Introduction

I have discovered the existence of time travelling bandits who steal your original thoughts. They download your files and images, sift through your newest ideas and return with them to the past. They spend years developing and articulating these ideas, using them to give lectures and to write books and essays. Decades, sometimes centuries, later you will discover your ideas in these books and realize what has transpired. At least that is how I like to imagine it happens.

When discovering your writings and artworks have already been done, often in better and more developed versions than your own, it is easy to become discouraged. Instead of feeling like a bad photocopy, I have decided to treat this experience as validating, as being on the right track.

Impulse 101 is a story about art, the internet and everything.

This story is a bus ride from cave painting to post-internet art; along the way it stops to pick up important passengers such as perfectionism, science fiction, minimalism, technology, interactivity, and generational theory. It is a relatively chronological narrative beginning with the evolution of art institutions, the development of the contemporary gallery, and conflicts regarding audience. The story ends with the unification of the preceding topics and the transition from artistic contemplation to erudition which ultimately manifests in a specific approach to art making.

This essay was written with a degree of user-friendliness in consideration of a broad readership.

 

 

Chapter 2: The Cumulative World of Contemporary Art

"When you're in your little room
and you're working on something good
but if it is really good
You're gonna need a bigger room
and when you're in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think of
How you got started sittin' in your little room"[1]
Little Room, The White Stripes

Letting Go

I take a deep breathe in — a long slow exhale.

During the collapse of reality, in the moments before entering sleep, I sometimes experience hypnagogia[2] and observe exceptional visual phenomenon set against Eigengrau nothingness. Some nights I see a slideshow of rapid-fire form constants, geometric objects or intricate sculptures. The shapes are usually complex and interwoven with ideas, existing abstractly and in more dimensions than could be drawn. Psychologists studying this phenomenon call it the most traveled but least charted territory of consciousness. This occurrence eases the transition between here, the real world, and there, the imaginative.

It's interesting that in my dreams the world is usually a better and more interesting place. It is often a deeply layered and complex utopia; the closest approximation in the real world exists in aspects of video games and in science fiction. I've been to a number of gallery openings in my sleep life, and seen some fantastic work. As an adolescent I struggled with accepting real world authorship for artworks which in the dream world were produced by other artists. I've spoken to a number of artists who have experienced with this same phenomenon of visiting art in one's imagination. Though ethereal concepts which were well understood in the sleep world dissipate upon waking, there are times where the more defined and concrete ideas are left intact. More profound are those ideas which come to full formation in a dream—experiencing a eureka moment—that leaves you utterly redefined upon waking. Maybe there is something to letting go of the solidity of the real which comes with dreaming that allows the mind the freedom to create and witness true and unadulterated inspiration. There must be, the 2010 Hollywood film Inception earned $827 million in less than a year just talking about it.

Recently I have had a sense of general disconnect coupled with anxiety and expressive numbness. It is directly related to the uncertainties in challenging my artistic status quo. I'm experiencing what feels like a lessening of gravity, I'm slightly hovering—a few centimeters from solid earth, and drifting ever so slightly upward—detachment. This sensation has been providing a feeling of raw and intense sensitivity to outside stimuli which can easily influence my theoretical objectivity, almost as if I must endure a heightened emotional innocence. Anxiety has a way of manifesting as existentialism which can be crippling for an artist, especially when applied through critical self-assessment. For me it has set in motion an unshakeable stream of consciousness with sometimes counter-productive inward thinking which will define the repetitive nature and contemplative "I" tone and of this chapter.

I will present a list of premises established in continuity with the previous chapter; these premises will plot the trajectory from my previous works to my thesis work. More importantly, I will position my work relative to the challenges in contemporary art and with contemporary art practices. I feel that this very sense of anxiety, loss of gravity, and detachment which I have been experiencing is also being experienced across the artworld; or at the very least, it occurs in the artworld and I am discovering it insomuch as I am looking for it.

Describing Art

Many theorists have defined art only to have that definition made obsolete by the next generation. Adorno tells us that each definition of art is simply a recollection of what art once was, the measure having been legitimized insomuch as art is a quantitative process of transfiguration.[3] Describing what art is may be a better approach than defining it. For McLuhan, art is a mere tangible model of another situation that is less accessible; it is a translator of experience, presenting us with what we have already felt or seen but in a more concrete form.[4]

Chutes and Ladders

A question which crops up a lot is whether or not something is art. Learning from Adorno, I prefer an open definition of what constitutes art and reserve a more narrow definition regarding whether an artwork is good or successful. Approaching art, I find it necessary to recognize that art has an undeniable hierarchy, if not several competing hierarchies. Different artworks serve different purposes and not all work should conform to some universal standard of accessibility. In the same way that one practice of scientific scholarship produced self-adhesive stamps while another produced fuel cells for the Mars rovers, some artworks are produced to serve an elementary purpose and other works are created for a compound purpose; neither of these routes signifies quality. I use the term quality to designate whether or not a work of art is good or effective at achieving its purpose, independent of the measure of that purpose. To depict this as a rudimentary scale, on one hand we measure quality, transitioning from bad to good, and on the other hand we measure purpose, from ordinary to compound.

