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For the title I decided that would be engraved in the cover, my first ideia was to make only the worl SHAPE-SHIFTING in italic, but the place I found to engrave my book did not had italic letters, so I had to do with normal letters
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I started to make the spine of the book cover, first I made a box with tracing paper, I had thought to leave the words of the loose titles inside the box, but I found that it became very figurative. So I thought why not put a mirror? The mirror was used for years as the currency of exchange in Brazil. Money is a mirror for other goods
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that’s when I saw that it would be the perfect solution to create a cover with the phrase “Capitalism is a shape-shifting monster.” I made the cover manually with leather and another fine fabric, to make a critique (almost a satire) to capitalism, because leather is one of the most expensive and used material in high quality wallets.
I made all the book cover manually
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But my final idea came later during a class talking to my colleagues and my teacher, after explaining the concept of shape shifting a bit, one of my colleagues thought of a magic wallet
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My second idea was to create a book cover that would work like a PIN-ART, but would have a bigger size, and the pins of the tittle would have different color on the back of the structure so you can choose if you want the title to be seen or not
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My first idea was to create a book cover that was made of this paper that reacts with chemical
The litmus paper is one of the oldest acid-base indicators. It has become very well-known because of its qualities: practical, economical and efficient to measure pH. But the interesting thing would be to know where the litmus comes from, let's know now?
The litmus is extracted from the lichen plant (found in Holland) and fixed (impregnated) on porous paper. Litmus paper can come in three different colors: red, blue or neutral. Red litmus is used to test bases, blue litmus to test acids and neutral litmus to test the two. The litmus paper changes color when it comes in contact with a particular solution. Example: Blue litmus paper, in the presence of an acidic solution, changes from blue to red. This is because the ions react by changing the arrangement of the atoms present in the indicator. Do not stop now ... There's more after the publicity;) The red litmus paper, in contact with a base, changes from red to blue. Neutral paper, in contact with acids, turns red; in contact with bases, turns blue. See more! Indicators and pH - Know other acid-base indicators.
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The term “post-internet” is a slippery one. Depending on where you turn, you’ll find that it’s been variously justified, adopted, embraced, vilified and laughed at. It’s a term that can be very useful when talking about a body of work and artistic practice, but it’s also somehow opaque and its meaning certainly isn’t immediately obvious.
A lot of people argue that there’s no single definition of “post-internet art”, and that’s definitely true to an extent. But art terms are never meant to be cut-and-dried, and post-internet practices vary in their manifestation and mindset just as post-modernist practices do, for example.
What does become clear, however, when you spend some time looking at post-internet art in depth, is that part of the reason that the meaning of the term is unfixed is that, like any art movement, it has evolved and changed over the years. This evolution is relatively easy to trace through the writing and practice of various artists, critics and curators.
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What Is Post-Internet Art? Understanding the Revolutionary New Art Movement
The key to understanding what "post-Internet" means is that, despite how it sounds, it doesn't suggest that the seismic technological developments associated with the Net are finished and behind us. Far from it.
Instead, in the same way that postmodern artists absorbed and adapted the strategies of modernism—fracturing the picture plane, abstraction, etc.—for a new aesthetic era, post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects. And while earlier Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online, the post-Internet generation (many of whom have been plugged into the Web since they could walk) frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world.
There are already a handful of artists and galleries that are closely linked to post-Internet art, and curators are aiming to sum up the way these artists reflects our new relationship to images and objects inspired by the infinitely variable culture of the Web. What follows is a summary of some of the major figures associated with the emerging world of post-Internet art.
Artie Vierkant's 2010 essay "The Image Object Post-Internet" sparked much of the recent conversation surrounding art after the Internet. In it, Vierkant, an artist himself, surveys the way we engage with images in the post-Internet era, when they can be shared, reproduced, altered, and distributed more easily than ever before in human history. His argument is that in the pre-Internet days, it was difficult to effectively reproduce an artwork because the photographic, scanning, display, and printing technologies we have now simply didn't exist yet; now, the opposite is true. To highlight this shift, Vierkant refers to his own work—Technicolor sculptural pieces he makes with photographic means—as "Image Objects," referring to their ephemeral and infinitely reproducible nature.
Vierkant's essay is preceded by a number of other projects that, themselves, range widely in content, form, and style. The influential blog The New Aesthetic, run since May 2011 by writer and artist James Bridle, is a pioneering institution in the post-Internet movement. The blog's heady take on online visual culture, imagined as a view of the contemporary from a robot's perspective (a conceit that is quickly becoming more akin to reality than science fiction), has led to a slew of responses, both online and "IRL" (as they say), including a panel discussion at the SXSWin 2012 and the book New Aesthetic, New Anxieties, a critical response to the discussion around the movement. Much of the energy around the New Aesthetic seems, now, to have filtered over into the "post-Internet" conversation.
