The palest ink is better than the strongest memory.

— Chinese proverb

In 2001 the hard disk on my laptop crashed and everything on it was lost. I’d been using the computer for two, almost three years, and had all my work on it—email, which was stored locally; photos; fragments of poems; presentations; sketches; ideas; love letters; everything. I lamented the loss to my friends and got lectured on doing backups. I sent the disk out to be repaired, but word came back from the shop that there was nothing that could be done. Miserably I thought of all the precious memories I’d lost.

Days later, after the initial shock had passed, I had a sudden sense of liberation and relief. 1999-2000-2001—I was completely free of those three years— I had no archive.

Recently I tried to recover some old blog posts from 1998–2003, and found they were also gone. I went to the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine, but it turns out at some point I’d blocked the Archive on my robots.txt. And I remembered the impulse that inspired the blocking: the ruthlessness of computers and how, if you set them up a certain way, the way that has become, today, the default— they never, ever forget.

Several years later, I started a website called Flickr and a team of people in Canada, a site for digital photographs, shared among a social network, with the photos defaulting to a public view. It incorporated tagging, groups, an API, posting photos on other sites, and other features that have now become standard in social media. It grew very rapidly, and as one of my friends told me, Flickr was a really great place to be a photograph. A photograph could remember the name of the wine you liked at that restaurant, that brunch where your friend made the funny jokes, the slant of sun on a winter’s day, your lover’s face that morning in May. We’d improved ourselves by improving our recall, our memory.

One of the first users of Flickr was a guy who seemed to photograph every minute of every day. Untied shoelaces, spots on the pavement—nothing seemed too trivial to escape his documentation and attention. This is excessive, even pathological, I thought. But it was nothing like what was to come. The participatory media of Web 2.0—MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and so on—made documentation, sharing, deliberate and passive documentation a daily activity for billions of internet denizens, including businesses, governments, and citizens.

“Free” is the museum show of our times, presaging the whole Wikileaks dustup, and it shows shifting power dynamics and a glimpse of the human in a world of flowing data. Pervading the show is this sense of how the “data”—the “facts,” if you will—tells us something, but fails to capture the human drama, the story, the suffering, the lived lives behind the information gathered and displayed.

Lisa Oppenheim gathers photographs that American soldiers stationed in Iraq have taken of Iraqi sunsets and posted on Flickr, prints them, and then holds them up, re-photographing against her own, local sunsets in an act of tribute and attempt at communal experience. The gulf yawning between her experience and theirs, the impossibility of connection, is emphasized. The sense is that their lives in a war zone cannot be known, and only a gesture is made to demonstrate fellow feeling.

Images of people caught on Google Maps “Street View” appear in Jon Rafman’s work, of which Rafman says:

The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.

We are bombarded by fragmentary impressions and overwhelmed with data, but we often see too much and register nothing.

Although the Google search engine may be seen as benevolent, Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.

Joel Holmberg collects earnest, whimsical and profound questions on Yahoo! Answers, foregrounding their often earnest, whimsical, and profound responses. They are both mock-serious and mock-comic in attitude, showing, again, the gap the medium creates between the querent and the human truth. Martin Hendrick’s video of shockingly callous texts (LOL!!!) in response to the footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution shows how people become things, how digital experiences are reduced to entertainment, and how meaning is leached out of the most significant or fraught events. It’s impossible not to see how the anonymity of online interactions dehumanizes us.

This effect is nowhere more tragic than in the real-life suicides of various teenagers living their lives online: Tyler Clementi, a freshman at Rutgers University, was having sex with another guy when his roommate and a female student broadcast their intimacies on the internet, resulting in Clementi throwing himself off a bridge and killing himself. Abraham Biggs, a young nineteen-year-old man from Florida, committed suicide live online, on the “lifecasting” site Justin.tv while viewers said “go ahead and do it, faggot.” And Megan Meier, a thirteen-year-old, hung herself after her rival’s mother created a fake MySpace identity “Josh Evans” to bully and humiliate her.

Can you withdraw? Can you escape? Is it possible to exist without being recorded by people’s devices, the unscrupulous roommates who would broadcast our most intimate moments, not to mention the ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras? Writer Evan Ratliff conducted an experiment for Wired magazine, in which he attempted to vanish for thirty days. His data trail was collated by various self-anointed online detectives (a $5,000 prize was offered to the person who could find Ratliff, say the word “fluke,” and take a photo of him) and he was eventually found. The sheer difficulty and inconvenience he underwent to attempt to evade detection was a lesson to us all. The project has launched an entire movement of efforts to disappear.

”Free” includes Jill Magid’s work Becoming Tarden (2010), a book-length profile of 18 Dutch secret service agents, created in collaboration with the agency. The final product did not meet the agency’s approval, and 40% of the text was censored — to protect the agents and the agency, to permit them secrecy, to allow their work to continue, as a secret service agency does, in private. Many arguments against the release of documents by Wikileaks covered the same territory: is some level of privacy required for diplomacy to take place? Not secrecy, mind you. Privacy. All of our parents had to do something in order for us to be conceived and born. It’s not a secret. But it likely happened in private. A necessary distinction.

Becoming Tarden is exhibited at the New Museum, copies of the book printed with the text blacked out, hiding the any information that might identify the secret service agents. Did their real selves escape behind those black boxes? You get the feeling it was never there to begin with. The book’s final quote is from Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit, where the character “Tarden” appears:

All that time and trouble, and still the record is a superficial one: I see only how I looked in the fraction of a second when the shutter was open. But there’s no trace of the thoughts and emotions that surrounded that moment. When I die and my memories die with me, all that will remain will be thousands of yellowing photographs and 35mm negatives in my filing cabinets.

The works of art in “Free” show the gap between the impassive data-gathering technology, human input, and the strange hybrid that is result of those interactions. As the human and data combine, as we appear in surveillance cameras, and leave behind traces on the internet, we’re in an alien netherworld, our selves and our humanity fugitive beyond the machine. There’s a reason we say IRL: our real life happens offline, unrecorded.

I often wonder if we should build some kind of forgetting into our systems and archives, so ways of being expand rather than contract. Drop.io, an online file sharing service, allowed you to choose the length of time before your data would be deleted. This seems not only sensible, but desirable. As Heidegger said, in Being and Time, “Forgetting is not nothing, nor is it just a failure to remember; it is rather a ‘positive’ ecstatic mode of one’s having been, a mode with a character of its own.” Proustian memory, not the palest ink, should be the ideal we are building into our technology; not what memory recalls, but what it evokes. The palest ink tells us what we’ve done or where we’ve been, but not who we are.

If we are not given the chance to forget, we are also not given the chance to recover our memories, to alter them with time, perspective, and wisdom. Forgetting, we can be ourselves beyond what the past has told us we are, we can evolve. That is the possibility we want from the future.

I remember a quote from the pre-digital, offline version of my high school yearbook, more than 20 years ago, which seems impossibly cute and corny to me now (form is more difficult, capitalization more dignified!) and yet so very true:

teach disappearing also me the keen
illimitable secret of begin

— e.e. cummings

Charles A. Csuri, Hummingbird II, 1969

A little over forty years ago, Harold Rosenberg observed that contemporary painting and sculpture had transmogrified into what he called “a species of centaur–half art materials, half words,”¹ a hybrid form in sharp contrast to the visual purity of the previous decade’s central artistic movement, Abstract Expressionism. Though Rosenberg himself had coined the term “action painting,” originally arguing for that mode’s existential ability to convey a record of the artist’s process on the canvas (“not a picture, but an event”² as he put it), by the late 1960s he had evidently revised this theory in light of conceptual art, minimalism, earthworks, and other developments.

Modern art, he now argued, never truly offered such direct access to experience; from its earliest beginnings, it had required the support of language, in the form of artists’ writings, curatorial statements, and criticism, in order be understood. Experiencing the artwork itself had become insufficient; increasingly, specialized knowledge was required. “Of itself, the eye is incapable of breaking into the intellectual system that today distinguishes between objects that are art and those that are not,” Rosenberg maintained. “Given its primitive function of discriminating among things in shopping centers and on highways, the eye will recognize a Noland as a fabric design, a Judd as a stack of metal bins—until the eye’s outrageous philistinism has been subdued by the drone of formulas concerning breakthroughs in color, space, and even optical perception (this, too, unseen by the eye, of course).”³ Rosenberg imagines that for viewers without access to these “formulas,” contemporary art objects simply disappeared into the consumer landscape, seen but misunderstood.

Rosenberg suggested that the vogue for text supporting the works themselves—or in the case of the most uncompromising conceptual artists, text as the works themselves—was not a radical break with the past, but an intensification of certain pre-existing qualities. The conceptual turn was simply a more overt manifestation of a state of affairs that stretched back to the turn of the century, when the pictorial role of art was displaced by the full-scale rethinking of visual representation at the core of the various avant-gardes. Modern art had always been conceptual; in the 1960s, it just became more self-aware about it.

In the headiness of this realization, artists and critics foresaw the dematerialization of art, but this never completely happened. Today, gallery spaces of the early 21st century remain populated by Rosenberg’s word-object centaurs. Once pressed into battle against the primacy of painting and sculpture, they have evolved into less warlike beasts, a menagerie of possibilities roaming through the expanded field. Like figures from Ovid, they exist frozen in mid-transformation from one state to the next.

