There's
a few things I want to talk about, rather than being totally critical
about the many things I think should be addressed with the curators
of the exhibition, as someone who was actively engaging
in post-internet aesthetics and movement in its peak around
2010 onwards I was struck by what I saw as I walked into
the ARS17 exhibition
about the post-internet now open in Kiasma museum in Helsinki.
It
should be made clear that the exhibition is not about the internet,
not about internet art, net art or other forms of art that have
existed in and around the internet for several decades. It is clearly
and only about post-internet, and not just any post-internet,
as the movement spanned the whole globe, but specifically California,
and more specifically regions around San Francisco, Oakland and
Silicon Valley, as well as Los Angeles and its suburban areas.
Why
would I say this about an exhibition that says it is about a whole
zeitgeist by using the title Hello World!
To
start with a quote from Richard Barbrooks & Andy Camerons
1995 THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY (link to article at
bottom):
"At
the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of
the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is
finally happening. Once again, capitalism's relentless drive to
diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the
verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play
and live together. By integrating different technologies around
common protocols, something is being created which is more than the
sum of its parts. When the ability to produce and receive unlimited
amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the
global telephone networks, existing forms of work and leisure can be
fundamentally transformed. New
industries will be born and current stock market favourites will
swept away. At such moments of profound social change, anyone who can
offer a simple explanation of what is happening will be listened to
with great interest. At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of
writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the
USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the
coming information age: the Californian Ideology."
What
better proof of this Idealogical
stance than Microsoft as the main sponsor. But that again is not
something I want to critique since Otso Kantokorpi has already done
so here.
What I want to talk about is the art itself, which I think is
important, and since so much seems to be taken at face value without
actually understanding the full scene that was post-internet.
Much
of what has been termed post-internet was born out of subcultures of
teens and young adults who were interested in engaging with people
and ideas from around the world in a direct way, this way was the
internet and more specifically social media, which is a different
thing to the internet. The world itself became about publishing, any
work could reach any person, not only could people and ideas
communicate over vast distances, objects themselves started doing so.
I was personally involved in the Alt-Lit (alternative literature)
scene as a poet and publisher first, as a composer and musician and
as a visual artist, the internet was more literal then and this is
also something I will talk about later. I played a role in what was a
part of the larger network of musicians, artists, poets, writers and
everyone else who wanted to put things out there fast, to reach an
audience now. It was an embodied and manipulative accelerationism. I
say this not to be authoritative, but to make clear why I will write
what I write, that I have come to see post-internet as I
describe through my own experience in it.
What marked
the post-internet of that time was the absolute belief in technology
as ubiquitous and perversive and unavoidability that fuelled the
dystopian and utopian visions that can also be seen in ARS17.
Hollywood styled 3D renderings are also a hallmark of this type of
late capitalism, which can be seen in the aesthetic fixtures
generated by computer graphic rendering possibilities available to
specific hardware architecture that are by far not free nor available
and are made by huge organisations and thousands of hours of labour
from thousands of persons intentionally making something that
can be used in only one way (and glitch came as a reaction to this
determinism). What ARS17 lacks, like most conversations
about post-internet or the internet in general, is the clear
signification that this is intentional and that there is a huge gap
in access to such devices that are able to produce 'post-internet'.
The internet did not form by accident but it was created for specific
means and purposes, it then spread laterally through people
using how they want to, but through big data mining and AI it has
again been possible harness this laterality in UI/UX design
incorporating the free agency of individuals to use for corporations.
There
are several critiques to be made about the exhibition based on what I
have just stated. Not only that it does not clearly differentiate
between post-internet as being part of social media use rather than
internet architecture as such even if there are many artworks that
deal with the internet as an object, or delve into the internets
materiality. Nevertheless the cables are there to connect people. The
exhibition, nor the discussion organised after the opening, did not
in any meaningful way open up the curatorial choices of the
exhibition. This was a total shame because I think if it were made
clear that the exhibition was not only not about the internet as
such, or a generation of artists or works born after the internet,
but about a very specific type of post-internet and the problematics
of that specific culture and its ways of dealing with its problems,
inherent in the works, ARS17 would communicate beautifully well to
artists and curators and other creative sector workers and to any
general audience a specific type of post-internet that could be used
to reflect everything else.