Since art appreciation is abstract, I'll first chart the hierarchy on the tangible nature of a ladder. Let's take two ladders: one ladder is designed to save people from a burning building, the other is designed to fetch a book from a high shelf. The measure of quality is objective and independent of its placement in the more subjective measure of purposefulness, which is situationally determined. In determining the purpose, one ladder has a more complex position in the ladder hierarchy than the other. When measuring quality, either ladder may have been well crafted or poorly crafted for its task. Applying this model to works of art requires an amount of aesthetic judgment where in Kantian philosophy this might be regarded as the distinction between taste and the sublime. At one end of artistic complexity we can place artworks which are one notch above ornamental, they are easily understood, and contain little to no communicated message or encoded meaning. At the opposite end is the complex artwork which has a high capacity to communicate or may include an encoded message or degree of specificity which requires an audience to be armed with the necessary tools for deciphering or utilization.

I began thinking about this topic during a conversation with fellow artist Ben Craig. We were walking down the street and passed an electrical transformer box, one which the city had commissioned an artist to paint. Witnessing a poorly executed painting we began discussing whether or not it was art. I explained my position about artwork hierarchies and defended the ability of a commissioned painting on an electrical box to be art, though one of the lower hierarchal manifestations. A commissioned electrical transformer box painting was not predestined to be reduced to mere decoration. Not all artwork is good; sometimes this is the fault of poor execution, other times simply the naïveté of the producer or a failure of the context by which it is presented. The question we debated was whether this box had in fact become artwork over ornament; Ben Craig put forth that it had, but that it was an incredibly bad piece of art, poorly executed, and entirely unsuccessful. At face value, this electrical box fell into the lower end of each scale, low quality and ordinary purpose. My conclusion, to which we both agreed, was that it is still better that someone was trying to make art, even bad art, then having no attempt at it at all; it is better that an artwork exist than not exist.

This hierarchal scale broadly defines what is considered high art and low art, which is ultimately subjective since no measure of purpose is shared by all audiences or situations.

The Witching Hour

When I was a child my father used to call twelve-midnight by an old term the witching hour. He said at twelve-midnight witches would come from the forest and fly around to steal children who were still awake; the only protection was for the children to be asleep. For me, the witches have become real in the dream world as symbol for anxiety; I often had nightmares of them circling around in my room on their broomsticks; the only escape was to hide under the covers and to try to fall asleep again inside the dream. Today my anxiety dreams resemble something closer to the nothingness from the Never-ending Story. The fear isn't of something but of the nothingness that comes from deer-in-the-headlights paralysis when confronted with an enormous task. I fear the nothing that comes from stagnation, the nothing that results from burning out, rusting out, or bowing out. Failure is better than nothing; nothing is a zero, a placeless place, limbo. As per the conversation with Ben Craig, even bad art is better than nothing.

As an emerging artist it seems overwhelming to enter the artworld without a substantiated body of work. It's very difficult to know where you stand in the artworld and with an audience; the first steps are a walk in the dark. I sometimes want to bow out and think—fuck art be a carpenter, the work is tactile and steady and at least there is an immediate sense of accomplishment. Part of being an artist is always looking, questioning, having process oriented discovery, finding something new, and following an idea through to the end. Defining forms and space is an exercise in imposition. I want my works to create the feeling that something is happening, maybe you aren't a part of it, but you wish you were.

Concept Based Artwork

Sifting through essays in art theory is like tossing a jigsaw-puzzle in the air, I am continuously discovering I don't yet have all the pieces. I will begin with writings theorist Arthur Danto.

Danto uses dreams versus reality as a metaphor for the concepts of art and non-art; the difference between the dream world and reality is momentous but is unperceivable until something happens such as waking up. He exemplifies this in art with the differences between the commercial Brillo box designed by James Harvey and the artwork reproduction of the same Brillo box created by Andy Warhol. Both can be the same physical object, one a work of art, the other a mere thing. Danto's key concept is that in contemporary art you can no longer tell in advance whether or not you are in the presence of a work of art.[5]

Though conceptual art is built on the shoulders of Dada, it is important to separate the two at one point: dada tended towards using new artistic practices for anti-art or simply for the sake of using new artistic practices where in conceptual artists are more often interested in the effective transmission of an idea than with the creation of that idea as an object.