“Free” is dominated by work in a post-conceptual mode that Rosenberg would recognize; it is a show in which wall text matters, and post-visit googling rewarded. Most pieces, like Aleksandra Domanovic’s 19:30 (2010), Lisa Oppenheim’s The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006) or Amanda Ross-Ho’s YOU AND ME FINDINGS (ROTATED 90° CW) (2009), remain less than fully comprehensible without recourse to information about their making. An uninformed viewer could not know that Domanovic collected a personal archive of Yugoslavian nightly news intro segments, then distributed them online for DJs to use as samples, simply by watching her two-screen video, though some variation of this back-story might be surmised. A similar issue arises with Ross-Ho’s grid of gold earrings, arranged on black canvas. She displays this jewelry like a taxonomist attempting to catalog variations within a species, but nothing intrinsic to the resulting arrangement communicates how she sourced them on eBay using the keyword “earring;” with this knowledge as context, her piece looks more like a physicalized version of a search results listing. At first glance, Oppenheim’s slides show photographs of sunsets re-photographed against other sunsets, their horizon-lines synched up by the photographer’s hand. The work only becomes truly meaningful when one reads that she found pictures of evenings in Iraq, taken by American soldiers and uploaded to Flickr, then re-shot them against analogous views in New York.

Cursory museum-goers averse to reading would mistake these works for simply what they appear to be: a video installation of appropriated television logos and rave footage, a minimalistic grid of found earrings, a slideshow of reflexive landscape photographs. Each of these objects is epistemologically incomplete, reliant on exterior information to achieve full significance. They point beyond themselves, to events that occurred outside the gallery walls, but at the same time bear more formal integrity than mere props for ideas.

This quality of incompleteness, of meanings sequestered elsewhere, is by no means unique to the works in “Free”—innumerable examples could be cited from the past half-century. But by focusing on art that responds to the Internet, something new comes to light through this exhibition. If conceptual art is a hybrid of objects and ideas, then conceptual art has changed, because our relationship to ideas has changed. And our relationship to ideas has changed because of the Internet. The Internet has altered how we relate to ideas—how we discover them, how we distribute them, how they circulate through society, how they are hidden or revealed—and this plays out in the latter-day descendants of what Gregory Battcock called “idea art.”

Consider Joel Holmberg’s Legendary Account (2007-10), presented at the New Museum in the form of six pieces of paper pasted to an expanse of sheetrock, each color-printed with a page from Yahoo! Answers. These half-dozen examples are taken from an ongoing series in which Holmberg, under his Yahoo! ID “jlhmberg,” posts absurdly open-ended questions to the popular knowledge-sharing site, verging on the logic of Zen koans. In the site’s section on “Wrestling,” he posts the question, “How can you occupy space?” In an area for “Men’s Health,” he asks, “When does post-coital end?” The wisdom of crowds remains dumbfounded in the face of such disordered queries, yet users nonetheless feel compelled to respond, if only to express their confusion. Legendary Account attempts to parody the online truism of “collectivity is correctivity” by pushing the process to its limits; the appearance of the piece in “Free” raises further conundrums.

The first is the question of documentation: do the printed-out sheets of paper mounted at the New Museum constitute the work, or are they just evidence of something that happened (or continues to happen) elsewhere? The answer depends on whether Legendary Account is seen from a medium-specific point of view—Legendary Account as a work of internet art—or a post-conceptual one. A medium-specific response would be that these bits of paper provide images of something that is meant to be experienced online, and as such, can only be properly understood in that context. Looking at Legendary Account in light of post-conceptualism sidesteps this issue. The replacement of performances with their documentation in the gallery is an established practice for art; performances are by their nature ephemeral, exhibitions require something to exhibit, and therefore to bemoan the illegitimacy of recordings would be unproductive in light of their utility. Like Domanovic’s video projection, Holmberg’s paper-and-sheetrock installation is an “incomplete” object pointing towards the existence of an artistic process outside of itself. On his own website, Holmberg chronicles the work through screenshots of the questions and their responses, calling them “performance documentation,” and does not link to the original pages. Some of his questions can be found by searching the Yahoo! Answers archive, while others cannot.

But querying the Yahoo! Answers database for Holmberg’s originals reveals something significant: any number of equally ridiculous questions posed by other users, like “At what point does your soul enter?” or “How is one supposed to know the difference between pre-coital and post-coital?” After wading through the proliferation of badly worded, inscrutable, juvenile or prankish postings on Yahoo! Answers, it becomes clear that the inquiries posed as part of Holmberg’s Legendary Account are essentially indistinguishable from these other “real” examples when experienced in situ. Therefore, a salient aspect of Holmberg’s performance is that it is invisible as a performance to fellow users of Yahoo! Answers. In this regard, Legendary Account could be compared to Vito Acconci’s Proximity Piece (Room Situation), performed during the Jewish Museum’s 1970 exhibition “Software,” which consisted of the artist walking close enough to unsuspecting attendees until such point they stepped away in discomfort. To attendees of that exhibition who were unaware of Proximity Piece, Acconci must have seemed like just another socially aberrant New Yorker. One is tempted to say that Legendary Account only becomes an artwork after the performance, when the screenshots are posted to Holmberg’s site. Prior to this point, it existed only as part of the normal ebb and flow of sketchy online weirdness. As the old New Yorker cartoon says, on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Here, we might instead propose that on the Internet, nobody knows you’re an artist.

Holmberg’s work presents an extreme example of a phenomenon well-known to contemporary internet artists: given the proliferation of creative activity online—amateur, corporate and otherwise—it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to tell when something online should be thought of as art, or indeed to imagine purely formal criteria that would distinguish art from any number of very art-like creations. Like Rosenberg’s Nolan fabric designs and Judd metal bins, online artworks easily disappear into the flux. Consider, then, the role played by the information presented at http://www.joelholmberg.com. Holmberg’s homepage embraces the conventions of the artist’s curriculum vitae and portfolio within its formal parody of news site. Examples of his work are categorized under tabs marked “video,” “sound,” “sculpture,” “internet” and so forth, and a “bio” section states clearly that “Joel Holmberg (b. 1982, Maryland, USA) Currently in Brooklyn, NY : creates artwork with computers and bare hands.”

In the decades-long discussion around the centrality of the readymade to contemporary art, the nomination of an object to the status of art is classically thought of as occurring in the space of the gallery, as if the white walls themselves were necessary for this transformative magic. But for Legendary Account, the paper print-outs on view at “Free” comprise merely one version of the piece, and arguably a non-essential one—any number of platforms could be used to show it, in an “art space” or not. The status of Holmberg’s Legendary Account postings as art is primarily supported by Holmberg’s assertion of his own professional status as artist. Put another way, Legendary Account’s status as art can’t be separated from Holmberg’s own self-authored online presence. Joelholmberg.com is not merely a means to document his artworks; its ultimate purpose is to document himself as an artist.

This process is not particular to Holmberg’s work, of course. The online portfolio plays a key role for artists in general, but internet artists especially, and we should consider how incredibly easy this has become. Through the publication of an online portfolio, any individual can confer upon her- or himself the status of artist, and thereby the status of art to her or his works. The power of the online portfolio, however, is purely nominative, rather than evaluative. One cannot, more crucially, evaluate one’s own work as good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, important or not. To state the obvious: the artist can declare him- or her-self an artist, but only other people can decide if he or she is a good one. These kinds of judgments can be stated on the portfolio as evidence of outside evaluation: academic degrees, exhibition history, critical reception, fellowships and residencies, where and how the work may be sold. The citation and listing of such facts becomes an argument for the kind of artist as well—commercial, fine, amateur, student, etc.

This question of the artist’s institutional existence is central to Jill Magid’s Becoming Tarden, installed at the New Museum in the form of a shelf bearing multiple paperbacks of her non-fiction novel, also entitled Becoming Tarden, and a vitrine containing a letter and a manuscript. Magid’s novel details her time spent as artist-in-residence at the headquarters of AIVD, the Dutch secret service agency. The center of the manuscript, containing the text of the novel’s narrative, has been removed from its binding; the book lies face open in the vitrine with its inner spine exposed, the novel’s prologue and epilogue sections lying flat to either side. The letter to its left details the removal of the novel’s body from its exhibition at Tate Modern by delegates of the AIVD, as per a prior agreement between Magid and the organization. At the New Museum, wall text informs visitors that they are welcome to read the copies of Becoming Tarden on the shelf by the vitrine, and that they can also purchase copies of the book downstairs at the museum bookstore.

