Evaluation: ‘The present king of France is bald’ Opinion verses logic.
There seems to be a pressure to use social media as a platform to exist as an artist these days. Many platforms since the emergent days of instagram and facebook offer a virtual ‘place’ to exist. So as an artist, and having the winter christmas show that I have just collaborated in so dependent on the web, due to the obvious constraints of the lockdown, why was this ‘dependence’ so problematic for me?
I feel there is something too performative about social media that changes the concept of the artist’s role.
I’ve started to think about this more and wondered why I see dependence as an issue. What does this threaten?, this yielding to commercial and social mediums that either drown the individual maker in a sea of ones and zeros, or have one believe that how many likes one attains is a measure of success.
I am feeling a pressure to perform as this module (methods and inquiry) , as well as projects, utilise the ‘working space’ of the virtual sphere to facilitate the process of making and doing.
Obviously, this is a very binary way of looking at how one is to utilise the internet as a maker and artist. In the current post - haptic world,(a term I am using to delineate the emergent shift to online virtual spaces, as seen by the large art institutions, so as to keep their brand in the public forefront as it were) taking such polarized positions could lead to unnecessary polemics of a changing world, where the internet of things and the imminence of a transition to the digital sphere may be one way out for an art world in stasis.
Hal Foster in his book, Bad New Days (Verso, 2015) highlights concerns towards this stasis, whilst pointing out that Critique, something that originated in the parisian salons with a view to making art accessible “from the point of view of a public visitor”, helping us become self aware as a public, now seems to be in a “post-critique” world where the “dissolution of the public sphere in its original definition” leaves us tied to what Stanford Scholar Brett Frischmann calls our “digital tethers”. On a daily basis, I find that the discursive worlds of politics, identity, social policy and digital influence all have an affect on my approach to making.
Below is and example of some writing I did as a side project. What I have started to understand from such writing, which runs in parallel with my practice of making, is that I can find myself in a paralysis of thinking, trying to contrive meaning into my process of making.
The need to make sense of current affairs starts to push my work into areas that, for me, become incoherent, murky and at times suffers from a form of prolixity that stifles the act of making. As the year has developed, unfolded and revealed itself, I am starting to understand that although arts make important contributions to certain world views and can be a strong element in political, social and environmental discourses, I am not sure if I want to utilise my making as a way presupposed actualizations of response to the world around me.
There are plenty of opportunities for current practitioners to opt into these spheres, but as a maker myself, I am not sure that these kinds of didactics are what my practice needs to be about. What does interest me, and what I would say most informs my work is what I am now coming to understand as “The Gap”. Graham Harman would say it’s the place where the autonomous object exists without any relationality to the world of human cognisance.
A development of Kant’s Noumenal that repositions and separates the ‘thing in itself, or what Heidegger calls ‘tool-analysis’ the ‘Being’, always either imminent in a ‘Being at hand’, or present at hand when I am in a relational correspondence with an object, from that which we perceive. Thus reducing the object to a set of descriptive qualities. I find I can fall into this literalism within my own practice.
There is no, (and here I use a Bradian term) “agential cut”, A place where between my process of making and the resultant outcome, something else has come into being, despite my input, outside of influence and not because of any imputed narrative. But, because of an internal agency within the materiality, form and process, no because of these elements, but because they just now are.
Arthur C. Danto in his book, ‘The transfiguration of the Commonplace’ talks about how the embodiment of an image enacted through a medium, leads to some truth of the real, so we can take from this that the real is not so paramount afterall. Which is why I think I am struggling at the moment to commit to my ability to paint. Portraits are too literal for me at the moment, where as sculpture and film seem to be opening me up to a space that explores something ‘between’ what I see and what is.
So, It is here that I find myself trying to decide, and again to quote Harman, exploring the place between “real objects and their sensual qualities”. This, I find as a fundamental principle to making within my own practice. The writing project below is fine for a content ‘online’, yet, rudimentary and contrived, it picks out certain obvious narratives, and runs with then to a very speedy conclusion that exhausts itself whilst trying to hard.
