Postinternet Art and Its Afterlives (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) 9781032182360, 9781032187730, 9781003256168, 1032182369

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Postinternet Art and Its Afterlives

Focusing on the ‘postinternet’ art of the 2010s, this volume explores the widespread impact of recent internet culture on the formal and conceptual concerns of contemporary art. The ‘postinternet’ art movement is splintered and loosely defined, both in terms of its form and its politics, and has come under significant critique for this reason. This study will provide this definition, ofering a much-needed critical context for this period of artistic activity that has had and is still having a major impact on contemporary culture. The book presents a picture of what the art and culture made within and against the constraints of the online experience look, sound, and feel like. It includes works by Petra Cortright, Jon Rafman, Jordan Wolfson, DIS, Amalia Ulman, and Thomas Ruf, and presents new analyses of case studies drawn from the online worlds of the 2010s, including vaporwave, anonymous image board culture, ‘irony bros’ and ‘edgelords’, viral extreme sports stunts, and GIFs. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, and digital culture. Ian Rothwell is a lecturer in contemporary art history and digital culture at the University of Edinburgh.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Art-Based Research in the Context of a Global Pandemic Edited by Usva Seregina and Astrid Van den Bossche Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral Edited by Max Ryynänen, Heidi S. Kosonen and Susanne C. Ylönen Art Agency and the Continued Assault on Authorship Simon Blond Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse Edited by Satu Miettinen, Enni Mikkonen, Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, and Melanie Sarantou Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art Edited by Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art Edited by Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, and Caroline Jordan Arts-Based Interventions and Social Change in Europe Edited by Andrea Kárpáti The Aesthetics of Image and Cultural Form The Formal Method Yi Chen Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies Peripheries in Parallax Edited by Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta and Jonna Tolonen For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Art-andVisual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Postinternet Art and Its Afterlives Ian Rothwell

Designed cover image: Jon Rafman, still from Still Life (Betamale), 2013. Single-channel video, 4:54 min. © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Ian Rothwell The right of Ian Rothwell to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-18236-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-18773-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25616-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003256168 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: TINA: Images Under Control

1

Postinternet Feelings 4 Postinternet Shudders 10 1

A Dysphoric World Picture

19

Consuming the Earth 24 Consumed by the Earth 30 Consumed by Google’s Earth 32 Consumed by Red Bull’s Earth 36 2

Dangerous Luxuries and Eloquent Vulgarities

57

Mimicry of the Hardened and Alienated 64 Mimicries of the Screen Part One: Postinternet Painting 69 Mimicries of the Screen Part Two: Postinternet Montage 77 3

Art in the Age of 4Chan

98

A Space to Be Wrong 100 Neo-NEET-Expressionism 108 Ecco Jams and Male Fantasies 115 4

The Horror of Digital Photography

132

Can a Jpeg Make Us Cry? 136 Aphotic Zones and Black Boxes 146 Prove Your Life 150 Coda: From Surfing to Scrolling

165

Surf Clubs 169 Scrolling Machines 170 Index

179

Acknowledgements

Postinternet Art and Its Afterlives took shape as a PhD thesis, so I first want to thank Tamara Trodd for her dedicated supervision. This experience had a great impact on the work and ideas contained in this book. I also want to thank the Images under Control and Art and Digital Culture alumni, the Lauriston Social Club, the Swamp Doctors, my family, and above all, Bex and our lolcats.

Introduction TINA: Images Under Control

More than a decade has passed since the term postinternet art emerged in the mainstream art-world vernacular in the early 2010s. Notable exhibitions that gathered around this movement and employed the term in one way or another include Free (The New Museum, New York, 2010–11), Art Post-Internet (UCCA, Beijing, 2014), Surround Audience (The New Museum, New York, 2015), Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966): From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2016), The Present in Drag (9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2016), Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (ICA, Boston, 2018), and I Was Raised on the Internet (MCA, Chicago, 2018). It is arguably the last major ‘movement’ in contemporary art, before the art and cultural industries atomised; splintering in a multiplicity of directions and across various niche online spaces, platforms, and user-generated content, exploring the farthest reaches of the internet’s long tail. It is a much-maligned, perhaps ill-defined stylistic label that unifies a generation of artists, predominately working in the Global North, who only know a life bound up and inextricably linked by the internet and who make work that bears its indelible trace, exploring the broad impact of internet-based technologies on the nature of culture, subjectivity, and the critical potential of artistic production in the 2010s and beyond. But what is postinternet? What does it mean? Does it mean anything? Is it a concept? A practice? A style? A marker of a new historical period? What are its form and efects? Is it still relevant today, as we move out of the 2010s and accelerate into a digitally mediated future? This book is about this odd, elusive, and perhaps ‘embarrassing’ neologism and presses at what is at stake in such a description of our recent historical past.1 In this respect, Postinternet Art and Its Afterlives is a book about the art and online culture of the 2010s and the various ways it gives forms, feelings, and concepts to recent technological changes, which can often happen so fast and seamlessly that we struggle to apprehend or engage with them critically. Now, at first glance, to say that we are, or were, post internet does not make much sense. The internet is still around, more so than ever. It has not ended. We have not entered a further technological moment in time. The phrase is vague and imprecise. It’s hard to gather exactly what it means and press at what it is intended to invoke. What sort of internet is imagined in such a phrase, which suggests that the internet has moved beyond the horizon of visibility? By moving into a postinternet age, have we entered through and beyond the gates of the digital utopia imagined by the theorists of cyberculture in the 1990s? In Nicholas Negroponte’s 1995 bestseller Being Digital, the theorist imagined a world on the cusp of a revolution; the internet promised to ‘flatten organizations, globalize society, [and] DOI: 10.4324/9781003256168-1

2

Introduction

decentralize control’ in a manner that would ‘help harmonize people’ into collaborative and joyful peer-to-peer networks of participants.2 Also in 1995, Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired magazine (a publishing hub for the early cyber-utopian theorists), described the internet as having ‘no center’: rather, he imagined it as ‘a bunch of dots connected to other dots – a cobweb of arrows pouring into each other, squirming together like a nest of snakes’.3 Kelly’s image of the internet is ‘restless’, energetic, and bursting with potential. Similarly, John Perry Barlow, in his hugely influential manifesto ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996), announced the internet’s cyberspace as a new world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth . . . a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. This is a world ‘that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live’. In Barlow’s imagining, our ‘identities have no bodies’.4 In this digitised world, freed from flesh, the individual is allowed to attain true and authentic flourishing, shorn of earthly prejudices and preconceptions. Reflecting on this cyber-utopian discourse, the media theorist Matteo Pasquinelli has observed that the ‘internet is supposed to be virtually free from any exploitation, tending naturally towards a democratic equilibrium and natural cooperation’.5 Finally, the so-called ‘good life’ was made possible (that is, as long as you had access to a stable internet connection). How does postinternet relate to this narrative or imagining of cyberspace from the 1990s?6 Certainly, the phrase maps onto Barlow’s suggestion of a world that is ‘both everywhere and nowhere’ at the same time. In the years since Barlow’s declaration, the internet has indeed become an inescapable, essential, and what some commentators have described as a ‘disappeared’ presence in life, having so saturated our modes of experiencing the world that we no longer recognise it as a medium or tool.7 This state of afairs was further accelerated by significant advances in Wi-Fi capability in the late 2000s and the mass market release of smartphones, particularly Apple’s iPhone in 2007. Now, each smartphone user carries the internet with them, a technological prosthesis that undermines any sort of ‘digital dualistic’ way of being in the world.8 To a certain extent, this makes us post-human: always available and exposed to online networks of information and potential digital collaborations, a dot – one of many – enmeshed in Kelly’s ‘cobweb of arrows’, squirming and forever pouring into each other. ‘The online subject is so deeply involved that she can no longer see the phone or internet’, the media critic Donatella Della Ratta has argued, ‘they have simply erased it, forgotten it . . . they simply don’t see technology anymore’.9 A simple illustration of this state of afairs is the tendency to use atmospheric or elemental terms to describe the internet’s various functionalities: for instance, ‘clouds’, ‘streams’, ‘hotspots’, ‘avatars’, and ‘torrents’. Also, terms that suggest a certain degree of transparency, such as ‘windows’ and ‘portals’. This symbolism, or digital vernacular, is suggestive of an internet that defies visibility; something that transcends materiality; something that has evaporated and become atmospheric or elemental – it is everywhere and nowhere. ‘[T]he material aspects of digital media’, Ramón Reichert and Annika Richterich have argued, ‘are increasingly invisible to users’.10 On this basis, we might claim, paraphrasing the influential cultural critic Frederic Jameson, that it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine a world without the internet.11

Introduction

3

Is this a realisation of the hopes and dreams of cyber-utopianism? Or is this, rather, a mutation: a metastasisation of cyberspace into a world of mass surveillance, commodified selfhood, data collection, algorithmic governmentality, doomscrolling, and echo chambers, amongst other things? Once heralded as a world-changing technology capable of democratising communication and levelling social hierarchies, the internet has arguably been drained of its radical utopian energy. It is now equally common, if not more common, for media theorists to describe the internet as a technology of power rather than a means of subverting entrenched power dynamics.12 Similarly, Bernard Stielger has argued that our imbrication within such complex telecommunication systems has resulted in a condition of ‘systemic stupidity’, rather than the authentic flourishing proposed in the 1990s.13 In this understanding, these systems that plug us into routinised circuits of stimulus and response and which profit from our constant engagement, locking us into our first-order impulses, have produced a compulsive and over-dependent relationship in service of new forms of capitalist extraction based around data collection. Indeed, the media theorist Patricia de Vries has written of the ‘unlimited and unprecedented data gathering and analysis by the state and its corporate consorts’ as a marker of the ‘end [of] the utopianism of the early days of cyber culture’.14 Online, we are ‘users’, not collaborators or active participants. The glib analogy between this phrasing and that used to describe a pathological dependency on drugs is fitting, suggesting a collapse of individual agency and autonomy when subjected to the internet’s ‘operant conditioning’.15 From a similar point of view, Hiroki Azuma has claimed that we have been ‘animalized’ by digital technologies.16 The internet is now something that makes us feel guilty, ashamed, and anxious. The fact of Being Digital has produced a sense of there being no alternative, no outside: there is no alternative (TINA) to its cobweb of arrows and the system of production it serves. The late cultural critic Mark Fisher employed this acronym, TINA, in a book titled Capitalist Realism (2009), which memorably described a ‘pervasive atmosphere’ that ‘not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’. Here Fisher proposes an imagining of capitalism that ‘seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’.17 TINA produces an experience of time as an interminable present, divesting us of the capacity to imagine any alternative to the status quo. The internet as a technology of power is similarly responsible for the mood captured by TINA: a sense of inertia, of time standing still, or at least of being stuck in a never-ending loop. One particularly visible symptom of this is the ‘nostalgia trend’ in contemporary popular culture, which has led to much cultural pessimism and hand-wringing amongst critics: Why is there nothing new anymore? Why is everything a rehash, reboot, sequel, prequel, and/or addendum? Where is the new IP? This cultural pessimism is partly a symptom of the rise of Big Tech, which has been accompanied by an increased presence of algorithms in our lives. These algorithms help to determine the culture we consume. For instance, the music streaming service Spotify utilises an algorithm – the Echo Nest – that measures recorded music according to a reductive set of parameters (i.e., danceability, energy, speechiness, liveness, loudness, etc.) and that also scours and categorises information on the internet for everything said or connected to this or that piece of recorded music. The purpose is ‘to break down music into its component parts; to turn it into data’.18 The algorithm gives Spotify the power to track and quantify your listening habits and then recommend what else you should listen to, according to the patterns established in its dataset, so that you don’t log of, you are prompted to just keep listening in perpetuity; you are kept in the flow.

4

Introduction Reflecting on this phenomenon, Grafton Tanner observes that as greater eforts are made to break down music to variables legible to computer algorithms, we will likely see a greater reduction in sonic diferentiation in Western mainstream popular music, especially if the data that’s generated is used to recommend music to listeners . . . New songs will sound the same as the old ones.19

The algorithms have become the cultural gatekeepers whom we look to for recommendations. The algorithms, whose essential purpose is to keep us logged in, consuming, and engaged with this or that platform, have become the de facto tastemakers in our postinternet world. And, if we follow this line of thought, artists and cultural producers, consciously or not, produce artworks and other bits of content that afrm the pre-determined criteria established by the algorithms to maximise their visibility. Art and culture become locked into these feedback loops, projecting ‘a future that is like the past’.20 There is an abundance of these projected futures that are like the past today, many of which project and fetishise a vague simulacrum of the 1980s, trapping us in a nostalgic pre-internet idyll. This projection of a future that is like the past has also aficted politics: ‘Make America Great Again’ and ‘Brexit’ were campaigns based on nostalgic projections of a simulacrum past. Nostalgia today is a sign that algorithms have become a primary driver of history. The ‘nostalgia mode’ that Jameson famously observed in cinema within postmodernity has been made code: dispersed as a structural component of the digital stage of late capitalism. This strange image of collapsed time – of futures that are like the past – is perhaps best crystallised by the GIF (graphics interchange format), a standardised unit of sharable content that is part of the general repertoire of communication on social media platforms. The GIF is an animated image stuck on a loop, moving forward to a point, then endlessly returning back, only to move forward to the same point, and then back again. This repetitive, looping, temporal dynamic marks much of contemporary digital culture. Indeed, a GIF-like dynamic structures the experience of content on the popular video-hosting platform TikTok, which subjects its users to a seemingly infinite scroll of audio-visual content, looping in perpetuity. The experience of time ofered by the GIF is one in which the ‘future, insofar as it can be imagined, ofers only more of the same’.21 The GIF has been described in an essay titled ‘Touchscreen Capture’ by Mark Fisher as an ‘image of trapped time, of bad infinity’; of being ‘locked into a purgatorial condition’.22 This vivid analysis, which evokes feelings of horror and utter dread – of an infinite trap – towards a technical bitmap image format developed by the online services provider CompuServe for its wide support and portability between applications and operating systems, demands pause for thought. It suggests that the lived experience of the internet is quite diferent from its associated symbolism and vernacular of immateriality. This is a lived reality of precarity: a collapse of work-life distinction; algorithmic bias; deepening environmental crises; trolling; rabbit holes of conspiracy theory, where ‘one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place’.23 The lived reality of the internet can often feel more like a horror film than the space of communication, interactivity, openness, and access marketed to us by the vernacular of digital boosterism. Postinternet Feelings Whilst the phrase postinternet is often printed with a hyphen, that is, Post-Internet, I will be using the unhyphenated version throughout the book, unless otherwise written in

Introduction

5

quoted material. This is indebted to its original use by the artist Marisa Olson, who based its formatting on the typical use of the phrase ‘postmodern’, rather than ‘post-modern’. This also reflects the fact that the internet is not over, as might be misinterpreted from its hyphenated version, but has rather intensified in scope and impact. Similarly, my account of postinternet is indebted to Jameson’s famous description of postmodernism as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’.24 Here, postinternet will be understood as expressing the specific cultural logic of the internet-enabled stage of late capitalism in the 2010s: a ‘structure of feeling’ explored by contemporary artists and creators of online culture alike, which allows us to address the various ways that this revolutionary technology has taken shape, after the cyber-utopianism of the 1990s, and has come to shape and reconfigure the world around us. The Marxist theorist Raymond Williams defined ‘structures of feeling’ as a means of describing the complex quality of lived social experience, in opposition to the definitions dictated by ofcial discourses. Simply put, as a tool for cultural analysis, Williams’s focus on ‘structures of feeling’ directs our attention to the ‘afective elements of consciousness’, or to the diferences between felt social experience and, what he calls, ‘formal or systematic beliefs’.25 The purpose is to move ‘towards a new way of seeing and/or feeling, resulting in the familiar appearing strange or the strange becoming familiar’.26 Thus, the postinternet art and visual culture analysed in this book explore a postinternet ‘structure of feeling’. It puts us in touch with lived and felt technological experience, oftentimes in opposition to the rhetoric surrounding digital technologies and devices. It does not afrm its specious techno-ideology. Instead, it does something diferent. It does something a little like Fisher’s haunting description of the GIF. It reflects on and represents the internet, as it appears and as it is felt in wider society, in a way that makes it strange and unfamiliar, diverting us away from our assumptions regarding its immateriality and invisibility. It puts us in touch with the models of subjectivity and appetites produced by digital culture, which don’t always map neatly onto its boosterish rhetoric of speed, transparency, and growth. In this respect, my exploration of postinternet art and visual culture is in broad sympathy with recent materialist approaches to digital media research and theory, which emphasise the relevance of materiality, particularly when it comes to digital matter. This digital materialism ‘rejects a conception of materiality’, Reichert and Richterich explain, ‘which is solely based on the fact that humans may touch, feel, see, or hear a sensation without mediation. It suggests looking at phenomena which do in fact not comply with our common-sense understanding of matter’.27 The critical value of this mode of thinking is its insistence on the material impact of digital media, despite it being increasingly invisible or appearing immaterial to its users. For some, the digital world has initiated ‘a crisis in representation’.28 This might seem counter-intuitive. It seems as if we are always subject to an ever-growing apparatus of optical media, which promise to improve our perceptual faculties. However, we are increasingly unable to grasp the totality of the digital world, which records, documents, and accumulates data on an infinitesimal scale, beyond our perceptual reach. The media theorist Alexander Galloway has claimed ‘that data have no necessary visual form’.29 Its primary mode of existence is not visual. This has resulted in an ever-widening gap between our individual experience of a digitally mediated world and the larger economic structures that determine and define it in the popular cultural imaginary. One purpose of this book is to narrow this gap through close analyses of the art and forms of online culture produced within our postinternet environment. Marianne van den Boomen has argued that the dominant imagining of the digital as something ‘disappeared’, or as increasingly

6

Introduction

invisible, does not point to ‘an actual immaterialization of culture’, but instead represents an all-pervasive ‘myth of the immaterial’.30 This recognition that we are dealing with a myth is crucial, pointing to a cultural imaginary of the digital that obscures its everexpanding infrastructure of huge data centres, coltan mines, server farms, physical wires, deep-sea fibre-optic cables installed at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and deep-sea mining for minerals and deposits from the ocean floor. Additionally, this cultural imaginary of the internet and digital media as immaterial obscures the fact that their constituting elements exert their own agency and power on us, to the extent that we often don’t feel like we communicate through the internet, but are rather spoken for and animated by it. This ‘myth of the immaterial’, for William Merrin, amounts to a contemporary and often hidden form of ‘totalitarianism’, fulfilled as ‘an ideal of digital transparency’ that ultimately functions to exploit us on the basis of our digital activity.31 The postinternet art and online culture gathered together in this book is an art of digital materialism, which forces some sort of confrontation with digital matter, materialising and creating complex afective experiences of digitality, rendering visible in some way or another what we increasingly assume or are told to be an invisible or ‘disappeared’ presence in our lives. This is an account that addresses and attempts to alleviate the so-called ‘crisis of representation’, which only deepens and entrenches TINA; what is becoming an ever more common and depressive vision of a stalled, exhausted world, dominated by algorithmic mechanisms that steer us into prescribed and agreeable, and yet increasingly coercive behavioural patterns. An example of this in practice is the artist Hito Steyerl’s short (barely 30 seconds long) video Strike, from 2010. Steyerl’s work opens with the word ‘Strike’ in all caps on the screen (Figure 0.1).

Figure 0.1 Hito Steyerl, Still from Strike, 2010. Video, HDV, 28 seconds. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Source: Image courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul.

Introduction

7

We then see the artist taking a hammer and chisel to a Samsung LCD (liquid crystal display) screen. With a single tap, the screen is cracked (Figure 0.2). Its opaque black surface, or portal, is suddenly broken, and rather than splintering violently, as we may expect, it is made to reveal a bizarre image, almost as if there were an abstract painting lying beneath its surface, a multi-coloured diagrammatic pattern caused by the LCD liquid leaking out of its containment and spreading through the cracks in the glass screen. So, we are given an image of the usually hidden apparatus that makes its images appear (Figure 0.3). ‘Its innards instantly articulate themselves’, Esther Leslie has written in a vivid description of this video; ‘[f]or a moment the materiality of the pixel is made obvious’.32 This pattern is marked with hard horizontal blue lines, scoring the opaque black surface, and a large shard of harsh white light containing its own criss-crossed gridded configuration. The digital screen, which we are taught by marketing to imagine as a ‘window’ or ‘portal’, is made material, revealing itself as a strange and indecipherable object, an obscure, crystalline, diagrammatic, geometric abstraction; more of a painting or sculptural object than a screen.33 In another context, when discussing the ‘diagrammatic paradigm’ of representation, the art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh argues that the form of the diagram ‘primarily serve the purposes of spatio-temporal quantification, surveillance, and registration . . . announcing . . . the disenchantment of the world and the total subjection of the body and its representations to legal and administrative control’.34 Thus understood, the diagram is a tool of discipline and of disciplining the body to a larger system of control. The fact that a diagram, or diagram-like form, is revealed on the digital screen via Steyerl’s chiselstrike is significant. It discloses a hieroglyph of a system of control, which undergirds

Figure 0.2 Hito Steyerl, Still from Strike, 2010. Video, HDV, 28 seconds. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Source: Image courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul.

8 Introduction

Figure 0.3 Hito Steyerl, Still from Strike, 2010. Video, HDV, 28 seconds. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Source: Image courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul.

Introduction

9

our everyday engagement with screens and digital devices. The revelation of Steyerl’s short and impactful video is an exposure of the opacity behind what initially appears transparent. This opaque system of control that is glimpsed in Steyerl’s striking of the LCD screen jars with Negroponte’s suggestion in 1995 of a ‘decentralized control’. Rather, it resonates with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s periodisation of the contemporary world in a short essay entitled ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, which was first published in 1990 and provides a more sceptical account of the then-nascent internet. The subtitle of this introduction – ‘Images under Control’ – is a direct reference to this text in which Deleuze describes a society supported by ‘a Control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar)’.35 This is not a ‘decentralization’ of control; it is intensification. Deleuze describes ‘ultrarapid forms of free-floating control’.36 This is control with a capital ‘C’. Deleuze’s proposition of a general ‘Control mechanism’ seems eerily to anticipate the many and varied devices of electronic surveillance that organise us today, from mobile phones to online data profiles and electronic passports. Likewise, his suggestion that social order is maintained upon the premise that we are never not under or within some sort of Control and that we always have the sense we are being watched or are giving our position away to some unseen authority, seems aptly to describe the mechanisms of social regulation with which we are now so familiar as to, most of the time, more or less forget about them. Deleuze writes of Control as corresponding to a world of computers, corporations, ‘idiotic’ competitiveness, finance capital, marketing, debt; a world where everything ‘enter[s] into the open circuits of the bank’.37 Indeed, this is the world as we now know it. For Deleuze, Control represented an epochal break from the older ‘disciplinary’ societies, which Michel Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish (1975), located in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which reached their fullest realisation in the twentieth century. Discipline was connected to the process by which the bourgeoisie became the politically dominant class in the eighteenth century. Their establishment of a ‘formally egalitarian juridical framework’ was supported by ‘discipline’, which Foucault writes ‘as all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical’.38 Disciplinary society organised life into a series of enclosed spaces, within which the individual was implicated in specific systems of ‘micro-power’. Social experience was concentrated, arranged, and rigidified as a procession of what Deleuze terms molds. He writes that: The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment.39 The spaces of Control, by contrast, are not organised as molds but as modulations, like a ‘self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’.40 This is to say that the old separated spheres of life have collapsed, and what was ‘discipline’ (i.e., specific sets of rules for specific spaces) has become ‘free-floating’ and gaseous, so that we are always being

10

Introduction

acted upon by some sort of indeterminate ‘micro-power’. Deleuze provides the contrast between the factory and the corporation as an example of this shift – the corporation being emblematic of Control’s modulatory power. For instance, the corporation, which has symbolically replaced the factory in Control societies, imposes a ‘modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability’, meaning that wages are no longer fixed but always have the potential to modulate up and down, pinning the worker to a state of continuous uncertainty.41 This is certainly the case with an increasingly precarious workforce that may be self-employed, on a temporary contract, or earning sales/bonus related pay. Accordingly, the corporation supplements work with a spirit of competition, pitting workers against one another through challenges, contests, and ‘highly comic group sessions’.42 The worker must commit to these activities wholeheartedly in order to care for their now anxiety-inducing ‘metastable’ salary, which is liable to fluctuate according to any number of variables. ‘If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful’, Deleuze argues, ‘it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision’.43 This constant sense of anxiety, competition, and uncertainty is crucial to the disciplining of society after discipline because it pressures individuals to always discipline themselves. The former Intel CEO Andy Grove all but confirms this in his 1996 book on management theory, Only The Paranoid Survive, in which he writes that the most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such a passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong, and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.44 Moreover, Grove lends further credibility to Deleuze’s analysis in his likening of the corporation to a ‘living organism’.45 In language that evokes Deleuze’s claim that Control’s (for want of a better phrase) spirit animal is the snake (‘discipline,’ he suggests, corresponds to the ‘mole’), Grove asserts a serpentine character to the corporation, which ‘has to continue to shed its skin’ and remain in a state of constant ‘transformation’.46 This is reflected in the normalisation of flexible and precarious work today, which also requires us to remain in a state of continuous transformation. In the new corporate work environment, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello write, the exemplary individual (they use the phrase the ‘great man’) is one who proves adaptable and flexible, able to switch from one situation to a very diferent one, and adjust to it; and versatile, capable of changing activity or tools, depending on the nature of the relationship entered, into with others or with objects. It is precisely this adaptability and versatility that make him employable.47 Postinternet Shudders One of the distinctive and eye-catching features of Deleuze’s theorisation of this situation, helping to make it more imaginative and revealing than a straightforward sociological analysis, is his claim that each society is ‘easily matched’ with a type of machine.48 This does not mean that the machine determines socio-cultural forms, but rather that the machine expresses those forms and is capable of generating and using them. This can be interpreted as suggesting that machines and their attendant socio-cultural forms can be unravelled in a way that brings to light some implicit trends and tendencies that are

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11

entrenched in current society. We can confidently assert that the non-enclosed and freefloating power of Control is best symbolised by the networked computer or smart device – a machine that sits in the ofce, in the home, in the pocket, and on the body – and through which we can continuously monitor the world and be continuously monitored ourselves. Computer-based technologies are therefore fundamental to the contemporary art and online cultural forms explored in this book, all of which are directly mediated in some way by this machine and its mechanisms of Control. These forms of art and online culture, however, are not understood as fully determined by the machine and its larger system of Control. Rather, they function as epiphenomena, capturing our somatic entanglements with internet-based technologies whilst also putting us in touch with the new structures of feeling created by these entanglements. As a result, they foreground what Williams calls the ‘afective elements of consciousness,’ in contrast to the ‘formal and systematic beliefs’ or prerogatives of Control. The priority given to the ‘afective elements of consciousness’, which are explored and revealed in postinternet art and culture, is pursued in the belief that these feelings and/or afects can be the foundation of a new cultural imaginary, diverting us away from fatalistic suppositions about Control society and its ever-expanding and evermore complex and seemingly immutable digital infrastructure. This is an urgent concern today. The digital stage of late capitalism has produced, amongst other things, intensified wealth disparities, automation, and declining labour market prospects, and an impending sense of environmental collapse. It has produced what the archive of online culture Encyclopedia Dramatica (sic) once referred to as a ‘lulzy’ view of the world: ‘engaged in by Internet users who have witnessed one major economic/environmental/political disaster too many’. As a result, they adopt ‘a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world’s current apocalyptic state’.49 History shows that reactionary politics flourished in such times. On this, Dale Beran has identified a parallel between the ‘lulzy’ and fatalistic online masses and those impacted by the inequalities of industrialisation in the early twentieth century. ‘Modern existence’, he explains, produced a vast new anti-class composed of isolated, de-classed individuals, torn from . . . traditional social structures . . . when, in the throes of industrialization, market changes, and crises, they lost their jobs or perhaps their entire job sector and thus held no economic purpose and, by extension, no place in society.50 Indeed, there is a striking commonality between Encyclopedia Dramatica’s account of a ‘lulzy’ gleeful sociopathy and Walter Benjamin’s observations of German society in the 1930s, where ‘self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.51 For Benjamin, these negative social conditions and the subsequent nihilistic worldview it creates tend to galvanise fascism, which results, as Beran suggests, ‘when these previously apolitical masses disposed by capitalism began to rebel against it, without discarding its cruel-minded competitive way of thinking’.52 Indeed, the increasing visibility of far-right and neo-fascist figures on the contemporary political and cultural stage has been galvanised by the ‘lulzy’ worldview produced by the internet (some of these ideas will be expanded on in Chapter 3). On this basis, in a book published in 2022, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen describes a ‘Late Capitalist Fascism’ that is shaped, in part, by the anomie and alienation of online experience.53 The book is structured across four chapters, each of which tackles a particular ‘image’ or expression of the postinternet ‘structure of feeling’ and that symbolises the mutation

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or metastasisation of digital utopianism in the contemporary period. These ‘images’ take various forms: user-generated online imagery produced for social media, ‘iconic’ images from popular culture, ‘elite’ artworks, and cutting-edge videos existing both within art galleries and on YouTube all have a place in my analysis. The attention given to these ‘Images under Control’ is indebted to the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, in particular Adorno’s account of the aesthetic category of the ‘shudder’. None of these ‘Images under Control’ are overtly political, in a didactic or documentary sense, yet they each contain political potential. For Adorno, in a world of total reification organised towards the reproduction of capital, it is the least political and more abstract artworks that have the most political potential because they refuse to adapt themselves to the system’s rules of identification. Writing in the 1960s, Adorno described the potential of art to momentarily expose the falsity of capitalist reification, threatening, albeit briefly, its totalising abstraction of reality: ‘Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent, they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification’.54 This ‘shudder’ can be understood as a kind of jolt, or a tremor, convulsion, shock, shiver, or thrill – both physical and psychological.55 It is a force that breaks through and undermines the rigidity of thought and experience within capitalist society, exposing what Adorno phrases, quite mysteriously, a ‘cryptogram of the new’, which is an ‘image of collapse’.56 For our own purposes, the ‘shudder’ is an efect of the ‘Images under Control’ gathered together in this book, each of which provides a momentarily jolt or thrill, disrupting the smooth, transparent, and immaterial veneer of digital experience and exposing us to the fractious relationship between the self and the screen and what lies behind or at the other end of the screen’s productions. These ‘shudders’ are evidence of the various impacts, dislocations, and disassociations produced by the digital, which defy traditional forms of media analyses, requiring new modes of conceptualisation. However, at the same time, each chapter is also attentive to how postinternet art and online culture can be considered in a longer art historical context and what modernist and postmodernist movements and legacies it tap into, develop, and reimagine within a postinternet environment. This includes the radical early twentieth century avant-garde traditions of montage, ready-mades, and Dadaist collage; the Commodity Sculpture of a hyper-capitalist New York art world in the 1980s; critical histories of expressionist and later neo-expressionist painting; and the appeal to the abject and formless in Bataillian approaches to Surrealist representation. The ‘shudder’ is an enigmatic concept in Adorno’s writing. It is not clear what the concrete impact of this ‘primordial shudder’ might be. For instance, Adorno uses the example of fireworks to help elucidate his thought: glowing, incandescent, and expressive for an instant before fading away. They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical .  .  . an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.57 Similarly, there is no concrete political impact of the postinternet artworks and online cultural forms gathered in this book as ‘Images under Control’. However, each provides some sort of a momentary ‘shudder’: ‘Images under Control’ as Adornian ‘images of collapse’; new ‘cryptograms of the new’, perhaps. These can be read as signs, or warnings, expressive for an instant, which at the very least ofer some sort of a disruption to the ‘myth of the immaterial’ and/or some sort of relief from the nihilism of TINA.

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Chapter 1 looks at internet-enabled images of the Earth from space, including Google Earth and Red Bull’s Stratos (2012); an extreme sports stunt from the ‘edge of space’, which live-streamed an extreme athlete’s (Felix Baumgartner) freefall from the Earth’s stratosphere over YouTube. It compares these spectacular impressions of our planet with NASA’s famous images of the Earth from space captured in the 1960s and 1970s. These are images that have been seared into the collective consciousness, producing new ways of imagining our relationship to the planet. The chapter asks what sort of relationship to the planet is produced by such postinternet images of the Earth. Chapter 2 analyses the artistic strategies of the postinternet art movement. Primarily, those of mimicry and repetition: a seeming abandonment of the historical role to challenge societal norms given to the artistic avant-garde. In this sense, postinternet art appears to thematise the idea of there being nothing new anymore, no scope for cultural innovation; it explores and visualises a scenario where corporate tech providers have come to occupy the role of the avant-garde rather than artists, crucially without succumbing to nostalgic fantasies of a pre-internet idyll, which are so common in contemporary popular culture. Ostensibly, postinternet artists adopted a fatalistic view of the corporatised internet as an immutable and impenetrable force. These strategies of mimicry and repetition are also the cause of the movement’s most trenchant critiques in the art press. The chapter considers these strategies within a longer art historical context and rethinks their critical efcacy today. Chapter 3 highlights the impact of online anonymous communities on the visual culture of the 2010s, in particular 4Chan. These online spaces or platforms have attempted to hold onto the utopian promise of the early internet by rigorously maintaining a culture of anonymity and refusing to archive information and content posted on the site. As a result of this purported freedom (at least in contrast to mainstream corporate social media platforms), 4Chan has been credited as one of the most ‘impactful generators of online culture’.58 This chapter analyses the cultural forms produced on and through these platform requirements, which demonstrate a strange mutation of the hopes and dreams of cyber-utopianism into chaotic and formless expressions of irony and transgression, to a certain extent realising the postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s enigmatic account of the ‘revenge of the social’ or ‘the evil genius of the object’.59 The chapter also analyses how contemporary artists and online practitioners have reflected and appropriated this aspect of online culture in their practice. Chapter 4 focuses on the transformation of the photographic medium within a postinternet world, when the indexical link between object and image has been deeply recoded and reformatted by digital mediation – no longer a ‘message without a code’, as Roland Barthes once suggested of the photographic medium.60 This is a photography that has lost its distinct spatiotemporal relation to the past, as it is made endlessly reproducible on multiple digital platforms: a ‘poor image’, a simulacrum, a copy without an original, or a code without a message. The chapter asks, what is a postinternet photography? Furthermore, is a postinternet photography still photography at all? Does it make sense to employ such medium-specific descriptors in our postinternet context? It does so using examples of works by contemporary artists including Amalia Ulman and Thomas Ruf, whose work mediates on the nature of photography as a unit of content on social media networks in the former and as an algorithmically interpolated image in the latter. The coda to the book reflects on the various ‘shudders’ produced by these ‘Images under Control’, and considers what these ‘shudders’ might critically and concretely bring

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forth as the postinternet world continues to mutate and metastasise around us, deepening an inversion between us and technology, whereby we are becoming (or have already become) its object; scrolling machines animated by, acted upon, and mined for data. It does so through close analyses of recent developments in the world of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically AI tools for image generation, which deepen and intensify many of the themes discussed throughout the book. Whilst all the chapters tell deeply connected stories, they need not be read consecutively. Instead, each chapter and its various subsections ofer their own route into, means of understanding, or way of feeling what the neologism postinternet captured about the world of the 2010s. Alternatively, the book can be read for its analysis of particular contemporary artists and aspects of online culture, which punctuate each chapter, including Red Bull extreme sports stunts (Chapter 1); Petra Cortright, Jordan Wolfson, and DIS (Chapter 2); 4Chan, Jon Rafman, and Vaporwave (Chapter 3); Thomas Ruf, Amalia Ulman, and photography on Instagram (Chapter 4). This is a book about art and culture that is mediated by the internet. But it is also a book mediated by the internet, written distractedly and anxiously by an extremely online art historian, as one of many tasks researched, compiled, and edited with multiple tabs always open on a browser, alerting unread emails and commitments. Like the postinternet art and visual culture analysed on these pages, the writing of this book is designed to bear the internet’s indelible trace in its scattered curation of aleatory references, which are gathered and pulled together not to provide an exhaustive or totalising account, but rather to assist the reader in finding some sort of pattern, mapping, or even ‘cryptogram of the new’ within the postinternet structure of feeling that emerged in the early 2010s and that still animates cultural practice today. Notes 1. I say ‘embarrassing’ in reference to the art critic Brian Droitcour, who, writing in 2014, claimed that ‘[m]ost people I know think “Post-Internet” is embarrassing to say out loud’. See Brian Droitcour, ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’, Art in America (October 2014), www.artnews.com/ art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040/, accessed 30/07/21. 2. Nicholas Negroponte, ‘Being Digital–A Book (P)review’, Wired (February 1995), p. 182. 3. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 25–26. 4. John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, Electronic Frontier Foundation (1996), available at www.ef.org/cyberspace-independence, accessed 02/02/2023. 5. Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008), p. 72. 6. For an extended discussion of the digital utopianism that informed the imagining of cyberspace in the 1990s, please see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 7. See Brian Kuan Wood, Julieta Aranda, and Anton Vidokle (eds.), The Internet Does Not Exist (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015). 8. ‘Digital Dualism’ refers to a traditional idea of the digital world as ‘virtual’ and the physical world as ‘real’, i.e., as oppositional categories. This binary is increasingly untenable. The sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has written extensively on this, criticising ‘digital dualism’ as an unrealistic way of viewing the world. In contrast, Jurgenson proposes ‘an alternative view that states that our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once’. Nathan Jurgenson, ‘Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality’, Cyborgology (February 2011), https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/, accessed 30/03/23.

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9. Donatella Della Ratta, quoted in Geert Lovink, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (London: Pluto Press, 2019), p. 10. 10. Ramón Reichert and Annika Richterich, ‘Introduction: Digital Materialism’, Digital Culture & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (October 2015), p. 6. 11. The original quote, that it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’, is included in both Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii; and Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, vol. 21 (May/June 2003), p. 76. 12. For example, see Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London; New York: Verso, 2017). 13. See Bernard Stiegler, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). 14. Patricia de Vries, ‘Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The Janus Face of Anti-Facial Recognition Masks’, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, vol. 8, no. 1 (2017), p. 79. 15. This is a reference to the behavioural psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Chamber. This was a cage Skinner developed in the 1930s that illustrated the manipulation of behaviour through simple stimulus and reward mechanisms. The Operant Conditioning Chamber revealed that a rat would become ensnared in an open cage fitted with a lever, which it could hit in order to receive a jolt of reinforcement, i.e., a food pellet. Skinner’s test went on to show that the rat became conditioned by this process and continued to remain in the cage even when the reinforcement stopped. The media theorist Nick Yee has proposed an analogy between the Operant Conditioning Chamber and the mechanics of online social gaming and the gamified nature of social media, both of which produce addictive and compulsive behaviour. See Nick Yee, ‘The Virtual Skinner Box’, Adriane – Understanding MMORPG Addiction, www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html, accessed 02/02/2023. 16. See Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 17. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), p. 8. 18. See Tom Vanderbilt, ‘Echo Nest Knows Your Music, Your Voting Choice’, Wired (February 2014), www.wired.co.uk/article/echo-nest, accessed 05/05/23. 19. Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia (London: Repeater, 2021), pp. 168–169. 20. James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London; New York: Verso, 2016), p. 44. 21. Mark Fisher, ‘Touchscreen Capture’, Noon: An Annual Journal of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art, vol. 6 (2016), p. 24. 22. Fisher, ‘Touchscreen Capture’, p. 20. 23. Kathleen Stewart, Paranoia Within Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 18. 24. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 25. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 132. 26. John Eldridge and Lizzie Eldridge, Raymond Williams: Making Connections (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 141. 27. Reichert and Richterich, ‘Introduction: Digital Materialism’, p. 6. 28. This claim is made in Ana Teixeira Pinto, ‘Can the Cultural Logic of the Digital Era Be Exhibited? A Tale of Two Shows’, Witte de With Review (July 2016), www.fkawdw.nl/en/review/ desk/can_the_cultural_logic_of_the_digital_era_be_exhibited_a_tale_of_two_shows, accessed 05/05/23. 29. See Alexander Galloway, ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, Theory, Culture, & Society, vol. 28 (2011), p. 88. 30. Marianne van den Boomen et al., ‘Introduction: From the Virtual to Matters of Fact and Concern’, in Marianne van den Boomen et al. (eds.), Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 9. 31. For instance, in a discussion of what is increasingly known as ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, William Merrin writes that ‘digitality has transformed capitalism, allowing new modes of exploitation based upon digital activity, and in particular, upon the ongoing, continuous, real-time transmission of information and activity – of digital signals – which pour from every individual

16

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

Introduction and connected device . . . opening all private spaces to digital transparency . . . Today’s totalitarianism fulfils itself as an ideal of digital transparency . . . a project aiming at the oversight, monitoring, capture, and evaluation of every aspect of personal interiority’. See William Merrin, ‘Hyporeality, the Society of the Selfie and Identification Politics’, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, vol. 2, no. 1 (2021), pp. 31–32. Esther Leslie, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), p. 247. For instance, at the time of writing, one of Sony’s LCD screens is branded with the tagline ‘Forget you’re watching TV’. Its advertisement explains that with ‘four times more detail than Full HD, 4K gives stunningly natural images, not pixels. Dramatically higher image quality means that you can sit closer to the screen, filling more of your field of view until the screen disappears’ (see www.sony.co.uk/electronics/televisions/x9500b-series, accessed 10/09/21). And in a television advert for the ‘Samsung Galaxy Note 4’ mobile phone, the narrator informs us that ‘this is not a screen, it’s a window’ (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHA4JUd8So&t=270s, accessed 10/09/21). Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Hesse’s Endgame: Facing the Diagram’, in Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Eva Hesse: Drawing (New York: The Drawing Center; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 119. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990], October, vol. 59 (Winter 1992), p. 7. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 4. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 222. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 3. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 4. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 4. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 4. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 4. Andy Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1996), quoted in Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), p. 241. Grove quoted in Mike Sager, ‘Andy Grove: What I’ve Learned’, Esquire (January 2007), www. esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500/, accessed 25/02/16. Grove quoted in Sager, ‘Andy Grove: What I’ve Learned’, www.esquire.com/entertainment/ interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500/, accessed 25/02/16. Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London; New York: Verso, 2007), p. 112. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 6. See ‘Lulz’, Encylopedia Dramatica, https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Lulz, accessed 26/05/15. Beran, It Came From Something Awful, pp. 128–129. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ [1935], in Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (eds.), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 42. Beran, It Came From Something Awful, p. 130. See Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge: Polity, 2022). Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London; New York: Continuum Books, 1997), p. 79. In a footnote to an essay on Adorno’s aesthetic category of the ‘shudder’, Justin Neville Kaushall explains how ‘Adorno uses two diferent German terms for “shudder”: Erschütterung and Schauer. The former term has various meanings: physical tremor or vibration (as in an earthquake), convulsion, traumatic breakdown, concussion, or shock (both physical and psychological). Hence, the term Erschütterung is associated with both objective and subjective experience. The latter term, Schauer, might be translated as shudder, shiver, or thrill. Hence, it is associated with cold and with fear – with both physical and emotional experience’. See Justin Neville Kaushall, ‘Natural Spontaneity, or Adorno’s Aesthetic Category of the Shudder’, Telos, no. 192 (Fall 2020), www.telospress.com/justin-neville-kaushall-on-adornos-aesthetic-category-of-theshudder/, accessed 02/02/2023.

Introduction

17

56. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 32. 57. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 81. 58. Gabriel Emile Hine et al., ‘Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Efects on the Web’, arXiv:1610.03452 (October 2017), https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452, accessed 10/05/23. 59. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 577–589. 60. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), p. 17.

References Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London; New York: Continuum Books, 1997). Azuma, Hiroki, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Barlow, John Perry, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, Electronic Frontier Foundation (1996), available at www.ef.org/cyberspace-independence, accessed 02/02/2023. Barthes, Roland, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977). Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 577–589. Boltanksi, Luc and Chiapello, Eve, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London; New York: Verso, 2007). Bridle, James, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London; New York: Verso, 2016). Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990], October, vol. 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7. de Vries, Patricia, ‘Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The Janus Face of Anti-Facial Recognition Masks’, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, vol. 8, no. 1 (2017), pp. 72–86. de Zegher, Catherine (ed.), Eva Hesse: Drawing (New York: The Drawing Center; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Droitcour, Brian, ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’, Art in America (October 2014), www.artnews. com/art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040/, accessed 30/07/21. Eldridge, John and Eldridge, Lizzie, Raymond Williams: Making Connections (London: Routledge, 1994). Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). ———, ‘Touchscreen Capture’, Noon: An Annual Journal of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art, vol. 6 (2016), pp. 12–27. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). Galloway, Alexander, ‘Are Some Things Unrepresentable?’, Theory, Culture, & Society, vol. 28 (2011), pp. 85–102. Han, Byung-Chul, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London; New York: Verso, 2017). Hine, Gabriel Emile et al., ‘Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Efects on the Web’, arXiv:1610.03452 (October 2017), https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452, accessed 10/05/23. Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). ———, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). ———, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, 21 (May/June 2003), pp. 65–79. Jennings, Michael W., Doherty, Brigid and Levin, Thomas Y. (eds.), The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2008).

18

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Jurgenson, Nathan, ‘Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality’, Cyborgology (February 2011), https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/, accessed 30/03/23. Kaushall, Justin Neville, ‘Natural Spontaneity, or Adorno’s Aesthetic Category of the Shudder’, Telos, no. 192 (Fall 2020), www.telospress.com/justin-neville-kaushall-on-adornos-aestheticcategory-of-the-shudder/, accessed 02/02/2023. Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Leslie, Esther, Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2016). Lovink, Geert, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (London: Pluto Press, 2019). ‘Lulz’, Encylopedia Dramatica, https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Lulz, accessed 26/05/15. Merrin, William, ‘Hyporeality, the Society of the Selfie and Identification Politics’, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, vol. 2, no. 1 (2021), pp. 16–39. Negroponte, Nicholas, ‘Being Digital – A Book (P)review’, Wired (February 1995), p. 182. Pasquinelli, Matteo, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008). Pinto, Ana Teixeira, ‘Can the Cultural Logic of the Digital Era Be Exhibited? A Tale of Two Shows’, Witte de With Review (July 2016), www.fkawdw.nl/en/review/desk/can_the_cultural_ logic_of_the_digital_era_be_exhibited_a_tale_of_two_shows, accessed 05/05/23. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, Late Capitalist Fascism (Cambridge: Polity, 2022). Reichert, Ramón and Richterich, Annika, ‘Introduction: Digital Materialism’, Digital Culture & Society, vol. 1, no. 1 (October 2015), pp. 5–17. Sager, Mike, ‘Andy Grove: What I’ve Learned’, Esquire (January 2007), www.esquire.com/ entertainment/interviews/a1449/learned-andy-grove-0500/, accessed 25/02/16. Saval, Nikil, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Anchor Books, 2014). Stewart, Kathleen, Paranoia Within Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Stiegler, Bernard, States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). Tanner, Grafton, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia (London: Repeater, 2021). Turner, Fred, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). van den Boomen, Marianne et al. (eds.), Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). Vanderbilt, Tom, ‘Echo Nest Knows Your Music, Your Voting Choice’, Wired (February 2014), www.wired.co.uk/article/echo-nest, accessed 05/05/23. Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Wood, Brian Kuan, Aranda, Julieta and Vidokle, Anton (eds.), The Internet Does Not Exist (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015). Yee, Nick, ‘The Virtual Skinner Box’, Adriane – Understanding MMORPG Addiction, www. nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html, accessed 02/02/2023.

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A Dysphoric World Picture

The philosopher Martin Heidegger was scared when he first saw a photograph of the Earth. ‘I don’t know if you were scared’, he explained in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel magazine, but ‘I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon’.1 The images Heidegger most likely refers to are those taken by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft, an unmanned photographing machine that now resides on the far side of the moon after it was retired and nudged out of orbit by a signal from Earth to crash land (Figure 1.1). This robotic device took the first ever photograph of the Earth, from the distance of the moon, on August 23, 1966. The photograph is grainy and distorted. It struggles to picture the planet, which seems to flicker behind the moon, appearing as a streaked and imprecise flash. Its smeared form indicates more of a photographic aberration than a planetary mass. Lunar Orbiter 1’s picture of the Earth was the first image in a new – extra-terrestrial – paradigm for photographic production. Whilst images of the Earth from space were first achieved by nonhuman robotic actors, astronauts were soon to follow and there have now been well over 250,000 photos taken from orbit by NASA astronauts. Two images, however, stand out: Earthrise (Figure 1.2) and Blue Marble (Figure 1.3), the latter being ‘perhaps the most widely reproduced photograph in human history’.2 In December 1968, NASA released the Earthrise photograph. It was taken by the crew of its Apollo 8 mission during the first manned orbit of the moon. The photograph was not part of the scheduled manifest. According to Robert Poole’s account, NASA’s focus was on the moon and its orbit. It was not explicitly intended to produce documentation of the Earth as seen from space. ‘At programme level’, Poole explains, ‘decision making was dominated by engineers and mission planners with a decidedly limited tolerance for “tourist photographs”’.3 However, the vision of the Earth appearing over the lunar horizon made a forceful and cinematic impression on the astronauts. It absolutely compelled their attention. Frank Borman, Apollo 8’s commander, remembers it as ‘the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was either black or white, but not the Earth’.4 And crewmember Bill Anders, who is credited with taking the photograph (archived by NASA as image AS8–14–2383), recalls glancing out of the window and seeing the Earth coming up: ‘I was immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth’.5 Thus ‘the sight of Earth came with the force of a revelation’ and the crew used its handheld Hasselblad camera with a telephoto lens to take one black and white photo and two in colour, as is detailed in the following transcript of their onboard recorder: 03 03 47 30 CDR Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty! DOI:10.4324/9781003256168-2

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Figure 1.1 Lunar Orbiter 1, the first ever photograph of Earth from the distance of the moon, 1966. Source: Photo credit: NASA.

Figure 1.2 Apollo 9, Earth Rise, 1968. Source: Photo credit: NASA.

03 03 47 37 LMP Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled. 03 03 47 39 CDR (Laughter) You got a color film, Jim? 03 03 47 46 LMP Hand me that roll of color quick, will you 03 03 J47 48 CMP Oh man, that’s great!6

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Figure 1.3 Apollo 17, Blue Marble, 1972. Source: Photo credit: NASA.

The resulting shot showed the Earth, one third in darkness, suspended in a black void, appearing behind the grey lunar surface, with the ‘entire human race . . . in the frame, bar the three behind the camera’.7 This image, as it came to be received, was subjected to post-production editing. Apollo 8’s lunar orbit was equatorial (with respect to both Earth and the Moon), and so from the photographer’s point of view, the Earth did not rise but emerged from the left side of the Moon. The original photograph was thus rotated 90 degrees, so that the moon’s surface became the ground of the photo.8 Moreover, the original photograph was cropped, cutting of much of the dark surrounding space so that the Earth was made to appear much larger. This made it truly spectacular: a viewpoint from which we are allowed the phantasmic experience of witnessing the Earth rise, as if standing on the moon, from a position totally independent of earthly life.