Jill Magid, Becoming Tarden, 2010 (Photo by Nick Hunt)

At just over 180 pages, Becoming Tarden is short for a novel, but not so brief that a museum-goer would likely read the entire thing in the course of visiting the exhibition. The sections of the book are arranged out of order: first its Epilogue, then its Prologue, then “The Redacted Manuscript,” which is most of the book, and finally a brief postscript. In the course of the novel, Magid makes it clear that it is the book Becoming Tarden which is the central work produced by her residency: she decided to create a collective portrait of AIVD by becoming one of its agents, and interviewing fellow agents about their lives and jobs. Composed as a memoir, these interviews form the basis of the Redacted Manuscript, with substantial sections removed by the agency after a vetting process, represented by blank spaces in the text. Magid’s residency was the result of Dutch arts funding laws that required a certain percentage of the budget of new state buildings to be set aside for this purpose. As the book chronicles, the literary form of Becoming Tarden was a surprise to the organization, which expected Magid to create a physical, singular art object—something more along the lines of a sculpture or installation to be displayed in its headquarters. In the Epilogue, Magid reports that the idea for exhibiting the novel in a vitrine came from the director of the organization itself.

My advisor interrupts him. What are you proposing?

He directs his answer to me. We want you to think of the book as an object of art. We will redact it and put it inside the vitrine with your notebooks where it will remain, permanently.

You want me to put it under glass so that it will no longer function as a book but as sculpture?

Yes. He blinks his eyes rapidly. It becomes an object of art.⁴

This exchange appears as part of a scene detailing one set of negotiations between Magid and AIVD, here represented by the unidentified “Director of the Organization.” As portrayed in the novel, the process of producing Becoming Tarden involves many such negotiations for Magid, with a population of lawyers, representatives of government agencies, and members of AIVD. The removal of large portions of the Manuscript, via AIVD’s redaction process, transforms the novel from a more straightforward memoir into a piece of experimental fiction, lending an erotic mystery to its lacunae; this feeling is heightened by Magid’s writing, which often contains implicit or explicit elements of romance and seduction. Because of these negotiations, Becoming Tarden ultimately becomes a collaboration between Magid and the secret service agency, both sides working to determine the final shape and nature of the product. As such, the novel provides a picture—a documentary parody, even—of the European-style administered artist, given resources and status by the state only through an agreement to function within its parameters.

There is a web version of Becoming Tarden, containing some of the documents from the project, but the work is not primarily about online culture. At “Free,” Magid’s work is situated close by the photos of Trevor Paglen, which likewise seek to provide visual form to the governmental control of information. Neither is directly about the internet but both could be said to exist in its negative space, being about information withheld rather than shared. By becoming complicit in the control of information by an intelligence agency, Magid provides a picture of this mode of power. The controversies around and repercussions of the Wikileaks diplomatic cable leaks, currently unfolding as this essay is being written, underscore this juxtaposition of government control and the possibilities of online file-sharing technologies.

Becoming Tarden takes its title from the main character of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1998 novel Cockpit, which Magid purchased at an English-language bookshop in The Hague. Kosinski’s Tarden is an ex-spy who, as the book’s current Amazon.com product description puts it, “thriving on psychological pressure, penetrates the lives of others, leading his momentary partners in a ruthless dance of complex intrigue.” Magid becomes fixated on the concept of the “hummingbird” in Cockpit, and quotes this passage from Kosinski’s novel at the end of her Prologue:

I was one of the specially trained groups of agents called ‘the hummingbirds’. The men and women of this group are so valuable that to protect their covers no central file is kept on them and their identities are seldom divulged to other agents.

Most hummingbirds remain on assignment as long as they lead active cover lives, usually as high-ranking government officials, military or cultural officials based in foreign countries. Others serve as businessmen, scientists, editors, writers and artists.

But I always used to wonder what would happen if a hummingbird vanished, leaving no proof…⁵

“I study Cockpit now as a guide to a kind of organization I have yet to see,” Magid writes in the Manuscript itself. “In Holland, I am looking to reveal Kosinski’s world, the kind of service that he describes, where the hummingbirds pull all the strings and know all the truths… To find the face at the center I will become a hummingbird and I will use the Organization to learn how to be one, because I believe it does this, it can do this, it is doing it all the time.”⁶ A black emblem of a flying hummingbird is included on the novel’s title page, and again in the center of the last page, facing the inside back cover.

Kosinski’s hummingbirds go so deeply undercover that they blend into the world around them, unseen in their operation. Perhaps the word derives from the flight patterns of tiny real-life hummingbirds, always flitting just out of view. Becoming Tarden presents a number of different disappearances: information deleted from the page via redaction, the original book vanishing into the archives of the AIVD, Magid herself trying to melt into the structure of the organization. The hummingbird stands for an ominous kind of control through secrecy, but also a form of personal transcendence through seamless transformation. The artist and the agent become mirrors of one another; both provide metaphors for general questions of social identity.

“Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur,” Seth Price writes in his essay “Dispersion.” “The art system usually corrals errant works, but how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks?” This quote calls to mind the softcover edition of Becoming Tarden, sitting on shelves in the New Museum, a book that the AIVD didn’t wish to see available to the public, yet there it is. Price seems to envision something distributed through regular bookstores or other non-art channels, but Becoming Tarden, judging from the information on its colophon and lack of ISBN, appears to be a small print run, its availability likely limited to art spaces.

A chapbook version of “Dispersion” has been available for sale at similar venues, but has circulated far more widely as a pdf available from Price’s site. The essay considers the impact of conceptual art’s legacy on artists’ practices, and how its original ethos might continue today. According to Price, conceptual art asked the question “What would it mean to step outside of this carefully structured system?” only to be re-contained by the artworld through entering its archives as “documentation and discourse.” He offers that a more successful route might be to create work for the realm of “distributed media,” which he defines “as social information circulating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market, stored or accessed via portable devices such as books and magazine, records and compact discs, videotapes and DVDs, personal computers and data diskettes.” One of the most dynamic spaces of distributed media would be the internet, and, as Price says, “Anything on the internet is a fragment, provisional, pointing elsewhere. Nothing is finished. What a time you chose to be born!”

“Dispersion” is displayed at “Free,” in a form that frustrates normal reading practices, as the wall-mounted Essay With Knots (2008). Like other works at “Free,” it too points elsewhere, in this case to the original essay itself. Blown up to enormous size, a complete set of its design galleys is printed onto sheets of plastic that in turn have been vacuum-sealed over large knots of rope, over which the words stretch and streak. Its large-scale industrial materials make Essay With Knot seem both monumental and disposable, as if it were an item that had been wrongly constructed, or a strange sort of container that might be discarded to get at the ropes inside. It imagines the essay as a means to package (and perhaps ship) a set of conundrums.

Essay With Knots appears to convey an uneasiness with its own physical necessity, and this paradoxical ambivalence is found in “Dispersion” as well. Past failures to transcend the institutions of the art world, Price writes, have stumbled because “immersing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of art—and with it, the status of artist—disperse entirely.” Yet the utopian urge to exist beyond the art world through distributed media seems doomed in the same manner. “Complete enclosure means that one cannot write a novel, compose music, produce television, and still retain the status of Artist,” Price writes. He suggests that the freedoms of distributed media, if fully embraced, would become a kind of exile. But at the same time, Price cites disciplines like film, music, fashion and performance as producing “some of the most interesting recent artistic activity,” all happening “outside the art market and its forums.”

This may be why “Free” contains more centaurs than true hummingbirds. Even as immaterial a work as Holmberg’s maintains a thin silver cord tying it to the institutions of the art world, and plays a game of ontological chicken with its own existence as art. But the questions raised by these latter-day hybrids of objects and ideas go beyond old chestnuts of aesthetic theory. In Rosenberg’s age, the combination of material and immaterial may have had a rush of novelty. In 2010, it seems like just part of the information-rich environment we move through every day. Every object in the world now has an image that can be captured, a name to be searched; each thing in our lives provides a potential link. Perhaps we should stop thinking about the failure of conceptualism to transcend the art world, just long enough to notice that it has, in fact, overtaken the world as such.

1. Harold Rosenberg, “Art and Words,” The New Yorker, 29 March 1969, 100.

2. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 25.

3. Rosenberg, “Art and Words,” 110.

4. Jill Magid, Becoming Tarden, (N.p.:n.p., 2010), 21.

5. Ibid, 46.

6. Ibid, 90.

In 2009, Microsoft launched an ad campaign to promote its search engine, Bing. One commercial starts with a blonde complaining about her meal at a sidewalk cafe: “We really need to find a new place for breakfast.” “The Breakfast Club,” her redheaded companion shoots back, “a 1985 cult classic starring members of the Brat Pack.” “What?” Cut to an electronics store. “So do we want a LCD or plasma?” a shopper wonders. His son pipes up: “Plasma is an ionized gas.” Cut to a line at an airport check-in counter. A traveler says to his friend: “Next time we gotta find cheaper tickets.” Glassy-eyed, the friend recites: “Cheap skate. Cheap thrills.” Each vignette resumes. Back at the cafe, the blonde insists: “Seriously, we need a new place to eat.” “Eat lead, eat my dust,” the redhead hisses. She pounds the table and shouts: “Man-eating shark!” A passer-by hailing a taxi chimes in: “Wolf spiders eat their young.” “Plasma cutter,” the electronics-store salesman says. “Tetro plasma,” replies the customer’s son. “Blood plasma,” adds a bystander. At the airport, the wide-eyed tourist says “theater tickets,” another man in line says “raffle tickets,” and over the airport’s PA system a check-in agent intones: “I’ve got two tickets to paradise, won’t you pack your bags and leave tonight.” Cuts quicken, and in each location more strangers extend the chains of association. Discrete vignettes dissolve in a shuffle of shots as absurd conversations become indistinct chatter. Silence. “What has search overload done to us?” Microsoft asks against a black screen. Bing, we’re told, is “not just a search engine, it’s the first-ever decision engine.”

