard Dyer, Pastiche, (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 180. 540 Jenkins, “The Future of Fandom,” p. 364. 541 Gray, Harrington and Sandvoss, Fandom: Identities and Communities, p. 10. 176 Figures 55 & 56: Josephine Skinner. (Above) video still, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You; (below) video still, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (detail), from Hopelessly Devoted, 2011-2013. 177 178 CHAPTER 4: PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION … the work of art became the site of a permanent scratching.542 Every work is issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly.543 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002) Introducing Overshare In the previous chapter, I considered how formalisations of online collectivity can reveal tensions between imitation and individuation—the way our self-remixing involves sampling and selecting from a common emotional language, mediated through globalised commercial pop culture. In Altermodern (2009), Bourriaud similarly warns of the homogenising impact of globalisation on identity, and further considers the implications for art: Under threat from fundamentalism and consumer-driven uniformisation, menaced by massification and the enforced re-abandonment of individual identity, art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale.544 In this chapter I will consider what reinvention might mean for artistic processes and strategies in an era Post-Internet. Rather than suggesting this might diminish Bourriaud’s earlier ideas in Postproduction, I will focus on two key aspects of it that require upgrading: the aesthetic of excess, and the artistic use of capital. In the shift to a ubiquitous networked culture, I propose that excess and capital inherently converge, as our online oversharing becomes emotional capital. The chaotic flea market, for Bourriaud, symbolised the dominant ‘art system’ of the nineties—evoking an aesthetic that he felt was epitomised by the immense, jumbled collections of objects by artist Jason Rhoades. According to Bourriaud, these revealed: … that the task of art is no longer to propose an artificial synthesis of 542 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 44. 543 ibid., p. 18. 544 Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), p. 12. 179 heterogeneous elements but to generate ‘critical mass’ through which the familial structure of the nearby market metamorphoses into a vast warehouse for merchandise sold online, a monstrous city of detritus.545 Now in our everyday lives, YouTube presents a vast warehouse of ‘detritus’; one filled not with consumer merchandise but its recycled versions in the form of media mash-ups and remixed identity performances. Within this new, media reality, the task, I will argue, is less one of reproducing an experience of excess, but as Simon Reynolds (2011) notes here, of filtering it: There are artists who are navigating the Web’s choppy info-ocean and, specifically, sifting through YouTube’s immense flea market of memory, finding new possibilities for creativity.546 As I’ve indicated throughout this thesis, I’m fascinated instead in YouTube’s flea market of feeling; my unique search through its chaotic jumble seeks media-objects of desire and new creative possibilities for shared affectivity. My approach, therefore, is situated within a broad turn toward the study of our emotional worlds as they relate to networked culture. As Brian Massumi has observed: There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literacy, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered … belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it.547 I’ll discuss in this chapter how artists, such as myself, are tasked with sifting through this surfeit of sentiment, and transforming the products of our pathological oversharing into artistic ‘source material’. However, I’ll do so by highlighting a parallel trend in commercial culture, as emerging marketing strategies are finding ways to use our digitised hopes and failures for capital gain. Capital underscores Bourriaud’s discussion of Postproduction; the artistic remixing of the social, cultural and consumable manifestations of late capitalism demonstrates, in 545 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 28. 546 Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, p. 78. 547 Massumi quoted in Mark Andrejevic, “The Work That Affective Economics Does,” in Cultural Studies, vol. 25, nos. 4-5 (July 2011), p. 609, accessed October 17, 2012 from Taylor and Francis Journals database. 180 its broad sense, the postproduction of capital. At a second remove from ‘raw’ source materials, postproduction art also marks a significant development from the much earlier artistic appropriations of products of industrialised labour.548 Now, as our personal lives openly play out within the digital realm, I propose that artistic ‘use’ is expanding again to a third remove—to the postproduction of our mediatised oversharings—and that our attention to capital must equally shift, to forward the significance of emotional capital in our present moment. Creatively Capitalising on Emotion Bourriaud’s ‘collective ideal of sharing’ has been both realised and perverted by social media. As Jenny Kennedy argues in “Rhetorics of Sharing: Data, Imagination, and Desire” (2013), the term ‘sharing’ has lost its neutrality and has become politicised as a rhetorical strategy. “Sharing rhetoric draws on a cultural image of connectivity”, she writes, arguing that establishing commonalities has taken on a moral dimension—it is for the ‘social good’. Social media’s promises for affective connectivity capitalise on an ethos of digital utopianism, Kennedy observes: “Essential to this rhetoric are attributes of openness, freedom for users to participate, and collective intelligence.”549 YouTube, she notes, is a key example, presenting itself as “a facilitator of social relationships, offering through its iPhone app ‘more ways to share with the people you love’.”550 While Kennedy’s main concerns, however, relate to ‘file-sharing’ and copyright infringement, what is significant for this discussion is how the rhetoric, and, more importantly, practice of sharing has implications for our personal lives. In “Copyright, Fair Use, and Social Networks” (2011), Patricia Aufderheide combines these two points by raising the question of whether remixed identities, when perceived as legitimate cultural performances, can be protected from copyright infringement. Summarising Aufderheide’s enquiry, Zizi Papacharissi asks: If indeed identity presented online becomes a performance, to what extent can that performance be protected, or exploited, in the manner that other 548 See Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, pp. 13 & 23. 549 ibid., p. 132. 550 Jenny Kennedy, “Rhetorics of Sharing: Data, Imagination, and Desire,” in Unlike Us Reader, eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), p. 130. 181 cultural performances are repurposed and traded within the greater cultural market place?551 I will consider in this chapter how artistic practice as well as commercial industries both exploit and repurpose these remixed performances of identity as emotional capital, albeit to different ends. Two key theorists of emotional capital are Mark Andrejevic and Eva Illouz, who both warn of the commercial imperatives that underlie the public sharing of our private worlds. Earlier on, I introduced Illouz’s notion of emotional capital in regards to the commodification of the self within the therapeutic narrative.552 Andrejevic’s surveillance perspective will be my primary focus here, as his discussion of commercial methods for capitalising on emotion can be put to use in regards to conceiving new artistic strategies. In “The Work That Affective Economics Does” (2011), Andrejevic expands from Henry Jenkins’s (2006) notion of ‘affective economics’, in which the term ‘emotional capital’ arises in a quote by CocaCola President Steven J. Heyer: We will use a diverse array of entertainment assets to break into people’s hearts and minds … [T]he ideas which have always sat at the heart of the stories you’ve told and the content you’ve sold … whether movies or music or television … are no longer just intellectual property, they’re emotional capital.553 Critical of Jenkins’s proposition that this same ‘emotional capital’ allows consumers to form a “collective bargaining structure that they can use to challenge corporate decisions” and counter the way advertisers “tap the power of collective intelligence [of viewers]”,554 Andrejevic argues that participatory culture potentially “cuts both ways”.555 The cybernetic loop of feedback that is integral to collective intelligence, Andrejevic argues, can give marketers exactly what they want—access to consumers’ affect. As explains one such marketer, quoted by Andrejevic (2012): “As marketers, we know that emotions rule thoughts, and thoughts rule consumer 551 Papacharissi, “Conclusion: A Networked Self,” p. 315. 552 See Chapter 2. 553 Heyer quoted in Andrejevic, “The Work That Affective Economics Does,” p. 607. 554 Jenkins quoted in ibid., p. 606. 555 ibid., p. 612. 182 behavior”.556 As new technologies gain ever more intimate access to our emotions, he warns, the information they garner can be used to better manage and predict our consumer behaviors, to more effectively turn our desires into capital. As these often-stealthy, commercial forms of monitoring affect are garnering ‘intelligence’ on our emotional lives, we can consolidate Andrejevic and Illouz’s perspectives, where collective intelligence and emotional intelligence meet. ‘Emotional intelligence’, now popularly used to describe the human quality of emotional competence and insight, underscores Eva Illouz’s (2007) notion of emotional capital. Reminding us it was originally conceived as an ‘instrument of classification’, Illouz quotes clinical psychologist Daniel Goleman, who coined the term with his book Emotional Intelligence (1992), and described it as: … a type of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions.557 Now, according to Andrejevic, “In an affective economy, a circulating, undifferentiated kind of emotion (neither solely ‘in’ the stories nor ‘of’ the audience) comes to serve as an exploitable resource, a part of the infrastructure”.558 Mood mining, sentiment analysis, and vibology are a few of the terms Andrejevic offers to describe the exploitative forms of monitoring that aim to make sense of this “never-ending modulation of moods, capacities, affects, potentialities assembled in genetic codes, identification numbers, ratings profiles and preference listings”.559 A list to which we might add YouTube videos. While it continues to take more sophisticated forms in networked culture, the premise of consumption, he suggests, remains the same as it ever was: to fix the abstraction of affect into a designed form of conscious emotion;560 to devise scripts, languages and melodies so that they allow us to experience intensity as a tangible, albeit fleeting, personal truth. If affect is, according to Shouse, “a non-conscious experience 556 Mark Andrejevic, “Brain Whisperers: Cutting Through the Clutter,” Somatechnics, vol. 2, no. 2 (September 2012), p. 198, accessed October 17, 2012 from Edinburgh University Press Journals database. 557 Goleman quoted in Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, p. 72. 558 Andrejevic, “The Work That Affective Economics Does,” p. 608. 559 Clough quoted in ibid., p. 608. 560 ibid., p. 609. 183 of intensity”, 561 then Andrejevic suggests the goal of affective economics “is to channel and structure that intensity”. 562 This goal is shared by certain artists, including myself, who are exploring how we might critically, rather than commercially, capitalise on the same ‘never-ending modulation of moods’ and to creatively re- structure that intensity. Andrejevic similarly frames the theoretical task of critical ‘Media Studies 2.0’. Corresponding with my perspective on the convergence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, he encourages us to be mindful rather than dismissive of past forms of media power, and to be wary of its evolving efficiencies: … the developments of new strategies for the reproduction of power relations do not necessarily mean that the old ones have died out. Thus, the goal is to highlight emergent tendencies and logics that call for updated critical strategies.563 In this chapter, I will propose what those updated critical strategies might look like for artistic practices; in particular, those that present, as I see it, a kind of Postproduction Art 2.0. In “Disruptive Business as Artistic Intervention” (2013), Tatiana Bazzichelli similarly attempts to ascertain a contemporary critical strategy for artistic practices. She posits that, rather than working against business as countercultural movements have done in the past, a new approach would be to transform business models from within: Accepting that the digital utopias of the 1980s and 1990s were never completely extraneous to business practices, the aim is to start analysing how cyclical business trends work in the present of network culture, and how artistic and hacker practices might emerge from business logics themselves.564 561 Shouse quoted in ibid., p. 609. 562 ibid., p. 609. 563 Mark Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade”, p. 40. 564 Tatiana Bazzichelli, “Disruptive Business as Artistic Intervention,” in Unlike Us Reader, eds. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch, (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), p. 271. 