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Four years later, another image was captured by the Apollo 17 crew, this time of the whole Earth in its entirety, prominently framed by pitch black space. The Apollo 17 mission was the last Apollo mission to land people on the moon, and the Blue Marble photograph was taken by its geologist and geophysicist, Jack Schmitt. The image is especially distinctive because there is no part of the Earth in shadow. The full disc is on view, illuminated from horizon to horizon. The contrast between this image and that taken by Lunar Orbiter 1 is stark: there, the Earth appeared uncertain and temporary; here, it appears proud and permanent. This image was initially archived by NASA as AS17–148–22726, but its startling appearance and gleaming colour have, since its distribution, commonly encouraged the comparison to something like a precious gemstone or Christmas-tree bauble. Thus, it received the afectionate moniker Blue Marble. This image, like Earthrise, was also reoriented. It was manipulated in accordance with the appearance of the most commonly accepted world map (the Mercator Projection, which was developed by Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 and has received significant criticism for representing a colonialist view of the world with its exaggeration of the landmasses of the colonial powers), being rotated 180 degrees so that the Antarctic glacial clump could be repositioned to the bottom of the Earth.9 These subtly edited photographs have subsequently become two of the most celebrated images of the latter part of the twentieth century. They were ranked numbers one and two as part of the Smithsonian Museum’s 2008 celebration of NASA’s 50 most memorable images.10 Regarding Blue Marble, NASA’s director of photography, Richard Underwood, enthuses that ‘More people have seen that photo than any in the history of mankind . . . I was the first person to see that photograph . . . When I saw it I said, “Boy, that’s it”’.11 Heidegger, however, was scared when he saw that crude precursor to Earthrise and Blue Marble. Whilst NASA scientist Edgar Cortright, for instance, celebrated our newfound ‘ability to contemplate ourselves from afar’, Heidegger was altogether more pessimistic.12 We might begin to understand his response by turning to his 1938 essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in which he echoes Ernst Jünger’s criticism of the phenomenon he saw as the essence of modern times: ‘man’s dominating of the earth by means of his technological will’.13 These photographic images, particularly Blue Marble’s totally illuminated representation, seem to precisely literalise his account of a ‘world picture’. From this point of view, we can begin to understand these images in a diferent light to that of the positive humanist message that was repeated by so many commentators. By examining Heidegger’s idea of a ‘world picture’ in more detail, we can begin to explore why his response to the photographs of the Earth from space was so fearful. ‘The fundamental event of the modern age’, Heidegger wrote, ‘is the conquest of the world as picture’.14 This suggests the totalisation of a particular world view. Whilst his essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ does not specifically refer to, or even imagine, a pictureof-the-world, Heidegger’s response to the photograph of the Earth produced by NASA in the later Der Spiegel interview provokes an intriguing set of questions and provides an opportunity to explore this connection. For Heidegger, the conquest of the world as a picture is ‘one of the pathways upon which the modern age rages toward fulfilment of its essence’. This ‘essence’, he explains, is ‘man’s domination of the earth by means of his technological will’, or ‘Total Mobilization’.15 From this perspective, it seems that these photographs may have shocked because their early gesture towards an enclosed representation of the Earth signified this ‘raging’ toward the fulfilment of the modern age’s essence. When Heidegger uses the word ‘picture’ (bild), he does not mean a literal picture or simply a representation of something, like a painting, but rather a conception of that

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something in its entirety, as in ‘the colloquial expression, “We get the picture”’. To get the picture ‘throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it’, Heidegger writes: ‘Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world, but the world conceived and grasped as picture’.16 NASA’s photographs can be seen as both a picture of the world and an example of the world grasped as a picture. This is because their distinctive picturing of the Earth produces the impression of an object totally under our control. It comes to us as a finite and understandable thing. With Blue Marble, for instance, the viewpoint is suggestive of a scientist looking down at a petri dish, in which the Earth’s flocky swirls and amorphous forms appear as some sort of microbiological culture observable within neutral laboratory conditions. Thus we arrive at Heidegger’s distinction between a modern ‘representation’ and a Greek ‘apprehension’, and this, he explains, is crucial to our understanding of ‘modern science’s’ process of ordering the world around us. This distinction advises that in the age of the Greeks, the world could not become a picture. A translation note makes this clear: ‘The noun Vernehmer is related to the verb vernehmen (to hear, to perceive, to understand). Vernehmen speaks of an immediate receiving, in contrast to the setting-before (vor-stellen) that arrests and objectifies’, which for Heidegger characterises the modern era.17 In further support of this notion, Heidegger comments that Greek science, in vast contrast to modern science, was ‘never exact . . . could not be exact, and did not need to be exact’.18 It was concerned with the apprehension rather than domination of nature. It accepted the fact that it could never fully comprehend and master the natural world. Earthrise and Blue Marble can be considered as ‘representation’, rather than ‘apprehension’, because of their assumption of something like an Archimedean point. This is a hypothetical vantage point from which the observer is removed from the object of study. It is applicable to NASA’s photographs because their complex means of production (and subtle edits) are entirely invisible; the images appear as if natural and uninterrupted, as if there were no underlying forces or conditions for their production. This assumption of a privileged Archimedean perspective is indicative of a vor-stellen, or setting in place of nature. We can therefore see this essay as a partner to Heidegger’s later text, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1954). Both understand the essence of modern scientific technologies as an ‘Enframing’. Heidegger uses this word to signify the way in which ‘Beings’ are ‘experienced by man as in one way or another “posed” . . . to, by and for man (e.g. “com-posed,” “contra-posed,” “pro-posed,” etc.) and thus conceivably subject to his control’.19 The predominant material drive behind this technological control is the denaturing, ordering, and instrumentalisation of the world as a standing-reserve, for the purpose of capital accumulation. The emergence of photographs of the Earth from space can be interpreted as part of Heidegger’s epistemology of modern man, which, Devin Fore explains, sees man as ‘distinct and apart from the object (Gegen-stand) before him, and who maintains this degree of cognitive remoteness by interposing a membrane of representations between himself and the world’.20 As an example of this distancing from the object world, Fore cites the invention of the atomic clock in 1949, which recomposed the passage of time as something determined by rates of atomic decay rather than the alternation of day and night. At stake for Heidegger is the uprooting of man from Earth and from a form of perception grounded in the regular movements and dimensions of the planet. The photographs of the Earth from space are symbolic of this severance of the subject from the object, and more widely, from the world. Its representation in these ‘world pictures’ becomes a visual shorthand for ‘the world’, replacing a more experiential or phenomenological

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‘apprehension’. From thereon in, the world is fixed as something always and already known: pre-seen and pre-cognised. Whilst Heidegger didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, envisage such an image in 1938 when he wrote the essay, the NASA pictures seem strangely to illustrate and demonstrate key points from his argument, almost as if prepared in his direction. An uncanny efect: no wonder he felt ‘afraid’ when he saw that smeared image of the planet captured and transmitted back to Earth by Lunar Orbiter 1 in 1966. It follows that Earthrise and Blue Marble, which followed just four years later, can be understood as further securing (or marking our accession to) Heidegger’s ‘Total Mobilization’. Thus, whilst the dominant early reception of these photographs put forward a vision of the Earth as something new and uncharted and that promised a new sense of planetary collectivity, when read in conjunction with Heidegger’s essay, these ‘world pictures’ evoke an overwhelming, even claustrophobic, sense of confinement: the world seems small, pictured as if we can reach out and grasp it, as something to be used, a standing reserve, a commodity. Fredric Jameson has famously written of this sort of abolition of distance as a more general condition of late capitalism, which witnesses the colonisation of previously uncharted spaces by ‘the massive Being of capital’.21 NASA’s space photographs can be seen as the historical marker for this new period in history, in which Heidegger’s totalising system of representation is intensified, or perhaps completed. [L]ate capitalism in general . . . constitute a process in which the last surviving internal and external zones of precapitalism – the last vestiges of noncommodified or traditional space within and outside the advanced world – are now ultimately penetrated and colonized in their turn. Late capitalism can therefore be described as the moment in which the last vestiges of Nature which survived on into classical capitalism are at length eliminated.22 With a nod to NASA’s literal ‘world pictures’ we can, I suggest, consider the ‘cosmos’ as one of Jameson’s eliminated or colonised domains of nature. Indeed, we might conclude that these planetary photographs efect a recalibration of the cultural imaginary according to a total system of representation in which nothing is beyond Heidegger’s concept of vorstellen. The result can be understood as a realisation of what Jameson describes as the ‘colonization’ of ‘noncommodified or traditional space’ by capital and the attendant elimination of ‘Nature’ as a separate category of experience. This is because these perfect and fully enclosed images seem to spectacularly materialise the idea that there is no outside, laying the seeds for a dysphoric imaginary of the Earth born at the moment, and from the same images, that spawned its supposed opposite: ecological/environmental awareness and concern. Consuming the Earth The front cover of the first issue (Fall 1968) of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog displayed a photograph of the Earth in its entirety that preempts Blue Marble’s configuration. The image was taken by NASA’s ATS-3 – a geostationary weather and communications satellite – in 1967, making it the ‘first spacecraft to transmit operational multicolor earth-cloud photographs’.23 This image of an enclosed Earth, repeated in Blue Marble (which was, unlike the 1967 image, taken by human hand), came to symbolise a holistic ecological worldview that found a popular voice in Brand’s publication. The Whole

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Earth Catalog (published between 1968 and 1972) functioned as a directory of objects, tools, and ideas for a communal and ecologically attentive lifestyle (for instance, advice on water purifiers, building teepees and geodesic domes, and obtaining fringed deer-skin jackets, alongside extracts from recent theoretical research in cybernetics and systems theory). With a first edition of only a thousand copies, the Whole Earth Catalog became a publishing phenomenon: after several subsequent editions and supplements, ‘The Last Whole Earth Catalog was published internationally by Penguin in 1971 and sold nearly a million copies’.24 ‘We are gods now’, Brand wrote in the first line of the first issue, ‘and we might as well get good at it’.25 Brand’s statement might seem in direct correspondence with Heidegger’s fearful remark in the interview with Der Spiegel that in our condition of ‘Total Mobilization’, ‘[o]nly a god can save us’.26 Brand’s bombastic rhetoric is, however, taken directly from anthropologist Edmund Leach’s book A Runaway World? (1968). In this book, Leach asserts that ‘Men have become like gods’.27 He then goes on to ask, ‘Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity? Science ofers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing, we feel deeply afraid’.28 It follows that Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog sought to mobilise modern science in a manner that connected people with each other and with their planet, which was now fixed in the larger cultural imaginary by NASA’s photographs. In this view, we can all become gods, united in the protection of our shared planet, if technology is properly distributed and made available to everybody. The emerging sense of environmental concern that followed the release of NASA’s photographs also marked the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1970, where professionals and environmental action groups were gathered to respond to the theme of ‘Environment by Design’. A French delegation, under the name The French Group, declined an invitation to participate. Instead, they sent a letter, penned anonymously by Jean Baudrillard, that suggested – channelling Karl Marx – that the new environmentalist discourses merely functioned as another ‘opium of the people’.29 It was, for The French Group, in part a mystification created by a capitalist system, which allowed the same system ‘to perpetuate itself under the pretext of nature’.30 It did not fundamentally alter our relationship to the planet, which was still essentially capitalist; it merely provided another lifestyle option or set of consumer choices. Certainly, The French Group’s provocative analysis would seem borne out by the intensified pace and strength of capitalist exploitation of natural resources since the 1970s, accompanied by ever higher levels of public environmental feeling and concern. At the time of writing, one of the richest people on Earth, Jef Bezos, has recently returned from a trip to space on the first crewed flight by the Blue Origin Company he founded in 2000. In an interview on his return, he parroted the same platitudes as those astronauts on Apollo 8 in 1966: ‘The most profound thing was looking at the Earth’s atmosphere and seeing how teentzy it is . . . When you get up there, you see that we are one world, this is one planet’.31 In a report released in 2019, it was revealed that Bezos’s e-commerce company, Amazon, the profits of which helped to fund the trip to space where he was able to glimpse the Earth’s atmosphere, had emitted 44.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents into that self-same atmosphere, roughly equal to the annual emissions of Norway.32 The French Group’s observations on the synergistic relationship between destructive capital and a Whole Earth worldview still resonate today. In this respect, the perspective of the Earth seared into the cultural imaginary by this extra-terrestrial viewpoint deepens Heidegger’s account of the Earth’s ‘enframing’ or

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‘Total Mobilization’: ordered, organised, and instrumentalised for the purpose of profit accumulation. This is because it naturalises our position – following Brand – as a ‘God’, looking at the world from a distance. This can be understood more precisely from the perspective of the modern consumer, who is ofered objects they can reach out for grasp and consume. Here, the world appears as just one such object among many. In another context, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘[o]nce radically parted from the object, the subject reduces it to its own measure; the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself’.33 The Earth in these ‘world pictures’ is an object grasped, reduced to our own measure, and swallowed up whole; made into a marble, just another commodity. This is particularly relevant for Blue Marble’s image of the world, which appears to capture and contain the Earth’s entirety like a carefully framed commodity object. Space, in this photo, acts as a framing device, focusing and isolating the object from its context. The implicit positioning of the viewer as someone who can reach out to the object and grasp it is commonly employed in advertising photography. In this sense, NASA’s photographs fit into a tradition of supposedly objective photography, or ‘realism’, which is employed in a way that conceals its underlying consumerist ideology. Indeed, these photographs can be likened to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) photography of 1920s Weimar-era Germany. Whilst it might seem like a surprising and historically remote comparison, New Objectivity provided a language of photographic form and an aesthetic of consumerism that is still in use today. This is a visual language that works to enhance the tactile and sensual appeal of the objects on display whilst at the same time making them appear clean, new, and unused, hiding their means of production. In this respect, the New Objectivity photographic style can be compared instructively to that of Blue Marble and the other NASA photographs, which staked a similar claim to objectivity and realism. The New Objectivity photographic paradigm is characterised by strong upwards, downwards, and diagonal angles, and the use of a sharp focus, and black and white contrasts. It is typically seen as a development of Soviet photographer Alexander Rodchenko’s ‘radical formalist photography’.34 Indeed, Abigail Solomon-Godeau has argued that the aesthetic programme announced by Rodchenko and others in the Soviet Union, where it was put to revolutionary purposes, was turned into a technique of commercial exploitation in the German New Objectivity trend.35 This style, Herbert Molderings writes, appropriated the ‘views from lifts, radio towers, cranes and aeroplanes’, which were typical features of Rodchenko’s ‘revolutionary vision’, and presented them in such a way that ‘endowed the world with the curious beauty of a diagram’.36 Albert RengerPatzsch’s 1928 book Die Welt ist Schön (‘The World is Beautiful’), for instance, is emblematic of this type of German New Objectivity. The book contains 100 photographs of industrial objects, natural objects, and commodity objects, pictured in a way that makes them seem cut-out and isolated from their environment.37 Amongst other things, the series features individual images of huge blast furnace chimneys, cacti, and glass tumblers. For Molderings (who also cites, in support of his critique of the technique, commentators who were contemporaries of New Objectivity, such as Walter Benjamin), this photographic methodology was most successful from the viewpoint of advertising. It served to express a certain fetishism, which, in his words, enabled the ‘ornamentalisation of the objective world’ as a series of abstract aesthetic structures.38 Therefore, Renger-Patzsch helped to innovate a consumerist aesthetic: a strange and homogenising photographic language that allowed blast furnaces, cacti and glassware to be appreciated according to precisely the same visual precepts. The object in the photograph takes on a fetish character, making the ordinary appear desirable and the banal seem rarefied. In

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his ‘A Short History of Photography’, Benjamin wrote that the New Objectivity style had the ability to ‘endow any soup can with cosmic significance’.39 Renger-Patzsch’s Kafee Hag (1925) is a case in point. We are given an attractive triumvirate of forms: gleaming black beans spilling generously from their ‘Kafee Hag’ packet and an intense, rich black cofee served in a delicate, clean white cup and saucer (Figure 1.4). Their tactile qualities are emphasised whilst at the same time the arrangement looks new, unused, carefully balanced, and thoughtfully arranged. This ordinary still life is made to seem important. But there is nothing to be interpreted beyond its superficial display. This was also the opinion of Carl Linfert, who commented in 1931: How seldom photographs tell us anything about the objects they show! But what is transmitted as a message to the eye stares at us like a fetish – especially since RengerPatzsch, photographs have become frightening . . . The urge to look, to record all that one sees, is so feverish that, while we grasp at everything, we end up holding nothing . . . The thing itself, however concisely and exactly the camera ends up perceives it, has less to say to us than ever before.40 NASA’s images of the Earth from space, I want to contend, perform a similar efect on their object of study. I have already mentioned that both Earthrise and Blue Marble

Figure 1.4 Albert Renger-Patzsch, Kafee Hag. (Draft for Poster), 1925. Source: © Albert Renger-Patzsch/Archiv Ann und Jürgen Wilde/DACS 2023.

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were subject to post-production editing procedures, which served to manipulate and abstract their extra-terrestrial perspective into something as if grounded in terrestrial perception. This was a process that made the Earth appear as a (albeit spectacular) commodity object. The gleaming spherical form of the cofee cup in Renger-Patzsch’s Kafee Hag can be seen as analogous to the opalescent globe in Blue Marble: both invite the viewer to identify themselves as consumer, and to identify the object as something that can be picked up and enjoyed. The means of production are not on display in either instance. There were thousands of photographs taken of the Earth from space but, Blue Marble is the one that survived in popular cultural consciousness. This is simply, I suggest, because it looks the most like the advertising photography that we are used to. The Earth is an object of consumption. Its prominent layer of clouds functions to wrap and obscure geographic details, just as protective plastic film obscures the particularity of objects on shop shelves. And its translucent, glossy appearance encouraged the popular comparison to ‘the most beautiful marble you could imagine’.41 The popularly perceived ‘awesomeness’ of the image is expressed by the popular astronomer Carl Sagan, who argued that Blue Marble conveyed the inconsequentiality of humans as ‘a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal’.42 However, by contrast, we might instead suggest that the Blue Marble photograph conveyed the absolute consequentiality of humans, who are given a view of Earth as if it were designed for their pleasure and consumption. In the same year that Earthrise was snapped as part of Apollo 8’s lunar orbit and rapidly cemented in the public’s imagination, the German artist Sigmar Polke made a strange, small ‘goofball’ style painting titled Polke as Astronaut (Figure 1.5).43 This painting, produced at the height of public euphoria for space travel, provides a gleefully caustic perspective that sharply contrasts with the ‘Whole Earth’ ideology that had enthralled NASA’s captivated audience. The small painting comprises a balloon-like grinning face scrawled with dispersion paint onto a space-themed patterned fabric. The astronaut is here depicted as, in the words of Bice Curiger, ‘an aimlessly drifting child’s balloon’.44 To a certain extent, Polke as Astronaut echoes Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream (1883), which is celebrated for its evocation of ‘great modernist themes of anomie, solitude and social fragmentation and isolation’.45 The Scream and Polke as Astronaut are both dominated by a single, centrally located figure. The distorted and trembling outline of the screaming subject’s schematised mask-like face (in Munch) is repeated by Polke, and both works feature a background that seems to revolve around the central figure. Commenting on the screaming figure in Munch’s painting, Jameson describes ‘great concentric circles . . . as on the surface of a sheet of water . . . which fan out from the suferer’.46 In Polke as Astronaut, the background patterned fabric composition of astronauts, globes, and lunar spacecraft seems to gravitate or fan out around the central head, as if some great black hole. However, the diferences between the two works, quite clearly, stand out more than their similarities. The figure in Munch’s The Scream can be seen as a stand-in for the subject before they were able to view the Earth from space, before they were able to see the Earth (like Bill Anders, Jack Schmitt, and more recently Jef Bezos) as one united planetary community. Instead, the figure in The Scream is alone, condemned, as Jameson writes, ‘to a prison cell without egress’.47 Polke’s painting, by contrast, depicts the – here astral – subject as a dumb grinning balloon. When looked at side by side, the space-themed patterned background in Polke’s work stands in sharp contrast to the sort of background in Munch’s painting, whose landscape records and transcribes the subject’s sufering. The industrially fabricated bed sheet used as a canvas by Polke, replete with graphic depictions

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Figure 1.5 Sigmar Polke, Polke as Astronaut, 1968. Dispersion paint on fabric, 35 1/2 × 29 1/2 in. (90.2 × 74.9 cm). Source: © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/DACS 2023.

of astronautical miscellanea, has nothing unique or personal about it. Moreover, the face is simplified to a point of ridiculousness, where it appears as a grinning inflated balloon, foreshadowing the fillers, botox, and other injectables and body sculpting treatments, such as ‘Emsculpt’ and ‘Trusculpt Flex’, which are rumoured to have plumped up and inflated Bezos’s new makeover as executive-chairman-of-Amazon-cum-astronaut.48 The

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subject depicted by Polke has no active role in the exploration of space. Polke’s astronaut is not heroic. To the contrary, it is symptomatic of the consumer, who looks back and gawps at the Earth as if it were a beautiful blue marble. Polke as Astronaut is one of Polke’s cloth paintings, or Stofbilder, which superimpose painted subjects onto found cloth materials as background support. ‘Black velvet, fake leopard skin, bed sheets and cheap chinoiserie silk’, are all used in this body of work, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh has suggested, to make works of ‘deliriously bad taste’.49 The cloth support in Polke as Astronaut is no diferent: it is most likely decorative material intended for use as curtains or bed sheets for a young NASA enthusiast – a distinctly mundane representation of the awesome scale of space flight. Polke’s treatment of space travel domesticates it, situating it in the realm of mass popular consumption. The conquest of space by man is relegated to ‘background’ and made to seem entirely banal. Polke employs an image of our planet triumphantly colonised by positivist ‘modern science’, euphorically appropriated by communitarianism (as if it presented material proof of our collective ecological consciousness), and turns it into a symbol of wilful and delirious bad taste. In this respect, Polke as Astronaut reverses the tendencies of New Objectivity in that it renders the spectacular and rarified mundane. The painting seems designed to display the material impact of the Earth’s representation as a photograph. Rather than granting us a new and expanded form of planetary consciousness, Polke’s work suggests that these new images of the Earth have their own agency and power over us, limiting our imaginative horizons and altering our relationship to the planet, so that we begin to see it as an object of consumption. Polke’s ridiculous image of an astronaut, who has flown of to space, only to end up surrounded by a ‘bad taste’ space-themed bedsheet, might well be taken as the symbolic incarnation of Hannah Arendt’s sardonic description of the astronaut in her essay ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (1963), in which she writes of an ‘astronaut, shot into outer space and imprisoned in his instrument-ridden capsule where each actual physical encounter with his surroundings would spell immediate death’.50 All of this, she argues, ‘makes it more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a diferent disguise’.51 NASA’s photographs of the Earth are stylised. They share a lot with the New Objectivity approach to photography, which pictures objects in a way that conceals their particularity and the photographs’ conditions of production. This approach to imagemaking ‘ornamentalizes the objective world’ and doesn’t really ‘tell us anything about the objects they show’, as Linfert wrote in 1931. Polke as Astronaut, made the same year as Earthrise was photographed, is arguably the more truthful image in that it contains and accurately materialises, without pretence or illusion, the ‘world picture’ theorised by Heidegger and glimpsed in the first image of the Earth taken by the Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft. In addition, Polke’s painting can be seen to anticipate the less overtly heroic and more stupid ‘world pictures’ that we have now, which organise and inform our contemporary understanding of the Earth. Consumed by the Earth This might seem like a strange starting point for a book about the art and visual culture produced by the internet. However, these photographs of the Earth from space produced a new relationship to the planet, one that parallels Jameson’s thoughts on the elimination of an outside to ‘the massive Being of capital’ in the popular cultural imaginary and that still informs a contemporary worldview. Building on this line of thought, the chapter will

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analyse images of the Earth produced within the postinternet world, asking what sort of relationship to the planet is expressed in these images. As we shall see, quite surprisingly, they share more with Polke’s caustic ‘goofball’ image than they do NASA’s euphoric and spectacular representations. It is certainly the case that our current imagining of the world is no longer accurately symbolised by NASA’s shots of the Earth in Earthrise and Blue Marble from the 1960s and early 1970s. We no longer see the Earth as a bounty of resources (or ‘standing reserve’), uniting us in a global community via a shared duty of care. Instead, we have entered a new situation in which the Earth’s productive resources are seemingly exhausted and the planet seems dangerous, threatening, and hostile to our well-being. In line with this view, it is becoming increasingly accepted that our epoch can be correctly understood with the geologic time label ‘Anthropocene’. This is proposed as an epoch of geological time in which it seems that, for all intents and purposes, ‘nature’ as we understood it is gone for good. As Robert Macfarlane writes, summarising the idea: [H]uman activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record . . . We have bored 50m kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.52 This epochal shift has resulted in a definitively pessimistic worldview, or ‘world picture’, which anticipates a series of impending catastrophes, as if the Earth will begin to reject and attempt to extinguish our destructive human presence. Indeed, some geologists have suggested that the Anthropocene may also mark the beginning of the ‘sixth mass extinction’.53 A 2015 article published in The Anthropocene Review outlines the current ‘extinction crisis’ and the possibility of a fundamental reshaping of the Earth’s existing ecological makeup: We are now living through a phase of rapid acceleration in many geologically significant processes, notably as regards climate, ocean chemistry and biodiversity, and the changes that already have occurred in the Earth System approach those evident in the lead-up to the Cambrian Explosion [an explosion of diversity said to begin around 545 million years ago, which precipitated the appearance of complex, multi-celled organisms]. Hence, current trends, if maintained, would likely result in period – or even era – scale changes to the Earth System.54 In light of these developments, I want to ask what sort of ‘world pictures’ we have now? What sorts of ideas are congealed within the ‘world pictures’ produced by our current social, technological, and ecological conditions? What are the ‘world pictures’ that mediate our experience of the Anthropocene and the postinernet world, and what sort of collective consciousness do they enable? Heidegger suggested that the ‘Age of the World Picture’ epitomised ‘man’s domination of the earth by means of his technological will’. I have argued that this was represented in NASA’s photographs, which displayed the Earth as a finite, fixed, and enclosed resource,

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or commodity even. Turning to the present, I want to look at what we might conceptualise as ‘world pictures’ from the last decades: Google Earth and Red Bull’s Stratos project, both of which share certain points of commonality with NASA’s photographs whilst also indicating an entirely diferent planetary consciousness that is related to recent technological innovations and attendant shifts in our relationship to the Earth. Consumed by Google’s Earth On start-up, the computer programme Google Earth begins with a slow, rotating drift towards the Earth from an unspecified location in outer space. We arrive at a view (Figure 1.6) as if from the perspective of the Apollo 17 crew, who in 1972 snapped the image that would become Blue Marble. The viewer of Google Earth, however, is given an active role in the planet’s representation: they are like an extra-terrestrial pilot to whom the Earth is made available as a ‘globe in practice’. By this, I mean that this particular image initiates a vision most associated with that of the pilot or ‘airman’. This idea of a ‘globe in practice’ was first described by American poet and essayist Archibald MacLeish, who wrote that, for the airman, the world is conceived as ‘a single sphere, a globe having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center’. This, he explains, is ‘a globe in practice, not in theory’.55 And so Google’s Earth comes to us as a sphere: a round object in which all points, spatial and temporal (in 2009 a feature was released wherein the user can move back and forth in time and thus reveal changes over past decades) eventually meet one another. One can scroll from deep ocean bathymetry to mountainous hypsometry in a smooth, continuous movement. Moreover, we are given the ability to zoom in from the Blue Marble viewpoint to a point beyond the highest zooming level of its map, arriving at the contentious ‘Street View’ level: a panoramic street-by-street representation

Figure 1.6 Screenshot of Google Earth, Data SIO, NOAA, US Navy, NGA, GEBCO, Landsat/ Copernicus IBCAO. Source: © 2023 Google.

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of urban and rural environments stitched together from 360° photographic images taken by a fleet of specially adapted cars, tricycles, snowmobiles, and boats.56 Google Earth’s spectacular virtual globe, map, and geographical information programme has been downloaded well over one billion times.57 Its software was originally called EarthViewer 3D and was created by a private Silicon Valley company, Keyhole Inc. This company was funded by In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which invests in Silicon Valley technology with the purpose of keeping the CIA equipped with the latest technological developments.58 This software came to public prominence in 2003 when, in exchange for on-air exposure, war reports from Iraq on American news networks were illustrated with its sophisticated 3D maps. For instance, on CNN, EarthViewer 3D was used to simulate a flight over Baghdad followed by a tour of the streets of the bombing targets.59 The software, whose website was so overwhelmed by enthusiastic users following its on-air publicity that it crashed, was acquired in 2004 by Google. And, soon enough, EarthViewer 3D’s form of global representation, which was primarily accustomed to illustrate and aid modern warfare, became a banal, utterly normal, and domesticated part of our everyday visual diet. Indeed, it has become one of the primary means by which we interact with the world. Mark Dorrian’s essay ‘On Google Earth’ makes clear that Google Earth’s ‘interface works through a principle of grasping’.60 Our interaction with the object pivots on a hand icon, with which we can manoeuvre the Earth and navigate our perception of it through a process of grabbing and pinching. For Dorrian, this intensifies the sense of the manipulability of the virtual object and, as such, is reminiscent of the ‘cartographic tradition of miniature globes that we place our hands on and revolve’. Indeed, Google Earth might even represent a ‘digital simulacrum’ of these ornamental spinning globes.61 This notion of grasping hints at the epistemic process Heidegger characterised as essential to ‘modern science’, and intensifies the efect of the earlier discussed ‘world picture’. To grasp something refers to a process of understanding by seizing and holding on. When we grasp something, we are, to paraphrase Heidegger, ‘the relational centre of that which is as such’.62 In this sense, grasping only serves to seize the object within an always-already known object sphere. Indeed, Google Earth seems to be the acme of Heidegger’s ‘representation’ [vor-stellen], or ‘setting in place’ of nature. For instance, this graspable Earth is, unlike Blue Marble and Earthrise completely bereft of cloud coverage. ‘The World ceases to have a dark side’, Dorrian writes, ‘and instead we have an entirely illuminated globe’.63 The lack of clouds distances this Earth from earlier ‘world pictures’, whose clouds were interpreted by some commentators as a disorientating element that transcended the expected geophysical grid.64 Google Earth enforces another form of interface: one that doesn’t emphasise the sublime incalculability of our planet (an end towards which the clouds might be seen to operate in Blue Marble), but instead displays the apparatus, or non-diegetic space, through which the virtual image is achieved. We are always aware that we are observing a mechanically encircled Earth, pieced together from various fragments of image data. The preset representation of the Earth is covered by thin, two-dimensional overlays containing icons, numbers, touristic points of interest, and links to destination photographs. We are forcefully disengaged from any sort of euphoric exhilaration or sense of awe. In other words, there is a drain of afect or loss of cathection in the world, whose representation here disavows any significant emotional investment or afective charge. Indeed, Dorrian claims that even ‘with the program’s informational layers switched of, we can be under no illusion that this is any kind of “natural” image’.65

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What is emphasised by this fragmented collection of geospatial data is a sense of total availability, or, in Dorrian’s words, ‘searchability’. Nothing is out of reach, nothing is unknown or beyond our grasp. It is as if the spectacular and readily mythologised images of the globe, such as the Apollo images, are now too simplistic. Indeed, four years before Google Earth was released, Denis Cosgrove, author of a book on the history of cartography, suggested that traditional representations of the globe could no longer signify the ‘abstract values required in corporate advertising at the millennium’.66 Cosgrove explains that the emergence of a ‘frictionless capitalism’ and an accompanying impression of the Earth as ‘great planetary marketplace’ required a diferent imagining of the planet. This capitalism was to be conceived as a ‘network of interconnecting lines signif[ying] communication between points that increasingly convey no material objects . . . virtual and purely informational, operating through satellites arrayed above the global surface and unconstrained by its physical barriers to flow’.67 And as if responding to Cosgrove’s analysis of the unconstrained and frictionless imagining of the Earth through corporate marketing, Google Earth emerged, ofering its users uninhibited access to traverse the planet in the absolute absence of any physical barrier. Similar to NASA’s photographs, however, the mode of representation ofered by Google Earth – without cloud coverage, totally searchable and visible, and overcoded with non-diegetic data – produces its own ideological mystification. By this, I mean that it intervenes in the individual’s perception of the world, putting it in alliance with the global system of frictionless capitalism that Google Earth symbolises. For this reason, the subject understands itself as increasingly ‘motile’. This is a condition, Paul Virilio writes in Open Sky (1997), where the individual has ‘limited his body’s area of influence to a few gestures, a few impulses’. This interactive being – hooked up to ultra-powerful communication and telecommunication tools – is, Virilio suggests, ‘doomed to inertia . . . natural capacities for movement and displacement [are transferred] to probes and scanners which instantaneously inform him about a remote reality’. Mobility is not important to the Google Earth user, who is, more precisely, ‘mobile on the spot’.68 Virilio cites the rise of home shopping and working from home as paradigmatic examples of the emergence of this new subject, whose private space ofers no sanctuary from the productive time of capital and who is now accordingly often confined to his or her home, condemned to immobility, having no good reason to leave. Of course, this condition has only accelerated more recently, post-COVID-19, when ‘motility’ became a governmental mandate, as part of preventative measures to impede the spread of the virus. Instead, the subject became ‘viral’, instructed to circulate and spread itself across digital networks in order to maintain personal and professional responsibilities. Google’s totally searchable Earth, dense with detail and accessible on a personal screen, upholds this idea of a ‘motile’ subject. Its user is allowed to ‘swoop in like Superman from outer space’, Dorrian writes, ‘flying over the planet, while . . . continuing to fulfil . . . bureaucratic obligations below’.69 This individual, simultaneously a superhero and an obedient worker, corresponds to what Virilio provocatively claims to be a technologically driven disabilisation of everyday life: [T]his citizen-terminal soon to be decked to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the spastic, wired to control his/her domestic environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost the capacity for immediate intervention along with natural motricity and who abandons himself, for want of anything better, to the capabilities of captors,

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sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say, he talks.70 Virilio’s claim is premised upon the observation of emerging similarities between the technologically well-equipped disabled person and the technologically over-equipped able-bodied person. He argues that reduced mobility – in the former – and growing inertia – in the latter – is fast collapsing the distinction between able and disabled. Virilio draws this conclusion from a seemingly benign remark made by François Mitterand at an international symposium on disability in Dunkirk regarding the need for cities to adapt to and be made completely accessible for the physically challenged.71 Virilio infers a technocratic underside to Mitterand’s ‘noble’ display of generosity. In this understanding, Mitterand’s putative benevolence toward the disabled veiled a more general concession to frictionless capitalism, which is indiferent to our spatial mobility and only requires that we be connected to its network. So, by the force of circumstance, the disabled subject becomes an imperative of capital. Whilst Virilio’s characterisation is highly problematic from a disability studies perspective, we can at least take from his argument the idea of delegating or surrendering our mobility to technical systems. This can be glimpsed, for instance, in the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori (meaning acute social withdrawal), which, like Baudrillard’s provocative analysis of obesity in America in the 1980s, can be seen to represent an ‘excess of conformity’ to cultural norms.72 ‘According to figures released by the Japanese government, as of 2010’, Franco Berardi writes, ‘700,000 individuals, with an average age of thirty-one, have made the decision to sever all relations with the outside world, in order to live their lives from behind the locked door of their own room’.73 Their only point of contact with the world outside their cramped and cluttered rooms is via electronic screens. Moreover, this motile subject is an imperative of the military in the West: its pilots are now operators of remote-controlled Predator and Reaper drones. ‘While previously the physical prowess of the pilots was an integral part of their public identity’, Hito Steyerl writes, now their ‘physical performance has become secondary and their own mobility is not a decisive factor’.74 More prosaically, Dorrian also suggests that the process by which we engage with Google Earth is symptomatic of contemporary consumer habits. ‘Searchability’ refers to the way that we engage with Google Earth: clicking and zooming into our specified target. This produces a dynamic similar to shopping. ‘The promise here’, Dorrian explains, ‘is of a kind of virtuous circle of mutual targeting whereby Google Earth permits the commodity to target, via advertising, the cybertourist cum satellite-consumer, and then in turn to be spatially targeted by her’.75 The total illumination of the globe on display and its overt constructedness (here I’m referring to the image’s highly visible apparatus of non-diegetic data) enunciate the wholeness of its searchability. For Dorrian, this is how we should understand its total dispersal of clouds: ‘for everything that retards vision tends to be drained away’.76 We are given a total range of vision that turns everything into a potential target or searchable commodity. Furthermore, this instrumentalisation of a ‘world picture’ for the purpose of shopping is actively reconfiguring the physical landscape as a media surface on which to advertise. For instance, the North American Land Artist Robert Smithson’s topographical intervention Spiral Jetty (1970), which revealed itself predominately from an aerial perspective, can now be seen as a precedent for a mode of advertising that directs itself toward a satellite intermediary in order to be seen by the consumer on Google Earth. This includes KFC’s famous 87,500 square foot Colonel Sanders logo in Nevada (removed in 2007, but still visible on

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Google Earth if the timeline scale is scrolled back to circa 2006) and a trend for rooftops as billboards.77 For Dorrian, what Google Earth ultimately facilitates is a circle of mutual targeting between commodity and consumer, within which the consumer doesn’t have to move. Virilio’s disabled person is normalised because we are encouraged to perceive the Earth in terms of its ‘searchability’. This feature represents a further advance on the way in which, as I earlier argued, NASA’s images of the Earth smuggled within them a consumerist ideology. In order to build on Dorrian’s interpretation, I want to ask what other insights Google Earth ofers into our contemporary understanding of the world: acknowledging that it is both empowering, ultra-useful, and at the same time symptomatic of Virilio’s critical reflections on ‘motility’. In particular, I want to highlight Google Earth’s aesthetic register or the ‘structures of feeling’ it produces. I earlier mentioned that its mode of representation forcefully removes us from any sense of the euphoric exhilaration that characterised NASA’s Apollo images. In this respect, a more likely response to a fragmented global image overcoded with non-diegetic tools for instantaneous targeting is not euphoria, but dysphoria, a feeling that refers to the total evacuation of euphoria. There is nothing designed to immerse, wow, or exhilarate the user within Google Earth. We can experience history on Google Earth through its time slider and access aerial views of local environments from certain ‘acquisition dates’ throughout twentiethcentury history. ‘Real’ history is displaced with a uniform, searchable, and nondescript interface. There is no euphoric register to Google Earth’s imagery, no attempt to achieve or fabricate a sense of transparency or immediacy. In their book Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000), Jay David Bolter and Robert Grusin write that this ‘immediate’ mode of representation is one where the media object operates ‘to make the viewer forget the presence of the medium (canvas, photographic film, cinema, and so on) and believe that he is in the presence of the objects of representation’.78 This, for instance, is applicable to NASA’s photographs of the Earth from space, which have a cinematic efect that hides their immensely complex conditions of production. However, Google Earth is ‘hyper-immediate’: a new-media ‘style of visual representation whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium’.79 The user is constantly made aware of the apparatus. The euphoric aesthetic of the ‘world pictures’ of the 1960s and 1970s has disappeared; Google Earth, by contrast, is depressing. It has a dysphoric aesthetic that can be seen to correspond to a wider planetary dysphoria, which is itself symptomatic of a worldview informed by the Anthropocene. Consumed by Red Bull’s Earth ‘Planetary dysphoria’ is a term coined by the literary critic Emily Apter that defines ‘a variation on Melanie Klein’s ‘“depressive position” [experience of guilt, grief, helplessness, and dependency towards the object, initially the mother], sufusing every aspect of economic, social and terrestrial life’.80 It refers to a process by which the Earth’s impoverishment is internalised by the individual, who then – paraphrasing Freud on melancholia – experiences a ‘delusional expectation of punishment’.81 Dysphoria, she writes, ‘denotes an unpleasant or uncomfortable mood: sadness, a downer moment, anxiety, restlessness, irritability, spleen, manic swings, withdrawal . . . and the total evacuation of euphoria’. The dysphoric individual is unreceptive to euphoric intensities because he or she is exhausted or too depressed. Apter observes a particular sort of ‘planetary aesthetic’ in contemporary culture: this is a ‘world picture’ that ‘captures the geopsychoanalytic state of

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the world at its most depressed and unruhig’. This aesthetic is ‘informed by a newfound sensitivity to the real and imagined processes of the earth’s destruction and the end of life as we know it’. The planet is conceived as ‘an environmental death-trap aficted by radiation, pandemics, dust and stellar burnout’.82 Google Earth provides a comparably depressing conception of the planet: an image of the Earth that has come to replace the increasingly cataclysmic world around us – one that is fully explored, mediated, and rendered as a 3D interactive world, locking us in as pitiful consumers and symbolising our increasingly total immobilisation. To further demonstrate this ‘planetary dysphoria’, I’m going to come to my final example: Red Bull’s Stratos (2012), which I will argue gives us a representation of the Earth that accurately pictures a planet that has entered a stage of spiralling collapse. Stratos was a freefall extreme sports stunt from the Earth’s stratosphere, which can be read as symptomatic of the ‘delusional expectation of punishment’ that results from our increasingly dysphoric worldview. In efect, it dramatically exemplifies this dysphoria with a spectacular display that can be seen to put our contemporary culture in touch with the history of sacrifices, suicide, and death that was theorised by Georges Bataille in the 1930s and also addressed more recently by Jean Baudrillard. All great world-historic events appear twice, Marx writes, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.83 Red Bull’s Stratos, I want to claim, is the ‘farce’ that corresponds to NASA’s iconic ‘world pictures’. Indeed, it produced a picture of the world whose sheer spectacle rivals and arguably exceeds NASA’s images from the 1960s and 1970s. However, with Red Bull, the NASA’s state-sponsored conquest and photographing of the Earth from space for political purposes (Cold War posturing) and modern scientific advancement shift to a corporate-sponsored conquest for the purpose of a marketing exercise-cum-Jackass-type stunt. On October 14, 2012, Red Bull achieved their goal of dropping someone from the edge of the stratosphere (or, as the event was marketed – ‘from the edge of space’) into freefall without vehicular support.84 The stunt was streamed in real-time on YouTube, and in doing this the Austrian parachutist, skydiver, and BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner set a number of world records.85 These records were ratified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and accounted for ‘Maximum Vertical Speed’, ‘Exit Altitude’, and ‘Vertical Distance of Freefall’.86 Baumgartner’s journey began in Roswell, USA, where he lifted of in a pressurised capsule attached to a large helium balloon. At an altitude of 38969.4 m (24 miles), he exited the capsule and fell down to Earth towards a specific target zone. Baumgartner, wearing a specially designed pressurised suit, fell without the aid of any support other than air for a distance of 36402.6 m (22.6 miles). He reached the maximum speed of 1357.6 km/h (843.6 mph) before opening his parachute and drifting down to his target. This speed also made him the first person to break the sound barrier without vehicular power or support. Red Bull is an Austrian company whose product is a globally popular energy drink. More important than the drink they produce, however, is the brand or lifestyle they market, which involves consuming the drink. The eponymous beverage was based on a preexisting Thai drink, Krating Daeng, whose logo displays two charging red bulls against a backdrop of the sun. Red Bull’s co-founder, Dietrich Mateschitz, encountered the drink in 1982 and slightly rebranded the product for distribution on the global market (it was initially released in Austria in 1987 and became globally popular in the late 1990s and 2000s). ‘We don’t bring the product to the people’, Mateschitz explains, ‘[w]e bring people to the product. We make it available and those who love our style come to us’.87 An article in The Economist stresses Mateschitz’s marketing, which ‘launched the brand by

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persuading students to drive around in Minis and Beetles with a Red Bull can strapped on top, or to throw Red Bull parties around weird and wonderful themes. The company’s only advertisements are a series of whimsical television cartoons’.88 In this respect, Red Bull is a fundamentally post-industrial enterprise in that all the company produces has symbolic value. It is a marketing machine for the brand’s self-promotion through extreme sports events, sponsorship, and sports team ownership. The Stratos project was one such event. They streamed the freefall ‘from the edge of space’ live on their YouTube channel and broke another – non-sporting – record at the time: becoming the ‘live stream with the most concurrent views ever on YouTube’ (at peak, it had over eight million concurrent views).89 The stunt was estimated to be worth ‘tens of millions of dollars’ for Red Bull. Indeed, an article in Forbes magazine claimed that the ‘sponsorship transcended sports and entertainment into Pop Culture, hitting new consumers that Red Bull does not usually capture, and on a global scale’. Sports, entertainment, and media-marketing mogul Ben Sturner, quoted in the article, enthused that the project’s ‘value for Red Bull is in the tens of millions of dollars of global exposure, and Red Bull Stratos will continue to be talked about and passed along socially for a very long time’.90 However, I want to suggest that the most striking aspect of the jump was the way in which it pictured the Earth (whilst the stunt did not technically take place outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, the exit altitude provided the impression of looking down on the Earth from space). Rather than the fixed perspective of NASA’s photographs or the continuous aerial viewpoint operative in Google Earth, here we had access to a much more dynamic perspective. Baumgartner’s capsule was equipped with nine highdefinition (HD) cameras, and his pressure suit had three HD cameras, one on each thigh and one on the chest pack. An optical ground tracking-camera system with high-power zoom lenses was also used to track Baumgartner’s descent. From the perspective of the viewer, we were able to see Baumgartner fall towards the Earth’s surface, the panoply of HD real-time imaging equipment allowing for a spectacularly embodied representation of the zoomed-in targeting that takes place on Google Earth. At the exit altitude, we were streamed a remarkable view of the Earth: its curvature visible, dividing an aerial view of the Earth’s surface from the mesosphere portion of the planet’s atmosphere (above the stratosphere), which appears as black as deep space. Before Baumgartner’s departure, he stood precariously on a platform outside the capsule. From here, it was possible to glimpse a Google Earth-style aerial view from just above the jumper. So we saw Baumgartner as if on a diving board, with the Earth’s surface stretching to the edges of the screen’s space (Figure 1.7). Baumgartner here seemed to occupy a viewpoint normally the privilege of unmanned communications satellites. After a short premeditated speech (‘sometimes you have to get up really high, to see how small you are; I’m coming home now’) that recalled Neil Armstrong’s famous words during the moon landing, albeit a more individualistic version (Armstrong referenced mankind, Baumgartner references only himself), he stepped of the platform and fell (Figure 1.8). Mission control confirmed over the radio, ‘Jumper away’. As Baumgartner entered his freefall, the image switched to the chest-pack-mounted HD camera, which provided a near-enough point-of-view (POV)-style representation of the Google Earth zoom toward a target zone. The Earth’s spherical surface had the efect of twisting, heaving, and mutating as Baumgartner dropped through its atmosphere, gravity pulling the mass of his body towards its terminal velocity. Interestingly, our perception of the Earth does not open up in accordance with Baumgartner’s position relative to the Earth’s surface; rather, the streamed image generated a much more dizzy perspective, a point of view totally alien

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Figure 1.7 Red Bull, Stratos, 2012. Source: Photo credit: © RED BULL STRATOS.

to Google Earth’s linear zoom. The view was distorted and wavered between geographic detail and abstract fluidity. In Open Sky, Virilio describes the perspective of a ‘freefall specialist’. He writes of the sudden magnification of vision that results from drastic acceleration. This is what seems to account for the bizarre representation of the Earth from Baumgartner’s

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Figure 1.8 Red Bull, Stratos, 2012. Source: Photo credit: © RED BULL STRATOS.

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chest-pack-mounted camera as he rushes towards terminal velocity – a speed of 843.6 mph reached in 42 seconds. Virilio mentions the particular rush of perception induced by a parachutist’s freefall as a metaphor for the shifts in perception that occur within the spatiotemporally accelerated conditions of experience provided by the telepresence of electronic screen-based technologies. He cites a description of ‘eyeballing’ the fall in progress (‘eyeballing’ is a parachuting term that refers to the assessment during free fall of the moment the parachute should be opened without reference to the altimeter) that, I think, helpfully illustrates the POV experience of Baumgartner’s jump: Eyeballing consists in visually assessing the distance between you and the ground the whole time you are falling. You evaluate your height and work out the exact moment you need to open your parachute based on a dynamic visual impression. When you are flying in a plane at an altitude of 600 metres, you don’t have anything like the visual impression you have when you clear this altitude in a high-speed vertical fall. When you are at 2,000 metres, you can’t see the ground approaching. But when you reach the 800 to 600 metre mark, you start to see it ‘coming’. The sensation becomes scary pretty quickly because of ground rush, the ground rushing up at you. The apparent diameter of objects increases faster and faster and you suddenly have the feeling you are not seeing them getting closer but seeing them move apart suddenly, as though the ground were splitting open.91 So the freefall appears as a ‘headlong rush of perception’, where ‘all geometric dimensions connect: at first the ground seems to come up, then to open up; the arrival of a surface is followed by the spreading of the vanishing lines of a volume, anticipating flattening at the point of impact’.92 In this respect, Virilio’s compelling description of the freefall specialist’s view of the Earth is bound up with the vicarious thrill of death, a suicidal experiment. Whilst Baumgartner’s perilous exercise seems to share Google Earth’s representation of the planet (an embodiment of its dynamic search process), it does not share its impression of an Earth ‘grasped’ and made manipulable (exemplified by its small hand icon, with which one can take hold of the Earth and spin it). By contrast, the eyeballer-type view creates the impression of ‘the ground splitting open’. Whilst we might argue that there is an implicit euphoria in this experience related to an overcoming of our fears, perhaps I want to maintain that the thrill ofered to us is bound up with the real-time of a freefalling body, the real-pull of gravity, and impending death. Virilio writes of freefall as an ‘experiment on the inertia of a body pulled by its mass: it is what happens prior to its indefinite annihilation upon ground impact’. In this understanding, the extreme sensations ofered by extreme sports, such as BASE jumping, are suicidal experiments ‘with no other aim than that of experiencing the heaviness of the body’.93 This analysis of Virilio suggests that beneath the immediate thrill of the jump, and perhaps in all thrill-seeking extreme sports, there is a deeper logic at play, a drive towards death. It is in this respect that it meets and is marked by the Anthropocene, in that it has to do with self-inflicted death. It is a display of extraordinary technological innovation turned into a form of self-destruction, or ‘demonstrative suicide’. This is a phrase the French critic Jean Baudrillard memorably directed at the New York Marathon in a passage from his book America (1986). ‘I would never have believed that the New York marathon could move you to tears’, he writes: In driving rain, with helicopters circling overhead and the crowd cheering, wearing aluminium foil capes and squinting at their stop-watches, or bare-chested, their eyes

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A Dysphoric World Picture rolling skywards, they are all seeking death, that death by exhaustion that was the fate of the first Marathon man some two thousand years ago. And he, let us not forget, was carrying a message of victory to Athens. They also dream no doubt of bringing a victory message, but there are too many of them and their message has lost all meaning: it is merely the message of their arrival, at the end of their exertions, the twilight message of a futile, superhuman efort . . . The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself.94

Likewise, Red Bull’s sponsored extreme sports events can be seen as forms of ‘demonstrative suicide’, which allow its participants to act out or perform their own deaths and allow viewers to do so by proxy. Indeed, for some unfortunate extreme sport specialists, their acts of ‘demonstrative suicide’ have been realised whilst under Red Bull’s employ, thus pitifully falling short of its famous company slogan – ‘Red Bull Gives You Wings’. In a trailer for Red Bull’s Human Flight 3D film, a group of proximity flyers (a variation of BASE jumping, where the jumper wears a ‘wingsuit’, the aim being to fly as close to the faces and ridges of mountains as possible) are gathered around a table discussing the next perilous jump: C’mon we don’t need to do this. It’s insane, it’s suicide guys! We got an obligation to push the envelope in this sport . . . Don’t be such a wuss! We gotta’ do it It’s true.95 Needless to say, the jump was suicide. The individual who claims an ‘obligation to push the envelope’ despite the overwhelming threat of suicidal death was freefall specialist Eli Thompson, who was later killed on a jump in the Swiss Alps. This so-called obligation to complete the stunt, or to just do it – to not be ‘a wuss!’ – is also paralleled in Baudrillard’s observations of the New York marathon. It is, he writes, ‘the mania for an empty victory, the joy engendered by a feat that is of no consequence’.96 This is about doing something to merely prove to yourself that you can do it – a maniacal desire to prove that you exist. However, Thompson’s was not an isolated occurrence of death under Red Bull’s supervision. In 2009, the ‘extreme-skier’ and BASE jumper Shane McConkey died in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy after freefalling for 12 seconds and failing to deploy his parachute.97 And, again in 2009, BASE jumper Ueli Gegenschatz died after making a ‘PR parachute jump from 88 metres high’ as part of the launch of Red Bull’s venture into mobile phone technology.98 The actual threat of death, it seems, is essential to the marketing of the energy drink. And this, communications scientist Norbert Bolz explains, is a highly lucrative ‘marketing strategy where there is no competition nobody else dares endorse the dangerous life like this’.99 For all intents and purposes, Red Bull has fully realised Baudrillard’s notion of ‘suicide as advertising’. Stratos did not result in death. Furthermore, as one would expect, eforts were made to subdue this potential outcome from the overall spectacle. Firstly, the initial launch date was aborted because of unfavourable weather conditions – a display of caution not always demonstrated by Red Bull, which has come under criticism for pressuring their athletes to perform in adverse weather conditions. Secondly, the jump was made for live viewing on YouTube. However, it was streamed with a 20-second delay in case of

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accident. This is called ‘broadcast delay’ and is commonly used for live television in order to prevent profanities or violence from making it to air. Whilst the stunt surely had viewers staring in open-mouthed horror at the jump’s absurd exit altitude, from which the Earth’s atmospheric edge appeared visible, a direct experience of death was never in the ofng for the viewers. For instance, when Baumgartner enters a potentially fatal, uncontrolled spin after the first minute of the jump, we don’t feel anxious or overly concerned; it is merely a brief period of heightened drama in a journey whose success is already assured. What we see are images that have already been screened, OK’d, and verified by a team of supervisors. In this respect, there isn’t anything immediately at stake. Nonetheless, Red Bull does seem to inherit the iconography and sadomasochistic pleasure that are historically associated with death and ritualistic sacrifice. In the late 1930s, Georges Bataille wrote an essay on the ‘joy’ one might feel before death. Bataille conceives this joy as a kind of epiphylogenetic retention: something that is retained and passed on throughout the generations despite historical change.100 Thus, he writes, the practice of joy before death rediscovers ‘naïve forms that antedate the intrusion of a servile morality’.101 The sacrificial impulse delivers us from what he terms a ‘restricted economy’ of conservation, exchange, growth, and accumulation, revealing an underlying ‘general economy’ of expenditure and excess, which for Bataille was ‘the defining [yet typically hidden] element of human identity itself’.102 Indeed, a short passage from Bataille’s essay, ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’, might be seen to describe the joy felt by the ‘eyeballing’ freefall specialist who witnesses the Earth splitting open: ‘I AM joy before death. Joy before death carries me. Joy before death hurls me down. Joy before death annihilates me’. ‘I slowly lose myself in unintelligible and bottomless space. I reach the depths of worlds. I am devoured by death. I am devoured by fever. I am absorbed in somber space. I am annihilated in joy before death’.103 This idea of epiphylogenetic joy and pleasure in death is also referenced in Michael Serres’s writing on the traces of ritualistic sacrifice that reveal themselves in the contemporary world. He discusses this in Statues (1993) and in his published conversation with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995). Serres’s argument is premised on the NASA Challenger disaster (January 28, 1986), when a Space Shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all crew members, whilst being streamed live on CNN. The cause of this disaster was famously demonstrated by theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman, in a televised hearing. Feynman simply plunged a sample of the Shuttle’s (not fit for purpose) sealing material into a beaker of liquid nitrogen to show its lack of resilience. This served to illustrate that the integrity of the Shuttle’s fuel rocket booster was critically impaired by the sub-zero weather conditions during launch. Feynman argued that this fault was known, and, in an appendix to a commissioned report on the accident, he explained that there are enormous diferences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000.

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A Dysphoric World Picture The high figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management.104

This point, that the potentially suicidal risk was known, internalised, and diluted by management, allows Serres to draw parallels between this explosion and the ancient Carthaginian practice of enclosing humans in a giant statue of the god Baal (who is, incidentally, symbolically represented with an image of a bull) and immolating them. ‘Denial’, Roxanne Lapidus writes in the book’s translator’s note, ‘played a large role in both events. Since the Carthaginians incinerated both animals and children in their statue of Baal, even the parents of the sacrificed children allegedly denied that the cries they heard were those of humans’. Lapidus, glossing Serres’s argument, asserts that ‘[w]e are engaging in a similar form of denial . . . when we say that the Challenger explosion was an accident; such accidents, he insists, are predictable, according to the laws of probability’.105 Seen from this perspective, Feynman’s statistics regarding the diferences of opinion between the engineers and NASA’s management figures reveal that modern science and its technologies contain shadowy traces of archaic violence. Serres concludes that ‘Baal is in the Challenger, and the Challenger is in Baal’.106 Other similarities between the two events include: the immense cost to the respective societies in erecting these “statues”, the active role of “specialists” (scientists/priests) in setting the event in motion, the presence of a large crowd of onlookers, who witness the events open-mouthed in horror, and the repetitive nature of the event (replayed again and again on television screens; actively repeated in Carthage whenever national events seemed to require it).107 And so, whilst we typically understand ‘modern science’ to have overcome archaic forms of consciousness and behaviour, Serres suggests that these are in fact sedimented within our social structures, systems, and apparatuses and destined to repeat themselves. Indeed, he provocatively claims that ‘[w]e are ancient in most of our actions and thoughts’.108 Certainly, the moving image streamed onto our computer screen of Felix Baumgartner exiting his support vehicle and perched on the edge of a horrific precipice carries a trace of archaic violence and ritualistic sacrifice. He then falls for our pleasure – a ‘joy before death’ by proxy. However, Stratos doesn’t have the same heroic aspect as Bataille’s account of death. For Bataille, the ‘practice of joy before death’ enacts a resistance to social servitude, tragically representing, he writes, the ‘only intellectually honest route in the search for ecstasy’.109 By contrast, there was nothing at stake for the Stratos project as a whole; it was not done in pursuit of any great hope or ambition. It was done for publicity, for the purposes of advertising, and to push the envelope. Thus delivering the sacrificial impulse back into a ‘restricted economy’ of growth and accumulation: ‘suicide as advertising’. The jump was a massively expensive, extraordinarily innovative, and absolutely empty gesture – a feat of no consequence. For the viewer, however, it allowed the vicarious experience of a suicide jump: the thrill of plummeting to your point of impact and annihilation whilst sat at a computer screen. This re-emergence or revival of an epiphylogenetic ‘joy before death’ in the context of advertising can be seen as a symptom of our dysphoric ‘world picture’ – a sign of the ‘delusional expectation of punishment’ that comes with this depressed outlook on the world.

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Perhaps this is also true of the enthusiasm for extreme sports within white collar corporate work culture, which is sometimes referred to as ‘extreme work’ due to its tendency to overwhelm and dominate people’s lives with ‘relentless bottom-line pressures’.110 This ‘extreme work’ is arguably what Red Bull’s energy drink really fuels. Recent market research data suggests that the ‘millennials – specifically the older millennials in the 27–37 years age group – have emerged as the key consumers of energy drinks . . . According to a recent survey by Mintel, 64% of the older millennials are consuming energy drinks’.111 These are the workers enmeshed in an ‘extreme work’ culture, whose long hours and relentless demands are galvanised by Red Bull’s potent mix of cafeine, taurine, B vitamins, sugar, and Alpine spring water. It is these workers who also pursue extreme sports in their ‘downtime’ – bungee jumping on the weekend or skydiving during a short holiday. ‘Marilyn, a senior banker at a London-based investment bank, was captivated by extreme sports’, Sylvia Ann Hewlett & Carolyn Buck Luce write in an article on ‘extreme work’ in the Harvard Business Review: [S]kydiving, snowboarding, triathlons, bungee jumping, surfing, mountaineering – anything that provided a rush of adrenaline and an element of danger. She eagerly recommended Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (an account of an ill-fated trip by amateur mountain climbers) as a window into why people push themselves to the limits of their physical endurance. Marilyn saw parallels between extreme sports and her life as an investment banker. First, there were the extraordinary time demands and performance stressors. Seventy-hour workweeks, grueling travel requirements, and relentless bottom-line pressures constantly pushed her to her limits – both physically and intellectually. Second, there was the allure of the job. Much like extreme sports, investment banking was exhilarating and seductive. Marilyn told us, ‘It gives me this rush. Like a drug, it’s addictive.’112 In this respect, extreme sports seem to be enthusiastically pursued by ‘extreme workers’ because it allows them to repeat the aspects of their job for which they receive the most praise and reinforcement: testing one’s limits, taking voluntary sacrifices and risks, and confronting high stakes and danger. Viewed in this way, the Stratos jump crystallises a contemporary ‘world picture’. Like Polke’s grinning astronaut in the 1960s, it figures our predicament accurately, without heroism or glow, but with a sort of gleeful, fatalistic energy. This illuminates, for instance, the idea that technological progress might complement, rather than oppose, a dysphoric worldview. This is encapsulated precisely in Red Bull’s stunt. It is a display of extraordinary technological innovation put to vapid use, appealing to a population whose life is work and whose culture is impressed upon them by an energy drink. In this respect, such suicidal experiments might be pursued for the same reason that Baudrillard observed of the New York marathon runner: the ‘mania for an empty victory’. The sheer excess of the modern marathon was, for Baudrillard, a blatant overcompensation for something – an ‘international symbol’ of ‘fetishistic performance’.113 In the case of extreme sports, it might be argued that this overcompensation is symbolic of an extreme work culture of long hours, increased stress, anxiety, and risk, and – returning to Virilio – an increasing sedentariness facilitated by the instantaneous reach of electronic communications. In extreme sports, the experience of extreme work continues after work as a form of hysteresis, like an afterimage that won’t leave your vision. And so, quite depressingly, the pleasure one takes in extreme sports is ultimately synonymous with the pleasure

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one takes in ‘extreme work’, paralleling Theodor Adorno’s dysphoric understanding of sports more generally, in which ‘people are unwittingly trained into modes of behaviour which . . . are required of them by the work process’.114 The theme of tragedy repeated as farce received a further twist in 2014, when Google’s then vice president Alan Eustace took a break from work in order to re-enact Baumgartner’s BASE jump from the stratosphere. In doing so, he broke the freefall specialist’s world altitude record. Eustace is not a dedicated athlete like Baumgartner; he is a middle-aged computer scientist with a classic business haircut and the sort of complexion one associates with a life spent behind a screen and under fluorescent tube lighting. The impression is that Eustace’s jump was, in efect, just another day at the ofce; however, this time he wore ‘a specially designed spacesuit [and] jump[ed] from 130,000ft over the southern New Mexico desert, reaching a top speed of 822mph during a freefall that lasted four-and-a-half minutes’.115 Red Bull’s farce was therefore followed by another farce. Eustace’s jump was simply a more extreme version of the extreme sports enjoyed by the extreme workers under his employ. We can understand these extreme phenomena as expressions of a Baudrillardian ‘hyper-conformity’ – a non-productive or seductive (as in to divert or lead astray) version of work in which you keep conforming to work protocols even though you are not at work. This hyper-conformity can be seen to function, similar to Polke as Astronaut, as a figure of parody: it seems to confuse and mock Red Bull’s spectacular stunt, making it seem unimpressive and quite ordinary. However, an important diference between Eustace’s jump and Polke’s work is that Polke’s intervention was an artistic commentary from an external position. Eustace’s jump, by contrast, came from within the self-same system of extreme work and extreme sports. This was a form of enthusiastic participation in this culture, which inadvertently resulted in something mocking and parodic. Indeed, it seems to afrm the idea of hyper-conformity as a ‘paradoxical participation that does not justify but destroys’.116 For Adorno and Max Horkheimer, it is at the height of enlightenment rationality that we are most vulnerable to stupidity – ‘[t]here is a historical tendency’, they write, ‘for cleverness to prove stupid’.117 David Jenemann expands on this idea, suggesting that when the ‘products of rationality are at their most refined, we are most liable to them tipping into mindlessness’.118 These ideas reverberate throughout Red Bull’s Stratos and Eustace’s repetition of the stunt, which reveal a strange aspect of technological advancement when it suddenly seems liable to regress or tip us into absurdity. This might be seen to represent a development of Heidegger’s account of our age: for Heidegger, technology allowed us to order and control the world, destroying our relationship with nature by compelling us to see it as a standing reserve, something from which to extract and accumulate profit. Now, by contrast, under the sign of the Anthropocene, technology has facilitated a diferent relationship to the world and, by extension, a diferent ‘world picture’. Whereas the world pictures of the 1960s and 1970s inspired a euphoric sense of global community, now our world pictures either symbolise our immobility, as in Google Earth, or induce a sense of individual competition, as in Stratos, through feats of little consequence, which repeat and reconcile us with the customs of an ‘extreme work’ culture. Our images of the Earth do not evoke the heroic achievements and conquests of modern science and our duty to protect the planet, as NASA’s images did. Instead, they symbolise a planet whose use has, to a certain extent, been exhausted, or a planet to which we no longer have any ‘useful’ relationship. Whilst Google Earth retains the Heideggerian idea of grasping the world as an object, albeit skeuomorphically with its hand icon, it is Red Bull’s Stratos that seems to play out the full implications of our contemporary ‘world picture’. By this, I mean to say that, with Stratos, we are made the object of technology: we

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see the world splitting open, we are the victims, acting out the fundamentally destructive drive of our dysphoric ‘world picture’. This is not an objectified Earth that we hold at a distance with a detached, controlling gaze. Here that distance is collapsed, it splits wide open. The Earth represented by Red Bull is an Earth spiralling out of human control. This seems to signal a diferent relationship to technology, perhaps reversing (or at least blurring) the subject-object relationship, whereby we have become the object of technology as opposed to technology being the object of our intentions, as Heidegger theorised it. This does not, however, signal our arrival at an epistemological ‘proper place’, where, Adorno writes, ‘the relationship of subject and object would lie in a peace achieved between human beings as well as between them and their other . . . [a] state of diferentiation without domination, with the diferentiated participating in each other’.119 Instead, it signals a subject-object relationship more like the one described in Vilém Flusser’s writing on our arrival into a ‘post-industrial’ age. Flusser argues that: human beings are subjects to objects which stand in their way. They must change the objects. This changing of the objects becomes increasingly better understood theoretically and can be improved in practice, that is until human beings no longer need to confront objects [arguably indicating a completion of the Earth’s Heideggerian ‘enframing’] while advancing toward the future: then humans can be replaced by apparatus. From this point on, humans are no longer true subjects.120 In the ‘demonstrative suicide’ or pseudo-sacrificial logic of extreme sports, there is a kind of enthusiastic hyper-conformity to the object position claimed for us in our new ‘world picture’, in which we have no useful relationship to the Earth and in which we are no longer true subjects but instead the object of technology, as though the ground were splitting open and swallowing us up whole. This dysphoric ‘world picture’ underlies much of the art and visual culture of our postinternet age, which is similarly marked by a gleeful, caustic, and fatalistic energy, exploring this turnaround of afairs whereby we have become technology’s object. Indeed, as we shall see, the postinternet art movement of the 2010s was attacked by critics for its ironic and fatalistic tonal register and supposed lack of critical consciousness, which was felt to represent a giving in or submission to the hegemony of the digital apparatus and the dysphoric ‘world picture’ it produces. Above all, this mode of artistic production was treated with scepticism because it appeared to do away with traditional avant-gardist notions of an autonomous artistic practice. However, the pervasive ironic and fatalistic tonal register of postinternet art and culture demands more nuanced scrutiny. Is there another way that we can understand this style? Does it hold open a space for progressive work with the tools and contents of digital culture? Does something have to be either fatalist/or critical, either ironic/or autonomous? Can it not be both/and? Can postinternet art be seen as another instance of a Baudrillardian ‘hyper-conformity’, a paradoxical participation that does not justify but destroys? Notes 1. Martin Heidegger, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’, Der Spiegel, vol. 30 (Mai 1976), 193–219, trans. William J. Richardson as ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, www.ditext.com/ heidegger/interview.html, accessed 20/07/14. 2. Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), p. 86.