Painting is to a book as conceptual art is to journalism.[6] In contemporary art, a painting can be the work of art, but it is increasingly more likely that a painting is the delivery device of another concept, such as On Kawara's Today series or Sol LeWitt's wall drawings. Where the painting was once the art object, the act of painting can now be received as the medium and the concept replaces the importance of the object. Pigment was once the medium delivering the painting as artwork, now the practice of painting can be used as the medium delivering a concept.

Frank Stella wasn't producing stripe paintings he was executing the path of a brushstroke on a canvas, the results of which were lines that formed an image.[7] This approach left the fundamentals of fine art object making intact. The use of a painted canvas in an artwork can be integral, but not always a means in itself. The principles and elements of design certainly still apply to the resultant art objects used as medium for transmission of the art concept.

The emphasis on craftsmanship espoused by the original Bauhaus remain ever relevant. Without diverging too deeply into Elkins's pedagogical nature of modern art education, it is sufficient to say that crafts remain integral to training, and that formal training of the artist in materials and techniques provides the necessary tools and language through which an artwork can be spoken.

Whatever Happened, Happened

These social and artistic advances throughout the century before I was born seem like massive sea change and chaos, magma and volcanoes. Even now, while the earth is still cooling, you can tell something big just happened. Recent advancements in art practices were taught to me like sermons on the mount. In my earliest art history lectures both modernism and postmodernism still had that new car smell; it was taught as a prided accomplishment who's significance my generation could not truly appreciate having been born after the fact. What were once radical developments were now the established. Painting had already been declared dead and resurrected many times; I don't have to approach painting as a process of illusion, painting need not be just a surface, it can be object, and it can be sculptural: color field painting happened, shaped canvases happened, the literalization of the surface happened; paintings literally became unframed. Marshall McLuhan declared that the medium is the message, and compared the obsolescent asking of what a painting was about, to asking what a melody was about, or what a house was about.[8] The medium is the message, it has been said, it exists, and I can wear that statement as a crown, or more often as a helmet. In regards to the aforementioned time traveling bandits, everything that has already been done is done, and thank god for that.

Stuck on Moving Forward

The next generation of artists no longer needs to start where the previous started; there is no mandate to revisit the past and re-state the established. I am confused why so many are still grasping at the ornamental, and ignoring rudimentary developments laid out over the last hundred years of art making. The prevalence of interactive, post-conceptual and new genre public art make classical manifestations appear more and more anachronistic. A few years back at a BFA student exhibition I heard a professor say, "It's like they aren't aware the 60's ever happened."

Concept based aspects of art can be outright threatening to some, both artists and audience. Some artists are afraid of becoming irrelevant if not adopting this philosophy, others simply hate it, or wish for a return to classical concepts. The Stuckist movement in London was born out of disdain for the direction of art being exhibited from Charles Saatchi's artists. In a proclamation that "a dead shark isn't art," the Stuckists protested conceptualism in favor of a return to figurative painting. They held protests and carried coffins in a mock funeral for the death of conceptual art. I don't know if the Stuckist's see the outright irony of performances associated with Stuckism, or that the traditionalist train has left the station. Stuckism reminds me of when the music recording industry was filing lawsuits during the swan-song of physical media and the advent of MP3 technology. It leaves Stuckism feeling like its pushing cassette tapes on iTunes.

For the purpose of transmitting a concept, artists are always looking for new and more effective methods of art making; the museum and gallery construct can be expanded. Stuckism misunderstands the divergence between audience and art; when we internalize the problem, it becomes obvious we have to move forward not backward, the way out is through.

Synthetic Shapes

In 2010 a classmate of mine, Juan Guillermo Caicedo Diaz del Castillo, prepared a performance piece inside an empty storefront where he would beat an arm-chair with a baseball bat. Various bureaucratic problems prevented him from ever securing the storefront for the performance; instead he wrote a description of the event as it would have occurred and wheat pasted that text in poster form around the location of the storefront. While the medium of the work was significantly altered, and no doubt it reception, the concept remained intact. It can be argued that the signified event remained unhindered. The performance, though never seen, is as real or not real as any other performance. I have not seen Joseph Beuys wrapped in felt with a coyote, I have not seen Juan Guillermo Caicedo Diaz del Castillo beating a chair with a baseball bat in a storefront, I know each of these works as intimately as the other; one has occurred as a performance, one has not.