184 While I share Bazzichelli’s view that a productive approach to critiquing business practice is “to reappropriate its philosophy, making it function for social purposes beyond the realm of capitalist logics”,565 she is arguing for a disruptive, interventionist strategy, and particularly hactivism, as the most viable method. In contrast, the ‘updated critical strategies’ for artists that I will forward here, align more closely with Andrejevic’s proposition that what we most need is “an expertise in sense making: in developing strategies for crafting knowledge out of the welter of information available online”.566 This opens up an alternative, artistic approach to utilising business logics. By using similar ‘targeting’ strategies as ‘mood mining’, ‘sentiment analysis’ and ‘vibology’, to tap into emotionally invested online expressions and identities, I will argue that disruption and intervention take place conversely through a process of sifting, sorting, editing and reorganising affective capital for creative rather than commercial ends. My use of these marketing terms is deliberately loose, as the arts practices I want to highlight do not attempt, in most cases, to replicate technologically sophisticated commercial methods. Rather, ‘mining’ may suggest a manual rather than computer automated search through data; ‘analysis’ might conversely take form as the artistic presentation of ambiguity, rather than graphics-filled reports in strategist presentations. The purpose of the analogy is to observe congruence and contrast between the creative and commercial mobilisations of emotional capital. For instance, just as Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts asserts “emotion is an unlimited resource”567 so too writer Robert Fitterman evokes emotion as a creative source material: “Today I have access to an unlimited number of personal utterances and expressions from the gut, or the heart. Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?”568 Where marketers are responding to a shifted economic and technological environment to ‘mobilize affect’ for commercial purposes, I want to argue that artists are developing equivalent approaches to utilise this ‘resource of emotion’ for the purposes of artistic exploration and critique. If the advertiser’s goal of mood mining and sentiment analysis is as Andrejevic describes “to craft an interactive mediascape 565 ibid., p. 270. 566 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 46. 567 Roberts quoted in Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, p. 70. 568 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 85. 185 that triples as entertainment, advertising and probe”, then for certain artists including myself, the goal is to craft an entertaining probe of the affective mediascape and art’s role within it. Tasked with sense-making in the face of chaos, these artistic practices, I propose, are updating the art historical critical strategy of collage, and its later iterations in scratch and concrete poetry. I will argue that in the broad field of Post-Internet art, new and expanded forms of collage are upturning its traditional formula for critique, which sought chaos making to shatter the spectacle’s illusion of wholeness. In contrast, I will propose that the artistic production of a spectacular ‘new whole’ might allow us to symbolically freeze the flow of affect, and make sense of the sentiment, in order that we might critically reflect upon it, rather than incessantly contribute to it. At the end of this chapter, I will discuss how my artwork Love Story demonstrates this approach by making sense of a multitude of shared romantic desires and failures, within a seemingly singular super-script. A Digital Junk Aesthetic Bourriaud notes that “Appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction”,569 and it is too for postproductions of self. However, where he starts his ‘narrative’, as he puts it, with Duchamp and the readymade, I will start this one fractionally earlier, with the collage paintings of Picasso and Braque. As the 20th Century began, these artists started to incorporate pieces of paper and other materials into their artworks. The appropriation of these pre-existing found materials and their juxtaposition within the pictorial plane of the canvas was revolutionary, because it broke the illusory cohesion of the paintings. The impact of collage went beyond its canvas: in Theodor Adorno’s words, it served to “shock people into realising how dubious any form of unity (is)”.570 Collage quickly expanded from painting, taking form within the early, found footage films by innovators of the field such as Adrian Brunel, Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner, and later the appropriation videos such as those by Dara Birnbaum and Ken Jacobs. Like collage paintings, these films appropriated fragments of pre-existing cultural material, and brought them together through postproduction processes to produce incongruous juxtapositions and to disrupt the narrative flow of the original material. Eugeni Bonet explains that the borrowing and recycling of film material in 569 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 25. 570 Adorno quoted in Wees, “Found Footage and Epic Collage,” p. 154. 186 collage film shifted the artists’ role from author to editor or compiler, and introduced an “aesthetic of junk, based on an assemblage of fragments or remnants valued because of their very residual nature”.571 Like the early found footage artists, who in some cases literally raked around in the rubbish of commercial film companies for reusable out-takes and left-overs,572 now on YouTube everyone rummages around in what Fredric Jameson once called, “recorded spools of canned cultural junk”.573 Everyday our networked navigations try to pick the treasure from the trash, which is no easy feat considering the piled-up and poorly-labelled sense that YouTube is more “a jumbled attic”574 than orderly digital archive. In 1993, in the catalogue for Bonet’s curatorial project Desmontaje: Film, Vídeo; Apropriación, Reciclaje [Montage: Film, Video; Appropriation, Recycling], which included 70 film and video works from the field of found footage, Bonet explains: “I turned my back on works based on home movies or pornographic films, as I believed that such images were not so ‘mediated’”.575 Were Bonet to update the project today, perhaps he would reconsider this omission in light of YouTube’s heterotopia, in which the everyday realities of users in their ‘home movies’, are variously mediated and juxtaposed with the spectacular imagery and narratives of mass-produced media. After all, as practices of collage and remix occur within YouTube’s content, across and between the numerous video players, text fields and hyperlinks, and where the videos are embedded amid the content of other websites, the site makes explicit Derek Hook’s (2007) argument that heterotopic spaces share the effects of recycling, juxtaposition and bricolage by destabilising taken for granted representations and meanings.576 YouTube, I propose, is not only a form of collage it is an epic one. For instance, in “Found Footage and Epic Collage” (1993) William Wees describes collage in such a way that we could equally apply it to YouTube: 571 Eugeni Bonet, ed., “Appropriation Is Theft,” in Desmontaje: Film, Vídeo / Apropriación, Reciclaje, (Valencia: IVAM, Centre del Carme, 1993), p. 145. 572 ibid., p. 149. 573 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 92. 574 Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, p. 62. 575 Eugeni Bonet, ed., “Demontage Handbook: Introduction,” in Desmontaje: Film, Vídeo / Apropriación, Reciclaje, p. 133. 576 Derek Hook, Foucault, Psychology and the Analytics of Power, (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 187-188. 187 [It] openly announces its affiliation with the everyday world of ordinary objects, consumer products, and popular culture, just as it unapologetically displays fragmentary form and content. Its fragments do not blend into a seamless, illusory whole, and its significance cannot be enclosed in the borders of the work itself.577 Epic collages, Wees explains, are “collages of collages”,578 and so, too, YouTube’s ‘epic’ status is no better illustrated than the fact that films Wees identifies as epic collages are themselves fragmented, or referenced within it.579 However, if YouTube offers a microcosm of the present-day cultural condition of digital fragmentation, we need to consider the implications for contemporary artistic strategies. In 1983, Gregory Ulmer wrote that, “collage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation in our century”.580 Moving into the 21st Century, according to Lev Manovich (2006), remix extends beyond the realm of artistic representation as the basic logic for all cultural production. This brings me to pose a key question, which I aim to address throughout this chapter: how can collage continue as a critical artistic tool within the already collagic, juxtaposing, fragmentary form of networked culture, that is characterised by a proliferation of remix practices? Launched in 2008, the Rhizome-hosted, Internet-based exhibition Montage: Unmonumental Online was crucial in paving the way for establishing an answer to this question. The online exhibition featured 14 artists in the field of Internet-based practices, and presented a kind of second-wave .Net art, born at the outset of Web 2.0. According to the illuminating online exhibition text (that I will continue to reference here), the artists including Olia Lialina, Oliver Laric, John Michael Boling, and Cao Fei were chosen for exploring “contemporary appropriation”, “Internet-based montage” and the “reinvention of collage techniques”.581 For instance, Paul Slocum's 577 Wees, “Found Footage and Epic Collage,” p. 155. 578 ibid., p. 16. 579 You can view on YouTube Part 6 of Abigail Child’s Is This What You Were Born For? (1981-89), and an artist talk by Leslie Thornton, uploaded in 2012, in which she references Peggy and Fred in Hell (1984-2012). While Keith Sanborn’s KAPITAL!, which Wees also describes as an epic collage, doesn’t appear on YouTube, an excerpt of a work he created in 2001 was uploaded in 2011 by YouTube user ifBLACKISBEAUTIFUL. See YouTube-ography. 580 Gregory Ulmer, “The Object of Post-Criticism,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 84. 581 Montage: Unmonumental Online, exhibition statement, Rhizome, c.2008, accessed May 1, 2013, 188 Time-Lapse Homepage (2003) revisits a scratch video aesthetic, flashing 1,000 screenshots of his homepage to an upbeat score as a way to think “Web design in the language of earlier time-based media.”582 The collage-inspired nature of the works is described through the rhetoric of remix: Cutting and pasting, breaking apart and reassembling, ripping and remixing, the artists in the exhibition extend the radical practice of collage to the Internet and demonstrate how previously tried techniques can engender rich, new artistic practices. The exhibited artworks serve as Internet-based precedents to the largely gallery- situated and object-based work of ‘Post-Internet’ practice, a broad contemporary field within which I situate my art projects, and discuss in more detail a little later. For this reason, the exhibition’s conceptual territory, rather than its specific manifestation in the online artworks, is particularly constructive in prefiguring my notion of Postproduction of Self. For instance, the exhibition statement describes how the works variously aimed to “interpret collective desires, frustrations, and fantasies recited online”, and observes that they “do not critique mass culture, but rather its consumption, internalization, and performance”.583 Key to this chapter is the way it points to a shift in the strategic role of collage within our contemporary mediascape: It is a landscape rich with fiction, contradictions, and disjuncture. The new quickly becomes obsolete, and the old is continually revived. Internet-based montage, the assemblage of distinct materials into a new whole, is therefore both an inevitable and perpetual accident and an emerging, illuminating art form. That these forms of collage aim to construct ‘a new whole’, as opposed to Wee’s description that traditional collage aims to fragment an ‘illusory whole’, demonstrates a significant conceptual and concrete shift in the use of collage as a political and aesthetic tool. Collage remains in its diversity the assemblage of distinct materials, but what Montage: Unmonumental Online identifies is the move away from creating contradictions and disjuncture to undo the spectacle’s unity, to creating new, unified 582 The Montage: Unmonumental Online Rhizome exhibition is no longer active, however, you can view this work at: Paul Slocum - Time Lapse Home Page, Dvblog Random Arts and Entertainment, February 17, 2012, accessed November 29, 2014, 189 ‘wholes’ within an already contradictory and incongruent networked environment. A cohesive form of collage shocks the established aesthetic critical strategies on which it is traditionally based. In the next few sections, I will expand on the ideas underpinning this shift by looking at contemporary discourse that aims to address the changing nature of criticality in our era of info-excess, and will highlight examples of contemporary art that aim to put this into practice by reconfiguring forms of collage. Throughout, I aim to show how certain practices that I consider ‘Post-Internet’ have begun to interpret online recitations of collective desires and fantasies through primarily ‘offline’, spatially situated, and even spectacular, new wholes. Soft Scratch The question of how to navigate, represent or elicit excess comes to the fore for artists who are working in response to our contemporary mediascape, but it isn’t an entirely new one. In 1985, Catherine Elwes wrote “Scratch, the most fashionable form of television deconstruction is proposing excess as the new video aesthetic.”584 Scratch video, a British movement arising in the 1980s, extended from the editing practices of found footage collage films to embrace excess in their critique of broadcast TV. Like collage film, they aimed to break the ‘illusory’ unity of the one-directional flow of information, but pushed to extremes the logic that “the fragmentation of seamless television footage robs the image of its narrative anchor and exposes it as a fictitious construct.” 