Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?

This is what the term “post-internet,” coined a few years ago by Marisa Olson and subsequently Gene McHugh, seemed to suggest while it had undeniable use value as opposed to being left with the increasingly privatised exchange value it has at this moment.

Cf. Peter Weibel, “Medien als Maske: Videokratie,” in Von der Bürokratie zur Telekratie. Rumänien im Fernsehen, ed. Keiko Sei (Berlin: Merve, 1990), 124–149, 134f.

Cătălin Gheorghe, “The Juridical Rewriting of History,” in Trial/Proces, ed. Cătălin Gheorghe (Iaşi: Universitatea de Arte “George Enescu” Iaşi, 2012), 2–4. See →.

Ceci Moss and Tim Steer in a stunning exhibition announcement: “The object that exists in motion spans different points, relations and existences but always remains the same thing. Like the digital file, the bootlegged copy, the icon, or Capital, it reproduces, travels and accelerates, constantly negotiating the different supports that enable its movement. As it occupies these different spaces and forms it is always reconstituting itself. It doesn't have an autonomous singular existence; it is only ever activated within the network of nodes and channels of transportation. Both a distributed process and an independent occurrence, it is like an expanded object ceaselessly circulating, assembling and dispersing. To stop it would mean to break the whole process, infrastructure or chain that propagates and reproduces it.” See →.

One instance of a wider political phenomena called transition. Coined for political situations in Latin America and then applied to Eastern European contexts after 1989, this notion described a teleological process consisting of an impossible catch-up of countries “belatedly” trying to achieve democracy and free-market economies. Transition implies a continuous morphing process, which in theory would make any place ultimately look like the ego ideal of any default Western nation. As a result, whole regions were subjected to radical makeovers. In practice, transition usually meant rampant expropriation coupled with a radical decrease in life expectancy. In transition, a bright neoliberal future marched off the screen to be realized as a lack of health care coupled with personal bankruptcy, while Western banks and insurance companies not only privatized pensions, but also reinvested them in contemporary art collections. See →.

Images migrating across different supports are of course nothing new. This process has been apparent in art-making since the Stone Age. But the ease with which many images morph into the third dimension is a far cry from ages when a sketch had to be carved into marble manually. In the age of postproduction, almost everything made has been created by means of one or more images, and any IKEA table is copied and pasted rather than mounted or built.

As the New Aesthetic tumblr has brilliantly demonstrated for things and landscapes (see →), and as the Women as Objects tumblr has done to illustrate the incarnation of image as female body (see →). Equally relevant on this point is work by Jesse Darling and Jennifer Chan.

See Steven Shaviro’s wonderful analysis in “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,”Film-Philosophy 14.1 (2010): 1–102. See also his book Post-Cinematic Affect (London: Zero Books, 2010).

Greg Allen, “The Enterprise School,” Greg.org, Sept. 13, 2013. See →.

Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Catastrophe (2009). See →.

“The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton.” See →.

Thanks to Josh Crowe for drawing my attention to this.

“The Cloud, the State, and the Stack.”

Oliver Laric, “Versions,” 2012. See →.

Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1999): 75–82. “‘In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.’ Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658.”

L. Arlas, “Verbal spat between Costa Rica, Nicaragua continues,” Tico Times, Sept. 20, 2013. See →. Thanks to Kevan Jenson for mentioning this to me.

Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988): 166–184.

Christina Kiaer, “‘Into Production!’: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism,” Transversal (Sept. 2010). See →. “Mayakovsky’s advertising jingles address working-class Soviet consumers directly and without irony; for example, an ad for one of the products of Mossel’prom, the state agricultural trust, reads: ‘Cooking oil. Attention working masses. Three times cheaper than butter! More nutritious than other oils! Nowhere else but Mossel’prom.’ It is not surprising that Constructivist advertisements would speak in a pro-Bolshevik, anti-NEP-business language, yet the picture of the Reklam-Konstruktoradvertising business is more complicated. Many of their commercial graphics move beyond this straightforward language of class difference and utilitarian need to offer a theory of the socialist object. In contrast to Brik’s claim that in this kind of work they are merely ‘biding their time,’ I propose that their advertisements attempt to work out the relation between the material cultures of the prerevolutionary past, the NEP present and the socialist novyi byt of the future with theoretical rigor. They confront the question that arises out of the theory of Boris Arvatov: What happens to the individual fantasies and desires organized under capitalism by the commodity fetish and the market, after the revolution?”

Charles Arthur, “How low-paid workers at ‘click farms’ create appearance of online popularity,” The Guardian, Aug. 2, 2013. See →.

Harry Sanderson, “Human Resolution,” Mute, April 4, 2013. See →.

And it is absolutely not getting stuck with data-derived sculptures exhibited in white cube galleries.

“Spanish workers occupy a Duke’s estate and turn it into a farm,” Libcom.org, Aug. 24, 2012. See →. “Earlier this week in Andalusia, hundreds of unemployed farmworkers broke through a fence that surrounded an estate owned by the Duke of Segorbe, and claimed it as their own. This is the latest in a series of farm occupations across the region within the last month. Their aim is to create a communal agricultural project, similar to other occupied farms, in order to breathe new life into a region that has an unemployment rate of over 40 percent. Addressing the occupiers, Diego Canamero, a member of the Andalusian Union of Workers, said that: ‘We’re here to denounce a social class who leave such a place to waste.’ The lavish well-kept gardens, house, and pool are left empty, as the Duke lives in Seville, more than 60 miles away.”

Thomas J. Michalak, “Mayor in Spain leads food raids for the people,” Workers.org, Aug. 25, 2012. See →. “In the small Spanish town of Marinaleda, located in the southern region of Andalusía, Mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo has an answer for the country’s economic crisis and the hunger that comes with it: He organized and led the town’s residents to raid supermarkets to get the food necessary to survive.” See also →.