A monkey shows a leaf to another monkey. Has The Internet changed The Ocean? Certainly our perception of it. Everything is chopped and screwed remixed some kind of post some kind of proto ironic earnest lashed together with historical references hyperlinkable personal narratives invention intention cultural amalgamation postproduction search engine optimization instantaneously translated third and fourth and Nth languages selfie poetics. Surveys on obscure cultures and figures and data are accessed by single keystroke. We dont have to memorize hard facts anymore just how to find them. As if our very brains have been outsourced to this continuum of data. We are spending our lifetimes sharing codes and signs. Financial power has been replaced with the ability to manipulate language and images which has shuffled and restructured power society institutions etc. You can buy pirated Hood By Air at the market in Pino Suarez. Nothing is finite. Everything is part of everything else can supplant everything else can commandeer and can meld to everything else. Our brains have become the text of William Burroughs’ Junky. Everything is violently propelled together. Atoms are crashing into atoms. Perhaps codifying into cold fusion. Perhaps codifying into that cold gelatinous beige mush that your stepmother eats for breakfast. All things shifting moving bumping into each other growing decaying performing greater functions. Deeply abstract Meta-Pointillism that we have to step away from to recognize in its glory. How has the Internet affected Art? How hasnt it! The Internet has affected everything and Art is part of everything. Blasting forward in all simultaneous directions. We are strapped to it in paralleled expansion waiting to see where it is taking us what it is showing us. I am trying to compile my thoughts in a cohesive twentieth century manner I want to build unidirectional linearity to share with you. I cannot. A better way to talk about The Internet is to talk about clouds. The best way to talk about Art is also to talk about clouds. I change the song to Ben Frost’s Rare Detay and kiss my girlfriend. The Internet taught me to share this information because The Internet wants and requires and begs for transparency and selfreflexion layering and pacechanging hypermanipulation and hyperoversharing collusion confusion opacity too. What does the hybrid of smoke-and-mirrors and honesty look like? Things which would have confused prior humans to the point of absolute bewilderment. The people who think The Internet and high-capacity data-sharing is a waste of time will soon be the dwindling minority. All physical borders are dissolving. Nations have become ideas again as they once were their parameters and infrastructures are no longer relevant to the conversation. The way we communicate has shifted radically. Grammar is a thing of the past its 2 damn fixed. Punctuations been phased out 2. Throw it in a lake. The way we produce and pitch information has shifted radically. We are looking for hits immediacy propagation. We are predicting virality from our jittering singular shared gestures. This changes the way we present process and subsequently organize data. This changes the very conception of ideas in our heads. The Internet is turning humans into an Amazonian colony of Leafcutter Ants supreme organization is playing out. My friend Joe says The Internet is really just a map of the human brain. The final evolved stage of humanity in Lucy is a USB drive. We dont have to reenforce talking points anymore. Want talking points or proof? Search for them. We dont have to explain references or entry points anymore either- you can search for those too. We are making connections between elements that fascinate us from all places and all periods of time hemming interesting points of data into a chainmail of information that satiates our intentions whatever they may be. It may suit our overarching brand, or merely our disposition as it is in this moment. We might like the way it looks. Or sounds. Or feels to interact with. Or the way it pushes against and rejects all these things. I have been thinking about how to write re: The Internet and Art. The topic couldn’t be more expansive or abstract so lets write expansively and abstractly. As the result of the new way we consume and harvest data we are able to identify what we like and dislike much faster than ever before. This means we can dive further and faster down rabbit holes explore more and more profound territories, and more adroitly define and understand systems. This of course means our targeted manipulation of said systems can be exacted with more poignancy. I run through museums hoping that nothing speaks to me. A moment of repose. We can ascertain and share more data than ever before. This matters to Art because Art is a system of ideas, just like Math, just like Meteorology, just like God, just like Mixed Martial Arts. The more ideas we can collect, the stronger our decisions for or against those ideas can be. An informed idea is a virus, it must spread. When you think of a great idea you tell your peers. When a monkey finds a particularly wonderful leaf, she shows the leaf to another monkey. The Internet allows all monkeys to show all leaves to all monkeys. Why read one book, why look at one piece of art, why share one leaf, why think about one idea, watch one game, when you can read, look at, share, think about, and watch thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions. All you need is The Internet. And an idea. And maybe a camera. To make your taste or opinion public is to open it up to scrutiny. Inside of scrutiny we learn. The part of the song where things start to taper out and scatter into space, far away from us. The lingering distracting impulse to take a selfie. Okay but what are the repercussions for our inability to focus on one thing at one time? An expanded, refracted dialogue, a broadening of scopes, more abstraction. The branches of a tree grow outward. More options, really. Less necessity to stay the course or dig in to trenches. Less pressure to stylize your ideas through only one font, and an exacerbated desire to seek out more fonts, more solutions, more alternatives, more roads, more techniques, more ways to manifest this idea, this mood, that memory. We can pivot and change our interests like we can change a song. No aspect of the changes that are underfoot, that we are rapt among, are bad. Perhaps they are rupturing outdated business models and as such receiving flak. Ho hum. Change is not a necessary evil. It is ambivalent toward morality. It is biologically necessary. Ones and zeros. All that jazz. Tim Hecker The Ravedeath 1972. The Internet has stacked our decks that much. Kenneth Goldsmith does not need any more press, but his awareness of Nowness precipitates his mentioning here. In the Spring of 2015, he will guide a UPenn class called Wasting Time On The Internet where students will drift through content online, building up a collection of data points which will coalesce by the end of the term into a cacophony of intellectual tonality. They are building clouds. I’m not saying much, but it feels pretty. Sheets of sound. According to his Wikipedia page, rapper and new media guru Lil B built a cloud of content on 155 connected MySpace pages, mirroring The Internet, mirroring the human brain, mirroring an atomic bomb and the expansion of the universe. Now you can download gigabytes upon gigabytes of his music, a monument of the diversity of humanity spewing forth unhesitant; our range, our emotions, the verisimilitude of our day to day struggling and adjusting and flexing and shifting of desires. People want to pin him down as a rapper, but he undulates between subjects and platforms in a way we’d never previously seen. Alexandra Marzella shares graphic macrozoom selfies of the hair sprouting out of her legs and glistening intestinal food shots. Keith J. Varadi has cornered the market on popular art-culture contusion. Daniel Hernandez provides breaking news on Mexico’s political pandemic. The more tapped in we can be to these direct fountains of data, the more our own stances, in art and in life, can be tempered. Sharing can solidify your understanding of and positioning in the fluctuating new landscape. Share here. Or here. We can do more than ever before. or NEGATE EVERYTHING.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 17:20:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015