Another artist associated with the post-Internet label, Oliver Laric makes work concerned with the Internet-wrought phenomenon of collective authorship and the effacement of the distinction between the real and the fake. In his videos and image-based pieces, Laric displays material he finds online as his own work and invites others to remix, reuse, and re-present it via YouTube and other online channels. Like Vierkant, Laric's work also extends to discursive projects: he used to run the highly influential website VVORK (with fellow artists Aleksandra Domanovic, Christoph Priglinger, and Georg Schnitzer), which set examples of recent artwork in one-to-one comparisons with historical pieces, all sourced online.
While writers, bloggers, critics, and curators attempt to get a handle on post-Internet art, artist keep trucking along, doing their own thing both online and off. Los Angeles-based Petra Cortright is representative of the many artists who make work specifically for online formats, creating animated GIFs, YouTube videos, and labyrinthine web pages that, in combination, present her compelling take on the newest aesthetic trends—while also somehow managing to treat current visual culture with nostalgia, emblematic of the Net age's constantly-updating, blink-and-you'll-miss-it progressions. Other Web-based projects that investigate how images operate online include Jon Rafman's popular Tumblr project 9 Eyes, for which the artist spends hours sifting "step-by-step" through Google's Street View function to find surprising, resonant, or simply beautiful stills that have accidentally been captured by the Google car's 9-lens, 360-degree camera.
Of course, both Cortright and Rafman also produce real-world artworks, objects that can be hung on the wall or placed on a plinth in a gallery; the most counterintuitive aspect of the post-Internet label is that it extends to work in the traditional formats of painting and sculpture. In fact, one of the features that distinguishes post-Interent art from the "Net Art" of the late '90s and early 2000s is its ability to crossover between online and offline formats. While Net Art refers to art that uses the Internet as its medium and cannot be experienced any other way, post-Internet art makes the leap from the screen into brick-and-mortar galleries.
ART AFTER "NET ART"
Seth Price's Double Hunt, 2007, a replica of a cave painting from the famous Lascaux caves in France screen printed onto a sheet of PVC
Seth Price, for example, is a post-Internet artist whose inkjet prints, vacuum-formed assemblages on high-impact polystyrene, and multiple iterations of the 'same' artwork with only slight variations question the status of objects within 21st-century media's distribution systems. Price has also attempted to manifest the viewing experience of YouTube in real gallery space, as in his 2011 show at New York's Petzel Gallery, where he installed his videos on monitors within individual viewing booths with video playback controlled by the viewer—harkening back to the viewing devices of the early days of cinema and the return to solitary viewership that the internet has brought on.
Cory Arcangel might be the best-known artist associated with post-Internet art that physicalizes immaterial digital structures—and he's certainly the only one to have had a solo exhibition at the Whitney at the age of 33. Arcangel is celebrated for his modifications of popular video games, a series of which were on view in that show; he also reuses appropriated gradient patterns from Photoshop, YouTube videos, and other bits of digital pop culture to craft prints, drawings, musical compositions, videos, and performance works.
The transmutation of art that's based on the Internet from online-only platforms to materializations in real life leads to an interesting question: what will this work look like 100 years from now, when the technologies that these artists are using, commenting on, and imitating either no longer exist or have been radically transformed? Only time will tell. Post-Internet art is distinctly of the now; and that quality, so far, is its most definitive feature.