585 Characterised by “machine-gun-like edits”, 586 scratch was an aggressive form of collage. Scratch artist Mark Wilcox describes it as “stealing off-air images from the broadcast channels”, and “forcing them into new, humorous and disturbing juxtapositions”.587 Fredric Jameson (1991) similarly describes the hostile nature of the scratch-style video artwork AlienNATION, in which the accelerated flow 584 Catherine Elwes, “Through Deconstruction to Reconstruction,” in Desmontaje: Film, Vídeo / Apropriación, Reciclaje, ed. Eugeni Bonet, (Valencia: IVAM, Centre del Carme, 1993), p. 162. 585 ibid., p. 162 586 John Wyver, “A Poached Text,” in Desmontaje: Film, Vídeo / Apropriación, Reciclaje, ed. Eugeni Bonet, (Valencia: IVAM, Centre del Carme, 1993), p. 160. 587 Wilcox quoted in ibid., p. 160. 190 of clashing images creates “the tempo of delirium, let’s say, or of direct experimental assault on the viewer-subject”.588 Its confronting aesthetic of visual excess meant scratch also demonstrated the psychedelic potential of the televisual material, and was likened to watching “General Hospital on Acid”.589 Its link to drug culture probably isn’t purely metaphorical, as scratch was often shown in nightclubs, and despite its hard-hitting effect was criticised for being highly pleasurable—too close to entertainment. While Wilcox claimed that the goal of scratch’s critique of TV was to move “to a moral order in an overloaded culture”,590 for Elwes this failed. Instead, she claims, the “old stereotypes” would “come at us ten times as fast, ten times as often and dressed up in the most elaborate electronic effects”.591 Elwes’s warning that “Scratch is being trapped by its own prey”592 is one we might bear in mind for the present-day, and our infinitely more ‘overloaded’ culture. Where artistic approaches aim to reproduce or even exceed the excesses of online culture, there is an ever more prevalent risk, I would suggest, of failing to critique networked culture, and instead producing the Internet’s equivalent of being “more like television than television itself”.593 An example of this might be Swiss artist Marc Lee’s multiscreen installation Breaking the News – Be a News-Jockey 594 (2007-), which transmits news reports live from the Internet into the gallery space. As the gallery visitor selects the topic or headline, and navigates between images, texts and sounds, they customise the excess of online global news to suit their taste. We might imagine this as a digitally networked version of journalist Andy Lipman’s 1985 proposition that “Just playing with the TV remote- control console, quickly switching stations at random, is a basic scratch”.595 But there is a crucial difference between these remote-controlled forms of scratch; notably, what surfaces as their subject of critique. “What emerges isn’t just a jumble of voices and images”, Lipman writes of 1980s scratch video, “but the personality of 588 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 82. 589 Sanborn quoted in Elwes, “Through Deconstruction to Reconstruction,” p. 162. 590 Wilcox quoted in Wyver, “A Poached Text,” p. 160. 591 Elwes, “Through Deconstruction to Reconstruction,” p. 162. 592 ibid., p. 162. 593 ibid., p. 162. 594 Marc Lee, Breaking the News - Be a News-Jockey, News Jockey, c.2007, accessed August 8, 2014, 191 broadcast TV itself. Its self-importance, its hectoring, its banality and plastic smile”.596 What is revealed in Lee’s work is less the nature of online news coverage, but the problematic nature of our interaction with it. As described on the artwork’s official website, Lee’s seemingly uncritical goal behind making the work reveals, from my perspective, the pressing issue, as he writes: “Friends ask: Could you help me cook up a news that I'll like? Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Friends told us their favorite headlines, and we in turn created new stories.”597 Inadvertently it seems, Lee reveals how, despite a seemingly infinite number of alternative news outlets in the post-broadcast era, people still choose the ‘plastic smile’. With this in mind, we might consider if his installation denaturalises our interactive behaviour by placing it the gallery, and ‘breaks-open’ the idea that news presents a singular truth, or simply immerses viewers in a larger-than-life version of ‘news-jockeying’ that they uncritically play everyday. Is this instance of interactive scratch, to reuse Andrejevic’s term, more info-glut than info-glut itself? Updating scratch’s critical strategy for this new media ecology, we might consider the potential pitfalls of participatory art through the lens of Andrejevic’s (2009) broader critique of interactivity. Exemplified by computer gaming, he suggests that frenetic feedback potentially prevents our capacity for critical reflection: What if it should turn out that we actually had more time to critically reflect on the forms of manipulation to which we were subjected in the mass media era, when we weren’t subject to the constant injunction to interact, respond, click the next link, and download the newest application? What if interactive media serve, in part, as means of short-circuiting the very forms of reflection that increasingly undermined the authority of ‘one-way,’ ‘top-down’ media technologies?598 Accordingly, when the remote control is handed over to audiences whose lives are already characterised by constant clicking, it might only serve to supplement the short-circuiting of criticality, rather than create time or space for forms of self- and social-reflection. The loss of aesthetic forms of criticality in the face of infinite choice invokes Andrejevic’s critique of the Bush administration’s 2004 political campaign: 596 Lipman quoted in ibid., p. 160. 597 Lee, Breaking the News - Be a News-Jockey, accessed August 8, 2014. 598 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 42. 192 … the goal was to demonstrate the impossibility of getting at the truth, leaving it up to voters to, instead, choose the narrative that best fit their prejudices, preconceptions and predispositions. By multiplying the narratives—and in particular, narratives that cast uncertainty on one another, the campaign sought to highlight the absence of any ‘objective’ standard for arbitrating between them.599 This perfectly demonstrates how the traditional, critical strategy of collage— multiplying, juxtaposing and fragmenting a dominant narrative in order to undermine its claim to truth—becomes meaningless within a digital environment in which those same strategies endlessly recur. The proliferation of information outlets and opinions, the infinite number of ‘experts’ and ‘newsworthy’ narratives, and the big data that can be molded to statistically support any claim, collectively challenge the possibility of discerning any single truth, unity or wholeness. Now audiences are savvy to the constructed nature of representation, Andrejevic argues, but, at the same time, critical thought is turning back on itself as “unreflective critique”.600 So, too, we might all be critically expressing ourselves through remix, according to Lawrence Lessig (2008), but he also points out that: “If you look at the top 100 things on YouTube or Google it’s not like it’s compelling art. There’s going to be a lot of questions about whether it’s compelling politics either.”601 So what is the way forward in this current critical and aesthetic impasse? Elwes suggested that instead of the chaos-creating techniques of scratch that saw artists “losing themselves in a circular argument with tel-tel-television”,602 what was required was “a confrontation with content and the formation of new narratives to replace the old”.603 The task for Post-Internet artists is a similar one, I suggest: to utilise the content of networked culture’s products of participation and find ways to contribute new, meaningful narratives that don’t simply reproduce the excess. 599 ibid., p. 38. 600 ibid., p. 39. 601 Lessig quoted in Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: Updated and with a New Afterword, p. 293. 602 Elwes, “Through Deconstruction to Reconstruction,” p. 163. 603 ibid., p. 163. 193 Aligning artists with fans again,604 I propose that Paul Booth’s “Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess” (2012) offers valuable insight for a new artistic critical strategy. It seems that, according to Booth, 21st Century fans are facing a similar predicament in regards to navigating excess. Considering fandom as an inherently transgressive act, Booth argues that fans of the US horror film Saw (2004) were faced with a film and film franchise that were characteristically excessive, leaving them with no recourse but to “resist the excess”.605 He explains: Fan filmmakers like those making fan-made trailers, parodies, and vignettes enact a new form of transgression—a move that is not satisfied with the typical gesture of the breaking of boundaries but one that calls into question that very expectation and model of transgression.606 In art terms, I propose this is found in new forms of collage that no longer aim to transgress the finite boundaries of broadcast era media power, or exceed the excess of the contemporary mediascape, but rather challenge the contemporary relevance of those earlier aesthetic strategies, by using them to craft the chaos and make sense of the excess. Serving to support my theoretical and aesthetic approach of articulated ambiguity, Booth suggests that Saw fans’ intersect homage with parody in a way that recalls Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of ‘double-voicedness’, producing a strategy that “articulates not just its position contra-Saw, but also pro-Saw”.607 Booth argues that by deliberately not going to too far, the fans’ approach “calls into question the nature of the transgressive act in a digital world. In other words, this ‘transgression of transgression’ creates a möbius-like parody of excess.”608 David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s interactive artwork The Outlands (2011)609 provides a key example of ‘parodying’ excess, through producing new narrative pathways within a taken-for-granted form of digital participation. As opposed to the “machine-gun-like edits”610 of scratch, their work interrupts an interactive gaming engine by removing its player’s capacity for violence—a form of resisting rather than 604 See Chapter 3. 605 Paul Booth, “Saw Fandom and the Transgression of Fan Excess,” in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of a Digital Age, eds. Ted Gournelos and David J Gunkel, (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 80. 606 ibid., p. 79. 607 ibid., p. 79. 608 ibid., p. 80. 609 David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s The Outlands (2011) won the Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2011, Art Gallery of NSW, 2011. 610 Wilcox quoted in Wyver, “A Poached Text,” p. 160. 194 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 57: A gallery visitor playing David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s interactive artwork The Outlands (2011), Art gallery of NSW. Screen grab from Art Gallery of NSW, Unguided Tours, YouTube, May 14, 2011. exceeding what Haines describes as the “shoot and kill mentality”.611 While the physical limits of a standard computer screen’s hardware are exceeded, the large- scale projection of the utopian virtual environment is more evocative of the spectacular cinematic experience than an immersion in frenzied interactivity. And, while the ‘dreamlike’ escapism of Hollywood film has been eschewed in recent discourse on participatory culture, the aim for The Outlands was: “to install the status of the dream-like state and bring it back into the fold of art that we really like, which is beauty, it’s contemplation, it’s all kinds of things. Not in a saccharine sense, but in a sense of depth and sublimity.”612 611 Haines and Hinterding in Art Gallery of NSW, Unguided Tours, YouTube, May 14, 2011, accessed August 3, 2014, 195 Like scratch, this work flirts with popular entertainment and pleasure, but it does so in a way that is conducive of critical reflection within our era of excess. Through a convergence of spectacular and digital aesthetics, it demonstrates how Post-Internet artists are forwarding an aesthetic strategy that doesn’t attempt to break the limits of the digital ‘universe’, but instead affects their own logic within the media flow—one that isn’t aggressive but affective: a softer sort of scratch. In the next section, I will expand on the roles of affect in text-based Post-Internet practices, to consider how contemporary manifestations of collage reorder and reorganise fragments in the production of narrative and drama. A New Concrete In an era of ‘emotional capitalism’, finding ways to critically reflect on digital affectivity is increasingly important. For Illouz in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007), the notion of emotional capital is intertwined with language—it has turned the “emotional self into a public text”,613 and has: … imbued economic transactions—in fact most social relationships—with an unprecedented cultural attention to the linguistic management of emotions, making them the focus strategies of dialogue, recognition, intimacy, and self- emancipation.614 In this section, I will propose that contemporary forms of linguistic collage, which update earlier aesthetic uses of language, such as concrete poetry, offer new ways of apprehending and comprehending the flow of intensity, affectivity and drama that I’ve argued specifically characterise the convergence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media in network culture. Post-Internet art practices, which take up the task of sifting and sorting the surfeit of sentiment, or more broadly manifest a convergence of affect and order, I will argue move beyond an historical binary that emerged in the 20th Century diminishing expression, sentimentality and subjectivity in creative works. 613 Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, p. 108. 614 ibid., p. 109. 