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3. Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 65. 4. Frank Borman quoted in Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, p. 2. 5. ill Anders quoted in Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, p. 2. 6. Transcribed from the Apollo 8 Onboard Voice Transcription, as recorded on the Spacecraft Onboard Recorder, January 1969, made available at the NASA, Johnson Space Centre History Collection, www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/, accessed 01/05/2014. 7. Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, p. 22. 8. Robin Kelsey, ‘Reverse Shot: Earthrise and Blue Marble in the American Imagination’, in El Hadi Jazairy (ed.), Scales of the Earth: New Geographies 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 12. 9. Kelsey, ‘Reverse Shot: Earthrise and Blue Marble in the American Imagination’, p. 12. 10. See www.airspacemag.com/space/top-nasa-photos-of-all-time-9777715, accessed 19/01/16. 11. Richard Underwood quoted in Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, p. 93. 12. Edgar Cortright, Exploring Space with a Camera (Washington, DC: NASA, 1968), electronic copy available at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168/sp168.htm, accessed 01/07/14. 13. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ [1938], in The Question Concerning Technology, and other essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York; London: Harper Row, 1977), p. 137. 14. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 134. 15. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, pp. 134–137. 16. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 129. 17. Translator’s note, Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, pp. 117–131. 18. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 129. 19. Taken from a footnote in Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, www.ditext.com/heidegger/ interview.html, accessed 20/07/14. 20. Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 65. 21. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 146 (July–August 1984), http://newleftreview.org/I/146/fredric-jamesonpostmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism, accessed 19/01/16. 22. Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text, no. 9/10 (Spring–Summer 1984), p. 207. 23. See ‘National Space Science Data Centre, Multicolor Spin-Scan Cloudcover Camera’, NASA, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/experimentDisplay.do?id=1967-111A-01, accessed 05/06/14. 24. Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, p. 148. 25. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (Fall 1968), www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronicedition.php?iss=1010, accessed 07/08/14. 26. Heidegger, ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html. 27. Brand admits to taking this phrase from Leach, who is quoted extensively in his essay ‘We Are As Gods’, Whole Earth Catalog Access to Tools and Ideas, www.wholeearth.com/ issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods, accessed 07/08/14. 28. Leach quoted in Brand, ‘We Are As Gods’, Whole Earth Catalog Access to Tools and Ideas, www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods, accessed 07/08/14. 29. This was claimed by Baudrillard, writing as The French Group, in a letter delivered to the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1970, where professionals were gathered in order to respond to the theme ‘Environment by Design’ (the French delegation refused to take part, and the letter acted as a surrogate). See Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Environmental Witch-Hunt. Statement by The French Group. 1970’, in Reyner Banham (ed.), The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International Design Conference in Aspen (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 209. 30. Baudrillard, ‘The Environmental Witch-Hunt. Statement by the French Group. 1970’, p. 210. 31. See ‘Jef Bezos on “The Most Interesting Thing” He Observed in Space’, CBS News (July 2021), www.youtube.com/watch?v=nE7f-I16u5A&t=11s, accessed 21/07/21. 32. See Matt Reynolds, ‘Jef Bezos Wants to Fix Climate Change. He Can Start with Amazon’, Wired (February 2020), www.wired.co.uk/article/jef-bezos-climate-change-amazon, accessed 21/07/21. 33. Theodor Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985), p. 498.

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34. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed’, in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 53. 35. Rodchenko’s photographic technique was radical, Solomon-Godeau explains, because it ‘disclaimed all aesthetic intent and instead defined itself as instrumental in nurturing a new, revolutionary consciousness’. Rodchenko viewed this new photographic style as an ideal instrument for social progress and, moreover, as something that entirely disavowed the normal bourgeois categories of art. However, as the title of Solomon Godeau’s essay attests – ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed’ – this revolutionary vision was rapidly disarmed and assimilated aesthetically in Western Europe and the USA. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Armed Vision Disarmed’, in Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 53. 36. Herbert Molderings, ‘Urbanism and Technological Utopianism: Thoughts on the Photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Bauhaus’, in David Mellor (ed.), Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 90. 37. The saccharine phrase ‘The World is Beautiful’ was given to this series of photographs by the book’s publisher, Kurt Wolf. Renger-Patzsch’s original name for the work was more neutral in tone: Die Dinge (simply ‘Things’). Renger-Patzsch described his book as ‘an alphabet intended to demonstrate how pictorial problems can be solved by purely photographic means’. However, his publisher Wolf’s assumption of the sentimental moniker for the series of photographs is indicative of how the formal style was readily usurped for commercial purposes. See Ute Eskildsen, ‘Photography and the Neue Sachlichkeit Movement’, in David Mellor (ed.), Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p. 105. 38. Molderings, ‘Urbanism and Technological Utopianism: Thoughts on the Photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Bauhaus’, p. 91. 39. Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’ [1931], in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931– 1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 526. 40. This is an extract of a 1931 article written by the art historian Carl Linfert in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Linfert was one of few commentators in this period of history who was explicitly critical of the ‘new realist’ style of photography, which had overwhelmingly received a positive – or, in the words of Molderings, ‘euphoric’ – reception. See Linfert quoted in Molderings, ‘Urbanism and Technological Utopianism: Thoughts on the Photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Bauhaus’, p. 94. 41. Michael Collins, James Irwin, and Bill Anders are cited in Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, p. 99. 42. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), p. 3. 43. In a review of Polke’s 2014 retrospective, ‘Alibis’, at MoMA in The Brooklyn Rail, Terry R. Myers refers to the painterly approach of this particular work as ‘goofball’, and thus willfully naïve, irreverent, and careless. See Terry R. Myers, ‘He-Who-Must-Be-Named Is Sigmar Polke!’, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics, Culture (May 2014), www.brooklynrail.org/2014/05/artseen/he-who-must-be-named-is-sigmar-polke, accessed 06/06/14. 44. Bice Curiger, ‘Accelerated Attention’, in Margit Rowell (ed.), Sigmar Polke: Works on Paper 1963–1974 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 32. 45. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, http://newleftreview. org/I/146/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism, accessed 19/01/21. 46. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, http://newleftreview. org/I/146/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism, accessed 19/01/21. 47. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, http://newleftreview. org/I/146/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism, accessed 19/01/21. 48. See Horacio Silva, ‘Jef Bezos and the New Face of Male Vanity’, Town and Country Mag (April 2020), www.townandcountrymag.com/style/mens-fashion/a31915854/jef-bezos-malevanity-now/, accessed 22/07/21.

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49. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Parody and Appropriation in Picabia, Pop, and Polke’ [1982], in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2003), p. 361. 50. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ [1963], The New Atlantis, no. 18 (Fall 2007), www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-of-space-and-thestature-of-man, accessed 22/07/21. 51. Arendt, ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’, www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/ the-conquest-of-space-and-the-stature-of-man, accessed 22/07/21. 52. Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet for Ever’, The Guardian (April 2016), www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generationanthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever, accessed 19/05/16. 53. See Jeremy Hance, ‘How Humans Are Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction’, The Guardian (October 2015), www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/oct/20/thefour-horsemen-of-the-sixth-mass-extinction, accessed 19/05/16. 54. Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, P.K. Haf, Christian Schwägerl, Anthony D. Barnosky and Erle C. Ellis, ‘The Anthropocene Biosphere’, The Anthropocene Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (December 2015), p. 18. 55. Archibald MacLeish, ‘The Image of Victory’ [1944], quoted in Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 246. 56. Google’s Street View has been vigorously criticised as an invasion of privacy and has been perceived by some national ofcials and various special interest groups as posing a threat to national security, for instance, through providing confidential visual and geographical information about military installations. For example, in 2008, an Indian lawyer filed a suit against Google Earth, claiming that it was used to plan a terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed 171 people. See Rahul Bedi, ‘Mumbai Attacks: Indian Suit against Google Earth over Image Use By Terrorists’, The Telegraph (December 2008), www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/asia/india/3691723/Mumbai-attacks-Indian-suit-against-Google-Earth-overimage-use-by-terrorists.html, accessed 17/06/14; in 2007 it was reported that Palestinian militants were using Google Earth to target their attacks in Israel. Indeed, members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, admit to using the internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes. See Clancy Chassay, ‘Google Earth Used to Target Israel’, The Guardian (October 2007), www.theguardian.com/ technology/2007/oct/25/google.israel, accessed 17/06/14; and The Bling Ring – a group of seven teenagers who robbed celebrity homes in the Hollywood Hills from 2008 to 2009 – famously used Twitter to track when their targets were away and Google Earth to plan their way into the target’s properties and subsequent escape route. A member of The Bling Ring, Larry Getlin, writes that ‘preparing for their crimes was simple. A Web site called Celebrity Address Aerial provided addresses, and Google Earth ofered maps and pictures of celebrity homes, helping them determine easy points of entry’. Using this process, The Bling Ring is reported to have stolen goods worth more than $3m. See Larry Gatlin, ‘We’ll Always Nab Paris’, New York Post (May 2013), http://nypost.com/2013/05/19/well-always-nab-paris/, accessed 17/06/14. 57. Google last published download statistics regarding Google Earth in October 2011, when it celebrated reaching more than one billion registered downloads. The company announced its achievement in histrionic fashion: ‘How large is one billion? One billion hours ago, modern humans were living in the Stone Age. One billion minutes ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing. If you travelled from Earth to the Moon three times, your journey would measure one billion meters . . . Today, we’ve reached our own one billion mark’. See http://googleblog. blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/google-earth-downloaded-more-than-one.html, accessed 16/06/14. 58. Sarah Lacy, ‘Meet The CIA’s Venture Capitalist’, Bloomberg Business Week (May 2005), www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-05-09/meet-the-cias-venture-capitalist, accessed 23/06/14. 59. Kevin Maney, ‘Tiny Tech Company Awes Viewers’, USA Today (March 2003), http://usatoday30. usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-03-20-earthviewer_x.htm, accessed 23/06/14. 60. Mark Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, in El Hadi Jazairy (ed.), Scales of the Earth: New Geographies 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 167.

A Dysphoric World Picture 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

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Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, p. 167. Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 128. Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, p. 167. For example, see Kelsey, ‘Reverse Shot: Earthrise and Blue Marble in the American Imagination’, pp. 10–16. Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, p. 167. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, p. 264. The phrases ‘frictionless capitalism’ and ‘great planetary marketplace’ are attributed to Bill Gates, the ‘chairman of the most successful software provider of the 1990s’. Quoted in Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, pp. 265. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London; New York: Verso, 1997), pp. 17–20. Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, p. 164. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 20. Mitterand is quoted: ‘Cities must adapt to their citizens and not the other way around. Let’s open up the city to the physically challenged. I ask that an overall policy on the disabled be a firm axis of Europe as a social institution’. See Virilio, Open Sky, p. 21. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies [1983], trans. Philie Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 47. ‘These people are ofcially defined as hikikomori, according to diagnostic criteria such as: 1) spending most of the day and nearly every day confined to home; 2) marked and persistent avoidance of social situations; 3) symptoms interfering significantly with the person’s normal routine, occupational (or academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships; 4) perceiving the withdrawal as ego-syntonic; 5) having a duration of at least six months; and 6) having no other mental disorder that accounts for the social withdrawal and avoidance. According to the estimates of the Ministry of Health of Japan, an additional 1.55 million people are on the verge of becoming hikikomori’. Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass-Murder and Suicide (London; New York: Verso, 2015), pp. 159–160. Hito Steyerl, ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment’, in Maria Hlavajova, Simon Sheikh and Jill Winder (eds.), On Horizons: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: BAK and Post Editions, 2011), p. 183. Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, p. 66. Dorrian, ‘On Google Earth’, p. 167. Whilst the popularity of ‘mapvertising’ or ‘astrovertisements’ soared following the public release of Google Earth, it is not a contemporary innovation. In 1965, a ‘Readymix’ logo was carved into the Australian desert, covering an area one-mile wide by two-miles across. Nevertheless, the popularity of this form of marketing has certainly increased with Google Earth. See Alex Turnbull, ‘The Real First and Largest Logo Visible From Space’, Google Sightseeing (November 2006), http://googlesightseeing.com/2006/11/the-real-first-largest-logo-visiblefrom-space/, accessed 20/08/14. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 272–273. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, pp. 272–273. Emily Apter, ‘Planetary Dysphoria’, Third Text, vol. 27, no. 1 (2013), p. 139. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917], trans. Joan Riviere, in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1995), p. 244. Apter, ‘Planetary Dysphoria’, pp. 134–140 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ [1852], Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm, accessed 26/08/14. The stratosphere is the second major layer of the Earth’s atmosphere and extends to a height of around 30 miles. It is particularly appropriate for a filmed stunt because it has ‘very stable atmospheric conditions and is almost completely free of clouds or other forms of weather’. See www.weather-climate.org.uk/02.php, accessed 26/01/16. BASE is an acronym standing for four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: building, antenna, span, and Earth (clif). The late BASE jumper Ueli Gegenschatz has

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86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108.

A Dysphoric World Picture described it as ‘the ultimate feeling of being in free fall’. See Ueli Gegenschatz, ‘Extreme Wingsuit Flying’, TED (February 2009), www.ted.com/talks/ueli_gegenschatz_extreme_ wingsuit_jumping, accessed 24/06/14. ‘Baumgartner’s Records Ratified by FAI!’, Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (February 2013), www.fai.org/records/news-of-records/37017-baumgartners-records-ratified-by-fai, accessed 23/06/14. Dietrich Mateschitz quoted in [uncredited author] ‘Selling Energy’, The Economist (May 2002), www.economist.com/node/1120373, accessed 27/01/16. ‘Selling Energy’, www.economist.com/node/1120373, accessed 27/01/16. Anita Li, ‘Final Numbers Are In: Space Jump Breaks YouTube Record’, Mashable (October 2012), http://mashable.com/2012/10/15/space-jump-youtube-record/, accessed 23/06/14. Ben Sturner quoted in Darren Heitner, ‘Red Bull Stratos Worth Tens of Millions of Dollars in Global Exposure for the Red Bull Brand’, Forbes (October 2012), www.forbes.com/sites/ darrenheitner/2012/10/15/red-bull-stratos-worth-tens-of-millions-of-dollars-in-global-exposurefor-the-red-bull-brand/, accessed 20/08/14. Gilles Défourneaux quoted in Virilio, Open Sky, p. 29. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 30. Virilio, Open Sky, pp. 30–31. Jean Baudrillard, America [1986], trans. Chris Turner (London; New York: Verso, 1988), 20–21. Transcribed from Red Bull – Human Flight 3D Movie [trailer] (March 2010), www.youtube. com/watch?v=HJOqnpHxDEQ, accessed 24/06/14. Baudrillard, America, p. 21. See Tim Mutrie, ‘Statement from JT Holmes’, ESPN X Games (June 2009), http://xgames. espn.go.com/skiing/article/4021669/statement-jt-holmes, accessed 24/06/14. Stefan Hohler, ‘Ueli Gegenschatz ist tot’, Tages Anzeiger (November 2009), www.tagesanzeiger. ch/panorama/leute/Ueli-Gegenschatz-ist-tot/story/28637980, accessed 24/06/14. Norbert Bolz transcribed from ‘The Dark Side of Red Bull – The Perils of Extreme Sport’, Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öfentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (August 2013), www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4cNIvzDSr8, accessed 24/06/14. ‘Epiphylogenetic’ is a term used by Bernard Stiegler to discuss the process by which the structures, systems, and apparatuses of society (such as language, religion, family structure, etc.) are perpetuated and passed on between generations. He writes that ‘[t]hese arrangements are supported by . . . epiphylogenetic strata or tertiary retentions. That is to say, the concretions of knowledge and abilities in objects and devices passed on as things belonging to the human world’. He cites the ‘builder’s shovel or a pitchfork’ as an example; they ‘have no mnemonic function, but they nevertheless bear the memory of gestures and functions’. Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, Vol 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Wiley, 2014), p. 7. Georges Bataille, ‘The Practice of Joy Before Death’ in Allan Stoekl (ed.), Visions of Excess Selected Writings; 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 237. This is summarised by Sean P. Connelly, ‘Georges Bataille, Gender, and Sacrificial Excess’, The Comparatist, vol. 38 (October 2014), pp. 108–109. Bataille, ‘The Practice of Joy Before Death’, p. 237. Richard Feynman, ‘Appendix F – Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle’, Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (1986), http:// science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Aendix-F.txt, accessed 25/06/14. Roxanne Lapidus, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), no pagination. Michel Serres in Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 160. Lapidus in Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, no pagination. Serres in Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, p. 138.

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109. Bataille, ‘The Practice of Joy Before Death’, p. 236. 110. I take this phrase ‘extreme work’ from an article in the Harvard Business Review, which refers to the commonplace idea of an ‘all-consuming career’ in the contemporary corporate world. See Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce, ‘Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek’, Harvard Business Review (December 2006), https://hbr.org/2006/12/ extreme-jobs-the-dangerous-allure-of-the-70-hour-workweek, accessed 28/01/16. 111. Sharon Bailey, ‘Energy Drinks Continue to Thrive despite Controversies’, Market Realist (June 2015), http://marketrealist.com/2015/06/energy-drinks-continue-thrive-despite-controversies/, accessed 28/01/16. 112. Hewlett and Luce, ‘Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek’, https:// hbr.org/2006/12/extreme-jobs-the-dangerous-allure-of-the-70-hour-workweek, accessed 28/01/16. 113. Baudrillard, America, p. 20. 114. Theodor Adorno, ‘Free Time’ [1977], trans. Gordon Finlayson and Nicholas Walker, in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 195. 115. See ‘Google executive Alan Eustace Jumps 130,000ft from Edge of Space’, The Guardian (October 2014), www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/oct/25/google-executive-alaneustace-jumps-space-felix-baumgartner-record-video, accessed 03/02/16. 116. This reference to hyper-conformity was made by Gary Genosko as part of a discussion of ‘pataphysics’ and its influence on Baudrillard’s thought. See Gary Genosko, ‘Pataphysics’, in Richard G. Smith (ed.), The Baudrillard Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 151. 117. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 209. 118. David Jenemann, ‘Stupider and Worse: The Cultural Politics of Stupidity’, Parallax, vol. 19, no. 3 (2013), p. 44. 119. Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object’, p. 247. 120. Vilém Flusser, ‘The Photograph as Post-Industrial Object: An Essay on the Ontological Standing of Photographs’, Leonardo, vol. 19, no. 4 (1986), p. 330.

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Hance, Jeremy, ‘How Humans Are Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction’, The Guardian (October 2015), www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/oct/20/the-four-horsemenof-the-sixth-mass-extinction, accessed 19/05/16. Heidegger, Martin, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’, Der Spiegel 30 (Mai, 1976), pp. 193–219, trans. William J. Richardson as ‘Only a God Can Save Us’, www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview. html, accessed 20/07/14. ———, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ [1938], in The Question Concerning Technology, and other essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York; London: Harper Row, 1977), pp. 115–154. Heitner, Darren, ‘Red Bull Stratos Worth Tens of Millions of Dollars in Global Exposure for the Red Bull Brand’, Forbes (October 2012), www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2012/10/15/redbull-stratos-worth-tens-of-millions-of-dollars-in-global-exposure-for-the-red-bull-brand/, accessed 20/08/14. Hohler, Stefan, ‘Ueli Gegenschatz ist tot’, Tages Anzeiger (November 2009), www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ panorama/leute/Ueli-Gegenschatz-ist-tot/story/28637980, accessed 24/06/14. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, I/146 (July–August 1984), http://newleftreview.org/I/146/fredric-jameson-postmodernism-orthe-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism, accessed 19/01/16. ———, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text, no. 9/10 (Spring–Summer 1984), pp. 178–209. Jazairy, El Hadi (ed.), Scales of the Earth: New Geographies 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Jenemann, David, ‘Stupider and Worse: The Cultural Politics of Stupidity’, Parallax, vol. 19, no. 3 (2013), pp. 34–49. Kelsey, Robin, ‘Reverse Shot: Earthrise and Blue Marble in the American Imagination’ in El Hadi Jazairy (ed.), Scales of the Earth: New Geographies 4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 10–16. Lacy, Sarah, ‘Meet The CIA’s Venture Capitalist’, Bloomberg Business Week (May 2005), www. businessweek.com/stories/2005-05-09/meet-the-cias-venture-capitalist, accessed 23/06/14. Li, Anita, ‘Final Numbers Are In: Space Jump Breaks YouTube Record’, Mashable (October 2012), http://mashable.com/2012/10/15/space-jump-youtube-record/, accessed 23/06/14. Luce, Carolyn Buck, ‘Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek’, Harvard Business Review (December 2006), https://hbr.org/2006/12/extreme-jobs-the-dangerous-allureof-the-70-hour-workweek, accessed 28/01/16. Macfarlane, Robert, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet for Ever’, The Guardian (April 2016), www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocenealtered-planet-for-ever, accessed 19/05/16. Maney, Kevin, ‘Tiny Tech Company Awes Viewers’, USA Today (March 2003), http://usatoday30. usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-03-20-earthviewer_x.htm, accessed 23/06/14. Marx, Karl, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ [1852], Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm, accessed 26/08/14. Molderings, Herbert, ‘Urbanism and Technological Utopianism: Thoughts on the Photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the Bauhaus’ in David Mellor (ed.), Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), pp. 87–94. Mutrie, Tim, ‘Statement from JT Holmes’, ESPN X Games (June 2009), http://xgames.espn. go.com/skiing/article/4021669/statement-jt-holmes, accessed 24/06/14. Myers, Terry R., ‘He-Who-Must-Be-Named Is Sigmar Polke!’, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics, Culture (May 2014), www.brooklynrail.org/2014/05/artseen/he-who-mustbe-named-is-sigmar-polke, accessed 06/06/14. Poole, Robert, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Dangerous Luxuries and Eloquent Vulgarities

This chapter zooms in on our dysphoric image of the Earth from space and focuses on the postinternet art movement discussed summarily in this book’s introduction. This was an approach to art making in the 2010s that was both produced by and expressive of our fully encircled, internet-mediated Earth, which appears to have swallowed us up whole, like it did Felix Baumgartner in Red Bull’s Stratos stunt. Postinternet art is an approach to art making that does not reject or withdraw from the internet or romanticise it as some sort of portal to cyber-utopia, but instead explores it as a material condition of contemporary existence to which there is no plausible alternative (TINA). We might describe this as postinternet arts’ avant-garde gambit; to not romanticise or reject the internet, but instead to respond to its colossal impact on our lives by embodying it, mimicking, reiterating, and exaggerating its generic forms and efects. The purpose is to wrench some form of critical distance from a digital apparatus that appears to have destroyed critical distance (a destruction evident in the contrast between the Archimedean perspective of NASA’s Blue Marble and the dizzying viewpoint of Red Bull’s Stratos) because it so thoroughly mediates our experience of and way of being in the world. However, postinternet arts’ particular avant-garde gambit was also the cause of its most trenchant critiques. These strategies of mimicry and reiteration – which will be explored and analysed in this chapter – ostensibly lacked the requisite criticality or oppositional spirit of a new or supposedly avant-garde artistic movement, which they arguably purported to represent. As a result, postinternet art was subject to widespread condemnation by numerous art critics for its refusal of the oppositional critical position typically associated with the artistic avant-garde. One particularly memorable example of this condemnation is Morgan Quaintance’s essay ‘Right Shift’, published in Art Monthly in June 2015. This essay, which came with the subtitle ‘. . . on the end of post-internet art’, described a scene of art making that ‘didn’t dismantle anything’, but ‘just revelled in, fed of and profited from the exploitative logics of late capitalism’. Quaintance observed a ‘politically ambiguous manner of address’ in postinternet arts’ embodiment of online forms and aesthetics, which produced a ‘specific brand of weak, indirect criticality, where criticism of late capitalism should be inferred from an artist’s participation in, mimesis, or re-presentation of, its strategies and forms of alienation, objectification and commodification’.1 This negative assessment of postinternet art culminated in 2016 with the 9th Berlin Biennale (BB9), which was titled The Present in Drag and curated by the DIS collective. BB9 was described dismissively in a review published by The Guardian as a ‘LOL biennale’, which efaced ‘any distinction between creation and complicity’.2 As is well known, negative press tends to spread more widely and go viral: postinternet art, the acme of which was BB9, subsequently came to be seen as a bad joke, rendering the phrase DOI: 10.4324/9781003256168-3

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‘embarrassing to say out loud’, and revealing the persistence of anxieties in the art world over the complicity of art with its own commodification and larger systems of reification in the late capitalist world.3 However, this chapter will claim that this assessment of postinternet art was too quick to apply traditional either/or categories (i.e., criticality or complicity) to evaluate the gambits of contemporary art making that, in part, reflect on the collapse of such categories in a postinternet world. Instead, we can look at its strategies of mimicry and reiteration as a purposeful aesthetic and conceptual language, attentive to the social effects and impacts of the internet, rather than a sign of fatalism or simple complicity with the machinations of the digital stage of late capitalism. Looking back, postinternet art can be seen as a genuine attempt to reshape our critical vocabulary and critical imaginations within and for a fully internet-mediated world. This chapter will reconsider what I referred to as its avant-garde gambit within a longer art historical context, specifically with earlier forms of artmaking that engage critically with the commodity object. It will also explore its relationship to popular imaginings of the internet, which persistently reproduce various modes of cyber-utopianism as a form of marketing or digital boosterism. The phrase postinternet first came into the art world vernacular in the late 2000s/ early 2010s, primarily in a few articles written by the USA-based artist Marisa Olson, including ‘Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture’ (2008), ‘POSTINTERNET: Art After the Internet’ (2011), and in an interview with Régine Debatty, published in 2008 on a blog titled We Make Money Not Art. In these articles, Olson reflects on how her internet-based practice and that of her peers difered from earlier forms of internet art, such as net.art, which was solely made on and experienced through internet web browsers. The diference is that postinternet art is the result, product, outcome, or yield of being online, but it is not necessarily something that needs to be experienced on the internet through a browser. It is a broad descriptor that responds to an expanded understanding of the internet as something that has modulated experience, a dispersed presence in our lives, no longer just a modem, hard drive, and monitor. In this sense, postinternet art reflected new hybridised understandings of the on-and-ofine world, which resulted in an art making that can no longer be distinguished as strictly computer- or internet-based, but rather can be identified as any type of art that is in some way influenced by the internet and digital media. It follows that postinternet art recognised the internet as an a priori condition of experience, that is, in the critic Gene McHugh’s words, ‘less a novelty and more a banality’.4 Within the postinternet state of mind, the internet is not a radical medium or revolutionary tool; it is an everyday and quite prosaic part of life. Olson describes coming up with the phrase as an attempt to define her (and her peers) new working processes as an artist in this world: What I make is less art ‘on’ the internet than it is art ‘after’ the internet. It’s the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading. I create performances, songs, photos, texts, or installations directly derived from materials on the Internet or my activity there.5 So, Olson used the phrase postinternet to indicate how she would make art after surfing the internet. She explains, ‘I meant to refer to art that couldn’t or wouldn’t exist before the internet and was in the “style” of or “under the influence” of the internet in some way’.6 This is suggestive of the new cultural imaginary of the internet analysed in this book’s introduction: not a tool, but a general presence, which underlies and mediates any and all forms of activity. ‘We are now in a postinternet era’, Olson claims: ‘Everything is

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always-already postinternet’. In this respect, the phrase acknowledges our shifted cultural imaginary, in which the internet has become a disappearing presence in life, so ubiquitous that it is invisible – more ambient than material. In another essay titled ‘The Image Object Post-Internet’ (2010), the artist and writer Artie Vierkant provides a further definition, explaining that postinternet is not only the yield of being online, surfing, and downloading, but is also deeply influenced by the new forms of labour and sociability associated with online experience in the late 2000s/early 2010s. It is ‘inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials’.8 In this sense, we are talking about a ‘digital native’ movement, intrinsically associated with the experience of growing up, working, and living on the internet. Indeed, the legal scholars John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s definition of ‘digital natives’ maps usefully onto the working practices of postinternet artists: Digital Natives live much of their lives online, without distinguishing between the online and the ofine. Instead of thinking of their digital identity and their real-space identity as separate things, they just have an identity (with representations in two, or three, or more diferent spaces). They are joined by a set of common practices, including the amount of time they spend using digital technologies, their tendency to multitask, their tendency to express themselves and relate to one another in ways mediated by digital technologies, and their pattern of using the technologies to access and use information and create new knowledge and art forms.9 In the 2010s, the topic of postinternet art achieved a great deal of attention in the art world, mostly on the basis of a number of large-scale group exhibitions (referenced in this book’s Introduction), which gathered together contemporary artists under this label. This heightened visibility saw much scrutiny to the phrase Olson initially coined as a simple descriptor for indicating the influence of the internet on her working artistic practice. In an article published in Art in America in 2014, Brian Droitcour criticised the term as inadequately vague, avoiding ‘anything resembling a formal description of the work it refers to, alluding only to a hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the context of digital technology’.10 Furthermore, Olson’s provocative idea that ‘everything is always-already postinternet’, unwittingly put forward a universalising worldview. This is despite the fact of it being a product of the privileged environs of the Global North, where ‘the internet is the same as running water’, as artist Jordan Wolfson once claimed.11 This problematic assumption of universality is critiqued in the aforementioned article by Quaintance, who sees postinternet art as simply the product of ‘a culturally and economically homogeneous community that is predominantly western, middle, and upper-middle class’.12 He continues to suggest, acerbically, that the glue holding together this loosely defined movement is the overarching socio-economic and psychological condition of privilege, which can be inferred because to make post-internet art a computer, multimedia tools, an expensive art education and the leisure time to feel a sense of ennui and anxiety about it all are needed.13 In this understanding, postinternet arts’ assumption of universality risks perpetuating (via ignorance) ‘digital divides’; namely unequal access to digital technologies and

60 Dangerous Luxuries and Eloquent Vulgarities infrastructure in the Global South, which might not have easy access to the internet (or running water). Elsewhere, some commentators have critiqued postinternet art as a simple afrmation of the capitalistic transformation of the online landscape of the 2010s and the larger economic system it supports, which encourages us to view the internet as the same as running water and not as something that has produced a ‘digital divide’ between the Global North and parts of the world whose natural resources are, ironically, indispensable to the manufacture of digital technological devices, such as the mining of lithium in Bolivia or coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). For instance, the DRC is the world’s largest coltan producer, and our reliance on this mineral has produced significant ‘violation of environmental laws, child labour on mining sites’, Oluwole Ojewale explains, ‘and complicity of mining companies in the abuses of populations at risk’.14 In its seeming afrmation of a worldview where ‘everything is always-already postinternet’, the art theorist Kerstin Stakemeier has suggested that postinternet art risks siding ‘with the inorganic, reified life under capitalism’.15 The negative critique reached its apotheosis in the critical reception of the BB9 in 2016. This iteration of the biennale was curated by DIS, a collective of artists and other cultural producers founded in New York in 2010, which began and evolved from an online, interactive magazine that mimicked popular art, fashion, and lifestyle publications (i.e., Vice, Dazed, and i-D), combining this with the emerging cultural sensibilities of the late 2000s/ early 2010s internet, which came with easy access to information, images, and media production tools. DIS was also associated with providing a platform for the work of postinternet artists, whose work was often featured and promoted in the online magazine. For instance, on DISimages, a fully functioning stock image library that invited artists to create new forms of stock photography that reproduced the generic norms of companies such as Getty Images (including the same watermarked font), whilst also pushing these norms in absurd directions.16 The result is a database of images that defy easy conceptualisation, combining a neutral, corporate aesthetic with niche content and esoteric mise-en-scène that appear organised by the flattened, hyperlinked logic of online databases. BB9 gathered a number of artists afliated with the larger postinternet art scene under the theme The Present in Drag. This exhibition set out to provide an accurate crystallisation of the aesthetic strategies of these ‘digital native’ artist practitioners. This is summed up in the Biennale’s press release, which functions as a sort of manifesto for postinternet art based around embodying, making visual and visceral, the mediations and machinations of the internet on day-to-day experience. Our proposition is simple: Instead of holding talks on anxiety, let’s make people anxious. Rather than organizing symposia on privacy, let’s jeopardize it. Let’s give a body to the problems of the present where they occur so as to make them a matter of agency – not spectatorship instead of unmasking the present, this is The Present in Drag.17 In this statement, DIS appears to propose postinternet art as a new form of critical art making. This proposal ofers a rejection of traditional models of criticality, often based around the critic/artist attempting to correct the viewers’ false consciousness by demystifying an object of critique from a (hypothetical) position of cultural separation.18 DIS’s statement rather appears sympathetic to the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s reflections on the problems of ‘critical art’ in Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009), which ‘in its most general expression . . . is a type of art that sets out to build awareness of the mechanisms of domination to turn the spectator into a conscious agent of world transformation’.19

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Rancière takes issue with this because, he writes, ‘the exploited rarely require an explanation of the laws of exploitation’.20 Whilst DIS expresses a desire to make the ‘problems of the present’ a ‘matter of agency’, as with Rancière’s pejorative assessment of ‘critical art’, they take a diferent approach. DIS describes a ‘critical art’ that inhabits, reiterates, and wears the mask of its object of critique as a sort of performance. The title, The Present in Drag, might be taken as a direct reference to Drag culture, which provides DIS with an alternative model of ‘critical art’. In Drag competitions, such as those in the New York ballroom scene represented in Jennie Livingston’s seminal documentary Paris is Burning (1990), Queer performers are judged and appraised according to the ‘realness’ of their adoption of hegemonic gendered norms. The outcome of Drag’s often funny, transgressive, and sardonic performances is a destabilisation of the fixity of its object of critique: gender. Discussing this, Judith Butler has described Drag as ‘subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality’.21 DIS appears to adapt this strategy as a rationale for the postinternet arts’ desire to be open to the internet but also resilient to its physics.22 However, just as Drag was critiqued for its perceived ‘over-identification’ with an oppressive status-quo (most notably from a critical race studies perspective, by bel hooks in her essay ‘Is Paris Burning?’ (1992)), DIS’s curation of the BB9 received significant critique for its ‘over-identification’ with the corporatised landscape of the 2010s internet, which was increasingly modelling the world in its image.23 For instance, a review in Hyperallergic suggested that DIS had turned ‘one of Europe’s most socially engaged and politicised biennales’ into what looked like an exercise in branding opportunities and product placement’.24 This point of view dominated the critical reception of BB9. For instance, James Farago condemned DIS for revelling ‘in sponsorships and branding opportunities’. The result was ‘an ultra-slick, ultra-sarcastic biennial, replete with ads, avatars, custom security guard uniforms, [and] a manic social media presence’.25 In a review vividly titled ‘A Vast Obsolescent Pageant of Irrelevance’, Dorian Batcyka described the show as ‘a bricolage of ahistorical rubbish . . . and crass co-branding opportunities’.26 Ahmet Öğüt observed a glorified sarcastic nihilism that dominates any form of sincerity, humor, irony, emotion, intellectual discourse, critique, or political and social struggle over how modes of art production can be detonators for counterculture and counterfinance [and instead] stayed complicit with neoliberalism.27 Tess Edmonson suggests that the exhibition, ‘populated with flat images, many of which are uniform large-scale lightboxes resembling advertising billboards’, performs ‘its own complicity [with] networks of capital and power’.28 The implication was that The Present in Drag, and by extension, the wider scene of postinternet art, represented the impoverishment of ‘critical art’ and merely proposed a cynical glorification of contemporary arts’ relationship to capitalist power. However, these critics failed to deal with the performative aspect of BB9, its overt reference to a model of critique adapted from Drag culture. The Present in Drag pulled together artworks that appeared to inhabit and reiterate some of the generic forms of the larger digital capitalist economy: evoking, for instance, the precarious gig economy (Calla Henkel & Max Pitegof’s Untitled (Interiors), 2016), corporate infographic presentations (Katja Novitskova’s Connectome Growth Potential, 2016), the amalgamation of digital technology branding and mysticism (Timor Si-Qin’s A Reflected Landscape,

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2016), exaggerated product placement (fashion designer Telfar Clemens’s uniforms for staf), and algorithmic recommendations (Alexandra Pirici’s Signals, 2016). In doing so, it ofered a lens or new frame within which to experience these generic forms. The image used to illustrate the exhibition catalogue is instructive: Babak Radboy’s Not in the Berlin Biennale (2016). This photograph, whose neutral palette and glossy tonality call to mind corporate stock photos, shows a person, head on hands, wide smile fixed on face, gazing through an overfilling glass of water beneath a dripping tap (Figure 2.1). The corporate aesthetic of the image is disrupted by the trembling water, which distorts the gaze of the person, pulling the eye into an uncanny smear. This, I think, is assumed to be the intended efect of the exhibition writ large: a window or strange trembling lens onto the postinternet world, through which the familiar is made to appear strange, absurd, and comical. However, because of the ambiguity of these artistic strategies, which refused traditional critical distance from their object of critique, pejorative labels of ‘complicity’ and ‘conformity’ abound in the Biennale’s critical reception. The works on display were roundly condemned for appearing to side with the machine, or with what Theodor Adorno has in another context called the ‘hardened and alienated’ aspects of everyday life – the inorganic and reified life under capitalism.29 These critiques seem to rely on the possibility of a subject position for the artist that exists outside this alienated lifeworld, outside our contemporary ‘world picture’. Indeed, we might argue that the increased mediation of life by advanced digital technologies, in which, following Olson, ‘everything is alwaysalready postinternet’, necessitates a reappraisal of the binary categories of reception that still dominate art criticism (i.e., human/machine, virtual/real, critical/complicit, subject/ commodity, inside/outside). It is no longer possible to conceive of a critical position outside the object of critique. This position, itself, also presents problems, monumentalising dualist categories in a way that echoes a romantic idealisation of the ‘self’ and the

Figure 2.1 Babak Radboy, Not in the Berlin Biennale, 2016. Source: Courtesy of DIS.

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‘artist’ as a figure unmediated by its socio-technical surroundings. As Patricia de Vries insists, ‘these classic dualist categories with which we navigate the world are not neutral; they are historical implements of hierarchy and oppression’.30 This claim is borne out in another context: that of critical race studies, which demands a new critical vocabulary and reimagining of radical struggle and critical practice that does not fall into the trap of dualistic oppositions. In a more balanced and sympathetic appraisal of BB9, Hannah Black describes its refusal of traditional forms of critique as an appropriate response to ‘a world dominated visually, ethically, and ontologically by capital, in which long-standing forms of struggle . . . seem like nostalgic curiosities or reenactments, ultimately doomed to fail’. From this perspective, it would be disingenuous for DIS ‘to valorize the kind of social-practice or research-based art that might have reassured critics’.31 She draws on the Black cultural theorist Fred Moten to propose a more nuanced reflection on modes of cultural practice that don’t overtly reject the commodity form. Moten has critiqued the tendency of modernist critical thinking to base itself on the negation of the commodity object (certainly, this modernist tendency to privilege the negation of the commodity object undergirded the dominant critique of DIS’s The Present in Drag, which did not play by those rules). For Moten, this discourse conceals a structural prejudice that is insensitive to the commodification of Black bodies under capitalism. In a 2015 interview, he argues: I’m not very moralistic when it comes to commodification. I don’t think commodities are dirty. I mean I think commodities are important and useful and necessary. They’re eloquent vulgarities. They’re these fundamentally important instruments that help to structure our social life. And also – insofar as I’m the descendent of commodities and bear the trace of that commodification in my own flesh – I don’t see that I have any standpoint from which to be moralistic about what it means to be a commodity or to be in relation, so to speak, to, or even through, commodities . . . I’m not interested in critique at that level anyway.32 For Moten, it is important to think of political struggle and critique not in opposition to the commodity object, but rather through it. Whilst I don’t want to establish a false equivalence between Moten’s words on historic Black struggle and the postinternet art movement (whose label purports to universality, but is essentially a product of the Global North), they do provide a useful counterpoint to the discourse on the negation of the commodity object that still undergirds much contemporary art criticism and results in a historically inattentive mode of art writing. Within the postinternet world, we are all made into commodity object, engulfed by processes of appropriation and surveillance, each of us a mine of data, ready to be harvested. This echoes Deleuze’s words in the ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, where he suggests that the individual has become a ‘dividual’, no longer a self-contained entity, but open, permeable, and made available to the imperatives of marketing and surveillance.33 In this respect, there is a total rule of the commodity in the postinternet world. It does not make sense to base critical thinking and critical practice on its negation. The negation of the commodity object is simply wishful thinking. Instead, it makes sense to follow Moten, not ‘be moralistic’, and instead conceive of the commodity form as an ‘eloquent vulgarity’. This is how I want to reconsider postinternet arts’ peformative mimicry or reiteration of what Quaintance referred to as the ‘strategies and forms of alienation, objectification and commodification’ in the digital world: an ‘eloquent vulgarity’, which helps us to

64 Dangerous Luxuries and Eloquent Vulgarities confront the material impact of the digital on our lives as well as putting forward articulations which make vivid and afective accounts of these conditions. This is a strategy that is in broad alliance with the media philosopher Miriam Rasch, who has advised for an updated model of critical thinking in our digital environment that ‘doesn’t just turn away . . . but confronts the post-digital condition head on, sucks it in, wallows around in it, and still thrives’.34 In the rest of this chapter, I want to contextualise these tendencies as strategic responses to the social efects of the internet, which confront it head-on, wallow around, and yet still thrive, retaining some level of critical diferentiation or resilience. I will also consider these strategies within a longer art historical context of mimicry including Dada, and the divisive Commodity Sculpture stylistic trend of the 1980s. In the process, I will present new readings of artworks, including those by Jordan Wolfson and Petra Cortright. Neither artist was featured in BB9, but both employ the avant-garde gambits described in The Present in Drag’s press release and have in one way or another been subsumed by critics into the bad object of postinternet art. Mimicry of the Hardened and Alienated There is a critical distinction sometimes drawn between ‘mimesis’ and ‘mimicry’ as cultural forms based around repetition or reiteration. Mimesis can be considered a repetition that produces diferences. Whereas mimicry is flat, the same thing is done again without comment or additional afect. Mimicry gives itself over and ultimately subsumes itself into the mimicked object. Mimesis repeats or copies the object, but in a way that produces something else, something new – maybe a laugh, or at least a new way of looking at the object. The related categories of ‘mimesis’ and ‘mimicry’ can be helpfully mapped onto Fredric Jameson’s distinction between ‘parody’ and ‘pastiche’. In his essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, Jameson advises that both ‘pastiche and parody involve the imitation or . . . mimicry of other styles’. Whilst ‘parody capitalizes on the uniqueness of these styles and seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an imitation which mocks the original . . . pastiche, on the other hand, is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style . . . but it is a neutral practice of . . . mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter .  .  . Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor’.35 The diference produced by ‘mimesis’ is oftentimes humour, a satirical repetition that undermines and causes us to view the mimicked object diferently. Mimicry, however, is a pastiche; it is neutral, ofers no satire, and, for this reason, converges with the mimicked object. From this point of view, it has no critical potential. This negative imagining of the mimetic impulse can be traced back to the work of the French sociologist Roger Caillois, particularly his 1935 essay ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia’. In this essay on the function of mimicry in the animal kingdom, Caillois presents a view of mimicry as a ‘dangerous luxury’.36 Mimicry is a ‘dangerous luxury’ for the animal life observed by Caillois because it does not necessarily function as a defensive mechanism to keep the animal from falling prey to other animals. Furthermore, for Caillois, it can also work to open up new and unforeseen ways of falling prey, which would have been avoided without the mimetic impulse. For instance, Caillois discusses the ‘geometer-moth caterpillars’, which ‘simulate shoots of shrubbery so well that gardeners cut them with their pruning shears’.37 And the Phyllia

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moth, which mimics leaves to the extent that other moths ‘browse among themselves, taking each other for real leaves . . . leading to mutual homophagy, the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism’.38 So, rather than a viable defence mechanism, Caillois suggests that the mimetic impulse represents ‘a real temptation by space’. This means that mimicry reveals an assimilation to space, a yielding of personality and life, where ‘life takes a step backwards’, suggesting that alongside the instinct of self-preservation in the animal kingdom, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling.39 This negative association of mimicry in the animal kingdom with indistinguishability, renunciation, reduced existence, and depersonalisation, has in some way permeated the critical reception of cultural forms that make use of repetition and reiteration as artistic strategies. These forms are imagined in similarly negative terms. For instance, Stakemeier makes an explicit connection between this type of insectoid mimicry and the aforementioned ‘urge toward indistinguishability’ in postinternet art, which ‘foregrounds its digitality’ to the extent that ‘it blends into its surroundings’.40 In this understanding, postinternet art is imagined as a scene in which life takes a step backwards. In the modern and contemporary art world, which Stakemeier recognises ‘has always been characterized by its aesthetic simultaneity with general commodity culture’, salvation can be found in forms of cultural practice whose ‘desire for reaching such a concurrence with everyday culture was inhibited by the genuinely artistic media of their work’.41 In this respect, the genuinely artistic media of their work puts this form of practice in alliance with a mimesis that produces a diference – a parody rather than a neutral and submissive pastiche of the mimicked object. Whilst not citing any particular examples, Stakemeier is most likely referring to certain strands of the historic avantgarde, which famously sought to ‘collapse art into life’ and in the process jolted or innervated both spheres.42 These artists, for example, the Dadaists, did so by mimicking the world around them in a way that was designed to produce a sense of shock in their viewers. They employed techniques like bricolage, which incorporated familiar bits and pieces from the everyday world, into dissociative collages in which ‘various fragments and materials of experience are laid bare, revealed as fissures, voids, and unresolvable contradictions’.43 The Dadaist Georg Grosz claimed to have invented the technique with John Heartfield in 1916 with a cardboard-supported collage of scattershot elements: ‘On a piece of cardboard’, he writes, ‘we pasted a mishmash of advertisements for hernia belts, student song books and dog food, labels from schnapps and wine bottles, and photographs from picture papers, cut up at will’.44 This tendency toward a fragmented and estranged re-representation of the everyday world in Dada’s genuinely artistic media has been theorised, for instance, by Brigid Doherty, as producing disruptions to the status quo, enabling critical consciousness via its ‘dismembered embodiments of contemporary life’.45 In contrast, we can consider the so-called Commodity Sculpture of the 1980s as a form of artistic practice that similarly engaged in the appropriation and re-representation of the everyday world but in a supposedly non-dissociative and non-estranging manner. Unlike the Dadaists, ‘Commodity Sculpture’ was, at first glance, an art of mimicry, a pastiche devoid of humour. This movement received significant critique for this reason: that,

66 Dangerous Luxuries and Eloquent Vulgarities unlike the Dadaists, Commodity Sculpture reached a sort of concurrence with everyday culture without inhibition or satirical impulse. However, these accounts of mimesis and mimicry, parody and pastiche, humour and humourlessness are, to my mind, too rigid and prescriptive, perhaps too much founded in an insectoid ‘Legendary Psychastenia’ that doesn’t map smoothly onto contemporary cultural life. Is it not possible to find pastiche funny? If we do find pastiche funny, must this only be taken as a sign of our false consciousness or dim-wittedness? Humourlessness can also be funny; it can be comedic in a deadpan way. Sometimes the fact of signalling your parodic intent, signalling your humour, and bracketing it of in hypothetical quotation marks can ruin it and destroy its impact. Sometimes blending in can be more dissociating, more funny, or more estranging. ‘If I were to let people in on the joke’, the legendary deadpan comedian Andy Kaufman once explained, ‘it wouldn’t have that efect’.46 Commodity Sculpture was a stylistic tendency amongst a certain group of artists in the North American art world of the 1980s. It is most typically associated with Jef Koons, Haim Steinbach, and Ashley Bickerton. These artists achieved a certain notoriety for ‘substituting design and kitsch for art’.47 For its critics (most notably those associated with the October journal, such as Hal Foster), Commodity Sculpture was a cynical demonstration of ‘the impossibility of transcendence in art’ and ‘of transgression in society’.48 In other words, it was empty and neutral, mimicry at its worst. Archetypal examples of commodity sculpture are: Koons’s New Shelton Wet/Dry Double Decker (1981), a display of two Shelton-branded vacuum cleaners in a Plexiglas vitrine illuminated with fluorescent tube lighting; Koons’s One Ball Total Equilibrium (1985), a display of a Spalding-branded basketball suspended in a glass tank with a solution of refined salt and distilled water; Steinbach’s Un-Color Becomes Alter Ego (1984), a display of a radio cassette player and two latex Yoda (of the Star Wars franchise) masks on a Formica shelf; Steinbach’s Related and Diferent (1985), a display of a pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers on a Formica shelf with five plastic gold goblets (Figure 2.2). This type of sculpture, which purposively chose not to employ ‘genuinely artistic media’, used the exhibition space to stage a collapse of the sacred and the profane, or, more precisely, of art and commerce. Mundane, everyday objects (vacuum cleaners, sneakers, toys), which are commercially branded (Nike, Spalding, Star Wars), are displayed as sacred and precious objects (fixed in vitrines, carefully arranged on shelves like a traditional tableau). They appear to demonstrate Walter Benjamin’s comments on the lost aura of art, which is compensated in the capitalist world by the ‘phony spell of a commodity’ and its sign-exchange value.49 The titles of the works function to further this reading: Koons’s reification of blunt matter-of-fact descriptions of the objects on display; Steinbach’s use of all lower-case, font indicating a flattened, pluridimensional world of total equivalence between objects within an economy dominated by sign-exchange value. No longer sacred or profane, but both sacred and profane. These supposedly oppositional categories are fused together by the fetish value of the branded sign and the gallery environ in which these objects are carefully placed. Almost explicitly, for Foster, ‘here the connoisseur of the art work is positioned as a fetishist of the commoditysign’.50 In this way, Foster argues that Commodity Sculpture’s substitution of the art object for commodity represents an ecstatic embrace of the commodity, a ‘triumphal defeatism’ that underscores ‘an identity between coveted art work and luxury commodity as objects of desire and vehicles of distinction’.51 Koons, Steinbach, et al. appeared to make a version of Pop Art without the Art, just the Pop. In this respect, Commodity Sculpture functioned as a component of the wider discourse in the 1980s on the so-called end of art.52 But is it not possible to find these works funny? Is there nothing deadpan about them?

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Figure 2.2 Haim Steinbach, related and diferent, 1985. Plastic laminated wood shelf, leather basketball shoes, brass candlesticks. 36 × 20 1/2 × 20 in. (91.4 × 52.1 × 50.8 cm) Source: © Haim Steinbach. Photo © David Lubarsky.

In his critique of Commodity Sculpture, Foster draws a comparison between the 1980s style of sculpture and Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Readymade’ objects from the early twentieth century (for instance, Bottle Rack (1914), an installation of a bottle rack in the gallery space; Fountain (1917), the same method, but with a urinal). Both approaches to sculpture substituted the art object for a ready-made commodity. In this respect, both Duchamp and Commodity Sculpture can be seen as examples of mimicry. They don’t employ ‘genuinely artistic media’, but only appropriated media from the everyday world with little to no artistic intervention. The objects are not estranged or dissociated; they

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appear as they do in the outside world. The only diference is the context in which they are displayed. However, Foster identifies a critical impulse in Duchamp’s mimicry that he sees as lacking in Commodity Sculpture. This is premised on an arbitrary detail. Duchamp’s Readymades demonstrated that objects of use value (urinals, bottle racks, etc.) can be transformed into objects of aesthetic and/or exchange value within and by the gallery space. This is their revelatory function. Since the objects displayed in Commodity Sculpture are commercially branded, Foster suggests that they invert or nullify Duchamp’s efect of estrangement. This is because we don’t identify them primarily with their use value. Branded vacuum cleaners and sneakers are always already identified with their exchange value as desirable consumer objects. For this reason, the artist putting them in a gallery does nothing but exaggerate the sign-exchange value they already hold in the world outside the gallery space. They have no revelatory function. With Commodity Sculpture, the gallery space does not function as Brian O’Doherty described it in his seminal text Inside the White Cube (1986), as a sanctuary from the world, where ‘the outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed of’, and ‘walls are painted white’, and where ‘the art is free . . . “to take on its own life”’.53 Duchamp’s Readymades illustrated the ideological efects of the gallery, to transform the mundane into aesthetic objets d’art. Commodity Sculpture updates and intensifies Duchamp’s gesture for the hyper-capitalist world of the 1980s USA: it explodes the privileged ideology of the gallery space, to the extent that it has no transformative efect on the objects on display but only intensifies their sign-exchange value – their status as consumerist fetish objects. No wonder Foster considered this approach to sculpture a cynical ‘demonstration of the impossibility for transcendence in art’. Foster’s coupling of Duchamp’s avant-garde Readymades and the cynical mode of 1980s Commodity Sculpture complicates the aforementioned negative imagining of mimicry. This is because Duchamp’s Readymades, which cannot be considered as ‘genuinely artistic media’ were nonetheless theorised as producing estranging or dissociating efects on the object. This was a repetition, aided by their re-presentation in a gallery context, which produced a diference. Perhaps, moreover, the same can be argued for Commodity Sculpture. In their inversion or nullification of Duchamp’s procedure, Koons’s and Steinbach’s sculptures indexed the total rule of the commodity in the late capitalist world, to which art and its typical forms of display no longer had an estranging function. This is its diference: a shattering of the illusions of autonomous art and a sanctuary-like gallery space. Instead, their so-called ‘triumphal defeatism’ encourages us to imagine forms of practice, critical thought, and humour that don’t rely on prescriptive oppositional categories; rather, it makes a joke of such oppositions. Commodity Sculptures’ approach to art making, which demonstrates the impossibility of transcendence in art, does not need to be imagined as a wholly cynical gambit. Instead, it can be seen as a prompt for a renewed critical imagination that works with and through the commodity rather than against it (because there is no authentic means of being against the commodity); that might use an object’s sign-exchange value as a ‘genuinely artistic media’ itself. This is a point arrived at more recently by Hito Steyerl, who, in an essay titled ‘A Thing Like You And Me’ (2010), interrogates how ‘emancipatory practice’ has traditionally been tied to a desire for ‘autonomy’ and ‘agency’: Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected. Though the position

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of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations . . . How about siding with the object for a change?54 Steyerl here ofers a way beyond the negative imagining of mimicry, which is typically interpreted pejoratively as a form of de-subjectification. For Steyerl, siding with the object (as Caillois’s caterpillars and moths were compelled to do) is not a moment where life takes a step backwards, but rather an opportunity for a diferent sort of life. ‘Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks’, she explains, ‘but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged’.55 To side with the object, as Steyerl phrases it, proposes a new sort of agency: ‘an agency that is not necessarily beneficial, as it can be used for every imaginable purpose [but] is vigorous and sometimes even viral’.56 This vigorous and viral energy Steyerl attributes to siding with the object produces a new way of evaluating cultural forms that have been criticised for this very reason. This is the longer art historical context that postinternet art connects to: a contested and divisive history of mimicry, repetition, and reiteration, which refuses to employ ‘genuinely artistic media’ and problematises the oppositional categories that structure much of the interpretive frameworks of art criticism. This is a history that moves from Duchamp’s Readymades to Commodity Sculpture, both of which perform a sort of mimicry that doesn’t just result in the artwork blending into its context and becoming indistinguishable. This is a form of mimicry that also alters our perception of the context in a way that echoes our discussion of a Baudrillardian ‘hyper-conformity’ in Chapter 1 as a ‘paradoxical participation that does not justify but destroys’. Duchamp’s Readymades, to a certain extent (despite the initial shock and outrage they received, for instance, when Fountain was submitted for an exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists in 1917), became indistinguishable as just another sculptural object, but in the process laid bare the ideology of the gallery space, and Commodity Sculptures’ mimicry exploded this ideology. This disruptive form of mimicry is an impulse that runs through postinternet art, which builds on the legacy of Koons, Steinbach, and others associated with the movement, such as Sherrie Levine, Ashley Bickerton, and Peter Halley. It can also be seen as historically attentive to a larger ‘post-media condition’ in the contemporary world, in which the idea of a ‘genuinely artistic media’ no longer seems to make sense and appears instead as a romantic idealisation that does not map onto our lived experience of the world.57 In this respect, Commodity Sculpture can be seen as a blueprint for a postinternet art that, perhaps more than any other, confronts this condition head-on. Mimicries of the Screen Part One: Postinternet Painting Petra Cortright is a postinternet artist whose practice involves the use of digital tools to make objects that look like gestural abstract paintings. She came to notice in the late 2000s with a series of works based on webcam videos, which functioned as a kind of self-portraiture for a social media generation, replete with basic digital graphic efects and animations. These were exhibited in some of the exhibitions of postinternet art mentioned in this book’s introduction, including Art Post-Internet (UCCA, Beijing, 2014), and I Was Raised on the Internet (MCA, Chicago, 2017/8). Cortright’s webcam video VVEBCAM (2007) is also featured in Rhizome’s ‘Net Art Anthology’, an online archive of internet art published in 2016 that restored and exhibited 100 seminal works that mapped out the development of internet art from the 1980s to the 2010s. These short

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videos (often less than one minute), which were originally uploaded to and exhibited on YouTube, are comprised of recordings of the artist through a computer webcam playing around with its various graphic options. In VVEBCAM and others, including DRagONBALL P (2008), Cortright displays a distinctly postinternet sensibility (Figures 2.3 and Figure 2.4). Rather than creatively rerouting or hijacking the webcam and its graphic filter efects and animations, she simply uses them as they are meant to be used. There is no obvious détournement of the technology. Cortright’s videos are a mirror image of her using these screen-based digital tools in an easy and uninvolved manner. There is no obvious labour or efort on display. She pictures herself as a consumer or user of the screen and its software, rather than a creator or disrupter. In VVEBCAM, Cortright is shown cycling through preset consumer-grade animated images, including dancing pizza slices, lightning bolts, cats, and autumnal leaves. We are given the webcam’s view, surveilling its user. It is often claimed that the video mimics the ‘camgirl’ genre in its formal makeup (Cortright is witnessed through a webcam), but dispenses ‘with its usual tropes’.58 The artist pictures herself as the in-built webcam would see her when absorbed in the screen, as a computer user; there is no direct address or overt performance for the camera. The webcam software efects are the active protagonist in the artwork, and the artist is pictured as a distracted user of the software, not performing for the camera but rather as the subject of the webcam’s gaze and as the backdrop or canvas for its arbitrary animations and cartoonish clips.

