Nevolution

Mood-board of unknown tumblrs

For a while now, I've been trying to collect tumblrs thats signal a maturity of the New Aesthetic. These move past the pixellated glitch hunt that everyone was arguing and obsessing over not long ago. Instead, these point to the way that the network is affecting our emotional connection to the world. 

Pergoogle, put together by the esteemed Rob Walker, takes Google image searches and presents the first page of listings. Webcamtears, take the trope of people crying into their web cams and presents it as a wall of misery. Screenshots of Despair, a master stroke of collecting, looks at the isolation we all face when attempting to use any digital product, especially when trying to present our online identity. And then there's the Rich Kids of Instagram, those loveable one percenters showing off their champagne fueled exploits one filter at a time.

There's something to be said for the single serving tumblr. The way they hone in on one particular topic and make their point again and again and again until we all finally get it. The lifespan of these jokes are getting shorter and shorter. Usually all that's needed is the title of the site and a handful of posts and we collectively get the punchline, with no real need to keep posting. This can happen before lunch if the joke is good enough.

 

Some of these jokes work well as additions to the feed, others when presented as a whole; Webcamtears falls into the latter. It takes it's strength by being presented as a singular body of work. It's a deeply troubling idea, collecting women crying into their webcam and presenting them as a whole. We're all used to and aware of this as a 'thing', and we've all Left Britney Alone. The idea of crying into a webcam to a distributed audience of followers as a way of getting something off the chest, letting it sit on youtube for eternity to be watched by complete strangers who are stuck in a hole and can't seem to turn away.

It's troubling the way it is presented, just a wall of endless narcissistic sadness. None of them mention why they are crying. They don't talk, or scream, or explain what is making them so sad. After some cursory research it turns out that this is an art project; a solicited call by the artist Dora Moutot for people to cry in front of their webcam. This knowledge detracts from the project. I feel let off the hook for being fascinated by watching strangers cry. They're not baring themselves anymore, they're being exhibitionist. Viewing the site doesn't feel like a voyueristic act, just more novelty for my eyes to glaze over. Which is a real shame and takes away the punch of watching strangers cry.

 

 

Pergoogle, by Rob Walker, seems to have lost some of its bite since he started, but that doesn't matter. As I mentioned, simple premise. Take a simple term, punch it into google images, and screengrab the top screen of results. Some of them illustrate archetypes and typologies, other are more political in their representations of the terms. He's written a few thoughts about it in The Work of Art in the Age of Google Reproduction

"One question that might arise is: who would be the owner, the artist, the author of the Pergoogles? They encompass original works, remix spinoffs, spoofs, maybe even keyword driven imagery. Is it an involuntary collaboration among all of the above? Or is Google the artist, creating the bricolage with its algorithm?"

The thing about these collective visual representations of terms is that they're framed through Rob Walker. Positioned through his search history. I initially thought that the interest in these results was due to it being pushed through some collective platonic realm of image results. That through each of our search queries we were setting up a definitive list of image results. Defining the concrete through the abstract multitude. This is partially correct. This is how one thought about Google and the Google brand of collective intelligence. Until I realise that this was the old way of presenting information. The new way is to tailor the results to the person, based on a vast subset of identifiers that seem too fuzzy unless framed through their secret algorithms for searching:

"Everyone today has his or her own version of Google. Your Google is different from my neighbour's version, and so on. This makes a lot of sense, because we all have unique distinct interests"

These image results, as mentioned, are framed through Rob. They are ephemeral, changing because of his changing search and browsing history, as well as our shifting collective visual intelligence. These results could change from week to week, day to day, cycle to cycle. Even acting upon the search results, tapping on one of the images, could affect a different result the next time. That is the effect of the network; it swallows up any notion we could have had for a platonic realm of perception. At least not in late 2012. That ended a few years ago.

 

 

And then there are the smarmy Rich Kids of Instagram; who take pride in showing off their cheque for a few hundred thousand dollars as part of their trust fund. That there are kids out there who will gladly spend forty thousand euros on a night out still shocks me. A few bottles of Dom (and my oh my do they like their Dom Perignon), the odd mineral water, a few more bottles of exquisite alcohol. All of their wild lives, their expensive cars, their manicured lawns, all public and aggregated for the world to see. But it's all done with tilt shift turned up high and a rich lather of Hudson or Valencia.

Despite these misgivings about having this thrown into my face every day is the security in knowing that they are just as racked by issues of status anxiety as the rest of us. Actually, more than the rest of us. They're constantly showing off their latest cars, yachts, or helicopters as they bounce from night club to pool party to mansion to island hopping. And in each one of their rose tinted memories they do nothing but strut their stuff and vainly try to illustrate their vunderful lives. They can't help themselves. It's as if we're living in a post Jersey Shore world: all popped collars and the latest in Rolex bling. These are all symptoms of new money. Nothing is restrained. Nothing is tasteful. Everything is in cerulean blue and hard to pronounce pastels.

Did I mention how fascinating this all is? To be given access to these lives? That there really are beautiful looking people who do nothing but lounge around in yachts as they float around the Caymans or the Maldives. And if it was anyone else who had their private lives displayed for all to see I would feel a twitch of regret. But fuck it, they're living in their post-Occupy, post-GFC bubble and they simply don't care, or realise.