Thankfully, this helps me highlight one of my failings within my practice. Trying to hard.
When Richard Dawkins, the anti-creationist, 'created' the word 'meme'[2], did he ever consider that it may set off a process that philosopher Jürgen Habermas called "the colonization of the lifeworld"[3] within the domain we call the internet that has become the new physical space for, to quote Dawkins, "cultural transmission"?[4] And to use an argumentation put together by Brett Frischmann, has this colonization gone on to create an endemic, that by "collapsing these domains allows data mining to crowd out moral attention",[5] in so far as our attention has become the product as Jaron Lanier warns “Google is perhaps a confusing example, since it is part of the large phylum of Siren Servers in which the users are product, and the true customers, the so-called advertisers, might not always be apparent.” [6]
And to further explain Frischmann's previously mentioned point, to avoid becoming 'programmed', we need to achieve utility with a more "attuned engagement than commodified environments are designed to facilitate".[7]
This calling out of commodification of the "engaged", or as others would call it, the addicted, goes back as far as Richard Serras's 'Television Delivers People',[8] a critique that television was designed to engage the viewer so as to have us in a position of 'product', even though paradoxically we perceived television as a tool of utilising access to product. This same caveat was echoed, once again, and in the same way as the meme is designed to work through replication ironically, through Jaron Lanier's interpretation of how we are at the mercy of silicon valley in the way that we are at risk of repeating a role of 'product' as opposed to being consumers of product or contributors, authors of a free and open space where information is free and open to all. In fact, Lanier's interpretation, paints a more sinister outlook, in as afar as the behavioural conformity is a slow, insidious change in our own perceptions. Thus, again confirming our position as the product.
"Well, that's exactly what a meme is!" I hear you cry. In some ways yes, but I believe it to be a more nuanced tool of injecting moral sentiment into a system that is designed to auto learn in a not so subjective way, thus thrusting the replication of the human element of existence into a structure that is perceived to be only hardware and software that exists within a mechanical structure.
Let’s unpack that a little further and expand on how the meme isn't just a funny thing you put on the internet to show your friends how funny or witty or clever you are, or as Marvin Minsky puts it, "collections of concepts".[9] These are just ideas, right? alignments that either bolster, solidify or encapsulate, a wider diverse opinion, ethos or observation that in some way fits within a definition of your own world view. These views, in one way or another, project a subjective and emotive resonance that can be interpreted into metrics that categorize where you fit within a digitized 'futures market in human behaviour'[10] expressed through the "high fidelity of memetic transmission".[11]
Notes.
[1] The Social Dilemma, Netflix, October 2020.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 192.
[3] Brett Frischmann, Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 162.
[4] Susan Blakemore, The Meme Machine, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 34.
[5] Brett, Frischmann, Evan, Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 163.
[6] Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future, (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 162.
[7] Brett Frischmann, Evan, Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 163.
[8] Richard Serra, ‘Television Delivers People’, KunstSpectrum, (1973), <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvZYwaQlJsg> [accessed 18/10/20]
[9] Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p 341.
[10] Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, (New York: Hatchet Book Group, 2019) p. 120.
[11] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, (London: Transworld, 2006), p. 225.
Bibliography:
Blakemore, Susan, The Meme Machine, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Danto, Arthur C., Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981)
Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion, (London: Transworld, 2006)
Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
Etymonline, Meme, (n.d.), < https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme> [accessed 18/10/20]
Foster, Hal, Bad New Days, (London: Verso, 2015), p. 122 – 23
Frischmann, Brett, Evan, Selinger, Re-Engineering Humanity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Harman, Graham, Art and Objects, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020),
Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future, (London: Penguin, 2013)
Minsky, Marvin, The Emotion Machine, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006)
Serra, Richard, ‘Television Delivers People’, KunstSpectrum, (1973), <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvZYwaQlJsg> [accessed 18/10/20]
The Social Dilemma, Netflix, October 2020
Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, (New York: Hatchet Book Group, 2019)