Figure 2.3 Still from Petra Cortright, VVEBCAM, 2007. Webcam video (colour, sound), 1:43 min. Source: Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

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Figure 2.4 Still from Petra Cortright, DRagONBALL P, 2008. Single channel video, 49 secs. Source: Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

Describing her approach to technological tools, Cortright once explained: ‘I have that attitude that I just can’t be bothered . . .’.59 These works are sufused with this energy, displaying an uncalculated and uninvolved use of webcam technology, reflecting the easy or user-friendly approach to video making in a postinternet world. They aestheticise an indifferent approach to things, to the extent that Paul Chan once gleaned a ‘disinterested delight’ permeating Cortright’s work.60 This strange ‘delight’ is the efect of Cortright’s mimicry or reiteration of a disinterested use of the digital screen. ‘It’s performance art that is digital and entirely about being digital, yet its intuitive and authentic. It can’t even bother to be self-consciously “surreal” or “absurd”’, Bruce Sterling observed of VVEBCAM.61 The implication is that there is no point in the artist being surreal or absurd anymore; we have moved beyond these tropes of the historic artistic avant-garde: surreal and absurd imagery – collages of cats, dancing pizza slices, lightning, and blazing fire, amongst other things – are often built into computer software and platforms as part of its generic set of visual efects, one option amongst many. It is more ‘authentic’ for the artist to not go along with these art historical stereotypes. Rather, postinternet artists, such as Cortright, respond to this state of afairs by refusing to be surreal or absurd; they just allow the technology to be its surreal and absurd self. This is the avant-garde gambit, to reiterate this, with a sense of apathetic abandon or aestheticised indiference. Bruce Sterling describes the afective quality of VVEBCAM as ‘sick’; in the slang use of the term, as a synonym for ‘cool’, for ‘being themselves and not caring how other people view what they say or do’.62 By being ‘sick’, Sterling argues, with its attendant lack of self-consciousness, Cortright exposes ‘the goofiness, the flaws, the

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corniness, of a planetary-scale post-internet social media system’.63 The same afective quality goes for Cortright’s ‘painting’, which can’t even bother to use ‘genuinely artistic media’. Cortright started making paintings in 2011, using the graphics editor Adobe Photoshop to simulate the look of painterly gestural abstraction. Cortright’s digital images are then printed onto various substrates, such as aluminium panels, sheets of linen, and rag paper – materials that hold light in a way that mimics how ‘everything we see on a screen is contextualised with light’.64 This is an approach to the painterly medium without any specificity, which is made utterly unspecific; it is a product of the generic language of Adobe’s proprietary digital graphics software, which is displayed on materials designed to mimic the luminescence of an LCD screen. However, on first glance, they resemble the densely layered and visceral oil paintings of, for instance, Joan Mitchell, or alternatively, they look like pastiches of Impressionist canvases. Indeed, in its critical reception, Cortright’s ‘paintings’ are often aligned with Impressionist ideas, but adapted for a twentyfirst-century context: ‘While Monet and his male counterparts reflected on the experience of seeing in late 19th-century France, Cortright does just this in the present moment, reflecting on the digital landscape’.65 And rather than working en plein air, as the Impressionists did, Cortright ‘paints’ indoors. Hers is a painting of ‘motility’, symptomatic of Paul Virilio’s interactive being (described in Chapter 1) – hooked up to ultra-powerful communication tools – whose ‘body’s area of influence [is limited] to a few gestures, a few impulses’.66 Cortright’s ‘motile’ painterly practice is structured according to a strict process. She begins by sourcing imagery and a colour palette online, scouring through the imagesharing network Pinterest. These images are then uploaded onto Photoshop to make what she calls a ‘mother file’. Cortright claims to then work for sessions lasting up to 12 hours on Photoshop, wearing ‘gamer classes’ designed to reduce glare and strain when staring at a screen for extended periods of time, allowing her to fully immerse herself into the screen.67 In these long Photoshop sessions, Cortright manipulates the ‘mother file’, building layer on layer, each time adding and subtracting colours, textures, and shapes, and employing ‘paintbrush’ simulations that she’s developed herself and others that she’s downloaded from the internet. Then, at an arbitrary ‘decisive moment’, the image is saved, fixed, and printed. This results in a kind of abstract, digital impasto, comprising hundreds of layers of content, some visible, some partially visible, and some obscured and covered up. They look as much like Monet’s Impressionist canvases and Joan Mitchell’s gestural abstraction as they do a smartphone or tablet screen when the light catches it in a certain way, exposing an oily, swiped, and smudged residue left behind by its user’s fingers. For instance, pecan_NECKLACE-tycoons.lrp, (2015) comprises a chaotic surface of hugely complex detail, gradations, hues, and mark-making (Figure 2.5). A knotted, dense array of markmaking and layering of colours – greens, blacks, and blues – shot through with dynamic bleeds of cadmium red; various oily smears and scribbled daubs, over and under-laid with a pattern of floral forms that struggle for visibility in the composition. Other indeterminate objects and forms also come into view at various points on the surface, making it hard for the eye to achieve any sense of focus or order. It’s unclear whether this is a macroscopic or microscopic view of something; the ‘painting’ seems designed to oscillate between these opposing poles of representation. This sense of oscillation or indeterminacy is also reinforced by the artwork’s title, pecan_NECKLACE-tycoons.lrp, and others, including telefonierenINdeautschland~~a botthefloatingTeatClock (2016) (Figure 2.6), which appears as a scrambled bit of code, seemingly made up of random keywords and search tags containing vague traces of concealed appropriated elements in the image.

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Figure 2.5 Petra Cortright, pecan_NECKLACE-tycoons.lrp, 2015. Digital painting on raw Belgian linen, 47 × 92.50 inches. Source: Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

The image file that is printed onto the chosen substrate (aluminium, linen, silk, etc.) appears, to a certain extent, as a traditional painting: self-contained, one-dimensional, flat, displaying the artist’s labour in its visible simulations of ‘brushstrokes’. However, it is a multi-dimensional object. We can understand the resultant image as a ‘stacked’ image, comprising complex layers, connections, and marks of integration within a larger digital infrastructure. I use the phrase ‘stacked’ as a reference to the sociologist Benjamin Bratton’s discussion of planetary-scale computation in his 2016 book The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Here, Bratton writes about how, in our world of planetary-scale computation, networks, algorithms, media, platforms, and apps, along with social, human, and physical forces, form a coherent and interdependent whole. These components no longer exist as separate entities; instead, they ‘align, layer by layer, into something like a vast, if also incomplete, pervasive, if also irregular, software and hardware Stack’.68 Cortright’s paintings are ‘stacked’ images because they appear to crystalise some key features of Bratton’s reimagining of computation. They appear as superficial or surface-oriented objects – flat, decorative, reminiscent of canonical Impressionist works, such as Monet’s Water Lillies series – however, this surface conceals a deeper, complex, and spiral-like layering of hard and soft systems: painterly gestures, codified ‘paintbrush’ applications, Cortright’s labour time, Adobe’s raster-based graphics editor, Google Image’s vast database of imagery, Pinterest’s curated global network of image-sharing, etc. Of course, a traditional painting also contains a deeper layering of hard and soft systems (i.e., painterly gesture, traces of its wider social and historical context, industrially produced oil paints, etc.); however with this ‘stacked’ painting, the layered efect is intensified, spiralling infinitesimally in a multiplicity of directions and connecting to The Stack’s planetary-scale computational ‘megastructure’. The contrast established in her digital paintings – such as the aforementioned telefonierenINdeautschland~~a botthefloatingTeatClock, a largescale digital impasto in watery pastel hues printed onto anodised aluminium – between ephemeral, shimmering surfaces and the deeper, complex digital infrastructure from which

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Figure 2.6 Petra Cortright, telefonierenINdeautschland~~a botthefloatingTeatClock, 2016. Digital painting on anodised aluminium, 67.13 × 47.87 inches. Source: Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

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these images are built, is striking. These oppositions – surface/depth, hard/soft, synthetic/ natural – have, as in so much postinternet art, collapsed together. Cortright has described her paintings as coming from a desire to ‘make dumb shit’.69 This is achieved through a process of actively ‘not thinking’ and working intuitively with colours, images, and appropriated content. Also, from delegating some of the artistic labour and painterly vitalism to paintbrush simulacra, whose use echoes the graphic animations and filters employed in the earlier webcam artworks. These ‘dumb’ processes of digital mediation are, as with the earlier works, made visible, folded into the reception of the images. Commenting on this aspect of her work, Daniel Neofetou highlights Cortright’s stress on the ‘active’ nature of her ‘not thinking’: ‘Cortright’s working method is far from an abandonment of rational construction to the aleatory’, Neofetou insists, ‘[r]ather than framing ‘not thinking’ as simply the negation of thought, she describes it as something that she ‘taps into’.70 Similarly, we might argue that Cortright taps into a feeling of disinterestedness, dumbness, and apathy produced by digital technologies. These afects and feelings are made active; they are highlighted in her practice. In doing so, Cortright makes it clear that she does not want to ‘hide or remove’ elements of the paintings digital construction and mediation, but instead make them explicit.71 On this basis, Neofetou argues for the ‘sensuous particularity’ of Cortright’s painting, which, in his understanding, reenergises the radical promise of Abstract Expressionism. ‘I would even go so far as to say’, he writes, ‘that her paintings’ ‘brushstrokes’ do not appear as simulacra of lines of pigment applied to a support with an implement topped with bristles at all, but rather as entities in their own right’.72 They appear as entities in their own right because they reformat a history of gestural abstraction through the language of tactility on digital screens, giving them an acute feeling of contemporaneity. Their smudges, smears, traces, swipes, layered, and flicked gestures resonate as operations that today configure our engagement with the world through digital screens. We are under no illusion that this form of gestural abstraction is not of the digital world, they do not claim any semblance of medium-specificity; reminiscent of both oil paint on canvas and oily finger-mark residue on the surface of smart screens. It is in this respect that Neofetou elevates Cortright’s practice above other instances of contemporary painting, which employ the directness and materiality of painting as a means of resisting digital mediation. He cites as an example the pejoratively labelled Zombie Formalism revival of painting in the 2010s, based around a focus on traditional (i.e., non-digital) painterly processes and mark making.73 For Neofetou, these revivals of traditional painterly forms in a digitised world ofer a compensatory illusion, which further distances us from the radical promise of Abstract Expressionism – an experience of immediacy with the object. By contrast, ‘the evident mediatedness of Cortright’s paintings . . . is what allows for their immediacy’.74 Thus, for Neofetou, there is something authentic or historically accurate about her approach to painting, which utterly dispenses with ‘genuinely artistic media’. However, Cortright’s painting is more related to Zombie Formalism than Neofetou lets on. Despite their use of traditional media, Zombie Formalist canvases are similarly informed by the digital and internet-mediated norms of display: typically vertical-formatted canvases, with little visual complexity or intricacy. What has been described as Zombie Formalist painting (such as those by, for instance, Helene Appel, David Ostrowski, and Oscar Murillo) displays simple, minimalist gestures, variations on a theme, colour, texture, or the process of applying paint to canvas. They can be seen as directed as much to the conditions of display on a digital screen as they are to the traditional gallery space. Their vertical format reiterates the vertical format of a smartphone screen, and thus the format

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of most image-sharing platforms. Their lack of visual complexity or intricacy allows them to be seen quickly, adapted to an online attention economy. The flatness of a canvas is similarly well suited to the conditions of display on image sharing platforms. The fidelity of other, more three-dimensional art forms fare much less well when viewed through a flat, often handheld, screen. Moreover, the models for painterly expression in Zombie Formalism appear to mimic a screen-based language of tactility. Paint is not handled, mixed, or thrown at the canvas. Instead, it oftentimes appears swiped, pinched, and dragged, in a way almost equivalent to Cortright’s use of Photoshop simulations of brushstrokes. In this respect, Cortright’s non-traditional painting might be folded into the larger revival of painting in the 2010s, which so irked critics. In particular, this critique might be mapped onto telefonierenINdeautschland~~a botthefloatingTeatClock, whose vertical format echoes the fixed verticality of many smart screen devices. The negative feeling towards Zombie Formalism is memorably summed up by Jerry Saltz in an article published in 2014 titled ‘Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?’: Most Zombie Formalism arrives in a vertical format, tailor-made for instant digital distribution and viewing via jpeg on portable devices. It looks pretty much the same in person as it does on iPhone, iPad, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Collectors needn’t see shows of this work, since it ofers so little visual or material resistance. It has little internal scale, and its graphic field is taken in at once. You see and get it fast, and then it doesn’t change. There are no complex structural presences to assimilate, few surprises, and no unique visual iconographies or incongruities to come to terms with. It’s frictionless, made for trade. Art as bitcoin.75 Saltz’s critique reveals how painting, one of the most traditional artistic mediums, surprisingly came to benefit from internet-based technologies and new norms for viewing art on image sharing platforms, arguably maintaining its place at the apex of the art market despite its use of non-technical media. Cortright’s painting, however, doesn’t use paint. They sit at a slight distance from this discourse. Whilst Zombie Formalist paintings might be argued to use the material, visceral nature of gestural painting to compensate for their ‘frictionless’ circulation in a digital economy, Cortright’s ofers no such compensation. Instead, her work expresses, with a certain level of ‘disinterested delight’, how painting today is produced by technological conditions. She does so through paintings that are stacked images, made up not of layers of paint but of layers of data, information, and code. This is painting with liquid crystals rather than liquid pigment. Roland Barthes once described ‘gestural’ painting as a matter of making time itself visible.76 This is because with this type of painting, we are not asked to see the final product but rather to review and identify the movement or gestures that ended up there with the product. In this understanding, gestural painting is an art of labour, or, more specifically, of making labour visible. In 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Jonathan Crary argued that One of the goals of Google, Facebook, and other enterprises (five years from now the names may be diferent), is to normalize and make indispensable . . . the idea of a continuous interface – not literally seamless, but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response.77

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On this basis, Crary claims that as ‘the opportunity for electronic transactions of all kinds becomes omnipresent, there is no vestige of what used to be everyday life beyond the reach of corporate intrusion’.78 Crary’s idea of a continuous interface, which always demands our interest and engagement and which continuously ofers opportunities for electronic transactions, collapsing any remnant of a boundary between labour and leisure, or work and play, presents the digital screen as a machine of capitalist extraction, mining its users patterns of engagement. Thus, our screen-based gestures, which Cortright’s gestural mark-making appears to model, are moments of extraction – strange signs of labour, of time given over to digital screens. On this basis, Cortright’s gestural painting fulfils Barthes criteria: it is a painting of digital labour. This is what gives them their immediacy – their acute sense of contemporaneity and historicity. The time and labour that are made visible in Cortright’s gestural painting refers to the time and labour we invest in the digital screen’s ‘continuous interface’, which absorbs and extracts value from the time embedded within our gestural interaction – swipes, pinches, and drags. Unlike Zombie Formalism, which ofers compensatory fantasies of non-digital labour, Cortright gives us a form of gestural abstract painting that is deeply informed by practices of digital labour. In this sense, they are ‘eloquent vulgarities’; as in her painting, materialises and makes eloquent a new stage of gestural abstraction within a digital economy, a form of labour that is normally invisible, expropriated within and behind the screen. However, Cortright’s distinctive approach to gestural painting, which visualises the labour and time invested in digital screens, also corresponds with recent approaches to behavioural web analytics that similarly produce visual representations of users’ gestural interaction with online platforms. One such analytics company, Hotjar, ofers a service whereby it analyses website use and provides feedback through tools such as ‘heatmaps’ that visualise patterns of user engagement in order to optimise website functionality, showing clients where and what users are most stimulated by and indicating through negative space where the dead (unoptimised) spaces of a webpage are located.79 The purpose of Hotjar is to consolidate Crary’s ‘continuous interface’, further enhancing opportunities for electronic transactions, and remove any vestiges of life ‘beyond the reach of corporate intrusion’. These ‘heatmaps’ also look like gestural abstract painting: smudges and sweeps of intense colouration across a canvas-like webpage, deep reds, and amber hues, accenting greyscale areas of disinterestedness. Another sort of ‘eloquent vulgarity’: human gestures, visualised in liquid crystal clarity, which disclose the time and labour given over to the extractive nature of the digital screen. Mimicries of the Screen Part Two: Postinternet Montage A similar sort of mimicry or reiteration of digital screen space can be found in the work of the American artist, Jordan Wolfson, an artist who is, perhaps more than any other, seen as emblematic of the bad object of postinternet art. This is, in part, due to his heightened visibility. In 2013, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent exhibited the first major survey of his work to date, Jordan Wolfson: Ecce Homo/le Poseur. In April 2014, he had a much-publicised solo show at David Zwirner in New York. This show hit the headlines for Female Figure (2014): a life-size, highly sexualised robot, made to look like a stripper with a witch mask, fitted with a motion-sensor (in order to look at and intuitively respond to spectators), that danced to pop music. The work, which cost upwards of 500,000 dollars to make, was produced in collaboration with Spectral Motion, an animatronics studio in California. All three ‘editions’ of Female Figure were promptly sold to

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‘megacollectors’, one of whom was Eli Broad, whose collection of modern and contemporary art also includes Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Jef Koons.80 Wolfson followed this technologically impressive sculptural work with Colored Sculpture (2016), a large-scale human-like robot rigged to be brutally tortured by an animatronic apparatus, which was acquired by Tate in 2018, and Real Violence (2017), a 2 minute 25 second virtual reality (VR) experience of the artist killing another man with a baseball bat, which was first exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennale. And in 2016 and 2017, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presented a two-part Wolfson retrospective, manic/love/truth/love. Wolfson’s work is owned by cultural institutions and private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he is represented by the blue-chip commercial gallerists Sadie Coles and David Zwirner. Wolfson’s sudden notoriety in the contemporary art world in the mid-2010s encouraged Holland Cotter, in the New York Times, to refer to him as ‘the latest in a line of young male artists to shoot to the top of the New York career heap with relatively little buildup’.81 His work has been critiqued as ‘Instagrammable’ entertainment: large-scale, technologically impressive, provocative, spectacular artworks that are seemingly designed to generate ‘attention’. The critic Ben Davis has described his work as ‘adult theme-park entertainment . . . a note-perfect illustration of how the circuit between the museum and the fairground will be closed’.82 Elsewhere, Jack Bankowsky has suggested that Wolfson’s work is ‘a symptom of the lengths to which art must go to make itself matter in the age of social media’.83 In this understanding, Wolfson’s is an art of hype that is seemingly designed to blend into and excel within an online attention economy. The intention is to wow viewers to the extent that they are compelled to photo it and put it on Instagram or tweet about it on Twitter in order to accrue cultural value and visibility. In this attention economy, aura has been replaced by what David Joselit has termed ‘buzz’.84 This is to suggest that the peculiar and impactful quality of seeing a work at a particular time and place has been supplanted by the power of the circulating image. Summarising Joselit’s ideas, Melissa Gronlund writes that: The more an image circulates and connections it builds the more powerful it is. Buzz is thus not a factor of the image itself but an emergent behaviour among its viewers . . . buzz derives from . . . a mode of becoming rather than a static quality: an images popularity (and hence power) is dynamic and always in a state of being performed, emerging, or perhaps slipping away.85 Wolfson’s work is said to prioritise the ‘buzz’, and his artworks are seen as devices for the accumulation of this ‘buzz’ efect. In this respect, he has been widely critiqued for a perceived emptiness, cynicism, or lack of critical content in his work. This is clearly expressed in the title of a 2014 article by Paddy Johnson in Art F City, which simply reads, ‘Is Jordan Wolfson’s Art Meaningless?’86 Johnson’s question on the artist’s meaninglessness is based on the critic’s experience of Wolfson’s audio-visual work Raspberry Poser (2012); a looping, 13 minute 26 second moving-image sequence of hand-drawn animation, computer-generated imagery (CGI), photography, references to the HIV pandemic, and live action filmed in New York and Paris, overdubbed with pop music: Beyoncé’s ‘Sweet Dreams’, Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade into You’ and Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’. Raspberry Poser’s montage of aleatory references, styles, and audio-visual elements attracted criticisms of this type and generated a stereotype of the artist, according to which subsequent works by Wolfson’s have been judged. For instance,

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Martin Germann and Aram Moshayedi have observed of Wolfson’s approach that ‘it might be easy to say that the references throughout . . . are empty, that any and all meaning has been evacuated’.87 It is from this perspective that Diana Hamilton, in an article published in Frieze, censures what she perceives to be the artist’s ‘empty, judgement-less vision’.88 It is this work, Raspberry Poser, that I want to focus on here. Whilst I don’t want to discount Wolfson’s critics, who have characterised the artist as ‘the perfect manifestation of the nastiest impulses of online life [such as] Internet trolling’, I am concerned with the extent to which the emptiness that critics perceive in the work indexes and visualises a real emptiness that exists in the postinternet world outside it.89 To be sure, like Cortright, Wolfson’s is an art of mimicry. And, with Raspberry Poser, Wolfson sets out to mimic our sensorial experience of a world mediated via digital screens. Should we understand his work – its mimicry of the hardened and alienated; its ‘manifestation of the nastiest impulses of online life’ – as so many critics do – as a cynical and ‘dangerous luxury’, or, alternatively, as an ‘eloquent vulgarity’? Whilst Cortright taps into a feeling of disinterestedness, dumbness, and apathy produced by digital technologies, making these afects and feelings an active, highlighted component of both her video-based and painting practice, Wolfson taps into a feeling of superficiality similarly produced by digital technologies. This superficiality is exaggerated to the extent that it appears hideous and striking, evoking a shudder in its viewer. Whilst Cortright simulates painting to evoke a feeling of time and the investment of labour in our digital screen space, in Raspberry Poser Wolfson appears to celebrate the superficial temporality and spatial logic of the internet, of easy access to an abundance of imagery, which is experienced as a ‘continuous interface’; a smooth, gliding, liquid procession of information. Wolfson’s aforementioned description of the internet as ‘the same as running water’ is given aesthetic form in Raspberry Poser. The film begins with a three second live-action shot of an empty showroom kitchen filmed in New York’s heavily gentrified SoHo district. The scene contains numerous displays of gleaming reflective surfaces. Two squirming, computer-generated HIV virus-type forms bounce and skitter around on top of the backdrop, like squeaky, red plastic dog toys. Despite the reflective façades on display, the virus-like objects do not produce any reflection or trace of their presence. The soundtrack to this grouping of kitchen and virus is Beyoncé’s 2009 synthpop single ‘Sweet Dreams’ (originally titled ‘Beautiful Nightmare’). The film continues to cut and sync alternate shots of equivalently chic interior stores at an irregular rhythm. The HIV viruses multiply, disappear, and appear again, their candy apple-red form riddled with peg-like nodules that bulge, wobble, and spill across the clean environment. Wolfson also cuts in a variety of animated anthropomorphic characters: a silvery CGI floating condom that sprays red hearts like bubbles (Figure 2.7); a cartoon lock and key in coitus; a docile cartoon elephant lying on a rotating trapdoor; an angry cartoon boy in a birdcage; a chair that grows spikes, transforming it into a Surrealist non-functional object (Figure 2.8); CGI pills that swarm, morph, and collect into various symbols – hearts, triangles, gender signs; an anarchist ‘circle-A’. These animations include both CGI and some more traditional-style hand-drawn cartoons, both of which are allowed to exist in the same screen space. The background shots switch variously to images of, in the artist’s words, ‘houses being renovated’, inner city New York ‘Technogyms,’ ‘heterosexual teenage scenes’, and ‘erotic drawings’.90 The artist himself appears in Raspberry Poser dressed as a stereotypical ‘punk’, wandering listlessly around parks in Paris, eating salad, and playing innocuous pranks on strangers (Figure 2.9). Certainly, the film does not appear to illustrate Beyoncé’s (or Mazzy Star’s, or Roy Orbison’s) song or follow its narrative logic. Nor is there any coherent narrative logic to the film’s procession

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Figure 2.7 Jordan Wolfson, Raspberry Poser [still], 2012. Digital video with CGI and hand drawn animation, duration: 13 min 55 sec. Source: © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

Figure 2.8 Jordan Wolfson, Raspberry Poser [still], 2012. Digital video with CGI and hand drawn animation, duration: 13 min 55 sec. Source: © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

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Figure 2.9 Jordan Wolfson, Raspberry Poser [still], 2012. Digital video with CGI and hand drawn animation, duration: 13 min 55 sec. Source: © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.

of imagery, nor is there any clear relationship between the various characters Wolfson appropriates throughout Raspberry Poser’s running time. Reflecting on the various characters that punctuate the film, Wolfson claims to inhabit them all: ‘As I was working, I started asking myself, am I the condom, and am I also the virus, and am I also the kid? And I become the punk’.91 Wolfson adopts these various roles with smooth indiference. Commenting on this aspect of his work, Katherine Guinness has observed that Wolfson’s subject positions are diferent than his own in ‘the same way one styles an online avatar from a pull-down menu’.92 Despite this, Raspberry Poser produces a compelling spectacle. The procession of haphazard imagery seems animated and given meaning by the music’s emotional affect. In this sense, Wolfson’s film is experienced like most commercial music videos, in which a powerful soundtrack often seems to supply a series of disconnected images with its libidinal energy.93 One efect of this, in both music videos and Wolfson’s work, is that the disconnected visual material is barely noticed but appears unified or continuous. As referenced, the supposedly disconnected and random arrangement of image and sound in Raspberry Poser (and in other works by Wolfson) has perplexed critics. Such criticisms arise from the extreme editing technique Wolfson employs, which quickly cuts together discontinuous elements. For instance, and most provocatively, as I have indicated, the HIV viruses in Raspberry Poser are visually discontinuous in type from the imagery behind them, and so they might appear meaningless because they seem to have no clear links to other imagery. Indeed, discussing his practice, Wolfson has insisted that there ‘is

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no didactic message in the work. The message is form . . . and letting whatever meaning surfaces exist’.94 And talking specifically about Raspberry Poser, Wolfson clarifies that he is not trying to make these elements come together . . . by any means or any narrative. There is no story. There is no clarity of content, only isolated areas of content . . . I am definitely concentrating on inventing and using a kind of form that binds these subjects together, but also abandons any clarity of form.95 This idea came across in my own conversation with the artist. For instance, he insisted that the music used in Raspberry Poser is just another formal element, something that is balanced and kept in equilibrium with the other areas of content: With the music I thought, what if I just take it, as if it is a colour and put it in . . . as if you were taking a piece of an object or a piece of an image, and then cutting it . . . so it’s like a cropped image as a piece of music.96 This idea of the work being a balancing of complex elements is further stressed in the artist’s description of his editing technique: ‘if you can imagine holding a ball’, Wolfson explained, ‘and you are constantly trying to balance the ball in diferent ways on your hand so that it never remains static, that’s how I think about editing. Something that is never static’.97 In these circumstances, when the artist has so carefully edited and flattened out the emphatic content, is there any way we understand the work without dismissing it, as so many critics have, as random or ‘meaningless’? One critical approach might be to see the origins of Wolfson’s technique of discontinuous, fast cutting and syncing of references, images, and sounds in the avant-garde theorisation of montage. Raspberry Poser resembles both the spatial compositions that layer diferent elements in the same frame, as in surrealist photomontage, and the shotto-shot successive montage, where images are cut together sequentially, as in the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic montage, with sequences seen, for example, in Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1927). The former can be identified in the aforementioned scenes of kitchen interiors overlaid with CGI viruses. And the latter, for instance, is evident five minutes into the film with a ten-second sequence of fast and interchanging snapshot-style photos of, in the artist’s words, ‘heterosexual teenage scenes’. A common thread in montage’s theorisation across the arts – including both photomontage and cinematic montage – is the idea of violent juxtapositions that produce cognitive emancipation in the viewer. For example, Eisenstein stressed the dissociative power of aggressively conflicting cuts in cinematic montage, in which concepts and ideas in the viewer are produced ‘from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another’.98 In his essay ‘The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram’, he compares the total ‘phalanx of montage pieces’ in a film ‘to the series of explosions of an internal combustion engine, driving forward its automobile’.99 The colliding juxtaposition of imagery fuels the film, giving it momentum and thrust. An example of this process can be found in Eisenstein’s first full-length feature, Strike (1925), in which a scene of striking workers being attacked is abruptly cut together with a shot of a bull being slaughtered. The violent combination of these images draws parallels between the workers and cattle: both appear as appendages to the production process, beaten down and easily replaced. Similarly, in his unfinished Arcades Project (1982), Walter Benjamin employed a terminology ‘awakening’ to describe the efects of a surrealist photomontage, ‘in which things

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put on their true – surrealist – face’. In this project, Benjamin conceives of capitalism as a ‘natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces’.101 It was against this backdrop that montage functioned. Its de-naturalisation of images through their shocking juxtaposition was felt to resist the prevailing narcoleptic ideology by jolting us out of its ‘dreamtime’.102 Moreover, Benjamin understood his own work in the Arcades Project as a kind of ‘literary montage’: an attempt to construct a materialist history of nineteenth century Parisian life through the textual assemblage of fragmented references without any overt authorial inscription.103 Its criticality lay in its bringing to light the disjointedness and contradictions of the everyday world, juxtaposing, for instance, symbols of luxury with those of misery. In Benjamin’s view, the shock of these de-idealised images might arouse the reader from their ‘dreamfilled-sleep’ and into a more critical awareness of their historical circumstances. Indeed, certain points of commonality might be seen to exist between Wolfson’s work and the theorisation of montage. Bearing out such links, Wolfson has said that he understands the imagery he uses in relation to Benjamin’s Arcades Project and its representation of late-nineteenth-century Parisian arcades as ‘surreal dream spaces’.104 This relationship is borne out in the video, whose live-action sequences are filmed in Paris and New York. It is as if he sees New York (specifically the SoHo area) in the 2010s as being like Paris then – an environment cluttered with the debris of the past, now gentrified, smoothed over, and thoroughly sanitised. The HIV viruses function as an artefact of his growing up in a ‘generation where we were impacted and conditioned by a fear of the HIV virus’.105 Thus, in Raspberry Poser, the streets, shops, and gyms of SoHo are made to seem haunted by its presence.106 From this perspective, Wolfson’s discontinuous mishmash of elements might be seen as exemplary in a Benjaminian sense: a montage that rescues and reactivates fragments of the past in order to work against and resist a state of historical amnesia imposed by the ‘dream time’ of a gentrified New York. And yet, it isn’t possible to see Wolfson’s work simply as inheriting the older model of montage, with its radical efcacy intact. In part, I want to argue, this is because reality itself has moved on and superseded those strategies of the early avant-garde. Indeed, in the intervening period, the idea of a city constructed with a montage-like aesthetic of violent juxtapositions has become something like a postmodern orthodoxy. The fragmented image of the city that emerges in Benjamin’s Arcades Project as a figure of critical resistance has come to be known as a structural feature of the postmodern city. In the view of many observers of this phenomenon, the chaotic, discontinuous, and disorientating character of the city now seems to do the inverse of Benjamin’s montage: de-realising and slackening our purchase of historical reality.107 Moreover, the cut-up discontinuity and seeming meaninglessness of Raspberry Poser’s content are now read as a structural aspect of contemporary screen culture, as media theorist Steven Shaviro has observed, in which ‘multiple diferences ramify endlessly; but none of these diferences actually makes a diference, since they are all completely interchangeable’.108 They are decontextualised and appear to exist in a vacuum, without any afective impact that might register as shocking. On this basis, the seeming ‘meaninglessness’ and overwhelming ‘flatness’ of Wolfson’s work – in both its formal and afective register – serves to index this aspect of our screen worlds. The artist is careful, I think, not to lapse into a skeuomorphic reprise of the older, analogue avant-garde technique, which is built upon the physical cutting, dismembering, and suturing of image fragments. Instead, the fragmented elements of the film have a liquid quality, appearing to glide, slip, and flow without any sense of conflict or friction.

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The avant-garde model of montage is present in the Raspberry Poser, but as a vague memory – it doesn’t work as it should. Wolfson inherits the cut-up haphazardness of the technique, but his work lacks its supposed intensity and conflict. Images don’t explode into concepts via their interaction. Instead, they sit side by side, one on top of the other; there are never any collisions. We might say that Wolfson replaces the physicality of the ‘cut’ with the gestural ‘swipe’ or ‘flick’ referencing, as Cortright does in her postinternet painting, our tactile relationship to images that are mediated via a touchscreen device. This reading is encouraged, in particular, by one sequence in Raspberry Poser in which the artist appears sitting on a bench: the camera is angled from behind his shoulder, so we can see Wolfson browsing through a series of images on his iPhone – pornographic drawings, manga, Sonic the Hedgehog, Batman, and other cartoon characters, some black and white photographic images. Many of them have already appeared, or will appear, in the film. The artist’s idle swiping through these images on the phone’s screen displays no obvious desire for the deeper, more conflictual manipulation of imagery in avant-garde montage. By contrast, they appear interchangeable and only arbitrarily linked because they are stored in the phone’s database; swiped and flicked away, they remain undamaged and, contra Eisenstein, conflict to no efect. Indeed, the visual elements in Wolfson’s film seem organised according to what Lev Manovich (in his analysis of The Language of New Media (2001)) calls a ‘database logic’.109 This is a feature, he argues, of the computer age and, by extension, its screen culture, in which ‘many new media objects . . . do not have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence’.110 Instead, the database operates as a ‘collection of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other’.111 The computer database, Manovich writes, has become a ‘true cultural form’: a means of representing ‘human existence in the world’ that can be seen as a contemporary correlate to the novel or cinema in the modern age.112 In this respect, online cultural forms now follow a database logic: they don’t operate according to a linear temporality, as, for instance, a traditional movie in a cinema; instead, they are ‘spatialized’. This is to say that we consume the cultural object in a spatial rather than temporal form; it is designed to be experienced on various multimedia devices with images, sounds, and hyperlinks that locate the cultural object in a wider database of information rather than in linear time. We can think here about people using their smartphones in the cinema in order to search for something related to the motion picture, thereby interrupting the experience of the film as a singular temporal object. Raspberry Poser has a database aesthetic. Its systematic and seemingly arbitrary accumulation of images, sounds, and references mimics the database logic that informs our experience of and navigation through the world, which now appears as an endless accumulation of images, texts, and other information that we can swipe and flick our way through. We might, furthermore, see this database logic as an aesthetic expression of the current disciplinary system: what Antoinette Rouvroy has termed ‘algorithmic governmentality’, in reference to ‘the new information infrastructures [that] “translate” or “transcribe” the physical space and its inhabitants . . . into constantly evolving sets of data points’.113 For Rouvroy, this governance by ‘algorithm’ increasingly ‘impact[s] on how we conduct ourselves, how we attempt to conduct others, and how others attempt to control our conduct’.114 The impact of algorithmic governmentality on our experience of the world can be seen, for example, with Google’s PageRank algorithm, which functions according to a database logic. PageRank’s underlying assumption is that the more important websites (and higher ranked) are those

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likely to receive more links from other websites and produce more data. Therefore, value is attributed to an object according to the quantity of its data production. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.115 This system forces us, as the then-editor of Wired magazine Chris Anderson explains, ‘to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later’.116 Data, we might say, is foregrounded in the current epistemic paradigm, and the materiality of objects is downplayed. ‘Google’s founding philosophy’, Anderson writes, is that we don’t know why this page is better than that one. If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that’s good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That’s why Google can translate languages without actually ‘knowing’ them . . . And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.117 Therefore, Google’s database logic can be seen to perform a ‘flattening exercise’ on the content contained in its ever-expanding corpus of knowledge and information. In this system, value is determined via relational systems such as ‘hyperlinks’ and ‘keywords’, thereby flattening out the historical and material complexity of the object. An unfortunate implication of this system was inadvertently revealed by a 2007 project by contemporary artist Cory Arcangel and curator Hanne Mugaas titled Art Since 1960 (according to the Internet). The project took the form of a performative lecture that asked what you would know about art history since 1960 if your only source of information came from YouTube’s database of videos. It turns out that one result of this is an almost complete absence of women. The artist Marisa Olson describes putting this point to Arcangel and Mugaas, recalling that: [T]hey replied simply that it was not an intentional choice, but rather that they let a widely-accepted primer determine the list of names for which they searched, and then they showed only those for which they found results; both steps filtered out women, as history is wont to do. In this sense, Arcangel and Mugaas performed art history, par excellence, by reenacting its cycles of filtration and info-trickling.118 So, in this set-up, YouTube’s ‘database logic’ only worked to perpetuate pre-existing prejudices: its system chewed the data and smoothed over any problems or dissonance in the information (here, an overwhelmingly patriarchal canon of art history). As a result, Arcangel and Mugaas’s project demonstrated a systemic tendency for the database to simply repeat the logic of its creators, however prejudicial or politically loaded that information may be, mostly because the database flattens out the historical complexity of its information. The ‘database logic’ that undergirds Raspberry Poser’s haphazard assemblage of imagery can be seen as an aesthetic expression of this value system; this is why it

86 Dangerous Luxuries and Eloquent Vulgarities appears to us as meaningless, overwhelmingly flat, and without the sparking, colliding imagery that was significant for a critical concept of montage. The ‘database logic’ of computer-based imagery confirms a shift away from the violent, shocking juxtapositions of montage towards images that are characterised by smoothness and continuity. The upshot of this is a mode of spectatorship in which such violent juxtapositions are invisible: we are conditioned not to see the severed edges or materiality of images, which are flattened out by the cultural form of the database. Now, everything ‘is already a montage’, Lovink writes in Sad by Design (2019), ‘with endless layers of data, software, content, form and meaning stacked on top of each other. A century ago the “destruction of coherence” was experienced as a shock’, as we have seen with the historic theorisation of avant-garde montage. ‘Today’, however, ‘it is the new normal’.119 I want to return, at this point, to the question of how we should address Wolfson’s mimicry of the flattening – ‘database aesthetic’ – of contemporary screen cultures. Either an ‘eloquent vulgarity’ or a mimicry that articulates or clarifies the montaged nature of screened representation, which is revealed as a means of disciplining vision and reconciling us with ‘algorithmic governmentality’. Or, alternatively, a ‘dangerous luxury’ – a mimicry that sides too closely with the mimicked object and ultimately ends up reproducing its most negative aspects. This accusation could have been levied at Arcangel and Mugaas’s Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) (2007), which reproduced the gendered and exclusionary aspects of a canonical art history. However, Arcangel and Mugaas’s project made this demonstratively apparent, revealing and acknowledging how structural prejudices are often coded into the algorithms that we assume operate with neutrality.120 Wolfson, on the other hand, as we have seen, absolves himself of artistic responsibility for the content of his work, insisting that his work is simply a process of formal problem solving. In this sense, he absolves himself of responsibility for his often provocative appropriation of loaded content. A case in point is the 2016 animatronic object Colored Sculpture, a green and red painted puppet-like robot chained up and tortured. Whilst the title seems to provide a matter-of-fact formal description of the object, at the same time it evokes a spectacle of lynching within a highly charged time of racially aggravated violence on Black bodies in America. It is no surprise that he was accused by some critics of ‘race-baiting’.121 The following year, in 2017, at an exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ in London, Wolfson included a version of this sculpture, this time painted in black enamel and chained around the neck – further teasing this connection to lynching. A similar point could be directed at Raspberry Poser’s flagrant use of HIV imagery, which appears as just one of many formal elements in the composition. There is a tendency in his work, therefore, to inhabit other identities and play and perform as minoritarian others. Guinness has argued that Wolfson efectively ‘colonises’ these bodies and identities in his work, continuing a privilege granted by patriarchy for white men to manipulate and assume control over otherness:122 Writing specifically about Wolfson’s appropriation of HIV-related imagery in Raspberry Poser, Guinness advises that: Sexuality, gender, mortality; these aren’t subject positions or identities he’s interested in inhabiting or identifying with or understanding as much as they are materials and mediums to build his own art through. Wolfson calls subject positions diferent from his own ‘textures’.123

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Guinness’s reflections on Wolfson’s artistic strategy in works such as Raspberry Poser can be seen as symptomatic of our postinternet condition, which explodes the utopic aspirations that were once attached to digital media and the potentialities of cyberspace. Artists like Wolfson, in the words of curator Omar Kholeif, have been ‘raised on the internet’.124 They have grown up playing video games, communicating in anonymous chatrooms, and sharing ‘shock-videos’ on online bulletin boards. ‘I think of the Internet as being the same as running water, or a refrigerator’, Wolfson claims: ‘It’s part of my life, and it’s an extension of my mind and my body in a way’.125 The uncomplicated and banal nature of Wolfson’s characterisation of the internet’s role within his practice dilutes the radical promise of the internet’s cyberspace, which the cyber-feminist theorist Karen A. Franck once described as ofering ‘immense opportunities for testing and blurring boundaries in those worlds and in this one . . . not a single monolithic version of reality but an . . . array of possibilities’.126 However, Wolfson’s blunt mimicry of the screen’s flattening efects and reiteration of white male privilege reveals these claims about the radicality of the internet to have been, perhaps like his work itself, a ‘dangerous luxury’ that functions to reconcile us with the hegemonic norms of an ‘algorithmic governmentality’. The question as to whether Wolfson’s artworks are ‘eloquent vulgarities’ is more complicated. Granted, they do manifest, with startling clarity, some of the most toxic aspects of online life. The analogy between Wolfson’s artistic persona and the wilful transgressions of online ‘edgelords’ and internet trolls is often referenced in critical discourse on his practice as a means of revealing a negative inverse to the ‘optimism that characterises . . . internet art’.127 This peculiar aspect of online culture, borne from the anonymous communities on online platforms such as 4Chan, will be explored in more detail in Chapter 3. In this sense, Wolfson’s mimicry is an accurate mirroring of digital culture, a means of estranging it from its natural state, rendering it as ‘a petrified primordial landscape’ (as Adorno once theorised the ‘window mirror’ in the bourgeois intérieur): an unhinged, unbounded, vacuous, and vulgar melange of information and emptied-out meaning.128 This interpretation is encouraged by the numerous instances of mirror-related imagery in Raspberry Poser, for instance, an animated magic hand mirror, recognisable from the Fleischers’ 1933 animation, Betty Boop’s Snow White.129 This mirror has metamorphic and defamiliarising efects; it is shown in the hands of a cartoon boy, who pulls it over his body, transforming him into an object; a chair that grows spikes (in Betty Boop’s Snow White, the queen is shown pulling the mirror over her body – revealing the original gesture that is repeated by Wolfson – and transforms into a witch). The animated magic mirror produces a distorted, diferent, and arguably ‘eloquent’ reflection of the world by pulling us through its tain. In this respect, we might take it as a synecdoche for the ‘eloquent vulgarity’ of Wolfson’s mirroring of contemporary screen cultures in Raspberry Poser, resisting, and complicating an interpretation of mimicry as simply a ‘dangerous luxury’. Perhaps, however, like so much postinternet art, the answer is not either/or, but both/and: both dangerous and eloquent, both luxury and vulgar. Wolfson’s imagining of the internet as both dangerous and eloquent, both luxury and vulgar, which produces an indiferent or flattened relationship to the world, provides an accurate yet uncomfortable picture of the internet as it metastasised throughout the 2010s, contributing to new forms of reactionary political ideology that deepen and exploit the anomie of online existence. These ideas and their associated visual culture will be explored in more detail in the next chapter.

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Notes 1. Morgan Quaintance, ‘Right Shift’, Art Monthly, no. 387 (June 2015), p. 8. 2. James Farago, ‘Welcome to the LOLhouse: How Berlin’s Biennale Became a Slick, Sarcastic Joke’, The Guardian (June 2016), www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/13/berlinbiennale-exhibition-review-new-york-fashion-collective-dis-art, accessed 16/02/21. 3. Brian Droitcour, ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’, Art in America (October 2014), www.artnews. com/art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040/, accessed 30/07/21. 4. Gene McHugh, Post Internet (Brescia: Link Editions, 2011), p. 25. 5. Marisa Olsen quoted in Lauren Cornell, ‘Net Results: Closing the Gap between Art and Life Online’, TimeOut New York (February 2006), p. 69. 6. Marisa Olsen quoted in Nick Warner, ‘A Conversation with Marisa Olsen’, in Phoebe Adler et al. (eds.), Art and the Internet (London: Black Dog, 2013). 7. Marisa Olson, ‘POSTINTERNET: Art after the Internet’, Foam Magazine, vol. 29 (Winter 2011), p. 63. 8. Artie Vierkant, ‘The Image Object Post-Internet’ (2010), https://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_ Image_Object_Post-Internet_a4.pdf, accessed 26/07/21. 9. John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 4. 10. Brian Droutcour, ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’, Art in America (October 2014), www. artnews.com/art-in-america/features/the-perils-of-post-internet-art-63040/, accessed 30/07/21. 11. Jordan Wolfson quoted in Andrew M. Goldstein, ‘Jordan Wolfson on Transforming the “Pollution” of Pop Culture Into Art’, Artspace (April 2014), www.artspace.com/magazine/ interviews_features/qa/jordan_wolfson_interview-52204, accessed 10/08/21. 12. Quaintance, ‘Right Shift’, p. 8. 13. Quaintance, ‘Right Shift’, p. 7. 14. See Oluwole Ojewale, ‘What Coltan Mining in the DRC Costs People and the Environment’, The Conversation (May 2022), https://theconversation.com/what-coltan-mining-in-the-drccosts-people-and-the-environment-183159, accessed 13/04/23. 15. Kerstin Stakemeier, ‘Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art’, Texte zur Kunst, vol. 98 (2015), p. 132. 16. See http://disimages.com/, accessed 13/04/23. 17. See DIS, ‘The Present in Drag’, press release available to view at https://bb9.berlinbiennale. de/the-present-in-drag-2/, accessed 28/07/21. 18. I take this use of the phrase ‘critical art’ from Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Cochran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 46–47. A similar model of ‘critical art’ making based around correcting the viewers’ perspective is labelled an ‘orthopaedic aesthetic’ in Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke, 2011), p. 35. 19. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, pp. 46–47. 20. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, pp. 46–47. 21. Judith Butler, ‘Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion’, in Judith Butler (ed.), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London; New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 85. 22. This position was described in a podcast interview with DIS founder Lauren Boyle by New Models. Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, hosts, ‘4-EVER-DIS w/ Lauren Boyle (NM59)’, The New Models Podcast (February 2023), https://newmodels.io/podcasts, accessed 13/04/23. 23. See bel Hooks, ‘Is Paris Burning’, in bel Hooks (ed.), Black Looks: Race and Representation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 145–156. 24. See Dorian Batycka, ‘The 9th Berlin Biennale: A Vast Obsolescent Pageant of Irrelevance’, Hyperallergic (June 2016), https://hyperallergic.com/306932/the-9th-berlin-biennale-a-vast-obsolescentpageant-of-irrelevance/, accessed 28/07/21. 25. Farago, ‘Welcome to the LOLhouse: How Berlin’s Biennale Became a Slick, Sarcastic Joke’, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/13/berlin-biennale-exhibition-review-newyork-fashion-collective-dis-art, accessed 16/02/21. 26. Batycka, ‘The 9th Berlin Biennale: A Vast Obsolescent Pageant of Irrelevance’, https:// hyperallergic.com/306932/the-9th-berlin-biennale-a-vast-obsolescent-pageant-of-irrelevance/, accessed 28/07/21.

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27. Ahmet Öğüt, ‘Obscure Sorrows: Thoughts around the 9th Berlin Biennale’, e-flux, Journal #75 (September 2016), www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67158/obscure-sorrows-thoughts-aroundthe-9th-berlin-biennale/, accessed 28/07/21. 28. Tess Edmonson, ‘9th Berlin Biennale, “The Present in Drag”’, Art Agenda (June 2016), www. art-agenda.com/features/238822/9th-berlin-biennale-the-present-in-drag, accessed 28/07/21. 29. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London; New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 21. 30. Patricia de Vries, ‘Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The Janus Face of Anti-Facial Recognition Masks’, Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, vol. 8, no. 1 (2017), p. 81. 31. Hannah Black, ‘The 9th Berlin Biennale’, Art Forum (September 2016), www.artforum.com/ print/reviews/201607/the-9th-berlin-biennale-63010, accessed 29/07/21. 32. Fred Moten quoted in Adam Fitzgerald, ‘An Interview with Fred Moten’, Literary Hub (August 2015), https://lithub.com/an-interview-with-fred-moten-pt-i/, accessed 30/07/21. 33. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990], October, vol. 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7. 34. Miriam Rasch quoted in Geert Lovink, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (London: Pluto Press, 2019), pp. 42–43. 35. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), p. 114. 36. Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia’ [1935], October, vol. 31 (Winter 1984), p. 25. 37. Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia’, p. 25. 38. Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia’, p. 25. 39. Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia’, pp. 30–32. 40. Stakemeier, ‘Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art’, p. 128. 41. Stakemeier, ‘Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art’, p. 126. 42. See Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the AvantGarde’, in Peter Bürger (ed.), Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xli. 43. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, October, vol. 16 (Spring 1981), p. 54. 44. Georg Grosz quoted in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 117. 45. Brigid Doherty, ‘“We Are All Neurasthenics!” or, the Trauma of Dada Montage’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997), p. 89. 46. This style of deadpan comedy is perhaps best epitomised by the comedian Andy Kaufman and his notorious refusal to tell jokes. Reflecting on this counterintuitive approach, Kaufman has argued that ‘there are times when real life is funnier than deliberate comedy. Therefore I try to create the illusion of . . . “real-life” . . . if I were to let people in on the joke, it wouldn’t have that efect’. Andy Kaufman [1981] quoted in Bill Zehmne, Lost in the Funhouse: The Life & Mind of Andy Kaufman (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 297. 47. Hal Foster, ‘The Art of Cynical Reason’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 107. 48. Foster, ‘The Art of Cynical Reason’, p. 107. 49. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1935], in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 231. 50. Foster, ‘The Art of Cynical Reason’, p. 109. 51. Foster, ‘The Art of Cynical Reason’, p. 112–116. 52. For instance, see Douglas Crimp, ‘The End of Painting’, October, vol. 16 (Spring 1981), pp. 69– 86. Also, see David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman (eds.), Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). This ‘endgame’ discourse is mostly concerned with the status of ‘art’ in a late capitalist world in which it appears to have become synonymous with the luxury commodity object. 53. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica; San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986), p. 15. 54. Hito Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You And Me’, e-flux, Journal #15 (April 2010), www.e-flux.com/ journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you-and-me/, accessed 03/08/21.

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55. Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You And Me’, www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-youand-me/, accessed 03/08/21. 56. Steyerl, ‘A Thing Like You And Me’, www.e-flux.com/journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-youand-me/, accessed 03/08/21. 57. I’m referring to the phrase ‘post-media condition’ in reference to a strand of media theory that highlights the distinctive nature of digital media as a definitive break from earlier forms of media because it appears to encompass and collapse all previous forms into a single homogenous and complex ‘media’ object or stack. Examples of this mode of thinking include Gene Youngblood’s speculations regarding digital video in 1984, whereby ‘all elements of the image exist in the same phenomenological domain . . . a medium in the environmental sense, like language [or] water’. See Gene Youngblood quoted in Timothy Druckrey, Ars Electronica: Facing the Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 45. In a similar vein, Peter Weibel has argued that in our post-media condition, ‘no single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the diferent media influence and determine each other’. See Peter Weibel, ‘The Post-Media Condition’, Mute (March 2012), www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/post-media-condition, accessed 04/08/21. 58. See ‘The Making of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology: Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM’, Rhizome, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/the-making-of-rhizome-s-net-art-anthology-petracortright-s-vvebcam-rhizome/7QUR-i5q5bl1IQ?hl=en, accessed 04/05/23. 59. Petra Cortright quoted in Will A. Brown, ‘I Wanted to Raise Questions about the Way We View Women in a Digital Landscape’, Studio International (September 2015), www.studiointernational.com/index.php/petra-cortright-interview-women-in-a-digital-landscape, accessed 04/08/21. 60. Paul Chan quoted on Rhizome’s ‘Net Art Anthology’, which features a dedicated entry on Cortright’s VVEBCAM. See ‘VVEBCAM’, Rhizome: Net Art Anthology, https://anthology. rhizome.org/vvebcam, accessed 01/05/23. 61. Bruce Sterling, ‘The Ephemera Mine’, Rhizome (March 2018), https://rhizome.org/editorial/ 2018/mar/01/the-ephemera-mine/, accessed 01/05/23/. 62. See ‘Cool’, Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Cool, accessed 01/05/23. 63. Sterling, ‘The Ephemera Mine’, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/mar/01/the-ephemeramine/, accessed 01/05/23/. 64. Cortright quoted in Will A. Brown, ‘I Wanted to Raise Questions about the Way We View Women in a Digital Landscape’, www.studiointernational.com/index.php/petra-cortrightinterview-women-in-a-digital-landscape, accessed 04/08/21. 65. Charlotte Jansen, ‘Petra Cortright Is the Monet of the 21st Century’, Artsy (May 2016), www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-petra-cortright-is-the-monet-of-the-21st-century, accessed 06/08/21. 66. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London; New York: Verso, 1997), p. 17. 67. Jansen, ‘Petra Cortright Is the Monet of the 21st Century’, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorialpetra-cortright-is-the-monet-of-the-21st-century, accessed 06/08/21. 68. Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), p. 5. 69. Cortright quoted in Jansen, ‘Petra Cortright Is the Monet of the 21st Century’, www.artsy.net/ article/artsy-editorial-petra-cortright-is-the-monet-of-the-21st-century, accessed 06/08/21. 70. Daniel Neofetou, Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 165. 71. Cortright describes this making apparent of the digital process as a means of ‘celebrating’ it. See Cortright quoted in Jansen, ‘Petra Cortright Is the Monet of the 21st Century’, www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-petra-cortright-is-the-monet-of-the-21st-century, accessed 06/08/21. 72. Neofetou, Rereading Abstract Expressionism, p. 166. 73. The art critic Walter Robinson coined the term ‘Zombie Formalism’ in an article from 2014, which analyses a particular style of painting that had a great deal of visibility in the art markets of the time. He writes of it as ‘“Formalism” because this art involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist method of making a painting (yes, I admit it, I’m hung up on painting), and “Zombie” because it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of Clement Greenberg, the man who championed Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella’s “black paintings,” among other things’. Walter Robinson, ‘Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism’, Artspace (April 2014), www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_ formalism-52184, accessed 03/05/23.