Bing advertisement, 2009

The unnamed culprit is Google. Its search engine, to be fair, is not so bad. But as the most commonly used, it is also most commonly associated with the pitfalls of applying Boolean search to a database as irregular as the World Wide Web. Before last year, Google allocated nearly nothing to advertising, because of its founders’ twin faiths in free-market meritocracy and the internet’s viral gravity. But in 2009, Google purchased airtime during the Superbowl for a commercial called “Parisian Love.” The ad tells a sugary boy-meets-girl story entirely in Google searches. The invisible hero enters “study abroad paris” and selects a program from the results. Google corrects the spelling of his query “cafes near the louve” and returns a map. Amid cafe noises, we hear a Frenchwoman say: “tu es tres mignon.” Google translates: “you are very cute.” With the help of searches, the hero of “Parisian Love” finds things to talk about with his new girlfriend, a job in Paris to be near her, a church to marry her in, and instructions on assembling a crib for their child.

Google advertisement, 2009

Was “Parisian Love” conceived as a riposte to Microsoft’s “Search Overload”? I don’t know, but the polarity of the two is so extreme, it’s funny. The Bing commercial dramatizes web search as an attempt at straightforward communication thwarted by non-sequitur interjections. It smartly exploits popular discomfort with search engines’ departure from natural language — the way Boolean search excises articles and syntax from queries to leave a jumble of decontextualized nouns, vulnerable to multiple interpretations. To great effect, the ad links the fragility of isolated words to the porous social boundaries of the internet. The strangers butting in with useless nonsense are farcical distortions of fears that a foray online might put you in touch with a MySpace predator or a Cragislist killer. The Google commercial romanticizes randomness. For all the quiet reminders of the search engine’s precision — corrections of misspelled phrases (even foreign ones), the return of a flight’s arrival time to a query giving the flight number alone — it is a tale of serendipity and spontaneity. In the Microsoft ad, language is a source of frustration. Ambiguities and proliferous associations harass the speakers. But for Google’s hero, language is the medium by which he contacts his spirit guide. He enters “churches in paris,” then picks Paroisse Saint Leon for his wedding; the telescoping movement from general to particular is like a dream come true.

Bing promises access to goods and services, Google — to love and life. Different as the two ads are, both map desires and anxieties onto language as it is used in a software application. Their success speaks to the search engine’s position in the public imagination: Can you imagine an equally affecting ad for PowerPoint? Neither commercial attempts to explain how the collective experience of the search engine affects individual ones, how the companies collect queries and clicks and use them to plan improvements. Instead, they make you wonder: Can my needs be conveyed in a handful of nouns? Am I feeling lucky?

Find keywords related to feelings, attitudes, and frames of mind. Affectionate, bossy, cheerful, content, displeased, distraught, ecstatic, furious, ignoring, impatient, loving, nosy, playful, serious, shy, sulking, tantrum, terrified, worried.
—Getty Images Keyword Guide

Getty Images licenses images for commercial and professional use from the world’s largest database of stock photography. Its website offers potential clients a brochure with advice on how to search it. Sections on “Concepts,” “Topics,” and “Human Emotions” explain how someone presenting a marketing concept, for instance, might go about finding suitable illustrations. Photo stock today is substantially different from its origins in the late nineteenth century, when new printing and photography technologies enabled the mass reproduction of images in newspapers. For decades, photo stock was a way for photographers to earn money from their leftover shots. But in the 1980s, the industry redirected its efforts toward anticipating the needs of media and advertising companies, commissioning photographers to produce images before anyone knew they needed them.

Aleksandra Domanovic, Anhedonia, 2007 (excerpt)

What works for Getty Images is weird for semantics. An English speaker understands “affectionate” with a set of associations determined by culture and personal experience. Images tagged “affectionate” in the Getty Images database have been chosen — or created — by an editorial team as an optimal visualization of those associations. Thus the word “affectionate” — as a Getty Images keyword or an element in an English speaker’s personal lexicon — and the image licensed by Getty Images both refer to a bundle of semantic and cultural information. But in the context of the photo-stock database, that relationship is severed and diverted: images labeled “affectionate” assume the position of what “affectionate” can mean. When removed from context, the absurdity of this principle quickly becomes apparent. Anhedonia, a video by Aleksandra Domanovic, matches visuals from Getty Images to Annie Hall. Word by keyword, film dialogue confronts discrete visual renderings of meaning. Between the words of Woody Allen and the pictures of Getty Images open gaps facing the infinity of language.

Last year, Domanovic traveled around the former Yugoslavia to assemble an archive of every television news interstitial used in the region since the 1950s. She shared the melodies with deejays and electronic musicians, and encouraged their use as samples in dance tracks. 19:30 arose from Domanovic’s idiosyncratic insight that television viewing and dance parties are two varieties of collective experience. Her association of the two is doubly poignant. Since the days of Yugoslavia’s breakup, cable TV and the internet have diminished network television’s ability to deliver information to the masses on schedule, while techno gave the youth of the former Yugoslavia reason to cross the new borders and attend raves.

Still from videos collected for 19:30

19:30 is an archive of endangered visual and musical material. No one claimed ownership after the Yugoslav national television network dissolved. But 19:30 becomes more interesting when it transcends the archive. When dancers hear the tracks composed at Domanovic’s suggestion, it invokes memory of past music and a past collective activity (i.e., watching television), while acknowledging time’s passage by transforming both. Getty Images, particularly as treated in Anhedonia, is sharp foil. Its archive is a catalogue of discrete visual representations of concepts that simulates collective linguistic knowledge. The collective memory tapped by 19:30 already exists outside of its archive, but by making that archive Domanovic shows the identity of memory and music. When they are activated in dance, a common past is remembered, and the framework of the archive is forgotten.

how is babby formed? how girl get pragnent?
—Question posed on Yahoo Answers

The white void of Google’s homepage was intended as relief from web portals cluttered with logos, flashing ads, and links. It presented the search engine as a tool, not an inviting or exciting destination in itself. This approach was key to Google’s ascendance, but it has never entirely displaced attempts at human warmth. Ask Jeeves, a leading entry point to the web around 2000, anthropomorphized the search engine as a cartoon concierge, and encouraged users to formulate their queries in complete sentences. (Popularity dwindled because Jeeves hadn’t actually discovered a way to parse natural language.) Yahoo was a catalogue of cool sites when it appeared in 1994, and though the company started developing its own search technology in 2003, it has always been associated with an editorial touch. In the early 2000s there was Ask Yahoo, where paid professionals answered questions, but that proved too costly to maintain. Yahoo Answers was the compromise launched in 2006. It blends automated categorization with message-board chat in a haven for people intimidated by search engines. Its community of askers and answerers has become the internet’s largest knowledge base after Wikipedia. Type a natural-language question on an everyday subject in Google, and there’s a good chance it will coincide with the wording of an appeal to Yahoo Answers, and Google will return the site among the top results.

Yahoo advertisement, 2009

One day in April 2008, Joel Holmberg posted three questions to Yahoo Answers: “When buying coffee to make myself, should I always buy whole bean coffee?” “If I buy whole bean coffee then how should I grind it?” “What’s the best way to store coffee beans?” The consensus: Buy whole beans, store them in an airtight container at room temperature, grind them yourself with a coffee grinder, available inexpensively at many stores. A few respondents touted their expertise in response to Yahoo’s prompt for a source of information (“they sell coffee grinders at places like walmart i dont think theyre that expensive / Source(s): we use coffee grinders at dunkin donuts where I work”). There were a few conflicting opinions. The experts said frozen beans lose flavor when thawed, but other users nonetheless advised Holmberg to put his beans in the freezer.

A week later, he submitted another question: “What do you see when you close your eyes while looking at a computer screen.? I see an orangish red color. I assume that this is because I am a white person and this is the color of light shining through my skin. Does race and skin color change what you see when you close your eyes?” There were twenty-eight responses. Someone wrote: “haha Funny Quistion!” Others actually closed their eyes and studied what they saw. “Um I see like a pinkish White light it the back of the darkness lol I sound emo! =]” As best answer, Holmberg chose a detailed account of a bluish flash fading to a dim orange. “good description,” he wrote.

Legendary Account tests the mediation of language by computer and community. When a question is submitted, Yahoo Answers selects a relevant category. Sometimes, ambiguities force the system to offer a few options. Holmberg took advantage of this to see how one question operates under different frames. “How do you occupy space?” went to “Military” and “Internet,” where the best answers, respectively, were “By being” and “by being a boyfriend.” Deliberately vague questions as likely to elicit mockery (“i had a dog named space… I just threw a ball for him and he was pretty occupied.”) as earnestness (“space is occupied by a presence of matter of the lack of there is always atoms or some sort of matter every where so every space is occupied even in outer space.”) The open-ended question opens onto an echo chamber, where speakers are absorbed in their own voices. Yet results for straightforward questions aren’t much different. Freezers of coffee beans! Are you paying attention?