I
saw ARS17 as a point, not as a cross section, but a point
of a specific cultural way of being. While it is a shame is that it
seems that this was not achieved consciously but by accident and
because of this it seems that it could not be communicated in the
curatorial work. At the same time post-internet is not about
being conscious, but about creating and recreating through embodied
acceleration and zone, it is about finding yourself in the flow and
going with it without critical self reflection, of trusting and being
confident about the fact that you are creating, rather than what you
are creating. In this way ARS17 is the perfect dot
of post-internet.
Yet
a dot is not a general, it is not a cross-section, nor a historical
review, and the dot ARS17 has landed on is the specific nature of
Californian culture as the trashy grungy, 'organised trash'
(paraphrasing Ed Atkins from the conversation I had with him before
his performance) feeling of putting things together fast in a mental
state infused with the cure of cannabis. Trash because the people who
are making memes and internet art and whose lives are lived online
are generally very poor. While the subject of poverty is very
important to post-internet art, and from the post-internet
has emerged many activist who are working towards better
representation of immaterial labour rights and unionisation of M-Turk
workers and so forth, and this is something I have also
been personally involved in since 2013, the poverty itself is
not something that the aesthetic embraces. In fact, the hardware
architecture and software solutions often used for making such
artworks deny this possibility through their natural functioning as
vector graphics.
Then
post-internet art is never concerned with poverty, but gleams through
that povert in the cure of cannabis which is related to the specific
this socio-political situation of the USA. And where the
post-internet occurred most strongly outside of the USA, countries
like Uruguay, Venezuela, Mexico, Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Germany,
UK, etc, cannabis is available and easy to access. Like the rest of
the hippie (or in this case yippie going back to Californian
Ideology) movements Californian post-internet is fuelled by the
interplay substances such as cannabis which helps people get past
their problems and poverty. Anyone familiar with LA, San Francisco,
or Oakland can see what I mean, there a ton of problems that are not
visible through traditional media channels, which only report things
like the tragedy of Ghost Ship. And it was places like Ghost Ship
where the communities of post-internet formed and grew irl. And it is
precisely these types of coagulated poor undergrounds where
post-internet became a thing, where I met it before it came into the
museums. It is no coincidence that post-internet coincided with the
legalization of cannabis in the USA.
Weed
and cannabis are really nowhere to be seen in the exhibition. Only
one single work, which is also related to what I will talk about
next, Yung Jakes music video on the fifth floor directly shows him
smoking cannabis. Cannabis is not seen as bad, this should be made
clear, and I have used the word 'cure' specifically because it is
viewed as a cure by everyone who has fought for its legalization.
Cannabis is seens a a healing substance and it is important to see that this view on its healing power is not only connected to post-internet as it
appeared but connects it strongly to California Ideology and people
like Terence McKenn who are big infliuences.
At
the same time as cannabis works as a cure it also works as a
melancholic agent, it is a manipulative mood agent, and forms a cycle
of use and un-use which when connected to poverty does not
necessarily heal completely, but it is seen as a help for a difficult
life. Famous artists of course do not live difficult lives, and I
cannot go into their use or un-use of cannabis.
The
previous is somewhat of an introduction and tries to lay the
groundwork for the understanding of the specific type of
post-internet that ARS17 shows. Next I will talk about post-internet
more generally but again focusing on something that was not shown in
the exhibition and which I think is essential to the aesthetic.
What
lies at the heart of post-internet that is totally invisible from the
exhibition and is accessed again through accident only rather than
conscious decision, is music. Music is, or can be if used that way,
like cannabis, a manipulative mood agent and popular music culture
has always been the culture of substances.
In
terms of the internet and music, Metallica vs. Napster was perhaps
the first indication of a changing attitude towards in the internet
in terms of the freedom to distribute music laterally, its
appropriation. Music was distributed at huge rates before images,
before social media took over and created image platforms where young
people would flock to. The internet project of social media and
post-intrenet emerged from this distribution. Everyone started making
music. Music is also immaterial, like Eric Dolphy said, 'it's in the
air, once it's over it's gone', it provides musicians and
composers with a platform to connect and distribute their work
as they want. As a machine the computer is a neutral musical
instrument, especially when accessed as hardware architecture, when
the computing experience is not mediated through ready-made software
vector graphics but directly through dsp programming.
Focusing
back on the internet visual art aesthetics, post-internet has always
been obsessed with immateriality, and again, it is not a coincidence
that performance art has received such a push during a time when the
immateriality of the internet is so widely discussed.