I'm reminded of the quote by that gum chewing speed freak Mister Andy Warhol when he said "a Coke is a Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Instagram filter than the one the bum on the corner is using". And what does all of this have to do with the New Aesthetic? I'm not really sure, but it's there. We wouldn't have access to these beautiful tinted seams a few years ago. It's a new way of seeing, seeing things we only thought about and imagined before.

 

Screenshots of Despair is a tricky one. It's the most interesting of the bunch, but it's the one I feel least comfortable writing about. It's the smartest of the bunch but also the one I feel least able to articulate. I can't seem to get my talons into it. It's about the loneliness that we go through as a result of using these devices and these services. How human language and our attempts to replicate warmth when used in conjunction with machine language have a tendency to fail with highly amusing side affects. But these are all glitch hunts. It too easily shows off the seams at which human and computer interactions fails. Which is, I suppose, a circuitous way of stating that the new aesthetic is all about the glitch hunt. These seams are what makes this new world evident. What makes it visible. Because without these little tears we wouldn't be aware of this new aesthetic.

What I mean is that we've got frustrated with the computer vision and the satellite imagery, and we need to see the feelings we have with a new wonder. Consider this a mood-board for unknown emotions.

 

Mixbook 2011

There’s never enough time to read anything properly these days, especially something on the internet. Even with Instapaper I need another step to filter and save what I’ve already filtered and saved. So, after a year of keeping the important stuff it only seems fair to do something with it. Printing out the internet seemed like a good approach to this problem. And yes, using a service such as Blurb fits perfectly with this project, living only on the internet. I didn’t want to spend too much time typesetting this or giving page numbers, just enough to make it a useful object. One of the problems I find with reading on screens is there’s no possibility for patina. Nothing can be dog eared, it can’t be taken into the bathroom (without pangs of guilt and shame) and yet the text is discarded too quickly.

After trawling through hundreds of saved posts and articles, a mild theme began to emerge. One that wasn’t just somewhat of a retrospective of the past year, but the way in which we’ve been thinking in 2011. Or, how I’ve been thinking this year at least. The overall shape of the 21st century is finally beginning to emerge and some of these pieces should point in that vague direction. While there’s somewhat of an underlying thread here, the most important thing was that this would be an interesting read. Something for the holidays. This meant loosening up the structure: taking out pieces that were too dry or specific. Editing is always the hardest part. I don’t want to ramble too much, so I’ll let you get on with it. Consider this my mixbook for 2011.

I should stress that I lovingly stole this idea from Christopher Butler (who lovingly stole it from Emmet Connolly). Chris is up to his third book so far (volume one, two, three) and I hope to continue the trend. He has much smarter things to say about this whole process, so read his and then come back here to read me waffle on for a bit. I've been planning on doing this for a year or so, when an email came in from Blurb that they were having one of their many sales, I quickly stopped everything for two days and got it done. Making it used parts of my brain that needed stretching, but also made me realise how much more time should have gone into it.

I wanted to include something by Dan Hill, which seems to be the running gag that any of these sorts of things should have one of his incredibly long blog posts. There's always next year. I couldn't help inserting my own private joke in here: having Bruce Sterling close the whole thing. Considering he's always called upon to close just about every conference it seemed fitting to let him do the same thing here. 

I didn't have time for any illustrations, page numbers or links in the text (two days is clearly not long enough), so next year should be much more of a finessed object. The other tip I've learnt is to actually hand them out between xmas and new years. It's holiday reading but not everyone has them despite everyone going back to work. In needing a front cover I couldn't resist a photo of my first 3D printed object: because, well, it's a print out. The icing on the laser sintered cake is that it's a generative piece which I made during the Generative Design intensive this semester (I DID mention I was doing my Masters this year didn't I?). Lots of algorithmic logic in some of these articles, I couldn't resist. Looking forward to seeing the amount of batshit that goes on in 2012 just so it can be squeezed into the next book.

 

Is 2011 a year that will change the world - John Harris

For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year’s most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. “One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it,” he says. “In one sense, it’s a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you’ve lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you’re a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It’s probably sitting in a square, in a tent.” 

 

Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of fiction - James Bridle

So, if Gibson was originally writing “on top of Firefox”, he’s now writing on top of Twitter. The stream contains references, mixed up, to Prada shoes and Idoru dancers. All links. All references, premade scenes waiting to be pulled into the flow of fiction. When the Festo drones appear in the text, they appear in the same location, same architecture as in those product videos. The network’s readymades. 

Gibson’s been talking a lot lately about atemporality, this idea that we live in a sort of endless digital now. In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.) ... it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are.

 

Thinking in Tumblr - Alexandra Lange

Which is why I recently found myself discussing with a designer why I thought his industrial design client should not publish a commemorative book, but should start a commemorative Tumblr. (I couldn’t believe it when those words came out of my mouth.) Considering this history project, my mind reassembled its pieces as a blog, asynchronic, motley, sketchy. Rough rather than smooth. An archive of affinities rather than a resolved history. There’s a reason so many archives are using it. On a Tumblr, every kind of memory could be collected and streamed, linked, as so many of the “f*** yeah” genre are, by a single word.

 

The Elusive Big Idea - Neal Gabler

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. 

 

Innovation Starvation  - Neal Stephenson

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others. Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

 

Inside the Mind of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery 

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. 