Joel Holmberg, Suggestion Slam, 2007

What matters most to Holmberg is the connection itself: the possibility of gaining and sharing knowledge in a socio-technological framework. Aleksandra Domanovic’s Anhedonia might be ascribed to the same interest; indeed, many of Holmberg’s peers have pursued projects that explore how linguistic and social relations adapt to systems designed for the acquisition of information. Others by him include Woman Eating Grapes, an eponymous Google image search that returns dozens of near-identical results from stock image companies, and Suggestion Slam, a video of the Google search bar as he enters each letter of the alphabet after the word “slam” and reads the results (“slam allen, slam book, slam city skates, slam dunk”) in the jazzy cant of a nineties slam poet. Suggestion Slam sets up an improv performance by Google Autocomplete, which attempts to anticipate Holmberg’s keystrokes by recalling other peoples’ searches. Autocomplete is oblivious, of course, that its own anticipation and other people’s search terms are all that he wants. Push a button and see what happens: This is how Holmberg works. Yahoo Answers appeals to him because it makes language into buttons, because it shrinks the distance between buttons and people.

Piet Mondrian bathroom set [via www.hanne-mugaas.com]

I guess that this is what you’ve all been waiting for! As you might know, art comes in different shapes, and could very well, like these bathroom items, be integrated in-between your everyday objects: “VERY COOL PIET MONDRIAN INSPIRED BATHROOM SET FEATURES A 4 COMPARTMENT TOOTHBRUSH HOLDER (5.25 INCHES X 2 INCHES X 4 INCHES), SOAP DISH (6.25 X 4 X 1), AND STORAGE CONTAINER WITH LID (5 X 4.25 X 3). [...] THESE ITEMS ARE FACTORY PROTOTYPES, NOT CIRCULATED, VERY RARE.”
—Hanne Mugaas

Legend traces eBay’s origins to 1995, when a programmer wanted to help his wife manage her Pez dispenser collection. Other collectors joined the system, and it gained credibility by tallying buyers’ ratings of sellers’ dependability. Dynamics of the shop were reversed: on eBay, you can’t see what you’re buying (aside from a photographic representation), but you can “see” the vendor’s reputation. In the flea market or thrift shop, browsing is the movement of body and eye in space. On eBay, it is the movement of search terms in a database.

Hanne Mugaas didn’t discover eBay until 2008, but she made up for it with vigor. When she came across a lot that intrigued her — most often, a household item with some connection to art history — she would post a tip to her blog, and she grouped her own purchases for resale in Secondary Market. The secondary market sells art and antiques from private collections. It relies on provenance, a record of a thing’s creation, ownership, and storage conditions. Philatelists and hoarders of Pez dispensers have practiced a kind of downmarket provenance for some time. eBay makes it easy enough for mass popularity.

Hanne Mugaas, Secondary Market, 2008.

Secondary Market debuted at Ooga Booga, a Los Angeles shop that sells artists’ editions of everyday objects: plush toys by Mike Kelley, glass tumblers by Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, moire-pattern buttons by Tauba Auerbach. Mugaas’ project was a good fit. It had a towel designed by Jeff Koons for Art Production Fund, Chanel shopping bags by Andy Warhol, a poster for BMW art cars, old issues of Interview and Artforum, and a reproduction of a Picasso painting from the MoMA store. The selection also included works on paper by self-taught painter Mary Carol Williams. Artists who use eBay as a sales platform occupy an unusual position: they are producers in an economy of resale and redistribution. They sell beauty, original vision, and craft on market where, for the most part, value is conferred by authenticity, scarcity, and seller reputation.

Painting by Mary Carol Williams. [via ebay.com]

Amanda Ross-Ho has used eBay as a starting point for art-making. YOU AND ME FINDINGS (ROTATED 90º CW) attaches earrings from an auctioned lot to canvas, while Double Feature #2 is a fabricated enlargement of a clown-head brooch she purchased. The search engine of eBay connects a word to a thing that can be bought and received in the mail. Ross-Ho, using art’s devices of display, returns the things she buys to the realm of words, of concepts. Language/object relations figure in Secondary Market, too. Mugaas’ searches for “Warhol” return things with motley links to his name. But Warhol is more than a keyword, he’s the guy who replicated everyday things for gallery display; Koons is the guy who exalts kitsch. Traces of them in Secondary Market, amid low-budget Matisses and Picassos, knickknacks and hobby paintings, reproductions and museum souvenirs, materialize the systems of value that cross through eBay.

An adventure is certainly a part of our existence, directly contiguous with other parts which precede and follow it; at the same time; however, in its deeper meaning it occurs outside the continuity of this life.
— Georg Simmel

A graffiti tag tracks a street artist’s movement in urban space. A metadata tag tracks the movement of discourse in a database. The graffiti tag is fixed to multiple locations; the metadata tag is a tool for bringing disseminated data back to one point. Before distributing a band’s tour photos to fans via email, David Horvitz gave each of the unique images a common numerical tag, so that after fans posted them to their blogs or Flickr accounts, they could be lined up with a search for that number. One time, Horvitz posted this message to his site: “TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF YOUR HEAD INSIDE A FREEZER. UPLOAD THIS PHOTO TO THE INTERNET (LIKE FLICKR). TAG THE FILE WITH: 241543903. THE IDEA IS THAT IF YOU SEARCH FOR THIS CRYPTIC TAG, ALL THE PHOTOS OF HEADS IN FREEZERS WILL APPEAR.” It got hundreds of responses.

Flickr search results for 241543903. [Via www.knowyourmeme.com]

A graffiti tag refers to its maker. Horvitz’s tags are not signatures; they refer to the data they tag. He stands behind the relationship, not in it. Sometimes he arranges exchanges where he is at the center; on his website, you can send him money for a trip to Taketomi, and he’ll send you a grain the island’s star-shaped sand. For A Wikipedia Reader, Horvitz asked friends to choose a Wikipedia entry relevant to their interests as the beginning of a series built on links contained in the text of each article; it tilted the axis of information’s organization from vertical to horizontal, from categorical logic to contingency and contiguity. Recently Horvitz made a personal edition of the Reader, Southern-most Inhabited Island of Japan (Hateruma… Public Domain), which includes articles on “transport,” “rural delivery service,” “trespass,” “intellectual property,” and others that occur along the path from Hateruma to Public Domain inscribed in the title.

The first move is from “Hateruma Island” to “Island.” It’s a one-way path. Once you’re in the entry on Island there are no links to specific islands. In the world you can’t travel to Island, but you can go to Hateruma, as Horvitz did in the summer of 2007. He took photos and, as other tourists might share photos on Flickr, he uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons, a database of uncopyrighted images available for use as illustrations of Wikipedia articles, so that they might help desktop travelers picture being there. And so on. A sociologist classified the kinds of mobility active in contemporary society — bodily travel, the distribution of objects, imaginative travel via images on screens or pages, virtual travel that transcends geographic and social distance, communicative travel of messages through telecom networks — and urged his colleagues to do work that engages them all. David Horvitz’s methods are nothing like a social scientist’s. But that is what he does.

Photograph of David Horvitz looking at a work by Marcel Duchamp, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and tagged “Duchamp”

In the last few years, social media applications have moved toward simultaneous engagement of virtual and physical travel. Foursquare lets users broadcast their location, in case friends are nearby and want to say hi, while earning points for visiting the same place repeatedly, or badges for going someplace new. Foursquare, by making urban consumption into a game, tallies the ordinary to sums that are extremely ordinary rather than extraordinary. When Horvitz mixes forms of mobility — using tags, trips, mailings, and photos — he sharpens their particularities, making each one strange and wondrous. “I found it all the way at the bottom,” he wrote of his photo at Hateruma’s tip. “Imagine going all the way to the end of something – to a point your body can go no further. Imagine standing there looking out at sea knowing that only your vision can continue further. It is this, your vision, that extends out into the distance, the unreachable, the impossible.”

Meeting: So Beautiful, OMG, |transition|
GK: Shhhhh You know? \transition?\
Meeting: definitely (kiss)
GK: Becareful:
{You Too/You2}
Girl, Watch me go reschedule My identical USA Post
—Ryan Trecartin

Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web at CERN, the research facility in Switzerland. His goal to make a “pool of human knowledge” by connecting computers around the world was largely informed by the needs of his first audience: scientists who wanted to upload multimedia data for review and commentary by their peers. Hypertext as understood by Berners-Lee and scholarly practice are not so different. An academic paper, with its footnotes and bibliography, points in a multitude of directions; it presents itself as a new node in a network of knowledge.

Standard web interfaces mimicked the printed page (diagrams, charts, captions, commentary) and, by extension, science’s commitment to the collective accretion of knowledge. As web use spread from CERN to the rest of world, the interface did not change. But the ideal it stood for drowned in burlesque. Witness YouTube, each page of which arranges image, index, and… comments: “this shit is retarded. i’m gonna go back to watching rap videos and halo montages.” “son wtf..dis is sum neck shit..is dis like supposed to be viewed on drugs ? lol” These were posted to wyantweecatin, Ryan Trecartin’s YouTube channel. They are relatively coherent compared to what you can find elsewhere on the site. Who needs it? The pursuit of knowledge will survive on its own. Not everything must adapt to its forms.

