HIRSCH, Anne - We Dont Need a Dislike Function, Post Internet, Social Media and Net Optimism

2/20/2015 magazine / archive / Ann Hirsch | MOUSSE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE

http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=1093 2/16

Ann Hirsch, Twelve, 2013 Courtesy: the artist

We Don’t Need a Dislike Function:PostInternet, Social Media, and Net Optimismby Andrew Durbin

In her recent essay “Too Much World,” Hito Steyerl asks us to imagine “an Internet of things allsenselessly ‘liking’ each other, reinforcing the rule of a few quasimonopolies. A world of privatizedknowledge patrolled and defended by rating agencies.” For Andrew Durbin, it isn’t a difficult worldto imagine. In fact, it is very much the world we live in now, one in which artists, writers, andbloggers struggle to overcome the web’s imperative to brand and make work in accordance with thecorporate gesture to “like” and “share.” And for Durbin, the art that counts is that which counters thenetwork by exploiting the senselessness that alarms Steyerl but few others.

PLAYGROUND

Internet art often narrativizes its production as a pozzy, optimistic, even utopianengagement with followers and friends on the corporate web, a notsobad playground offree exchange, following the happy regime that demands we always like and reblog or elsesuffer obscurity. In 2014, the only measure of quality is likes. Despite the supposedopenness of social media interfaces, art made and distributed through these networks iscritically subject to their terms and conditions. In October 2013, for example, the NewYorkbased artist Ann Hirsch staged Playground at the New Museum, a performance basedloosely on the artist’s cyber sex history set in a fictional 1990s AOL chatroom calledTwelve, which she released as an app of the same name. Apple hosted Twelve for roughlytwo months before it removed the app from the App Store because it violated Apple’sterms and conditions. Specifically, they faulted its “simulation of a desktop experience,” its“use of AOL branding,” and its sexual content.(1) Apple declined to review Hirsch’s case,arguing censorship was not a “legitimate contention.” Four months later, Klaus_eBooks,which originally commissioned the app for the New Museum, released an editioned set ofjailbroken iPad Minis, each preloaded with Twelve and signed by the artist. As thisincident highlights, these seemingly open, friendly networks—iTunes, Facebook, Tumblr,etc.—are in fact sites of intense, often invisible struggle, wherein content competes notonly for likes (and virality), but for a place on the network in the first place, always granteduntil revoked if found to violate the unreadable fine print. And if it fails to accumulateenough likes, it recedes from the newsfeed. While we are free to like, only social media’scorporate administrators are privileged to dislike—and remove content. Yet distasteremains a definitive aesthetic response, and central in many cases to the artists who usesocial media. How do I dislike your stupid profile picture? Or a jpg of your shitty politics?I share them widely.



The Jogging and DIS, Political Freedom Planting Pots, 2013from "Madison Beer #NoFilter" series. Courtesy: DIS Magazine. Photo: DIS

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Sometime in the mid2000s, net art began to keep a second home off the web, in the realspace of galleries and associated venues. While this art, some of which has recently beentermed “PostInternet,” existed as a jpg, pdf, tiff, or gif circulated on artistmade websitesand blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and later Tumblr, it doubled offline as tangible, physicalobjects (often in multiple versions of itself.) Although Lev Manovich first used the term