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin. 

 

How Algorithms Shape our World - Kevin Slavin

And that’s the thing, is that we’re writing things, we’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. And we’re starting to make our way. There’s a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don’t know what, and they reach in to all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. 

 

A Critique on the Critical - Patrick Keating

Critical design cannot predict the future.  Our ideas of the future are often less radical than the reality. Design however, can invent worlds giving us freedoms to explore various branches of reality. Speculative design is a dreamlike exercise – manufacturing alternate worlds, ones which feel every bit as real as the “real world” we inhabit day-to-day (whatever that is!).  It cannot predict the future, but it can shape the present. 

 

The Movie Set that Ate Itself - Michael Idov

One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I’d stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss. 

 

Twenty Years Fore and Aft - Bruce Sterling

Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.

 

Kim Jong Il Communication

The second I found out that Kim Jong Il had died I quickly followed the protocol in a situation such as this and immediately scanned my twitter feed for confirmation. After failing to come up with anything worthy of 140 characters I moved on and waited for others to do what I couldn't be bothered doing.

I've kept North Korea in my partial attention zone for a few years, after @cowbellistan gave me a copy of Dictators Homes for my birthday, followed by Tyrants the following year. Hungover, I would spend the day after reading about horrible people and their horrible ways. Don't know why but North Korea always seemed to stick out. Fascinating, train wreck of a place. Complete and utter nightmare. I could keep on going with the cliched half sentences but I'll leave it at that. Point is, a bad man died. And now we're all supposed to react in some collective way. But how do we react to something this culturally foreign and closed off? Why do we feel the need to react in a certain way?

  

We do it for the Lulz. 

While that video was uploaded in mid September, months before his death, it conveys the point. Especially when the subtitle is Ain't no party like a Pyongyang party, cause a Pyongyang party is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. It's a response to a situation that we don't understand, by the only means through which we're capable of understanding. It's not humour, but not tasteless either. It's a response to everything being available, at all times, for everyone. It all just becomes fodder. I'm surprised that no one has taken apart the chilling video of North Koreans trying to cry their hearts out and replace the sounds with cats meowing. When I first saw it (and I've seen it countless times in the past few days) I remarked on twitter that it felt like one big cultural photoshop. We can clearly see through the whole affair, and I'm sure that they can too, but meh. Whaddya gonna do? Viscerally feel what it would be like to live with such a twisted mindset?

And that was when I realised the depth that the lulz was willing to go. How it acted as our coping mechanism. The contrast between the lulz and the leader couldn't be starker. A man who commanded a country with the most perverse of grips; he went far beyond the jackboot stamping on the face of humanity. North Korea is testament to the failure of centralised command hierarchies.

The lulz, on the other hand, revels in its distributed and decentralised nature. Anyone can do it for the lulz, as long as you're steeped in network culture. The lulz takes your Juche ideology of self reliance and determinism and pisses all over it. The Lulz sees your hermit kingdom, scrapes all the intent out of it and squirts it out onto the web. For all the unknowable horror that he causes, we take it and turn it into a small joke of him looking at things.

It would be remiss of me to not mention Team America and the hilarious song I'm So Ronery by a puppet Kim Jong Il. I'm beginning to see this as the Ur script of all humourous takes on North Korea. It enabled us to see him as a short and angry little man, something able to be mocked. Perhaps we needed that particular angle to view him as in order to make fun of him. But that was before he died, while he still maintained godlike power over a nation of slaves. When all he could do, post-stroke, is look at things and approvingly smile.

Not that we should be surprised at any of this. Lulz has somewhat become the easiest way to cope our world. It's soon on the way to replace irony and sarcasm as our humour coping mechanism. Or, as sarcasm was to the nineties, the lulz is to the early twenty teens. Yet, the lulz seems only possible in our networked world. It doesn't seem to make much sense away from keyboard and mouse. Unless you're Anonymous, then go right ahead and do whatever it is that you please.

I feel as if there needs to be some mediated screen between us and the lulz. The lulz needs to come out of the internet, as a product of it. Either as a cheezeburgeresque macro or as a single serving fuckyeah tumblr. I've been keeping a few tabs on the fuckyeah genre of tumblr; it works really well when there's enthusiasm for the topic. A sadistic yet comical tyrant, not so much. So how, now that he's dead, do we deal with it? Simple, another single serving tumblr, this one with more deft and vulgarity than the previous. Kim Jong Il Dropping the Base.

I'm impressed at how quickly it was put together, let alone coming up with the idea. It's also amazing how many photoshops could be made in one day, all of fairly decent quality. All scraped and spidered off the internet, ready to be spread as fast as possible. Prepackaged and destined for a quick like on the facebook. To re-enter the stream in as many ways as possible just to become more content for our thirsty eyeballs and reward centres.

Much as the trend for vintage posters of soviet memorabillia seemed odd and somewhat offensive to survivors of communism, Kim Jong Il dropping the base would be downright weird if any North Koreans ever get a hold of it. Not because it's offensive to their beloved leader, or because of all the atrocities that they've gone through. No, it's because they simply wouldn't get it. Their pre-networked culture isn't close to the nuance and deft that the lulz can bring. Expecting them to get the joke, pushed through the sieve of the new aesthetic is light years ahead of their aesthetic sensibilities. That's probably the saddest part of all of this. Apart from the torture and starvation and fear of course. That when the Norks do open the border through some way or another and the stream of stunted masses pour through the border that they'll be too far gone to ever catch up to the cynicism of the lulz.