David Karp developed the microblogging platform Tumblr to facilitate a decrease in the production of text. Posts tend to be images or links, rather than diary-style monologues. Approval of a post can be indicated by liking or reblogging it, circulating it without adding words. When Karp and Trecartin met in the context of Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference in April 2010, they conceived what eventually became riverthe.net. The site plays brief videos in a sequence that is mostly random, partly determined by tags assigned to videos by the users who upload them. Viewers can click a tag, in the bottom left of the screen, to direct the flow, but the videos fill the browser, fulfilling Trecartin’s desire to “see the interface move inside the content, rather than surrounding the content.”

Trecartin’s identification of interior and exterior is important. From the icons representing file folders on the computer’s so-called desktop to the command to “open” a browser tab, the interfaces we take for granted are full of signs that distance people from content, by putting the content inside something else. riverthe.net puts everything in front of you: a surface animated with a carnival of images.

On the road [...] the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people–representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages–intersect at one spatial and temporal point. [...] Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flows in it.
— Mikhail Bakhtin

One of the technologies Vice President Al Gore is pushing is the information superhighway, which will link everyone at home or office to everything else–movies and television shows, shopping services, electronic mail and huge collections of data.
— The New York Times, October 26, 1993

In June 2009, Wired magazine ran a cover story heralding “The New Socialism.” Its author found a political tinge in activities typical of internet use: collaboration, aggregation, copying, and free services. “Sharing is the mildest form of socialism,” he wrote, “but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.” How can the internet be qualified as socialist when the companies that do the most to define it have found it so conducive to capitalism? The author acknowledges he uses the word, in part, to rescue it from misuse in attacks on the presidential administration. But more than anything, the article is a symptom of the tendency to use metaphor to obscure what is hard to apprehend. The author of a popular book on search describes Google as having “its finger on the pulse,” as being “jacked into the culture’s nervous system,” and as a “Database of Intentions.” A company is a body, an attachment to the body, and an immaterial extension of the collective mind, all in the space of one page.

Al Gore envisioned networked technology as the “information superhighway,” tempted by the symbolic power of the road. In the analysis of Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, the road’s properties of openness and motion make it a common literary setting for encounters among individuals of diverse backgrounds. Time’s forward movement, doubled by the road’s linear shape, is transfused into social exploration. Bakhtin opposes the road to the town, where everyday life follows the cycle of habit, and where the interiority established by buildings and walls embodies fixed social relations. In the early 1990s, the promise of the “information superhighway” was to access the new; buzz about Web 2.0, the “social web,” tends to emphasize staying connected with the familiar.

Harm van den Dorpel, Ethereal Others and Ethereal Self, 2008-2010

The internet is not a town and it is not a road, no more than it is a giant brain or a socialist country. But in how it shapes the experience of time and social relations, it shares properties with both. In fact it elides the distance between habit and exploration, just as the road, in Bakhtin’s description, shortens social distance. All of these relations are established by language, which in its online forms mixes the temporal and spatial characteristics of writing and speech. Written language dominates, but it is used to fulfill functions of speech — most importantly, the everyday affirmation and maintenance of social relations. Writing is subject to immediate feedback, revision, deletion, and other operations impossible for the published page, the ink-and-paper letter.

And so, one definition of the internet might be: an environment where cyclical and forward-moving time on one hand and the temporalities of the conversation and the archive on the other are staggered in simultaneity. Another definition could be: servers connected in networks. That’s fine, but it says little about how the internet is experienced and imagined. Recall the commercial for Bing, where sample search queries are transposed to conversational speech, which is interrupted by strangers: a wrong turn on the road is a breakdown in the order of the town. Google’s “Parisian Love,” in creating a positive message, eliminates everything beyond the user and his search engine, which is as intimate and white as a page of a diary. The social sphere isn’t disrupted, doesn’t disrupt — it’s imagined out of existence.

“We should recognize that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion,” Seth Price writes in his essay “Dispersion.” “Publicness today has as much do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza.” Ethereal Self is a website by Harm van den Dorpel, with enough hits to be considered public art by Price’s criteria. When viewers allow it to access their webcams, it shows their reflections refracted in a silvery gemstone. Ethereal Others, the site’s double, tiles snapshots of the viewers at the moment their webcams connect. Between these two sites, van den Dorpel visualizes the principle of Google Autocomplete or Amazon’s shopping suggestions, which make individual interests and queries available for common use. Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others — the object of public viewing and the record of its viewers — inverts domestic interiors into the internet’s open space.

Google search screenshot by Hanne Mugaas

Simultaneity and the nature of collective experience are key concerns for the projects discussed above. In 19:30, Aleksandra Domanovic presents a post-internet view of television of simultaneous private experience and launches it into the present via the rave, an event with no interiority, where feeling is expressed physically and, in the twist specific to 19:30, public memory is exteriorized as music. Joel Holmberg uses the multiple temporary communities that pass through the front pages of Yahoo Answers for each question asked; the site is the inverse of Wikipedia, where group interaction is hidden on the “edit” page, and the archive is out front. eBay is another mass of fleeting communities, and Hanne Mugaas presents the multiple values held by them in objects obtained through its systems. David Horvitz steps out of time, out of collective experience by choosing eccentric pathways through language and through the world. riverthe.net tries to give a vernacular shape to this kind of
contingent movement; its solution is to remove the archival framework,
as in 19:30 or Secondary Market.

Can the individual and collective be mediated in a meaningful, enduring way? This is an old question, and the internet poses it more acutely with its simultaneous elisions and shortenings of social and geographic distance. I don’t presume to have an answer. Microsoft and Google, Wikipedia and Getty Images, Yahoo and YouTube, Foursquare and Tumblr — the entities that have invested substantially in shaping the experience of the internet — don’t either. Some of them ignore the question, others offer answers but hedge them in upgrades and versions. The projects discussed here, and most of the works in “Free,” don’t offer answers, but they face the question directly, without allegory or hyperbole or the other figures that popular culture uses to decorate its responses to the internet. They trace the structures of systems available to us, or build new ones alongside them; and in doing so let us more distinctly picture the forms this new environment is taking, the forms it might take.

Louis J.M. Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, Paris, Spring 1839, 1839

Paris thoroughfare Boulevard du Temple looks strangely absent of horse-drawn wagons, carts, and crowds in Louis Daguerre’s 1839 image. Only a man and a shoeshine boy attending to him appear in the resulting “daguerreotype.” Plenty of people were out that morning, but in the course of the fifteen-minute exposure time their motion blurred them out of representation. Just the shoeshiner and his client stood still long enough.

We see the same sunny emptiness in the cities Google captures. It never rains in the world of Google Street View but few people live there. The camera cars wait for clear skies and shoot at an hour when most people are at work or running errands.

Someday we will press a button to rewind and fast-forward through the history of Google Street View images. We will watch entire neighborhoods created, remade, destroyed, or left unchanged except in the subtlest ways. And in the course of it, we will find flashes of human experiences like the man standing with the shoeshiner in the Boulevard du Temple daguerreotype.

Jon Rafman, Selections from 9 Eyes of Google Street View, 2010

In his work for “Free” at the New Museum, Jon Rafman finds the shoeshiners in Google Street View. These are the few who were not indoors when Google camera cars drove out. A woman unclothed, her feet in the water, starring out at the waves on the coast in southern Italy. Four boys in tracksuits and trainers flashing rude hand gestures, perhaps shouting at the vehicle photographing them. Three men walking aimlessly through the wet grey-green grass in the Dutch countryside. They stand at a distance too far from each other to converse. The man nearest to the camera is wearing a kilted uniform. Is he a pilot? A police officer?

Google’s policy is to blur the faces of the individuals they photograph to protect their anonymity. Obscured by this ersatz bokeh, the people of Google Street View seem even more remote. It is difficult to determine one’s age, even race and gender. Vaguely rendered individuals seem like they are farther off in distance. They are photographed at an unknown moment in time, neither now nor obviously in the past, as indistinctly featured as the man and the shoeshiner.

The world of Google Street View looks eerily different from the crisp, color saturated digital photography that even a disposable camera can produce nowadays. Professional photographers generally avoid shooting in direct sunlight at midday, the conditions ideal for Google Street View cameras cars. Digital cameras are now designed to prevent the washed out look of harsh outdoor light, and in a pinch, Photoshop is there to amplify contrast and hue.

The slightly faded, sometimes blurry look of Google Street View appears without any time signifiers. No time stamps or indication as to what day the cars drove out. Paradoxically, the capacity to capture cities this way is a product of modern technology, but the degraded picture quality looks to come from a digital camera with so low a megapixel range it is no longer sold in stores. The blurred faces only amplify this confusion.

Time is just another thing to scramble and remix on the Internet. Now Google is in the process of reshooting everything in higher resolution, creating the possibility of an enormous geomatic archive if they continue the project. There are reports that the company intends to “refresh” the data every year. Eventually the quality of Street View photography will peak and the website will achieve a perfect atemporality. The image quality of 100 Oak St in Google Street View in 2015 will look no different from a 2025 representation. Date is then determined by recondite indications of the landscape and architecture transforming. No sepia tone, no lens flare occurs to sort these images into their respective moments in history.