“PostInternet” in 2001, Marisa Olson popularized it in a 2008 interview on wemakemoneynotart.com(2), citing Thomas Beard’s Rhizome interview with net artist GuthrieLonergan from that same year. In that interview, Lonergan expressed an interest in movingbeyond the Internet’s (and net art’s) “kind of disrespect for objects” into new, Internetaware territory that would allow for the creation of objects that “aren’t objects.”(3) Later,younger artists and writers further parsed the term(4), emphasizing a diversified materiality(and immateriality) that reflected upon its iterative possibilities in both “real life” andonline. As such, art increased its attention to how Internetnative communities also formoffline.In “Notes on PostInternet,” the artist and writer Jennifer Chan points out that net art’s“optimistic tendencies […] possessed little if any critical background towards the politicalimplications of existing on any network,”(5) though multiple attempts were made byNineties net artists to subvert the browser and the structure of the Internet. With someexceptions, PostInternet art has adopted an even less critical pose—however difficult itremains to assess what is intentionally or unintentionally critical in net and PostInternet art—in incorporating and aestheticizing accelerationist capitalist strategies of brandedproduction on social networks. From Ryder Ripps’ RedBull residency to the Jogging’sPowerade memes, brands—and branding—became essential to how PostInternet art reliedon and reflected on the corporate web as both a distribution network and a source for visualmaterial, even if it became increasingly unclear whether this was “political” or not.(6) ForPostInternet artist Brad Troemel, social media made art populist by providing new,“accidental” audiences for art, augmenting Boris Groys’ binary between “unpopulardemocratic art vs. popular undemocratic art” with a third, literally redundant term: “popularart that is also democratic.”(7) But doesn’t “popular democratic art” represent yet anotherway the net utopianism of the 1990s has reinvented itself, this time valorizing audienceparticipation as ipso facto good, even if the networks themselves might not be? In a conversation with Lauren Cornell, Ed Halter raises an important question about PostInternet art’s use of corporate strategies: “Couldn’t you argue that this line of work—seeingculture as the new nature—not only acknowledges the logic of the market, but basicallyendorses it, refuses to offer any idea beyond it?”(8) It seems that one way that PostInternetart has managed to disrupt the logic of the market has been through the ways it tests thelimits of social media. I would characterize much of PostInternet as neither optimistic norpessimistic, but rather as fixed in a critical holding pattern that highlights the machinationsof semiocapitalism, but not its effects. Sometimes. It frequently slips into bleary humor, asin Madison Beer’s recent shoot for Dis magazine, which features plants potted in beanieswith Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers’ names printed on the side of the hat.Politics and ecology as interior design.PostInternet art largely avoids any extended consideration of the political and naturalenvironment and has focused its critique instead on what Cornell has called the “mobile,decentralized information environment,”(9) an environment that collapses the political andthe natural into one. Perhaps this infoenvironment has more or less replaced the one inwhich waves crash on beaches and trees are logged for paper, as the “space” for art toconsider; perhaps it has been so thoroughly infiltrated by technology that it no longerexists. But it seems to me that it isn’t fully gone yet, and that it is incumbent upon an artthat relies on the technologies of (drastic) consumption to reflect on that originalenvironment whose consumption it so thoroughly aestheticizes. Too often it doesn’t engagein this reflection, leaving us to admire plants potted in beanies. But there have been distinctmoments in which PostInternet art has offered a salient critique of the ways in whichsocial media presents itself as an open field of exchange, above and outside politics.



The Jogging, Rationed Water, 2013Courtesy: The Jogging

THE SPECULATIVE OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY

Social media ask: Who has time for art—or anything for that matter? In a time of no time,wherein the only way to be noticed is to be always noticed, PostInternet art has seized onthe mobilized, alwaysposting blogger/creative/artist/alt lit poet as web antiflâneur,exploring the net, yes, but also filling it with content, endlessly elaborating the city s/he isincapable of fully exploring. These antiflâneurs trawl the web and reformat what they findand make into a politics of how we produce (or name) art objects rather than of what weproduce. In his essay “Athletic Aesthetics,” Brad Troemel describes the “aesthlete” as anoverproducing artist of this how. The aesthlete “overwhelms his/her audience” with content“rather than provide them with a selection.”(10) Aesthletes post twenty albums of imagesto their Facebook a day, an exhaustive practice exemplified by the Jogging (curated inpartby Troemel), which invites artists to contribute to a continuous stream of image contentthat follows similar visual (and now political) logics.It is hard to define what makes a Jogging post, but often it looks like Madison Beer’spotted plants, rooted in the ambivalent politics of obsolescence. For a time its imageshumorously (?) and postironically (?) submitted technology and brands to the natural orhuman forces that underscored their fragility—and, in the best, the fragile ecology of ourreliance on these technologies of exchange. The Jogging was:

a. parodied obsolescenceb. branded détournementc. content as artd. endless scroll of individual works, thus a useless archivee. crucially: perhaps none of these things