I can draw some of this analysis through my recent work titled Wappen. Wappen was conceived as a concept for an exterior installation on a building which houses the art space Weltecho in Chemnitz. I approached the work as an exercise in semiotics in an attempt to create a symbol which would signify the artworld in the same manner in which at picnic bench signifies a park. Wappen, German for coat of arms, identifies Weltecho as a citadel of the artworld. In place of a shield, this coat of arms holds a four-dimensional icon which takes form only after an act by the observer. The installation would have been a 10 x 10 meter sign mounted on the northern façade; the shape of the sign forming a white cube. The Wappen white cube is depicted as a three-dimensional representation of a tesseract, or hypercube. Its contours are defined by retroreflective sheeting; the image becomes revealed or obscured contingent on ambient light.

_{Figure 2: Wappen, proposed installation on Weltecho}

Like a flag driven into a mountain top, the Wappen emblem brands Weltecho as an art space and brands it as a white cube. Where the depiction of this white cube is shown as a hypercube it extends the metaphor of into four-dimensional space. As we are bound to three-dimensional space we cannot directly experience the fourth dimension, and like the arts the abstract concept of the fourth-dimension cannot be held or touched and is only made material when imagined—this imagining is the act of the observer.

For the purpose of the proposal a scale model was crafted since the actual fabrication and execution of the work would cost in excess of 20.000 euros. The work remains unexecuted, but the concept alone was developed during my semester study at university. I discussed the project with my professors, other artists, and then presented the concept at the Weltecho gallery space. The concept was discussed and juried, the semester ended and I was graded and received feedback on this work. Since then this form has manifested in other works and paintings, Wappen remains a tangible concept, but it has no one singular fabricated existence. Each instance of the shape is an illustrated form constant, an embodiment of the concept, but not the work itself. Wappen as a concept can never be produced or executed as a single physical finale; it has a truer nature when imagined than produced.

_{Figure 3: Wappen (left photo showing reflected light), 45 x 45 cm, enamel and reflective tape on aluminum, 2011}

 

 

Chapter 4: Deus Ex Internet Machina

"There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction they are going!
There's no knowing where they're rowing,
Or which way the river's flowing!
Not a speck of light is showing,
So the danger must be growing,
For the rowers keep on rowing,
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing . . ."^[1]
Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The Cabin in the Woods

Prior to the industrial age, people could live their whole lives in a relatively static technological state. It was reasonable to assume that the world which you were born into would look technologically similar upon your departure. The dynamism that came with the industrial age changed everything; there was no longer an expectation that technology wouldn't advance during your lifetime.

Changes first came in waves the size of centuries, then decades, years, months, and eventually to the point where the near continuously spinning wheel of technological progress became the new constant. For our generation, a period of relative technological stagnation would be unusual.

Unfortunately progress doesn't occur in all aspects of civilization simultaneously. This developmental lag can create disturbing circumstances where technology and culture are misaligned. McLuhan reminds us of the indigenous Australians whose culture collapsed after the introduction of steel axes by missionaries. Similar problems crop up in the arts; we can see the fear and anxiety that came with the transition from rural to city life manifested in expressionism. In the early 1900's the situation was grim, Dewey describes the conditions of his era: "Industry has been mechanized and an artist cannot work mechanically for mass production. He is less integrated than formerly in the normal flow of social services."[2] He claims it lead to the withdrawn introspective artist, and individualism.

When I think about the past century of art making, with its stresses on individualism, I see this as a cabin in the woods. The artist was alone in the cabin, and created his work there. The impulse was there, but art is not yet part of a social relationship, the binding concepts which have pushed us to network and interact hadn't yet begun. By the end of millennium, the situation had inverted; the cabin was no a longer a suitable studio place for the artist. With the ease of travel, accessibility of information, and the advent of the digital age, we have seen a complete reversal of that isolation: a renaissance of interaction. By leaving the cabin, arts role transformed from Gesellschaft to Gemeinschaft, with the artist now practicing within the relational world.

