annotated bibliography: mass effect

Edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter. Mass Effect: Art and Internet in the Twenty-First Century. The MIT Press, 2015.

 

Cornell, Lauren and Halter, Ed. “Hard Reboot: An Introduction to Mass Effect.”

 

Mass Effect attempts to move beyond the what the editors term “the first generation of net.art,” which has at this point already been extensively historicized, and instead offer a reading of how the internet has shaped artistic practices from 2002 onwards: the byproduct of a generation that “could be described as the first to respond to the internet not as a new medium, but rather a true mass medium, with a deeper and wider cultural reach, greater opportunities for distribution and collaboration, and advanced corporate and political complexities.” Cornell and Halter question the legacy of net.art, the displacement of the web-savvy user in the 1990s by the technically disinclined “user,” the reality of surveillance and monetized data, and the ephemerality of digital art and its increasingly unreliable archive as formats and platforms become unreadable. The anthology similarly investigates the failure of museums and galleries to “integrate internet-based practices into traditional art spaces,” a problem lies with its cultural ambiguity (as groups such as Paper Rad straddle the line between art, punk, and popular culture) and distribution networks (how does one exhibit a website in a gallery?). The anthology similarly tracks the entrenchment of corporate interests into personal space, the attention economy of “friending, upping, liking, and starring” refuses the worker-consumer any break from labor.

 

Lialina, Olia and Espenschied, Dragan. “Do You Believe in Users / Turing Complete User.”

 

Lialina and Espenschied offer a history of the user-based of the world wide web, one marked by a cultural division between an old guard of computer enthusiasts (often with a university background) and “users” (derogatorily known as “lusers,” or those that use the internet without technical knowledge and are exploited as “ad-clicking revenue generators”). The authors trace this divide back to 1993, when AOL connected its customers to the internet without any orientation, which they frame as a preemptive “invading” of the Usenet discussion system. The intervention made by Lialina and Espenchied is in their attention to the importance of the common user. “The networked personal computer must be regarded as a medium with a cultural history shaped more by its users and less by inventors,” they write. “Then hopefully a reasonable relationship between users and the medium can be restored.” The essay therefore advocates for what the authors refer to as “digital folklore,” which “encompasses the customs, traditions, and elements of visual, textual, and audio culture that emerged from users’ engagement with personal computer applications during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century.”

 

Arcangel, Cory. “Coming Soon: eBay PayPal Blogs the Internet.”

 

Corey Arcangel describes the shift from a professional to amateur internet (which he marks as the origin point of web 2.0) through the punk media collective Paper Rad, active from 2000 to 2008 and comprised of Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones. Paper Rad, Arcangel suggests, is difficult to place due to their refusal to distinguish between hierarchies of distribution: we encounter them onscreen behind M.I.A. in concert in addition to within the space of the gallery. Much of Arcangel’s essay focuses on their website, which he suggests was the “nexus of Paper Rad’s activities and mass-culture interventions.” The essay is also useful in distinguishing Paper Rad as a generation removed from JODI, quoting Olia Lialina’s description of the second generation of internet artists as those that “studied jodi at university.”

 

Kukielski, Tine. “Doing Assembly: The Art of Cory Arcangel.”

 

Kukielski offers a survey of Cory Arcangel’s career as a digital artist that existed in and outside of academic institutions, beginning with his move to New York City when the “swan song for all things digital” was playing out across the art world. The main utility of this essay is its description of various works and exhibitions by Arcangel. One such work is Masters (2011), in which Arcangel modifies a golf game so “every swing is reprogrammed to miss the hole.” Kukielski marks the trend in Arcangel’s work in which participatory aesthetics are marked by frustration, invoking the theorization around the “prosumer” that has risen since Web 2.0. (A useful quote from Arcangel: “I mean, where is art left when everyone is a producer?”) Arcangel’s work is similarly littered with failure, malfunction, and glitch. Permanent Vacation (2008) features two iMac computers sending “Out of Office” replies back and forth until the hard drives crash. Continuous Partial Awareness (C.P.A.) (2008-ongoing) details his artistic ideas and prompts that have not been pursued. His work also deals with data compression and decay, with Untitled (After Lucier) (2006) looping the Beatles appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show as it degrades (referring to Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room). Personal Film (2008) similarly uses stock digital video from iMovie to then be transferred to a 16mm film format, while Data Diaries (2003) manipulates QuickTime to read a day’s worth of random-access memory data into a multicolored, pixelated video file. 