It’s never a joke anymore than it’s not not a joke; subironic in its dreamy, endless scroll ofusersubmitted images, it’s a postjoke. It’s actually very “bro,” a category that is not only



purveyor of the joke or prank but its victim too: fail videos, the flat affect of homoerotic(but often homophobic) fraternity, of the pluralized “experience of maleness” and itsconstituency (brands: Five Hour Energy, Xbox, Powerade; hypergendered bodies: male,female; athletics, the gym). The Jogging bros things, communalizes them by imbuingdiverse objects—iPhones, a tennis ball, a soda can, a watermelon—with fraternité,establishing an excited sense of things as being related in mysterious ways, like universityfreshmen who discover a common, if abstract, bond with other “brothers” in a frat house orsports team. It goes so far as to bro its own platform, converting “blogging” to a sport—scrolling as derivative of exercise.

Brad Troemel, Untitled , 2014



Courtesy: the artist

Recently, the Jogging has largely changed the images it generates from the ones describedabove to images that parody diagrammatic right wing memes, highlighting a new logic ofthe obsolescent politics of social media. The Jogging has copied the visual tropes of theright’s conspiratorial jpgs to expand on even more absurd conspiracies, torqueing rightwing conspiracy logic with impossible “facts,” a unit of truth the right wing meme seeks touncover from under the obscurity of government corruption(11). These facts are oftenhiding in plain sight. But for the Jogging, facts obscure obscurity, and so its memes seek tobring that obscurity to the fore. After the first months of these images’ appearance onTumblr, Tea Party Republicans and other far right conservatives began to reblog and sharethese images on their Facebook pages in earnest, circulating them as authentic expressionsof their beliefs even though, under the most basic scrutiny, these memes “say” “nothing”by saying nothing. These recent images—a shift initiated by Troemel and Edward Marshall Shenk—express aHegelian idea of Aufhebung (to borrow from Bettina Funcke, who used the term todescribe Warholian sublation in pop art) that is, the idea of the “upheaving” of things in the“negation of their negation” that allows the original thing, raised to the fore, to bepreserved even in its destruction. For the Jogging, the preserved/destroyed is theideological object. Funcke imagines a figure in excavation, which “in order... to be liftedup, it must be dug out of its ground, thus producing a ‘heap’ under which what used to bestill lies under a new and higher surface.”(12) It is easy to see an interpretative frameworkfor the Jogging’s conservative posts in this image of the excavated figure. The Jogging andits contributors extract this ideology in order to upheave it in a negation of its originalintent or context that simultaneously affirms its value as a messagecarrier, underscoringthe obvious: these conspiracies ultimately represent imaginative failures for the far right.The Jogging uses the social network to feed the right explicit representations of thatimaginative failure, calling into question the authority of these rightwing administrators toclarify what it is they share.The Jogging’s speculative objects of ideology reflect on the network and offer a third waybetween the optimism and pessimism that has defined net and PostInternet art. This breakis characterized by a strategy of upheaval, a method that rethinks the translational, diffuseInternet object and its life online and how they might politically engage community. TheJogging’s conservative memes color the water, allowing us to follow a meme’s migrationacross radically different contexts and trace how meaning shifts, even if its “message”doesn’t. The Jogging transformed itself by annihilating itself, coopting an accidentalaudience that had been previously far, far out of reach. By not only allowing for the spaceof misinterpretation (a hallmark of the web in its numerous forums and anonymousmessages), it elevated that misinterpretation to a unique instrument for expanding itsaudience, for making “contact” with divergent webs outside the normal purview ofcontemporary art. In doing so, it made an even more remarkable translation than jpeg toobject, it translated itself into a practice of outside, to borrow a phrase from the poet RobinBlaser, by bringing the outside in. Blaser wrote nearly forty years ago: “A reopenedlanguage lets the unknown, the Other, the outside in again as a voice in the language. Thus,the reversal is not a reduction, but an openness. The safety of a closed language is gone andits tendency to reduce thought to a reasonableness and definiteness is disturbed.”(13)