196 While our perspectives ultimately diverge, in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Kenneth Goldsmith usefully illustrates this binary, engaging it throughout his argument that appropriation presents new possibilities for literature. Goldsmith appears to embrace self-expression in his notion of ‘uncreative writing’, but only when it takes place through process, rather than within literary content. “The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother’s cancer operation, 615 he writes, being deliberately (and perhaps ironically) dramatic, in order to highlight that his premise for ‘uncreative writing’ directly inverts what he perceives as a dominant, narrow view of ‘creative writing’— one he argues is defined by melodrama and subjectivity. Literature is “in a rut”616 he claims, due to the continuing historical legacy that creative writing should prioritise invention, imagination and the theatrical, over the mundane everyday. Aligning himself with Gertrude Stein—who writes (in the third person), “The use of fabricated words offended her, it was escape into imitative emotionalism”617— he disparages creative writing ‘how-to’ books for encouraging such emotive and fictional forms of writing, claiming they are “unsophisticated”, “clichéd”, and “coercing”.618 Yet, by inverting this model of creative writing in order to conceive of ‘uncreative writing’, his approach risks reinforcing the same simplistic binary. Looking to reinvigorate the field of literature, for instance, Goldsmith finds inspiration in 20th Century art practices that appropriated language and foregrounded its material qualities. He admires the mechanistic and logical approaches found in Conceptual Art and the Pop Art-inspired Concretists; movements which were reacting against the subjectivity and emotionalism intrinsically linked to traditional ideas of creativity, originality and authorship. Evoking a binary established by the Concretists, Goldsmith writes that they engaged ‘cool words’ in contrast to a poetry of expression and hedonism: “The emotional temperature of their concrete poems is intentionally kept process-oriented, controlled and rational”.619 Accordingly, the contemporary artists and writers Goldsmith advocates demonstrate a “dispassionate tact”; bringing the same ‘cool’, rational methodology to rearrangements of text. For instance, describing Alexandra Nemerov’s poem First My 615 Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, pp. 8-9. 616 ibid., p. 7. 617 ibid., p. 8. 618 ibid., pp. 7-8. 619 ibid., p. 59. 197 Motorola,620 in which she chronologically lists every brand she touches in a day, he observes, “There’s nothing here but brands. Nemerov is a cipher, a shell, a pure robotic consumer.”621 Here he is upholding an approach that explores not only the “deadening effects of globalisation on language”,622 but, similarly, the deadening effect of consumption on identity. ‘Uncreative writing’, Goldsmith argues, is ‘postidentity literature’; a perspective that aligns with mine, in the sense that I propose consumption is interweaved into our remixed subjectivities. I also agree with his claim that “the Web has, in effect, given a second life to concrete poetry”.623 However, Goldsmith’s focus on the Web as solely computational in form and nature is reductive of its complexity, ignoring the concretisation of feeling that constructs it. Instead, upholding what I perceive as an outdated binary, he celebrates a total loss of expressive subjectivity in favour of robotic and ‘pro-consumerist’ evocations of identity and artistic practices. In the digital age, “Our task”, he surmises, “is to simply mind the machines”.624 I aim to suggest that deferring back to the linguistic strategies of mid 20th Century art forms has stuck Goldsmith’s concept of ‘uncreative writing’ in a different rut. He admires Directory, for instance, Robert Fitterman’s poetic listing of the outlets in a shopping mall, which aims to be “as numbing, dead, and dull as the mall experience itself”.625 Yet, according to Bourriaud (2002), the ordered shop windows and ‘formal matrices’ that comprised the dominant aesthetic in the 1980s were displaced by the chaotic, flea market aesthetic back in the 1990s.626 The question must become, what does contemporary creative writing look like if it’s to reflect upon present-day networked culture. Today, I’ve argued that a convergence of the everyday and the spectacle takes place as a matter of course, and most visibly appears within YouTube. People are appropriating theatrical, melodramatic language within the scripts of their mundane lives, and ‘imitative emotionalism’ is commonplace within the affective escapism of self-remix. Moving into the 21st Century, I propose that contemporary artists, who are 620 For the full poem, see Kenneth Goldsmith, Pro-Consumerist Poet #1, Poetry Foundation, June 12, 2007, accessed August 7, 2014, 198 giving second life to concrete poetry, are doing so by reflecting this convergence, and interweaving these two preceding aesthetic strategies—affective excess and aesthetic order. We encounter a new concrete, I would argue, in the practices of Australian artist Grant Stevens and Korean artist duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, who both variously converge cliché, emotion and melodrama with the mundane everyday. Animating digital text, the artists’ authorial ‘hand’ and subjective ‘glue’ crafts affective narratives that interweave with an objective and mechanistic use of text and digital aesthetics. Stevens, for instance, appropriates and manipulates the clichés and conventions of popular culture’s shared languages. His digital videos spatialise words, constructing flowing linguistic mediascapes that loosely form narratives and themes, and tease out common desires, anxieties and pathologies. His work is markedly ambiguous; it warns that emotional oversharing risks dissolving into meaninglessness, and, at the same time, seeks authenticity in commonality and cliché. As the online exhibition text for his artwork Tranquility Falls (2013) observes: Apathy reigns, and possibilities for expressions of sincerity and authenticity seem to be eroded with every Like and LOL. How can we continue to seek and find moments of clarity, insight, affect and poetry within the haze? Perhaps as Don DeLillo says in his first novel, ‘Americana’, ‘There is substance to most clichés’.627 Stevens doesn’t reject or invert a warm, emotive language, but seeks it out and further heightens it. Moreover, where the Concretists, and Goldsmith in pursuit, rejected subjectivity as hedonistic, Stevens demonstrates its continued value in his work Crushing (2009), as he explains: The text for Crushing was actually based on my own experiences. As you know, most of my works use appropriated material, but that work was an attempt to make a sincere response to a breakup. Of course, my interest in making it wasn't just self-indulgence. Hopefully other people find points of 627 Grant Stevens: Tranquility Falls, Art Month pop up exhibition, online exhibition text, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, 2013, accessed May 8, 2013, 199 connection and commonality in there. That's one of the things I keep going back to—that our experiences can be simultaneously profound, epic and affective on the one hand, and generic, banal and clichéd on the other.628 As the text in Crushing floats whimsically across the screen, it artfully converges Julia Kristeva’s notion that love is a “flight of metaphors” 629 and Fredric Jameson’s description that the chaos of digital culture is constructed from “fragments in flight”.630 Stevens’s play with form and meaning presents the complexity of language and our emotional relationship to it, evoking how the most personal experience can speak to a universal one. We see this quality in the web-based text animations by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Viewed within the browser, words and symbols tend to flash rapidly in a scratch-style aesthetic, however, it is the quirky stories that unravel in time to funky jazz soundtracks, which demand their viewer’s attention. Akin to the genre of magic realism, unusual and dramatic narratives combine with a naturalistic style of narration and banal atmosphere. (Out of the Internet and) Into the Night (n.d.)631 is a key example, relaying a couple bickering as they drive out of the Internet, having burnt it down. Despite the extra-ordinary nature of their predicament, and cinematic references to road movies and Film Noir, it is the representation of daily drama that comes to the fore, as their dialogue is peppered with acute insights into the mundane tensions and frustrating miscommunications that afflict most romantic relationships. This work is genuinely funny, speaking to the all-too-familiar, and revealing the universal commonalities within intimate and imperfect human relationships. In relation to these complex, affective formalisations, Goldsmith’s proposition that “Words exist for the purpose of détournement: take the most hateful language you can find and neuter it; take the sweetest and make it ugly”632 seems decidedly clumsy. In this section, I’ve aimed to show why the language of emotion deserves to be valued, and further enlightened by Post-Internet practices: not only is it central to 628 Grant Stevens, email, May 13, 2013. 629 Kristeva quoted in Judy Gammelgaard, “Love, Drive and Desire in the Works of Freud, Lacan and Proust,” in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 92, issue 4, (August 2011), p. 963, accessed May 27, 2013 from ProQuest Central database. 630 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 78. 631 See (Out of the Internet and) Into the Night (n.d.), Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, accessed February 2, 2015, 200 the power dynamics of our affective digital economy, but it is equally meaningful and powerful as the centre of our shared human experience. Freezing Feeling In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric Jameson described television’s “incomprehensible and never-ending stream of keenings and mutterings”633 as “total flow”.634 Now, as that nonstop flow of dialogue is one we’re all contributing to via the constant connectivity of networked digital culture, the Post- Internet artist’s task, as I’ve argued throughout this chapter, is one of sifting, sorting and sense-making. Jameson, however, presented an entirely contrasting perspective: … whatever a good, let alone a great, videotext might be, it will be bad or flawed whenever such interpretation proves possible, whenever the text slackly opens up just such places and areas of thematization itself.635 For Jameson, total flow made critical distance “obsolete”.636 Artistic approaches that sort to identify and rearrange televisual fragments according to narratives or themes necessarily preclude the possibility of truthfully representing it, he explains: … anything which arrests or interrupts it will be sensed as an aesthetic flaw. The thematic moments … are just such moments of interruption, of a kind of blockage in this process: at such points a provisional ‘narrativisation’—the provisional dominance of one sign or logo over another, which it interprets and rewrites according to its own narrative logic.637 Perhaps worse than ‘flawed’, Jameson warns that themes are “corny”,638 a sense we also garner from Geert Lovink, as he verbalises a similar dilemma for comprehending the flows of social media: Social media are too big and fluid to research—not just because of the sheer size of users, heavy traffic, closed databases, and overkill of metadata. The 633 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 72. 634 ibid., p. 70. 635 ibid., p. 92. 636 ibid., p. 70. 637 ibid., p. 91. 638 ibid., p. 90. 201 Figures 58 & 59: Grant Stevens. Video stills, Crushing, 2009. 202 impossibility to reflect on them is also a given by their fluid nature, presenting themselves as helpful gatekeepers of temporary personalised information flows. Would we like to freeze dry them? ‘A day in the life of Twitter?’ What we need to do is develop ways to capture processual flows (which explains our obsession with info visualization and cool statistics).639 Certain theorists and arts practitioners are attempting to address this challenge through media visualisation, with the desire to represent big data in a non-reductive way. Lev Manovich, for instance, is currently investigating the field of media visualisation in his Software Studies Initiative, which launched in 2007, and aims to shift from representing media landscapes to representing “media universes”. 640 Distinct from typical information visualisation that “translates the world into numbers”, he explains that “it involves translating a set of images into a new image which can reveal patterns in the set”;641 a goal mirrored in the new forms of collage I’ve discussed in this chapter, which aim to visually make-sense of the media flow. While innovative and invaluable, the quantitative scale of his visualisations risk falling into the trap of simply re-presenting our everyday experience of excess, while their often graph-like presentation tends toward an aesthetics of informatics and infographics. More successful in representing the temporal experience of social media flow, from my perspective, are those artists who highlight the humanistic aspect of this digital excess. A key ‘realtime’ example is US artist Christopher Baker’s Murmur Study (2009), which he describes as “a live Twitter visualisation and archive”.642 The work monitors Twitter for common emotive utterances, such as argh, meh, grr and ooo, and prints them onto strips of paper that accumulate in piles within the gallery. However, an immersion in information is also successfully evoked in Grant Stevens’s Supermassive (2013), albeit through the representation of flows rather than a ‘realtime’ manifestation. As is explained in the work’s press release: The viewer is immersed in a moving, abstract environment of text clusters that refer to seemingly diverse and dissonant topics: self-affirmations, an Indian restaurant menu, the periodic table, and common prescription drugs. 639 Lovink, “A World Beyond Facebook: Introduction to the Unlike Us Reader,” p. 12. 