Kunstwerk: Interaktivität

Interaction is the defining characteristic of every living being; interaction is exploratory, survival depends on it, that which does not interact, dies. ^[3]

Bourriaud coined Relational Aesthetics.simply by reading from the barometer of contemporary art, he defined it as: "Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt."[4] He describes art a state of encounter; artwork is a linking element, having left its material form to become part of a trajectory: a dot on a line.[5]

There was a lot of wonderment surrounding the advancements and rise of computer networking in the late eighties. From Roy Ascott in 1989: "Networking provides the metaphor for late twentieth century culture: it speaks of interactivity, decentralisation, the layering of ideas from a multiplicity of sources. Networking is the provenance of far-reaching connectivity and, mediated, accelerated, and intensified by the computer, it leads to the amplification of thought, enrichment of the imagination, both broader and deeper memory, and the extension of our human senses."[6] Ascott witnessed the development of what he called dispersed authorship and layering: "Since reciprocity and interaction are of its essence, such work cannot differentiate between "artist" and "viewer," producer and consumer."[7] This, as Stephen Wright would later describe, is the transformation from authorship to usership.

In the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey early man is shown banging away at a pile of bones until the realization that a bone could be used as a tool. Unlike this pile of bones, the possibility of networking through technology didn't show up first and then we found a use for it; it exists insomuch as we wanted it to exist and eventually technology enabled it to exist. Technology closely mimics an advanced form of preexisting human processes, conversely it can be the introduction of a process which a human alone cannot achieve; in both these senses we see technology as a tool or extension.

The technology of the original Star Trek series was imagined during a time of analog computers; we can see the desire to communicate wirelessly came long before the technological possibility. To put this into perspective, Star Trek aired during the three years prior to the Apollo 11 moon landing in which space travel was aided by slide rulers. Save for Enterprise itself, teleporters and warp engines, many of the tools and technology from the original Star Trek now exist: computer databases, video chat, language translators, wireless communication, tablet computers, stun guns, and automatic doors.[8][9] So it isn't hard to imagine some of the future applications of technology, we simply look to our pre-existing processes, practical needs, and technological desires, and eventually we will see part of the spectrum of future development. This will then be supplemented by the unforeseen possibilities that come out of those advancements: even Star Trek couldn't predict the internet.

The predictive relationship of sci-fi to technology is comparable to that of art and society. As McLuhan put it: "The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenges decades before its transforming impact occurs."[10] […] "[Artists] are engaged in making live models of situations that have not yet matured in the society at large. In their artistic play, they discovered what is actually happening, and thus appear to be "ahead of their time."[11] In his this characterization, artists are less like societal psychics and more like cold-readers, though futurists might be a nicer word.

Old Internet, New Internet

In the early days of the internet, each website was a destination off a long road. Though it was a network, everything was awfully static; there were far more cul-de-sacs than communities. The old internet, Web 1.0, was like a filing cabinet, it was about specificity of content, not interoperability. Content wasn't yet presented in a unified manner, each function was separate: information content was in the browser, video and music were downloaded, and communication was relegated to email or chat software. Code rendering was made variable by proprietary software, competing web standards, and the unavoidable bugs/glitches that resulted from the first browser war. This is the cabin in the woods era of the internet.

This was later remedied in the transition to Web 2.0 with the emphasis on information sharing, link backs, blogging, and the social experience. It became less like a filing cabinet and more like us. Content began to unify: information in wikis, music and video could be streamed, and interactivity was introduced through social bookmarking and social networking. We saw the advent of commenting, tagging, content-management-systems and the introduction of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)[12] editing which allowed users to create content without having to create code. We also saw the perfecting of technologies: Voice-over-IP, video conferencing, the peer-to-peer file sharing of Napster gave way to torrents, and data moved from personal drives to cloud computing. Web 2.0 is the collective experience; perhaps it's the internet equivalent of Relational Aesthetics. leaving the cabin in the woods.

Plausible White Cubes

If we think of the contextualizing white cube as a construct, how can we further extend this model? I see the internet as one post-physical realization of the white cube; it is truly the abstract, timeless, and dimensionless construct where content can be experienced free from the outside world, void of the presence of the human body. Of course it can be argued that the physicality of a concrete gallery or museum place isn't ready to be transcended by the internet in its current form, but neither makes the other obsolete, they can perform simultaneously. The digital or meta-white cube should not be regarded as a successor, but as an extension.

As it stands, many artworks are temporal and created with the express understanding that they will live on, or fully blossom, in documentation. More and more often documentation will outlive the actual, and with the internet, documentation is preserved in the continuum. Artworks, whether or not originally intended for this destination, have already cropped up in countless news feeds, curated blogs, bouncing from the walls of artist and gallery websites to social networking sites. With awareness of this realm as a plausible white cube, artists have begun creating artworks anticipating this digital reception; some works have been created to exist and be documented digitally and cannot exist more in the real world than they do online. There is a more advanced approach I will discuss in the next chapter. In a most literal sense, online can be a place for exhibition.