Clunie Reid, Take No Photographs Leave Only Ripples, 2010

Oliver Wendell Holmes called the daguerreotype a “mirror with a memory.” Clunie Reid’s exceptional collage series Take No Photographs Leave Only Ripples (2009) appears like a pastiche of this early photographic method of printing on reflective silver coated plates. But computer screens also reflect in certain light. In a contemporary context, Reid’s work reminds one of the uncanny experience of seeing your reflection in the glare of your monitor while deeply enmeshed in multiple tabs open in your web browser. Inkjet prints on silver foil, the mix of drawings, photographs, text, and media imagery explores sex, power, class, and technology. These are found images from websites striped of the website’s meaning and presented with the artist’s point-of-view. It is as though Reid is sharing every tab she opened in Firefox this week – along with commentary. Catching a glimpse of your reflection in the mirror-like prints is a subtle reminder of the role of the audience in the art experience.

For her slideshow projection, The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006), Lisa Oppenheim took pictures of her hand holding snapshots of sunsets in front of actual sunsets. The horizons match up although the colors are not the same. The pictures she holds were taken by US soldiers stationed in Iraq. The artist found them on Flickr. The re-photographed images are a comment on the Internet enabled collapse of space and time. Learning the origin of these snapshots, the sunset becomes a symbol of homesickness, courage, hope, and fear. There is an artificial closeness created on image-sharing sites like Flickr, as we may observe a person’s life through his eyes in unedited streams of uploaded content. Few if any of the images these soldiers upload will ever be printed on paper. Oppenheim’s choice to print these pictures on an obsolescing form enhances the nostalgic quality. A snapshot of a sunset, like photographing an aircraft wing from the window in flight, is a momentary reflection on the possibility of the everyday. Sunsets never cease to be beautiful even in an unsafe place, far from home.

The online experience is generally a self-contained collage-like assemblage of windows and browser tabs open concurrently. The only through line is the user’s sense of curiosity and chance. Online information is generally distributed in asynchronous ways. You access a website sometime after it is created, at a moment convenient for you to receive it. But not everything online is available on demand. Martijn Hendriks’ Untitled Black Video (2008) details a rare shared experience online at a tense moment in recent history. The white text in the pitch black video is directly lifted from the comments section of a site where Saddam Hussein’s execution video was posted. These were among the first reactions to the unauthorized video, leaked cell phone captured footage. The comments express fear and anxiety, as well as cruel humor (“Haha maybe he’s still alive!”) Their anonymity frees them from cultural norms. To comment is to make one’s presence known, as there is no clear reward for engaging in this ad hoc online community. They are sharing an experience without exchanging faces or names. They could be anywhere in the world. All we know about the people who wrote these comments is that they were, at that moment, sitting behind a screen somewhere.

Aleksandra Domanovic’s video installation 19:30 (2010) makes use of the Jugoslavenska Radiotelevizija nightly news themes. It takes its name from the time the broadcast aired every night. But Yugoslavia, as a nation, now no longer exists. The past has an end in this particular archival project. After gathering these broadcast themes, Domanovic asked DJs to remix them, and the resulting music seems anchored to the years in which the nation was falling apart. One of the countdowns played on a vibraphone sounds as memorable as Brian Eno’s Microsoft Windows 95 theme. Others resemble jingles that could be used for commercials or broadcasts today. But most of the music strikes one as uncannily contemporary, sharing similar ground with a recent trend in music that rejects the aural perfection of digital recording. Writer Simon Reynolds and blogger K-Punk call it “hauntology” after Derrida’s concept that history gains relevance as time progresses. Cracks and fuzz are recreated and uncovered old-timey audio tracks are frequently sampled. It is not quite nostalgia, but an entirely different form of remembering the past. Music from anytime over the past hundred years may now sound like it comes from the early twentieth-first century.

The artists in “Free” at the New Museum demonstrate how the Internet shifts our perception of ownership. Before the Internet, no one ever had to think of whether or not his home might be photographed, freely and easily available for anyone in the world to see. Personal snapshots of a soldier stationed abroad would not be available to the wider public, rather these images would exist as stacks of glossy paper in a shoebox under the bed or pictures taped to the refrigerator. And recordings of Yugoslavian nightly news broadcast themes would collect dust someplace, if not lost or destroyed as new countries emerge in its wake.

Lisa Oppenheim, The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else, 2006

These are comments not just on the erosion of ownership, but the new frontiers of representation in a digital age. Everything on the Internet is free to see and explore at whatever moment one chooses. The meaning of a photograph of a sunset on the horizon changes when the photographer is a soldier stationed abroad. The meaning of art changes when it is viewed online as part of a personal collage integrated with whatever other desktop apps and browser tabs are open. It plays within the narrative of whatever other desktop apps and browser tabs are open. But if art is viewed in a museum it is a shared experience.

Boulevard du Temple never existed as Daguerre captured it. It never looked that empty. The street has for centuries remained a hub of shopping and entertainment. It is not even clear if the photograph was taken in 1839, some reports have it at 1838. The only thing known is the hour of day (roughly 8 in the morning.) This is the uncertainty of the images in Google Street View. You recognize your car is not in the driveway, so you must be at work, but what day did they photograph it exactly? Google Street View shows you your home as you never actually see it.

Information is scrambled online absent of obvious time indicators. Images no longer fade with age. With no physical object to play the music, recordings do not skip because of scratches in the disk. And as the tools we use to create peak in performance, the date of creation loses its relevance. Although the date is in the metadata of a digital photo or music file, or stamped on a blog entry, the swift ways in which people navigate online means the relevance of the date is not as immediate. Now the story, not the technology to capture it, determines a creative work’s moment in history.

Timelessness is also the mark of a profound work of art. Previously, the atemporal was elusive to artists using cameras, computers, and audio recorders to create. As the technology to produce creative work improves; video, sound, and picture quality plateaus in appearance. Now it is easier to create something ahistoric with tools and gadgets. These creations can be meaningful and look relevant to any age.

The future was once represented in fantastically romantic ways: white spacesuits, buildings infinite in height, interplanetary travel, alien interactions, an abundance of wealth, and robot servitude. Now the future is represented as something more compressed and accessible. The future is on the Internet, in those screens we glance at intermittently at all waking hours of the day. Our expectation is the “IRL” world will look not much unlike what we see today. It is a future of gradual changes, incorporating familiar aspects with new but not too crazy updated technology. What is in abundance is not wealth but information.

The idea of the future is now a distorted mirror. It is the future of screens. Like the daguerreotype, screens contain memory and reflection, as well as an unknown difference only discerning eyes can see. We are overfutured. We’ve reached the point where the past, present, and future look no different from one another.

SERGEI: …Let me ask you all this: What do you think has been the most important technological development of the last twenty years?
LUCIAN: [pauses] I don’t know… The MRI scanner?
DAPHNE: [pauses] Remotely operated killer drones?
PENNY: [pauses] Is it cell phone?
OSMIN: [enthusiastically] Oh, I know what it is! Online dating.
SERGEI: Exactly. Osmin was the only one who got it right. Except for the dating part, that is. It’s the internet, kids.
—Alexandre Singh, from School of Objects Criticized

i. Introduction

It seems unnecessary to foreground this essay with a statement about the internet’s importance, for this fact is permeating daily news, politics, and our personal lives every day. And yet, in contemporary art, its pervasiveness seems often misunderstood or overlooked. While the field of art online continues to thrive, art engaged with the internet does not need to exist there; because the internet is not just a medium, but also a territory populated and fought over by individuals, corporations, and governments; a communications tool; and a cultural catalyst.

The exhibition “Free” explores how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space. We can now be in public, while being alone and separate. Our shared territory has expanded beyond streets and schools to more distributed forms of collectivity. And, what constitutes the fabric of this publicness is not only the expanded sociality of the web but an accelerated, highly visual, hybridized commons. Free takes its name from free culture, a social movement that was defined and promoted most ardently by Lawrence Lessig in his momentous 2004 book by the same name. Free culture—the philosophy—recognizes the revolution the internet has caused in industries, like music and print publishing, and argues that it be dealt with as an opportunity for greater sharing and distribution of knowledge, rather than a threat. “Free”—the exhibition—is based in this commitment to openness but not directly about the movement itself. Rather it explores how artists are responding to the complex freedoms of a newly expanded public space: How they are examining possibilities, dilemmas, and ethics enabled by the seemingly endless availability and circulation of digital material; rooting out the information that is missing or hidden; and exploring how web aesthetics and logic have seeped across form.

“Free” is also partly inspired by “Dispersion,” an open-ended essay by the artist Seth Price that he tweaked and adjusted since 2002. In the words of writer Brian Droitcour, also a contributing essayist for the exhibition: “The essay examines artists’ attempts throughout the twentieth century to subvert the structures of the art world through conceptual strategies and new forms of media, and thus to reach new audiences.” It also explores how the essence of publicness has changed. Price writes: “…Collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion, and discussion. Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons, so a popular album could be regarded as a more successful instance of public art than a monument tucked away in an urban plaza.”