640 Lev Manovich, Media Visualization, Manovich, 2011, accessed July 26, 2014, 203 As each cluster was sourced online, it bears the trace of how one navigates through online information.643 In contrast to Bourriaud’s image of the chaotic flea market, as “a temporary and nomadic gathering of precarious materials and products of various provenances”,644 the chaotic mass of Supermassive is thematised. Moreover, with echoes of Lev Manovich’s (2001) early proposition that new media “externalises and codifies the database of cultural elements existing in the mind”,645 Stevens’s work creates “a visualization of a mental landscape based on abstract, spatial representations of text”.646 In effect, this is returning Manovich’s recent theories on media visualisation back to a psychic realm. Figure 60: Grant Stevens. Installation view, Supermassive, 2013. 643 Grant Stevens: Supermassive, exhibition press release, La Louver Gallery, December 2012, accessed November 29, 2014, 204 Such works are aesthetic flaws—according to Jameson’s formulation. However I propose that they productively expand his argument, to account for a shifted mediascape in which the ‘total flow’ is not only mass-produced, but produced by us en masse. Jameson’s earlier solution to the inevitable disruption of its never-ending stream was to suggest that artists “foreground the process of production itself rather than its putative messages, meanings, or content”. 647 However, the new and expansive approaches to collage that I’m forwarding here, make visible not only their construction from numerous pieces of ‘digital junk’, but also treat the message as potent and important rather than putative—they highlight, as I’ve argued, that the message is the self as medium. Challenging Jameson’s pejorative stance on the use of thematisation and narrativisation, I would argue that it is precisely by analysing sentiments, freezing the social flow, and not only mining for moods but materialising them, that Post-Internet artists narrow down the digital affective excess, so that we might begin to critically comprehend it. Materialising the effects of Internet ubiquity within the gallery, or through object- based artworks, is a key characteristic of Post-Internet art. In his text “What’s Postinternet Got to do with Net Art?” (2013), for instance, Michael Connor attributes the term’s first usage to artist Marisa Olson in 2006, quoting her description of artistic process: What I make is less art ‘on’ the Internet than it is art ‘after’ the Internet. It's the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading. I create performances, songs, photos, texts, or installations directly derived from materials on the Internet or my activity there.648 In Frieze magazine’s (2013) survey on the definition of Post-Internet art, New Museum curator Lauren Cornell also contributes: ‘Post-Internet’ emerged as a bridge term, one that came to signify a discursive shift from thinking through the Internet as an emergent system to focusing on the broader absorption of its widespread entanglements ... [It] 647 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 95. 648 Michael Connor, What's Postinternet Got to Do with Net Art, Rhizome, November 1, 2013, accessed September 12, 2014. 205 Figure 61: Penelope Umbrico. 541795 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (Partial) 1/26/06 (detail), 2006- ongoing. seems to demarcate work that exists within a gallery but which has a relationship to a broader set of cultural conditions influenced by the web.649 Within the gallery, artists are moving away from early approaches to digital excess and media flow, such as complexly interactive technologies, innumerable narrative possibilities and multiplied computer interfaces. Artists still aim to create or evoke immersive environments, but participation may take place through more subtle forms of inhabitation or emotional engagement with the selected and reordered social scripts and the cultural signs. As artist Artie Vierkant writes in “The Image Object Post-Internet” (2010): 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.650 649 Wiley et al., “Beginnings + Ends,” accessed February 2, 2014. 650 Vierkant, The Image Object Post-Internet, accessed September 9, 2014. 206 Sincerity does not eclipse criticality in these new aesthetic forms of collage. Rather it is an approach that contrasts the historical, largely oppositional relationship that existed between artists and the consumer products and broadcast media material they appropriated. Instead Post-Internet artists, I would argue, are positioned on a spectrum of ‘savviness’ along with the fans and prosumers whose utterances, activities and affective objects they quote, sample and remix. Now, as artists are bringing together these fragments of feeling into the gallery, they produce spectacular new wholes. Inspiring her ongoing installation project Suns from sunsets from Flickr (2006-),651 for instance, US artist Penelope Umbrico discovered sunsets are the most popular subject matter on photo-sharing site Flickr. Despite covering gallery walls with vast numbers of these images in an overt materialisation of excess, Umbrico’s artwork first takes shape through acts of subtraction: she selectively downloads only the best suns, and then crops them from their sunsets. Printed as cheap photolab photos, they are adhered edge to edge in an epic collage of digital sunsets. While the work may fail to reproduce the sublime, just as each and every holiday snap inevitably fails to do, when we encounter its multitude of images we also encounter a multitude of people. That they shared something in those innumerable moments, that none of us can express in words and all of us try to in pictures, offers in itself a sublimely moving experience. Umbrico’s spectacular gallery presentations of clichéd sunset snaps are truly the sublimation of Jameson’s claim that themes are corny. But considering that humans are, by nature, corny, isn’t this freeze-drying of Flickr just about the most realistic representation of social flow as we might get? Throughout this chapter, I’ve argued that collage now seeks control, scratch has become softer, and concrete more sentimental. In this sense, perhaps the public displays of affection presented within the field of Post-Internet art are redressing Elwes’s (1985) observation that a “general fear of sentimentality, of appearing sincere, romantic or even remotely optimistic is apparent in much video art today”.652 651 In 2013, this work featured in a group exhibition titled The Big Picture, at Stills Gallery, Sydney, which I co-curated with Stills Gallery Director Bronwyn Rennex. 652 Elwes, “Through Deconstruction to Reconstruction,” p. 163. 207 By succeeding in aesthetically “making sense out of the glut”653 and “cutting through the clutter”,654 as Andrejevic challenges for critical theorists in the face of commercial counterparts, these heterogeneous artistic forms reintroduce to collage its capacity to incite reflexivity and criticality. At the same time, by variously appropriating and arousing the drama, affectivity and narrative cohesion found within forms of spectacular entertainment, like pastiche655 they evoke the historically constructed nature of emotion through emotion, as we experience it in our present, networked moment. 653 Andrejevic, “Critical Media Studies 2.0: An Interactive Upgrade,” p. 48. 654 Andrejevic, “Brain Whisperers: Cutting Through the Clutter with Neuromarketing,” p. 200. 655 Here I am referring back to my discussion of the artwork Hopelessly Devoted in Chapter 3, in which I reference Richard Dyer’s (2007) notion of pastiche. 208 209 Figure 62: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Love Story, 2010-2013. 210 ARTWORK Love Story Love Story (2010-2013) is a deliberately clunky and awkward installation. When it was displayed on two top-heavy, wall-mounted CRT TVs in The Social exhibition (2013), for instance, it evoked the type of waiting room or backwater motel reception that is as dated as its magazines. This banal aesthetic contrasts the work’s hyper- sentimental, saccharine, and evocative content. A never-ending kiss plays on the larger monitor—a fleeting yet iconic moment from the film Love Story (1970) that has been cut from its prestigious place in a YouTube DIY canon titled Best Movie Kisses- top10, 656 and pasted into this new scenario. The already-recycled footage is extended and exaggerated through editing to become an absurd, almost grotesque, public display of affection (PDA). Emanating from the monitor is a looped music sample taken from the kiss compilation. This 90s neoclassical pop song657 was chosen by the YouTube user as an alternative soundtrack to their compiled movie moments, unifying the various rom-com narratives and eras into a new, heterochronic and hyper-climatic moment. This YouTube user’s creative process is mirrored in the production of Love Story. The haunting, emotive melody has been edited into a continuous and noticeably repetitive loop that indefinitely suspends a sense of melodrama, and provides an appropriately sweet yet sinister accompaniment to the dramatically fluctuating sentiments that appear and disappear on the small screen. Uniform in pace and written as a first person monologue, words appear like an autocue or teleprompter—the machine that feeds lines to TV presenters who read directly into a camera. In Love Story, however, the words don’t overlay a blank background in perfectly formed sentences. Instead the text, rife with typos, irregular capitalisation and odd punctuation, appears at the horizon of an idyllic tropical sunset before disappearing into wispy clouds. In a different version, exhibited in the Love and Fear ARTBAR, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, 658 the text was animated in YouTube’s inbuilt online editor, so that each line fades into the next. In both cases, aesthetic and linguistic oddities are clues to the monologue’s construction—the singular ‘script’ is in fact an assemblage of many: a compilation of numerous YouTube users’ text-based PDAs within one epic montage of emotion. 656 This video has been removed from YouTube. 657 The track is Secret Garden, 'Adagio', (Mercury Records, 1996). 658 Love and Fear ARTBAR, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia, February 27, 2015. 211 Figure 63: Josephine Skinner. Installation view, Love Story (detail), 2010-2013. The work is the result of mining a specific genre of YouTube videos—love and heartbreak quotes, sayings and poems. These videos cover a vast spectrum of emotions and moods, from infatuation to heartbreak, depthless love to death-wishing hate. They include general compilations made by small commercial producers, like Best Love Quotes!659 and Poems about lost love,660 as well as highly personal love messages that are often dedicated to a current lover or recent-ex, including I miss you...661 and You Were My Everything.662 The sunset image and romantic melody, as well as the unsophisticated text animation in Love Story, recreates an aesthetic formula common to these videos. Text tends to be animated in the most rudimentary sense; behind it, misty lakes, silhouetted kissing lovers, and cartoon-esque broken hearts and thorny roses, often appear; and pop music plays along, resonating with the mood of the video’s ‘message’. 659 :), Best Love Quotes!, YouTube, April 22, 2008, accessed November 28, 2014, 212 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 64: Text excerpted from this YouTube video was used as source material in Love Story, 2010-13. Screen grab from My channel, Poems About Lost Love, YouTube, March 16, 2008. 213 The formulaic characteristics of this genre reflect the now-common accessibility to easy-to-use media production software and illustrate Lev Manovich’s (2008) double- edged critique of YouTube’s everyday media practices; the use of ready-made templates create a standardising of creativity, while at the same time, the aesthetic and linguistic variation within the content can be seen as a form of “tactical creativity”.663 In a similar approach to artists Language Removal Services, who remove words from their original context in order for us to see them afresh, Love Story distills the genre’s aesthetic variations into a single utopian image, continuous soundtrack, and consistent font. This unifies the text’s numerous sources, while revealing nuances within the language: repetitions of words, familiar yet oddly phrased aphorisms, and intermittent SMS-style abbreviations, are among the linguistic glitches that become more visible. Albeit through imperfections and irregularities, we begin to see how words are being rearranged, narratives personalised, and scripts rewritten, within this online language of love. Just as the YouTube users have rewritten the social scripts of common sayings and poems, Love Story does the same with theirs—creating in accumulation a ‘super- script’. The first person subject position produces singularity and meaning throughout the mass of heterogeneous sources, while also working to tease the implicit boundaries between audience and performer, and public and private space. In popular culture, an informal and direct type of talk is characteristic of television, and serves as a powerful representational strategy. It creates a false sense of intimacy and connection between the presenter and the audience, argue Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998): “as if a conversation was taking place between the people appearing on the set and those watching it.” 664 Eva Illouz (2007) also credits therapeutic-style interviews in television talk shows for contributing to the rise of emotional capitalism, arguing that they have naturalised the public narration of autobiography. In the visual arts, Vito Acconci has similarly utilised the confessional possibilities of video and performance to challenge the intimacy, trust and power dynamic between himself and his audiences. In Face-Off (1972), for example, Acconci is filmed listening to a tape-recorded monologue, in which he reveals sexually intimate 663 Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life,” p. 40. 664 Abercrombie and Longhurst, Audiences, p. 110. 