On this topic, I spoke with the artist Peter Huestis.[13] Huestis works at the National Gallery Art, Washington, D.C, in the rights and reproductions department and has unparalleled real-world access to the collection and archive. What I find most interesting is his daily work, which is documenting material art objects in the collection, contrasted with his series of artwork called Ugly Tour Bus Photoblogging. The works in the series—which are exhibited wholly on his blog Princess Sparkle Pony[14]—expresses profundity through shallowness, and as the name suggests they are explorations of the otherwise banal and garishly decorated tour buses parked in the nation's capital. These images filter and frame reality as a formalist investigation of composition; he details reflections, shadows, and shapes in a manner that resembles the minimalistic photographs of Lewis Baltz. Huestis had his start as a painter and exhibited in galleries. He explained that his work was limited mainly to exhibitions that saw, at most, a few thousand gallery patrons over the course of several years; compare this with his tour bus series which received between 600–4000 unique visitors a day. These works exist digitally; the viewer isn't seeing a reproduction. He places the works directly to the audience without a gallery, from which he gains a satisfying control over the presentation.

 

_{Figure 7: Photographs by Peter Huestis, eight images from the series Ugly Tour Bus Photoblogging}

This scenario parallels so many online works such as digitally delivered temporary work, certain conceptual works, complex image memes, interactive audio sites, and video pieces. One other example which comes to mind is the street artist Blu. He produces street art which take the form of painted animations which are produced into stop-motion videos and uploaded on Vimeo. The real-world artwork is perpetually overwritten in each frame of the animation and can only be witnessed after the video is compiled and uploaded.

The Death of the Author is the Birth of the User

Writer and art theorist Stephen Wright has explored today's new stage for art making. He calls art a productivist undertaking where the notion of authorship is being contested in preference of co-authorship, and spectatorship replaced by usership. In his collaborative project Plausible Artworlds[15], Wright introduces artworlds which are not geared toward audiences or publics, but instead toward an expansive usership.[16]

To better understand this concept of usership, if we imagine artistic impulses as naturally occurring springs, than art history and culture are formed by combing those waters into rivers which go on to fill an ocean from which each generation can both benefit and contribute. Though we have created an ocean, there are still barriers which restrict the usage and taking of the water. The freedom to explore new artworld territories has been somewhat hindered by the rules and definitions which sustained the old artworld. Wright articulates: "Although we still use the same artworld terms of the past centuries, they have an awkward fit and it's a fit that does a great deal of violence to emerging practices."[17] In the same way that the words and institutions as they are described by Wright can negatively influence emerging practices, so can their accompanying copyright laws which squander creativity; laws which protected values nearly all of which are nearing obsolescence.

There is an archaic ideology which is still espoused that insists on viewing and coddling originality as if it were a unique singularity born of spontaneous generation and not built on the shoulders of the amassed knowledge. Originality is the successful addition to a cumulative process, building off of what was there before. Strict application of copyright law is being used not only to seize credit for all cumulative processes which culminated in the production of a new work, but also to legally create an end cap from which no other progress can be added. This outmoded application can become the death of the remix, the remake, the reboot and has culminated in the marginalization of those who disregard these creative restrictions, labeling them outlaws or pirates. Part of the solution has been introduced with the usage of copyleft, Creative Commons, and the Free Art License, the rest is still under construction.

Arthur C. Clarke and Arthur C. Danto

In Arthur C. Clarke's transhumanist sci-fi novel Childhood's End there is an elaborate dramatization of the disconnection experienced between human generations. In the book, the last generation of human children was utterly incompatible with the previous. They became non-verbal and communicated telepathically with each other, they had no interest in communication with adults; their minds were flooded by combined knowledge, they didn't sleep and hardly moved. They were linked together rocking back and forth in a pattern spanning continents as they slowly entered into the next phase of human evolution as a collective consciousness.[18]

In a non-fiction study, the authors of the book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe, separated Anglo-European generations into two distinct eras: crises and awakening. Crises are periods of extroverted upheaval and reorganization of the institutional structures, while awakenings are more introverted marked by emphasis on individualism and personal values.[19] Their model of generational theory carries over nicely into the world of modern art; the difference is a generation in the art world advances at a different rate than a human generation.