 

The Altermodern Nomad

Apologies for the academic language but I don't have the energy, headspace or the smarts to work through and rewrite it. This essay was written last year, during what I'm calling my Bourriaud phase when I was knee deep in art theory. Thankfully that's over, but he has plenty of worthy ideas as a result of the Tate Triennial Altermodern as well as The Radicant (a companion book he wrote at the same time as curating the show). Which is why I'm posting this essay after all this time. Consider this a conceptual precursor to my other blog – Heterochronia – as it works through some of the ideas I was stumbling my way through in a previous post. Thinking in Tumblr, while fun, is hard to make a comprehensive point. It's more about falling through links as I come across them. It's all too easy to forget about any sense of direction.

Reading through this essay I forgot about one of the key distinctions about the way in which we percieve time and progress. Less teleological direction, more about moving through multiple temporalities, evolving through a network of differing periods and possibilities. Moving through time as if it were space. It's interesting to go through this essay nowand remembering grasping these ideas and spending a few solid weeks with them. That is, instead of throwing up a quick link here and there. That's the beauty of studying: the forced concentration, the singular depth of thought. As I write these words I realise I'm going to have to quote myself and turn this depth into easy bite size links for Heterochronia.

The images aren't connected in anyway to the essay, but should be seen as a visual counterpoint. I came across this project (Nomadic Plants by Gilberto Esparza) on we make money not art at the same time I was writing the essay and I always imagined pairing the two. Regine Debatty

Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and 'drink' water from it. Through a process of microbial fuell cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle. 

They don't really connect with Bourriaud's notion of the vine or creeper as the botanical metaphor for our time, but it's a plant that lives in a robot and moves about a polluted landscape. What more do you need? I'll stop faffing about and let you get on with the essay.

 

The theme of travel is the most dominant of all concepts articulated in the Altermodern Manifesto. Travel is a part of our daily lives, and the effect it has on our way of being affects the way in which we inhabit and view our globalised world. 

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.1 

Considering this emphasis on travel, then we need to explore what forms of travel are implied, and what are their reasons and effects. We can see the beginnings of an answer in the Altermodern catalogue: 

The artist turns cultural nomad... Thus the exhibition brings together three sorts of nomadism: in space, in time, and among the ‘signs’.2 

By constructing the identity of this nomad and how it is suited to Altermodernity, we can look for comparisons to differing identites found in Modernity and Post Modernity. Through this construction we will then articulate how this nomad exists in the parameters set forth by Bourriaud and what journey forms are made and how. 

This essay will not look at the art or artists of the Altermodern exhibition (Tate Triennial 2009), but instead extend the central thesis put forth by the show’s curator and lead theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud. Using his ideas as a base in which to begin the journey, the discussion will wander through other ideas and theorists who share similiarities and correlations in describing the world in which we now inhabit.

 

If we are to discuss the nature of Altermodernism as a third stage of Modernism, then we need a set of tools that others have used to explore the two previous modernities. Bourriaud looks to the world of botany in which to explain the new world.3 In ‘The Radicant’ a book considered as a companion to the Altermodern exhibition, he explores the notion of roots and extends the ideas set forth by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening chapter of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’.4 

Through the use of lexicography, Bourriaud equates the Modern individual with that of the tree root, a Radical.5 While Modernity is predicated on a rupture with the past and a desire for progress, it was also concerned with it’s historical roots. The duality of the sprouting tree encapsulates Modernism and the Radical individual: focused on the future but aware of it’s heritage. 

Not content to view their writing as a mode of binary oppositions, Deleuze and Guattari look to the image of the Rhizome: an underground root system consisting of only horizontal offshoots, such as ginger. This metaphor is one that indulges in it’s plurality: 

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. 6 

The need to create this distinction was to delineate away from Cartesian dualisms, that of the vertical tree and root system, and instead to comprehend the notion of horizontal multiplicities. However, this multiplicity has neither subject nor object. It is only able to reference itself, forever deconstructing the environment amidst a desert of self referentialities. By continuing with the botanical metaphor Bourriaud utilizes the image of the Radicant: a vine or creeper plant that plants it roots constantly as it moves along. 

Unlike the rhizome, which is defined as a multiplicity that brackets out the question of a subject from the beginning, the radicant takes the form of a trajectory or path; the advance of a singular subject. 7 

This is a clear difference than the others. It accepts the need for multiplicities and the need to not be fixed upon one stable point. It articulates not only the need for movement, but the way in which it can be done. The conceptual link between the constant daily travel and the idea of the radicant are unmistakable.

Bourriaud continues by stating that “it [the radicant] exists exclusively in the dynamic form of wandering”.8 This denotes an identity that moves away from a static existence to one in which we are only able to understand our identity through a dynamic process. This notion of existence as only made visible by it’s trajectories echoes sentiments by Emirbayer in discussing the identity of an individual where "a dynamic, unfolding process, become the primary unit of analysis, rather than the constituent elements themselves". 9 

Emirbayer is elaborating on ideas put forth by Dewey and Bentley in the idea of the Trans-Action. In looking at systems of naming and linguistic taxonomies ‘elements’ or ‘entities’ are not in isolation, but are a part of their ‘relations’.10 The act of ‘relating’ overrides the reductionist tendency to look at the subject unto itself. 