214 secrets. While sharing this act of disclosure with his viewer, he simultaneously shuts it down, shouting over his ‘confession’ at the moments he wants to conceal.665 The paradoxical desire for self-revelation and concealment appears later in Gillian Wearing’s Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry, You Will Be In Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994), in which members of the public responded to her call-out, confessing their personal fantasies and secrets on video, while afforded the anonymity of masks. Love Story extends this exploration of intimacy, self-exposure and public confession to social media, in which traditional public and private boundaries are already confused, negotiated and tested. While Acconci and Wearing’s works distance their audience as voyeurs of the confessors, the viewer of Love Story is called into being within the narrative as they read its script. Like Lacan’s question of “Where is the moi?”666 the work’s first person monologue creates an ambiguous scenario: is the reader the narrating “I”, the person it directly addresses (in this case often a “U”), or a third subject—one which observes the other two? Here we find the ‘Borgesian conundrum’ that Mark Amerika (2012) argues is manifest in our cut-and-paste digital lifestyles. Beyond the duality of author and narrator, in Love Story the pseudo- autobiographical ‘I’ is created collectively from numerous first-person texts—it materialises what Amerika describes as “a mash-up of subjectivities”.667 Similar artistic approaches include US artist Cory Arcangel’s paperback Working On My Novel (2014), in which he strings together one tweet per page to create a collective story from users’ shared experiences of writing their own novels; and French artist Stéphane Querrec’s theatrically performed ‘super-monologues’, which take “the aesthetics and text of amateur confessions and condenses these to form a new rehearsed script”, creating “one universal voice”.668 However, while Arcangel’s task of writing the novel aligns him, not the book’s reader, with the multiple “I”s in the tweets, and Querrec’s non-professional actors perform his scripts, with Love Story the distance between the script and viewer is diminished because they are the ones that perform it, albeit in their own head. 665 See Face-Off: Vito Acconci, Video Data Bank, n.d., accessed July 27, 2014, 215 Figures 65 & 66: Josephine Skinner. (Above) installation view, Love Story (detail), 2010-2013; (Below) screen grab from the making of a YouTube Video editor version of Love Story, 2015. 216 Love Story’s script, in this sense, inhabits the reader’s internal monologue, as much as they inhabit it. This means that imaginatively adopting the pseudo- autobiographical “I”, also means adopting all its emotions and anxieties. Like the YouTube users who personalised their romantic social scripts, the reader might fleetingly find they are doing the same thing: inhabiting, customising and remixing this super-script to make sense of it within their own life stories. In Love Story, therefore, the self ‘resides’ in performance—an idea Jurgenson and Rey (2013) draw from Ernest Goffman, as they explore how the revelatory nature of social media means “high degrees of privacy and publicity are enacted together”.669 Each of my artwork projects discussed in this thesis focus on different ways that YouTube makes visible Goffman’s idea that ‘back stage’ scripts construct our performed identities. Goffman’s rhetoric of scripts, Jurgenson and Rey explain, stems from the way we “often present idealized versions of the self, which requires a great deal of work and preparation beyond what is visible in the performance itself.”670 The formal construction of Love Story mirrors this process. For example, the new, super- script of Love Story was designed in just the same way as Goffman describes a specific instance of a ‘back stage script’: To give a radio talk that will sound genuinely informal, spontaneous, and relaxed, the speaker may have to design his script with painstaking care, testing one phrase after another, in order to follow the content, language, rhythm, and pace of everyday talk.671 Like the commercial marketing processes for digitally gathering ‘emotional intelligence’, to create Love Story YouTube was manually ‘mood mined’ for love and heartbreak videos that contained certain linguistic motifs, such as stars, tears, and pain, as well as for narrative themes like promises of eternal love and fantasies of revenge. Transcribing the selected videos permitted a further stage of ‘sentiment analysis’; a process in which excerpts were variously chosen for their hyperbolic qualities, the cheesiness or absurdity of their allegories, and to satisfy more logistical constraints, such as a consistency of tense and subject position. 669 Jurgenson and Rey, “The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity,” p. 67. 670 ibid., p. 65. 671 Goffman quoted in ibid., p. 65. 217 Lastly, there was an exercise in sense making—the construction of a cohesive ‘character arc’ and narrative flow that segue ways through a gamut of emotions, from being in love, through paranoia to hate, before a return to infatuation. The aim: a near-seamless, never-ending loop. However, with the retained linguistic imperfections, and the YouTube users’ credits on the room sheet or wall label, Love Story make this process visible—exposing the “invisible identity”672 Jurgenson and Rey write belies the “calculated spontaneity”673 at work in public interactions. This collective love story simultaneously points to the way our performed self-remixes are carefully pieced together, and to the socially shared nature of a standardised language of love. For Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1979) one downside of ‘democratic’ communication674 is that with it “Love is downgraded to romance”.675 Emotions, they had observed, were being standardised along with culture. YouTube’s collection of love and heartbreak quotes and sayings takes this one step further, as the ‘democratisation’ of media production converges with two other democratisations: of pain and of romance. Illouz (2007) writes that emotional capitalism tells us we have the right to tell our story, quoting art critic Robert Hughes, who suggests that we live in an “increasingly confessional culture, one in which the democracy of pain reigns supreme. Everyone may not be rich and famous but everyone has suffered.”676 As we see mirrored in the character arc of Love Story, suffering not only underlies the right to narrate one’s life story, but its narrative construction. Echoing the way a scriptwriter would employ suffering in a character arc, Illouz writes: What helps one rewrite the story of his or her life as a therapeutic narrative is the goal of the story … It structurally makes one understand one’s life as a generalized dysfunction, in order precisely to overcome it.677 In “Love, Drive and Desire in the Works of Freud, Lacan and Proust” (2011), Judy Gammelgaard highlights how emotional pain also defines the ‘democratisation’ of romance: 672 ibid., p. 65. 673 ibid., p. 65. 674 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 122. 675 ibid., p. 140. 676 Hughes quoted in Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, p. 57. 677 ibid., p. 52. 218 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Figure 67: The looping, never-ending kiss comprising one channel in Love Story 2010-13, was excerpted from a now removed YouTube video titled Best Movie Kisses-top10. This screen grab of search results for the term ‘Best Movie Kisses-top10’, demonstrates the commonality of such user- created ‘Top 10’ compilation videos. 219 What started as a myth about passionate love created through renunciation has, in the words of de Rougement, been democratized and has thereby lost its aesthetic and spiritual dimensions. Thus the paradox has arisen that we today seek passion and unhappy, unattainable love, but only as a fiction, never as a fate we strive for in our own lives.678 Mirroring the narrative arc of Love Story, Denis De Rougement’s Love in the Western World (1939/1983) has been described as "The History of the Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Love Affair."679 In it, De Rougement argues that the idea of love as “a dream of potential passion” 680 derives from 12th Century fictional literature. The idea of passionate love has become socially ‘democratised’, he argues, having been absorbed into popular culture, as Hollywood movies attest, and is now embedded in our desiring, private realities. Standardised through the spectacle, and inextricably linked to suffering, his notion of unattainable passion reflects the dualities within Love Story of private reality and social fiction, desire and failure, love and pain.681 However, while according to De Rougement, “Whatever turns into a reality is no longer love,”682 Love Story suggests that in an era of prosumers—when imagination is a social media practice—the “dream of potential passion” may no longer be a just a dream. What might it mean, for instance, when the fiction of passion is written into real life stories and shared within the collective imagination of YouTube, like the following romantic idiom: U r my dream come true683 Excerpted from YouTube user thelegend10’s personally dedicated video How i feel about U, and inserted into the super-monologue of Love Story, we might imagine that 678 Gammelgaard, “Love, Drive and Desire in the Works of Freud, Lacan and Proust,” p. 967. 679 Denis De Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), book summary. 680 ibid., p. 283. 681 The looping kiss, sampled from the movie Love Story (1970), is a classic example of De Rougement’s notion of ill-fated passionate love. When the female lead Jenny dies the movie’s love affair is brought to a tragic end. Due to an external obstacle rather than a depleting passion, however, the ‘dream’ of a never-ending romantic love prevails. 682 ibid., p. 34, italicised original. This is an excerpt of a quote by De Rougment from French medieval literature, retelling the legend of Tristan and Iseult. De Rougement argues that this tragic-romantic tale influenced the Western idea of love. 683 thelegend10, How I Feel About U, YouTube, January 3, 2008, accessed November 29, 2014, 220 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figures 68 & 69: Text excerpted from these YouTube videos was used as source material in Love Story, 2010-13. Screen grabs (above) from thelegend10, How I Feel About U, YouTube, January 3, 2008; (below) from Baileyhamster, Sweet Love Quotes - Angel of Mine, YouTube, May 9, 2010. 221 it is not only the user’s words, but also their sentiment, that is concretised by digital media—in this sense it is YouTube, more than their lover, that makes this user’s dream come true. However, this clichéd romantic rhetoric presents another iteration of the double-bind of imitation and individuation, sameness and difference, that I’ve highlighted throughout my discussion of the Postproduction of Self. Like the globalised language of emotion in pop music, YouTube’s love and heartbreak quotes and sayings simplify complex relationships and standardise profound emotion, while equally allowing us to express our own individual versions and communicate commonalities of desire, failure and hope. In its collective formalisation of this YouTube genre, Love Story aims to affectively heighten the incongruous convergence of heartfelt emotion and linguistic formulas, templates and codes—and to make explicit the locus where social system and sentiment meet. From the pessimistic perspective, Love Story’s sad tale is one of unrequited love, and the inevitable failure of a happy ending. In this sense, it evokes Illouz’s (2007) warning that: … we have cultural techniques to standardize intimate relationships, to talk about them and manage them in a generalized way, which weakens our capacity for nearness, the congruence between subject and object.684 This plays out within the artworks’ source material, in which YouTube users not only use standard sayings to express their personal sentiments, but upload ones that have already been shared. For instance, Baileyhamster’s dedicated video Sweet love quotes – Angel of Mine states: I matched each star with a reason for loving you. I was doing great until I ran out of stars… 685 684 Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, p. 112. 685 Baileyhamster, Sweet Love Quotes - Angel of Mine, YouTube, May 9, 2010, accessed August 8, 2014, 222 While just a few months earlier, Pavan4everUrz dedicated to a lover a close variation: I was matching a star to each thing I love about you, I was doing great until I ran out of stars686 When personalised professions of love are communicated, paradoxically, through near-rote-like repetition, it seems these modes of ‘self expression’ undo themselves. Here again we find the caméra-stylo’s potential to both express and delimit. In Love Story’s source material linguistic conventions are breached, and the poetic products of popular culture have been put to work as tools for expression, rather than treated as the holy ‘creation’ of a single author’s pen. But the extent to which these interventions are conscious negotiations of the limits and potentialities of love’s language is ambiguous—certainly many users appear more rueful at the state of their love lives, than about being reduced to cliché. However, while it is a cliché that clichés are clichés because they are true, these formulaic online expressions are powerful and perplexing, precisely because they reveal at once a vast disparity between ‘cheesy’ superficiality and the authentic depth of shared affectivity. Love Story’s super-script reveals this paradox. It exaggerates the repetitive nature of standardised romantic language, and uses it as linguistic glue to join the excerpts into a flowing narrative. In so doing, it heightens the sense that what is highly personal and deeply felt is diminished when expressed through the same relatively small pool of recycled adjectives, analogies and platitudes. As we’ve already noted, a shared system of signs is the necessary foundation for all social interaction, and is the material with which we continually self-remix. But when it comes to sampling the semiotics of love, this fact seems incompatible with the profundity of the subject—it feels odd that remixing love’s language should be “as common as dust”.687 686 Pavan4everUrz, Beautiful Heart Touching Lines, YouTube, January 31, 2010, accessed August 8, 2014, 223 Figure 70: Josephine Skinner. Video still, Love Story, 2010-2013 (YouTube Video Editor version, 2015). However, rather than simply presenting a lazy critique of the shallow feeling fostered by the Internet, Love Story also reminds us that the language of love is, in all its forms, inherently inadequate. As Gammelgaard writes, “Love’s language not only resists scientific discourse but remains an oddity that evades our fumbling attempts to speak it.”688 In the same way that Umbrico’s Suns from sunsets from Flickr, suggests it is those experiences that resist easy communication that drive a seemingly universal urge to keep trying, Love Story’s social script also makes visible our universal desire to communicate the inexpressible—feelings of love, and unfortunately, as it turns out, loathing. Making explicit the standardisation of love’s language, the cultural construction of romance, and our overreliance on easy-to-use templates of feeling, Love Story might well suggest that the aphorism, “some people would never have fallen in love had they not heard of it first”,689 may well be true. But it also suggests that, when that 688 Gammelgaard, “Love, Drive and Desire in the Works of Freud, Lacan and Proust,” p. 963. 