“Dispersion” is freely available on Price’s website, but is also exhibited as a sculptural installation in “Free.” This coordination between the gallery and other spaces is shared by several other of the works on display. For some, the gallery is one stop in a larger network, which includes performances, books, archives, installations, websites, and dance parties. For others, the gallery is their final and most appropriate mode of display. The featured works emerge from different modes of artistic practice to form an open-ended inquiry not a conclusive one. Below I outline three themes that bind the works included.

ii. Where Ideas End

“Copying” in contemporary parlance has negative connotations—it is associated with theft and inauthenticy, being derivative. Among the works in “Free,” it is infused with a different, more multifaceted meaning, as it is the inherent basis of so many works. Here many works lift, borrow, and reframe digital images—not in a rebellious act of stealing or a deconstructive act of critique—but as a way to participate thoughtfully and actively in a culture that is highly circulated, hybridized, internationalized—if unevenly.

To discuss issues of adaptation and censorship, Lars Laumann turns to Helen Keller—author, political activist, and also the subject of scandals relating to plagiarism and free speech. In her memoir, The Story of My Life, she recounts a traumatic childhood experience where she was accused of lifting the plot of a story she had been read, and weaving it into a narrative of her own. The resulting trials she endured educated her—in harsh, quick terms—about the boundaries of ideas. On writing the story in question at age eleven, Keller wrote:

“My thoughts flowed easily; I felt a sense of joy in the composition. Works and images came tripping to my finger ends, and as I thought out sentence after sentence, I wrote them on my Braille slate.” And, after being run through a trial of accusation and inquisition: “Now, if words and images come to me without effort, it is a pretty sure sign that they are not the offspring of my own mind, but stray waifs that I regretfully dismiss… It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind.”¹

This trouble over distinguishing is relevant to artists working within a shared culture that is deeply textured, reproduced, and regurgitative. Where others’ ideas stop and yours begin is a highly sensitive fault line with major ramifications. What material is and is not legitimate to appropriate are important, and murky, questions that often come into sharp focus when intellectual property is asserted.

The artist Takeshi Murata is interested in how culture—like the song “Happy Birthday”—can be part of our living environment, and yet legally out of grasp. Evoking the evolution of a folk song that is sung thousands of different times—each iteration unique—his works often copy, mutate, and personalize public imagery. The character Popeye is the flexible subject of I, Popeye (2010), his new single-channel video that premieres in “Free.” Here, Popeye is given endless visual treatments: he stands facing the camera as a 3D model, wearing a T-shirt with his own face on it; he rides through neon-colored geometric landscapes, eats spinach; and melts into puddles of electric colors. He is copied endless times, broken apart, and resurrected. Like images freely circulating in the public domain, Popeye’s identity is deeply hybrid–he seems to take on his own life, and yet constantly be altered and imprinted with use.

This notion of a hybrid form, where images are copied and adapted in a number of contexts, plays out in different ways throughout the featured works in “Free.” Andrea Longacre-White’s photographs begin with found images of car crashes, and are subjected to obsessive re-photographing until their original meaning is abstracted, and a materiality is imbued into their once ephemeral form. Clunie Reid and Rashaad Newsome are involved in processes of reclamation: Reid flips the meaning of found images, making submissive female bodies and objects talk back brashly; Newsome winds reproductions of hip-hop stars and their related lifestyle bling into self-styled heraldry, elevating quotidian, paparazzi photography into cultural emblems.

Other works involve an incredibly varied process. Amanda Ross-Ho works, many of which derive material from the web, are subjected to a seemingly endless cycle of versioning. Much like “Dispersion,” they are tweaked and adjusted, blown up, yanked across format—from images to sculptures and back again. To create 19:30 (2010), Aleksandra Domanovic traveled around the former Yugoslavia collecting “idents”—the graphical intro sequences to nightly news shows from national television stations. She then uploaded these clips online and encouraged DJs to use them as the basis for new techno tracks—a genre of music chosen for its sampling and variability, and also for the historic role it played within the ex-SFRJ as the first music craze to enter the region after borders collapsed, becoming its first transnational phenomenon. The work manifests as a gallery installation, a singular historical archive, and the soundtrack for parties internationally.

In the spirit of copying that is part homage and part participation, less theft that is shared by other artists, Domanovic stretches the original ideas of the “idents” out across a distributed culture, keeping their native history and ideas alive by keeping them moving.

iii. Unknown Unknowns²

This idea of endless and free appropriation leads us to a new set of questions: What isn’t free? What is hiding? What is repressed? Many works in “Free” point to what is kept out of the public domain, to what is unseen, and thus unknown. A trained geographer and visual artist, Trevor Paglen’s activity has long centered around the black budget—the part of the US federal budget that is blacked out, i.e. allocated towards classified operations. In “Free,” he presents four large-scale photographs, each one a visually stunning landscape, at first glimpse engaged with the aesthetics of landscape photography. Contained in each one, however, is evidence of classified information—for instance, Untitled (Predators; Indian Springs, NV) of 2010, which contains razor-thin black lines, the trails of predator drones that Paglen located by comparing the public, online records of NASA that track objects in the sky with similar records of amateur astronomers. Through collaboration with these communities of hobbyists, Paglen was able to research and locate information that was repressed from public view—but actually visible in plain sight. In an essay on the artist, the novelist and essayist Rebecca Solnit relates these black sites, or what we can’t see, to an impediment in democracy:

“The unseen itself is a vast realm, the black budget of the Pentagon, and the ‘black sites’ Paglen documents. Most people don’t make much effort to know about this realm, and the knowledge that emerges is quickly forgotten and dismissed. ‘We are a peaceful nation’ is a popular thing to say in the United States. Those who might say this have been denied the intelligence to know what is done in their name and to decide democratically whether it should be done. Or they have ducked it. The blank spots on the map that Paglen describes have their corollary in the blank spots in the mind and in public dialogue.”³

Where Paglen fills in our “blank spots on the map”4 through photographic evidence, other artists pick up seemingly minor evidence to point to larger cultural events. In The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else (2006), which is a slideshow containing images of the artist holding up images of sunsets taken by US soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan against her own horizon, Lisa Oppenheim makes a seemingly trivial occurrence—an unspoken pattern among soldiers living away from home—illuminate a much larger fact: the ongoing reality of war. The rote beauty of a sunset here becomes a way to connect to something universally familiar. Homesickness isn’t a side of war discussed in top news headlines and yet here it is eloquently expressed.

This ability to not only participate in shared events remotely, but also to observe them is something new the internet enables. Now, reaction doesn’t need to be reported to us—we can see it. This is made clear in Martijn Hendriks brutal piece Untitled Black Video (2008), a reconstruction of a leaked cell phone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution as told through video comments. The work has no image—it features only text, in white font, projected on a black screen—each line a comment taken from the online chat rooms where the video was played. Frightened, callous, confused, the comments capture an immediate public reaction that crisscross all over the emotional map. Untitled Black Video captures a community response, revealing what can be said under the cloak of anonymity, and further how people respond to political events often hidden from them.

iv. New-ishness in an Expanded Public Space

Would this range of emotional expression in Hendriks video have been articulated before the mass, centralized platform of the internet? Probably. The substance of the reaction itself is not entirely new, but the anonymous, decentralized online platform is. “Free” asserts that our public space has expanded, but it doesn’t assert that it creates an entirely new culture—a “cyberspace.” Rather, several works, including Joel Holmberg’s Legendary Account (2007–10), which documents the artist asking questions in Yahoo! Answers simple Q&A service, and Hanne Mugaas’s Secondary Market (2010)—explore how social behavior and taste translates online. Part of a series entitled “Blue Screen Process,” Liz Deschenes’s Green Screen #4 (2001) points to the history of the moving image special effects tool. In the gallery, it is situated next to a live stream of video generated through a program called riverthe.net (2010), made by Ryan Trecartin and David Karp. As the green screen has evolved from an industry tool to a common function on the computer desktop, Deschenes’s work demonstrates how the fantasies of Hollywood and television are internalized, performed, embraced, and rejected in broader culture.

Alexandre Singh’s ambitious installation The School for Objects Criticized (2010) stands within “Free” as a space for consideration. The work—a play told between objects—features characters discussing a work that has just been transpired (although viewers can’t see it). The arbitrariness of their criteria for judging contemporary art and newness is thrown into light as they compare and contrast notes on the work. They both stand against the prevailing winds of change, and are racing to catch up with it—they parody and consider a culture at a crossroads, undergoing another evolution wrought by a new medium. Some of Singh’s dialogue is lifted from newspapers, and conversations with artists and curators, there is uncanniness to it. The play reflects back on our own predicament, and the ideas that play centrally within the show in terms of how artists and the culture industry reacts to a great change in our landscape of information. Like Singh’s work, “Free intends to raise questions—not answer them—to look at artists fighting, embracing, considering a common culture undergoing yet another sea change.

1. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Bantam Classics, 1990).

2. United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

3. Photographs by Trevor Paglen and text by Rebecca Solnit, Invisible. (New York: Aperture, 2010).

4. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map (New York: NAL Trade, 2010).