Thus, in the context of Altermodernity, the wanderer is inseperable from the act of wandering. By existing only in this nomadic state of constant travel, the act of travel overrides any notion of singular identity. In accord with the nomadic method of wandering through the signs, we see that the process of organising connections between signs is what constitutes a radicant identity. Continuing on with relational and trans-actional linguistics, Brown looks at the difficulty in percieving this dynamic unfolding process in Western languages.11 The issue here is in the ability to hold both noun and verb at the same time. Being a radicant and the act of radicantity as one. 

This ability to nod at syntax and carry on is a result of the re-introduction of pragmatics. When the intent and reception of language is included while considering the fluid process of signifying, there emerges a coherent rambler. 12 

This ability to nod and carry on is central to our need to move past the impotency of Post Modernity and towards our abilities as nomads. 

Having revealed why the Radicant identity is predicated on movement, we now need look at how we’re moving through time, space and the signs. Leading on from the Enlightenment, Modernist notions of time were teleological. Post Modernism saw fault in this linear direction as hegemonic and saught to dismantle the notion of progress through deconstruction: “A levelling of chronological systems by criticizing the Western one.”13 Time was instead seen as a catalogue, something in which all cultures are situated on a horizontal plane of relativism. The result was that ideas and cultures could be mined for their stylistic attributes. 

Through the eyes of the nomad, time is somewhere that can be travelled to and inhabited. For when we travel, are we not also travelling to cultures with a different temporal sequence than our own? Appropriated from biology, heterochrony is the timing of the developmental variation of an organism in a species, leading to differing results. It is with this application of evolutionary understanding of history that the radicant travels through Altermodernity: a multitude of possible worlds, each with their own narrative of events.14 

This notion of history as geographical and “constituted of multiple temporalities”15 is similar to the idea of Atemporality put forth by Bruce Sterling.16 He defines the difference between previous notions of history and our current one as a result of the intrinsic capabilities of the dominant medium of our day. The contrast between moving through a history book understanding the narrative as a linear process as opposed to the result of attempting to search online for an aspect of a historical narrative is a important one. 

A book is a linear piece of text. It has a beginning, an end and an author with intent. To continue along this line into Post Modernity – a period of time punctuated as after the death of history – one could look at Barthes and the Death of the Author as a lack of regard to any historical narrative.17 But the internet has brought a levelling of authoritative knowledge: “A single historical narrative is a paper narrative”.18 We shouldn’t be expecting a new meta narrative while network culture is the dominant framework in which we view the world.19 It is only through network culture that are we able to understand heterochronic multiple narratives. 

It is this network culture that has become the dominant cultural logic of our day, though this is not to say that it defines all systems of logic. The machine as cultural metaphor did not extend into all forms of thought in Modernism, it only acted as a suitable metaphor.20 Instead of an autonomous individual – a result of the Western Enlightenment – we now see ourselves as nodes in a network, as an individual situated and contingent upon other nodes. As Varnelis argues: “affirming one’s identity today means affirming the identity of others”.21 

It is at this point that we need to refer to one of Bourriaud’s previous works, Post Production. In it he comes up with the term seminaut: one able to move through the signs, to create new paths through culture and semiotics. Relying on previous notions of authorship – both Modern and Post Modern – and originality as points of departure is no longer productive as “The seminaut imagines the links, likely relations between disparate sites”.22 For while artists like Duchamp and Burroughs bravely constituted works by blurring the notion of authorship, we have witnessed this logic be appropriated everywhere. The DJ and the idea of the remix has firmly entrenched itself in our society and is now taken as a given, it’s practices no longer informed by a degree of ironic self consciousness.23 The notion of context within a given network is what gives the artist or author an instinctive understanding of use: “exhibiting a work composed as a network of signs”.24 

If the seminaut imagines the links, then the radicant set these forms in motion.25 Perhaps instead of wandering through the ‘signs’ we should be wandering through links. As Bourriaud explains: 

The journey format... goes hand in hand with the generalisation of hypertext as a thought process: one sign directs us to a second, then a third, creating a chain of mutually interconnected forms, mimicking mouse clicks on a computer screen. 26

If this metaphor is to extrapolated, then this is a form of travel with no particular endpoint in mind. This applies to all forms: temporal, spatial or through the ‘signs’. This differs from the teleological direction of Modernism or the looping tendencies of Post Modernism.27 

 

In order to summarise the nomadic facet of Altermodernity, we need to look at one last image: travel. The Modern era was informed by the explosive power and superabundant energy of both the train and automobile.28 The direction and progress implied by these modes allow for the arrangement of events into causally linked sequences, correlating with the teleological notion of history that we have discussed. The 1973 oil crisis as a precursor to the Post Modern condition is an event that Bourriaud places great importance, making us aware of our limited energy reserves.29

The object that neatly sums up the current spirit of our directionless travel today is that of the mobile phone. While both the train and the automobile are objects that create travel, the mobile phone presumes an inherent mobility on the part of the user. It allows us to connect to our roots at any point amidst a state of wandering. Technological progress allows us to carry the network in our pocket, no longer attached to the home. This enables us to situate ourselves within a network of signs while in the act of movement in time and space. Considering worldwide demographic shifts to the city, the mobile phone seems perfectly suited to our new built environment, especially considering the speed at which both the developing and the developed world have made it a central part of this new Altermodernity. 