Arthur Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was published in 1981, the year I was born. Danto differentiates between works of art and mere things; I grew up in an environment in which it was a given that any object could become activated as art, and art can manifest in nearly everything and anything. Artists in my generation did not experience firsthand the shift from the art object to art concept; we grew up with the art world resolved to this newer understanding. New media is everywhere; everything is in a common state of flux.[20] Apart from the plot, the children of Childhood's End look a lot like today's version of anyone who's online.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

In 2009 I attended an exhibition at the New Museum in New York called Younger Than Jesus which was the first of its kind to showcase the artwork of Generation-Y, or Millennial, artists. Not surprisingly, the exhibition was built in part on the research of Strauss and Howe who also contributed an essay to the Younger Than Jesus exhibition reader.[21] The exhibit introduced art goers to the attitudes and values of younger artists; it demonstrated the products of living in a world of instant communication and the importance of conceptual and new artistic practices to young artists. Social media sprouted around the Millenials, user generated content bleeds over into user generated artwork with an increased interest by this generation's artists in more interactive art practices. The past decade has been increasingly validating of the concepts framed by Bourriaud. With each Facebook status update we draw that much closer to the birth of a world-wide urban culture[22]—which hopefully looks a little more promising than the one in Childhood's End.

But all of this is what journalists call the situation on the ground. These fundamentals, givens, or artworld-truths merely outline the world where contemporary artists live; the artistic existentialist crisis begins with deciding what to say, and what to do. I'd like to think the age of the monumental be-all and end-all artwork—the artistic singularities and momentous object making—has drifted away and been replaced with the emphasis on something akin to a conversation.

Social media and contemporary art have many similarities; both currently look like a free-for-all playground for experimentation. Pop culture is used as a communicative currency, but unlike pop culture where celebrity status can be gifted to someone plucked from obscurity, today's social generation gears more toward recognition and merit based on contribution. The talent of establishing a meaningful exchange can be showcased, but not forged. There is no genuine way to skip the line; as with a conversation, interrupting may give you the floor, but it is by no means a method of maintaining that position in the long term. All in all, in social media and modern life, the immediacy of now is becoming more and more intense.

 

 

 

Chapter 6: WYSIWYG

"Good luck out there, buddy. You're gonna need it."^[1]
Barney Calhoun, Half Life 2

See You Online is the New Goodbye

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking demonstrated that if the universe is infinite, than any particular point could potentially be designated the center. Of course, any other competing point could also be declared the center and therefore every place in the universe could simultaneously be the center. I like to think that in our contemporary pluralist artworld any point of entry could be a starting point, and a starting point derived from the strongest artistic impulse would be the most obvious. For me this impulse is a return to painting, to the painted object, and to craftsmanship. Painting has been the first developmental starting point for each series of my work.

With Impulse 101, my challenge is to place objects in public space in a method that first defines a context for their reception, and then communicates their content through a painted medium. Painting is a loaded artistic practice; as a medium it carries a historic weight, one which contains the capacity to be a burden or a resource. Through the utilization of painting it is possible that the work will be more readily understood as a work of art; however, as with other forms of public art, if it is not successfully executed there is the possibility that an audience may come to understand it as ornamental, commercial advertisement, or vandalism. I enter into this series with recognition of these obstacles.

Not all these works will need to first establish themselves as art before being experienced; for some works, the communiqué or the transfiguration often precedes the audience's awareness that what they are experiencing is art. At times the event may pass without an audience ever achieving this awareness. For those in which the work does need the context alongside its reception, this places a special challenge on the work to perform at a higher awareness of its location than a similar object in the contextualizing walled cube.

Situating these works in public is less about public art and more about site specific installation. The artwork will occur as part of metamorphic cycle; its states changes can be analogize as dandelion/seeds/field, ice/water/gas, or in the Lost universe: John Locke/Jeremy Bentham/Smoke Monster.

Throughout this metamorphosis these works will experience the tension between wanting to be online and being in the real world. These paintings may wish they were digital but they don't mimic being digital; they are merely what the modern day internet-familiar eye accepts. Compare this to the same awkwardness in the ecotone[2] where human society edges up against nature: canyons outlined with railings, large map boards on hiking trails, and signposts popping out of ponds warning not to feed the ducks; these absurdities have become normalized to the modern eye.

The first state of the work is dynamic: it reacts and interacts with its environment; this is a highly contextual and cerebral state. The visual information of the surrounding area will be filtered, reduced and reframed; this will diminish the relative distance between the painting and its subject matter. The work begins to vibrate between availability and non-availability; it will be viewable during a limited duration, maintaining the format of exhibition. The second state is static, the object moves to the white cube where it is exhibited as a trophy, artifact, or curiosity. Here the art object can serve as commodity; commodity being a necessary parameter for self-replication. The third state is the post-material rebirth where the artwork moves online. If it survives intact at this level it will exceed mere documentation and attain its digital reincarnation as reusable information. Like the dandelion, with the death of the author it can begin its transmission and proliferation as a meme.