Edward Shenk, More Evidence of Chemtrails Ignored by The Mainstream Media, 2014Courtesy: the artist

RETURN OF THE REAL

The rise of the art fair culture stretched along the geographical axes of Beijing and LosAngeles, Basel and São Paulo, has transformed much of the art world into a largescalecircuit party, held mostly at night, fueled by day drinking, room service, afternoons onSouth Beach (or at Berghain), sales, dinners, after parties, after after parties, and theassociated vacuity of meeting and adding a collector/gallerist/artist/writer on Facebook,whether at the 21:00h dinner or much later at Lady Bar in Basel. In this world,



geographical and timebased distinctions break down, and the internationalized tweet, theFacebook post, the #artselfie increasingly signal where you are and who you are with andwhat you are doing, narrowly defined by their relationship to, and expression of, yourcareer, transforming what typically characterizes the “social” of these networks (the“warm” family and friend moments and photo albums that Facebook uses to promoteitself), transforming them into diffused LinkedInlike pages in which career is developedand broadcasted to the members of the network as a new selfie, one in which the clearestpicture is of a brand and not a subject. Looking toward this exhausting art world, trendforecasting group KHole hopes foranother practice of outside that might network disparate communities into a larger, moreinclusive one. In a recent report titled Youth Mode (a collaboration with Box 1824,)(14) KHole addresses the migration of the Internet into the space of the real and its attendantculture of alienation (characterized by extreme public cell phone use at parties, avoidanceof eye contact, and a general malaise/wish to be online at all times) by proposing“Normcore” as a new social category for the “strategic misinterpretation” of the varieties ofcultural “experience,” which KHole dehashtags in order to reassert the individual’s rightto freely express themselves in the métiers defined by the scarcity of difference thatadminister and control that experience. For KHole, normcore makes room for the sinceritylost in the totalizing, “mass indie” culture that organizes taste into harmonious consumerchoices, acting as its counterpoint: “Normcore capitalizes on the possibility ofmisinterpretation as an opportunity for connection—not as a threat to authenticity.” Choiceis situational and always subject to (rapid) change. Normcore generates a celebratoryfeeling of belonging, nonexclusivity, and individuality not predicated on its isolation amidthe hypersensitive particulars of scenes and cliques. And as KHole clarified in a recent talkat MoMA PS1, it is most productively experienced at night, in “nightlife,” amid thelibidinal economies of the nightclub/bar/party/rave. Vaguely optimistic, Normcore recuperates party culture as a space for sincere play, playcharacterized by actual—rather than virtual—connection. KHole pushes back against“mass indie” by splintering its isolationist territories and reconstituting the fragments into apatchwork community wherein the divisive, netoriented competitiveness of the currentscene(s) is replaced by inclusiveness. No photography, no tweeting, no IRL, rather thereturn of a preLacanian real, a real real depsychologized by invasive discourses of thebody, a simple real of tactility and the pleasure of getting to know someone, a utopian realthat cannot and even refuses to exist except in the imaginary of emergent Normcoreculture. I am suspicious of KHole’s Normcore, even though I appreciate its drive toward asupposedly nonhierarchical social engagement predicated on the genuine, even sinceredesire to know someone else and feel the “freedom to be with anyone,” too. Normcore’smove “away from a coolness that relies on difference to a postauthenticity coolness thatopts in to sameness” ignores the ways difference and sameness are defined within thelarger systems that authenticate them. Any mode, youth or otherwise, that effacesdifference is ultimately hierarchical as it must rely on the instrumentalization of privilegevia a calling forth of authority (often white, male, and straight) to assert that there is nohierarchy in the first place. But there is always a political and economic structure in placefor determining how youth and nightlife are experienced and by whom, mobilizing andcompelling bodies along vectors specified and conditioned by discourses that establish thetwo categories in the first place. That structure is most thoroughly lockedin when it affirmsthat it does not exist, that within it you are “free” to “lose yourself” to communalizedpleasures. But whose sameness are we opting into?