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Post Internet
Artie Vierkant is an artist active on the Internet and in physical space. His work can be seen at artievierkant.com and in the UbuWeb Film / Video Archive, ubu.com/film/vierkant.htmlPreface Being Post-Internet//This PDF is to serve as an extended statement of artistic purpose and critique of our contemporary relation toobjects and images in Post-Internet culture. More than anything, it poses a survey of contemplations and openquestions on contemporary art and culture after the Internet.“Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson⊘ and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in thecritical blog “Post Internet”⊖ during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh'sdefinition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a noveltyand more a banality. Perhaps ... closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–or when the photoof the art object is more widely dispersed [&] viewed than the object itself.” There are also several references to theidea of “post-net culture” in the writings of Lev Manovich as early as 2001.⊗Specifically within the context of this PDF, Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment:inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physicalspace in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials.Post-Internet also serves as an important semantic distinction from the two historical artistic modes with which it ismost often associated: New Media Art and Conceptualism.New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies,rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore beseen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice)presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea,image, context, or instruction.Post-Internet art instead exists somewhere between these two poles. Post-Internet objects and images aredeveloped with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation anddissemination.It is important to also note that “being Post-Internet” is a distinction which carries ramifications beyond the artcontext as a societal condition at large, and that it would be antithetical to attempt to pinpoint any discrete momentat which the Post-Internet period begins. Any cultural production which has been influenced by a network ideologyfalls under the rubric of Post-Internet. The term is therefore not discretely tied to a certain event, though it could beargued that the bulk of the cultural shifts described herein come with the introduction of privately-run commercialInternet service providers and the availability of personal computers.⊘Régine Debatty, Interview with Marisa Olson, We Make Money Not Art (2008), http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/03/how-does-one-become-marisa.php⊖Gene McHugh, Post Internetblog (2009-10),http://122909a.com⊗Lev Manovich, Post-Media Aesthetics (2001)//Art is a social object.From the rise of a liberal market economy through the build-up and ubiquity of the “middle class,” art has matchedand excused itself with the social conditions of its production. The rise of the “industrialized arts” gave way to loftynotions of art-after-object as late capitalism approached, all the while explaining itself as obligated to echo existingcultural conditions rather than move to shape them. Where are we left now? Art and arts pedagogy has become so inextricably linked with a variety of interpretations onthe Conceptual art doxa that it would be impossible to argue against any artistic gesture being automatically tied toits reception and the language surrounding it. At least from a historical perspective, Conceptual art assured its ownlegacy by the overwhelming volume of language produced within and around it at a time when summary-through-language was the easiest means of disseminating an object (profoundly simpler, even, than reproducing aphotograph).We find ourselves in radically different times. Increasingly the majority of both our cultural reception and productionis mediated through some descendant of a Turing machine—taken now both technically and culturally for Turing's“universal machine,” a “single machine which can be used to compute anycomputable sequence.”1 In culturalterms, assuming a certain level of access which does not yet exist in all cases,2 the ubiquity of these devices andtheir massively interconnected nature signifies two realities which are crucial to an understanding of art after theInternet. First, nothing is in a fixed state: i.e., everything is anything else, whether because any object is capable of becominganother type of object or because an object already exists in flux between multiple instantiations. The latter is aschema already intuitively arrived at by artists in recent history, prompting writers as diverse as Rosalind Krauss andLev Manovich to proclaim a “Post-Medium Condition”3 and the rise of “Post-Media Aesthetics”4 (Krauss using it as avessel to decry art marooned in medium specificity, what she calls “technical support;” Manovich uses it to offer asketch of how one might categorize different types of art in an environment without traditional notions of “medium”).The former, an art object's lack of fixity in representational strategy, is less often explored. This is not to say thatartists are not involved in exploring the relationship of many copies and variations of a single object to one another.Artists like Oliver Laric and Seth Price routinely present multiple variations of the same object—Laric's Versionsexists as “a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a song, a novel, a recipe, a play, adance routine, a feature film and merchandise,”5 Price's Dispersion “[taking] the form of a widely reproduced essay,an artists’ book, a freely available online PDF, as well as [a] sculpture.”6 These works are emblematic as Post-Internet gestures and have surely been influential in different ways, but step only lightly away from the tautological1Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, in Proceedings of the London MathematicalSociety, Series 2 Volume 42(1937)2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_digital_divide3Rosalind Krauss, Reinventing the Medium from Critical Inquiry Volume 25, No. 2 (1999)4Lev Manovich, Post-Media Aesthetics (2001)5The Real Thing, interview with Oliver Laric by Domenico Quaranta, Art Pulse Magazine (2010),http://artpulsemagazine.com/the-real-thing-interview-with-oliver-laric6Lauren Cornell, Seth Price artist page in The New Museum's Free catalogue (2010), http://www.newmuseum.org/free/#sethpricerationale of Conceptual art (typified in Joseph Kosuth's 1965 One and Three Chairs, an arrangement of threeversions of the same object, each signifying “chair,” and language surrounding the piece to assert that nothing isbeing missed and the art is in the idea—Kosuth's “Art as Idea as Idea”). In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one wouldencounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet andprint publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited andrecontextualized by any other author.The less developed stratagem for pointing to a lack of representational fixity isthat of taking an object to be represented (to be more direct, presented) as another type of object entirely, withoutreference to the “original.” For objects after the Internet there can be no “original copy.”Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both itsmateriality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of itscopies. When I take a moving image and represent it through an object (video rendered sculpturally in styrofoam forexample), I am positing an alternative method of representation without ever supplying a way to view the source. Asource video exists. The idea of a source video exists. But the way the object is instantiated denies both thenecessity of an original and adherence to the representational norms that follow the creation of “video” as bothtechnical device and terminology.The possibilities for these transformations, alternative methods of viewing “media” which essentially amounts to anarbitrary assemblage of data, has thus far been most thoroughly examined in the field of “information aesthetics,” afield as distanced from Post-Internet art as it is close to design, cartography, and indexing. Its fault is in its attemptto encapsulate large amounts of data—practical information, experience—into an aesthetic and understandableshorthand. In other words, information aesthetics provides in one object both a representation and the componentswhich make up its source in an attempt to illustrate or arrive at knowledge. While Conceptualism as outlined byKosuth may be limiting in its reliance on art propositions as enclosed tautological systems, its foundations—delineating progressive art with the same zeal Greenberg applied to ascribing modernism its “purity”7—hold true:“art’s viability is not connected to the presentation of visual (or other) kinds of experience.”8 For us to receive a pieceof art and determine from it some piece of empirical information about the world at large would seem almost abewildering proposition, even in a cultural climate where we have accepted that the singular qualification for themoniker “art” is the intention of any one individual to label it as such.//The second aspect of art after the Internet deals with not the nature of the art object but the nature of its receptionand social presence.To be “progressive” in art is a fundamental impulse which which seems to pervade the majority of our judgements ofthe quality of art propositions. This leads to the use of such terms as the “avant-garde,” which in the twentiethcentury held as its central project the delineation of a cultural space for art to occupy in relation to “mass media.”However the nature of mass media is now profoundly different, in that we are both its subject and the engine behindit.Attention has always been a currency, but with the proliferation of networking methods and infinitely alterable andreproducible media, that attention has diverged and become split amongst anyone and everyone who wishes to7Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting (1960)8Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy (1969)seek it. Fixed (which is to say, physical) media once imposed an economy to the image and object, a value drivenby scarcity which necessitated a one-to-many system of distribution. Over time this spread and democratization ofimage and object production tools has led to a perpetual iconoclasm, each successive volley of formats breeding anew dogma and its own particular set of aesthetic principles. Hyperreal tableau photography gives way to thefetishized imperfection of the polaroid, tape hiss is abandoned for ironic autotuning, &c.What has remained through each iconoclasm is an inability to fully break the mentality imposed by a one-to-manysystem of distribution. The continual use of “They” in language: “They should make a second one, They shouldhave done it this way, They should stop doing this,” &c., can be seen as sort of philosophical litmus test in whichour method of discussing cultural production continually falls short.“They” implies an alienation from production, a continuous deferral to action. It is a vacant critique, either proposalfor the perpetuation of the same image unchanged (“They should release this on another platform”) or proposal foran iconoclasm which will never take place, the genesis of the proposition being encased entirely in a passive modeof reception. This deferral is an act which accepts dogma, accepts a dominant image paradigm as an unchangingabsolute rather than the result of a complicated history of new approaches. “They” venerates this absoluteness,sanctifies it, while its opposite, “We,” postures towards the creation of an alternative and constitutes an actualschism; Baudrillard writes: “One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negatingimages, were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections inthem and were content to venerate a filigree God.”9Open questions.The use of “We” is not to advocate solely for participatory structures of art but to insist on a participatory view ofculture at large, and ultimately of taking iconoclasm itself as a quotidian activity. Whereas in previous times it was9Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1985)legitimate to conceive of culture as a greater system with impassible barriers to entry and a finitude of possibilities,culture after the Internet offers a radically different paradigm which our “They” idiom does not allow for. This is notto say that we have entered a fully utopian age of endless possibilities but simply to claim that culture and languageare fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-creation tools used bymass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those images, and gain free access to themajority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning.10These are conditions endemic to Post-Internet society, allowing for a ubiquitous authorship which challengesnotions of the “definitive history” or the “original copy.” Just as Barthes' proclamation of the “death of the author”isin fact a celebration of the “birth of the