689 ibid., p. 967. 224 same pre-designed notion of passion converges with our individual realities, the love story is unavoidably rewritten anew. As Pavan4everUrz sagely shares: Love is like playing piano, first you must learn to play by the rules, then you forget the rules and play from your heart690 The blurring of lived reality and popular fiction in our remixed and rewritten love stories is exaggerated further in Love Story, through a play with forms of temporality. For Fredric Jameson (1991), the fictive quality of cinema and television programs is due to an accelerated temporality and a foreshortening of reality, where as video art “is not fictive”,691 he categorically argues, and instead demonstrates the quality of ‘real time’. Now video works often utilise fictive time, or, like Christian Marclay’s masterpiece The Clock (2010), converge fictive and ‘real time’. Love Story also plays between both; on one monitor, it jams cinematic fictive time into a never-ending ‘real time’ kiss, while on the other monitor, it constructs a cinematic foreshortening of temporality as the ‘real life’ experiences comprising the super-script cover a spectrum of extreme emotions and relationship scenarios, all within a condensed loop. What Love Story serves to show is that an amplification of emotion and a shift in temporality is no longer only indicative of cinema’s fictive time, but is found in our everyday online experiences. According to Sherry Turkle in Alone Together (2011), an exaggerated and expedited experience of affect is a characteristic of virtual reality. “Time and relationships speed up. Emotions ramp up”,692 she explains. Turkle refers to the experiences of Maria, a Second Life player, who says “a lot of culminating points are compressed into an hour in the world … What you hear from people is “I want to [virtually] kill myself, I want to get married, I am in love, I want an orgy.” 693 Love Story’s narration of the most extreme romantic emotions and construction of fictive time echoes Maria’s description that: “The time from meeting to 690 Pavan4everUrz, Beautiful Heart Touching Lines, accessed August 8, 2014. See YouTube- ography. 691 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 75. 692 Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, p. 217. 693 ibid., p. 218. 225 falling in love to marrying to passionate breakups ... that all can happen in very short order”.694 Within YouTopia, as Love Story demonstrates, people attempt to make the dream of passion into a reality. They not only re-write and inhabit the emotional social scripts of popular fiction, but also postproduce their desires and disappointments—adding that extra bit of melodrama with moving soundtracks and utopian images. The expanded processes of mood mining and sentiment analysis that constitute this explication of the Postproduction of Self are particularly evident in Love Story. Taking quite the opposite approach of avoiding the aesthetic flaws that Jameson claimed are the essence of “bad videotexts”, the work foregrounds thematisation, standardisation and classification, not only in its own construction, but also in the digital content of our self-remixing lives. As a total flaw, Love Story instead captures Jameson’s description of the desire to make sense of total flow: … do we try to turn it back into a story of some kind? … Or, at some more critically sophisticated level, do we at least try to sort the material out into thematic blocks and rhythms and repunctuate it with beginnings and endings, with graphs of rising and falling emotivity, climaxes, dead passages, transitions, recapitulations and the like?695 So, while it may only present one tiny slice of the endless excesses of social media’s flow, it does speak to our psychological processes in the face of them, as well as the enduring fiction of romance within our individual life stories. As a spectacular ‘new whole’, it offers a master version of the romantic social scripts that our online over- sharings together reveal. Inscribing its reader within this passionate journey of collective love, loss and redemption, Love Story asks: are we endlessly rewriting the narratives of popular culture, or are they rewriting us? 694 ibid., p. 217. 695 Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 79. 226 Figures 71 & 72: Josephine Skinner. Love Story, 2010-2013, (YouTube Video Editor version, 2015); (above) installation view, Love and Fear ARTBAR, Museum of Contemrpoary Art, 2015; (below) video still. 227 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figures 73 & 74: Josephine Skinner. (Above) source material for Take My Breath Away, 2011-2013. Screen grab from Yee Lee Moua, evo playing cover song “take my breath away”, YouTube, June 16, 2009; (below) installation view, Take My Breath Away (detail), 2011-13. 228 CONCLUSION Fiction's swing toward reality creates gaps in the spectacle … 696 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (2002) Banal Spectacles: The Use of You Looking through Michael Shamberg’s eyes at YouTube’s cultural databank of remixed ‘video-selves’ and ‘video grammars’, we might imagine that his 1971 vision for guerilla television has now been realised: When we develop super-sophisticated access models we’ll be able to re-cycle all of man’s past data to fit useful, contemporary contexts. At that point we’ll have a true information ecology.697 Throughout this thesis, I’ve argued that such ‘contemporary contexts’ are networked culture, emotional capitalism, and Post-Internet art, and that the recycling of users’ affective videos is useful when it allows us to critically reflect on the ‘message’ their content reveals—the significance of You in YouTube. Whether YouTube presents a ‘true’ information ecology, however, remains up for debate. This discussion of the Postproduction of Self provides a 2.0 upgrade of Bourriaud’s Postproduction (2002), suggesting that the most ‘truthful’ portrait of our current information ecology is found in articulating both sides of the Media Studies 2.0 discourse, and highlighting the ambiguities at play within participatory culture and the practice of self-remix. My contribution lies in expanding thought and practice in relation to the artistic ‘turn away’ from appropriating professional media productions and rescripting the scenarios of ‘passive’ consumption. Now our task, I’ve argued, is in apprehending and comprehending prosumer culture, and specifically the everyday postproduction of lives, imaginations and fantasies found on YouTube. Uniquely, I have articulated how the changing use of collage to create spectacular new ‘wholes’ from such digitally mediated expressions of affect is a creative strategy distinctive of 696 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 52. 697 Shamberg quoted in Merrin, “Still Fighting 'the Beast': Guerrilla Television and the Limits of YouTube,” pp. 106-107. 229 postproduction art 2.0. Framing this claim, I have argued that YouTube is a heterotopic space—a YouTopia—in which our banal realities join with not one, but two, utopias: the spectacle and digital utopianism. Rather than dismissing ‘old’ media, I present YouTube’s paradoxical space as a microcosm of Internet culture as whole. As Simon Reynolds writes, the Internet places “the remote past and the exotic present side by side. Equally accessible, they become the same thing: far, yet near … old yet now.”698 An artistic paradigm for the present moment, I propose, must explore how old and now converge in evermore complex ways—not only in everyday media mash-ups and political parodies, but also as the convergence of private desires and social fictions. The flow of fragments from spectacular media and consumer culture traverses our lives and minds as much as transmedia platforms. Within the garbage, junk and throwaway material of YouTube’s feeling feedback, I’ve proposed that we find an active and social form of the broadcast era’s emotional escapism. This new mode of escape better accounts for the complex dynamic between life, social media and the spectacle than the idea we’re all political activists in training. My argument lies in the proposition that having access to the tools and digital platforms that allow us to create and share our own productions doesn’t sidestep the daily experiences of lack and desire that have long informed our relationship with media. Within the spectrums of dreariness to intensity, fragmentation to community, the shared desires for ‘what could be’ and the lacks and inadequacies of ‘what is’, materialise and dissipate with every YouTube search. At the crux of YouTube’s content, escapism is more visible, more mediated, and more complex than it was in the broadcast era. Now we don’t relinquish our bodies for immersion in the world of moving image, but instead project ourselves into it; we don’t retract from social interaction but seek it; and we don’t imagine better lives but put them into practice as we inhabit utopian narratives—whether they’re the ‘good’ type of pop, or just plain trashy. Taking digitised ‘suburban’ fantasies seriously—as a theoretical subject and artwork source material—I’ve questioned the romance of remix as an inherently liberating form of creative expression. Significantly expanding present discourse on remixed identities and online performance, I’ve shown that being both subjects and objects of networked media creates a present-day scenario that is as liberating as it is 698 Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past, p. 85. 230 problematic. Our daily selecting and sampling from social fictions, and our remediation of self to screen, I’ve argued, is driven by a desire for emotional intensity and the feeling of commonality, as much, if not more, than expressing resistance, or even difference, to the status quo. Looking more deeply at our video-selfies than the simplistic notion of self-love, I’ve argued that transforming the self into a mutable media object may be an expression of self-dissatisfaction, and an attempt to address an everyday experience of lack. As the cultural mentality of DIY therapy converges with ‘democratised’ media production, authenticity is to be forever attained through identity alterations and multiplications, rather than a static state of self-acceptance. As a contemporary version of ‘therapeutic’ self-reflexivity, which objectifies our desires and concretises our dreams, digitised self-remix presents a new aesthetics of narcissism—one characterised by perpetual self-change, and the social sharing of new versions of postproduced ‘true selves’. More than providing platforms for self-presentation, I’ve argued that social media sites offer solutions to a digitally fragmented and isolated daily life. Now, the broadcast era’s utopian promise for a feeling of community is not irrelevant but reformed in our post-broadcast ecology, as the rhetoric of digital utopianism offers mobile-friendly access to meaningful social connection. Yet, within collective formalisations of ‘virtual’ communities, I’ve explored another ambiguity—are we really uniting in new, democratic and emotionally fulfilling ways, or are we simply connected by the digital scripts of shared meta-data and tags, and the collective recourse to the emotional language of commercial pop culture? Has the digital caméra-stylo freed us to be more expressive, and more creative, or are we just re-writing ourselves in rote- like iterations of identity? While social media platforms promise to unite us more profoundly than their ‘old’ media predecessors, I’ve shown that, ironically, they serve to make more visible that it is often the affective language of spectacular entertainment that continues to unify us; if not literally through its globalised scripts and lyrics, then through our desire for the intensification and simplification of our affective day-to-day life. Returning ourselves to the screen creates a ‘cybernetic loop’, not only as a troubling submission to networked surveillance, as Andrejevic argues, but in a looping of media validation and desire. YouTube, I’ve argued, is the perversion of the 231 machinery of rejoinder; the majority of us don’t use it to reclaim power from the utopian spectacle but to get closer to it—to intensely become part of it. Among the gamut of social media sites, YouTube’s audiovisual archive is uniquely vital for making visible—making visual—this blurring of self and spectacle, and the ambiguities that arise between individuation and imitation within its collective imagination. Mirroring emerging marketing strategies that aim to capitalise on the emotional glut, I’ve argued that identifying cliques and niches of self-remixed sampling, and aesthetically formalising this digital affect, is a viable critical and artistic strategy to begin making sense of the surfeit of sentiment, and to better understand the relationship between individual desires and collectively shared fantasies. As Stephen Duncombe writes in Dream: Re-Imagining Politics in an Age of Fantasy (2007): It is not the job of progressives to condemn popular fantasy and desire. It is our job to pay careful attention to them, learn from them, and perhaps—God forbid!