Juliana Huxtable, Nuwaubian Princess, 2012Courtesy: the artist

SELFIE OF THE YEAR

Against this promise of a recuperated nightlife, the artist and performer Juliana Huxtablehas offered a unique platform for meaningful social engagement in the various parties andevents she hosts, including her #ShockValueNYC. Networked to other similar partieshosted around lower Manhattan and Brooklyn (especially Bushwick) like WestGay, 11:11,and those at the Spectrum, Huxtable’s events constitute an open space in which difference—subtle or exaggerated, expressed in fashion or in gender identification or behavior—isnot subsumed to the core energies of normativity, which superconduct an homogenizingAmerican nightlife; it operates against it, fleshing out a space in which you are permitted tobody yourself and circulate on multiple platforms offline and on. This nightlife ofdifferenceexpressing, alternative bodies also calls into question what it even means to “beyourself” by cycling through visual and social references from the previous thirty or soyears, from Warholian superstars to the ballroom culture of Harlem in the 1980s to 2000scybergothic, selfhistoricizing itself as a scene among scenes, virtually out of time as muchas it is out of gender. The integration of the Internet into IRL has allowed for more choice and the opportunity toreference the varieties of the backlog, leaving questions of “authenticity” to seem as datedas KHole’s name sounds in 2014. Huxtable’s work—and the space it creates—is positive,open, inclusive, and differencefriendly. She uses hashtags #TRANSENCOURAGED and#FULLSPECTRUMRAGE to define these events for an online audience. Her parties andrelated performances, which rely on the web as a site of organization, promotion, andarchive, become exactly the positive space for engagement that KHole mythologizes andcannot seem to locate. KHole seeks refuge in communities of sameness and comfort.Huxtable notes in an interview with Ana Cecilia Alvarez on topicalcream.info: “I don’twant to go somewhere and feel completely at home. I want to be surprised by someone Isee—to see different people exist together. The best is at the end of the night when thepeople who are here to just have a good time and dance indulge in the space.”(15)



In her writing, Huxtable opposes the cismasculine imperative that calls for bodies toconform to it. In a poem she recorded for Hood By Air’s New York Fashion Week show,she calls for the annihilation of monogamy and divorce in order to make polyamority thebasis of (idealized) community. For Huxtable, love is the requisite feeling that bindscommunity, not youth, and frees us from the alienating overinteractive web. In thisatmosphere, Huxtable elevates difference to an organizing principle for community thatmight actually return us to an IRL released from the sceney fears that haunt KHole. Shediagnoses our problem as the propensity to monogamy, which isolates and bisectsindividuals, continuously displacing love by forcing it to compete with a coupling desirethat must ultimately die in order to live. Love is a compass, one that might point us toterritory still further out: “SHOUT OUT TO MY URBAN ANGELS SEARCHING FORPOSTORPREGENITAL DESIRE VIA GPS,”