reader” and the “overthrow[ing of] the myth,”11 culture Post-Internet is madeup of reader-authors who by necessity must regard all cultural output as an idea or work in progress able to betaken up and continued by any of its viewers.With this comes new issues, though. As Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker point out, “the mere existence ofnetworks does not imply democracy or equality ... [we] suggest [that] rhizomatics and distribution signal a newmanagement style ... as real as pyramidal hierarchy, corporate bureaucracy, [&c.].”12While art may no longer have to contend with an idea of “mass media” as a fixed, monolithic system, instead it mustnow deal with both itself and culture at large as a constellation of diverging communities, each fixated onpropagating and preserving itself. This condition is espoused in the writings of Nicolas Bourriaud as “constructingarchipelagoes ... a voluntary grouping of islands networked together to create autonomous entities” as a means ofproclaiming that “the universalist and progressive dream that governed modern times is in tatters.”13 ElsewhereCritical Art Ensemble (CAE) explain similar ideas, expressing culture as already beholden to a “bunker” ideology, aself-preserving and replicating tendency towards the formation of specified bureaucratic structures, a tendency CAEpinpoints equally in “community-based art”14 and traditional mass media. CAE write, “While mass media brings itsviewer the world,the world is also held at bay while the viewer commits h/er gaze to the screen, forever separatedfrom others andfrom communal space”15Increasingly though, mass media and the world of “the screen” is our communal space. And with it comes newfragments with their own particular hierarchies. As reader-authors navigating these fragments, where now would wefind a space within which to delineate “art”? Or, if the new “mass media” is as distributed and varied as our socialnetworks themselves, and in fact driven by them, is that delineation even necessary? Ironically, the most radical and“progressive” movements of the Post-Internet period would be those who either pass by either largely unnoticeddue to a decision to opt out of any easily-accessible distribution networks, or else would be composed of acommunity of people producing cultural objects not intended as artistic propositions and not applying themselveswith the label of artist.1610The majority of texts researched in preparation for and cited within this writing are available as free PDFs on the Internet through somecombination of Google searches, AAAARG.org and Gigapedia.com. For more see this interview with Sean Dockray, founder ofAAAARG.org, The Public School, Telic Arts Exchange, and more: http://127prince.org/2010/10/04/sean-dockray-interview-by-randall-szott/11Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (1967)12Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit p.13 & 39 (2007)13Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant p.185 (2009)14Critical Art Ensemble, On Electronic Civil Disobedience p.39 (1996)15ibid., p.3716For a case study in a networked community engaged in artistic production without adherence to self-proclamation as “artists” see BradTroemel's anonymously released essay What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn from 4Chan (2010), http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/09/09/img-mgmt-what-relational-aesthetics-can-learn-from-4chan///The “bunker” of art and artist persists, however. The goal of some Post-Internet practices is to engage with thisproliferation of images and objects—“general web content,”17 items of culture created without necessarily beingdescribed as art—and proclaim an authorial stance by indexing / curating these objects. These projects are aswide-ranging as Jon Rafman's “Nine Eyes of Google Street View” project18 and some of the earlier works done bySurf Clubs19 and their participants, among them Guthrie Lonergan who was one of the first artists to release worksin the form of YouTube playlists. Artists after the Internet thus take on a role more closely aligned to that of theinterpreter, transcriber, narrator, curator, architect.This is often broadly ascribed to traditions of artists dealing with the banal, the everyday: “surfing as art” articulatingquotidian Internet-user “tactics”20 or the artists acting, essentially, as ethnographers who would chart and explainthe new variety of images found within visual culture.21 I would argue for a slightly different case.In his essay On the New, Boris Groys writes:... art can [become unusual, surprising, &c.] only by tapping into classical, mythological, andreligious traditions and breaking its connection with the banality of everyday experience. Thesuccessful (and deservedly so) mass cultural image production of our age concerns itself withattacks by aliens, myths of apocalypse and redemption, heroes endowed with superhumanpowers, and so forth. All of this is certainly fascinating and instructive. Once in a while, though, onewould like to be able to contemplate and enjoy something normal, something ordinary, somethingbanal as well. ... In life, on the other hand, only the extraordinary is presented to us as a possibleobject of our admiration.22But just as any object is conceivably any other object, our ubiquitous authorship marks a point in cultural productionat which the extraordinary is now also the ordinary—the myth is also the everyday. In many of my video works, Imake a point to appropriate imagery from recent popular films, mass media spectacles made with all of the fervorand resolution of an empire that only partially realizes its own decay. The striking thing about these images is nottheir content but their availability and the context within which they are now received. Where once an experience ofcinema was that of receiving an absolute, fixed icon—a definitive copy, inaccessible and precious—that is now farfrom the case. Cinema now becomes encapsulated, transferrable and transformable in the same vain as everythingelse, a “file” to be treated with all the levity we reserve for any other file.The images I deal with in my work, authentic unauthorized copies of spectacle films, thus represent the absolutecollapse of the mythological and the quotidian into a single indistinguishable whole.The goal of organizing appropriated cultural objects after the Internet cannot be simply to act as a didacticethnographer but to present microcosms and create propositions for arrangements or representational strategieswhich have not yet been fully developed. Taking a didactic stance amounts to perpetuating a state of affairs of