Whether or not the Altermodern exhibition was a success, the ideas put forth by it’s lead curator can not be discounted. Not just as a consideration on the changing face of art, but in the way in which it has made links and correlations in our contemporary world. Only as nomads are we able to inhabit this new world and must set about doing so.

 

1. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Tate Britain, ‘The Altermodern Manifesto’

2. Bourriaud, Nicolas et al, The Tate Triennial: Altermodern, (London, Tate Publishing, 2009) 13

3. Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant, (New York, Sternberg Press, 2009) 21

4. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 

5. Bourriaud, op. cit., p22

6. Deleuze & Guattari,  op. cit., p6

7. Bourriaud, op. cit., p55

8. ibid

9. Emirbayer, Mustafa. ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 103, No. 2. (Sep., 1997), 287 

10. Bentley, Arthur & Dewey, John. Knowing and the Known. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1949) 108

11. Brown, Colleen. ‘The Relational Meme’ Fillip Vol 1 (Summer 1996) 

12. ibid

13. Morton, Tom & Bourriaud, Nicolas. ‘Looking Forward: Tate Triennial 2009’ Frieze Issue 120 (Jan-Feb 2009) 

14. Bourriaud, op. cit., p13

15. ibid

16. Sterling, Bruce. Beyond the Beyond ‘Atemporality for the Creative Artist’ 

17. Barthes, Roland. ‘The death of the Author’ Aspen No. 5-6 (Fall-Winter 1967) Roaring Fork Press NYC

18. Sterling, op. cit. 

19. ibid

20. Varnelis, Kazys. ‘The Immediated Now: Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality’ Networked: A (networked_book) about (networked_art).  

21. Varnelis, Kazys. ‘On Atemporality’, http://varnelis.net/blog/on_atemporality, accessed 18/03/2010

22. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Post Production: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York, Sternberg Press, 2002) 18

23. Kazys, op. cit.,

24. Bourriaud, loc. cit.

25. Bourriaud, op. cit., 23

26. Bourriaud, op. cit., 20

27. Bourriaud, op. cit., 18

28. Bourriaud, op. cit., 16

29. ibid., 15

 

Heterochronia

For the past few months I've been toying around with a side project, and it's somewhat about time that I attempt to make it somewhat public. I've had it on the sidebar for some time as well as slyly using it as a category on this blog, but I feel it's time to announce it. Heterochronia. It's a somewhat lazy attempt to collect examples of something that I can't exactly put my finger on, I'm not exactly sure I understand it, but it's there. I'm hoping that if I make this post long enough I'll be able to get a handle on it. I'll ramble on for a bit before hopefully either making sense to my self or getting around to making a point. The term, heterochronia, is a biological one, that refers to a different timing in the development of organisms. For a more useful and relevant definition, we should turn to the source from where I got it from, the semi recent Tate Triennial Altermodern.

Hetero – different or other, chronos – time. Within the framework of Altermodern, it describes artists’ work which cannot be easily anchored to a specific time; which asks us to question what is contemporary. Without nostalgia, artists trace lines and connections through time as well as space. It is not the modernist idea of time advancing in a linear fashion, nor the postmodern time advancing in loops, but a chaining or clustering together of signs from contemporary and historical periods which allows an exploration of what is now.’It is significant that a number of today’s artists operate in a space-time characterised by this “delay”, playing with the anachronistic, with multi-temporality or time-lag.

This doesn't exactly get across what I'm toying with, but Bourriaud does go someway towards explaining it. I spent some time toying around with what to name the blog, in the end going with Heterochronia. Yet the roots of this idea isn't with everyones favourite french super curator. Instead, I'm shamelessly exploring a few of the thoughts that Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have been toying with for the past two years or so: atemporality. To paraphrase Sterling, I'm playing with their ideas but "shaving off the serial numbers". I wanted, badly, to call it Atemporality or Zero History. Not only would it have been too obvious and easy but the SEO would have been nigh impossible.

Perhaps another explanation would be through a semi incoherent rambling email I sent trying to explain the darn thing:

It's a symptom of the network culture that we live in, that the idea of time, and progress, that we used to have has changed. We're not looking down the barrel of a single point perspective of progress, nor are we pissing on it because it's a product of - what's that word? The annoying one? Deals with power struggles. Annoying and PoMo - anyway, [I think I meant hegemony] it's not those two approaches to time, but this really fragmented version of progress.

Where it makes total sense to use instagram or hipstamatic on an iphone. Or that camera that you have is a model of an older camera, that borrows the styles of yesteryear of the Olympus Pen line, but then doesn't keep on replicating the styles as it continues, but branches out from it. And how we're all toying around with the idea of utopia and progress ad futurity, but it feels different than any other time.

It's not a grand statement or vision of the future, but a smaller, more pragmatic approach. We're not going to solve the problem that will be the twenty teens with large monolithic solutions, but we'll branch out, and try a million different possibilities and see what sticks. And also how we've got guys with jets coming outof their back, which is kinda the future, but we're not responding to it the way we should. Or, we can't, because there's too many things going on and we have to go look at cats or look at gizmodo instead. 

