Inspired by Julian Stallabrass’s book Art Incorporated and a web exhibition on the nude, I have been investigating the phenomena of Internet Art, if indeed there is such a thing.
To be Internet Art, it not only has to be on the internet it also has to be non-transferable. There has to be something about the piece that binds it to the medium. This is why something like The Bubble Project is not really internet art.
Secondly, it’s free, which is why it will never be recognized by gallerists or collectors: it has no monetary value or social cachet. Even if a piece of internet art was conceptually breathtaking and stunningly beautiful, it would be surely ignored. Perhaps the only cachet you get from it is if you partake in some collaborative work yourself. For instance, I recently submitted a photo of the view from my window and an mp3 of the background noise to l’appareil’s Window Standpoint Series. The gloominess of Glasgow and the endless stream of traffic from the M8 appear in my entry.
If anyone can direct me towards some distinctly web-based artworks, I would be very grateful. I’ve looked at Rhizome.org, but there’s just too much stuff.
I don’t know how I missed this, but I just found an entertaining transcript of a discussion between Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Will Self, of course, adores Sinclair and would love to have his visionary integrity. Sinclair, on the other hand, disdains Self’s hack ‘PsychoGeography’ and his status as an intellectual gadfly. The discussion ends with this cutting attack on Self’s prostitution of whatever talent he had:
Self: As a producer of dense literary creations I feel like a psychic tweed jacket -with a leather elbow-pad cranked across my mouth – but as the glib hack I feel absolutely at one with everybody and quite comfortable in myself, and I’ve trousered the money of course.
Sinclair: In How the Dead Live the ghosts of aborted souls cling to the present; when you die rings of people cluster round your neck and shoulders. I can see your old columns embedding their scythes into your back…
Self: That’s very savage, and frankly quite hostile, but I’m just going to have to live with it… I’ll probably wake up screaming tomorrow…
Addictions grow and fester with dissatisfaction. The fact that we live in a society whose walls are plastered with advertisments offering to fulfil every conceivable whim and desire, taunting us with their absence, has made us all terribly dissatisfied. It’s all “I want I want I want”. When these desires are thwarted by lack of money and time we comfort ourselves with something warm, homely and pleasurable. For some, it is alcohol. For others, it is food. For me, it is the internet.
Like all addictions, it took me by surprise. One minute I was fine, the next I was slavishly clicking around the net: posting on discussion boards, reading endless articles by bloggers and journalists, looking on e-bay for a bargain and generally getting sucked further and further into the vortex; a fly on a sticky web, flailing, waiting to be consumed. I would justify it to myself in the weakest terms, as an alcoholic justifies their pint of port for breakfast, saying just the once and then I’ll never use it again. But five minutes later there would be a fact that I wanted to check or an mp3 that I wanted to download and the familiar crunch and cry of the modem would start up. Five minutes turned into fifty minutes as I checked my e-mail accounts, all three of them. With each “no unread messages” sign my heart would sink further. I would be positively suicidal if it said 4 new messages and they were all spam.
The worst thing is that I thought that I understood addiction. I am a devotee of addiction counsellor Allen Carr. His book on smoking (The Easyway to Stop Smoking) I thought a work of amazing psychological insight, destroying like an angry god the build-up of false consciousness that afflicts the addicted. Furthermore I thought that his insights were transferable to any addiction . . . and yet I can’t seem to be able resist the temptation to check my e-mails or to see if my e-bay auctions have had any bidders. Even just thinking about it has me eyeing up the cheery e of the “internet explorer” logo . . . No, I must resist. If only I could intellectualise the reasons why to do so would be such a waste of time . . .
And with that we come to the nub of the problem. The reason the internet is so appealing to someone like me, who lives for the decadent pleasures of the intellect, is that I have found, in my little corner of the internet, constantly updated pages that frig the centres of the brain where momentary pleasures take place. It is an easy pleasure, like junk food, but of little or no substance. I can find out facts about absolutely anything with a quick visit to google. I risk becoming a cyberstalker when I found out that google can unearth all the skeletons that people thought had been buried long ago.
This entry wasn’t going to be a journal piece. It has so far taken about five minutes to write after absolutely no consideration. I suspect that my addiction has decided that it should make it a journal piece so that it can get back on the internet all more quickly. Indeed, I am sure that I had more things to say, but my addiction is so powerful.
I think I first became aware of my addiction when I saw C_____ rush to his computer to check his messages on Friendster. It was then that I realised that I am exactly the same, forgoing civilized behaviour for electronic consummation with the screen and its polymorphous perversity. It reminds me of Better Than Life, a fictional game that features heavily in the novelizations of Red Dwarf, wherein people become locked into a computer game that satisfies their deepest desires. Is this not me with the internet?
So, how do I break through the meniscus of this vessel I am drowning in? How do I shirk off this sticky web?
First step: Understand the nature of the addiction. The pleasures are manifold, but as long as I can demonstate to myself their inadequacy then . . .
Second: Go to a public library and look at the gormless nerds chuckling over a message board (I am thinking of a specific girl in New Malden library). Ask myself: do you want to be like that.
In ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, Oscar Wilde celebrates the fact that poetry is not read by the public. For if they did read it they might attempt to influence it and, to meet the requirements of the public, “the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to supress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him”
On 8 mile high, Penny Broadhurst explicitly rails against such high-minded seclusion, asserting that “art is communication . . . I want to speak to the people and I want to kick arse.” With such an attitude, it is deeply mystifying as to why she should chose poetry(!) as her medium. Surely nothing is more alienating to the 21st century mind (sic) than poetry. The question is: why does it alienate?
Perhaps it’s because poetry, after Romanticism, became inextricably bound in the popular imagination to the self-indulgent, to the introspective and to the futile dramatizations of the self. When the poet became ‘sensitive’ s/he lost all authority. When pale-skinned schoolboys and schoolgirls with gothic tendencies took over the poetry racket, the game was lost.