artpositioned in contradiction to an older one-to-many hierarchy of mass media. For the new hierarchies of many-to-many production, the cultural status of objects is now influenced entirely by the attention given to them, the waythey are transmitted socially and the variety of communities they come to inhabit.Thus in the same way that all cultural images and objects become general—the film Independence Day being notdissimilar in homogeneity and degree of spectacle from any individual's photos of their newborn child on Facebook—so too does the authorial stance of the artist become general. Any sorting of images or aspects of culture,applied with a declaration or narrative gesture, becomes not dissimilar to our experience of everyday life, regardless17http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&site=&source=hp&q=site:rhizome.org+%22general+web+content%22&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=1bde53b2ade8e60318http://www.googlestreetviews.com19See Marcin Ramocki's Surf Clubs: organized notes and comments (2008), http://ramocki.net/surfing-clubs.pdf20A term adopted from Michel de Certeau's L'invention du Quotidien (1980)21See Hal Foster's The Archive Without Museums (1996)22Boris Groys, On the New (2002)of the degree to which the images are spectacular. What comes to matter is not that an artist has presented someaspect of the spectacle and how it fits neatly into some aspect of a linear historical trajectory. What matters is thatin the presentation they have created a proposition towards an alternate conception of cultural objects.//If, in Post-Internet culture, artistic production must deal with arrangements and representations of images andobjects taken from any cultural context, how do we conceive of sorting the artists themselves? How do we judgethe spaces in which this work is exhibited, on the Internet and off?As Lauren Christiansen writes, “with today’s burgeoning potential for digital mass viewership, transmission becomesas important as creation. Contemporary online artists are aware of this fact and seek to actively make use of itspotential.”23 As artists come to self-sort and form international communities based on mutual investigations, it isabsurd to think of being able to act with any curatorial agency in selecting from the vast array of “contemporaryartists” without being in some way tied directly to those artists' social networks. The methods of transmission theseartists use become imbricated with the work they create, who accesses it, and the spaces they ultimately show in. This is a complicated turn, as communities are for the moment more likely to form based on aesthetic principlesthan conceptual or ideological ones. Whether these aesthetic principles mean a preference for sleek geometricshapes with gradient overlays or mean a preference for a particular blogging platform, the underlying segmentationis the same. Posting an image of a gradient implicates an artist within a particular aesthetic mindset in the sameway that having a Tumblr adheres an artist to a particular format of transmission. In either case, the architecture ofthe Internet—an arrangement of language, sound, and images in which imagery is the most dominant, immediatefactor—helps facilitate an environment where artists are able to rely more and more on purely visual representationsto convey their ideas and support an explanation of their art independent of language. This is a crucial point ofdeparture from recent art history, as arguably it marks an abandonment of language and semiotics as basemetaphors for articulating works of art and our relationship to objects and culture.24This should come as little surprise as, especially after the Internet, the far more instantaneous and safe method ofcommunication is through imagery. Dealing with language can too forcibly illustrate the thoughts behind an image,or belittle a work if the text is not as clever or aesthetic as the image itself. Language can also be excruciatinglylimiting for those who trained to think beyond the fixity of “mediums,” especially as the involvement of language inmost average Internet use comes down to having a keen memory for appropriate search terms, keywords, tags: asimple but nevertheless grossly limiting architecture.23Lauren Christiansen, Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age (2010)24Haim Steinbach describes his relationships to objects as such: “objects, commodity products, or art works have functions for us that are notunlike words, language. We invented them for our own use and we communicate through them”—interviewed by Joshua Decter, Journal ofContemporary Art (1993), http://www.jca-online.com/steinbach.htmlDeprecated tagsFurther, it marks a denigration of objects and our relationship to space: if an object before us in a gallery is only oneof an infinite multitude of possible forms that object could take, its value to the viewer becomes little more than acuriosity. The viewer can judge it only by visually and conceptually relating it to every other project they are aware ofby said artist and the other artists within their aesthetic community.The strategy employed by myself and others towards this physical relationship has been to create projects whichmove seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation, either changing for each context, built withan intention of universality, or created with a deliberate irreverence for either venue of transmission. In any case, therepresentation through image, rigorously controlled and edited for ideal viewing angle and conditions, almost alwaysbecomes the central focus. It is a constellation of formal-aesthetic quotations, self-aware of its art context and builtto be shared and cited.It becomes the image object itself
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Thinking Like a Craftsman