As I mentioned, these aren't my ideas. I'm merely using the medium of a blog to explore them. I'm not such a fan of tumblrs, sucking and scraping thing's off the internet with no real attempt to create something new. It does suit the project (as exploration) and the topic (contemporary understanding of time and our time period) rather well. I don't provide any commentary on any of the links I've put up; it's more of a public archive for my own sake. I kept on noticing these vaguely coalescing ideas and felt the need to do something about it. Shamefully, the front end needs quite a bit of work. I've stabbed at it here and there, but I just can't wrap my head around the CSS and HTML that Tumblr use to construct templates. No matter, it's a rough approximation of the heroic modernist aesthetic that seems appropriate for what I'm collecting. 

At this point I need to mention the starting point for this project. Sterling's talk Atemporality for the Creative Artist is a near perfect explanation for some of the ideas that I'm playing around with in my assortment of links. The whole talk is mesmerising in only the way Bruce can be:

So what makes an atemporal situation different from a post-modern situation, or a modernist situation, or a classicist situation, what’s really different about it?

Well, let me take a guy who I am very fond of, a very immediate, hard-headed scientific thinker - Richard Feynman, American physicist. Richard Feynman once wrote about intellectual labor, and he said the following: ‘Step one - write down the problem. Step two - think really hard. Step three - write down the solution’.

And I really admire this statement of Feynman’s. It’s no-nonsense, it’s no fakery, it’s about hard work for the intellectual laborer… Of course it’s a joke. But it’s not merely a joke. He is trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean: really just confront the intellectual problem!

But there is an unexamined assumption in Feynman’s method, and it’s in step one - write down the problem.

Now let me tell you how the atemporal Richard Feynman approaches this. The atemporal Richard Feynman is not very paper-friendly, because he lives in a network culture. So it occurs to the atemporal Feynman that he may, or may not, have a problem.

‘Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

In one way it's the triumph of the new over the old. On the other hand it doesn't really care about the distinction between the new and the old, in a manner that's dissimilar to the postmodern notion of the pastiche. In this regard we return to Bourriaud's idea that our understanding of time, and thus the future (and the past), are about how we cluster various signs together. By branching out in different directions instead of moving from step one to two to three. Having quickly flipped over to check my mail and messages it occurs to me that a tidy example is the use of threaded and branching messages on facebook, gmail, twitter etc. 

Sterling continues:

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.

Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.

To reiterate: our understanding of temporal sequence is affected by the dominant medium of the day. The sequential nature of the book forced upon us the idea of the lone subject reading a singular argument from beginning to end. After the Renaissance and single point perspective, the Industrial revolution gave us steam travel, and with it the ability to move continuously through space in a single line. There's also the Judeo-Christian notion of time either moving towards or away from an ideal. Let's not forget my favourite time period, the Enlightenment and the sumptuous idea of progress. But the dominant form of our time is not a sequential argument, it's a series of links that (hopefully) add up to something cohesive. Or there's no argument to be had at all, merely the experience of moving through different points. The network image has been seared into our collective consciousness. I'll be damned if Deleuze gets credit for any of this; rhizome is such an ugly word. We'll all just agree to use the term network structure and leave it at that.

Back to the idea of the paper narrative. I'm intrigued at this idea, and despite the obvious and inherent problems with it, I'm attempting to turn the blog into a paper narrative. It's a bit of a silly and self indulgent project; I've been toying around with the idea of making a small run risograph book, mostly to flex my print layout muscles. But as Mr Geddes pointed out to me the other day, the risograph is a technology that doesn't make sense. It's a printing method that doesn't belong in this time frame, nor any other time frame at that. And with that in mind, I'm attempting to create this book and send it out. I'm hoping that after a year I'll be tempted to make another one. It's partially to unashamedly play around with aesthetics. The other reason is to kickstart me into paying more attention to the blog; to fine tune my antenna.

My main fear is that the end result will be a silly attempt at shoehorning some ideas into a medium that doesn't play well with the content. So, how to organise a non linnear narrative according to a medium so intent on remaining linear? Perhaps, and this is a side thought, the next edition could be a newspaper. To just play around with dead media. It is at this point that I realise that I am toying around with the designer equivalent with the hipster fascination with dead mediums, the tape cassette being the immediate substantion of that. I've recently been wondering when fashion will catch up, properly, to rave culture. To the heady days of pre Y2K, (ok, fine, when I got into rave culture) and the cd as the equivalent of the cassette tape and vinyl before that. I'm intrigued at how that particular object will play into the vernacular in the same way. As an object, it's useless. Far too thick to be used as a phone case. Beige computer boxes will have to make a comeback at this point. Mark my words, expect to see old pentium computers being hollowed out to be used as speaker boxes. I must find that scene in Idoru, or is it All Tomorrow's Parties, where a bar (I think) uses the boxes as an interior decorative element. Pardon that tangent. I must learn to focus, or edit.

One method I've been toying with is by going through the blog and tagging everything. I find tagging slows me down when all I want to do is copy a link or text and throw it up before I get distracted. But there's an argument to be made that the act of naming something helps to clarify oneself. Even if I don't get around to tagging the blog (or using these tags specifically), breaking down the posts into these components helps me work through a few disparate thoughts.