LIKE SNOT, MUCOUS, CUM, SHIT SWEATUNITING ELEMENTS AS THE BASISOF REALITYAND CLOTHING AS AN EXTENSION OF FLESHMONOGAMY DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE FETISHAS IT’S MANIFEST IN THE CARNAL MARKETPLACE OF DESIRE EMBODIED INXTUBE AND POLYVORELOVE IS NO LONGER A LOVE OF A SINGULAR AND COMMITMENT HASCOLLAPSED AS ITS FRAIL AND EMACIATED LEGS GIVE WAY TO THEBURDEN OF THE DIMINISHING HALF LIFE OF THE SHARE AND REBLOG ASREIFY, AVOIDING ENTRAPMENT BY AN OVERLY SPECIALIZED ANDSPECIFIC CORNER OF THE AESTHETIC MATRIXMONOGAMY DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE POLYAMOROUSAN EXTENSION OF ONE’S LOVE TO MULTIPLE AT ONCESPLITS TIME BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL WORKERWEAR, DISCOUNTED‘URBANWEAR’ OUTERWEAR AND SECONDHAND MILITARY SHOES AT THESAME DOWN TIMEMONOGAMY DIED AT THE HANDS OF SERIAL MONOGAMY[…]MONOGAMY PROPER DIED AND WAS REINCARNATED—STEADY SINGULARLOVE OF MUTABILITY AND CONTINUAL SHAPESHIFTING ALA THE CYBORGAS LOVER. CONSTANT DECAY AND BIRTH. SOME PIECES ARE PERMANENT,OTHERS EPHEMERAL, DIMINISHING AGAINST THE HORIZON OFOPENNESS(16)

Decay, rebirth: a reenforcement of the obsolescence of the body that reprivileges it as thesuperior platform for the mediation of the social. Decay gives things meaning: the youIRLthat obsolesces, not the youonline that replicates infinitely. If the condition of the world is,in fact, PostInternet, and if we are to continue to believe in its liberating potential, whetherit’s the freedom to expand a social scene secluded in one of the world’s cities united underthe banner of art and partying hard or to organize a protest that will overthrow agovernment, then it is time to look toward that horizon of openness and force itshomogenizing alternatives to diminish behind us as we approach it.

(1) Quoted material provided by James La Marre, who designedthe App.

(2) Olson, Marisa. “Interview with Marisa Olson.” We Make Money Not Art. 28 March2008. http://wemakemoneynotart.com/archives/2008/03/howdoesonebecomemarisa.php#.Uwy2r0JdU



(3) Lonergan, Gutherie. “Interview with Guthrie Lonergan.” Rhizome. 26 March 2008.http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/mar/26/interviewwithguthrielonergan/

(4) The writer Gene McHugh followed the development PostInternet art on his blog122909a.com, later published on Lulu as PostInternet. But see also the writing of BradTroemel and Artie Vierkant.

(5) Chan, Jennifer. “Some Notes on PostInternet.” You Are Here. Ed. Omar Kholeif.London: Cornerhouse. 2014.

(6) In, “The Image Object PostInternet,” Vierkant characterized PostInternet by the“sincerity” of its translational practice. Brad Troemel made clear that Tumblr and similarplatforms are “democratic” in his essay “The Accidental Audience.”

(7) Troemel, Brad. “The Accidental Audience.” The New Inquiry. 23 March 2013.http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/theaccidentalaudience/

(8) Cornell, Lauren and Halter, Ed. “Mass Effect.” Mousse. No. 41.http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=1054

(9) Ibid.

(10) Troemel, Brad. “Athletic Aesthetics.” The New Inquiry. 10 May 2013.http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/athleticaesthetics/

(11) Other images in this conservative vein replicate the diagrammatic structure but insertnonsensical images from cartoons or random images from other memes.

(12) Funcke, Bettina. Pop or Populus. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009.

(13) Blaser, Robin. “The Practice of Outside.” The Fire: Collected Essays. Berkeley:University of California Press, 2006.

(14) KHole and Box 1824. “Youth Mode.” 2013. http://khole.net/

(15) Alvarez, Ana Cecilia. “Juliana Huxtable #Shockvaluenyc.” Topical Cream. 2013.http://topicalcream.info/?post_type=editorial&p=992&preview=true

(16) Huxtable, Juliana. “SHOUT OUT TO MY URBAN ANGELS SEARCHING FORPOSTORPREGENITAL DESIRE VIA GPS.” 10 February 2014.http://julianahuxtable.tumblr.com/post/76261782220/aportiontextfromthevocalsididforthehoodby

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HIRSCH, Anne - We Dont Need a Dislike Function, Post Internet, Social Media and Net Optimism