Dedicated to the ideas of libertarian communism, libcom.org is a website that pursues the “political expression of the ever-present strands of co-operation and solidarity.” In March 2009 a contributor posting under the alias “Kambing” ventures the interesting thought that “the artisan” may qualify as “a rather attractive concept for a post-capitalist subject—it certainly beats the bourgeois star artist or proletarianized designer as a way of organizing creative activity.” However, “Kambing” continues, the concept of the artisan is at the same timedoomed as an attempt to overcome capitalism, as it can be so easily drawn back into capitalist processes of accumulation and dispossession. This is precisely the problem with a lot of autonomist (and anarchist) strategies for resistance or “exodus”—including some forms of anarcho-syndicalism.5This skepticism is only too familiar by now—any candidate put forward for the new revolutionary subject will be quickly rendered inappropriate, deficient, co-optable. The reasons for such pre-emptive skepticism, popular even among the most hard-line autonomists, anarchists, or anarcho-syndicalists, are manifold. However, a central argument for this co-optation is linked to the awe-inspiring malleability and adaptability of capitalism as such, accompanied by post-political renderings of “democracy,” helpful in reducing politics “to the negotiation of private interests,” as Slavoj Žižek puts it in his discussion of what he considers to be a symptomatic proximity between contemporary biopolitical capitalism and the post-operaist productivity of the multitude: “But what if, in a parallax shift, we perceive the capitalist network itself as the true excess over the flow of the productive multitude?”6The Fable of the Hedgehog and the Hare.The structure of the argument has been so thoroughly rehearsed in past decades that it has assumed a somewhat mythical truth. Capitalism is the shape-shifting creature-beast always already ahead and above—regardless of which revolutionary force tries to overthrow or subvert it—as it continually vampirizes any signs of resistance. It may be necessary to deploy the perceptual model of the parallax, as Žižek does, in order to maintain the structurally paranoiac—if absolutely legitimate—belief in capitalism’s shrewdness, which sometimes seems to resemble the clever hedgehog family in the Grimms’ fairytale “The Hare and the Hedgehog.” Its remarkable ability to re-invent itself and stay alive even as the current full-fledged crisis in interlinked systems of state and corporate capitalism turn capitalism-as-such into a transcendent miracle and/or metaphysical force with increasingly violent repercussions on the ground, with its most recent turn being the recruitment of state and legal powers. Referring to Carlo Vercellone’s 2006 book Capitalismo cognitivo, Žižek points to how profit becomes rent in postindustrial capitalism.7 The more capitalism behaves in “de-regulatory, ‘anti-statal,’ nomadic, deterritorializing” fashions, the more it “relies on increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses.”8 While the “general intellect” in reality doesn’t appear to be that “general” or shared—with the products of the innumerable and increasingly dispersed multitudes becoming copyrighted, commoditized, and legally encapsulated as part of the accumulation of wealth by way of “rent”—the unity of the proletariat has split into three parts, following Žižek’s Hegelian idea of the future: white-collar “intellectual laborers,” blue-collar “old manual working class,” and the “outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space).”9 Any possibility of solidarity amongst these factions appears to have been foreclosed, and in many respects the separation seems absolute. The liberal-multicultural self-image of the cognitive workforce doesn’t rhyme particularly well with the populist, nationalist position of the “old” working class, and both are further ostracized by the unruliness, illegality, and poverty of the outcasts who alienate white collar workers and blue collar workers alike, as they seem to indicate through their fate how imperiled their remaining privileges of citizenship may be.But Žižek’s Hegelian triad of postindustrial proletarian factions is debatable. The identities (intellectual laborers, working class, outcasts) are much too unstable, much too fluid and transient for a theorization of the (im)possibilities of overcoming capitalism. And it remains doubtful whether their insertion into the discourse provides more than a paralysis characterized by deadlock, tribal oppositions, and endless desolidarity.In fact, these and other identities shift according to (but also against) the self-transformation of capitalist institutions enabled by various neutralizations and recuperations. And these self-transformations entail wars of position, to use Gramsci’s term. As Chantal Mouffe put it a few years ago in pre-9/11, pessimism-of-the-intellect/optimism-of-the-will style: “although it might become worse, it might also become better.”10 Even Žižek—who has always endorsed a strong idea of capitalism, evincing a certain obsession with the task of proving capitalism’s fascinating, horrifying, and stupefying superiority as one that could only be seriously challenged by a return to the Leninist act—is himself looking for other actors and different processes now. Currently, his hope lies with the hopeless, the people fooled and victimized by “the whole drift of history”—in other words, the very “outcasts” from the proletarian triad mentioned above, those who are forced into improvisation, informality, clandestinity, as this is supposedly all they are left with in a “desperate situation.”11To rely on the desperation of others for one’s own idea of a successful insurrection is of course deeply romantic and utopian. Žižek may be right in asserting that waiting for the Revolution to be undertaken by others has been the fundamental error of too many leftists. However, would he count himself or anyone in his vicinity to be “desperate” enough to act, especially in a spirit of voluntarism and experimentation that would effectively dissolve the constraints of “freedom” as it is granted by neoliberalism?The “artisan” evoked by “Kambing,” though immediately disregarded as allegedly “doomed” to fail in the face of capitalism like so many others, may be an interesting figure to reconsider here—less out of interest in revolutionary politics than in envisioning alternate ways of organizing “creative activity” to replace and/or evade capitalist modes of production. As Raqs Media Collective have pointed out in their essay “Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage in a Networked World,” the figure of the artisan arrived historically before the worker and the artist, before “the drone and the genius,” while it enabled the “transfiguration of people into skills, of lives into working lives, into variable capital.”12 “The artisan,” Raqs claim, “is the vehicle that carried us all into the contemporary world.” However, after the artisan’s role in “making and trading things and knowledge” had been replaced by those of the worker and the artist, by the ubiquity of the commodity and the rarity of the art object, the artisan now seems to be returning, but in different guises—the migrant imbued with all kinds of tactical knowledges, the electronic pirate, or the neo-luddite, many of whom are immaterial laborers, pursuing processes