Modern Ruin looks at the built ruins of modernism, the architectural decay of the dreams of the twentieth century. Taking the name from an exhibition at GOMA, it's ruin porn, plain and simple. Yet I'm not looking back at this past with scorn, or through rose tinted glasses, although there are tinges of admiration. It's more about looking at a foreign past. A past whose ideologies seem foreign to us now. A past in which the idea of utopia and progress don't match with how we view our uncertain future. And looking at the result that entropy has had on those ideologies and their material substantiations. It's a deep and respectful nostalgia for the absolute, without the warfare.

As a flip to this are the unbuilt attempts and ideas of what the future was to be like. I'm trying not to toy around with this too much, as there are plenty of paleofuture blogs out there that have this niche cornered extremely well. Besides, it would be too easy to spend all my time on youtube looking up Jetsons snippets and world fair videos. But this sort of stuff is good ol' fashioned light hearted fun. Especially when they get it so wrong.    

It seems that while the idea of futurity has mostly fallen in the west, it seems to be alive and well in other parts of the world. In the heroic sense at least. I need to put up more examples of this. The recent world fair in China is a perfect example of how the idea of progress is alive and well in other parts of the world. The unbelievably bland American exhibit was in stark contrast to the rest on show. There is still a sense of the heroic, but it's not coming out of the west, not as strongly as it used to, anyway. That's what I'm attempting to do with Rise of the Rest: document the excitement coming from other areas of the globe, without looking at it through the (somewhat whiney) lens of Post Colonialism. 

Objects out of time plot some of the points of the consumer landscape that don't seem to exist in the right time frame, aesthetically at least. I mostly blame the hipster for this one, and their love of nostalgia. I'm still trying to determine if there is an element of pastiche with some of the products, but I'm more impressed when they bring something out of retirement and then move it into new directions. Directions that couldn't have existed then, and can only exist now, as extensions of their former selves, either through technological or branding means. Exploring the new map with old objects, pushing the form or the function or the market niche for todays situation. 

Design Fictions are quite useful as they help to push through ideas of futures that we may inhabit, to act as probes (pardon the use of that term, I'm feeling lazy and it always feels apt). I find them to rather hard to spot without resorting to the usual suspects. The really good ones always look plausible, and I always have to question if they're fun playthings or genuinely attempt to map out and explore future scenarios or to extrapolate on situations that we're already inhabiting. 

Leading on from that are genuine attempts at future making. I'm getting lots of this stuff from kickstarter, the best place for pushing out ideas of the distributed and clustering future that we're headed for. Except most of the real juicy bits from kickstarter are all centered around a very specific future. Minor tangent: I'd love to see a compendium of interesting ideas on kickstarter that didn't make enough money for the project to start. Surely there'd be a few super interesting ideas that didn't get enough attention.

And then there's been a recent spate of juicy spacefaring goodness, and the death of the shuttle program. Nothing speaks to the raw vein of wanting to live in the future than spaceflight. The prohibitive costs of it meant that it just wasn't sustainable until we move a few parsecs above the level of technology we have now. Shame. 

I haven't poked around with Network Culture stuff too much; the ways in which our newly networked mediated culture affect us and our comprehension of time. A halfhearted attempt to map the false histories and possible futures that a network culture enables. In other ways it looks at how the network culture is surpassing the twentieth century. A superficial example of this are the delightful photos of the smoke trails of space shuttles taken out the window of an airplane, using a cameraphone, with all of the poor image quality that this brings. To see the trails of these hulking machines lift through the cloud, the dreams of a faded future. And then watching these images zip through the internet, one retweeted twitpic at a time. 

Another gaping hole that I should really get around to tending to sooner rather than later is the new form of heroic modernism as it relates to generative structures, objects and systems. This is a useful avenue to go down as it provides an even starker vision of modernism than the original. I'll need to tip toe down this route; too much of it or the wrong examples and the point will be lost. Sitting next to Design Fiction should be something about Alternative Universes but the concept hasn't had enough time to crystallize for me to say anything worthwhile about it. 

So far these are just some of the threads that I've been able to name. There's much more stuff in there that I haven't been able to get a handle on. Perhaps what's needed are more examples of similar links, enough for it to make sense to me at least.

Returning back to Bourriaud, it's the way in which our time is not linear as it used to be, nor is it endlessly cycling back on itself. Instead, it's how our attempts at progress are spreading out in different directions, and clustering on those different futures that seem plausible, or even hopeful, for different groups of people. In another way - and I can't really back this up with any sort of a cohesive argument - it is an attempt to pretend that Post Modernity never happened. Instead, we're faced with a void of time between the end of heroic modernism and now. Just a small thought. 

As I've mentioned, it's a way for me to get a handle on a few things. As such, there isn't much cohesive thought put into it, and I'll get distracted by a few things that aren't necessarily what I'm looking for, or appropriate. But that's fine. In some way, I wanted to do this blog to get away from the fear of having to write for a blog. Twitter has taken away all of the short form posts I used to do, and thus after redesigning this place I was left without a place to just put stuff up online without it disappearing in a twitter stream.

Having gotten this far, I haven't really completed step 3 - solve the problem. I haven't really thought hard enough about some of these topics, missing large areas that require deeper thought than what I've been able to attend to. On the other hand I find it much easier to take Feymans atemporal approach. Which, if you've paid attention so far, is mostly the point.