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74. Neofetou, Rereading Abstract Expressionism, p. 165. 75. Jerry Saltz, ‘Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?’, Vulture (June 2014), www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstract-paintings-look-the-same. html, accessed 03/05/23. 76. Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 164. 77. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London; New York: Verso, 2013), p. 75. 78. Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, p. 75. 79. See www.hotjar.com/get-heatmaps/, accessed 20/05/23. 80. Jori Finkel details Zwirner’s sale of the three editions of Female Figure in the article: ‘Reality Bytes’, W Magazine (December 2014), www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-and-design/ 2014/12/jordan-wolfson-robot-artist/photos/, accessed 08/10/15. 81. Holland Cotter, ‘Where Blue-Chip Brands Meet Brassy Outliers, From Hot to Schlock: Holland Cotter Tours Chelsea Galleries’, New York Times (April 2014), www.nytimes.com/ 2014/04/04/arts/design/from-hot-to-schlock-holland-cotter-tours-chelsea-galleries.html, accessed 08/10/15. 82. Ben Davis, ‘Jordan Wolfson’s Creepy Robot Art Reboots Jef Koons’, Artnet (May 2016), https://news.artnet.com/market/jordan-wolfsons-creepy-robot-art-reboots-jef-koons-493949, accessed 09/08/21. 83. Jack Bankowsky, ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’, in Jordan Wolfson -manic/love truth/ love (New York: Rizzoli, 2018), p. 63. 84. See David Joselit, After Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013). 85. Melissa Gronlund, Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 200. 86. See Paddy Johnson, ‘Is Jordan Wolfson’s Art Meaningless?’, Art F City (March 2014), http:// artfcity.com/2014/03/25/is-jordan-wolfsons-art-meaningless/, accessed 09/08/21. 87. Martin Germann and Aram Moshayedi, ‘Introduction’, in Aram Moshayedi (ed.), Jordan Wolfson: Ecce Homo/le Poseur (Köln: Walther König, 2013), p. 8. 88. Diana Hamilton, ‘Who Likes Jordan Wolfson?’, Frieze (December 2019), www.frieze.com/ article/who-likes-jordan-wolfson, accessed 09/08/21. 89. See Dana Goodyear, ‘Jordan Wolfson’s Edgelord Art’, The New Yorker (March 2020), www. newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/jordan-wolfsons-edgelord-art, accessed 09/08/21. 90. These descriptions of scenes and background imagery were made by Wolfson in a Skype conversation with the author 04/03/15. 91. Jordan Wolfson quoted in Paul Soto, ‘Flattening Exercises: Q+A with Jordan Wolfson’, Art in America (December 2012), www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/ jordan-wolfson-redcat/, accessed 01/10/14. 92. Katherine Guinness, ‘The Coloniser and Corpus Nullius’, Parallax, vol. 26, no. 1 (2020), p. 81. 93. The afective power of Beyoncé’s song is evident in James Montgomery’s enthusiastic review for MTV. He describes ‘Sweet Dreams’s’ ‘gnarly low end (which kind of sounds like Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” for about half a second)’, and praises ‘the spare snare kicks, the expansive-yet-molecular chorus – sonically’, he writes, ‘it’s as adventurous as anything she’s ever released’. See James Montgomery, ‘Beyonce Gets Crazy, Sexy, Cool In “Sweet Dreams” Video’, MTV News (2009), www.mtv.com/news/1615576/beyonce-gets-crazy-sexy-cool-insweet-dreams-video/, accessed 23/10/14. 94. Jordan Wolfson, ‘Flattening Exercises: Q+A with Jordan Wolfson’, www.artinamericamagazine. com/news-features/interviews/jordan-wolfson-redcat/, accessed 01/10/14. 95. Wolfson quoted in Soto, ‘Flattening Exercises: Q+A with Jordan Wolfson’, www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/jordan-wolfson-redcat/, accessed 01/10/14. 96. Wolfson, Skype conversation with author, 04/03/15. 97. Wolfson, Skype conversation with author, 04/03/15. 98. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form) [1929]’ in Richard Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: BFI, 1998), p. 95. 99. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Cinematic Principle and the Ideogram’ [1929], in Jay Leyda (ed.), Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (San Diego; New York; London: Harcourt, Inc, 1977), p. 39.

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100. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 464. 101. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 391. 102. For Benjamin, this ‘dreamtime’ (orig. Zeitraum) is a fact of nineteenth-century capitalism, in which he writes, ‘the individual consciousness more and more secures itself in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep’. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 389. Glossing Benjamin’s notion of ‘dreamtime’ and its association with ideology, Max Pensky writes that capitalism ‘deploys the hypnogogic appearance of endless progress to mask its own delusional core’. See Max Pensky, ‘Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Arcades Project’, in Beatrice Hanssen (ed.), Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 114. 103. Benjamin explains the work: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse-these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’. See Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 460. 104. This description of The Arcades Project made by Wolfson in Skype conversation with the author 04/03/15. 105. Wolfson, Skype conversation with author, 04/03/15. 106. This is, however, an inadvertent efect of the work. The artist explicitly stated to me that Raspberry Poser’s inclusion of SoHo was not in direct reference to one of the main locations of the AIDS crisis. Nevertheless, Wolfson does very explicitly refer to these environments as ‘dream spaces’. 107. See, for instance, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London; New York: Verso, 1992), Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001) and Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Geof Dyer (London; New York: Verso, 2010). 108. Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Afect (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2010), p. 133. 109. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 218. 110. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 218. 111. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 218. 112. Manovich, The Language of New Media, p. 215. 113. Antoinette Rouvroy, ‘Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: Governmentality in Age of Automatic Computing’, in Mireille Hildebrandt and Antoinette Rouvroy (eds.), Law, Human Agency and Automatic Computing: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 122–125. 114. Rouvroy, ‘Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: Governmentality in age of automatic computing’, 122–125. 115. ‘Google’s Definition’, quoted in Danny Sullivan, ‘What Is Google PageRank? A Guide for Searchers and Webmasters’, Search Engine Land (April 2007), http://searchengineland.com/ what-is-google-pagerank-a-guide-for-searchers-webmasters-11068, accessed 31/07/15. 116. Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete’, Wired (June 2008), http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/ pb_theory, accessed 31/07/15. 117. Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete’, http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory, accessed 31/07/15. 118. Olson ‘POSTINTERNET: Art after the Internet’, p. 62. 119. Lovink, Sad by Design, p. 150. 120. This point, made back in 2007, has only intensified since, as similar algorithmic biases afict current Artificial Intelligence models based on datasets of historic information, which often contain hidden prejudices. See, for instance, Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018), and Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 121. For instance, see Ajay Kurian, ‘The Ballet of White Victimhood: On Jordan Wolfson, Petroushka, and Donald Trump’, Artspace (November 2016), www.artspace.com/magazine/con tributors/jottings/ajay-kurian-on-jordan-wolfson-colored-sculpture-54364, accessed 10/08/21.

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122. On this, Guinness argues that ‘The white male body is at best universal and at worst almost invisible. No wonder artists such as Wolfson find it easy to slip in and out of other identities; they simply have to acknowledge their own bodily and phenomenological identities less, and so there is more room in their lived experiences for these forms of artistic embodiment, not very diferent from ‘digital drag’, which media theorist Theresa M. Senft describes as ‘performances in which people (almost always men) attempted to represent themselves in cyberspace as something other than their ofine gender, sexuality, race, or ability’. See Guinness, ‘The Coloniser and Corpus Nullius’, p. 81. 123. Guinness, ‘The Coloniser and Corpus Nullius’, pp. 79–81. 124. See Omar Kholeif, I Was Raised on the Internet (New York; London: Prestel, 2018). 125. Wolfson quoted in Goldstein, ‘Jordan Wolfson on Transforming the “Pollution” of Pop Culture Into Art’, www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/jordan_wolfson_interview52204, accessed 10/08/21. 126. Karen A. Franck, ‘When I Enter Virtual Reality, What Body Will I Leave Behind?’, in Maggie Toy (ed.), Architecture in Cyberspace (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), p. 23. 127. Timo Feldhaus, ‘In the Moment of Terror’, Spike Art Quarterly, no. 40 (Summer 2014), http://spikeart.at/en/a/magazin/back/Encounters, accessed 20/10/14. Also, see Dana Goodyear, ‘Jordan Wolfson’s Edgelord Art’, The New Yorker (March 2020), www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2020/03/16/jordan-wolfsons-edgelord-art, accessed 11/08/21. 128. Adorno discusses the bourgeois ‘window mirror’ in a small subsection of his habilitation thesis, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Adorno examines this device as part of a wider discussion of the bourgeois intérieur in Kierkegaard’s writing, in which he criticises as inherently bourgeois the aspiration to isolate oneself from the capitalist process. The ‘window mirror’ emblematised this point: it was a popular nineteenth-century gadget that passively projected an image from the outside world into the living room for the private enjoyment of the occupant. With this mirroring, reality ‘comes into focus as a mere commodity’. This spectral return of the outside world inside the bourgeois living room leads Adorno to suggest that the ‘harder subjectivity rebounds back into itself from the heteronomous, indeterminate, or simply mean world, the more clearly the external world expresses itself’. The world reflected by the mirror into the living room appears ‘with the facies hippocratica of history, a petrified primordial landscape’. Therefore, the reflected world appears as if on the edge of death, at its worst. It is estranged from any sort of ‘natural’ state and instead appears reified as a commodity, organised according to an abstract principle of exchange. See Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic [1933] (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 42–54. 129. Wolfson explains in conversation that: ‘With the mirror, I was thinking a lot about generic cartoon actions of distortion . . . the mirror can actually be cited as a reference to the Fleischer Brothers in a Cab Calloway animation, in which he takes a mirror and turns into a skeleton. In mine the kid turns into a chair, and then spikes come out of the chair’. The artist also mentions, lending further significance to this motif, that ‘I actually have that [mirror] tattooed on my chest’. Wolfson, Skype conversation with the author, 04/03/15.

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———, ‘The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form) [1929]’ in Richard Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: BFI, 1998), pp. 93–110. Farago, James, ‘Welcome to the LOLhouse: How Berlin’s Biennale Became a Slick, Sarcastic Joke’, The Guardian (June 2016), www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jun/13/berlin-biennaleexhibition-review-new-york-fashion-collective-dis-art, accessed 16/02/21. Feldhaus, Timo, ‘In the Moment of Terror’, Spike Art Quarterly, no. 40 (Summer 2014), http:// spikeart.at/en/a/magazin/back/Encounters, accessed 20/10/14. Finkel, Jori, ‘Reality Bytes’, W Magazine (December 2014), www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-anddesign/2014/12/jordan-wolfson-robot-artist/photos/, accessed 08/10/15. Fitzgerald, Adam, ‘An Interview with Fred Moten’, Literary Hub (August 2015), https://lithub. com/an-interview-with-fred-moten-pt-i/, accessed 30/07/21. Foster, Hal, ‘The Art of Cynical Reason’ in Hal Foster (ed.), The Return of the Real: The AvantGarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 99–126. Franck, Karen A., ‘When I Enter Virtual Reality, What Body Will I Leave Behind?’ in Maggie Toy (ed.), Architecture in Cyberspace (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), pp. 20–23. Goldstein, Andrew M., ‘Jordan Wolfson on Transforming the “Pollution” of Pop Culture Into Art’, Artspace (April 2014), www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/jordan_wolfson_ interview-52204, accessed 10/08/21. Goodyear, Dana, ‘Jordan Wolfson’s Edgelord Art’, The New Yorker (March 2020), www.newyorker. com/magazine/2020/03/16/jordan-wolfsons-edgelord-art, accessed 09/08/21. Gronlund, Melissa, Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 2017). Guinness, Katherine, ‘The Coloniser and Corpus Nullius’, Parallax, vol. 26, no. 1 (2020), pp. 76–88. Hamilton, Diana, ‘Who Likes Jordan Wolfson?’, Frieze (December 2019), www.frieze.com/article/ who-likes-jordan-wolfson, accessed 09/08/21. Hooks, bel, ‘Is Paris Burning’ in bel Hooks (ed.), Black Looks: Race and Representation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 145–156. Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 111–125. ———, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London; New York: Verso, 1992). Jansen, Charlotte, ‘Petra Cortright Is the Monet of the 21st Century’, Artsy (May 2016), www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-petra-cortright-is-the-monet-of-the-21st-century, accessed 06/08/21. Johnson, Paddy, ‘Is Jordan Wolfson’s Art Meaningless?’, Art F City (March 2014), http://artfcity. com/2014/03/25/is-jordan-wolfsons-art-meaningless/, accessed 09/08/21. Joselit, David and Sussman, Elisabeth (eds.), Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). ———, After Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013). Kester, Grant, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke, 2011). Kholeif, Omar, I Was Raised on the Internet (New York; London: Prestel, 2018). Kurian, Ajay, ‘The Ballet of White Victimhood: On Jordan Wolfson, Petroushka, and Donald Trump’, Artspace (November 2016), www.artspace.com/magazine/contributors/jottings/ajaykurian-on-jordan-wolfson-colored-sculpture-54364, accessed 10/08/21. Lovink, Geert, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (London: Pluto Press, 2019). ‘The Making of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology: Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM’, Rhizome, https:// artsandculture.google.com/story/the-making-of-rhizome-s-net-art-anthology-petra-cortright-svvebcam-rhizome/7QUR-i5q5bl1IQ?hl=en, accessed 04/05/23. Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001). McHugh, Gene, Post Internet (Brescia: Link Editions, 2011).

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Montgomery, James, ‘Beyonce Gets Crazy, Sexy, Cool in “Sweet Dreams” Video’, MTV News (2009), www.mtv.com/news/1615576/beyonce-gets-crazy-sexy-cool-in-sweet-dreams-video/, accessed 23/10/14. Moshayedi, Aram (ed.), Jordan Wolfson: Ecce Homo/le Poseur (Köln: Walther König, 2013). Neofetou, Daniel, Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Noble, Safiya, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018). O’Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica; San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986). Öğüt, Ahmet, ‘Obscure Sorrows: Thoughts around the 9th Berlin Biennale’, e-flux, Journal #75 (September 2016), www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67158/obscure-sorrows-thoughts-around-the-9thberlin-biennale/, accessed 28/07/21. Ojewale, Oluwole, ‘What Coltan Mining in the DRC Costs People and the Environment’, The Conversation (May 2022), https://theconversation.com/what-coltan-mining-in-the-drc-costs-peopleand-the-environment-183159, accessed 13/04/23. Olson, Marisa, ‘POSTINTERNET: Art after the Internet’, Foam Magazine, vol. 29 (Winter 2011), pp. 59–63. Palfrey, John and Gasser, Urs, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Pensky, Max, ‘Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Arcades Project’ in Beatrice Hanssen (ed.), Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), pp. 113–131. Quaintance, Morgan, ‘Right Shift’, Art Monthly, no. 387 (June 2015), pp. 5–8. Rancière, Jacques, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Cochran (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). Richter, Hans, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965). Robinson, Walter, ‘Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism’, Artspace (April 2014), www. artspace.com/magazine/contributors/see_here/the_rise_of_zombie_formalism-52184, accessed 03/05/23. Rouvroy, Antoinette, ‘Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: Governmentality in Age of Automatic Computing’ in Mireille Hildebrandt and Antoinette Rouvroy (eds.), Law, Human Agency and Automatic Computing: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 119–140. Saltz, Jerry, ‘Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?’, Vulture (June 2014), www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstract-paintings-look-the-same.html, accessed 03/05/23. Shaviro, Steven, Post-Cinematic Afect (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2010). Soto, Paul, ‘Flattening Exercises: Q+A with Jordan Wolfson’, Art in America (December 2012), www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/jordan-wolfson-redcat/, accessed 01/10/14. Stakemeier, Kerstin, ‘Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art’, Texte zur Kunst, vol. 98 (2015), pp. 124–143. Sterling, Bruce, ‘The Ephemera Mine’, Rhizome (March 2018), https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/ mar/01/the-ephemera-mine/, accessed 01/05/23/. Steyerl, Hito, ‘A Thing Like You And Me’, e-flux, vol. 15 (April 2010), www.e-flux.com/ journal/15/61298/a-thing-like-you-and-me/, accessed 03/08/21. Sullivan, Danny, ‘What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers and Webmasters’, Search Engine Land (April 2007), http://searchengineland.com/what-is-google-pagerank-a-guide-forsearchers-webmasters-11068, accessed 31/07/15. Venturi, Robert, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001). Vierkant, Artie, ‘The Image Object Post-Internet’ (2010), available to view at https://jstchillin.org/ artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_a4.pdf, accessed 26/07/21.

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Virilio, Paul, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London; New York: Verso, 1997). ‘VVEBCAM’, Rhizome: Net Art Anthology, https://anthology.rhizome.org/vvebcam, accessed 01/05/23. Warner, Nick, ‘A Conversation with Marisa Olsen’ in Phoebe Adler et al. (eds.), Art and the Internet (London: Black Dog, 2013). Weibel, Peter, ‘The Post-Media Condition’, Mute (March 2012), www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/ post-media-condition, accessed 04/08/21. Zehmne, Bill, Lost in the Funhouse: The Life & Mind of Andy Kaufman (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).

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With an eerie soundscape of glistening synths, a pixelated animation of a figure looms into view, pointing at us, the viewer. The screen fades to black. A still image of a man in a room, cluttered with computer monitors, slowly appears (Figure 3.1). He has panties wrapped, balaclava-like, around his head and holds a gun in each hand. Both are directed at his temple. The screen cuts to black again. Another pixelated anime figure appears, staring at us. They speak with an electronic voice: As you look into the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity. You see the things that were inside you. This is the womb, the original site of imagination. You do not move your eyes from the screen. You have become invisible. As we hear these words, which propose the digital screen as staging a psychoanalytical ‘womb fantasy’, a series of still images of computer setups flash across the display.1 They are soiled: keyboards, monitors, hard drives, tangled cables, and modems encrusted with decomposing food, cigarette butts, plastic bottles, hair, scrunched-up energy drink cans, and other bits of general detritus, all in rooms that evoke the ‘Hikikomori’ culture of acute social withdrawal discussed in Chapter 1. What are sometimes, more colloquially, known as ‘crazy gross troll caves’.2 So begins Still Life (Betamale) (2013), a five-minute video made by the Canadian postinternet artist Jon Rafman. Following its abject, yet hypnotic, opening few scenes, Still Life (Betamale) continues to subject the viewer to a disturbing collage of ‘hentei’ pornography, anime, and images of masochistic self-destruction, which accumulate and loop throughout the video, sometimes appearing overlaid on top of one another, as if on a computer screen, with one too many tabs open at the same time. One particularly striking and recurrent image shows a lone figure dressed as a fox, slowly drowning in a swamp (Figure 3.2). During the course of the video, the electronic synth soundscape, composed by Oneohtrix Point Never, ebbs and flows, swelling at points and building to moments of extreme catharsis, before fading out into sparse ambient hums and delicate twinkling sounds. This video is one of a triptych of moving image works made by Rafman in the mid2010s, also including Mainsqueeze (2014) and Erysichthon (2015). They comprise a similar collage of grotesque and surreal found footage (still images and clips), combining imagery of computer apparatuses along with those of miscellaneous waste, destruction, and inertia. Mainsqueeze includes an intermittent video of a washing machine tearing itself apart; a graphic clip from a ‘crushing fetish’ video; a ‘hogtied’ figure dressed up as a frog struggling to break free of their binds; and an ofce worker destroying his laptop. Erysichthon includes a snake thrutching, ouroboros-like, to eat its own tail; a clip of a boy going round and round on a swing, making a dizzying loop; and a computer-generated ‘vore’ animation of a dragon swallowing a lion. We are also shown the seemingly infinite DOI: 10.4324/9781003256168-4

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Figure 3.1 Jon Rafman, still from Still Life (Betamale), 2013. Single-channel video, 4:54 min. Source: © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Figure 3.2 Jon Rafman, still from Still Life (Betamale), 2013. Single-channel video, 4:54 min. Source: © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

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100 Art in the Age of 4Chan coils of black-box sever humming in a data centre, whilst an electronic voiceover drones that your fantasies can never be quenched. The clips and images contained in these video works are all appropriated from anonymous online message boards, for instance, and in particular, 4Chan. This is a niche social media platform that is mostly populated by anonymous communities of internet trolls, online gamers, and self-identified NEETs (those not in education, employment, or training) and credited for incubating what is known as the ‘alt-right’.3 It has also been referred to as ‘one of the most impactful generators of online culture’.4 This chapter will unpack this characterisation of 4Chan’s visual culture and explore its appropriation within postinternet art, particularly with Rafman, and in the online audio-visual subculture vaporwave, which attempts to provide a sonic representation of online experience. A Space to Be Wrong 4Chan was launched in October 2003. Its teenage creator, Christopher Poole, set it up as a forum for discussing anime and sharing fan art with a small community of friends. He acquired the source code from a simple Japanese image board called Futaba Channel, whose web address was 2chan.net, and rewrote the site in English. The only thing that was altered was the translation of the kanji signifying Futaba’s default username – ‘Nameless’. Poole changed it to ‘Anonymous’.5 Following Futaba’s model, 4Chan ofered a fully anonymous posting with no required login or membership. It has expanded massively since its release. Poole began by sharing the site with a group of 20 friends, and without ‘any efort or marketing’ the image board grew exponentially.6 At the time of writing, 4Chan boasts over 500,000,000 page impressions per month, over 20,000,000 unique site visitors per month, and 900,000–1,000,000 unique posts per day.7 In an interview with TechCrunch magazine in 2012, Poole suggests that the basis of the site’s success was two features inadvertently appropriated from Futaba: user anonymity and its lack of an archive. ‘We don’t have recognised user accounts’, Poole explains, ‘there are no structural barriers to entry, and anyone can go in and post a comment within five seconds’.8 There is an option to use a pseudonym on 4Chan, but it is uncommon. In an article for Triple Canopy magazine, David Auerbach observes how the technical aspect of anonymity has grown into a self-declared virtue amongst users of the platform, which is protected by a collective form of user policing. ‘[I]rritating the community can result in a member being deanonymized and “doxed” by having their personal information published’, he writes: this is ‘A-culture’s [anonymous culture] form of ostracism’.9 It follows that roughly 90% of all messages on 4Chan are posted under the site’s default tag ‘anonymous’. By maintaining this culture of anonymity, 4Chan allows for an alternative way of being online that difers from mainstream social media platforms. Anonymity was, Julian Dibbell writes, ‘once thought to be a defining attribute of online interaction’.10 Nowadays, however, it is ‘widely approached as a bug to be fixed’.11 Dibbell argues that ‘the clearest demonstration of the internet’s move away from anonymity has been the rise of social-networking sites like Facebook, whose appeal to both users and marketers rests on a closing of the gap between online and ofine identities’.12 Anonymity, therefore, has no place in this system. Indeed, Facebook is built on a model of ‘radical transparency’.13 Its founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, confirms this in an oft-cited statement that ‘having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity’.14 As a result, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has described the necessarily anonymous user of 4Chan as a ‘provocative antithesis to the logic of self-publication and

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the desire to attain recognition or fame’ on mainstream social media platforms. These mainstream platforms, such as Facebook, encourage us to view our public and private selves alike through an entrepreneurial lens. Coleman’s argument, by contrast, suggests that the anonymity practiced on 4Chan enables users to pursue a kind of online life that pushes beyond this, a space free from pecuniary interests and identity politics.16 Lee Knutilla makes a similar claim in an essay titled ‘User Unknown: 4Chan, anonymity and contingency’ (2011). ‘The actions by uncontrolled and anonymous others’, he argues, ‘continually push beyond the simple binaries of you and I, self and single other, troll and victim, joker and audience member’.17 Thus, the centrality of anonymity on 4Chan allowed it to develop as a space for the symbolic resistance of dominant forms of social media capital accumulation. 4Chan’s lack of an archive is also significant to this imagining. ‘The way the software works’, Poole explains, ‘is that you can only have something like 160 threads that exist at any given time on a specific board, and for every new thread that’s posted, an old one gets bumped of’.18 This leads to a flowing waterfall of information and image feeds. Every time a user refreshes the web page, they are confronted with a whole new thread of posts. The lack of an archive means that the content is both anonymous and ephemeral – once it’s bumped of, it disappears (unless it gets reposted by someone else).19 This means that any one user’s experience of the site is likely to be unique. Images and messages vanish as new ones are posted. User-generated content on 4Chan has something like the quality of quicksilver: as soon as a trend or normative identity is established, it quickly slips out of grasp when the user refreshes the page – revealing a new iteration of the thread with new arrangements of content. Knutilla compares this experience to ‘an encounter with anonymity, with a stranger in passing’.20 In a conversation published in 2020 in Art in America between Ara H. Merjian and Mike Rugnetta, Merjian exclaims that 4Chan is ‘so low rent! I thought I’d stumbled upon the internet circa 1999’.21 In response, Rugnetta describes how: Their software hasn’t been updated much. It’s like the punk rock bar that smells bad and doesn’t have working bathrooms. You’re proving that you really want to be there by putting up with the lack of amenities. It’s hostile to outsiders, which is ideal if you don’t want normies coming to your space and seeing what you’re up to. You want to make it kind of weird. And that message-board technology is quick. You want to have a very fast-paced, dense set of interactions, and the simplicity of the technology allows that to happen.22 In this respect, the site is claimed to have a ‘punk’ aesthetic. Despite 4Chan’s emergence in 2003, it mimicked the look and limited functionality of websites in the 1990s, such as Yahoo’s much-satirised ‘Geocities’ web hosting service for user-generated websites. In the years since 2003, despite the large-scale development and increasing complexity of online social media platforms, 4Chan has resolutely stayed the same, keeping its limited and rudimentary interface. Its back-to-basics rejection of the production values of normal social media suggests a kind of online subculture, evoking a tradition of finding empowerment from below, as with the sociological analyses of ‘subcultures’ in the 1970s and 1980s that were prominent in what was known as the Birmingham School for Cultural Studies, particularly for instance, in Dick Hebidge’s research into Punk, Reggae, Hipster, and Glam in his 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style.23 Likewise, the archetypal form of content shared on 4Chan, internet memes, have been theorised in similar terms,

102 Art in the Age of 4Chan particularly in the field of media and communication studies, which tend to highlight the radical participatory and collaborative nature of this form of online image-making. In December 2014, the Journal of Visual Culture published a themed issue on ‘Internet Memes’.24 In 2013, the MIT Press published Limor Shifman’s Meme’s in Digital Culture as part of their ‘essential knowledge’ series.25 And various academics, such as Kate Miltner, Michelle Calka, and Ryan Milner, have been involved in research projects that interrogate the distinctive use of language and linguistic play embedded within this culture of image making.26 In her book Memes in Digital Culture, Shifman argues outright that meme images ‘spread the notion of participatory culture itself’.27 Much of this literature celebrates the images shared on such anonymous online message boards for their participatory impulse and inherent playfulness, signalling the emergence of self-determining communities of users via a technology that we are often told fragments and separates individuals. ‘From an aesthetic point of view’, Merjian suggests, ‘we might think of the meme in terms of what Umberto Eco called the “open work”: unfinished, unresolved, in process, participatory’.28 On this basis, internet memes can potentially be imagined as ‘a widescale creative collaboration’, which poses ‘a meaningful challenge to the media property regime’.29 The conversation between Merjian and Rugnetta moves onto a consideration of how memes and the visual culture of 4Chan share many aesthetic – or anti-aesthetic – strategies with the historic avant-garde Dadaist movement, evoking its ‘aggressively countercultural’ style.30 Superficially, this may be the case. 4Chan’s creator, Poole, once described the platform as a ‘space to be wrong’.31 As a result, its social and visual culture is militantly anonymous, a throwback to the cyberutopian imagining of the internet in the 1990s. There is a severing of the self from the body and its identity on 4Chan that parallels John Perry Barlow’s early theorisation of a cyberspace that is ‘both everywhere and nowhere, but . . . not where bodies live’.32 4Chan is both radically anonymous and ephemeral. This is its diference from mainstream social media platforms. This is also why it has been credited as one of the most impactful generators of online culture: spontaneous, reckless, and shared without caution or accountability. However, it is typical for the critical commentary on 4Chan to maintain careful distance from the specific content shared on its platform: a visually experimental, oftentimes upsetting and shocking culture of image sharing, including internet memes but also what are known as ‘shock videos’, ‘cursed images’, ‘shit-posts’, and ‘copy-pastas’.33 On this basis, 4Chan has been called ‘the asshole of the internet’.34 It has also been referred to as the ‘ninth circle of hell’.35 Elsewhere, it’s been described as an ‘internet hate machine’.36 And a New York Times journalist has labelled it as ‘one of the darkest corners of the web’.37 This demonstrates a strange mutation of the hopes and dreams of Barlow’s cyber-utopianism into chaotic and formless expressions of irony, transgression, and nihilism. The attention given to, what might be described as, the excremental nature of the site suggests a kind of sewage system where all that is unproductive, abject, wasteful, and uncategorisable within our digital economy is filtered through and onto its online platform. Its anonymous community has been described by Coleman as ‘obscene and frequently barely literate – a nonstop stream of language and imagery that’s often racist, sexist and homophobic’.38 The message board is experienced as a flood of wilfully incendiary imagery, comments and pranks, and functions, in some ways, like a game, with users seemingly attempting to outdo one another in terms of provocation.39 The rules of 4Chan – its militantly observed anonymity, its lack of an archive, and the ephemeral nature of content shared – have resulted in a culture of total irresponsibility

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and what Auerbach has described as an ‘economy of ofense’. In this strange economy, users shielded by anonymity compete to share the most shocking and transgressive content. This reflects or evokes a visual culture of the internet that is unconstrained by the terms of service, algorithmic moderation, and data mining practices typical of mainstream social media platforms. It is a visual culture that is radically detached from identity, bodies, morality, social etiquette, and civility. Instead, it is a visual culture produced by the ironic outlook allowed to flourish in a space that is not where bodies live and thus disconnected from any sense of accountability. Whilst Merjian and Rugnetta suggest a Dadaist style to 4Chan’s radical visual culture and ‘economy of ofense’, the more accurate comparison is perhaps to the Surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille, specifically Bataille’s Acéphale, a journal and ‘secret society’ established in 1936 France (which ran until 1939). The emblem for Acéphale was a headless figure illustrated by the Surrealist artist Andre Masson, which celebrated a violent decapitation of identity and thus the afrmation of anonymity, or what Bataille called ‘the chief-less crowd’ (Figure 3.3). This headless, amorphous, and chief-less anonymity, Bataille proposed, might produce ‘a universe which exists in a state of play rather than one of obligation’.41 It is important to note the urgency and larger context of such a claim in the interwar years, as Europe was devastated by an inhuman rationality and perverted sense of obligation to national identity. In this historical moment, Bataille celebrated a world of irrationality, waste, and non-production as symbols of this universe that exists in a state of ‘play’. He was drawn to ‘excremental forces’ that have no obvious or clear place in orderly systems.42 The allure of these ‘excremental forces’, is of an excess that is uncontained and inassimilable to any and all forms of systematic thinking. For Bataille, ‘dirt, disorder, contagion, expenditure, filth, immoderation – and above all, shit – exceed the proper, what constitutes “good taste”, good form, measured production’.43 For Bataille, the ‘excrement philosopher’, there is some sort of salvation in waste.44 There is a Bataillian quality or ‘excremental force’ to the transgressive visual culture of 4Chan. Indeed, the more excremental, the more immoderate, and the more excessive the imagery, the more clout is accorded its anonymous poster. The more shocking and impactful the content, the more likely it is to be reposted and retain visibility on the platform. This content could be anything; it doesn’t matter what it is, so long as it stands out, so long as it sears through the screen, violently unsettles the viewer, and punctures their sense of well-being and comfort. This is a visual culture dedicated and given over to the Barthesian punctum, to images that rupture us; ‘which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’.45 However, in this postinternet context, these ‘excremental forces’ are deployed as a reaction to an internet that increasingly exists in a state of obligation and value production. They are a violent attempt to hold onto a cyberspace that is disappearing, or has already gone (if indeed it ever did exist in actuality), as the internet becomes monopolised by contemporary platforms – from what is known as GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) in the West to the ‘three kingdoms’ of the Chinese Internet (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent). For the last decade or so, these platforms have had a monumental impact on cultural production, as social life happens through and on their propriety software, following their specific rules and protocols. In an analysis of the ‘Platformization of Cultural Production’, Brooke Erin Dufy, Thomas Poell, and David B. Nieborg describe how these online platforms are ‘reconfiguring the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content in staggeringly complex ways’.46 One result of this is a homogenisation and sanitisation of content shared online in order to prioritise its

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Figure 3.3 André Masson, Acephale est la Terre, 1936. Source: Courtesy colaimages/Alamy Stock Photo.

potential for monetisation via paid advertising and other forms of online value production. The Bataillian excess of 4Chan pictures the underside or shadow cast by this ‘Platformization of Cultural Production’. To a certain extent, the visual culture produced by 4Chan’s anonymous mass of online users, which undermines, muddies, and refuses the prerogatives of the digital economy,

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represents what Jean Baudrillard has described as ‘the evil genius of the social’: the revenge of an online community subjected to administration and commercial optimisation that refuses to adapt to its apparatus. Baudrillard, writing in 1985, described this ‘evil genius’ as an efect of polling: attempts by politicians to codify the wants of the masses, who disclose a hidden desire to defy their reduction to data, preventing the poll from ‘achieving the objectives which it claims’.47 The ‘evil genius of the social’ is ‘an irruption into the polls themselves of a ludic, aleatory process . . . a wave of derision, of reversal, and of parody’. ‘They turn themselves’, Baudrillard writes, ‘into an impenetrable and meaningless surface’. The outcome is the production of ‘failure in the truth of the social and in its analysis’.48 Baudrillard was drawn to this ‘evil genius’, as a symbol of how the social will never be fully subsumed by the political and economic systems that address it as such. He writes of the ‘evil genius of the social’ as an ofensive (not defensive) counterstrategy by the object – that, all in all, there exists somewhere an original, positive, possibly victorious strategy of the object opposed to the strategy of the subject (in this case the pollster, or any other producer of messages).49 Similarly, there is an ‘evil genius of the social’ at work on 4Chan, an ofensive counterstrategy to the platformisation of cultural production, which sees social media platforms thrive through expropriating and extracting value from their users and their various activities. The ‘evil genius’ of 4Chan is its prioritisation of an unwieldy, unproductive, and ‘excremental’ visual culture in this otherwise informationalised, privatised, and commercialised world. 4Chan’s extreme negativity and wilfully transgressive nature tend to be rationalised by its apologists as a form of authentic ‘play’, which perhaps maps onto Batailles’s description of the ‘chief-less crowd’. In his aforementioned article, ‘Anonymity as Culture: Treatise’, Auerbach reflects on the typical forms of content exchanged on 4Chan and its unfortunate tendency to manifest in aggressive hate speech. In his understanding, this form of sociability is playful: Anyone entering into an A-culture [anonymous culture] forum is likely to witness a nonstop barrage of obscenity, abuse, hostility, and epithets related to race, gender, and sexuality (‘fag’ being the most common, often prefaced with any trait, e.g., ‘oldfag’, ‘straightfag’). Anyone objecting to this barrage will immediately attract a torrent of even greater abuse. These forums maintain an equilibrium of ofense . . . This is not to say that the participants are not racist; the point is that there’s no way to know the views of the participants, even more given the self-referential irony in constant play. A-culture is hardly a utopia of free speech, but neither is it a fulcrum of hate speech. Yet the barrage inoculates against sincere, extreme hatred by making it harder for genuinely virulent views to stand out.50 We might suggest that in A-culture’s wilful abuse of civility, Auerbach discerns an aspect of ‘sacred seriousness’. This is to say that A-culture generates playful involvement amongst its participants by establishing spatial and temporal borders that designate specific social efects. In his 1938 book on play, Johan Huizinga argues that this sort of ‘sacred seriousness’ is the foundation of ‘play’. ‘Formally speaking’, he writes, there is no distinction whatever between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play. The turf, the tennis court, the chess board

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and the pavement-hopscotch, cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle.51 These spaces, to which Auerbach suggests 4Chan’s message board corresponds, produce intensive afects that Huizinga (writing in the 1930s) suggests counter the anti-play of ‘our worship of technological progress, which was itself the fruit of rationalism and utilitarianism [and caused people to] mould the world after the patterns of their own banality’.52 In 4Chan, this sacredly observed (thus seemingly irrational) ‘play’ is felt to foster a spatial and temporal zone that counters the productive drive of the digital economy. For instance, the ‘equilibrium of ofense’ that Auberbach mentions abuses the sort of singular identities that can be so efciently mined and monetised by marketing technologies. This ‘equilibrium of ofense’ – otherwise referred to, by Auerbach as an ‘economy of ofense’ – ensures that no idea or act exists outside of irony, and that nothing can be taken more seriously than anything else. It can also be seen, I think, as synonymous with the logic of ‘lulz’, which is commonly equated with online behaviour on message boards: Lulz is a corruption of LOL, which stands for ‘laugh out loud’, signifying laughter at someone else’s expense . . . Lulz is the only good reason to do anything . . . After every action taken, you must make the epilogic dubious disclaimer: ‘I did it for the lulz’.53 On 4Chan, this lulzy ‘equilibrium of ofence’ is forcefully maintained. If not, the unwilling user will be alienated from the group. This is identifiable in the emotional distress recounted by users who have unwittingly mistaken this language and abuse for sincere animosity. When a user threatens to take severe personal action in response to abuse (Auberbach cites instances of self-harm), a typical response is to further ridicule said user until they leave the conversation thread.54 This pathological form of play might be seen to epitomise an acting-out against the platfomisation of the internet and an increasingly dysphoric ‘world picture’ (as explored in Chapter 1). Indeed, the playful nastiness that is associated with the aforementioned logic of lulz, as Enyclopedia Dramatica argues, ‘is engaged in by Internet users who have witnessed one major economic/environmental/ political disaster too many’.55 As a result, they adopt ‘a state of voluntary, gleeful sociopathy over the world’s current apocalyptic state’.56 Further to this, we might consider (as another antagonising variable), the extreme commodification of one’s identity and activity that takes place online, which appears to relinquish and alienate the utopian potential of the early internet.57 In reaction, 4Chan insists on an uncompromising (or, for Auberbach, playful) abuse of identity: a form of aggressive and unpredictable social activity that purports to resist instrumentalisation and value capture. In doing so, Auerbach proposes that 4Chan recovers an authentic mode of play. This form of play invoked by Auerbach has an important history of theorisation on the Left. Indeed, 4Chan’s ‘equilibrium of ofense’ might seem to reactivate surrealist writer and sociologist Roger Caillois’s conceptualisation of ‘play’ in his book Man, Play and Games (1961), which builds upon Huizinga’s account. Caillois considers the way in which play serves to suspend direct engagement with normal social and political life, allowing for a separate, uncertain, and unproductive occupation. Caillois notes Huizinga’s remarks that play is what we might call: a free activity, standing quite consciously outside ordinary life as being not serious, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly . . . an activity connected

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with no material interest, and [from which] no profit can be gained . . . proceed[ing] within its own proper boundaries of time and space.58 Following this, Caillois explains that play crucially ‘creates no wealth or goods, thus difering from work or art . . . Nothing has been harvested or manufactured, no masterpiece has been created, no capital has accrued. Play is an occasion of pure waste; waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill’.59 This Cailloisian sense of play, which is negative and non-productive, can be identified in Auerbach’s ‘equilibrium of ofense’, and is present, for instance, in his analysis of the site’s use of the pejorative epithet ‘fag’. The term is employed as a label that denotes group membership. So, everyone is a ‘fag’. It is one of the rules of 4Chan’s game, which creates a sense of indiference to normal social codes. There is an attempt to preserve the stigma of the word, but drain it of historical meaning, leaving an excessive and abstracted sign of abuse. In doing so, the possibility of a genuine identity politics is cancelled out through aggressively policed anonymity and a playfully indiscriminate smearing of all forms of individuated identity. Within this framework, the possibility of establishing genuine intentionality collapses.60 Needless to say, the reclamation of the term in this context is diferent from the reclamation of other hateful slur words, as in, for instance, Queer Theory, where the insult is given a new positive meaning. The reclamation of the term at issue is specifically mediated by the parameters of 4Chan’s rules: its anonymity and ephemerality give full reign to a culture of sociopathy and involuntary hate without accountability. On 4Chan, the term is reclaimed only for its ofence and ofensive associations. It functions negatively, with the purpose of outraging and removing anyone not willing to comply with the site’s incendiary culture. For Auerbach, this form of play is a legitimate means of self-determination for that community of users. He writes that ‘in making their own contributions to that [4Chan’s] world (however unreal), participants establish ownership; the world becomes their own because it is distinct and detached from the real one’.61 However, it seems too simple to celebrate 4Chan in these terms: as a site of ‘playful’ resistance to the internet’s platformisation. Its sacredly observed rules are not authentically ‘playful’. It is not a ‘free activity’. It is exclusionary: totalitarian in its lack of empathy and subservience to arbitrary rules designed to alienate anyone not willing to embrace its anonymity, which ultimately, Whitney Phillips has suggested, comes from a place of privilege and a determinately androcentric worldview.62 Moreover, the supposedly radical or transgressive nature of this ‘play’ does not necessarily proceed within its own boundaries of time and space. Rather, it can be thought of more simply as a symptom of computer-mediated communication, which often produces this form of anti-social behaviour. Digging deeper into the history of computing and online communities, we find a useful study published in American Psychologist in 1984 that observes similar behaviour patterns amongst networked computer users. Indeed, this paper proposes a perspective that can be applied to 4Chan’s ‘equilibrium of ofense’. The article, titled ‘Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication’, claims that the type of uninhibited and violent humour that is common in computer-mediated communication might, more simply, be a result of that mediation. For them, it is a consequence of a user’s integration into the machine. The authors suggest that: using the computer tends to be absorbing and conducive to quick response, which might reduce self-awareness and increase the feeling of being submerged in the machine. Thus, the overall weakening of self- or normative regulation might be similar

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to what happens when people become less self-aware and submerged in a group, that is, deindividuated.63 This early paper on computer-mediated behaviour, quite remarkably, comments on ‘flaming’: a tendency to express oneself more strongly on the computer than in other settings. They write about the earliest iteration of the internet, ARPANET, which was a collaborative research project between a subdivision of the US Department of Defence, MIT, and Berkeley. ARPANET was initially designed as a means to transfer files and electronic mail between multiple organisations in separate geographical locations, which might serve to maintain government and military communications during a nuclear war.64 Sara Kiesler, Jane Siegl, and Timothy W. McGuire describe how the discussion on this modest peer network of strictly scientific and academic computers nevertheless required policing for offensive content. Every few days, it needed ‘manually screening [for] messages . . . deemed in bad taste’.65 Further to this, the paper contains details of an experimental study carried out with groups of people who were asked to reach consensus on a choice-dilemma problem in three diferent contexts, one of which physically separated each person and allowed them to use a computer anonymously. Whilst the data showed ‘that computermediated communication had marked efects on communication efciency, participation, interpersonal behavior, and decision making’, they nonetheless exhibited what appeared to be ‘uninhibited verbal behavior, defined as frequency of remarks containing swearing, insults, name calling, and hostile comments’.66 Like the users of ARPANET, it is as if they just could not help themselves when given the afordances of anonymity. The same might be said of 4Chan: not heroically anonymous but rather pathetically deindivuated. Neo-NEET-Expressionism It is the ‘excremental force’ and pathetic deindividuation of 4Chan’s visual culture that Rafman is drawn to in works such as Still Life (Betamale). Described as ‘a shocking glimpse at some of the darkest, most neurotic corners of the internet’, Still Life (Betamale) was first exhibited on 4Chan in September 2013, the platform from which it appropriated most of its footage.67 In this sense, the video was fed back to the culture it took from and subjected to the critical reception of its anonymous community. The screed of messages and comments that followed are archived on Rafman’s website, in which it appears the artist struck a collective nerve, with many comments highlighting its intense afective impact, particularly in response to its still images of soiled computer set-ups: ‘some of those computer setups were unbelievably depressing. The one on the unadorned mattress was heartbreaking’; ‘I feel sick’; ‘I should be desensitized to this sort of shit by now, but I still feel totally shellshocked after watching it’; ‘god this shit is gritty and nasty and inexplicably surreal’; ‘pretty fucked up, i’m at a loss for words’; ‘That was weirdly moving’; ‘that was really afecting. holy shit’.68 Clearly, Still Life (Betamale) is unsettling. Its reception on 4Chan tends to highlight the sort of ‘terror of pleasure’ normally reserved for the horror genre.69 It is as if, when confronted with Rafman’s collage of archived online content, the viewer’s critical faculties are suspended and overwhelmed by its afective experience. ‘Yeah, I have no idea why but I almost started crying during it’, one commentator on 4Chan remarks, ‘I don’t know, I mean I just don’t know’.70 Still Life (Betamale) has subsequently been shown in more traditional contemporary art exhibition spaces. However, its display in these spaces seems similarly designed to encourage this sort of intense, overwhelming experience. The artist has described his work

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as a ‘filmic representation of surfing the internet’. He wants to give a somatic and visceral feeling to this ordinary engagement with the digital screen, where we surf through content, skimming its surface, without being made to apprehend its cavernous depths. In Rafman’s hands, we are made to feel this depth, as if surfing an ocean whose magnitude is suddenly made visible, a glimpse at an excessive horror where chaos and nonsense rule: an internet that defies conceptualisation. Rafman typically installs his works in immersive environments to encourage this sort of overwhelming experience, restricting the audience’s mobility and intensifying their attention to the imagery in the videos. For instance, in an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2016, viewers were invited to watch Still Life (Betamale) from a ball-pool display structure, efectively immobilising them beneath a screen as the artwork played out. In other exhibitions of Rafman’s work, viewers are invited to sit on and sink into custom-made polyurethane foam-covered chairs, which have the appearance of chewed-up chewing gum or melted waxy flesh, or alternatively, sit in reformatted medical chairs, which contort the body and afx their attention to screens that play the videos on a loop. Rafman’s Still Life (Betamale) and the torturous environments it is displayed within appeal to the generic tropes of horror. Its audio-visual-physical experience immobilises the body, taking away our agency. Moreover, the artist’s specific curation of ‘excremental’ content from 4Chan’s anonymous ‘economy of ofense’ seems designed to evoke a feeling of abject horror in the viewer. The series of images of soiled computer apparatuses in cluttered bedrooms, with stained mattresses and accumulations of general refuse, which flit across the screen at various intervals, are evocative of the ‘Terrible Place’. This is a recurring device in horror cinema, which tends to imagine domestic spaces of safety and security (for instance, the home) as sources of potential horror. The film theorist Carol J. Clover has discussed the ‘Terrible Place’, in her influential essay ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’ (1987), as a ‘venerable element of horror’. The house, Clover writes, ‘may at first seem a safe haven, but the same walls that promise to keep the killer out quickly become, once the killer penetrates them, the walls that hold the victim in’.72 An exemplar of this, cited by Clover, is Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), whose narrative is set in rural Texas in the post-industrialised USA. In the film, a home that promises refuge for our protagonists is fast revealed to be a ‘Terrible Place’, occupied by a murderous brood of declassed slaughterhouse workers. The horror of the ‘Terrible Place’ is the way it disrupts the normal coding of spaces associated with security and homeliness, shattering these preconceptions with images of chaos and disintegration that are threatening, potentially fatal, to the subject. This efect is amplified in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as the normal order and wholeness of post-industrial North America are also destroyed by its ‘terrible’ image of a family of ex-workers, who now have no productive role in society, descendent into a state of violent abjection. The domestic spaces in Still Life (Betamale) similarly evoke the dialectic of the ‘Terrible Place’: both homely and/or threatening. They are full of paraphernalia associated with telecommunications: devices, screens, interconnected cables, keyboards, and hard drives. All items essential to the open, participatory system of communicative capitalism. This apparatus promises us access to cyberspace, a supposedly immaterial system of exchange, sharing, and access to information. In short, cyberspace is coded as secure and homely – a sanctuary that nourishes and works for our betterment and that does not have a threatening or deleterious materiality. This understanding is disrupted by Rafman’s picturing of the digitised environment, which leaves in its wake an accumulation of material chaos and impoverishment; images of screens and all their promises of open

110 Art in the Age of 4Chan access and participation are seen drowning in dirt and paired with images of subjective isolation. This space, which purports to be a sanctuary or ‘safe haven’, is instead imagined as a trap. All of the figures shown in Still Life (Betamale) are alone, fixed in a state of pathos, confined by the limited aspect ratio of the screen: a lone man, gagged, holds a gun in each hand, pointed at his head, as the camera performs a slow zoom-in (Figure 3.1); a figure dressed up as a fox slowly drowns in a swamp, gasping silently (Figure 3.2). The electronic soundscape hums melancholically, providing no relief and only intensifying the sense of doom. These figures appear clownish, sad, and pathetic: stand-ins for 4Chan’s anonymous users, contemporary re-articulations of Masson’s headless Acéphale. Furthermore, Rafman’s picturing of the 4Chan user evokes Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s analysis of the art historical motif of the clown as ‘an essentially powerless, docile, and entertaining figure performing his acts of subversion and mockery from an undialectical fixation on utopian thought’.73 The electronic voiceover employed in Still Life (Betamale) is apposite in this respect: [A]s you look into the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity. For a moment it all interlocks, but then a new pattern of order-disorder emerges in front of you. Always the one before the last. You are again in a dream, walking endlessly. And you can’t find your way out of the maze you are convinced it’s been created solely for you. 4Chan’s visual culture, which is appropriated in Rafman’s work, and its desperate appeal to Bataillian ‘excremental forces’ as a defence against the sanitised and monetised internet are overlaid with feelings of pathos, doom, dread, and fatalism. It does not have the irruptive and vital energy of Bataille’s writing. Rather, it is downbeat and depressive in tone. The film theorist Robin Wood once ofered a definition of the horror film as a ‘collective nightmare’, something that ‘brings to a focus a spirit of negativity’, which ‘seems to lie not far below the surface of the modern collective consciousness’.74 Similarly, Still Life (Betamale) represents 4Chan as a ‘collective nightmare’, revealing a squirming, abject, and negativity that seems to lie not far below the surface of the screen. This sensibility carries through in Rafman’s more recent work, in which he employs machine learning technologies, which are trained on online image datasets, and able to automatically convert textual prompts into ‘photographic’ images. Rather than using these cutting-edge technologies to produce plausible ‘photo-realist’ representations of the world, Rafman uses algorithmic artificial intelligence (AI) image-generating software to highlight the strange machine vision chewing over the dataset and struggling to respond to its textual prompts. In works such as 𐤒𐤓𐤌𐤟𐤎𐤅𐤎𐤉𐤌 (Cheval Crème), 2022, an AI generated image is printed to a painted canvas, replete with textured brushstrokes, as if caught in a state of processing (Figure 3.4). These hybrid objects function in a similar way to Cortright’s painting (discussed in Chapter 2), ofering an ersatz simulation of gestural abstraction. In this sense, they reveal the abstractions that structure algorithmic interpretations of the world, and the ruptures or non-simultaneities of such a digitised vision, which aspires but struggles to achieve a sense of realism. Again, there is a Bataillian aesthetic to this work. The partial, fragmented, broken-up, gloopy, and viscous-looking images, which are almost photographic in their realism and representational fidelity, appear formless, ground-down, and squashed. Rafman’s textual prompts produce images where representation is caught in a state of slimy dissolution. There is no clear distinction between figure and ground, instead they melt into one another, producing a strange new version of an abstract expressionist all-over painting.