What makes music so important to post-internet is that all artists listen to music through the internet. It might be DIY, it might be noise, but usually it is trap or other forms of rap music or glitter pop or Math rock etc etc, but the setting is always the same concert or record where a traditional popular listening mode is engaged in order to consume the music. And the internet provides the platform to combine interest in images and music.
After
the death of Napsters music became the de-facto underground commodity
online, it went to soundcloud first and then, and more importantly,
to Youtube and which has since then become the distribution channel
for everyone because in youtube artists were able to indulge in their
desire and sense for immateriality and affectivity in music while at
the same time without needing to know how to make music properly
because the strong images would override any musical skill, which
anyway was after affect in order to pump up the images.
It
is this combination of music with video that is the key to
understanding the post-internet. Music videos area the heart of
post-internet aesthetic. Artists recognized that images do not
communicate that immaterial affective feeling they wanted so much to
communicate and thus they turned to simple gimmicks and effect in
music production that every composer learns through studying
classical and popular music. Every artist from Ed Atkins to Hito
Steyerl to Tuomas Laitinen and Pink Twins are all replicating music
videos and they do this because it is a fantastic form of art. This
is a nail that Kiasma did not hit upon, but that is not their fault,
I have not read a single essay or text which directly points towards
the relationship between the visual arts and music as a centre of
post-internet. The problem is of course that to find someone who
has knowledge of both art history and music history to a level where
they are able to see the connection is hard in a world where they
have been separated structurally for so long. I wrote about this for
the first time in 2015, but only through ARS17 was I able to see
exactly where the connection happens.
Youth
culture, and that is something I think the curators of Kiasma are
correct in saying, that post-internet is the appropriation of youth
culture, is not obsessed with pure images, for youth and therefore
for post-internet there is no purity, and again this can be seen in
the rise of Witchcraft and other forms of belief systems and
divination methods like Tarot and Chaos Magic and Kek. Youth sees the
song, the voice and the image together, as being of the body, and I
was glad that Ed Atkins was able to channel this, albeit
unconsciously (and I base this on our conversation before the
performance where we shortly talked about the relationship of music
to the internet) into his performance at the Kiasma Theatre, and in
this sense he is tapping into the Californian post-internet spoken
word world.
The
reason it is Californian post-internet is not the aesthetic but
the focus on spoken word culture. The post-internet of USA is
specifically not a text culture even when text is so important to how
the internet works, but like anyone who has read memes knows, it is
not literacy, not about spelling, but about directly notating the
sounds that are spoken, the music. Thus every member of post-internet
recognizes that writing, like any music notation, is underdetermined.
Music
is the most important thing because it happens under and emerges
through the images, it is the base for the images over which they run
at a speed not possible for sounds, you cannot hide from it, only
consciously reject its affective manipulative consequences on the
body (read Eduar Hansliks The Beautiful in Music for
a 19th century analysis of this). Music is more directly related to
the immediate feelings and happenings of those young people that
established post-internet artists are appropriating. Music is played
on instruments and computers, and through the computers it leaks into
the images as music videos. Unlike still images, or different to
images, music is underdermined in its physical form. Being
underdetermined means that the music that is written down, that can
be archived viewed and repeated is not the music itself which is a
coagulation of notation, sound, space, place, history or concept and
situation. Music recordings are also underdetermined, even if they
are more like images in that they have a specific physical shape that
reproduces the sounds more or less accurately to the performance.
Acousmatic and concrete music have been attempts to solve this
problem from a musical standpoint. These questions of immateriality
and the location of music has been under discussion in music history
for hundreds of years and art historians especially would do well in
studying music history in finding specific ways and ideas to deal
with the change that is happening in the internet to visual art.
This
fuzziness and instability, or the desire for this instability is what
is generally themed melancholy in ARS17, are all normal for music as
they are to images in some way, the difference being in the
pervasiveness and lasting effect of the feeling. Music is the true
immaterial and images can only hint at that. Thinking about ARS17
through this lens that I have outlined makes it interesting to me.
Not only does it point towards one of the centres of origin
of post-internet, the Californian consumer culture and ideology,
but it also able to discover and show, albeit accidentally but itself
a feature of post-internet, how the main feature of the change in
aesthetics of visual arts is the appropriation of music as visual
art.
California
Ideology:
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