As the “arse-kicking” opener to Blue Bank shows, Ms. Broadhurst seemingly disdains such cliches: her “inspiration is Eminem and Dolly Parton.” And yet, the next poem includes lines melancholy lines about “thickening, black mucus lungs, viscous”. Vacillating between introspective and in-yer-face, Blue Bank is an uncomfortable listen. The former are embarrassingly descriptive of personal ailments (Scabby Queen) and the latter media cliches (chavs etc). The musical accompaniment is inventive and astute, never sounding amateurish, but one longs for some consistency.
Maybe my problem is that I don’t like contemporary poetry. I tend to agree with Peacock’s The Four Age of Poetry. From Shakespeare to Pope to Keats to Eliot to Empson to Larkin, the well of poetry has been drying out and getting more stagnant. Most intelligent animals now get their sustenance elsewhere (pop lyrics, poetic prose, photography), leaving only the weak and atavistic with poetry. There is massive amounts of hypocrisy that surrounding it. Nobody, or almost nobody, reads it. People like the idea of reading it, it still carries a certain kudos in some areas, but I find it difficult to recall the last time a poem has escaped the confines of the books pages and accompanied an intelligent thought. The least efficient way to spend money is to spend other people’s money on other people. All those awards and grants in the poetry world epitomise this inefficiency.
As far as I can see, the criteria for poetry rests on either the modernist ideas of form, beauty, aesthetics etc. or folky ideas of traditional culture, memorable songs etc. Neither of these things have much weight in modern culture, so the poet is left isolated. And, whilst self-pleasure has its place, I’d rather not read it, especially not in sentences that don’t have the good grace to reach the end of the page.
With a corrupted computer on a corrupted, yet increasingly lively train that is stuck somewhere outside of Darlington, my corrupted body and mind composes these words in the hope of staving off panic, depression and despair.
We arrived in Glasgow after a journey of peerless efficiency. How beautiful to see the vast, anonymous sea bereft of human taint. On the way, I read Edward de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats, which despite a broad streak of vulgarity running through it like a stick of rock (“Yes, that’s good black hat thinking, but now put on the yellow hat.”) teaches a valuable lesson in how to structure ideas about a subject. I wish I’d had it when I was planning the pilot issue of the magazine.
I find myself brooding on the meaning of life. How simple it seems when you give in to extremes how challenging it is when you avoid them. Fundamentalists don’t realise how difficult it is for everyone else to make sense of experience.
A brusque Yorkshireman whines on about the deficiencies of GNER and I can’t really blame him. It is farcical how little connection there is between the people who deal with emergencies (there has been a fire, leading to all the power on the line being cut out) and those who deal with getting the trains moving. It was ever thus. To my right, a Chinese girl talks loud and endlessly on her mobile phone.
Anyhow, Glasgow. My first time in Scotland, the land of my distant forefathers, if my name is anything to go by.
The first thing that struck me was distinct absence of a pretension in the citizens. The idea of dandyism was utterly alien. Whether this is due to the brutality of the tracksuit wearing masses or, the theory I favour, because pretentiousness is so indelibly connected with the vulgarity of the merchant classes is uncertain. But normality is the rule.
Whilst they may not reach, in aesthetic terms, either the highest highs of London or its lowest lows, they nevertheless enjoy more inequality than we do. Privilege is a privilege in Glasgow. Or maybe that’s just what I want to think.
You see, dear reader, it looks like we may be moving to Glasgow. I know, I know. What a wrench! Especially for someone as impecunious as me! Whilst I may be relieved of my burdens, I will also lose a lot of the things that are most valuable to me now . . . The train – thank heavens – has started moving again.
Anyone travelling on the London Underground recently could not fail to notice a certain advert. Above the person in front of you, just above their heads (so you can look at them without ever catching their eye), is an advert for the internet gambling service Casino-on-Net or 888.com.
The appeal of gambling is surely in the purity of the excitement, the heart-skipping moments when to win or to lose are the only things that matter in the world. Gambling, unlike other addictions has an inherent narrative, one you can tell yourself as you rise or fall. Sometimes it’s the most rational, logical thing you can do; other times, it’s all luck. Either way, it is intensely personal.
Casino-on-Net, unsurprisingly, do not mention the word addiction in their ‘mission, purpose and principles’ page. Instead, they write crap like: “For us a winner is not a sinner. Winners are our ambassadors to the world.” As a libertarian, who thinks that if a person wants to be cannibalized then they should be allowed to be cannibalized, I have few qualms with people gambling as much as they like. But the consequences and the reality of gambling must be shown: show the losers, not just the winners. “We believe that Gambling is entertainment, and it should be fun,” say Casino-on-Net. But they are ignoring the despair and sadness in the eyes of the unemployed in my local post office as they play the new European lottery (jackpot odds are 37 million to 1, coincidentally the same odds as DNA evidence being wrong).
The inspiration for this post came from visiting Wandsworth yesterday. I had thought that the Wandsworth/Earlsfield area was becoming gentrified, but I was wrong: dead and moribund shops are everywhere. What used to be called the Arndale Centre has a new parade of shops, and yet the old one lingers on, stinking of piss and disinfectant, fish heads and fried sticky donuts. On a whim, I went into one of those garish arcades so popular in poor areas. One-armed bandits and fruit machines lit the faces of the pensioners playing them; 25p a go, for a measly jackpot of £15.
Behind the concentration was a quiet desperation. This was a level of nihilism that I can only dream of reaching.
Inspired by Julian Stallabrass’s book Art Incorporated and a web exhibition on the nude, I have been investigating the phenomena of Internet Art, if indeed there is such a thing.