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Figure 3.4 Jon Rafman, 𐤒𐤓𐤌𐤟𐤎𐤅𐤎𐤉𐤌 (Cheval Crème), 2022. Inkjet print and acrylic on canvas, 186.7 × 134.6 cm/73.5 × 53 inches. Source: © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

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But what can we glean from Rafman’s focus on the abject and visceral in his artworks, which attempt to picture or crystallise the visual culture of 4Chan in a manner similar to the horror genre – in a manner that asserts some sort of a bodily experience? It insists on a visceral experience of the internet, appropriating the ‘excremental’ imagery of 4Chan as part of a larger refusal of the normal ideological register of the digital as immaterial and sanitised. The critical value of this mode of representation is to deconstruct this mythology, forcing a bodily apprehension of the internet. Rafman does so by substituting the immaterial symbolism of the digital world with a visual language of excess and abjection borrowed in part from 4Chan. Hal Foster has suggested that ‘there is often an insistence on the body . . . at times of technological transformation, as though each wave of new media might be countervailed by a call to our old carnalities’.75 4Chan’s ‘economy of offense’ and culture of transgressive image sharing might be imagined in these terms as an insistence on the body and visceral experience in a system that disembodies experience, smoothing it out and sanitising it as part of a larger platformisation of cultural production. However, Rafman’s work pictures this visual culture as depressing and hollowedout. It gives witness to the negative, often wretched, structures of feeling produced by the level of anonymity aforded online, which can no longer be imagined in the utopian terms of the early cyber-theorists of the 1990s. I first started researching 4Chan in the early 2010s, during my PhD study. Then, 4Chan was a curiosity, a strange holdover from the early internet of the 1990s, which attempted to hold onto its radical promise as a playful resistance to the corporatisation of the online world, and the attendant collapse of ‘digital dualism’ (the imagined gap between the on-and-ofine). However, in the intervening years, the narrative surrounding 4Chan has changed in a manner pre-empted by the abject imagery collected and fused together in Rafman’s Still Life (Betamale). In 1939, Max Horkheimer memorably wrote that ‘whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism’.76 Today, we might alter and update this claim: whoever is not willing to talk about 4Chan should also keep quiet about neo-fascism and the alt-right.77 A contemporary account of 4Chan must necessarily confront its relationship to the emergence of visible forms of neo-fascism within the contemporary social and political landscape. Rather than a form of transgressive play that stands outside ordinary life, in the last few years, 4Chan’s nihilistic and hyper-aggressive form of sociability has bled out in the real world and increasingly influenced the mainstream political sphere and contributed to acts of extremist violence.78 This has been chronicled in detail in two book-length studies of the phenomena: Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the AltRight (2017) and Dale Beran’s It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Ofce (2019). Both Nagle and Beran highlight the impact of 4Chan in fueling the rise of fascistic subjectivities and political leanings today, focusing on the negativity facilitated by the platform’s privileging of an unaccountable anonymity and ephemeral culture of exchange. This is to suggest that 4Chan has given a platform for users to express and act out their resentment towards our ‘dysphoric world picture’, which has both exacerbated social and political inequalities and severed the imaginative capacity to envision alternatives. For instance, Beran discusses the rise of a resentful and nihilistic sensibility amongst 4Chan’s typically white and male users (the Betamales, referenced in the title of Rafman’s work), who indulge in a feeling of victimhood, of being cut out from society, left alone behind a computer screen. By 2012 groups of isolated, de-classed individuals began to appear [on 4Chan]. Cut of from humanity, they evaluated themselves by their use. They were not revolutionaries,

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but NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). Weirdly, they defined their existence by their lack of employment . . . And by this simplified metric, they considered themselves worthless . . . In their defeated and unquestioning cynicism, they saw the world as a video game – deterministic and drained of all meaning.79 Beran identifies a parallel between the declassed online masses and those impacted by the inequalities of industrialisation in the 1920s. ‘Modern existence’, he explains, ‘produced a vast new anti-class composed of isolated, de-classed individuals, torn from . . . traditional social structures . . . when, in the throes of industrialization, market changes, and crises, they lost their jobs or perhaps their entire job sector and thus held no economic purpose and, by extension, no place in society’.80 This new anti-class was diferent from the working class, Beran insists. Instead, it represents what Hannah Arendt has described in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) as ‘the refuse of all classes’.81 Certainly, this description is evocative of the wasteful and excremental nature of the content and form of exchange on 4Chan, which might be understood as the ‘refuse’ of social media. These are the negative social conditions and the nihilistic view of the world that have been theorised as leading to fascism, which results, as Beran suggests, ‘when these previously apolitical masses disposed by capitalism began to rebel against it, without discarding its cruel-minded competitive way of thinking’.82 It is beyond the purview of this book to document the fascistic trajectory of 4Chan, and I would recommend anyone interested in this from a sociological perspective to look at Nagle’s and Beran’s detailed accounts. However, some illustrative key events, figures, and groups in this narrative of 4Chan’s descent into a populist fascism in the mid-late 2010s, or what is otherwise known as the ‘alt-right’, include: Gamergate; Elliot Rodger; Dylan Roof; Milo Yiannopoulos; Steve Bannon; Donald Trump; Charlottesville; Richard Spencer; The Proud Boys; Pizzagate; and Q-Anon. The key takeaway is that 4Chan’s ‘space to be wrong’, became a space to express and reproduce anti-social and reactionary sentiments and slurs. The extreme misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racism initially levied as a form of, albeit toxic, transgressive and ironic play were weaponised by the far right as the ideological basis for a reactionary politics that targeted particular – traditionally othered – social identity groups as the cause of the inequities of contemporary capitalism. Thus, the cyber-utopian imagining of the internet, which initially informed 4Chan’s ‘space to be wrong’, has ultimately resulted in the ‘continued maintenance of subjects formed by patriarchal, hetero-sexist relations’ and the perpetuation of ‘social hatred’ of otherness.83 In a conversation on ‘Anti-fascist Art Theory’ between Angela Dimitrakaki, Marina Vishmidt, and Larne Abse Gogarty, Vishmidt wonders ‘if art theory, or aesthetic theory more broadly, can give us some insight into the “structures of feeling” that . . . can normalise or mystify fascism’.84 To a certain extent, Rafman’s treatment of appropriated material from 4Chan is revealing of these ‘structures of feeling’. Its appropriation of its visual language does not strengthen or add to the mythologisation of 4Chan’s anonymous culture within alt-right circles. Instead, its rendering of this world in a visceral aesthetic of slime, goo, and crushing ooze, and its appeal to an afect of overwhelming excess, is unsettling. Rather than ‘metallise’ the nascent fascistic subject, Rafman melts it into an indeterminate and autophagic form.85 In Rafman’s hands, 4Chan’s visual culture is not hardened and galvanised. It is made expressionistic; we experience it sensually, both sublime and utterly grotesque. The hypnotic melange of imagery and evocative synth soundscapes of Still Life (Betamale) endow its ‘terrible places’ and tragic clownlike figures with a certain romantic pathos. Gogarty usefully describes how the current fascistic zeitgeist ‘fantasise[s] about entirely evacuating history and the social, in favour

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of an atomised, self-possessing subject’.86 To a certain extent, this online tendency to evacuate history and the social, in favour of an atomised subjective representation of the world reprises an expressionistic aesthetic. This early-twentieth-century art movement emerged in a time of rapid industrialisation, market changes, and post-war crises. It pictured this world and its cataclysmic impact on the body with a distinctive visual and textual language of distortion and vivid, lurid colours, to create heightened emotional efects, providing form and feeling to traumatic historical change. Despite its radical aesthetic form, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács was a staunch critic of the movement. In an essay titled ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ (1934), Lukács argued that expressionism’s aesthetic tendencies, of abstracting away from reality, obscured the political consciousness required in such a time of crisis. There is .  .  . a general estrangement from the concrete problems of the economy, a concealment of the connections between economy, society and ideology, with the result that these questions are increasingly mystified. The growing mystification and mythologization . . . of problems opens a way to presenting what is criticized either outside any connection with capitalism, or else giving capitalism itself so evaporated, distorted and mystified a form that the criticism does not lead to any kind of struggle, but rather to a parasitic acquiescence with the system.87 Lukács’s core critique of expressionism was that its despairing, contextless, and mystified representation of the world, which was not clearly connected to any form of social consciousness or political awareness, functioned to negate the theorisation of any potential alternatives. This inherently apolitical and regressive style became what Lukács called, noting Joseph Goebbels’s positive assessment, an ‘adaptable means for fascist propaganda’.88 Rafman encourages us to uncover a similarly expressionistic aesthetic at play in 4Chan’s specific visual and social culture. Indeed, this parallel maps onto our earlier discussion of anonymity and ephemerality on the platform. The impression of a lack of accountability or responsibility for your actions on 4Chan is key to its expressionistic aesthetic. An inadvertent outcome of (4Chan creator) Poole’s idea for an anonymous and transient form of online exchange was the construction of a fantasy space that gratifies a users’ desire to transgress. In this sense, 4Chan has come to occupy for its users something like the compensatory role that Sigmund Freud attributed to ‘art’. In this understanding, ‘art’ is conceived as an alternative to reality: a ‘phantasy-life [that] allows full play to [the artist or spectators] erotic and ambitious wishes’.89 Freud’s concept of ‘art’ is foundational to the art theorist Craig Owen’s critique of the revival of an expressionist aesthetic in the neo-expressionist painting of the 1980s. In an essay titled ‘Honor, Power and the Love of Women’, Owen’s interprets the neo-expressionist canvas as a fantasy space, where the (invariably male) artist can sublimate a feeling of aggression or desire for mastery and autonomy, which they struggle to express and achieve in the real world, thus gratifying their ‘(masculine) desire to be a hero’.90 Reflecting on Freud’s analysis, Owens’s suggests that there is an inherent frustration or feeling of lack in this particular concept of ‘art’: What is the source of the artist’s desire, then, if not the sense of frustration that Freud locates at the origin of the work of art, his sense of powerlessness to achieve in reality what he desires in his fantasy? His desire to be a hero, then – ‘to feel and act and to arrange things according to his desires’ – arises only because he believes he lacks this power.91

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The imagining of 4Chan as a ‘space to be wrong’ and as a space where communication is immediate, spontaneous, and impulsive fulfils the same compensatory role accorded to ‘art’ by Freud. In a digital economy that reproduces itself through the rigorous surveillance and tracking of internet users, to the extent that we are always addressing some unseen authority, 4Chan promises salvation from this experience of daily alienation. On 4Chan, anonymous users are given a phantasy of feeling, acting, and arranging things according to their desires, rather than the desires of their digital surveillers. Rafman’s picturing of 4Chan in Still Life (Betamale), (which carries through in Mainsqueeze and Erysichthon) reveals a sort of neo-neo-expressionism – or neo-NEET-Expressionism – at play online. A technologised expressionism; an adaptable means of fascistic propaganda; a ‘collective nightmare’ and ‘spirit of negativity’ that is increasingly now on the surface of the modern collective consciousness. Ecco Jams and Male Fantasies The soundtrack for Still Life (Betamale) was created by Oneohtrix Point Never, a pseudonym for Daniel Lopatin, an experimental electronic music producer and composer based in the USA. Lopatin is known as a pioneer of vaporwave, an online audio-visual subculture that emerged in the early 2010s amongst producers working under obscure pseudonyms who initially built an audience on anonymous message boards such as 4Chan and other audio distribution platforms, for example, Mediafire, Last FM, Soundcloud, Tumblr, and Bandcamp. The vaporwave audio-visual aesthetic maps onto our discussion of 4Chan, in particular its atomised mode of representation based on the appropriation and distortion of found material. ‘The typical vaporwave track is a wholly synthesised or heavily processed chunk of corporate mood music’, Adam Harper writes, ‘bright and earnest or slow and sultry, often beautiful, either looped out of sync and beyond the point of functionality or standing alone, and sometimes with a smattering of miasma about it’.92 Although vaporwave requires a fairly rudimentary understanding of music production techniques, such as slowing down and/or looping samples and sound mixing, it has a distinctive and particular sound, evoking a knotted set of afects: variously hollow and generic, and also deeply emotive or ‘oceanic’, to borrow Freud’s labelling of an afective response to an object that plunges the viewer into total reverie.93 Reflecting on his 2010 release, Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, Lopatin has claimed that the ‘entire point of eccojams’, which consists entirely of looping, efects-laden samples from popular songs from the 1980s and 1990s, ‘was that it was a DIY practice that didn’t involve any specialised music tech knowledge and for me it was a direct way of dealing with audio in a mutable, philosophical way that had very little to do with music and everything to do with FEELINGS’.94 In this respect, vaporwave is often theorised as providing an aural representation of the ‘structures of feeling’ produced by certain aspects of online experience. For instance, of ‘cultural and informational oversaturation’ informed by the ‘exponential growth of online media channels’, which render a sense of total availability and access to a history of recorded music that can be ‘mined and reused in ways that recontextualize (or decontextualize) its original meaning’.95 And of the subsequent anomie and strange temporality, or placelessness, this creates in the user, where ‘the past and the present commingle in a way that makes time itself mushy and spongiform’.96 Lopatin evokes this sensibility in Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 by sampling popular music and commercial culture from the 1980s and 1990s, the cyber-utopian period of the internet, when technology was imagined and speculated in emancipatory terms: an

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‘ideological utopia free from the tangible everyday’.97 Lopatin does so with a heavily processed and synthetic sound: fragmented, chopped-up, and distorted, producing a heightened sense of nostalgia for this utopian moment, albeit with a keen sense of its illusory quality. It creates a feeling of a broken future or of the unrealised futures promised by its various reference points. Indeed, the label vaporwave, as Adam Trainor has observed, ‘is also similar to the term vaporware, which describes computing projects that, even though advertised and promoted, are never in fact released’.98 This results in an analgesic sound: a drowsy, dizzy, and foggy feeling. A sense of familiarity yet also confounding placelessness. The second track of Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1 – titled ‘A2’ – is indicative of this feeling. A2 appropriates a single short section of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Only Over You’ (1983), which is slowed down and looped at irregular intervals throughout the track’s 3:48 running time. This fixates on the original song’s refrain: Angel please don’t go, I miss you when you go, Please stay. A phaser modulation efect is added to certain phrases, which gives a synthetic, detached feeling to the natural grain of Christine McVie’s imploring vocal. Lopatin also released a video for the track on YouTube, which features chopped-up clips from advertisements for early VCR technologies, cassette players, neon 1980s graphics of a home computer and early operating system interfaces, and footage of an idyllic ocean sunset. These images are edited in a similar manner to the sound: variously slowed down, looped at irregular intervals, and cut short. These rudimentary, non-specialised editing audio-visual editing techniques result in a strange melange of afects: emotive, intense, detached, hollow, tedious, evocative, and nostalgic. This aesthetic, which does not hide its basic production techniques and yet taps into the buried, ecstatic utopianism of the digital age, produces a feeling that parallels Sianne Ngai’s definition of the ‘stuplime’: a neologism describing a ‘tension that holds opposing afects together’.99 Both sublime and stupid, Ngai writes of the ‘stuplime’ as something that speaks to the aesthetic experience of mass accumulations of information or data. Whilst the scale of these accumulations induces a sense of astonishment, the accumulation of data puts strain on the viewers’ capacity to metabolise the information; it both exhausts and astounds. The feeling of ‘stuplimity’, for Ngai, ‘reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality’.100 In this postinternet context, the ‘stuplime’ is fitting: capturing the individual’s experience of the internet’s planetary-scale megastructure; the tension between a seemingly infinite cyberspace and the finite body. I earlier described vaporwave’s ‘stuplime’ sound as analgesic. Its fragmented and chopped-up appropriated content is not jarring or overwhelmingly dissonant, as we might expect. Instead, it has a pleasurably woozy, viscous, and narcotic aesthetic. It is a thick sound, despite its tendency to strip the mid-section tones from the mix.101 It also produces a deep feeling of uneasy pleasure from its excavations of obsolescent media artefacts, symbols of broken technological futures. Lopatin has described wanting to use the cultural and informational saturation of the internet and its spongiform temporality as a means for opening up ‘spaces for ecstatic regression’.102 This ‘ecstatic regression’ is captured in Lopatin’s use of obsolescent relics from a not-so-distant technological past and the various cultural memories they evoke, which are remediated via an embrace of consumer-grade production techniques. This ‘ecstatic regression’ is also present in other vaporwave albums, notably Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe, described by Pitchfork magazine as a ‘pioneering document’ of 2011.103 This album samples, remediates, loops, slows down, and stutters sounds taken from early Nintendo video games, Sade, Diana Ross, generic New-Age, and corporate muzak. It combines these references with heavy

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washes of synths and hard-cuts, which variously tease and then obfuscate recognition of the source material, using digital production techniques to produce new emotional resonances in found or cliché content. In the aforementioned Pitchfork review, Miles Bowe struggles to pin down and articulate the album’s sonic particularity, which, as with Ngai’s ‘stuplime’, produces a tension that holds seemingly oppositional afects together. ‘Its ability to channel personal ennui, despair, isolation, hope, and stupefying overstimulation’, for Bowe, results in ‘a new musical language . . . as personal as a diary and as universal as a meme’.104 Floral Shoppe’s cover art reiterates this ‘stuplimity’: a hot pink ground with neon green title font, overlaid with a black checkerboard tile, receding to a horizon point; an edited photograph of a Hellenistic Grecian bust of the god Helios; and a graphic image of a pixilated Oceanside cityscape washed over with a glowing sunset (Figure 3.5). These images are arranged in a haphazard manner, as if copied and pasted

Figure 3.5 Album artwork, Floral Shoppe (フローラルの専門店), Macintosh Plus, 2011

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on top of each other like fragments or layers on Photoshop or some other photo-editing software. Both stupid and sublime, its radically decontextualised Ancient Greek bust is reminiscent of the pittura metafisica style of painting developed by the Italian artist Georgio de Chirico, whose emtpy arcades and cityscapes are here substituted for blunt neon vector graphics. Floral Shoppe’s ‘ecstatic regression’ goes much further back than Lopatin’s, yet is still firmly anchored in the musy and spongiform temporality of the internet’s digital present. In their analysis of vaporwave, Andrew Whelan and Raphaël Nowak observe that ‘the (academic, vernacular, and press) writing about vaporwave commonly positions the genre as an ironic or ambivalent critique of contemporary capitalism’.105 In this writing, vaporwave is depicted as a form of ‘knowing critical practice’.106 This is the supposed meaning of its ‘ecstatic regresions’. Indeed, Alican Koc describes how vaporwave aesthetics can ‘be understood as creating a cognitive map of the bleak afective space of late capitalism, inviting viewers and listeners to step inside of it and critique it from within’.107 Morevoer, Trainor’s writing about Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, suggests that Lopatin labelled this work ‘eccojams’ as a knowing reference to critical practice: a play on the concept of eco jamming, which is ecological because it recycles culture, and also economical because it picks a single concept from its source material, which is obtained for free, and jams on it . . . The use of the term ecco also references both Sega’s 1992 console game Ecco the Dolphin, from which Lopatin borrows imagery for the release’s cover, and Umberto Eco’s work on ‘guerrilla semiotics’ (1986), which informs much of the thinking on culture jamming and its attempt to ‘turn corporate power against itself by co-opting, hacking, mocking and re-contextualizing meanings’.108 Elsewhere, Mike Watson has celebrated the ‘creative abstractions’ and ‘counter-rationalist’ tendency of vaporwave as something that ‘temporarily shocks the viewer out of their acceptance of a society completely beholden to capital’.109 However, vaporwave’s supposedly critical practice is based around a remediation of capitalistic fragments that renders them distorted and evaporated, echoing Lukács’s negative assessment of the expressionistic aesthetic. The risk here is a form of criticism that does not lead to any form of historical consciousness or struggle, but rather to what Lukács calls ‘a parasitic acquiescence with the system’. Or worse, an ‘adaptable means of fascist propaganda’. Indeed, we might also describe 4Chan’s ‘space to be wrong’ as a space for ‘ecstatic regression’, albeit the regressions of neo-fascist male fantasies. This analogy is borne out in a derivative of vaporwave that emerged in the mid-2010s: fashwave, which was identified in 2016 by the white supremacist news site The Daily Stormer as ‘The Ofcial Soundtrack of the Alt-Right’.110 In the online art workshops of the white nationalist alt right, young neo-Nazis and neo-fascists trade simple aesthetic tips . . . The style amounts to a racist clone of vaporwave, the visual and musical aesthetic born on the internet in the early end of this decade . . . Vaporwave, as a style, uses discarded remnants of early-internet themes, like vector art, pixel painting, bright neon and tropical landscapes from the screen savers of yesteryear. Fashwave employs much of the same, set against the backdrop of burning cities and superimposed swastikas and sonnenrads, the ancient European symbols appropriated by the Nazis.111

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Thus, fashwave weaponises vaporwave’s subtle aesthetic evocation of a late capitalist disillusionment and ‘ecstatic regression’ as part of an ideological programme that pictures the spongiform present in apocalyptical terms to propose that the only way forward being a return to traditionalist dogma and fascistic illusions of the past. In an analysis of fashwave’s ‘suicidal retro-futurist art of the alt-right’, Josh Smith IV suggests that the ‘white nationalist alt-right and its myriad factions believe that society is in ruins because white men have lost control of the Western world to women, Muslims, immigrants liberals and a conspiracy of Jewish overlords’.112 Therefore, vaporwave’s audio-visual representations of online anomie can be understood in Lukácsian terms as an adaptable aesthetic language well suited to impress this idea of a ‘society in ruins’ whose only salvation lies in regressive fascistic fantasies of ancient civilisations and traditionalist dogma. Smith’s critique of fashwave draws on the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Fascistic Modernities (2004).113 In particular, Ben-Ghiat’s account of the appeal held by ancient GrecoRoman marbled sculptures to Hitler and Mussolini, who were drawn to these hardened white sculpted bodies as an idealised image of masculine power, of fascistic ‘strongmen’. This maps onto other critiques of fascistic fantasies, notably Klaus Theweleit’s seminal work Male Fantasies, in which the German sociologist analyses the personal writings of groups of ofcers of the Freikorps: volunteer armies that repressed the revolutionary German working class following World War I and who went on to become key functionaries in Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (or Storm Troopers). Theweleit’s examination of these writings revealed a peculiarly distorted vocabulary describing left-wing movements, women, and other traditionally ‘othered’ groups. They were personified, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses in the foreword to Male Fantasies Vol. 1, ‘as something murky and viscous, like a swamp or a cesspit . . . To the Freikorpsmen, the Reds, like individual women, are a nameless force that seeks to engulf – described over and over as a ‘flood,’ a ‘tide,’ a threat that comes in ‘waves’.114 To counter this perceived threat, a ‘man must hold himself firm and upright, or be ‘sucked in’ by this impure sea .  .  . All that is rich and various must be smoothed over (to become like the blank facades of fascist architecture); all that is wet and luscious must be dammed up and contained’.115 The Freikorps imagined the threat of the ‘flood’ as something that could ‘be combated with ‘erections’: towering cities, mountains, troops, stalwart men, weapons’.116 This perceived threat was also countered with idealisations of the masculine fascistic body as hardened, armoured, and impenetrable. ‘What he produces’, Theweleit suggests, ‘is a monstrosity that expends every ounce of its energy in maintaining the appearance of invulnerability’.117 The fashwave aesthetic is similarly drawn to hardened, glossy, and impenetrable surfaces: the angular forms of computer hardware, the brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes of neon lights, and the marbled sculptural form of idealised male bodies. All as a form of armouring against the threat of a ‘society in ruins’: a regressive reaction to the planetary dysphoria described in Chapter 1 of this book. However, whilst both vaporwave and fashwave ‘play in the ruins of modern consumerism’, with each representing the present as a melange of fragmented historical references, one cannot be collapsed into the other.118 Vaporwave’s audio-visual culture rejects the hardened, invulnerable, armoured forms of fashwave’s ‘male fantasies’. Floral Shoppe’s use of a Grecian sculpture does not gesture towards a return to traditionalist dogma and white supremacy. Instead, it floats on top of a pink background, which recedes into nothingness. It has no urgency or historical specificity. It appears anonymous and non-heroic: a compressed image file, slightly pixelated, copied and pasted onto an image editing software, just one layer of many. Moreover, the archetypal vaporwave sound – tinny, frustrating, hazy, spongiform,

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self-consciously hypnagogic, disorientating, murky, and smeared – rejects the hardened vocabulary and calcifications associated with fashwave. Fashwave pictures a ‘society in ruins’ in order to capitalise on its resentments for a radical conservative agenda. Vaporwave simply pictures a ‘society in ruins’, as Rafman does in Still Life (Betamale). It doesn’t look back, but is firmly anchored in the present, in the ruins. ‘They let flow the music that lubricates Capital, open the door to a monstrously alienating sublime’, Harper observes of the genre, ‘twist dystopia into utopia and vice versa, and dare you not to like it’.119 In this sense, we might argue, vaporwave is forward-looking, ofering a way out from the reactionary fantasies often inculcated by TINA and our ‘dysphoric world picture’. It doesn’t piece together the fragments and chaos of our mushy and spongiform present as a map back to traditionalist dogma. Rather, it leaves them in a state of dissolution. And encourages us to feel and enjoy this dissolution. I earlier suggested that Rafman appeals to the generic tropes of ‘horror’ in his unsettling still life of 4Chan Betamales. Although not as immediately apparent, not as immediately on the surface, there is a similar afective quality to vaporwave, which distinguishes it from the fashwave derivative. In his analysis of American horror cinema, Wood outlined two prevailing styles or approaches to the genre: the ‘reactionary wing’ and the ‘“apocalyptical” horror’ film. As mentioned, for Wood, horror is a cinematic form uniquely capable of bringing ‘to focus a spirit of negativity’. However, this negative potential is ambiguous. In what he calls the ‘“apocalyptical” horror film’, this negativity can be claimed as progressive, ‘in so far as their negativity is not recuperable into the dominant ideology, but constitutes (on the contrary) the recognition of that ideology’s disintegration, its untenability’. This is a horror whose negativity, ‘even when presented in metaphysical terms (the end of the world), is generally reinterpretable in social/political ones (the end of a highly specific world of patriarchal capitalism)’.120 In contrast, the ‘reactionary wing’ of American horror appears to transcend such social and political realities. The trend’s key characteristic is its presentation of the ‘monster as totally nonhuman’ or as ‘simply evil’. This distinguishes the ‘reactionary wing’ from a more progressive ‘“apocalyptical” horror film’. Here, we have a monster that cannot be taken as a symbolic return of societal damage or repression, but that is ‘evil incarnate’.121 This is a negativity that exists without context. The ‘reactionary wing’ of horror presents us with a negativity that can only be destroyed, sealed over, to maintain the status quo or dogma it disturbs. It cannot be reinterpretable in sociopolitical terms because it has no socio-political context. And despite deliberately evoking ‘maximum terror and panic’, the ‘new’ does not come about – only interminable repetitions of what came before. Fashwave pictures our ‘society in ruins’ as a ‘reactionary horror’, capitalising on its resentments for a radical conservative agenda. Rafman’s, and the vaporwave aesthetic it taps into, is more an ‘apocalyptic horror’: picturing a ‘society in ruins’ but without an agenda. It pictures and forces an awareness of the non-simultaneities of digitisation, between a seemingly infinite cyberspace (a screen through which you might gaze into eternity) and a flood of material chaos and dissolution accumulating around the technological apparatus and its captive body. Crucially, it does not piece these fragments back to together for us, as in fashwave and its associated male fantasies. Rather, it leaves them in a state of disarray. This brings us back to the question of criticality, particularly as it relates to vaporwave. Harper considers if vaporwave is ‘a critique of capitalism or a capitulation to it?’ His response is that it is: ‘Both and neither’. Similarly, for Trainor, vaporwave is ‘both a critique and a celebration’, at the same time. Whilst this is perhaps

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a cynical position (a form of ‘enlightened false consciousness’), it is to my mind correct.122 In this sense, it ofers an authentic critical response to the postinternet world, which produces cynical subjectivities, too ground down by the realities of TINA and our ‘dysphoric world picture’, and disillusioned by traditional critical positions that promise to awaken us from the trance of late capitalism, a trance that we are all already aware of and participating in. In this state, vaporwave’s ‘both and neither’ critical position is informed by an afective subjectivity, attentive to the postinternet structures of feeling. It is cynical. But it does not succumb to cynicism. It seizes on this cynicism as a means of providing a complex and sincere afective experience of the postinternet world, in opposition to both the cyber-utopian ‘myths of immateriality’ and the reactionary male fantasies of the ‘alt-right’. It finds some sort of jouissance in the ruins. In this respect, we might imagine vaporwave as a ‘nourishing decomposition’, to borrow Alain Badiou’s phrase, according to which ‘the new can only come about as the seizure of a ruin’.123 Looking back, vaporwave’s critique, capitulation to, and celebration of the postinternet world has arguably proved a ‘nourishing decomposition’. Its fragmented and distorted aesthetic, given over to floods of digital remediation, has produced new, diverse, and progressive (anti-fascist) audio-visual subcultures that embrace this murky, slimy, and hypnagogic sound. For instance, the particular inflection given to the grain of the human voice in vaporwave’s extreme sound mixing and pitch-shifts, which plays with digital processing to decontextualise the sampled voice and find new textures and emotional resonances in its clash with digital efects, is often theorised as a representation of online anomie. Miles Bowe describes the second track of Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe – ‘Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing’ –which borrows the ‘chirpy, euphoric’ groove of Diana Ross’s version of ‘It’s Your Move’, but ‘pitch-shifts the pop icon’s voice to a murky smear, draining its flirtatiousness and amplifying its desperation’.124 This freedom in vaporwave to repurpose the voice, to not see it as fixed, but rather as something open to manipulation and vulnerable to digital re-coding, has provided the foundation for a recent evolution of ‘genderless’ vocal performances in contemporary electronic music. Here, the spoiled and ruinous digital sound of vaporwave becomes an opportunity for Queer experimentation: a decomposition of a history of recorded music, now made available as a database of manipulable sounds, which nourishes the visibility of a broader range of identities and afective subjectivities. In a fascinating essay titled ‘Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice’ (2019), Max Schafer describes a ‘forefront of sonic experimentation’ at the end of the 2010s, which exploits the easy accessibility of music production techniques of ‘modulating vocals with pitch & speed bending’ and ‘harmonizers that reach inhuman ranges’.125 Referencing trans-identifying artists including SOPHIE and Laura Les of 100 gecs, Schaffer writes of a ‘chaos-trans aesthetic’, which we might claim to have been produced from the ‘ruined’ digital soundscapes of vaporwave: ‘not quite robotic, they’re not quite natural, they’re somewhere in between and really unique’.126 Vaporwave accurately pictures the postinternet as a ‘society in ruins’, discombobulated and radically decontextualised, a sonic representation of the feelings and appetites produced by online platforms such as 4Chan, which facilitate a culture of total irresponsibility and unaccountability. In this sense, it creates what Kerstin Stakemeier has called the ‘somatic sense of risk that is inherent to and painfully omnipresent in digitized capitalism’.127 The risk here is that the affordances of digitised capitalism and its veneer of interactivity, openness, and access might nonetheless reproduce hegemonic patriarchal relations and forms of hatred. However, at the same time, in these ruins, there are also opportunities for playful experimentation beyond the hegemonic binaries that still structure our engagement with the world. Not back

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into the reactionary and traditionalist fantasies of fashwave, but into the chaos of new worlds made possible by digital dissolution. In the following chapter, we will pick up on the theme of horror as a means of describing and apprehending the supposed threat of the digital. Chapter 4 focuses on the transformation of the photographic medium within the postinternet world, where the indexical link between object and image has been deeply recoded and reformatted by digital mediation, similarly turned into a state of horrifying dissolution or decomposition.

Notes 1. For more information on the psychoanalytical ‘womb fantasy’, and its coding in cultural texts as a compulsive response to trauma, see: Caroline Rupprecht, Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013). 2. See ‘Crazy Gross Internet Troll Caves Will Make You Feel Better About Your Dirty Keyboard’, Hufngton Post (October 2012), www.hufpost.com/entry/crazy-gross-internet-trollcaves-dirty-photos_n_1967717, accessed 05/05/23. 3. Thomas Colley and Martin Moore, ‘The Challenges of Studying 4chan and the Alt-Right: “Come on in the Water’s Fine”’, New Media & Society, vol. 24, no. 1 (September 2020), p. 4. 4. Gabriel Emile Hine et al., ‘Kek, Cucks, and God Emperor Trump: A Measurement Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Efects on the Web’, arXiv:1610.03452 (October 2017), https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452, accessed 10/05/23. 5. Julian Dibbell, ‘Radical Opacity’, MIT Technology Review (August 2010), www.techno logyreview.com/featuredstory/420323/radical-opacity/, accessed 24/07/13. 6. See Christopher Poole, ‘(Founder Stories) Christopher Poole, (AKA Moot), Full Interview’, TechCrunchTV (August 2012), www.crunchbase.com/person/christopher-poole, accessed 24/07/13. 7. A page impression is the record of a particular web page loaded through a particular browser. Each time you load the page, it counts as one page impression. All statistics found at 4Chan’s information page for prospective advertisers. See www.4chan.org/advertise, accessed 16/08/21. 8. See Poole, ‘(Founder Stories) Christopher Poole, (AKA Moot), Full Interview’, www.crunchbase. com/person/christopher-poole, accessed 24/07/13. 9. David Auerbach, ‘Anonymity as Culture: Treatise’, Triple Canopy, no. 15 (April 2012), http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/anonymity_as_culture__treatise, accessed 17/07/13. 10. Dibbell, ‘Radical Opacity’, www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/420323/radical-opacity/, accessed 24/07/13. 11. Dibbell, ‘Radical Opacity’, www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/420323/radical-opacity/, accessed 24/07/13. 12. Dibbell, ‘Radical Opacity’, www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/420323/radical-opacity/, accessed 24/07/13. 13. Dibbell, ‘Radical Opacity’, www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/420323/radical-opacity/, accessed 24/07/13. 14. Mark Zuckerberg quoted in Miguel Helft, ‘Facebook, Foe of Anonymity, Is Forced to Explain a Secret’, The New York Times (May 2011), www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/ technology/14facebook.html, accessed 13/05/15. 15. Gabriela Coleman, ‘Our Weirdness Is Free’, Triple Canopy, no. 15 (January 2012), http:// canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free, accessed 17/07/13. 16. Coleman, ‘Our Weirdness Is Free’, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_ free, accessed 17/07/13. 17. Lee Knuttila, ‘User Unknown: 4chan, Anonymity and Contingency’, First Monday, vol. 16, no. 10 (October 2011), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3665/3055, accessed 17/07/13. 18. See Poole, ‘(Founder Stories) Christopher Poole, (AKA Moot), Full Interview’, www.crunch base.com/person/christopher-poole, accessed 24/07/13.

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19. There are various other sites that will republish certain material from 4chan boards, that is, images and specific conversation threads. An example of this is Encyclopedia Dramatica, which allows users to add, modify, and delete content and which acts as an encyclopaedia of, predominately, anonymous culture (see https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Main_Page, accessed 13/05/15/). Nevertheless, on the 4chan system, there is no option to view older posts, as there is on sites such as Facebook and Twitter (which contain timelines displaying a user’s history of activity on those platforms). Because of this, one navigates the site using the refresh key on the keyboard or browser toolbar, rather than trawling through pre-existing information. 20. Knuttila, ‘User Unknown: 4chan, Anonymity and Contingency’, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/3665/3055, accessed 17/07/13. 21. Ara H. Merjian and Mike Rugnetta, ‘From Dada to Memes’, Art in America (December 2020), www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/memes-dada-political-collage-1234577740/, accessed 12/08/21. 22. Merjian and Rugnetta, ‘From Dada to Memes’, www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ memes-dada-political-collage-1234577740/, accessed 12/08/21. 23. Dick Hebidge Subculture: The Meaning of Style [1979] (London; New York: Routledge, 1988). 24. Laine Nooney and Laura Portwood-Stacer (eds.), ‘Internet Memes’ [themed issue], Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 13, no. 3 (December 2014). 25. Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2014). 26. See, for instance, Kate Miltner, ‘“There’s No Place for Lulz on LOLCats”: The Role of Gender, Genre and Group Identity in the Interpretation and Enjoyment of an Internet Meme’, First Monday, vol. 19, no. 8 (August 2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/5391/4103#author, accessed 15/05/15; Ryan M. Milner, ‘FCJ-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz’, The Fibreculture Journal, no. 22 (2013), pp. 62–92; Michelle Calka, ‘I Can Has Community? A Case Study and Reflection on Norms and Social Support in a Lolcat Fan Group’, in Laura W. Black (ed.), Group Communication: Cases for Analysis, Appreciation, and Application (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 2010), pp. 83–90. 27. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, p. 89. 28. Merjian and Rugnetta, ‘From Dada to Memes’, www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ memes-dada-political-collage-1234577740/, accessed 12/08/21. 29. Merjian and Rugnetta, ‘From Dada to Memes’, www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ memes-dada-political-collage-1234577740/, accessed 12/08/21. 30. Merjian and Rugnetta, ‘From Dada to Memes’, www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/ memes-dada-political-collage-1234577740/, accessed 12/08/21. 31. Christopher Poole, ‘The case for anonymity online’, TED (February 2010), www.ted.com/ talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online, accessed 20/03/15. 32. John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, Electronic Frontier Foundation (1996), www.ef.org/cyberspace-independence, accessed 02/02/2023. 33. See for instance, Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (London: Zero, 2017). 34. Nick Douglas, ‘What The Hell Are 4chan, ED, Something Awful, And “b”?’, Gawker (January 2008), http://gawker.com/346385/what-the-hell-are-4chan-ed-something-awful-and-b, accessed 05/11/2015. 35. Allie Conti, ‘4Chan Cam-Girl Loli-Chan Grows Up’, Miami New Times (October 2013), www.miaminewtimes.com/news/4chan-camgirl-loli-chan-grows-up-6393598, accessed 11/05/15 36. See ‘Internet Hate Machine’, Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internethate-machine, accessed 09/03/21. 37. Jenna Wortham, ‘Founder of a Provocative Web Site Forms a New Outlet’, New York Times (March 2011), www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/technology/internet/14poole.html?_r=3and, accessed 11/05/15. 38. Coleman, ‘Our Weirdness Is Free’, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_ free, accessed 17/07/13. 39. It is beyond the purview of this chapter to document the various provocative and nihilistic pranks on 4Chan; however, David Auerbach’s article ‘Anonymity as Culture: Case Studies’ is revealing of the nature of 4Chan’s culture. See David Auerbach, ‘Anonymity as Culture:

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42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

Art in the Age of 4Chan Case Studies’, Triple Canopy, no. 15 (April 2012), http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/ anonymity_as_culture__case_studies, accessed 17/07/13. Auerbach, ‘Anonymity as Culture: Treatise’, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/anonymity_ as_culture__treatise, accessed 17/07/13. Georges Bataille quoted in Alastair Brotchie, ‘Introduction’, in Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups (eds.), Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman and Alexis Lykiard (London: Atlas Press, 1995), p. 15. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, edited by Allan Stoekl (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 92. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 153. In the second surrealist manifesto, ‘André Breton denounced Bataille as an ‘excrementphilosopher’, a criticism’, Benjamin Noys suggests in his ‘Critical introduction’ to the philosopher that ‘Bataille would probably have considered to be a compliment!’, Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 6. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 26. Brooke Evan Dufy, Thomas Poell and David B. Nieborg, ‘Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship’, Social Media + Society (November 2019), p. 1. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 3 (Spring 1985), p. 582. Baudrillard, ‘The Masses’, pp. 582–583. Baudrillard, ‘The Masses’, p. 583. David Auerbach, ‘Anonymity as Culture: Treatise’, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/ anonymity_as_culture__treatise, accessed 17/07/13. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture [1938] (London; Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegen Paul, 1980), p. 20. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, p. 192. See ‘Lulz’, Encylopedia Dramatica, https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Lulz, accessed 26/05/15. In situations where a user threatens self-harm or suicide, it is common for them to be ridiculed as ‘an hero’. Auerbach describes the origin and motivation for this sort of abuse: It is: ‘A derogatory term for suicide, originating from a MySpace tribute page devoted to a thirteen-year-old suicide, whom a classmate eulogized as “ ‘An Hero” ’. The term is a noun and a verb and is used by people who post fake and real threats of suicide. The term deflates the act of suicide by replacing self-pity with sarcastic pride. It also deflates the they’ll-miss-me-whenI’m-gone sentiment associated with suicide by retaining the tribute’s grammatical inaccuracy. And there’s the secondary efect of poor taste achieved by ridiculing a teenage suicide’. See David Auerbach, ‘Anonymity as Culture: Case Studies’, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/ anonymity_as_culture__case_studies, accessed 17/07/13. See ‘Lulz’, Encylopedia Dramatica, https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Lulz, accessed 26/05/15. See ‘Lulz’, Encylopedia Dramatica, https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Lulz, accessed 26/05/15. Capturing the sense of alienation that results from this online commodification of identity and activity, Mark Andrejevic explains: ‘Every message we write, every video we post, every item we buy or view, our time-space paths and patterns of social interaction all become data points in algorithms for sorting, predicting, and managing our behavior’. Mark Andrejevic, ‘Estranged Free Labor’, in Trebor Scholz (ed.), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York; London: Routledge, 2013), p. 159. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, p. 13. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961), pp. 5–6. By this, I mean to say that 4chan’s culture makes a mockery of any sort of authorial intention. Indeed, the difculty that one might have in distinguishing between genuine antagonism and playful antagonism is known as ‘Poe’s Law’. This is an ‘Internet axiom which states that it is difcult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent’. It is based on a post from a Christian forum by a user called Nathan Poe. Poe argued that ‘[w]ithout a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

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mistake for the genuine article’. This is, of course, further complicated on sites such as 4chan, where a sense of playful irony and general hate is foregrounded over and above any claim to truthfulness or sincerity. See Uncredited author, ‘Poe’s Law’, Know your Meme, http://know yourmeme.com/memes/poes-law, accessed 26/05/15. Auerbach, ‘Anonymity as Culture: Treatise’, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/anonymity_ as_culture__treatise, accessed 17/07/13. The ‘androcentrism’ and privileged nature of 4Chan’s anonymous culture are analysed in Whitney Phillips extensive sociological research into online trolling. Phillips’s describes the androcentrism of anonymous culture as ‘most conspicuously apparent in their replication of the adversary method . . . [which] presupposes the superiority of male-gendered traits (rationality, assertiveness, dominance) over female-gendered traits (sentimentality, cooperation, conciliation). In the process, it privileges and in fact reifies an explicitly androcentric worldview while simultaneously delegitimizing less confrontational discursive modes’. She goes on to critique the assumed playfulness of 4Chan on the grounds that ‘while the ludic impulse may be strong in some, it is not, and cannot be, strong in everyone, for the simple reason that not all people have access to the technologies in question, the time to devote to learning the ins and outs of specific systems, or the energy to play with the tools they’ve been given’. Reflecting on the so-called playful culture of 4Chan, Phillips states simply that ‘this is what privileged people will do with technology’. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge; MA: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 124–130. Sara Kiesler, Jane Siegel and Timothy W. McGuire, ‘Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication’, American Psychologist, vol. 39, no. 10 (October 1984), p. 1126. See Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), p. 10. Kiesler, Siegel and McGuire, ‘Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication’, p. 1130. Kiesler, Siegel and McGuire, ‘Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication’, pp. 1128–1129. Michelle Geslani, ‘Oneohtrix Point Never’s Video “Still Life (Betamale)” Takes You into Dark Underbelly of Internet’, Consequence Sound (September 2015), https://consequence. net/2013/09/oneohtrix-point-nevers-video-still-life-Betamale-takes-you-into-darkunderbelly-of-internet, accessed 10/01/2023. All comments are archived on the artist’s website. See Jon Rafman, ‘4Chan Thread (pdf)’, https://jonrafman.com/4chan.pdf, accessed 10/01/2023. On this idea of the ‘terror in pleasure’ in horror cinema, see: Tania Modleski, ‘The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory’, in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 155–166. Rafman, ‘4Chan Thread (pdf)’, https://jonrafman.com/4chan.pdf, accessed 10/01/2023. The artist states this in a video posted on the Sprüth Magers gallery website, see https:// spruethmagers.com/exhibitions/jon-rafman-dream-journal-16-17-berlin/, accessed 03/02/21. Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, Representations, no. 20 (Autumn 1987), pp. 197–198. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting’, October, vol. 16 (Spring 1981), p. 53. Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), p. 101. Hal Foster quoted in ‘Hal Foster in Conversation with Aria Dean’, November, vol. 0 (2020), www.novembermag.com/content/hal-foster, accessed 05/05/23. See Max Horkheimer, ‘The Jews and Europe’ [1939], in Eduardo Mendieta (ed.), The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 225–241. My understanding of the ‘alt-right’ is based on what Ana Teixeira Pinto has described as ‘a loose coalition of white supremacists, masculinists, anti-feminists, old-school racists, Islamophobes, neo-monarchists, and anti-semites’. What distinguishes the ‘alt-right’ from

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86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

Art in the Age of 4Chan other far-right movements is a combination of its internet literacy and its adoption of antiestablishment posturing typically associated with the left. Pinto has suggested that the ‘altright’ is hyperaware of its ‘style’ and form of self-presentation: ‘extoling nihilism, sarcasm, and anti-establishment sentiments, among other modalities of dissidence that were formerly the preserve of the Left, traditionally associated with the term “alternative”’. See Ana Teixeira Pinto, ‘Artwashing: NRX and the Alt-Right’, Texte Zur Kunst, no. 106 (June 2017), www.textezurkunst.de/106/artwashing-de/, accessed 10/03/21. There are numerous examples of this. One striking example is the Christchurch Mosque shootings in 2019, where a self-identified white supremacist ‘alt-right’ shooter killed 51 people and injured 41. The 28-year-old shooter has claimed to have started frequenting 4Chan at age 14 and cited it as a significant source of inspiration for his actions. Dale Beran, It Came From Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Ofce (New York: All Points Books, 2019), pp. 131–132. Beran, It Came From Something Awful, pp. 128–129. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland: World, 1962), p. 317. Beran, It Came From Something Awful, p. 130. Angela Dimitrakaki, Marina Vishmidt and Larne Abse Gogarty, ‘Anti-fascist Art Theory: A Roundtable Discussion’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Harry Weeks (eds.), Third Text, no. 158 (May 2019), ‘Anti-fascism/Art/Theory’ special issue, p. 455. Dimitrakaki, Vishmidt and Gogarty, ‘Anti-fascist Art Theory: A Roundtable Discussion’, p. 451. This fantasy of ‘metaillising’ the body is key to Christine Poggi’s discussion of the aesthetics of the Italian Futurists, whose work and ideas were aligned with the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s. See Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 33. This Futurist fantasy of ‘metallising’ the body perhaps finds its contemporary correlate in the popularity of MMORPGs amongst gaming communities that gravitate towards online message boards. In these games, such as World of Warhammer, gamers play as heavily armoured avatars wielding huge metallurgic weapons. The correlation between these fantasy game scenarios, a fascination for traditionalist philosophers, such as Julius Evola (whose work celebrates and mythologises white supremacist patriarchal social hierarchies), and NEET culture is discussed at length in Beran, It Came From Something Awful, in particular the chapter titled ‘Steve Bannon: Nerd out of Time’, pp. 159–170. Dimitrakaki, Vishmidt and Gogarty, ‘Anti-Fascist Art Theory: A Roundtable Discussion’, p. 455. Georg Lukács, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ [1934], reprinted in Rodney Livingstone (ed.), Essays on Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), p. 116. Lukács, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’, p. 111. Sigmund Freud, ‘Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Mental Functioning’ [1925], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 224. Craig Owens, ‘Honor, Power and The Love of Women’, in Craig Owens et al. (eds.), Beyond Recognition : Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), p. 144. Owens, ‘Honor, Power and The Love of Women’, p. 144. Adam Harper, ‘Vaporwave and the Pop-Art of the Virtual Plaza’, Dummy (July 2012), https:// dmy.co/news/adam-harper-vaporwave, accessed 11/05/23. The ‘oceanic’ refers to a sensation of limitlessness resulting from the perceived absence of perceptible boundaries – like an ocean. In his writing about this ‘feeling’, Freud argues that it represents a fragment of infantile consciousness – a time before the infant can ‘distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him’. It is a feeling associated with a time before the infant was aware of other people in the world; thus, a very narcissistic form of elation. In this respect, an ‘oceanic’ feeling represents a complete disinvestment in the actual or historical content of the object. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents [1930], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963), pp. 13–14. Daniel Lopatin, ‘I am Musician Oneohtrix Point Never, Currently Importing SysEx Files into FM8 – AMA’, Reddit (August 15, 2017), accessed 10/05/23.

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95. Adam Trainer, ‘From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory’, in Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 409–413. 96. Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 63. 97. Trainer, ‘From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory’, p. 420. 98. Trainer, ‘From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory’, p. 420. 99. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 271. 100. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 271. 101. Laura Glitsos has analysed the production techniques employed in vaporwave, describing how its oftentimes ‘‘hollow’ and ‘generic’ sound aesthetic is achieved . . . by stripping the mid-section of the tones. The term ‘mid-section’ is a cognitive metaphor used in sound mixing that represents the middle range of frequencies that can be manipulated in the mix. In the language of sound engineering, mid-section tones are often anthropomorphised as a ‘body’. For instance, if the mid-section frequencies are full and privileged in the mix, the sound will be referred to as having a ‘good body’. Conversely, vaporwave strips these frequencies out, and, as a result, vaporwave mixes generally have no mid-section – no body – provoking a sense of hollowness or melancholy that connects readily with loss in trauma’. Laura Glitsos, ‘Vaporwave, or Music Optimised for Abandoned Malls’, Popular Music, vol. 37, no. 1 (2018), p. 108. 102. Daniel Lopatin quoted in Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), p. 83. 103. Miles Bowe, ‘Floral Shoppe, Macintosh Plus’, Pitchfork (April 2019), https://pitchfork.com/ reviews/albums/macintosh-plus-floral-shoppe/, accessed 11/05/23. 104. Bowe, ‘Floral Shoppe, Macintosh Plus’, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macintoshplus-floral-shoppe/, accessed 11/05/23. 105. Andrew Whelan and Raphaël Nowak, ‘“Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism”: Genre Work in An Online Music Scene’, Open Cultural Studies, vol. 2 (2018), p. 451. 106. Whelan and Nowak, ‘“Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism”: Genre Work in An Online Music Scene’, p. 457. 107. Alican Koc, ‘“Do You Want Vaporwave, or Do You Want the Truth?” Cognitive Mapping of Late Capitalist Afect in the Virtual Lifeworld of Vaporwave’, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Afect Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 1 (2017), p. 60. 108. Trainer, ‘From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory’, pp. 413–414. 109. Mike Watson, Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2019), pp. 3–4. 110. See ‘Fashwave/Tradwave’, Know your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/ fashwave-tradwave, accessed 11/05/23. 111. Josh Smith IV, ‘This Is Fashwave, the Suicidal Retro-Futurist art of the Alt-Right’, Mic (2018), www.mic.com/articles/187379/this-is-fashwave-the-suicidal-retro-futurist-art-of-thealt-right, accessed 11/05/23. 112. Smith IV, ‘This Is Fashwave, the Suicidal Retro-Futurist Art of the Alt-Right’, www.mic. com/articles/187379/this-is-fashwave-the-suicidal-retro-futurist-art-of-the-alt-right, accessed 11/05/23. 113. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascistic Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 114. Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Foreword’, in Klaus Theweleit (eds.), Male Fantasies Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. xv. 115. Ehrenreich, ‘Foreword’, p. xv. 116. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Vol. 1, p. 402. 117. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Vol. 2 Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989), p. 202. 118. Smith IV, ‘This Is Fashwave, the Suicidal Retro-Futurist Art of the Alt-Right’, www.mic. com/articles/187379/this-is-fashwave-the-suicidal-retro-futurist-art-of-the-alt-right, accessed 11/05/23.

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119. Harper, ‘Vaporwave and the Pop-Art of the Virtual Plaza’, https://dmy.co/news/adam-harpervaporwave, accessed 11/05/23. 120. Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 102. 121. Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, p. 103. 122. This is one of Peter Sloterdijk’s definitions of cynicism: ‘Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-of and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels afected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively bufered’. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 6. 123. Alain Badiou, The Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 45. 124. Bowe, ‘Floral Shoppe, Macintosh Plus’, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macintoshplus-floral-shoppe/, accessed 11/05/23. 125. Max Schafer, ‘Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice’, maxmadethat (December 2019), https://maxmadethat.com/publishing/transvocalmodulation, accessed 15/05/23. 126. Schafer, ‘Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice’, https://maxmadethat.com/publishing/ transvocalmodulation, accessed 15/05/23. 127. Kerstin Stakemeier, ‘Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art’, Texte zur Kunst, vol. 98 (2015), p. 138.

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‘Internet Hate Machine’, Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/internet-hatemachine, accessed 09/03/21. Kiesler, Sara, Siegel, Jane and McGuire, Timothy W., ‘Social Psychological Aspects of ComputerMediated Communication’, American Psychologist, vol. 39, no. 10 (October 1984), pp. 1123–1134. Knuttila, Lee, ‘User Unknown: 4chan, Anonymity and Contingency’, First Monday, vol. 16, no. 10 (October 2011), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3665/3055, accessed 17/07/13. Koc, Alican, ‘“Do You Want Vaporwave, or Do You Want the Truth?” Cognitive Mapping of Late Capitalist Afect in the Virtual Lifeworld of Vaporwave’, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Afect Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 1 (2017), pp. 57–76. Lopatin, Daniel, ‘I am Musician Oneohtrix Point Never, Currently Importing SysEx Files into FM8 – AMA’, Reddit (August 15, 2017), accessed 10/05/23. Lukács, Georg, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ [1934], reprinted in Rodney Livingstone (ed.), Essays on Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), pp. 76–113. ‘Lulz’, Encylopedia Dramatica, https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Lulz, accessed 26/05/15. Merjian, Ara H. and Rugnetta, Mike, ‘From Dada to Memes’, Art in America (December 2020), www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/memes-dada-political-collage-1234577740/, accessed 12/08/21. Miltner, Kate, ‘“There’s No Place for lulz on LOLCats”: The Role of Gender, Genre and Group Identity in the Interpretation and Enjoyment of an Internet Meme’, First Monday, vol. 19, no. 8 (August 2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5391/4103#author, accessed 15/05/15. Milner, Ryan M., ‘FCJ-156 Hacking the Social: Internet Memes, Identity Antagonism, and the Logic of Lulz’, The Fibreculture Journal, no. 22 (2013), pp. 62–92. Modleski, Tania, ‘The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory’ in Tania Modleski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 155–166. Nagle, Angela, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (London: Zero, 2017). Ngai, Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2005). Nooney, Laine and Portwood-Stacer, Laura (eds.), ‘Internet Memes’ [themed issue], Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 13, no. 3 (December 2014). Noys, Benjamin, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000). Owens, Craig, ‘Honor, Power and The Love of Women’ in Craig Owens et al. (eds.), Beyond Recognition : Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 143–155. Paul, Christiane, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008). Phillips, Whitney, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge; MA: MIT Press, 2015). Pinto, Ana Teixeira, ‘Artwashing: NRX and the Alt-Right’, Texte Zur Kunst, Issue 106 (June 2017), www.textezurkunst.de/106/artwashing-de/, accessed 10/03/21. ‘Poe’s Law’, Know your Meme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/poes-law, accessed 26/05/15. Poggi, Christine, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Poole, Christopher, ‘The Case for Anonymity Online’, TED (February 2010), www.ted.com/talks/ christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online, accessed 20/03/15. ———, ‘(Founder Stories) Christopher Poole (AKA Moot), Full Interview’, TechCrunchTV (August 2012), www.crunchbase.com/person/christopher-poole, accessed 24/07/13. Rafman, Jon, ‘4Chan Thread (pdf)’, https://jonrafman.com/4chan.pdf, accessed 10/01/2023. Reynolds, Simon, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber & Faber, 2012).

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Rupprecht, Caroline, Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Literature, Cinema, and Art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013). Schafer, Max, ‘Modulation & the Chaos-Trans Voice’, maxmadethat (December 2019), https:// maxmadethat.com/publishing/transvocalmodulation, accessed 15/05/23. Shifman, Limor, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2014). Sloterdijk, Peter, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Smith IV, Josh, ‘This Is Fashwave, the Suicidal Retro-Futurist Art of the Alt-Right’, Mic (2018), www.mic.com/articles/187379/this-is-fashwave-the-suicidal-retro-futurist-art-of-the-alt-right, accessed 11/05/23. Stakemeier, Kerstin, ‘Exchangeables: Aesthetics against Art’, Texte zur Kunst, vol. 98 (2015), pp. 124–143. Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies Vol. 2 Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minnesota: University of Minneapolis Press, 1989). Trainer, Adam, ‘From Hypnagogia to Distroid: Postironic Musical Renderings of Personal Memory’ in Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 409–427. Watson, Mike, Can the Left Learn to Meme?: Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2019). Whelan, Andrew and Nowak, Raphaël, ‘“Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism”: Genre Work in An Online Music Scene’, Open Cultural Studies, vol. 2 (2018), pp. 451–462. Wood, Robin, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), pp. 73–110. Wortham, Jenna, ‘Founder of a Provocative Web Site Forms a New Outlet’, New York Times (March 2011), www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/technology/internet/14poole.html?_r=3and, accessed 11/05/15.

4

The Horror of Digital Photography

In Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay, ‘Pictures’ (1977), published on the occasion of the landmark exhibition of the same name at Artist’s Space, New York, the curator and writer described a new concern amongst conceptual artists for exploring the reproduced photographic image as a device that manipulates our perception of reality rather than as a simple tool of representation. Writing about this phenomenon, Crimp explains that: We only experience reality through the pictures we make of it . . . To an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in cinema. Next to these pictures first-hand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the picture itself, not in order to uncover a lost reality, but to determine how a picture becomes a signifying structure of its own accord.1 Crimp’s provocative claim that pictures have usurped reality and that ‘we only experience reality through the pictures we make of it’ forces our attention to the signifying structures that mediate images and how this subtly alters our perception of reality. The digitised nature of photography today demands a return to Crimp’s argument. This chapter builds on Crimp’s line of thought, addressing how the new form of picturing with digital, or postinternet photography might be seen to alter our experience of reality. This will be explored through an analysis of how contemporary artists, including Thomas Ruf and Amalia Ulman, have interrogated and engaged with the signifying structures that mediate digital photography, revealing photography as an essential mechanism of Control and capitalist extraction that elicits a specific set of behaviours and modes of being in and visualising the world. Ultimately, photography has become one of the many forms of digital culture that promote the mandate, described by Grafton Tanner, for us to be ‘perpetually digitally engaged . . . train[ed] for lives and careers dependent on digital devices’.2 Firstly, what is digital photography? How can we define the sort of photography that circulates on the internet? JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, and TIFFs: an obscure acronym; an image made up of pixels; something designed to be shared on social media platforms; something to be re-shared or re-posted; something banal; something ubiquitous; something deskilled; a generic application on a smart phone or tablet that appears to make photographic decisions (i.e., aperture, depth of field, aspect ratio, exposure, focus) for you; a form of self-commodification, a revealing of the self to digital surveillance; a bundle of data or ‘meta-data’ that produces value in a digital economy; a tool of Control, which compels a constant and hyperactive production and consumption of digital content. DOI: 10.4324/9781003256168-5

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This isn’t really photography as we once knew it. Whilst it normally looks like photography – an indexical image of something by means of optical technology – here we are dealing with something more complex, knotted, and multi-layered. Postinternet photography is a ‘stacked’ phenomenon, to bring back Benjamin Bratton’s label for the intermingling of hard and soft systems that tend to define digital media objects. In a conversation between Isabelle Graw and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh published in a 2015 issue of Texte zur Kunst, Buchloh exclaims that ‘there’s one thing that does seem certain: digital technology has utterly changed and perhaps even undone the material basis that analog photography had presupposed’.3 The idea of indexicality, or the assumption of an authentic relation existing between the photograph and reality, is one of these changed presuppositions because the digital photo exists as a knotted or ‘stacked’ object, a smaller part of a much larger system, which is never only a singular or stand-alone media object. Whilst the indexicality of analogue photography has always been, to a certain extent, compromised by external factors such as the photographer’s intentionality and other curatorial decisions (lighting, framing, etc.), it nonetheless ofers some sense of an authentic relation with the photographed object. The rays of light coming from the object are preserved on a light-sensitive, silver-grain-coated support. This is why Roland Barthes once described photography as an ‘ectoplasm’, or ‘like a living organism . . . born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages’. This is also why Barthes described an intense attachment to photography as an ‘emanation of a past reality’. It represents a ‘sort of umbilical cord’, linking ‘the body of the photographed thing to my gaze’.4 It is alchemic and alive. It embodies presence. This sense of liveliness and presence does not map into digital photography. According to these criteria, there is now no ‘authenticity’ to photography. With a digital photograph, rays of light are translated into data. In digital photography, as Byung-Chul Han has observed, Barthes’s ‘alchemy gives way to mathematics. It disenchants photography’.5 This is a provocative and counter-intuitive statement. It suggests that there is no direct correlation anymore between the photographed object and the digital photographic image. It suggests that there is some sort of an essential inauthenticity to the digital photograph. Of course, there is some relationship between the two, and digital advances in photography have furthered the practical value of some disciplines (such as, for instance, medical imaging) and have allowed for new forms of ‘cell phone activism’ based on the increased accessibility and portability of digital photography.6 But what Han suggests is lacking in the digital photograph is the sort of intense libidinal attachment that motivated Barthes’s reflections on photography in 1980: It does not immerse itself in the object, does not fall in love with it. It does not call upon it, does not enter into a dialogue with it. It is not based on a singular, unique, irrevocable encounter with the object. The seeing itself is delegated to the apparatus.7 This definition of digital photography as mathematical, as opposed to alchemic, and disenchanted, as opposed to ectoplasmic, and which delegates seeing to an apparatus, makes a little more sense if we analyse the Jpeg, which is perhaps the most widely known format for digital photographic imaging today. Jpeg is an acronym for the ‘Joint Photographic Experts Group’, an international standards organisation that worked to develop a standard means by which colour images could be compressed.8 The Jpeg is the name of an image file type (it carries the common extension ‘.jpg’) that has become a ubiquitous and everyday presence in our postinternet visual culture. It is the most common format used by digital photographic

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apparatuses (digital cameras, phones, tablets, etc.) and the format normally used for storing and transferring photographic images online. It was first detailed in a technical document published in 1992 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which covered the requirements and guidelines for the digital compression and coding of continuous-tone still images. This document, titled ‘ISO/IEC IS10918–1/ITU-T Recommendation T.81’, ushered in what William B. Pennebaker and Joan L. Mitchell refer to – in their co-authored book JPEG: Still Image Data Compression Standard (1993) – as ‘the new international standard for colour image compression’.9 These requirements and guidelines, through third-party development, became known as Jpeg files. The Jpeg permitted the widespread use and distribution of digital images, which was previously impeded by the massive amount of space required to store high-quality, readable digital images. It overcame this impediment by providing a standardised algorithm that allowed for the interchange of images between diverse applications and media platforms in a way that was both quick and cheap. Indeed, it is now so widespread and extensively implemented that the acronym is deployed as an informal name in and of itself – something that simply denotes a digital image. ‘The purpose of image compression’, Pennebaker and Mitchell state, ‘is to represent images with less data in order to save storage costs or transmission time and costs’.10 So, the less data required to represent the image, the better (cheaper and easier) for its users. Compression is achieved by ‘approximating the original image’, therefore, ‘the greater the compression, the more approximate (“lossy”) the rendition is likely to be’.11 Instead of reducing the image in scale, for instance, the image is approximated; that is, data is lost. This is achieved via a mathematical formula called the Discrete Cosine Transfer (DCT), which negotiates the amount of damage an image can receive without losing its overall readability. In simple terms, it decomposes visual samples into eight-by-eight blocks of segmented colour, which standardises diferent colour tones according to a prescribed set of variables. The ‘loss’ is thus a loss of continuous tonality, as the image now contains what are known as ‘blocking artifacts’.12 This process, which reformats continuous visual information into discrete, prescribed, and reproducible patterns, represents a fundamental diference between analogue and digital imagery. On this diference, W.J.T. Mitchell writes: The continuous spatial and tonal variation of analog pictures is not exactly replicable, so such images cannot be transmitted or copied without degradation . . . But discrete states can be replicated precisely, so a digital image that is a thousand generations away from the original is indistinguishable in quality from any one of its progenitors.13 So, there is no real loss of quality or degradation in the transmitted or copied digital image because the image is already ‘lossy’ and always already degraded. This type of compression works successfully with digital photography by exploiting deficiencies in human vision. It works because our eyesight is relatively limited. Pennebaker and Mitchell explain that in normal use, ‘colour images can be compressed by Jpeg lossy techniques by more than 20:1 yet have nearly imperceptible levels of visible distortion in the reconstructed image’.14 The bits of visual information that we are insensitive to are approximated more drastically. This ‘lossiness’ is also encoded into the music that we listen to – a phenomenon that we fail to notice because, like our eyes, our ears are somewhat insensitive. Indeed, the MP3 audio file format, like Jpeg, was designed for the maximum possible mobility and flexibility and is therefore designed to exclude information. Jonathan Sterne, in his book MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012), details how early research in human auditory patterns informed the later development of the MP3

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file. This mapped out the ‘positions of the nerve endings and their responses to sounds’, so that the ‘zones of sensitivity and insensitivity’ could be determined.15 The faculty of audition came to be seen as limited and imperfect, and hearing (like vision with the Jpeg) came to be seen as a medium ‘understood in terms analogous to the media that were being built to address it’.16 And in terms that are similar to Pennebaker and Mitchell’s discussion of the Jpeg and the DCT formula, Sterne describes the practice of ‘perceptual coding’, which ‘appears in a published work by 1988 and was probably in common parlance sometime before that’.17 It is used to ‘describe those forms of audio-coding that use a mathematical model of human hearing to actively remove sound in the audible part of the spectrum under the assumption that it will not be heard’.18 For all intents and purposes, it seems that these algorithmic regulations are embedded in our audio-visual language and inform our comprehension of digitised sounds and images, which now comes to us, for the most part, degraded. ‘JPEGs are everywhere today’, the contemporary artist Cory Arcangel declared in an essay titled ‘On Compression’ (2008), and, moreover, they have informed the ‘look’ of the last decade: in case you haven’t noticed, this look is everywhere else as well (ads, digital cameras, digital video, etc.) If the ’80s gave us ‘hot’ colors and ‘rad’ graphics, and the ’90s gave us slick vector design, then the ’00’s are giving us compressed blocky images.19 Rather than the ever-increasing audio-visual fidelity and ‘realism’ that is marketed to us by big-tech firms, the truth of the matter is that our audio-visual culture is premised upon an ever-increasing level of loss, damage, and compression, which we don’t usually experience as such. The Jpeg, arguably, can be seen to have ushered in a new epistemic paradigm, where the photographic enlargement or magnification of an object no longer renders it more precise or reveals more detail. By contrast, enlargement, as I will explore in relation to a series of works by the contemporary photographer Thomas Ruf, reveals less detail, causes further abstraction, and eventually displays absolutely nothing. This aspect of the digital photograph can be seen to invert the main plot point of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966), based around the revelatory potential of the analogue photograph. In Blow Up, Antonioni’s protagonist discovers more information than immediately meets the eye when he ‘blows up’ and magnifies a photographic negative, inadvertently uncovering evidence of a murder in its fuzzy grain. Regarding this potential of analogue photography, W.J.T. Mitchell explains that ‘there is an indefinite amount of information in a continuous-tone photograph, so enlargement usually reveals more detail but yields a fuzzier and grainier picture’.20 Walter Benjamin also discusses photographic close-ups and enlargements in his ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), focussing on the close-up botanical photography of Karl Blossfeldt. For Benjamin, these techniques (as with the use of slow motion in the moving image) reveal a ‘secret’: we ‘discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious’.21 The nascent technology of photography is understood to provide us with access to a never-before-seen realm of minute detail and slowed-down time. Esther Leslie summarises Benjamin’s idea of the ‘optical unconscious’ as a playful and harmonious relationship between humanity and machinery: ‘A “new region of consciousness” is summoned . . . contracted only in conjunction with technology’, she writes, ‘enlargements, emphases of miniature details, the focus on banal, everyday milieus . . . not only renders more precise what was already visible but unclear: it divulges wholly new structural formations in the material’.22 The camera

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is like a tool that both simulates the visual organ and extends its perceptual reach. By contrast, a digital image, Mitchell writes, ‘contains a fixed amount of information’, and once it ‘is enlarged to the point where its gridded microstructure becomes visible, further enlargement will reveal nothing new’.23 The camera in this context does not work like a tool or prosthesis that enhances perception. Instead, it seems to work on a diferent basis, inverting the relationship between human and technology, because we always inevitably come up against a wall of pixels that divulges nothing to us. We might suggest that this ruins the imaginative possibilities and revelatory potential of an ‘optical unconscious’. Benajmin’s ‘Little History of Photography’ also references Bertolt Brecht’s description (in a famous passage of ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’) of a photograph of ‘the Krupp works [the original factory in the Krupp steel, armaments and shipbuilding empire] or the AEG’.24 A photograph of these institutions, Brecht argues, ‘tells us next to nothing’.25 He uses this example in order to claim that, as such has become the reification of human relations within capitalist society, ‘less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality’.26 This claim can equally be put upon the magnified Jpeg, which shares more with Brecht’s understanding of photography than with Benjamin’s playful understanding of photographic magnification and the ‘optical unconscious’. Brecht’s thoughts on photography can be seen to anticipate the opaque grid of pixels revealed by the Jpegs’ magnification. His analysis was based on the specific content of the photograph, a picture of a Krupps factory, which ‘tells us next to nothing’. However, his argument now seems to aptly reflect the formal structure of the digital image, which, when magnified, reveals its pixelated construction and tells us nothing. This, perhaps, is the ‘secret’ of digital photography’s ‘optical unconscious’: that it doesn’t reveal anything about reality but only discloses its mathematical or algorithmic foundation. These reflections on the Jpeg, as an image format that is emblematic of what Han describes as the mathematicised and disenchanted nature of digital photography, suggest a form of image making that has severed the so-called ‘umbilical cord’ of photography, which ties the photographic object to the subject’s gaze. This reciprocal or empathetic relationship between the two is lost. The Jpeg’s re-composition of the photographed object as a series of eight by eight blocks of segmented colour swatches according to the DCT formula is symptomatic of Han’s provocative claim that ‘seeing itself is delegated to the apparatus’. Han continues to claim that digital photography is ‘de-coupled from the referent’, thereby becoming ‘self-referential’. It creates ‘a new, expanded reality that does not exist, a hyper-reality that no longer corresponds to reality, to a real referent’.27 This reality that does not exist, or hyper-reality, is a world born not on the level of the sprouting silver grains, as Barthes described it, but rather on the level of hard-edged, opaque pixels. It refers not to reality but to itself, to the mandates of an automated mathematical formula. Thus, according to Han’s rather melodramatic diagnosis, the digital photograph cannot ‘fall in love’ with its object. Can a Jpeg Make Us Cry? In 1983, Electronic Arts (EA), then a new video game company, announced itself with an advertising campaign whose tagline asked: can a computer make you cry? They did so to suggest that video games might take on the mantle of ‘art’ in the digital era. This new form of computer-mediated interactivity is more than ‘just a processor of data’, the advert continued; instead, it is a tool that can ‘bring people’s thoughts and feelings closer’.28 The ability to evoke intense empathetic responses, like crying, was assumed as a kind of

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litmus test for taking computer games seriously as genuine forms of artistic expression. The EA advertisement promised a digitised future quite diferent from the one analysed by Han. It suggests that the mathematical foundation of digital imaging technologies does not disenchant but has an untapped afective potential; that ‘the computer can be more than just a processor of data’. But how seriously should we take this statement? Whilst EA frames the potential of computers making us cry positively, we can, building on Han’s critique, suggest that this idea of computers and software developers taking on the mantle of ‘art’ and ‘artists’ today is symptomatic of a larger sense of cultural pessimism and inertia (related to the TINA phenomenon described in this book’s introduction). In this understanding, we have outsourced the role of a cultural or artistic avant-garde to corporate technology providers, whereby technological advancements and upgrades – new iPhone models, patches to Instagram, new software from Apple, Google, and Meta, etc. – have taken on the imperative of the artistic avant-garde, whose ‘true and most important function’, the art critic Clement Greenberg wrote, ‘was not to “experiment” but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving’.29 However, this obsessive foregrounding and insistence on new ‘avant-garde’ technological artefacts within contemporary culture might only obfuscate ‘the fact that the formal features of what we are seeing and hearing are familiar to the point of being exhausted. Relentless technological upgrades’, Mark Fisher has claimed, only function to ‘disguise the disappearance of formal innovation and new kind of sensory experience’.30 Perhaps the question is not can a computer make us cry, but do we want a computer to make us cry? Should a computer make us cry? Should we not, rather, lament at the fact that a processor of data can make us cry? A similar set of questions is asked about digital photography in the photographer Thomas Ruf ’s Jpeg series (2004–2007). This series of large-scale images includes over 150 works, ranging in scale from 6 ´ 6 feet to nearly 10 ´ 12 feet. Each individual work comprises an appropriated digital image of an impactful and often traumatic historical event, sourced from the internet, downloaded, and compressed as a Jpeg file of the lowest possible quality before printing at large scale. Ruf also manipulates the image using photo editing software in order to heighten the efect of the image’s pixilation.31 The series includes, for instance, compressed images of the 9/11 attack, the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, the US ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign in Iraq, nuclear bomb testing on Bikini Atoll, the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia, and scenes of warfare in Beirut and Grozny. These are images, Ruf explains, ‘that have been seared into the collective memory . . . images of the world that are unforgettable’.32 Ruf’s treatment of these diverse, eventful, and historically significant images, however, renders them uniform. All the appropriated images have been magnified beyond their limit of resolution – a point beyond which the image’s overall readability or indexicality collapses – and seem to shift into a form of geometric abstraction. The efect of this might be compared to the look of bufering screenshots of bad-quality online video streams. It flips our perception of the image, forcing us up against a grid of pixels, which confuses our recognition of the pictorial subject. The resulting picture, which foregrounds the signs of digital reproducibility, is then printed in limited edition at the largest available scale and at high resolution, giving the pixel blocks a crystal-like clarity. The photograph is also housed in a heavylooking dark wood frame, producing a tense, seemingly contradictory aesthetic – the compressed and disposable structure of digital imagery collapsed together with the bigmoney objet d’art status of contemporary art photography in one incongruous object (Figure 4.1 and Figure 4.2).