—even enjoy them, ourselves. Then carjack these fantasies and drive them somewhere else.699 My form of carjacking takes shape in the accumulation and spectacularisation of banal fantasies; heightening YouTube’s public displays of affection, and turning them into what Duncombe terms ‘ethical spectacles’. Collaged from old analogue TVs and already-recycled 1970s soap operas, fan performances of movie soundtracks and video comments threads, these illusory ‘new wholes’ are unified by the shared affective language of pop culture like social media micro-versions of Debord’s insidious spectacle; as “society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification”.700 At the same time my artworks highlight how the spectacle’s scripts, lyrics and narratives offer genuine forms of escapism and connection, allowing YouTube users to make their everyday lives feel a little bit closer to their dreams and a little bit less lonely. 699 Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, (New York: The New Press, 2007), p. 77. 700 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 12. 232 Bourriaud (2002) suggests that postproduction art offers escape from collective scenarios: Just as through psychoanalysis our unconscious tries, as best it can, to escape the presumed fatality of the familial narrative, art brings collective scenarios to consciousness and offers us other pathways through reality.701 Its 2.0 upgrade, I suggest, offers a slightly different type of escape: one that embraces again the immersion, drama and affective intensity of broadcast era entertainment. Transforming banal and fragmented daily experiences into micro- spectacles encourages us to stop participating for a second, and to watch the carnival that is YouTube, that is networked culture. After all, it is not only YouTube but our altermodern present moment that is, according to Bourriaud, “both heterochronic and heterotopic”.702 Fans and artists, who are now one and the same thing, need to be wary not only of how we use mass-produced social fictions, but of the way we utilise that use. In postproducing the new social forms of digitally networked culture—the proliferation of mash-ups, alternative narratives and affective oversharing—we must avoid simply adding to the myriad versions, or attempting to exceed the excess. As if preempting remix culture, Adorno and Horkheimer presciently warn: The promise that a work of art will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfillment lies in their aesthetic derivatives.703 So, too, by spectacularly formalising collectively shared desires my artworks might appear guilty of becoming exactly what the Situationists critiqued. According to Anselm Jappe: … the Situationist criticism of the work of art is curiously reminiscent of the psychoanalytical account, according to which such productions are the sublimation of unfulfilled wishes.704 701 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 46. 702 Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), p. 16. 703 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1979), p. 130. 704 Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, p. 36. 233 Figure 75: Patrick Pound, Portrait of the Wind (detail), 2012. 234 Offering a way out of this artistic bind, however, Adorno and Horkheimer offer: “The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise.”705 So, too, for Judith Butler, critical possibilities arise when a social script becomes “a de-formity”;706 “A failed copy”. 707 Failure, then, is perhaps the most hopeful of strategies. Heightening and exaggerating the paradoxical scenario of YouTopia—that both the spectacle and collective intelligence unify individual imaginations through commercial popular culture—my artworks demonstrate that in YouTube both utopias are achieved and, therefore, necessarily fail. As deformed spectacles, my artworks aim to make visible what may not be apparent in a single YouTube video, but becomes clear in the accumulative effect of collage— all our efforts at self-reinvention, our attempts to escape banal reality, our affective over-sharings, are materialisations of an essential and insatiable desire to feel more. Addressing the Situationist critique, they simultaneously sublimate and reveal the immaterial, communal lack—a lack that is apparent only in collective-narratives, super-scripts, shared-scenarios. YouTube, and other social media platforms, may not yet be succeeding in doing much more than collecting and collating digitised perceptions, fantasies and gestures, but we can still creatively search their tags for a truth, albeit one best formalised through fiction. In sifting through these search results, we glimpse that there is a common affective language that transcends the spoken tongue, and may even transcend the limited, over-imitated commercial pop culture that so often mediates our emotions. As Australian artist Patrick Pound’s Portrait of the Wind (2013) beautifully attests, it is only through the assemblage of old analogue snaps in which people are caught by a gust of breeze that we can see the invisible. 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RCA by infiniteincongruence Uploaded on Jul 5, 2007 C.R.T Smash With Surprise- 100th VIDEO! by SpeakerFreak95 Uploaded on Jun 14, 2011 TV cathode ray tube explodes by RODALCO2007 Uploaded on Jan 21, 2012 TV overvolting and smoking on 480 Volts by RODALCO2007 Uploaded on Dec 25, 2010 Lighting a TV on Fire by DangerDan2 Uploaded on Apr 24, 2011 Music “BLUE IMAGES: from the “The Young And The Restless” Sound Track album (1974) by Bpkalamazoo Uploaded on Aug 2, 2010 Dallas – The best Music Score (Larry Hagman) by Vincent1039 Uploaded on Dec 30, 2011 Dallas Bobby returns by Thore Spolwing Published on Jul 30, 2013 Robert & Holly – Luke’s Back from the Dead Part 1 by EMMAFAN01 Uploaded on Sep 17, 2007 262 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 78: Source material for The end, 2013. Screen grab from RODALCO2007, TV cathode ray tube explodes, YouTube, January 21, 2012. DOCUMENTATION Image Index Pages 58, 63, 64, 66 USB 1. The End & Needed To Talk—Installation Documentation, 2013 Filmed at The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 27 November – 14 December 2013. Duration: 2:12 minutes. Installation footage: Nick Garner, Rococo Productions. Edited: Josephine Skinner. Copyright the artist. This project was supported by Arts NSW's NSW Artists' Grant Scheme, a devolved funding program administered by the National Association of the Visual Arts on behalf of the NSW Government. The project received support through the 2013 Firstdraft Emerging Studio Residency Program. 263 NEEDED TO TALK, 2013 Vinyl text installation, reused YouTube comments thread YOUTUBE SOURCE MATERIAL (Getting Dumped)|What to Do After (Getting Dumped) by jaydeman23 Uploaded on November 26, 2008 DOCUMENTATION Image Index Pages 58, 66, 70, 236 USB 1. The End & Needed To Talk—Installation Documentation, 2013 Filmed at The end, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW, 27 November – 14 December, 2013. Duration: 2:12 minutes. Installation footage: Nick Garner, Rococo Productions. Edited: Josephine Skinner. Copyright the artist. 264 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figures 79 & 80: (Above) source material for Needed to talk, 2013. Screen grab from the comments thread responding to jaydeman23, (Getting Dumped)|What to Do After (Getting Dumped), YouTube, November 26, 2008; (below) during the installation of Needed to talk, 2013, Firstdraft Gallery, NSW. 265 THE END PROMOS: IT’S OVER & IT WAS ALL A DREAM, 2013 4:3 videos, sound, reused YouTube content YOUTUBE SOURCE MATERIAL Dallas Promo Collection (1978-91) by JAldridge86 Uploaded on Apr 28, 2011 Dallas Finale Promo (4-26-1991) by JAldridge86 Uploaded on Nov 12, 2009 DALLAS – Season 9 (1985-86) Cliffhanger (Pam Wakes Up) by Keith Norman Uploaded on Mar 7, 2010 Dallas : Bobby Dies by DallasJR4Ever Uploaded on Aug 22, 2007 (vintage?) Blaupunkt CRT TV Smash HD (GOOD IMPLOSION!!) by TheCousinsSmash Published on Nov 3, 2011 TV overvolting and smoking on 480 Volts by RODALCO2007 Uploaded on Dec 25, 2010 Huge Console TV Implosion by bluesmokeproductions Uploaded on Jan 8, 2012 Funny TV Implosion by StevenNovak Uploaded on Jan 29, 2011 It is hard to break a TV screen by mopatin Uploaded on Dec 30, 2011 DOCUMENTATION Image Index Page 61 USB 1. The End Promo: It’s Over, 2013 Duration: 30 seconds. Copyright the artist. 2. The End Promo: It Was All A Dream, 2013 Duration: 30 seconds. Copyright the artist. 266 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 81: Source material for The end Promos, 2013. Video still from JAdridge86, Dallas Promo Collection (1978-91), YouTube, April 28, 2011. 267 ALONE TOGETHER, 2013 21 looped videos, stereo sound, CRT TVs, street found furniture, reused YouTube content YOUTUBE SOURCE MATERIAL Soul Mate Connections Part 1 Uploaded on May 14, 2011 by southpaw124 Loving Yourself by Louise Hay Pt 1 Uploaded on Oct 22, 2009 by debpaulmal Loving Yourself by Louise Hay Pt 2 Uploaded on Oct 22, 2009 by debpaulmal Wayne Dyer – Power of Intention pt 1 Complete Version Uploaded on Aug 8, 2011 by boqueroningles Presence in Relationships – www.eckharttolle.com Uploaded on Apr 14, 2008 by EckhartTeachings Increasing Self-Love - Affirmations by Cassendre Amethyste Rah Xavier Uploaded on Mar 20, 2010 by Cassendre Xavier “Source Connection” Recorded Positive Affirmations Uploaded on Sep 23, 2011 by Jesse Pender DOCUMENTATION Image Index Pages 21, 114, 117, 120, 122 USB 1. Alone Together—Installation Documentation, 2013 Filmed at The Social, Campbelltown Art Centre, 2 February – 13 March, 2013. Duration: 1:50 minutes. Installation footage: Nick Garner, Rococo Productions. Edited: Nick Garner and Josephine Skinner. Copyright the artist. 268 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 82: Source material for Alone Together, 2013. Video still from debpaulmal, Loving Yourself by Louise Hay Pt 1, YouTube, October 22, 2009. 269 HOPELESSLY DEVOTED, 2011-2013 Series of 5 HD videos, stereo sound, reused YouTube content YOUTUBE SOURCE MATERIAL YouTube Users (left to right) Hopelessly Devoted mlgharlaar2 lowflyer55 Louieeee Take My Breath Away TPBoy llnednol yee673 InnocentMalin ElonDaVocalist LittleDragon259a Lozekinz Intellichick A Whole New World haroldwreid katsikides zym3ths serbie17 aznvietmunkey810 The Time of My Life stephenpeters1 rredsox92 derekmok Can’t Take My Eyes Off You BrokenConcept KaraokeAlert CamiCalamity eerteep jazztake2007 270 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 83: Source material for Hopelessly Devoted, from Hopelessly Devoted, 2010-2013. Video still from lowflyer55, Hopelessly Devoted, Olivia Newton John, cover-Jonathan Finch, YouTube, May 6, 2007. DOCUMENTATION Image Index Pages 26, 162, 165, 166, 168, 171, 173, 174, 177, 228 USB 1. Hopelessly Devoted—Show Reel, 2013 Includes artwork excerpts and installation documentation filmed at The Social, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2 February – 13 March, 2013. Duration: 2:19 minutes. Installation footage: Nick Garner, Rococo Productions. Edited: Josephine Skinner. Copyright the artist. 2. Hopelessly Devoted—Full Series, 2011-13 Duration: 19:07 minutes. Copyright the artist. 271 LOVE STORY, 2010-2013 2 looped videos, sound, reused YouTube content YOUTUBE SOURCE MATERIAL Monitor 1 I love you – Romantic Poem "Take My Breath Away" Poem by Michael Livingston Uploaded on Feb 19, 2011 by Musicplayer014 Uploaded on Nov 19, 2010 by lilreb37 Love Poems Beautiful heart touching lines Uploaded on Sep 29, 2006 by Chintamenie Uploaded on Jan 31, 2010 by Pavan4everUrz Love Sayings and Quotes Sad Love Quotes & Sayings Uploaded on Nov 28, 2009 by Cute5555 Uploaded on Jan 28,2010 by bestquotes How i feel about U Poems about lost love Uploaded on Jan 3, 2008 by thelegend10 Uploaded on Mar 16, 2008 by vainly112 Best Love Quotes Ever heartbreak poem by amanda Uploaded on Feb 18, 2011 by quotesnsayings Uploaded on Oct 5, 2008 by mandeebaby6 Sweet love quotes – Angel of Mine You Were My Everything Uploaded on May 9, 2010 by Baileyhamster Uploaded on Dec 30, 2006 by kamboi A Wish Upon A Star..... Poems about love and missing someone... Uploaded on Aug 22, 2010 by rachey109 Uploaded on May 13, 2008 by horselover101k Love Quotes and Sayings a broken heart poem Uploaded on Mar 24, 2010 by bestquotes Uploaded on Jul 31, 2008 by CloudKitty18 Best Love Quotes! Sad love poem... Uploaded on Apr 22, 2008 by Poetryfreak08 Uploaded on Mar 16, 2008 by vainly112 I Love you more than you`ll ever know I miss you.... Uploaded on Jan 6, 2009 by lovelyluz Uploaded on Nov 20, 2007 by ShieetHead I Love You Quotes Lost love Uploaded on Apr 2, 2010 by SophiieeLouiiseee Uploaded on Jun 14, 2009 by savidgesports I LOVE YOU Missing you Uploaded on Dec 23, 2006 by Scashatkeylargo Uploaded on Dec 19, 2008 by stargate55746 My Valentines Day Message to You Heartbreak Quotes Uploaded on Jan 3, 2009 by achievesuccessful Uploaded on Jan 11, 2009 by Kakashi9112 I love you – Romantic Poem Broken hearts and broken dreams Uploaded on Feb 19, 2011 by Musicplayer014 Uploaded on Dec 27, 2009 by thatdashit True love quotes The Best HeartBreak Quotes online ever!!!! Uploaded on Sep 21, 2006 by bucksblonde Uploaded on Dec 11, 2009 by Xhannahboo1X Monitor 2 Best Movie Kisses-top10 User unknown, account terminated 272 Figure has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Please find the URL listed in the YouTube-ography. Figure 84: Source material for Love Story, 2010-2013. Screen grab from My Channel, Sad Love Poem, YouTube, March 16, 2008. DOCUMENTATION Image Index Pages 210, 212, 216, 224, 227 USB 1. Love Story—Installation Documentation, 2013 Filmed at The Social, Campbelltown Art Centre, 2 February – 13 March, 2013. Duration: 1:10 minutes. Installation footage: Nick Garner, Rococo Productions. Edited: Nick Garner and Josephine Skinner. Copyright the artist. 2. Love Story—Full Loop, Dual View, YouTube Editor Version, 2015 Duration: 11:15 minutes. Copyright the artist. 273