of “imagining, understanding, and invoking a world, mimesis, projection and verisimilitude as well as the skillful deployment of a combination of reality and representation.”Interestingly (and similarly), “Kambing” distinguishes the “artisan” from the “bourgeois star artist” and the “proletarianized designer.” However, one may also imagine these distinct figures aligning—with each other and with others beyond themselves. These alignments or fusions would depend on an ability and a willingness to recognize and accept difference and diversity not only in one’s own social surroundings, but also within oneself as a subject. To acknowledge the fact that one may simultaneously inhabit more than one identity leads almost inevitably to co-operation with others that would go beyond the model of the homogeneous community.But, in Capital, Marx is highly skeptical of “co-operation” as a way out of capitalism: “Co-operation ever constitutes the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production.” Its power isdeveloped gratuitously whenever the workmen are placed under given conditions and it is capital that places them under such conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, and because, on the other hand, the labourer himself does not develop it before his labour belongs to capital, it appears as a power with which capital is endowed by Nature—a productive power that is immanent in capital.13A standardized bumper had been installed at the end of each car stall. It looked sleek, but the lower edge of each bumper was sharp metal, liable to scratch cars or calves. Some bumpers, though, had been turned back, on site, for safety. The irregularity of the turning showed that the job had been done manually, the steel smoothed and rounded wherever it might be unsafe to touch; the craftsman had thought for the architect.14The labor of modifying and repairing the work of others is certainly not groundbreaking in terms of anti-capitalist struggle per se. However, the physical skills, the attitude of care and circumspection, the inscription of a hand that performs “responsible” gestures, and so forth, all engender a shared authorship—in this case a cooperation between the absent architect’s and/or construction company’s work and the subsequent, careful labor of detecting and correcting the building’s design problems. This cooperation is neither contractually negotiated nor socially expected, but instead results from a specific situation in which a problem called for a solution. It is inseparable from local conditions and constraints, and should not be taken as a model for action. Yet, on other hand, it is intriguing, as it displays relationalities within material-social practices that usually remain unnoticed, and whose resourcefulness is thus overlooked.Paris scene with a goldsmith's shop , detail of a miniature from "La Vie de St Denis", 1317. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.In some respects Sennett’s concept of “thinking like craftsmen” resembles a definition of “design” that Bruno Latour introduced the same year The Craftsman was published. Speaking at a conference held by the Design History Society in Cornwall, Latour differentiated “design” from the concepts of building or constructing. The process of designing, according to Latour, is marked by a certain semantic modesty—it is always a retroactive, never foundational, action, always re-design, and hence “post-Promethean.” Furthermore, the concept of design emphasizes the dimension of (manual, technical) abilities, of “skills,” which suggests a more cautious and precautionary (not directly tied to making and producing) engagement with problems on an increasingly larger scale (as with climate change). Then, too, design as a practice that engenders meaning and calls for interpretation thus tends to transform objects into things—irreducible to their status as facts or matter, being instead inhabited by causes, issues, and, more generally, semiotic skills. And finally, following Latour, design is inconceivable without an ethical dimension, without the distinction between good design and bad design—which also always renders design negotiable and controvertible.15 Here, at this site of dispute and negotiation, especially on an occasion in which the activity of design is “the whole fabric of our earthly existence,” Latour finds “a completely new political territory” opening up.16
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On this project we were asked to read a few articles, choose one of them, get ideias and inspirations from them to create a book cover. Choosing one of the articles took longer than I expected, I read all of them but I just connected with one of then, so I decided to go ahead with Post Internet article, but I could not forget a quote from the Craftsman article tha was “ Capitalism is a shape-shifting monster.” I started to research on post internet, after a few moments researching, I noticed that the internet itself is something mutable, constantly changing, so I thought why not relate the phrase that I could not forget with post internet. so I decided that the principal theme of my book cover would be shape-shifting. I had a lot of ideas to represent this shape-shifting, one of them was to create a book cover with paper “tormasol” a paper that react with chemical, so the book could change depending the environment. Another one, was a create a book cover made like PIN ART, so anyone could decide what was going to be image of fhe cover, looking at the back of the cover the title pins would have different colors from the others to be differentiated from the others, so that when the person is making his cover they can decide if the title will go on the cover or not. But my final idea came later during a class talking to my colleagues and my teacher, after explaining the concept of shape shifting a bit, one of my colleagues thought of a magic wallet, that's when I saw that it would be the perfect solution to create a cover with the phrase "Capitalism is a shape-shifting monster." I made the cover manually with leather and another fine fabric, to make a critique (almost a satire) to capitalism, because leather is one of the most expensive and used material in high quality wallets. I started to make the spine of the book cover, first I made a box with tracing paper, I had thought to leave the words of the loose titles inside the box, but I found that it became very figurative. So I thought why not put a mirror? The mirror was used for years as the currency of exchange in Brazil. Money is a mirror for other goods
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