Figure 14: Code Page 437 from the original IBM PC

The first two iterations of this approach take their namesake from this essay: Impulse 101 and WYSIWYG. I'll begin by discussing the origins, formation, manifestations and transformations of Impulse 101.

Impulse 101 is a conceptual work which begins with the 4 foundational font characters of 8-bit Block ASCII, ░ ▒ ▓ █. These shapes were originally found in the 1979 character set Code Page 437, or CP437, of the original IBM PC.

ASCII art has its origins in 7-bit ASCII which originated in the 1960's. My first encounters with ASCII art were with 8-bit CP437 on Bulletin Board Systems in the 1990's, just a few years before the internet caught on in the consumer sector. The CP437 character set has a total of 256 glyphs; in Impulse 101 I put the parentheses around ░ ▒ ▓ █, the foundational forms which can be seen as the triangle-square-circle of Block ASCII.

Figure 13: JPG version, White Square on Black	Figure 14: JPG version, Black Square on White

The first principle was to appropriate these shapes as my own, using them as 4 small robots whose purpose is to self-replicate and take on new forms. Being symbols, they can slip through the analog and digital world without needing a physical form, they exist as meme nanites[3], replicating, infesting and building upon themselves.

I began by spreading these symbols in various online locations: embedded in HTML code, in emails, Facebook, YouTube, and on dump.fm[4]. I watched as the symbols were picked up and remixed into new shapes by other users. The symbols bounced around the internet, copy-pasted, blogged and reblogged. In a chance coincidence the Written Images exhibition at LEAP gallery in Berlin had an experimental project taking place on July 1, 2011. The project enabled users to submitted JavaScript code online which would be rendered as 8-bit ASCII and printed as a continuous feed in the gallery. The event was live streamed over the internet, a camera captured each printout, and the printed simultaneous acts as the exhibition catalog. The robots of Impulse 101 got to work mass producing images which poured into the gallery by the thousand.

 

_{Figure 15: Impulse 101 printed out in LEAP Berlin as part of the Written Images exhibition}

Figure 17: Impulse 101, 1 x 1 meter, acrylic on canvas, deactivated installation view, Eigenheim Gallery, Weimar

I formed the symbols into a cube configuration in homage to Malevich. From the JPG's I dragged these cubes half-way into the real world in a painting diptych. The diptych installation is half-digital, half-painted, half in the real world, half on the internet via a projection. In the video half the symbols are ever changing forms, evolving and morphing via newer videos. The video projection is temporal, activating and deactivating the diptych, fluctuating between analog and digital. The online version/digital version of the work allows new videos to be loaded, and remixes to be entered by users into the video screen.

In a symbiotic cross-over, the Impulse 101 diptych was curated into the thesis performance Extend.fm by Alma Alloro. The work provided video movement to the performance, and in return the symbols were presented to her audience replicating in the physicality of the space and reproduced in every layer of the video and photo documentation.

Figure 16: Impulse 101 seen in the background during Extend.fm performance

The story of these shapes has only just begun; the concept spins and spins on an abstract plane, touching down in different tactile forms, the manifestations of which can never be fully quantified or documented.

The second work, WYSIWYG, is a site specific installation in Weimar. If Impulse 101 is the younger, faster, Pepsi artwork, then WYSIWYG is a more formal, classic Coca-Cola artwork. Where in Shapeshifters the paintings were slipped between the wall and the graffiti, in WYSIWYG the painting is slipped between the reflection and the reflected. Where the Shapeshifters squares were ultimately self-updating paintings, WYSIWYG is a self-updating reflected remix.

On Coudraystrasse in Weimar there are two modern buildings across from each other, the MFPA building and the CIB building. On the front of the MFPA is a large vector-like graphic artwork by local artist Klaus Nerlich; on the opposite side of the street the mirror-tinted glass of the CIB façade reflects back the MFPA building and Nerdlich's image. I placed a painting directly behind one of the window panes of the CIB building; the content of the painting is the exact image of the reflection on that particular pane of glass. The image solidifies as single reflected perspective; as a painting, the work first remixes a sample of Nerlich's work, and then is presented in a way which causes another direct interaction based on the new reflection. The glass overlay on the painting causes visual distortion which changes depending on the distance and direction from the painting, the obstacles obstructing the view, and the changes in daylight. Ultimately the work is constantly remixing that pane of glass. It simultaneously duplicated and remixes, stabilizes and distorts a reflection where each photograph or video of results in a different image of the work.

 

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