 

Galloway, Alexander. “Two Statement on Carnivore.”

 

Galloway’s essay reads through Radical Software Group (RSG)’s Carnivore, “a public domain riff on the notorious FBI software called DCS1000” that eventually offered “any PC user the ability to analyze and diagnose the traffic from his or her own network.” The essay uses Carnivore to investigate the relationship between surveillance, art, and science more generally. Galloway offers a history of the hacker, a figure that (in the mid to late eighties) transitions from “do-it-yourself hobbyist to digital outlaw.” He also reads the relationship between Conceptual art and coding. “How can code be so different than mere writing?” Galloway questions, “. . . It lies not in the fact that code is sub-linguistic, but rather that it is hyper-linguistic. Code is a language, but a very special kind of language. Code is the only language that is executable” (italics in original). Galloway pushes this further: “Code has a semantic meaning, but it also has an enactment of meaning.” Hackers, through code and projects such as carnivore, can “level the playing field,” remove the unilateral domination of government operatives.

 

Jim, Alice Ming Wai. “The Different Worlds of Cao Fei”

 

Alice Ming Wai Jim’s contribution to Mass Effect is a survey of the work of Cao Fei, whose RMB City (an “experiment exploring the creative relationship between real and virtual space, and is a reflection of China’s urban and cultural explosion”) is the most widely acclaimed SLart, or Second Life art, project. Cao Fei’s art, the author suggests, is invested in urban youth culture (ranging from “American rap” to “Chinese TV dramas” and identity play, which the author describes with a quote from Cao Fei herself: “For cosplayers, they put on different costumes in real life, but they’re conscious of playing a game. When you’re online in a totally new world, your physical self if more invisible, and it’s your inner self that’s revealed” (91).

 

Moss, Ceci.“Internet Explorers”

 

Ceci Moss’s essay offers a micro history dated between 2005 and 2010 of “an international network of artists, many of them millennials, working on the internet turned their focus to mainstream user-generated content as a form of popular culture following the rise of social media.” Moss argues this was a new phase of contemporary art, in which it was actually “about informational culture,” investigating the 2006 Laruen Cornell exhibition “Professional Surfer” (which she credits as “coining the term in a project that boldly considered web browsing an art form”) and artists such as John Boling (responsible for Lord of the Flies) and Kevin Bewersdorf (who wrote the Spirit Surfing Manifesto).

 

 

Olson, Marisa.“Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture”

 

Olson’s essay is invested in tracking the relationship between “pro surfer” work and the critical vocabulary already present in the studies of photography and cinematic montage, as she suggests it bears a resemblance to “the use of found photography while lending itself to close reading along the lines of film formalism.” The “pro surfer” (which originated in 2006 with the Nasty Nets, an “internet surfing club”) is a figure she defines as one “characterized by a copy and paste aesthetic that revolves around the appropriation of web-based content,” art both about and against the internet that is heavy in “animated GIFs, YouTube remixes, and an embrace of the old-school ‘dirt-style’ web-design aesthetics.” How do we consider the problem of circulation with images on the web, or how they are produced and exchanged? Moss points out that such images are both “positioned as quotations” and yet “authorial status is inscribed by the artist who posts them,” reading across Justin Kemp’s Pseudo Event and Guthrie Lonergan’s Internet Group Shot. Internet images are similar to found photography under the same logic with which an “author’s right to control the image, to claim ownership of it as an object or a product of his or her mind or labor, is theoretically ceded when it’s tossed into the bin, whether at a garage sale or photo fair”: according to Olson, we much question whether their internet equivalents are still ready-mades or rather “something else.”

 

Joselit, David. “What to Do with Pictures”

 

David Joselit’s essay aims to answer his titular question—what do we do with pictures, emphasizing “do” as an active verb—by focusing on three of Seth Price’s “routines,” which include dispersion, profiling, and effecting. Joselit notably suggests that “formatting,” which he defines as “the capacity to configure data in multiple possible ways,” ahs become a more fitting term than “medium” in the realm of contemporary art, due to the latter’s preoccupation with physical matter (paint, wood, etc.).