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Figure 4.1 Thomas Ruf, Jpeg ny06, 2005. Chromogenic colour print, diasec. 276 cm × 185 cm × 6 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Source: Photo courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © DACS, 2023.

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Figure 4.2 Thomas Ruf, Jpeg wd02, 2005. Chromogenic colour print, diasec. 255 cm × 185 cm × 6 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Source: Photo courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © DACS, 2023.

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Michael Fried, commenting on the obfuscating abstraction that results from the Jpegs’ extreme pixelation, has compared Ruf’s photographs to ‘the pointillist structure of NeoImpressionism’.33 In a historically more direct comparison, we might instead suggest Ruf’s compression produces a result that is comparable to one of Gerhard Richter’s totally abstract colour chart paintings, such as 256 Colours (1974) or 4900 Colours (2007). The Jpegs, however, contain nearly 100,000 individuated pixel blocks, far exceeding the visual data in Richter’s colour charts. Ruf’s Jpegs can be understood as something of a test, which sees the photographer subject a series of afectively charged photographs to the abstractions of the Jpeg algorithm, which, if we are to follow Han’s line of thought, ‘de-couples’ the image from its referent’ and becomes entirely ‘self-referential’. This is the revelation of Ruf’s gesture that all digital images are equivalent to one another, and ultimately all are equivalently self-referential to the DCT mathematical formula. For instance, each photograph is subjected to the same level of compression and is ‘blown-up’ to a similar scale so that they are equally pixelated. They appear as alternative configurations or variations of the same coloured grid. They no longer seem singular or eventful. Instead, each appears as generic as any other. The titles of individual works in the series encourage this response. They resemble indiscriminate filenames, the type that often appear automatically on a computer database, which don’t speak to the emphatic nature of the photograph’s content. They simply include some abbreviated detail of the location of whatever is depicted: jpeg ny14, jpeg wd02, jpeg gr01, etc. The art historian Rachel Wells has analysed Ruf’s treatment of historically significant and traumatic imagery in the Jpeg series. She argues that Ruf’s artistic process, which reveals the pixelated structure of digital photography, has an important ethical aspect. This is premised on a claim made by Judith Butler: ‘that visual culture in a time of war should demonstrate the unseen within our seeing’.34 This is because war, Butler argues, tends to numb the senses, decimating ‘our capacity to feel outrage in the face of human sufering’.35 Referring in particular to the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs (blatant evidence of this numbing of the senses), Butler writes that ‘this “not seeing” in the midst of seeing, this not-seeing that is the condition of seeing, has become the visual norm . . . one that we read in the photographic frame as it conducts this fateful disavowal’.36 In this sense, a visual culture that ‘teaches us to see the frame of what we see’, is crucial.37 For Wells, the opaque grid of pixels in the Jpeg series stands in for this idea of the unseen within the frame of our vision: ‘we are shown the blunt finiteness of the image’.38 Discussing the stakes of Ruf’s compressed and ‘lossy’ images of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, she suggests that ‘only by becoming resolved to their own distance and limitation in their attempts to comprehend the horror of 9/11 can those who were not directly affected come closer and see more clearly’.39 Leaning on Butler, she argues that ‘Ruf ’s jpeg images of war highlight [our] “quotidian acceptance [of war]”’, and highlight the necessity to ‘break apart and fragment a recognized, learned response from the media’s model of images’ in order to try to understand a larger ‘horror and outrage’.40 Wells’s argument suggests that Ruf’s foregrounding of the ‘frame of what we see’ might reenergise or re-cathect the digital image as an object of emotional attachment and fount of afective feeling, so that the Jpeg can make us cry. This analysis of Ruf’s compressed ‘lossy’ photographs can be seen to build on a longer history of the theorisation of ‘poor images’, which imagines the poor or lowresolution image as a tool to activate the viewer as a critical agent. This is exemplified by Marshall McLuhan’s diferentiation in his book Understanding Media (1964), between ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ media. It is also evident in more recent discourse on production values

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in contemporary media, in particular the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl’s influential essay ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’ (2009). Their point in common is that ‘poor’ quality images are more likely to enable viewer participation and disrupt passive modes of spectatorship. McLuhan’s Understanding Media explains his distinction between ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ media as follows: There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’ High definition is the state of being well filled with data. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.41 So, a ‘hot’ medium is something that comes to the viewer filled to the brim with data and requires little viewer participation, as everything is already there in front of them and there is nothing to decode or ponder. On the other hand, something is ‘cool’ if it is low definition, if it allows for some participation, letting the viewer fill in the gaps. McLuhan, writing in 1964 (before television arguably ‘heated up’, becoming more high definition, more ubiquitous, and continually available), claimed that television was a ‘cool’ medium. In part, he argued that the ‘cool’ promise of participation was evident in the staticky ‘look’ of television visuals. In his typically phallocentric approach, the static bursts of accidental colour, or blurring distortion (often referred to as ‘visual snow’), which sometimes occur on analogue screens, are made objects of libidinal investment. These moments when we become aware of the screen, the medium transmitting the image, remind McLuhan of the ‘open-mesh’ of a ‘silk stocking’: which is ‘far more sensuous than the smooth nylon, just because the eye must act as hand in filling in and completing the image, exactly as in the mosaic of the TV image’.42 Indeed, an image of stockings is used in McLuhan’s book, The Media is the Massage (1967), co-created with the graphic designer Quentin Fiore. This idea was revised by McLuhan in an interview for Playboy magazine in 1969. McLuhan suggests that in a cool medium, the audience is an active constituent of the viewing or listening experience. A girl wearing open-mesh silk stockings or glasses is inherently cool and sensual because the eye acts as a surrogate hand in filling in the low-definition image thus engendered. Which is why boys make passes at girls who wear glasses.43 The mosaic-like distortion in Ruf ’s Jpegs recalls McLuhan’s thoughts on ‘cool’ media. McLuhan’s conflation of less information or less data with a more active recipient or viewer is also inherited in some of the critical reception of the Jpegs. For instance, Bennett Simpson suggests that by zooming in and exposing the materiality of the jpeg, Ruf makes the picture ‘less visible’, in order to make it ‘more visible’.44 This process, Simpson continues, ‘encourages viewers to see and analyse’.45 Simpson’s argument is therefore premised on the putative ‘coolness’ of the Jpegs. They must, he concludes, ‘rile art photography’s increasingly mandarin penchant for elaborated and pristine production values’.46 Certainly, when magnified to this extent, the materiality of the digital image comes to the fore: the imagery in the Jpegs is inscribed and distressed by the gridded structure that is

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necessary for its compression. A diferent argument is used by photography theorist David Campany, who nevertheless comes to a similar conclusion in a variation on a Greenbergian modernist formulation regarding some sort of ‘truth’ to the materials. Campany suggests that, despite its cold and machinic nature, the ‘pixel’ is increasingly replacing the photographic grain as a ‘sign of the virtuous materiality of the image’ and of the ‘virtuous embodied photographer’.47 Campany writes that the pixel might be seen to inherit ‘the connotations of “authenticity”’ put upon the photographic grain in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when graininess was ‘coded as a kind of limit to which the photographer and the equipment had been pushed’.48 In line with either of these positions, it could be argued that Ruf’s extreme enlargement in the Jpeg series symbolises a resistance to the perfectibility associated with digital media and technological boosterism, revealing its structural apparatus, something that we aren’t normally supposed to see. Back in 2003, Lev Manovich wrote that with increasingly high-resolution imaging technology, the pixel was no longer present in the viewer’s experience of the digital image: ‘as far as the user is concerned’, he claims; ‘it simply does not exist’.49 Thus, we might see this work as a ‘cooling’ down process: draining the image of its high definition data in order to expose a skeletal support (as seen in Figure 4.3, a close-up detail of Jpeg wd02, 2005). Similarly, a narrative of the ‘poor image’ informs much contemporary discourse about artistic experimentation with digital imagery. It is based on the premise that less polished media might increase active or critical participation. More specifically, the ‘poor image’ builds upon the épater la bourgeoisie aspect of the historic avant-garde, which sought to outrage the bourgeoisie, trash traditional art values, and ofend the status quo with quick, crude, and cheap materials. For instance, Steyerl argues that the Jpeg is a ‘poor image’ and, as such, takes its place within a genealogy of ‘non-conformist materials’.50 Certainly the Jpeg, as we have seen with Ruf, is, in some respects, a ‘poor image’. It is glitchy, lo-fi, and intrinsically ‘lossy’ or compressed. Superficially, these aesthetic traits can be seen to symbolise non-conformity or at least some sort of resistance to media spectacle and technological innovation. After all, the Jpeg is designed for quick and easy distribution, and the ability to transgress borders and elude boundaries

Figure 4.3 Detail of Thomas Ruf, Jpeg wd02, 2005. Chromogenic colour print, diasec. 255 cm × 185 cm × 6 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Source: Photo courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © DACS, 2023.

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(both geographic and technological) is marked all over its compressed and bashed-up appearance. Ruf ’s Jpeg series, however, is rarely invoked in these discussions surrounding artistic engagement with digital imagery. When mentioned, as in Paolo Magagnoli’s writing on contemporary artist Sean Snyder’s use of digital compression, Ruf ’s experimentation with digital imaging is simply dismissed as a ‘spectacular’ and therefore lacking counterpoint.51 The implication of such a dismissal is that Ruf’s ‘spectacular’ conditions of production, sale, and display contradict the true value of the file format, or at least damage its subversive potential. By contrast, Snyder’s work with compressed photography has, Magagnoli writes, a ‘sober and minimal aesthetic’.52 Unlike Ruf, he explains, ‘Snyder’s photographs are modest in size, unframed, and sometimes placed on white aluminium boards and glass exhibit cases’.53 Synder’s use of ‘poor’ images, in this understanding, symbolises a ‘pedagogical’ rather than ‘spectacular’ practice.54 Again, McLuhan is echoed in Magagnoli’s account of Snyder’s digital compression, in which a disintegration of image quality is seen to open up space for the viewer’s interpretation: Technically, compression entails a loss of information or resolution. Nevertheless, within the artist’s practice it emerges as the metaphor for a process of reduction and analysis through which images are questioned and new, unconventional readings can be generated. ‘Data compression results in the disintegration of image quality,’ wrote Snyder, ‘leaving space for interpretation (or over-interpretation).’ For Snyder it is this ‘space for interpretation’ opened up by the manipulation of digital software like Photoshop that makes the medium a vehicle for the questioning of mass media propaganda.55 However, I don’t want to dismiss the ‘spectacular’ aspect of Ruf’s Jpegs. Rather, this aspect produces a tension lacking in Snyder’s work: the ‘cool’ loss of resolution bound up with the ‘hot’ luxuriant commodity (printed large as a high-quality C-type print and framed as an objet d’art). Instead, by picturing the Jpeg in this manner, Ruf’s work offers a more nuanced representation of the ‘poor image’ today. It reveals the difculty in applying long-standing forms of media analysis to objects produced within a digitised world. For Ruf, the ‘poor image’ is simply a result of algorithmic compression: an operating protocol, or dominant cultural logic, that mediates our everyday perceptual capabilities. There is no disintegration of image quality because the image is always already disintegrated. We can’t therefore assume a viewer’s critical receptiveness to ‘poor’ image quality because everything that we experience is always already ‘poor’. Ruf ’s ‘spectacular’ Jpegs can be seen as a measure, perhaps, with which to assess the Jpeg’s place within what Steyerl characterises as a ‘genealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agitprop films, underground video magazines, and other nonconformist materials, which aesthetically often used poor materials’.56 The relationship between digital compression and activism that is established in Steyerl’s text is further galvanised by the media representation of the Arab Spring in 2011. In this period of revolutionary activity, the visual language of digital compression slipped into the popular consciousness when compressed images saturated the media. Compressed and poor-quality images taken on mobile phones and digital cameras were distributed via proxy servers (web tools to mask your user location) and streamed around the world; they came to our screens blocky and pixelated. Digital compression was therefore essential for the spread of information through compromised channels. It became a

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form of political visibility for the protestor on a global stage. Eyewitness accounts of the escalating events could be captured and distributed quickly on social media platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, spreading information much faster than traditional media outlets. These images were grainy, glitchy, distorted, and ‘poor’, and came to be a significant actor in the revolution. This notion of the ‘poor’ image having a particular kind of agency is echoed in Steyerl’s essay. ‘Poor images’, she writes, ‘are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly’.57 They ‘lose matter and gain speed’.58 The poorer and more compressed the image, the lighter, more portable, and more evasive. The associated loss of quality, moreover, is something that counters ‘the contemporary hierarchy of images . . . based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution’.59 Thus, for Steyerl, the Jpeg is a ‘lumpen-proletariat in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution’.60 In this understanding, values such as focus, resolution, sharpness, and clarity of content imply class privilege. They become new markers of bourgeois comfort. On the other hand, a compressed, ripped, remixed, copied, and pasted aesthetic is the visual language of a new proletariat. This new visual language is one that ‘strips quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction’.61 This image, which loses part of its ‘visual substance’ through compression, ‘recovers some of its political punch [and] builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates’.62 Steyerl’s narrative of the ‘poor image’ is related to certain strategies of the artistic avant-garde that foreground the material properties of the apparatus in order to shock and disrupt the ideological illusions of media spectacle. For instance, her argument repeats some of the concerns of structural-materialist filmmakers in the 1970s (such as, for instance, Hollis Framption, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage), who sought ‘to demystify the film process’.63 Structural film did so by making visible the various, often shoddyseeming editing techniques used in commercial cinema (lighting efects, slow motion, etc.) that manipulate our afective response to the film and which we don’t tend to perceive in normal experience. Steyerl’s discussion of the compressed and shoddy-seeming jpeg is built on a similar claim: Although ‘they are frequently drawn from commercial media and circulate via networks that support corporate and state interests’, Lucy Soutter writes in her commentary on Steyerl’s account of digital ‘poor’ images that they ‘may have subversive efects . . . they have the potential to undercut spectacle in the ways that they are used’.64 T.J. Demos’s discussion of Steyerl’s artistic practice in his book The Migrant Image (2013) sustains this proposition regarding material ‘weakness’ or ‘poorness’ in the art work. He devotes a long discussion to Steyerl’s ‘essayistic documentary’ video work and, in part, discusses her employment of ‘poor’ production values as a destabilising element. For instance, Demos argues that the ‘poor’ quality of images in this context (owing to multiple generations of copies and the recording of imagery directly of the TV screen) has the efect of ‘derealiz[ing] the video’s referents’.65 It lessens the image’s ideological inscription, helping to ‘reveal the intrinsic malleability of video’s meanings’.66 Again, the glitchy or lossy image is associated with a mode of reception that creates an active, even liberated, form of spectatorship. Steyerl, Demos writes, does not fetishise high-definition; rather, she ‘appears politically committed to her images’ low resolution’.67 Poor production values are synonymous with political commitment; on this account, the narrative of the ‘poor’ image, as these writers present it, is a narrative of resistance and oppositionality, a means of disrupting the teleology of technological progress with a flow of bad, substandard, weak, and deficient images.

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However, Demos overlooks a central nuance of Steyerl’s argument, which, above all, highlights the ambivalence of ‘poor images’ in today’s media landscape, disrupting the notion of there being clear binary visual oppositions in a postinternet world where all images, even the richest and the most sublime, are necessarily poor; mediated by and subjected to processes of algorithmic decomposition. The poor image, Steyerl writes: operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings . . . The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and afect.68 Ruf’s ‘poor images’ in the Jpeg series, which are of the lowest possible resolution but printed as a high-quality, lustrous C-type photographic print and framed tastefully in dark wood (both spectacular and poor), crystallise the essential ambivalence of the ‘poor image’ in Steyerl’s argument. They caution us against fetishising ‘poor’ quality in an artwork, particularly when, as with the Jpeg, that ‘poorness’ is the result of a technical operating protocol. Often, in the accounts I have quoted, it is made to seem as if these aesthetic traits are automatically in possession of critical, subversive, or creative power. However, today, these qualities of low resolution, as Steyerl makes clear, are also a precondition of visibility in a system of information capitalism, which subjects images to standardising forms of compression to render them transmissible as units of content on digital networks. What Ruf ’s Jpeg series shows us is that the glitchy, degraded ‘poor’ image is always there, right at the heart of our visual culture – perhaps representing the deepest secret of the commodity within contemporary capitalism. The degradation, or compression, of the image is entirely in tune with the systematic impoverishment that capital itself performs. All commodities are, in a similar sense, compressed: whittled down and concentrated, generating interest and desire through spare, shoddy, and expendable means. Indeed, in a Wired article published the same year as Steyerl’s, Robert Capps argues that the main philosophy of twenty-first-century consumer technology ‘favor[s] flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished’. ‘Cheap and simple’, Capps makes clear, is ‘just fine’ for contemporary consumers.69 The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman made similar comments in Liquid Modernity (2000), writing that ‘it is now the smaller, the lighter, the more portable that signifies improvement and “progress”. Travelling light, rather than holding tightly to things deemed attractive for their reliability and solidity – that is, for their heavyweight, substantiality, and unyielding power of resistance – is now the asset of power’.70 Bauman goes on to assert that ‘it is the mind-boggling speed of circulation, of recycling, ageing, dumping and replacement which brings profit today – not the durability and lasting reliability of the product’.71 Therefore, ‘poorness’ is not in opposition to ‘spectacle’ or the commodity. By contrast, it is the essence of spectacle and commodification in what Bauman refers to as our ‘Liquid Modernity’. Ruf, in contrast to Wells’s argument, does not re-cathect the digital photograph as a visual medium that can create political and emotional attachments to its referent, as something that can make us cry. There is no possibility of a Barthesisan punctum in the Jpeg series – something that pierces through the image, which

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‘pricks’, and afectively connects with the viewer.72 Ruf’s large-scale magnification of the low-resolution image renders it too opaque, too equivalent, and too generic for such an emphatic response. In contrast, Ruf’s process rigorously disinvests our attachment to the digital photograph, forcing our attention to its abstractions and to its essential selfreferentiality, focusing on the barrier, limitation, or inherent blankness that exists at the heart of the digital image. It is the limit of what we are allowed to see by Jpeg’s mathematical formula that we see in Ruf’s work. In this sense, the subject matter in Ruf ’s appropriated photographs seems incidental rather than essential to their critical reception. Perhaps a proper response to this state of afairs is not tears but horror. This horror is not located in the emphatic content or subject matter of the Jpegs; rather, it is found deep in the structural composition of the digital image. Aphotic Zones and Black Boxes In Steyerl’s argument, the ‘smooth integration’ of the ‘poor image’ into the circuits of information capitalism does not necessarily denude the potential for disruptive movements of thought and afect. Following this, I want to explore the critical stakes of Ruf’s exposure to the disenchanted nature of photography today. These photographs picture the fact that, with the Jpeg, the closer we look, the less we get to see. Indeed, we are confronted with a level of the image that, I think, can be constructively defined as an ‘aphotic zone’. This is a phrase normally used to describe the depth of an ocean beyond which there is no light and where photosynthesis can’t take place. In the aphotic zone of the ocean, the water is pitch black and extends to the ocean floor. There is very little life. Likewise within the Jpeg series: the image is magnified to its limit of resolution, to a point where its visual information just gives out. And, as in the aphotic zone, we arrive at a point where we simply can’t see anything. The aphotic zone describes the horror of digital photography: it is the opaque mark of all that is excluded by the digitisation of the referent. The aphotic zone symbolises something aesthetically new about the digital photograph, namely, the opacity or inaccessibility that exists at the core of the image, despite it appearing natural or indexical. In doing so, we might add, it precludes the imaginative possibilities of an optical unconscious because a viewer always comes up against the dull finiteness of the image. Certainly, this medium cannot be understood according to the libidinal categories proposed by McLuhan: unlike the TV’s open-mesh stocking-like image, there is nothing to tease or for the eye to fill in and complete. The Jpeg is complete, signalled by the irreducibility and opacity of its grid of pixels. Perhaps this is surprising; we don’t tend to associate digital imaging with such a vocabulary of obfuscation. Rather, we are encouraged by every technological upgrade to imagine digital imaging in teleological terms, with each advancement producing a greater level of perfection and image clarity. Ruf’s work, by contrast, complicates this linear narrative. It encourages us to think more dialectically about this upward trajectory of digital imaging, whose form of picturing is based on an essential abstraction. It prompts us to consider, for instance, the compressions of digital photography as an epiphenomenon of ‘black boxing’, a descriptor for technological devices whose inner workings are kept hidden from us. This is something very familiar to users of smart devices, laptops, and phones: smooth, hard, and often reflective objects that ofer very little possibility for interaction. In contrast, these are objects that deflect our attention from their materiality or thingness. When open or switched on, these devices present us with a series of buttons, boxes, windows, or a

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touch-sensitive surface that requires our clicks and fingers to tap, drag, flick, and activate. It is an interface or portal to something somewhere else. Again, it deflects our attention away from the physical object. The phrase ‘black box’ has its origins in military technologies developed during the Second World War, such as radars in war planes, which were equipped with self-destruction mechanisms in case they fell into the hands of the enemy. If these technologies were captured, military strategists needed to develop approaches to gain knowledge from the devices without exploring their innards and risking explosion. Thus, Alexander Galloway surmises, any knowledge to be gained ‘would have to be gained purely via non-invasive observation. The point here is that because of these auto-destruct mechanisms, it was inadvisable if not impossible to open up devices (black boxes) gleaned from the enemy. The box must stay closed. The box must stay black. One must concentrate exclusively on the outside surface of the box, its inputs and outputs’.73 In this approach, we can’t know what goes on inside the ‘black box’ device; we can only record what goes in and what comes out and how it interacts with its environment. As we have seen at various points in this book, much of the technologies that have become ubiquitous in our postinternet age (including, for instance, Google Earth and the internet itself) have their origins in militaristic innovations, whose prerogatives still code our means of interaction with the world. Indeed, many scholars, including Galloway and notably Frank Pasquale, have argued that ‘black boxing’ has dominated our technologised world.74 It has come to be seen as an ‘epistemic object’, which symbolises a society rendered increasingly opaque by digital technologies.75 Today, the problem of opacity that comes with ‘black boxing’ has been further exaggerated by issues of access and illegibility, as the majority of the digital platforms that we use on a daily basis are both propriety and also impossibly complex. James Bridle analyses this tendency in his book New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018), the title of which suggests a world where increased technological complexity is accompanied by diminished human understanding. Computation is opaque: it takes place inside the machine, behind the screen, in remote buildings – within, as it were, a cloud. Even when this opacity is penetrated, by direct apprehension of code and data, it remains beyond the comprehension of most. The aggregation of complex systems in contemporary networked applications means that no single person ever sees the whole picture.76 The aphotic zone of Ruf ’s Jpeg series pictures the opacity of computation, as described by Bridle. Superficially, Ruf’s methodology echoes a traditional form of critical inquiry based on Karl Marx’s account of a descent ‘into the hidden abode of production’.77 The photographer zooms in on the digital image, demystifying and denaturalising its ‘mystical shell’, to display and reveal its ‘rational [mathematical] kernel’: a descent into the hidden abode of digital reproduction.78 However, this descent into the hidden abode is not revelatory; it reveals more opacity, more darkness. If anything, Ruf’s repetition of this critical gesture reveals that Marx’s famous allegory of critique is not available to us today in a world of digitised ‘black boxes’. To a certain extent, Ruf’s work has always been preoccupied with the interconnection of transparency/opacity and visibility/invisibility in photography, namely, the counterintuitive idea that photographic representation might function to conceal or obscure reality, despite it appearing to render the world more transparent and more visible. His work is about the double nature of technological advances in photographic representation. This

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is evident in his early series of large-scale photographic portraits (1981–1991), which transform individual subjects into generic and anonymous-looking images through extreme transformations in scale. It is contained in the Nights series (1992–1996), which pictures banal scenes of Frankfurt at night using a military-grade night vision lens, creating a convincing yet false impression of a war zone. It is also a significant aspect of his more recent exploration into digital imaging, for instance in the Substrate (2001–2007) and Photograms (2012–2015) series, which manipulates source imagery to a state of total abstraction using computer imaging software. All of Ruf’s work discloses the stylistic innovations of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. This is a group of German photographers (including, as well as Ruf, for instance, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Candida Höfer) who studied under the tutelage of Bernd and Hilla Becher and achieved international prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, whose work is characterised by highlevels of photographic resolution and depth of colour, the use of luminescent aluminium or Plexiglas panels as print surfaces, and a forthright embrace of digital retouching techniques. With Ruf, these techniques are employed to an extreme, aiding an exploration of photographic technology as something that obscures and manipulates our experience of the world. This revelation of opacity behind what we assume to be transparent or visible is at the core of what I have termed the horror of digital photography, which describes the particular afective quality of Ruf’s Jpegs. A central motif of the horror genre is the idea of confronting a limit to our ability to understand something. In horror, Eugene Thacker explains, you find a fundamental question about the fabric of reality and the impossibility of ever fully knowing or comprehending it . . . horror moves away from human-centric concerns . . . and towards a view of a world that is either against the human, or in many cases indiferent to the human.79 It is in these terms that we can understand the aphotic zone in the Jpegs, when we come up against a grid of pixels, the boundary or interface to a ‘world-without-us’.80 This experience of a ‘world-without-us’ in horror, for Thacker, represents ‘the subtraction of the human from the world . . . a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific’.81 In this respect, Ruf’s photographic work can be seen in dialogue with the media theorist Vilém Flusser, who, in his Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), appealed for an ‘informative photography’ that would ‘reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses’.82 The photographic image ‘must not lead to the fetishizing compensation of lost objects by their symbolic replacement’, Hubertus von Amelunxen glosses, putting stress on Flusser’s belief that we must give up any illusion of recovering a pre-photographic and pre-technological world. Instead, ‘it must educate us into an awareness of this translation within the image’.83 Flusser’s text was originally published before the emergence of the digital image (therefore, the ‘photograph’ in this context still refers to the capture of light and other rays onto sensitive surfaces via chemical and mechanical devices). In this book, he argues that photography is emblematic of a post-industrial and fully ‘apparatized’ world.84 This is because the photograph is a ‘technical image’ – an image produced by apparatuses. ‘As apparatuses themselves are the products of applied scientific texts’, Flusser explains, ‘in the case of technical images one is dealing with the indirect products of scientific texts. This gives them, historically and ontologically, a position that is diferent from that of

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traditional images’. Flusser’s strict interpretation of photography as an apparatised practice, and thus ‘technical’, can be seen to lay important groundwork for thinking about digital photography, within which the photographic image’s relationship with the apparatus becomes ever tighter and evermore automated because the light admitted by the camera lens is automatically digitised and made ‘lossy’ by its mathematical algorithm. Flusser’s concept of photography as an apparatised practice is premised on the idea that photographic representation can only constitute a variation of the technical categories of the camera, ofering little in excess. So, the photograph, in this understanding, is simply a dumb function of its technological support. Whilst this point of view seems overly deterministic, it appears precisely to describe the digital image as pictured by Ruf. Primarily, what we see in the Jpegs is a gridded system of pixels. In this respect, Flusser’s theorisation of photography is of a technology that no longer functions as the object of our intentions. Instead, the photographer is always operating within the pre-programmed possibilities of the apparatus. And the ‘freedom of the photographer’, Flusser proposes, is ‘a programmed freedom’.86 The horror of photography, thus understood, is that it functions for the benefit of a photographic apparatus, servicing a feedback mechanism with the ‘single aim of maintaining and improving’ itself.87 So, whilst the photographer might feel that they are bringing their own criteria to bear (so that ‘the apparatus functions as a function of the photographer’s intention’), this intention, nevertheless, ‘functions as a function of the camera’s program’.88 Flusser’s notion, in the early 1980s, that the simple act of photography is symptomatic of our functionalisation in a system of inhuman apparatuses might seem overstated in relation to that historical period of analogue photography. However, it represents a surprisingly plausible diagnosis of our current photographic condition. The idea of a photographic apparatus whose single aim is to maintain and improve itself is perhaps expressed in the automatic compulsion to document the minutiae of our lives on social media using the cameras on our phones and tablets. Furthermore, this view of photography is reflected in the pressure that photo-sharing social media users feel to constantly ‘prove their life’ by taking and posting photos of anything and everything.89 Who are they proving their life to? This or that social media platform, which coerces a relentless photographic activity to maintain, expand, and improve itself. In Thacker’s understanding, one of the aims of horror is to confront ‘the impersonal and indiferent world-without-us’.90 The genre is directed against the presupposition that the world is always the ‘world-for-us’. In doing so, it focuses on blind spots, instances when there is a horrible disproportion between the ‘world-for-us’ and the ‘world-initself’. ‘It makes these blind spots its central concern’, Thacker writes, ‘expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms – mists, ooze, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck’.91 This is how we can read the murky aphotic zone in the Jpegs. It can be tacked on to Thacker’s list of bestial ‘life forms’, a new addition that speaks to the blind spot at the heart of the digital photograph, reflecting a world concealed by ‘black box’ technological apparatuses, smart devices that obscure their functioning from us. This blind spot seems to express some sort of inversion in our relationship with technology, which does not necessarily enhance our vision or improve our perceptual capabilities. We do not simply use it as we want to; it also conditions and, to a certain extent, uses us. The blank pixels represent the boundary between us and the apparatus, which, following Flusser’s logic, is a world-without-us: a ‘black box’ that functions automatically. This is how Ruf’s practice bears out Flusser’s desire for an ‘informative

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photography’. His photography is one that does not ‘venerate apparatuses and programs’ and does not overcompensate for a putative lack in the photographic image. Instead, it works to expose ‘the cracks in [photographic] representation’.92 The aphotic zone forces us to reconsider our imaginative horizons when we think about photography; here we see its embeddedness in a system of automated apparatuses. And, worse still, this aphotic zone is also expressed, if we look a little closer, in the trillions of photographs that circulate around us on a daily basis. A timely reminder that prompts us to question and cast doubt on new forms of so-called ‘photo-realistic’ representation in our age of deep-fakes and AI image generators, where hidden algorithms mediate information according to processes that are concealed from us, behind inscrutable pixelated surfaces: a photography that is becoming more and more a world-without-us. Prove Your Life The dialectic that Ruf explores in the Jpeg between transparency/opacity and visibility/invisibility similarly structures its social and documentary value in the postinternet world. The interconnection between these seemingly oppositional categories is central to what scholars have recently termed the ‘social photo’. This is a phrase used to describe the historical specificity of photographs that are functionalised for use on social media networks and designed to circulate online, primarily as a means of communication and performative self-presentation. This is a photography made possible by smartphones. Photography as one app of many is a quick, easy, and seamless part of the way you use smart devices, without ceremony or process, and not something we associate with skill, craft, or individual creativity because the camera app tends to automate photographic decisions (i.e., aperture, shutter speed, exposure, etc.) on our behalf. The social photo describes ‘the overwhelming bulk of photographs being made today’, Nathan Jurgenson has argued, but it must be distinguished ‘from those weightier images made with that traditional understanding of photography as something more informational, formally artistic, and professional’.93 What ‘fundamentally makes a photo a social photo’, Jurgenson suggests, ‘is the degree to which its existence as a stand-alone media object is subordinate to its existence as a unit of communication’.94 So, the specificity of the social photo is not related to any sort of medium specificity or enclosure as a self-contained object. Today, the ‘passion of the image’, Geert Lovink has suggested, echoing some aspects of Han’s critique of digital photography, ‘is no longer a mystery’, or at least no longer matters.95 Instead, what matters is its ability to disperse and circulate, to be shared and reproduced online, to go viral, and to accumulate value for modes of ‘platform capitalism’.96 Another sort of ‘black boxing’: a form of image-making that deflects individual attention and formal scrutiny from the object; what matters more is how it interacts with its environment. The nature of the social photo – as a signifying structure of its own accord – was memorably explored in an online performance art project, Excellences & Perfections (2014), by the artist Amalia Ulman. This was a five-month scripted and site-specific performance that took place on the artist’s personal Instagram account. It began unannounced and was conceived by Ulman as a boycott of her online persona. She boycotted her persona by mimicking what she identified as ‘the most popular trends online (for women)’; creating a three-part narrative told via photo sharing on the social media platform, which saw her take on the roles of a ‘cute girl’ (Figure 4.4), ‘hot babe’ (Figure 4.5), and finally ‘life goddess’ (Figure 4.6).97 The performative nature of Ulman’s Instagram account was not made explicit from the outset. It was revealed after the fact. In real-time of the project, it

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Figure 4.4 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram update, June 1, 2014), 2014. Source: Image courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC.

was carried out as if it were simply a record of the artist’s real life. In Excellences & Perfections, Ulman used social photography to project a luxury consumerist fantasy lifestyle: cosmetic surgery; bespoke diets; pole-dancing lessons; hotel rooms; plush robes; branded couture; spa days. The artist’s Instagram account became a meticulous collage of carefully arranged flowers, expensive lingerie, highly groomed interiors, selfies, and perfectly plated brunches, with no obvious suggestion that this was in fact a performance. Indeed, the images were accompanied by a range of organic comments posted by followers of Ulman’s account throughout the duration of the project (Figure 4.7). These comments revealed an authentic relation to Ulman’s scripted performance, with followers taking the social photos at face value: sharing their own cosmetic beauty experiences; some making abusive propositions; others scolding the artist for conforming to the exaggerated or

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Figure 4.5 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram update, July 4, 2014), 2014. Source: Image courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC.

cliché ideals of feminine beauty perpetuated on social media.98 Whilst the social photos posted by Ulman were excessively curated, they were also eminently believable because they’re so familiar. Social photography is not a tool to document or interpret reality; it’s a means of creating reality: selling your lifestyle, building a brand, and producing content. Ulman went to great lengths to replicate the narrative conventions of the more privileged ‘influencer’ feeds, which tend to promote a highly crafted lifestyle (often aided by paid-for-endorsements), from her use of captions and hashtags to the pace and timing of uploads to the inclusion of images of ‘authentic’ intimate or emotional content. In this respect, Cadence Kinsey has analysed how Ulman’s performance responds ‘to the demands of social media to act in a certain way’ and illustrates ‘the way in which authenticity, or

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Figure 4.6 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram update, August 27, 2014), 2014. Source: Image courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC.

coherence between on- and ofine performance, is constructed not simply through representation but through expectation’.99 Namely, the expectation is to provide raw material for the extraction of data and ultimately capital for the online platform. Following the conclusion of Excellences & Perfections, Ulman was invited to talk about the performance at Art Basel 2014 in Miami Beach on the subject of ‘Instagram as an Artistic Medium’. The artist shared the stage with Kevin Systrom, the co-founder and then CEO of Instagram, who also ofered his thoughts on the subject. Systrom used the stage to propagandise what he described as the ‘mission’ of Instagram: to ‘capture and share the world’s moments’. Instagram is designed, Systrom insists, to inspire a ‘raw, uncut, unfiltered, and unproduced’ form of creativity and ‘emergent behavior’. Above all, he goes on, ‘authenticity is at the center of Instagram’.100 At this point, Ulman interjects,

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Figure 4.7 Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Instagram update, July 8, 2014), 2014. Source: Image courtesy the artist and James Fuentes LLC.

but is that authenticity real? Systrom struggles to find an answer to this question. For Systrom, it is real. This goes without saying. The question, for him, is a misnomer. The instantaneity ofered by the platform allows users to capture an image with their smartphone and immediately upload it to their social network. It is fast, candid, and uncurated – a veritable slice of life. Instagram as an inheritor of Barthes’s message without a code. Or of Susan Sontag’s account of photography as a medium that ‘discloses’ reality (as opposed to constructing it).101 However, Systrom’s understanding is lacking nuance. His view is premised on an assumed authentic or direct relation between the image, the photographer, and the photographic referent. Sontag, by contrast, despite celebrating photography as a medium of disclosure, qualifies this relationship, claiming that ‘what is true of photographs is [merely] true of the world seen photographically’.102 Thus, the photograph is not necessarily true of the world, only of its own conditions of production. Excellences & Perfections ofers its own response to the question of authenticity. It suggests that the authenticity that Systrom claims to be at the centre of Instagram is not a form of ‘emergent behavior’. Not raw, uncut, and unfiltered. But curated, produced laboriously, and often compulsively. Ulman’s three-part narrative is structured in meticulous detail. It doesn’t capture life. It ofers a simulation of life as a sequential series of images arranged according to Instagram’s gridded content feed, echoing the pixelated grid revealed in Ruf’s Jpegs. In each of its narrative parts, Ulman adopts a clearly defined and standardised aesthetic, which puts forward the idea of Instagram as a space that produces specific or homogenous subjective types (rather than allowing for an emergent or heterogeneous expression). Ulman as ‘cute girl’: various shades of pale, linen fabric,

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cream and strawberries, petals, ribbons, cotton socks, and soft toys; Ulman as ‘hot babe’: darker tones of black and gold, branded couture, ice cream, drugs, and the city at night; Ulman as ‘lifestyle goddess’: pastel tones, avocados, brown bread, wellness slogans, homewares, and self-care. This standardised and formulaic aesthetic is amplified by the attention given by Ulman to the hashtags, comments, and likes, which form an essential component of the performance, giving it its site-specificity. This system of tagging, liking, sharing, and commenting has a significant impact on the nature of photography today. It encourages a standardised visual language that prioritises connectivity and the accrual of likes and shares rather than an intuitive or experimental approach to image making. As with Excellences & Perfections, this tends to result in the reproduction of stereotypical and sometimes prejudicial norms. For instance, Kinsey focuses on the foregrounded aesthetic of ‘prettiness’ in Ulman’s performance, which represents: an aspirational but ultimately bland femininity: that which is simply ‘pretty’ possesses a sub-visibility that is not only the mark of the historical association of femininity with passivity, but also of acceptability, moderation and restraint. In this, prettiness stands for the exertion of a violent normativity that is, ultimately, exclusionary. As such, it is an aesthetic logic that belies its ugly core values.103 Therefore, the system of connectivity that social photography is enmeshed within does not produce authenticity; rather, it reproduces traditional and exclusionary social forms and behaviours. As such, we might claim that authenticity on Instagram and with social photography more generally, is ideological. An ideology of authenticity is a veil that conceals or prompts one to overlook the fact that social photography is not simply photography as we knew it; it is also something deeply connected to the way in which our subjectivity is regulated today and how we are made productive in a digital economy. This ideology of authenticity conceals the nature of photography today: a form of immaterial labour, a contribution to the algorithm, content, or raw material from which value can be extracted by ‘platform capitalism’. The images captured and shared in Excellences & Perfections looked authentic; they looked spontaneous, uncut, and unproduced. However, as Ulman made clear in her own contribution to the talk at Art Basel, Miami Beach, they were carefully calibrated and curated. A huge amount of hidden or immaterial labour went into their construction. This is a form of labour that undergirds much of the so-called ‘authentic’ content that we consume today. Indeed social media has ‘been built on the free labour of users, much of which has been directed at hiding the fact that it is labour at all. (It resembles domestic work, ideologically structured as something done out of love and therefore not requiring additional recompense beyond token recognition)’.104 Social media has become a weird form of continuous, non-stop work: this compulsion to perform the self, to prove your life, Rob Horning suggests, ‘sometimes seems like an endless interview with no interviewers’.105 It compels us to constantly address ourselves to an invisible interviewer, giving them information and pictures, perpetually proving our lives to them. This labour on social media, which might feel more like leisure – something done just for fun, done out of love and enjoyment – is nonetheless a labour that is producing value and revenue for someone else. The majority of social media platforms are free to use; however, this is not for good reason. As the cliché goes, If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson have argued that this is representative of a new stage of capitalist

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production; ‘the capture of value online’, they write, ‘represents the extension of the logic of capital into new spaces and temporalities; it appears that capitalists have found another group of people – beyond workers (producers) – to exploit and a new source of surplus value’.106 This new group of people, beyond workers, is just everyday people doing everyday things, photographing this and that, and sharing their images online. The media theorist Marc Andrejevic ofers an unsettling account of this state of afairs, which deepens the privatisation of social interaction and alienation of our lifeworld: When we create a blog or post an item on Facebook [or on any other social media platform, such as Instagram] or even purchase an item or view a webpage, we do so in ways that are . . . unsupervised and minimally controlled. At the same time, however, we generate information about our activities over which we sacrifice control in exchange for access to the infrastructure and the services it supports. In a sense, then, we lose control over some aspects of our online productivity even when this remains free from familiar forms of oversight and control . . . The alienated world envisioned by interactive marketers is one in which all of our actions (and the ways in which they are aggregated and sorted) are systematically turned back upon us. It is, in the end, a disturbing vision: an informationalized world in which the very atmosphere through which we move has become privatized and commercialized. Every message we write, every video we post, every item we buy or view, our time-space paths and patterns of social interaction all become data points in algorithms for sorting, predicting, and managing our behavior.107 In an evocative discussion of the act of posing for a camera in Camera Lucida, Barthes described how ‘once I feel myself observed by the (camera) lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing” . . .: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice’.108 Barthes is commenting on how when the camera is on us, we feel compelled to pose for it; it mortifies our body, as if we were an automaton in the face of its gaze. In our postinternet world, this tension is writ large; we are always being addressed, tracked, watched, surveilled, and mortified. Camera lenses are everywhere: CCTV, webcams – every person with a smartphone is a potential photographer lying in wait. We are always given the feeling of posing for something or someone. This makes material Horning’s idea of the ‘endless interview’, because there are lenses everywhere, we have internalised this idea that we are always being watched and always might have to prove our life to our watchers. We can think of social photography as a crucial element or conduit in this never-ending interview situation. We are always compelled to prove ourselves and to perform who we are. This performativity is central to Ulman’s own performance in Excellences & Perfections. Ulman reveals this performative relationship to social media through a fictionalised or inauthentic performance of ‘authenticity’. This disenchanted authenticity might represent a disruption of social photography and its demand on us to rigorously construct naturalness, or to naturalise the continuous ongoing labour required for this appearance of authenticity and self-expression. Consumer culture relies on the ideological fiction that self-expression brings personal fulfilment and ‘self-actualization’, so that the injunction to reveal oneself is not a burden, but bliss. This makes us both consume more – the self is articulated through branded commodities that have ever-shifting signifying potential – and provide more

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undercompensated labour (often the sort of ‘immaterial’ labour that invests commodities with their signification capacity, giving brands their ‘meaning’).109 Horning argues that within a platform capitalism that disciplines us to naturalise a performative authenticity – essentially because it feeds the algorithm with data that can be used to more efciently target us with advertisements and construct us as a bundle of saleable metadata – the only means by which the individual subject can maintain a space concealed by these power relations is to naturalise fakeness, to be authentically inauthentic. ‘Faking the natural’ Horning insists, ‘takes a lot of money’, whereas ‘naturalizing the fake is egalitarian’.110 However, Ulman’s complex repetition of the generic and ‘violent normativity’ of Instagram’s social photography has been the subject of trenchant critiques within the art press, who failed to observe a critical gesture in its strange patterns of mimicry and playing to type. Notably, Morgan Quaintance singled out Ulman for her ‘specific brand of weak, indirect criticality . . . In reality’, he writes, ‘Excellences & Perfections, true to the post-internet sensibility it sprang from, didn’t dismantle anything, it just revelled in, fed of and profited from the exploitative logics of late capitalism’.111 This reading is perhaps given strength by the fact that Ulman’s Instagram profile had amassed 88,906 followers by the final post of the project. So according to typical social media metrics, it was a resounding success.112 However, we can also see Excellences & Perfections as emblematic of a larger concern in postinternet art, revealing the disruption of oppositional boundaries in today’s media landscape, for instance, between the transparent and the opaque and the visible and the invisible. The separation of such boundaries is today enforced as a prerogative of social media, which is veiled with an ideology of transparency and visibility and the insistence that it has nothing to hide, that it is working for you, and that you are not, in fact, the product being sold. Ulman’s performance inverts this prerogative through careful repetition and reiteration, giving in to this idea of the self as an object, as a product, allowing the self to be ‘posed’ and ‘mortified’ by the algorithm, ‘according to its caprice’. She uses social photography to render – as Ruf does in the Jpeg series – what we assume to be transparent, opaque, and what we assume to be visible, something invisible, something that might disappear the subject from the gaze of social media, so that is rather hidden in plain sight. But this does not mean that hers is a ‘weak’ form of criticality. By contrast, it may be the only critical gesture or strategic resistance possible in a platform capitalism that demands we be authentic and that we prove our lives compulsively to the algorithm. Jean Baudrillard pre-empted this question of the critical or subversive gesture within a system that prioritises and indeed requires our participation and authentic self-expression (only to flatten subjectivity into opaque screeds of metadata and patterns of consumer behaviours). In an essay from 1985 titled ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, Baudrillard explains: To a system whose argument is oppression and repression, the strategic resistance is to demand the liberating rights of the subject. But this seems rather to reflect an earlier phase of the system, and even if we are confronted with it, it is no longer a strategic territory: the present argument of the system is to maximize speech, to maximize the production of meaning, of participation. And so the strategic resistance is that of the refusal of meaning and the refusal of speech – the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is another form of refusal by overacceptance . . . This

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strategy does not exclude the other, but it is the winning one today, because it is the most adapted to the present phase of the system.113 This strategy of ‘hyper-conformity’ and ‘overacceptance’, which we can intuit in Ulman’s work, allows us to properly confront the horror of the system it addresses and which addresses – posing and mortifying – the subject. Instead of naturalising the online subject as a vector of authentic meaning and speech, Ulman denaturalises her online image, rendering it opaque. As with Ruf, Ulman does not work to re-cathect photography, to reenergise its afectivity; instead, she disenchants social photography, refusing its so-called authenticity, making it ‘informative’ in a Flusserian sense, revealing a horror buried within and concealed by its algorithmic simulation of photographic indexicality. This might not be a ‘winning’ strategy, but it, at the very least, gestures to some sort of resistance to the ideological fantasy of authenticity that continues to mark photographic production today, as it is increasingly enmeshed within and attached to systems of capitalist extraction. Notes 1. Douglas Crimp, Pictures (New York: Artists Space, 1977), p. 3. 2. Grafton Tanner, ‘Classroom Management: Simon Sinek, ClassDojo, and the Nostalgia Industry’, The Los Angeles Review of Books (January 2019), https://lareviewofbooks.org/ article/classroom-management-simon-sinek-classdojo-and-the-nostalgia-industry/, accessed 15/10/21. 3. Isabelle Graw and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Lost Traces of Life: A Conversation about Indexicality in Analog and Digital Photography between Isabelle Graw and Benjamin Buchloh’, Texte zur Kunst, no. 99 (September 2015), www.textezurkunst.de/99/lost-traces-life/, accessed 10/02/23. 4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), pp. 81–93. 5. Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2022), p. 31. 6. See for instance Chad Elias, ‘Emergency Cinema and the Dignified Image: Cell Phone Activism and Filmmaking in Syria’, Film Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 1 (September 2017), https:// filmquarterly.org/2017/09/14/emergency-cinema-and-the-dignified-image-cell-phoneactivism-and-filmmaking-in-syria/, accessed 15/11/21. 7. Han, Non-thing, p. 32. 8. The ‘Joint’ refers to it being a joint committee between ISO/IEC JTC1 and ITU-T. ISO/ IEC JTC1 is itself a joint committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop international standards in information and communication technologies. See ‘Mission and Principles’, www.iso.org/iso/home/standards_development/list_of_iso_technical_committees/ jtc1_home.htm#JTC_1_mission_and_principles, accessed 21/09/15/. ITU-T is a division of the International Telecommunication Union, which also works to ensure the maintenance of global telecommunication standards. Its website states that their aim is to ‘develop the technical standards that ensure networks and technologies seamlessly interconnect’. See ‘About ITU’, www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/default.aspx, accessed 21/09/15. 9. William B. Pennebaker and Joan L. Mitchell, JPEG: Still Image Data Compression Standard (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993), p. 1. 10. Pennebaker and Mitchell, JPEG: Still Image Data Compression, p. 4. 11. Pennebaker and Mitchell, JPEG: Still Image Data Compression, p. 4. 12. Pennebaker and Mitchell, JPEG: Still Image Data Compression, p. 38. 13. W.J.T. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 12–14. 14. Pennebaker and Mitchell, JPEG: Still Image Data Compression, p. 78.

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15. Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 100. 16. Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, p. 99. 17. Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, p. 21. 18. Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, p. 21. 19. Cory Arcangel, ‘On Compression’, in Steven Bode (ed.), A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould (London: Film and Video Umbrella, 2008), pp. 221–222. 20. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 6. 21. Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 511–512. 22. Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London; New York: Verso, 2002), p. 105. 23. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, p. 6. 24. Brecht quoted in Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 526. 25. Brecht quoted in Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 526. 26. Brecht quoted in Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 526. 27. Han, Non-things, p. 32. 28. This advertising campaign is analysed by Aubrey Anable, who quotes the text accompanying EA’s advert, which explicitly claims the historical role often attributed to artists: ‘What are the touchstones of our emotions? Until now, the people who asked such questions . . . were, in the traditional sense, artists. We’re about to change that tradition . . . In short, we are finding that the computer can be more than just a processor of data. It is . . . an interactive tool that can bring people’s thoughts and feelings closer together . . . And while fifty years from now, its creation may seem no more important than the advent of motion pictures or television, there is a chance it will mean something more’. Aubrey Anable, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Afect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), p. vii. 29. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ [1939], Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 5. 30. Mark Fisher, ‘What Is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1 (Fall 2012), p. 18. 31. Commenting on the Jpeg series, Greg Hainge writes that ‘before printing these images are subject to a great deal of post-capture manipulation, pixels being moved in such a way that each pixel is itself regridded and thus expanded, emphasising the structural properties of the image, and some colours are altered also. The characteristics of the image that are emphasised by Ruf’s manipulations are . . . artefacts of an image compression standard’. Greg Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 218. 32. Thomas Ruf in Max Dax, ‘Interview with Thomas Ruf’, in Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), Thomas Ruf (Milan: Skira Editore, 2009), p. 74. 33. Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 154. 34. Judith Butler quoted in Rachel Wells, ‘Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruf’s JPEG Series’, in Alexandra Moschovi, Carol McKay and Arabella Plouviez (eds.), The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), p. 212. 35. Judith Butler, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 25, no. 6 (April 2007), p. 956. 36. Butler, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, p. 956. 37. Butler quoted in Wells, ‘Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruf’s JPEG Series’, p. 212. 38. Wells, ‘Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruf ’s JPEG Series’, pp. 212–213. 39. Wells, ‘Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruf’s JPEG Series’, p. 212. 40. Wells, ‘Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruf’s JPEG Series’, p. 213. 41. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 22–23. 42. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p. 23.

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43. Marshall McLuhan, ‘The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan’, Playboy Magazine (March 1969), republished by Next Nature (December 2009), www.nextnature.net/2009/12/theplayboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan, accessed 17/11/15. 44. Bennett Simpson, ‘Ruins: Thomas Ruf’s Jpegs’, in Bennett Simpson (ed.), Thomas Ruf: Jpegs (New York: Aperture, 2009), no pagination. 45. Simpson, ‘Ruins: Thomas Ruf ’s Jpegs’. 46. Simpson, ‘Ruins: Thomas Ruf ’s Jpegs’. 47. David Campany, ‘Thomas Ruf: Aesthetic of the Pixel’, IANN magazine, no. 2 (2008), http:// davidcampany.com/thomas-ruf-the-aesthetics-of-the-pixel/, accessed 20/01/14. 48. Campany, ‘Thomas Ruf: Aesthetic of the Pixel’, http://davidcampany.com/thomas-ruf-theaesthetics-of-the-pixel/, accessed 20/01/14. 49. Lev Manovich, ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (New York; London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 243–244. 50. See Hito Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, in Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle (eds.), The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012). 51. Paolo Magagnoli, ‘“Let Meaning Disintergrate”: Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder’, in Alexandra Moschovi, Carol McKay and Arabella Plouviez (eds.), The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), p. 226. 52. Magagnoli, ‘“Let Meaning Disintergrate”: Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder’, p. 226. 53. Magagnoli, ‘“Let Meaning Disintergrate”: Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder’, p. 226. 54. Magagnoli, ‘“Let Meaning Disintergrate”: Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder’, p. 227. 55. Magagnoli, ‘“Let Meaning Disintergrate”: Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder’, p. 230. 56. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, pp. 43–44. 57. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 41. 58. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 41. 59. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 32. 60. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 32. 61. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 32. 62. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 42. 63. See Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’, in Peter Gidal (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976), p. 1. 64. Lucy Soutter, Why Art Photography? (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 102–103 65. T.J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 82. 66. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, p. 88. 67. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, p. 88. 68. Steyerl, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, p. 43. 69. Robert Capps, ‘The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine’, Wired (August 2009), www.wired.com/2009/08/f-goodenough/, accessed 11/11/15. 70. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 13. 71. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 14. 72. The punctum is Barthes’s phrase for the particular afective quality of a photographic image that exceeds its documentary or indexical value. Barthes writes of the punctum as a ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole-and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, p. 27. 73. Alexander Galloway, ‘Black Box, Black Bloc’, in Benjamin Noys (ed.), Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2012), p. 242. 74. See Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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75. Philipp Von Hilgers and William Rauscher, ‘The History Of The Black Box: The Clash Of A Thing And Its Concept’, Cultural Politics, vol. 7, no. 1 (March 2011), p. 46. 76. James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2015), kindle edition. 77. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 279. 78. This is a reference to Marx’s account of the dialectical quality of the commodity object in Capital, Volume One, which, Marx writes, ‘must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, p. 103. 79. Eugene Thacker quoted in ‘The Sight of a Mangled Corpse: An Interview with Eugene Thacker’, Scapegoat, no. 5 (Summer/Autumn 2013), p. 379. 80. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2011), p. 5. 81. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 6. 82. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography [1983], trans. Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), pp. 81–82. 83. Hubertus von Amelunxen, ‘Afterword’ to Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, pp. 93–94. 84. Flusser contrasts technical apparatuses with the machines of the industrial world. ‘Tools and machines work,’ he writes, ‘by tearing objects from the natural world and informing them, i.e. changing the world. But apparatuses do not work in that sense. Their intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world. Their intention is symbolic’. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 25. 85. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 14. 86. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 35. 87. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 73–74. 88. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 35. 89. This idea of pressure to ‘prove your life’ on Instagram is taken from Essena O’Neill, a teenage Instagram ‘star’ (reportedly she would receive up to 2000 Australian dollars to post to her 612,000 followers). O’Neill received a lot of publicity in November 2015 after she announced her retirement from the photo sharing platform, stating that the pressure to constantly ‘prove her life’ had become too much. See Elle Hunt, ‘Essena O’Neill Quits Instagram Claiming Social Media “Is Not Real Life”’, The Guardian (November 2015), www.theguardian.com/media/2015/ nov/03/instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-2d-life-to-reveal-true-story-behind-images. 90. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 6. 91. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, p. 9. 92. von Amelunxen, ‘Afterword’, p. 94. 93. Nathan Jurgenson, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London; New York: Verso, 2019), p. 8. 94. Jurgenson, The Social Photo, p. 9. 95. Geert Lovink, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (London: Pluto Press, 2019), p. 99. 96. Nick Srnicek employs the phrase ‘platform capitalism’ to describe online platforms that ‘appropriate data as a raw material. The activities of users and institutions, if they are recorded and transformed in to data, become a raw material that can be refined and used in a variety of ways by platforms. With advertising platforms in particular, revenue is generated through the extraction of data from users’ activities online, from the analysis of those data, and from the auctioning of ad space to advertisers’. See Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2016), p. 35. 97. Cadence Kinsey, ‘Archetype and Authenticity: Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections’, in Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers (eds.), Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 23. 98. Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections have been archived and restored by Rhizome using its Webrecorder tool, which enables the creation of high-fidelity archives of the web. Using this tool, the project can be viewed as it would have appeared in 2014. See https://webenact.rhizome. org/excellences-and-perfections/, accessed 17/05/23.

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99. Kinsey, ‘Archetype and Authenticity: Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections’, p. 28. 100. Kevin Systrom, transcribed from ‘Salon | Digital Talk | Instagram as an Artistic Medium’, Art Basel, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8PHAtm9Buk&ab_channel=ArtBasel, accessed 10/03/23. 101. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 92. 102. Sontag, On Photography, p. 79. 103. Kinsey, ‘Archetype and Authenticity: Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections’, p. 29. 104. Rob Horning, ‘Perpetual Provisional Selves’, in Amalia Ulman (eds.), Excellences & Perfections (Munich: Prestel, 2018), p. 25. 105. Horning, ‘Perpetual Provisional Selves’, p. 23. 106. George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, ‘Production, Consumption, Presumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital “Prosumer”’, Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 10, no. 1 (2010), p. 21. 107. Mark Andrejevic, ‘Estranged Free Labor’, in Trebor Scholz (ed.), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 159. 108. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, pp. 10–11. 109. Horning, ‘Perpetual Provisional Selves’, p. 24. 110. Horning, ‘Perpetual Provisional Selves’, p. 25. 111. Morgan Quaintance, ‘Right Shift’, Art Monthly, vol. 387 (June 2015), p. 7. 112. Cadence Kinsey, ‘The Instagram Artist Who Fooled Thousands’, BBC Culture (March 2016), www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160307-the-instagram-artist-who-fooled-thousands, accessed 05/05/23. 113. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History, vol. 16, no. 3 (Spring 1985), p. 588.

References Anable, Aubrey, Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Afect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Andrejevic, Mark, ‘Estranged Free Labor’, in Trebor Scholz (ed.), Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 149–164. Arcangel, Cory, ‘On Compression’, in Steven Bode (ed.), A Couple Thousand Short Films About Glenn Gould (London: Film and Video Umbrella, 2008), pp. 220–232. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media’, New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 577–589. Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Benjamin, Walter, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 507–530. Bridle, James, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2015), kindle edition. Butler, Judith, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. vol. 25, no. 6 (April 2007), pp. 951–966. Campany, David, ‘Thomas Ruf: Aesthetic of the Pixel’, IANN magazine, No. 2 (2008), http:// davidcampany.com/thomas-ruf-the-aesthetics-of-the-pixel/, accessed 20/01/14. Capps, Robert, ‘The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine’, Wired (August 2009), www.wired.com/2009/08/f-goodenough/, accessed 11/11/15. Crimp, Douglas, Pictures (New York: Artists Space, 1977). Dax, Max, ‘Interview with Thomas Ruf’, in Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), Thomas Ruf (Milan: Skira Editore, 2009), pp. 70–75. Demos T.J., The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2013). Elias, Chad, ‘Emergency Cinema and the Dignified Image: Cell Phone Activism and Filmmaking in Syria’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (September 2017), available at: https://filmquarterly.

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org/2017/09/14/emergency-cinema-and-the-dignified-image-cell-phone-activism-and-filmmakingin-syria/, accessed 15/11/21. Fisher, Mark, ‘What is Hauntology?’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Fall 2012), pp. 16–24. Flusser, Vilém, Towards a Philosophy of Photography [1983], trans. Anthony Matthews (London: Reaktion Books, 2005). Fried, Michael, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2008). Galloway, Alexander, ‘Black Box, Black Bloc’, in Benjamin Noys (ed.), Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2012), pp. 237–252. Gidal, Peter (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976). Graw Isabelle and Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ‘Lost Traces of Life: A Conversation about Indexicality in Analog and Digital Photography between Isabelle Graw and Benjamin Buchloh’, Texte zur Kunst, Iss. 99 (September 2015), www.textezurkunst.de/99/lost-traces-life/, accessed 10/02/23. Greenberg, Clement, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ [1939], Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 3–21. Hainge Greg, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Han, Byung-Chul, Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2022). Horning, Rob, ‘Perpetual Provisional Selves’, in Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (Munich: Prestel, 2018), pp. 23–26. Hunt, Elle, ‘Essena O’Neill quits Instagram claiming social media “is not real life”’, The Guardian, (November 2015), available at: www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/03/ instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-2d-life-to-reveal-true-story-behind-images. Jurgenson, Nathan, The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (London; New York: Verso, 2019). Kinsey, Cadence, ‘The Instagram artist who fooled thousands’, BBC Culture (March 2016), www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160307-the-instagram-artist-who-fooled-thousands, accessed 05/05/23. Kinsey, Cadence, ‘Archetype and Authenticity: Amalia Ulman’s Excellences & Perfections’ in Boel Ulfsdotter & Anna Backman Rogers (eds.), Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity and Activism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 22–37. Leslie, Esther, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London; New York: Verso, 2002). Lovink, Geert, Sad by Design: On Platform Nihilism (London: Pluto Press, 2019). Manovich, Lev, ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (New York; London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 240–251. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1982). Magagnoli, Paolo, ‘‘Let Meaning Disintergrate’: Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder’, in Alexandra Moschovi, Carol McKay and Arabella Plouviez (eds.), The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet, (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), pp. 223–240. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [1964] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). McLuhan, Marshall, ‘The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan’, Playboy Magazine (March 1969), republished by Next Nature (December 2009), www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan, accessed 17/11/15. Mitchell, W.J.T., The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Pasquale, Frank, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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Pennebaker. William B. and Mitchell, Joan L., JPEG: Still Image Data Compression Standard (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993). Quaintance, Morgan, ‘Right Shift’, Art Monthly 387 (June 2015), pp. 5–8. Ritzer, George and Jurgenson, Nathan, ‘Production, Consumption, Presumption: The Nature of Capitalism in the Age of the Digital ‘Prosumer’, Journal of Consumer Culture 10, no. 1 (2010), pp. 13–36. ‘Salon | Digital Talk | Instagram as an Artistic Medium’, Art Basel, available at www.youtube.com/ watch?v=m8PHAtm9Buk&ab_channel=ArtBasel, accessed 10/03/23. Simpson, Bennett, ‘Ruins: Thomas Ruf’s Jpegs’, in Bennett Simpson (ed.), Thomas Ruf: jpegs (New York: Aperture, 2009), no pagination. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979). Soutter, Lucy, Why Art Photography? (London; New York: Routledge, 2013). Srnicek, Nick, Platform Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2016). Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2012). Steyerl, Hito, ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, in Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle (eds.), The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), pp. 31–35. Tanner, Grafton, ‘Classroom Management: Simon Sinek, ClassDojo, and the Nostalgia Industry’, The Los Angeles Review of Books (January 2019), https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/classroom-management-simon-sinek-classdojo-and-the-nostalgia-industry/, accessed 15/10/21. Thacker, Eugene quoted in ‘The Sight of a Mangled Corpse: An Interview with Eugene Thacker’, Scapegoat, Iss. 5 (Summer/Autumn 2013), pp. 379–387. Thacker, Eugene, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, 2011). Von Hilgers, Philipp and Rauscher, William, ‘The History Of The Black Box: The Clash Of A Thing And Its Concept’, Cultural Politics, Vol. 7, Iss. 1 (March 2011), pp. 41–58. Wells, Rachel, ‘Digital Scale: Enlargement and Intelligibility in Thomas Ruf’s JPEG Series’, in Alexandra Moschovi, Carol McKay and Arabella Plouviez (eds.), The Versatile Image: Photography, Digital Technologies and the Internet (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), pp. 205–222.

Coda From Surfing to Scrolling

Writing in 1990, Deleuze made the following enigmatic claim about sports and surfing at the close of the twentieth century: Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.1 What did he mean with this provocative aphorism? Of course, it is an exaggeration. But in this exaggeration, there is some truth or facticity. Deleuze is describing the subject of Control, or the subject produced by the ‘Societies of Control’. This is a subject conceived by capitalism as a continuous producer of energy, of a vitality that can be extracted as raw material and exploited by private enterprise. Control produces us as surfers; it is an efect of contemporary forms of power, which requires us to be ‘undulatory’, active participants in a ‘continuous network’.2 The veracity of Deleuze’s aphorism has been strengthened by the nature of platform capitalism today, which inculcates a continuous frenetic activity from the subject, a continuous pouring out of information, images, comments, data, and everyday gestures, given up and made available for expropriation. The image of the surfer is perhaps well-suited in this context of incessant, continuous activity and attentiveness: the surfer has to keep moving, finding new pathways through the irregular and multidirectional flow; passivity and inaction are not options if they are to stay above water. This account of the surfer as a symbol of our day-to-day interactions with the internet perhaps realises Slavoj Žižek’s remarks on the ‘real threat’ of digital media, namely, that it ‘deprive[s] us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare[s] us for mindless frenetic activity – for endless work’.3 This is a form of work that, as we have seen in Chapter 4, often does not appear as work or labour; rather, it is coded as fun, done out of love – a form of work that nonetheless feels like sport. Not long after Deleuze made this oblique claim, the phrase ‘surfing the internet’ came into common parlance. In 1992, the librarian Jean Armour Polly published an article titled ‘Surfing the Internet’, which set out the benefits of web connectivity and access for libraries, and that also saw her inducted into the ‘Internet Hall of Fame’ in 2019.4 On her personal website, Polly explains how she decided on this title because she ‘wanted something that expressed the fun I had using the Internet, as well as hit on the skill, and yes, endurance necessary to use it well. I also needed something that would evoke a sense of randomness, chaos, and even danger. I wanted something fishy, net-like, nautical’.5 Surfing is a sport of endurance and randomness: skimming an oceanic surface, getting moved and manipulated, negotiating and intuitively responding to chaotic ebbs and flows – a compliment to the metaphors of liquidity often attributed to digital experience. Surfing also suggests an internet that we don’t have deep access to; we can only skim its surface, DOI: 10.4324/9781003256168-6

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finding pathways and new patterns through its voluminous, rapid, and incessant flow of heterogeneous information. The postinternet art described in this book is an art of surfing, giving form to the internet’s chaos, danger, and randomness. As we have seen, it also tends to repeat, mimic, and reiterate the generic forms of online culture, often appearing to go along with its logic – to just, like the surfer – go with the flow. And postinternet artists are internet surfers – users or consumers of the internet – rather than tech specialists. They express little to no concern with technological proficiency in their artworks, such as knowing how to code, hack, and divert technical systems. They don’t go along with this autonomous model of activity, which perhaps characterises earlier forms of internet art, such as net. art, in which the artist adopted a certain level of technical proficiency to take on the role of the hacker, a form of cultural production that seeks to subvert digital systems at a cellular level. The radical agency of the hacker is described in McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004), the title of which proposes some sort of relationship between hacking and the adversarial spirit set out in the various manifestos of the artistic avant-garde in the twentieth century: an inheritance of its struggle for autonomy in a world of capitalist expansion: The hacker class likewise struggles for autonomy in a world in which the means of production are in the hands of the ruling classes. But the diference is that the hacker class is also a designer of the very tools of production. Hackers program the hardware, software and wetware, and can struggle for tools more amenable to autonomy and cooperation than monopoly and competition.6 This does not describe the forms and practices of postinternet art. The artists analysed in this book are not designers of ‘tools of productions’. They are users and/or consumers of the tools of production. They don’t program. They don’t hack. They surf. This is postinternet art’s key diference from earlier models of internet art, whose practices more neatly map onto Wark’s definition. For example, in Tilman Baumgartel’s analysis of net. art in the 1990s, he describes an art form that ‘plays with the protocols of the Internet, with its technical peculiarities. It puts known or as yet undiscovered errors within the system to its own use. It deals creatively with software and with the rules software follows in order to work’.7 So net.art ‘plays’ with ‘protocols’ and ‘technical peculiarities’. It does not surf the internet; it goes beneath the surface and engages with it on a technical rather than superficial level; a producer of tools rather than a consumer of content. In 1997, the artist duo MTAA published a widely reproduced illustration of net.art, titled Simple Net Art Diagram: a linear diagram of two computers connected by a wire, with a flashing red lightning bolt captioned ‘The art happens here’ (Figure 5.1). Thus, the art happens in between the computer network and a disruptive charge of energy deep in its infrastructure. The diference between this imagining of internet art and the postinternet art of the 2010s is why the latter movement has proved to be such a contested form of art and cultural production: because it appears to dissociate itself from the tradition of autonomy associated with hackers and earlier models of internet art. It is a form of internet art made by users, consumers, and non-tech specialists. As such, when it gestures towards some form of criticality or evokes some sort of struggle for autonomy, it risks coming of flat, weak, and indirect – a form of posturing, rather than action. It doesn’t appear to resist the threats of the internet as it exists; rather, it goes along with it, participating in its various economies of extraction. We have seen, for instance, how Amalia Ulman’s

Source: Digital Image. CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0). Public Domain Dedication.

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Figure 5.1 MTAA, Simple Net Art Diagram, 1997.

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work appears to participate in the internet’s reputation economy with her Excellences & Perfections performance, which adhered to the most visible and profitable models of online subjectivity on mainstream social media platforms, and how Jordan Wolfson’s work participates in its ‘attention economy’ with its eagerness to shock and stand out, to the extent that he has been pejoratively labelled an ‘edgelord’ artist. However, what I hope to have proven is that – in spite of its disconnection with histories of avant-garde practice, which coded much of the discussion surrounding earlier forms of internet art – postinternet art ofers some insight into the ‘structures of feeling’ produced by the internet as it developed throughout the 2010s. This is an internet of black boxing, automated labour, and algorithmic bias, which has contributed to a wider sense of planetary dysphoria and facilitated new political afliations, often to the far right. An internet that is not readily available to the hacker’s struggle for autonomy. It can be seen as progression, refinement, and optimisation of the technology that proves, to a certain extent, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observation of the ‘historical tendency for cleverness to prove stupid’.8 In 2008, the artist Kev Bewersdorf updated MTAA’s Simple Net Art Diagram. In Bewersdorf’s illustration, the two computer terminals are replaced by laptops with human users, connected by arrows, creating a feedback loop between the laptop and their respective user. In this version the caption – ‘The art happens here’ – is pasted on top of the laptop user, no longer in between the computer network, but now in the body (Figure 5.2). This postinternet diagram proposes an internet art that is not concerned with intervening and disrupting the network, but rather is about how the body itself is intervened and disrupted by the perpetual feedback loops it is caught within as a networked user. Bewersdorf titled the illustration maXimum SORROW, in a font style designed to evoke corporate infographics. This is an imagining of art produced by an ever more corporatised internet, which registers and gives form to its alienations and various structures of feeling. As mentioned in the book’s introduction, the critical value of this attention

Figure 5.2 Kev Bewersdorf, maXimum SORROW, 2008–2009. Source: Digital Image. Courtesy of the artist.

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given to these ‘structures of feelings’, to lived and felt technological experience, is that it provides some opposition to the often evangelical or boosterish rhetoric surrounding the digital, which still perpetuates a myth of immateriality, transparency, and access. By this, I mean it still presents itself as a tool, something that functions as an object of our intentions, rather than the complex apparatus of capitalist extraction that renders us the object of its intentions. Postinternet art’s provocative methods of hyper-conformity, mimicry, over-acceptance, horror, and excess have some shuddering historical authenticity in this context. This is an art that is ‘open to the internet’ yes, ‘but still resilient to its physics’.9 Surf Clubs A number of the artists gathered in this book were associated with ‘surf clubs’ in the late 2000s/early 2010s. For instance, Petra Cortright, Kev Bewersdorf, Jordan Wolfson, and Marisa Olson, who first coined the term postinternet, were members of a surf club called Nasty Nets, which was active between 2006 and 2012.10 Surf clubs were set up as invitation-only spaces for artists to post content found online to a specific website, where they would be arranged into thematic lists or larger compositions. Artists would sift through the huge amount of content on the internet, find ‘jewels’ in its deluge of information and content, and ofer these up as a ‘boon’ to the surf club.11 Olson describes the practice as a new form of appropriation art or found photography for an internet age, describing herself and her peers as ‘pro-surfers’: the work of pro-surfers transcends the art of found photography insofar as the act of finding is elevated to a performance in its own right, and the ways in which the images are appropriated distinguishes this practice from one of quotation by taking them out of circulation and reinscribing them with new meaning and authority.12 So, ‘pro-surfing’ is imagined as an act of performative media sharing that is not about producing something new but about selecting and reorganising information from the internet’s huge database of content and finding new meaning from what is already there. Soon after Nasty Nets emerged, the label, pro-surfing, was quickly adopted by other artistic collectives with similar practices of collecting, juxtaposing, and curating found objects online, including: Computers Club, Double Happiness, Loshadka, Mouse Safari, Jogging, Spirit Surfers, and Supercentral. The act of pro-surfing reflects the surface-level means of engaging with a corporatised internet, which tends to deny the deep form of interaction and disruptive activity of earlier forms of internet art. This is partly due to the black boxing that dominates recent technological experience (as discussed in Chapter 4). Reflecting on the activities and ‘boons’ of surf clubs such as Nasty Nets, the media theorist Curt Cloninger has suggested that he finds this form of artistic production ‘“pathetic” (and not necessarily in a derogatory sense)’. It represents and pictures a ‘manic, doomed attempt to manufacture any kind of memory at all in the fluorescent light of an eternally modern present’. Despite this sense of pathos, Cloninger suggests a ‘resistant political value’ in artistic surfing based on it enacting and propagating a ‘“tactical” way of moving through corporate culture’.13 It ofers a new means of production in a world where everything is seemingly available and open to interaction, where anything qualitatively ‘new’ risks being swamped and drowned in floods of information and content. These practices of appropriation and reinscription are a form of surface-level play that

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explores the aleatory possibilities of ‘tactically’ surfing the internet. This banal activity is made to appear compelling. It maps onto something the late North American conceptual artist Elaine Sturtevant (an early pioneer of appropriation art) once opined as the potential of the internet for appropriation art: ‘What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine – that’s the way to go’.14 This ‘pro surfer’ methodology for artistic production, which was explored in the surf clubs in the late 2000s, informs much of the postinternet art explored in this book, most of which is modelled on its surface-level play and practice of remaking, reusing, reassembling, and recombining content found online, turning this activity into ‘jewels’. The diference with postinernet art is that these ‘jewels’ are ofered not as a ‘boon’ to the surf club’s blog but rather to the various forms of display in contemporary art galleries. However, looking back on the practices of pro-surfing today, in the 2020s, this form of artistic production appears a little less compelling. It now seems ‘pathetic’ in the derogatory sense – pitiful and quaint. The type of aleatory content curation enacted on these surf clubs now appears painfully similar to the feeds of content we consume and scroll through on social media platforms, such as Instagram and Tik Tok, albeit reassembled and recombined and reinscribed with meaning not by pro-surfers but by hashtags and algorithms, which automate this form of surface-level play. Furthermore, the idea of ‘surfing the internet’ now seems a little outdated; it no longer necessarily describes the typical internet user’s interaction with online content. Now, moving out of the 2010s and into the 2020s, we might say, scrolling has already replaced the older sports. Scrolling Machines If the model of surfing is of a lateral and multidirectional movement across the internet’s voluminous surface, scrolling suggests a descent and confined means of interaction. In the Oxford English Dictionary’s ‘Words of an Unprecedented Year’ report of 2020, the phrase ‘doomscrolling’ is cited as a ‘trending cultural and social expression’: doomscrolling n. the action of compulsively scrolling through social media or news feeds which relate bad news.15 The report suggests that doomscrolling emerged as a symptom of a larger sense of crisis in the world, expressing anxieties and uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, government-enforced lockdowns, deepening climate catastrophe, tensions surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and divisive culture wars between the Left and Right. In this time of crisis, internet users found themselves both locked-down and locked-into compulsive feeds of content on their smart devices that amplified feelings of worry and concern. Scrolling also suggests a very diferent model of consumption and means of engaging with the internet. It reflects an intensification of the forms of ‘platformization’ of cultural production discussed in Chapter 3, which puts images under more Control, and produces us as scrolling machines, serving a system of production that trades user attention and the data it creates. Now cultural producers and consumers alike are increasingly reliant on privatised digital platforms for the creation, distribution, and reception of content. We have moved even further away from Wark’s account of a hacker-cum-artist as designer of the ‘tools of production’. For an artist to achieve visibility today, they must

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adhere to the rules of the platforms, which have monopolised attention in a world where we don’t surf the internet but rather scroll on algorithmically curated feeds, typically within the fixed verticality of smart screen interfaces. This has been variously described as a form of ‘platform-dependant creativity’, ‘platform enclosure’, or ‘platform captivity’.16 These phrases, all of which suggest a feeling of doom analogous to doomscrolling, refer to a new cultural imaginary of the internet: of an infinite scroll divorced from the hyperlinked connectivity and aleatory ‘randomness’ of the 2010s. A descent, guided by algorithms that monitor and respond intuitively to our activity, deeper and deeper into echo chambers, walled gardens, and filter bubbles, which amplify and reinforce whatever the machine thinks we want, to render our desires more predictable for targeted marketing, capitalist extraction, and/or political gain. How will art respond to this new cultural imaginary of the internet? What new modes of creative production might emerge with some ‘resistant political value’? Is there a means of ‘tactically’ scrolling that updates Cloninger’s account of a ‘tactical’ form of surfing the internet? In Chapter 3, I referenced a recent body of work by Jon Rafman, which employed AI machine learning technologies to produce a strange new form of painting. Rafman uses a model called CLIP-Guided Difusion that translates textual prompts into painterly but pseudo-photorealist images. This model functions broadly in a manner similar to other AI image-generating tools, such as Midjourney, Stable Difusion, and Craiyon AI (what was formerly known as DALL-E mini), all of which were released and made freely available to the public in 2022 (barring Mid Journey, which requires a subscription fee). These AI ‘tools of production’ are trained on datasets of billions of images, the knowledge of which can be used to generate new images based on whatever is provided in our textual prompts. For instance, Stable Difusion is trained on datasets collected by LAION (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network), whose compute time is backed by the venture capital-funded start-up Stability AI and built of of Common Crawl, a company that continuously scours the internet, ‘producing and maintaining an open repository of web crawl data’.17 LAION collects all images from this ‘crawl data’ that have alt-text attributes (written copy that is used to describe images to visually impaired readers and that also appears on a webpage if the image cannot be loaded on the screen) and classifies them based on this linguistic system. The AI image-generating tools are trained on these embedded relationships between images and textual data. The new synthetic images produced by AI systems in response to our textual prompts are generated by a process of ‘difusion’. In simple terms, the AI model starts with a random, noisy pattern of pixels, which has been produced by its training on datasets of billions of images. This information is then refined into an image by a process of ‘difusion’ and ‘reverse difusion’.18 This process is possible because the AI has learned how things look based on the billions of images found in its datasets, all of which are associated with particular textual parameters. Based on our prompts, it will find something that corresponds to the requested image via some configuration of its seemingly infinite cloud of pixels, all of which can be destroyed, reformatted, and arranged accordingly. In this respect, this process of AI image generation parallels and intensifies the forms of image compression described with the Jpeg in Chapter 4. The image, no matter how obscure and unfounded in reality, is not created but rather found via some microscopic refinement of its massive accumulation of pixels. In this sense, these AI models are also a sort of ‘scrolling machine’, designed to scroll, sift through, and recombine whatever they

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have been trained on to produce new synthetic images. In Rafman’s use of CLIP-Guided Difusion, we might suggest the artist turns the AI model into a doomscrolling machine, using its protocols of ‘difusion’ and ‘reverse difusion’ to generate images of formless abjection: uncertain and anxious images that struggle to fulfil the model’s criteria of ‘photo-realism’ (Figure 5.3).19 This new world of AI image generation, which is typically free, easy to use, and happens within seconds, has become a new battleground for contemporary artistic production. It threatens to fully automate the generation of new images – a model of visual culture that is now, on a deep technical level, a pastiche of everything that has ever appeared on the internet – crawled, scoured, saved, and made available as a unit of content on an ever-expanding database, such as that collected by LAION. Found images become like textures or pigments, totally shorn of their historical specificity. They have no edges, open to potentially infinite variations, and recombination with other images. The AIgenerated image is made up of multitudes of realities and many disparate sources, all joined up and fused into a new whole. Fredric Jameson’s famous critique of the pastichelike character of postmodernist culture, written nearly 40 years ago, now seems to eerily anticipate and resonate with this state of afairs. In the mid-1980s, Jameson wrote of a period in which: the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds – they’ve already been invented; only a limited number of combinations are possible; the most unique ones have been thought of already . . . Hence, once again, pastiche: in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.20 AI image tools appear to codify Jameson’s concerns, producing a form of image-making that can only ever be a combination or variation of whatever is already known and categorised in its dataset. Jameson wrote of pastiche as a ‘failure of art and the aesthetic’. Furthermore, a ‘failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past’.21 These threats are more pointed today. The ‘imaginary museums’ of Stable Difusion, Mid Journey, Craiyon AI (etc.), trained on billions of images scraped from the internet, also contain huge numbers of works by artists who were unable to ofer their consent and whose distinctive artistic styles can be mimicked and ventriloquised by the AI user. There is a vast amount of unattributed and uncompensated immaterial labour congealed within the machine learning process, which both threatens to ‘imprison us in the past’, and also to remove a huge amount of creative jobs from the labour market, further delegating the emerging visual culture of the 2020s to the machine. In January 2023, a group of artists filed a class-action complaint in the Northern District of California against the companies behind three AI art generators, which rely on the LAION dataset. The lawsuit describes AI image generation as ‘21st century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists’.22 In April 2023, according to CNBC, in the world of generative AI, ‘the courtroom battles are just getting started’.23 Arguably, AI image generation crystallises the worst tendencies of digital media analysed throughout this book. Their datasets of images, which are used to build the ‘new’, contain and reproduce historic biases, producing a visual culture skewed according to the stylistic tendencies of whatever is the most reproduced art and visual material online and thus the most likely to appear in its training. In Chapter 2, I referenced a project by Cory

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Figure 5.3 Jon Rafman, 𐤒𐤓𐤀𐤁𐤟𐤀𐤍𐤂’𐤋𐤟2 (Club Angel II), 2022. Inkjet print and acrylic on canvas 186.7 × 134.6 cm/73.5 × 53 inches. Source: © Jon Rafman Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

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Arcangel and Hanne Mugaas titled Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet), which used YouTube’s algorithmically organised database of content to produce an alternative art history, the result being a sobering reproduction of a reactionary Western patriarchal canon. A similar issue is at stake with AI tools. In 2022, the technologist Andy Baio produced a data browser that enables a search of the image datasets used to train Stable Difusion, which can be categorised and ranked according to artist name references. At the time of writing, of the top 25 artists in the dataset, only three are still living, and all are North American; all but one of the top 25 artists are male (Frida Kahlo being the exception); and 12 of the 25 are identified as ‘landscape artists’, which is the most common style detailed in the dataset.24 In this respect, AI image-generating tools, which advertise themselves as ‘exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species’, are still locked into the various ideological fantasies of the digital described throughout this book, namely, given over to an appearance of the natural, organic, and elemental, and thereby obfuscating its material infrastructure and various material impacts, putting further strain on the planet.25 For instance, in her book Atlas of AI – Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (2021), Kate Crawford has argued persuasively that: AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications. AI systems are not autonomous, rational, or able to discern anything without extensive, computationally intensive training with large datasets or predefined rules and rewards. In fact, artificial intelligence as we know it depends entirely on a much wider set of political and social structures. And due to the capital required to build AI at scale and the ways of seeing that it optimizes AI systems are ultimately designed to serve existing dominant interests. In this sense, artificial intelligence is a registry of power.26 These material aspects of AI and its larger infrastructure are downplayed through this continued invocation of an elemental symbolism and history of landscape painting, as if to say that it is simply part of the landscape. Not a ‘registry of power’. It presents itself as a new frontier of the sublime – something awesome and dazzling; a gift; stunning; something that is incomprehensibly cool. There is a sticky persistency to this visual language of the digital apparatus as something organic, elemental, and sublime. In November 2022, MoMA unveiled a new AI-generated artwork by new media artist Refik Anadol: a massive-scale (24 square foot) moving image work on a digital display screen that unfolds in real-time. With this work, titled Unsupervised, Anadol trained an artificial intelligence model to interpret and reimagine the publicly available data in MoMA’s collection. As a viewer, we experience what is claimed to be a visualisation of the AI model’s processing of MoMA’s collection, creating ‘new forms that could exist in the archive but don’t’.27 Anadol describes it as a ‘living’ animation, a visualisation of an AI machine ‘dreaming’ about modern art.28 It has no predetermined beginning or end. Rather, it unfolds and flows unpredictably and spontaneously, creating a hallucinogenic experience of interlocking, flowing, and recombining shapes and abstract forms. However, when I saw this spectacular work unfolding before me, it was strangely disappointing. It did not appear radically new. Instead, it reminded me of screen savers. Generic computer animations that were first used in the 1990s as a way of preventing damage to older monitors but are more recently used as a way of hiding desktop contents

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whilst the user is away. These screen savers (for instance, Microsoft Windows XP’s ‘Bézier’ and Windows 10’s ‘Mystify’ screensaver, or Apple’s ‘Drift’ and ‘Flurry’) tended to be based around smooth, flowing, seemingly limitless, unfolding, abstract animations, similarly creating a sense of reverie in the face of the digital screen. Ironically, screen savers generally do not save energy. In fact, some graphics-intensive screen savers ‘can cause the computer to burn twice as much energy’.29 The screen savers’ visual language hides these contradictions. I think it is not surprising that this visual language is also common in the often fraudulent world of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and crypto-currencies. A quick search on the OpenSea NFT marketplace reveals a plethora of similarly flowing shapes and abstract compositions, all of which are a gesture to some sort of experience of the sublime. The sublime is traditionally theorised as an aesthetic response to experiences of ‘crude nature’. For instance, in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), the German philosopher considers the sublimity of ‘bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on’. These objects produce an experience of the sublime in the viewer – a feeling of ‘inspiriting satisfaction’ – because ‘they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range’.30 A similar sense of ‘inspiriting satisfaction’ is suggested in the discourses attached to AI image-generating tools, which purport to raise our soul’s fortitude by expanding our imaginative powers and cultivating autonomous freedom. However, the ‘crude nature’ of AI (e.g., mined rare Earth metals and minerals) is not visible; rather, it is congealed and concealed in its functioning; it is not part of our experience of its sublimity. Rather, the sublimity of AI is a ‘data sublime’, made to appear, superficially, as a Kantian sublime. By this, I mean to say that it confronts the user/viewer with a spectacle of complexity – of an immense accumulation of data that defies human conceptualisation, in the face of which we can only be wowed and awed by its speedy visualisation of whatever we want. I’ve borrowed the phrase ‘data sublime’ from Julian Stallabrass, who uses the term to analyse the typical forms of reception provoked by large-scale contemporary art photography, such as that by Thomas Ruf (discussed in Chapter 4). For Stallabrass, this style of photography, which tends to be on a massive scale and sometimes printed onto luminescent aluminium panels with liberal use of digital touch-up techniques, does not function as a faithful documentation or reproduction of reality. Instead, ‘they overwhelm the viewer with an ocean of data that they cannot make sense of [and] abandon the viewer in a wilderness of information’.31 Elsewhere, he writes pejoratively of this mode of photography as fostering ‘wonder rather than thought’.32 Thus, it encourages a ‘transparent complicity with commercialized spectacle’.33 In Chapter 4, I claimed that Ruf’s photography has an ‘informative’ function, which arguably undermines some aspects of Stallabrass’s critique; however, the phrase ‘data sublime’ is given renewed urgency today as a critical framing of the forms of reception implied by AI imaging technologies. It prompts us to consider and grasp how new modes of creative production might emerge with some ‘resistant political value’, which doesn’t give in to its ‘data sublime’, nor regress and doomscroll into fatalistic fantasies of the past. ‘There is no need to fear or hope’, Deleuze wrote in his ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, ‘but only to look for new weapons’.34 As it was then, so it is now.

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Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990], October, vol. 59 (Winter 1992), p. 6. 2. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 6. 3. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Will You Laugh for Me, Please?’, In These Times (July 2003), http://inthesetimes. com/article/88/will_you_laugh_for_me_please, accessed 31/08/15. 4. Jean Armour Polly, ‘Surfing the INTERNET: an Introduction Version’, Wilson Library Bulletin (June 1992), https://web.archive.org/web/20160303194924/http://internet.eserver.org/SurfingInternet.txt, accessed 18/05/23; on Jean Armour Polly’s induction into the ‘Internet Hall of Fame’, see www.internethallofame.org/inductee/jean-armour-polly/, accessed 15/05/23. 5. Jean Armour Polly, ‘Birth of a Metaphor–The Nascence of Surfing the Internet’, Net-mom (November 1994), www.netmom.com/surfing/birth-of-a-metaphor, accessed 18/05/23. 6. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), no pagination. 7. Tilman Baumgartel, net.art 2.0: New Materials towards Net Art (Nurnberg: Verlag fur modern Kunst Nurnberg, 2001), p. 24. 8. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), p. 209. 9. I have taken this phrase from a podcast conversation with Lauren Boyle of DIS (discussed in Chapter Two). Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, hosts, ‘4-EVER-DIS w/ Lauren Boyle (NM59)’, The New Models Podcast (February 2023), https://newmodels.io/podcasts, accessed 13/04/23. 10. Nasty Nets also counted amongst its members the artists Travis Hallenbeck, Tom Moody, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, John Michael Boling, Camille Paloque-Berges, Javier Morales, Robert Wodzinski, Olia Lialina, Paul Slocum, Michael Bell-Smith, Constant Dullaart, Peter Baldes, Pascual Sisto, Chris Coy, Brian Blomerth, Damon Zucconi, Dennis Knopf, Britta Gustafson, Brenna Murphy, Aleksandra Domanovic, James Whipple, Kari Altmann, Michael Guidetti, Jan Robert Leegte, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Charles Broskoski, Dragan Espenschied, Charles Westerman, Paul B. Davis, Harm van den Dorpel, Emma Davenport, Laura Brothers, Chance Jackson, and Summer Shifman. 11. This specific phrasing of ‘jewels’ and ‘boons’ is used to describe the act of ‘pro-surfing’ by Kev Bewersdorf in an essay published on the artist’s website in March 2008. See Kev Bewersdorf, ‘Spirit Surfing’, http://web.archive.org/web/20080521094644/www.maximumsorrow.com/ writing/spiritsurfing.html, accessed 21/05/23. 12. Marisa Olson, ‘Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture’, in Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein (eds.), Words Not Pictures (New York: Aperture, 2008), p. 274. 13. Curt Cloninger, ‘Commodify Your Consumption: Tactical Surfing/Wakes of Resistance’, lab 404 (personal website) (February 2009), http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption. pdf, accessed 25/05/23. 14. Elaine Sturtevant quoted in Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Sampling the Globe’, Art Forum (October 2004), www.artforum.com/print/200408/sampling-the-globe-7598, accessed 25/05/23. 15. See ‘Oxford Languages 2020 Words of an Unprecedented Year’, Oxford University Press, report available at https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2020/, accessed 20/05/23. 16. The phrases ‘platform-dependant creativity’ and ‘platform enclosure’ are used to describe the way that online platforms both intervene in ‘existing site[s] of cultural production, [and] reassert their control over the means of distribution and marketing’. Content that was perhaps ‘previously available via a decentralized distribution architecture’ is pulled into a closed system that perpetuates the creation of capital for the platform. See Brooke Evan Dufy, Thomas Poell and David B. Nieborg, ‘Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship’, Social Media + Society (November 2019), p. 3. The phrase ‘platform captivity’ has been coined by Idil Galip to describe the experience of communities of artists on Instagram, precarious workers who feel they must adhere to the rules of Instagram’s platform – to become ‘productive users on Instagram’ – in order to maintain their practice. See Idil Galip, ‘The “Grotesque” in Internet Memes’, Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Culture, 2021), p. 31. 17. Kyle Wiggers, ‘Stability AI, the Startup behind Stable Difusion, Raises $101M’, TechCrunch (October 2022), https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/17/stability-ai-the-startup-behind-stabledifusion-raises-101m/, accessed 30/05/23. Also see https://commoncrawl.org/about/, accessed 30/05/23.

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18. For more information on this process, see Ryan O’Connor, ‘Introduction to Difusion Models for Machine Learning’, Assembly AI (May 2022), www.assemblyai.com/blog/difusionmodels-for-machine-learning-introduction/, accessed 30/05/23. 19. For instance, Stable Difusion advertises itself as a ‘latent text-to-image difusion model capable of generating photo-realistic images given any text input’. See https://stabledifusionweb. com/, accessed 25/03/25. 20. Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1985), p. 115. 21. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, p. 116. 22. See Min Chen, ‘Artists and Illustrators Are Suing Three A.I. Art Generators for Scraping and ‘Collaging’ Their Work Without Consent’, Artnet (January 2023), https://news.artnet.com/ art-world/class-action-lawsuit-ai-generators-deviantart-midjourney-stable-difusion-2246770, accessed 30/05/23. 23. See Ellen Sheng, ‘In Generative AI Legal Wild West, the Courtroom Battles Are Just Getting Started’, CNBC (April 2023), www.cnbc.com/2023/04/03/in-generative-ai-legal-wild-westlawsuits-are-just-getting-started.html, accessed 30/05/23. 24. See https://laion-aesthetic.datasette.io/laion-aesthetic-6pls/artists?_sort_desc=image_counts, accessed 30/05/23. 25. This is a quote from Midjourney’s marketing copy, which details: ‘Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species’. See www.midjourney.com/home, accessed 30/05/23. A similar tone is adopted by Stable Difusion, who explain that its image generation ‘cultivates autonomous freedom to produce incredible imagery’. See https://stabledifusionweb.com/, accessed 25/03/25. 26. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI–Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2021), p. 8. 27. Refik Anadol, ‘AI, Algorithms, and the Machine as Witness’, MoMA (December 2022), www. moma.org/magazine/articles/821, accessed 30/05/23. 28. Anadol, ‘AI, Algorithms, and the Machine as Witness’, www.moma.org/magazine/articles/821, accessed 30/05/23. 29. ‘Low Carbon IT Campaign Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)’, ENERGY STAR®, www. energystar.gov/products/low_carbon_it_campaign/faqs#:~:text=I%20have%20my%20 screen%20saver,computer%20from%20entering%20sleep%20mode, accessed 30/05/23. 30. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 120. 31. Julian Stallabrass, ‘What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography’, October, no. 122 (Fall 2007), p. 83. 32. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 96. 33. Stallabrass, ‘What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography’, p. 89. 34. Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, p. 4.

References Anadol, Refik, ‘AI, Algorithms, and the Machine as Witness’, MoMA (December 2022), www. moma.org/magazine/articles/821, accessed 30/05/23. Baumgartel, Tilman, net.art 2.0: New Materials towards Net Art (Nurnberg: Verlag fur modern Kunst Nurnberg, 2001). Bewersdorf, Kev, ‘Spirit Surfing’, available at http://web.archive.org/web/20080521094644/www. maximumsorrow.com/writing/spiritsurfing.html, accessed 21/05/23. Birnbaum, Daniel, Sampling the Globe, Art Forum (October 2004), www.artforum.com/ print/200408/sampling-the-globe-7598, accessed 25/05/23. Busta, Caroline and Internet, Lil, ‘4-EVER-DIS w/Lauren Boyle (NM59)’, The New Models Podcast (February 2023), https://newmodels.io/podcasts, accessed 13/04/23. Chen, Min, ‘Artists and Illustrators Are Suing Three A.I. Art Generators for Scraping and “Collaging” Their Work without Consent’, Artnet (January 2023), https://news.artnet.com/art-world/

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class-action-lawsuit-ai-generators-deviantart-midjourney-stable-difusion-2246770, accessed 30/05/23. Cloninger, Curt, ‘Commodify Your Consumption: Tactical Surfing/Wakes of Resistance’, lab 404 (personal website) (February 2009), http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption. pdf, accessed 25/05/23. Crawford, Kate, Atlas of AI – Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2021). Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ [1990], October, vol. 59 (Winter 1992), pp. 3–7. Dufy, Brooke Evan, Poell, Thomas and Nieborg, David B., ‘Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries: Creativity, Labor, and Citizenship’, Social Media + Society (November 2019), pp. 1–8. Galip, Idil, ‘The “Grotesque” in Internet Memes’ in Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Culture, 2021). pp. 27–40. Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1985), pp. 111–125. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). ‘Low Carbon IT Campaign Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)’, ENERGY STAR®, www. energystar.gov/products/low_carbon_it_campaign/faqs#:~:text=I%20have%20my%20screen%20 saver,computer%20from%20entering%20sleep%20mode, accessed 30/05/23. O’Connor, Ryan, ‘Introduction to Difusion Models for Machine Learning’, Assembly AI (May 2022), www.assemblyai.com/blog/difusion-models-for-machine-learning-introduction/, accessed 30/05/23. Olson, Marisa, ‘Lost Not Found: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture’ in Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein (eds.), Words Not Pictures (New York: Aperture, 2008), pp. 274–284. ‘Oxford Languages 2020 Words of an Unprecedented Year’, Oxford University Press, report available at https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2020/, accessed 20/05/23. Polly, Jean Armour, ‘Surfing the INTERNET: An Introduction Version’, Wilson Library Bulletin (June 1992), available online at https://web.archive.org/web/20160303194924/http://internet. eserver.org/Surfing-Internet.txt, accessed 18/05/23. Polly, Jean Armour, ‘Birth of a Metaphor–The Nascence of Surfing the Internet’, Net-mom (November 1994), www.netmom.com/surfing/birth-of-a-metaphor, accessed 18/05/23. Sheng, Ellen, ‘In Generative AI Legal Wild West, the Courtroom Battles Are Just Getting Started’, CNBC (April 2023), www.cnbc.com/2023/04/03/in-generative-ai-legal-wild-west-lawsuits-arejust-getting-started.html, accessed 30/05/23. Stallabrass, Julian, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Stallabrass, Julian, ‘What’s in a Face? Blankness and Significance in Contemporary Art Photography’, October, no. 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 71–90. Wark, McKenzie, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Wiggers, Kyle, ‘Stability AI, the Startup behind Stable Difusion, Raises $101M’, TechCrunch (October 2022), https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/17/stability-ai-the-startup-behind-stable-difusionraises-101m/, accessed 30/05/23. Also see https://commoncrawl.org/about/, accessed 30/05/23. Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Will You Laugh for Me, Please?’, In These Times (July 2003), http://inthesetimes. com/article/88/will_you_laugh_for_me_please, accessed 31/08/15.

Index

Abstract Expressionism 75 Acéphale 103–104, 110 A-culture 100, 105 Adobe Photoshop 72, 76, 118, 143 Adorno, Theodor: Aesthetic Theory 62; Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) 46, 168; on the ‘shudder’ 12; on sports 46; on subjects and objects 26, 47; on the ‘window mirror’ 87 algorithmic governmentality 3, 84, 86–87 Anderson, Chris 85 Andrejevic, Mark 156 Anthropocene 31, 36, 41, 46 aphotic zone 146–150 Apter, Emily 36 Arcangel, Cory and Mugaas, Hanne 85–86, 135, 174 Arendt, Hannah 30, 113 ARPANET 108 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 110, 150, 171–172, 174–175 Auerbach, David 100, 103, 105–107 Avant-Garde 57–58, 64, 71; see also montage; readymade Azuma, Hiroki 3 Badiou, Alain 121 Bankowsky, Jack 78 Barlow, John Perry 2, 102 Barthes, Roland: and gestural painting 76–77; and photography 133, 136, 154, 156; and the punctum 103, 145 Bataille, Georges: on the ‘chief-less crowd’ 103, 105; on the excremental 103, 110; on ‘joy before death’ 43–44; see also Acéphale Baudrillard, Jean: and environmentalism 25; and ‘evil genius’ 105; and marathon running 41–42, 45; and participation 157; see also hyper-conformity Bauman, Zygmunt 145 Baumgartel, Tilman 166 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth 119

Benjamin, Walter 11, 26–27, 66, 82, 83, 135 Beran, Dale 11, 112–113 Bewersdorf, Kev 168–169 Bezos, Jef 25, 28–29 Black box technologies 146–147, 149–150, 168–169 Black, Hannah 63 Boltanski, Luc and Chiapello, Eve 10 Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Robert 36 Brand, Stewart 25–26 Bratton, Benjamin 73, 173 Brecht, Bertolt 136 Bridle, James 147 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 7, 30, 110, 133 Butler, Judith 61, 140 Caillois, Roger 64–65 Calka, Michelle 102 Campany, David 142 Challenger disaster 43–44 Chan, Paul 71 Cloninger, Curt 169, 171 Clover, Carol J. 109 Coleman, Gabriella 100–102 Commodity Sculpture 12, 64–69 control 9–13, 63, 132, 165, 170, 175 Cortright, Petra: DRagONBALL P (2008) 70–71; pecan_NECKLACEtycoons.lrp (2015) 72–73; telefonierenINdeautschland~~a botthefloatingTeatClock (2016) 72–74, 76; VVEBCAM (2007) 69–71 Cosgrove, Denis 34 Crary, Jonathan 76–77 Crimp, Douglas 132 cyber-utopianism 2–5, 13, 58, 102, 113–121 dada 12, 64–65, 102–103 database logic 84–86 Davis, Ben 78 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 10, 63, 165, 175 Della Ratta, Donatella 2 Demos, T.J. 144–145

180

Index

Der Spiegel 19, 22, 25 de Vries, Patricia 3, 63 Dibbell, Julian 100 Dimitrakaki, Angela 113 DIS 57, 60–63; and the 9th Berlin Biennale (BB9) 57, 60–61, 63–64 Doherty, Brigid 65 Dorrian, Mark 33–36 Drag 61 Droitcour, Brian 59 Duchamp, Marcel 67–69 Dufy, Brooke Erin, Poell, Thomas, and Nieborg, David B. 103 Düsseldorf School of Photography 148 economy of ofense 112 Edgelords 87, 168 Eisenstein, Sergei 82–84 Encyclopedia Dramatica [sic] 11 extreme work 45–46 Facebook 76, 100–103, 156 fashwave 118–120, 122 Fisher, Mark 3, 4, 5, 137 Flusser, Vilém 47, 148–149 Fore, Devin 23 Foster, Hal 66–68, 112 Foucault, Michel 9 Franck, Karen A. 87 Freud, Sigmund: on art 114–115; on melancholia 36; on the oceanic 115 Fried, Michael 140 Galloway, Alexander 5, 147 Gogarty, Larne Abse 113 Graw, Isabelle 133 Greenberg, Clement 137, 142 Gronlund, Melissa 78 Grosz, Georg 65 Grove, Andy 10 Guinness, Katherine 81, 86–87 Hacker 166, 168, 170 Han, Byung-Chul 133, 136, 137 Harper, Adam 115, 120 Hebidge, Dick 101 Heidegger, Martin: and ‘The Age of the World Picture’ 22–23, 31, 33; and photographs of the Earth 19; and ‘The Question concerning Technology’ 23–24, 46 Hikikomori 35, 98 Hooks, bel 61 Horkheimer, Max 112; see also Adorno, Theodor Horning, Rob 155–157 horror 4, 108–110, 120, 148–149, 158, 169

Hotjar 77 Huizinga, Johan 105–106 hyper-conformity 46–47, 69, 157–158, 169 immaterial labour 155, 157, 172 Instagram 76–78, 137, 150–157, 170 Internet Hall of Fame 165 Irony: and 4Chan 102–103, 105–107; and postinternet art 47, 61; and Vaporwave 118 Jameson, Frederic 2, 4, 24, 28, 64, 172 Jenemann, David 46 Johnson, Paddy 78 Joselit, David 78 Jurgenson, Nathan 14, 150, 155 Kaufman, Andy 66 Kelly, Kevin 2 Kholeif, Omar 87 Kiesler, Sara, Siegl, Jane, and McGuire, Timothy W. 108 Kinsey, Cadence 152, 155 Klein, Melanie 36 Knutilla, Lee 101 Koc, Alican 118 Koons, Jef 66, 68–69, 78 Latour, Bruno 43 Leach, Edmund 25 Leslie, Esther 7, 135 Linfert, Carl 27, 30 Lopatin, Daniel 115–116, 118 Lovink, Geert 86, 150 Lukács, Georg 114, 118–119 Lulz 106 Macfarlane, Robert 31 Macintosh Plus 116–117, 121 MacLeish, Archibald 32 Magagnoli, Paolo 143 Manovich, Lev 84, 142 Marx, Karl 25, 37, 147 Masson, André 103–104, 110 McHugh, Gene 58 McLuhan, Marshall 140–141, 143, 146 Merjian, Ara H. and Rugnetta, Mike 101–103 Merrin, William 6 Milner, Ryan 102 Mitchell, W.J.T. 134–136 Molderings, Herbert 26 montage 82–86. Moten, Fred 63 MTAA: Simple Net Art Diagram (1997) 166–168 Munch, Edvard 28

Index Nagle, Angela 112–113 NASA: and Blue Marble 19, 21–24, 26–28, 30–33, 57; and Earthrise 19, 22–24, 27–28, 31–33 Nasty Nets 169 NEET 100, 113, 115 Negroponte, Nicholas 1, 9 Neofetou, Daniel 75 Net.art 58, 166 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) 26–27, 30 Ngai, Sianne 116–117 nostalgia 3–4, 116 O’Doherty, Brian 68 Olson Marisa 5, 58–59, 62, 85, 169 Oneohtrix Point Never 98, 115; see also Lopatin, Daniel optical unconscious 135–136, 146 Owens, Craig 114 PageRank 84–85 Palfrey, John and Gasser, Urs 59 Pasquinelli, Matteo 2 pastiche 64–66, 72, 172 Pennebaker, William B. and Mitchell, Joan L. 134–135 planetary dysphoria 36–37, 119, 168 Polke, Sigmar 28, 30–31, 45–46 Polly, Jean Armour 165 Poole, Christopher 100–102, 114 Poole, Robert 19 post-media condition 69 Quaintance, Morgan 57, 59, 63, 157 Rafman, Jon: Erysichthon (2015) 98, 115; Mainsqueeze (2014) 98, 115; Still Life (Betamale) (2013) 98–99, 109–110, 112–113, 115, 120; Cheval Crème (2022) 110, 111 Rancière, Jacques 60–61 Rasch, Miriam 64 Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt 11 readymade 67–69. Red Bull Stratos 38–40 Reichert, Ramón and Richterich, Annika 2, 5 Renger-Patzsch, Albert 26–28 Rhizome 69 Richter, Gerhard 140 Rodchenko, Alexander 26 Rouvroy, Antoinette 84 Sagan, Carl 28 Saltz, Jerry 76 Schafer, Max 121

181

scrolling 3, 14, 170–172 Serres, Michael 43–44 Shaviro, Steven 83 Shifman, Limor 102 Silicon Valley 33 Simpson, Bennett 141 Smith IV, Josh 119 Smithson, Robert 35 Snyder, Sean 143 social photography 151–152, 155–158 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 26 Sontag, Susan 154 Stakemeier, Kerstin 60, 65, 121 Steinbach, Haim 66–68 Sterling, Bruce 71 Steyerl, Hito: on autonomy and agency 68, 69; on drones 35; on the ‘poor image’ 142, 143, 144, 145; Strike (2010) 6, 7, 8 Stielger, Bernard 3 Sturtevant, Elaine 170 surfing 165–166, 169–171 Systrom, Kevin 153, 154 Tanner, Grafton 4, 132 Thacker, Eugene 148–149 Theweleit, Klaus 119 Tik Tok 170 Trainor. Adam 116, 118, 120 Ulman, Amalia 13–14, 150–158 van den Boomen, Marianne 5 vaporwave 110, 115–116, 118–121 Vierkant, Artie 59 Virilio, Paul 34–35, 39, 41 Vishmidt, Marina 113 Wark, McKenzie 166, 170 Watson, Mike 118 Wells, Rachel 140, 145 Whelan, Andrew and Nowak, Raphaël 118 Whole Earth Catalog 24–25 Williams, Raymond 5, 11 Wired (magazine) 2, 85, 145 Wolfson, Jordan: Colored Sculpture (2016) 78, 86; Female Figure (2014) 77; Raspberry Poser (2012) 78–87; Real Violence (2017) 78 Wood, Robin 110, 120 YouTube 12, 13, 37–38, 42, 70, 85, 116 Žižek, Slavoj 165 Zombie Formalism 75–77 Zuckerberg, Mark 100