Project Resources
Books
Cornell Lauren and Ed Halter. Mass Effect : Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century.
WHAT TO DO WITH PICTURES by David Joselit: “In digital economies, value accrues not solely from production—the invention of content—but from the extraction of meaningful patterns from profusions of existing content.” (268)
LOST NOT FOUND: THE CIRCULATION OF IMAGES IN DIGITAL VISUAL CULTURE by Marisa Olson: It was once argued that collage was the most powerful tool of the avant- garde, that it was a literalization of the drive to reorganize meaning. Now that it has become a mainstream practice, its authority has become virtually endangered.It borrows the techniques of collage—namely piecing together fragments, objects, and ideas in what Roland Barthes might call a “tissue of quotations”—to create new valences. This is not so much derivative as dialectical. Each “lifted” piece is put in conversation with the other, so that the combination creates a third (or fourth or fifth) “term.” (165)
Steyerl Hito. Duty Free Art. Verso 2017.
Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?: But if images start pouring across screens and invading subject and object matter,the major and quite overlooked consequence is that reality now widely consists of images; or rather, of things, constellations, and processes formerly evident as images. This means one cannot understand reality without understanding cinema, photography, 3D modeling, animation, or other forms of moving or still image. The world is imbued with the shrapnel of former images, as well as images edited, photoshopped, cobbled together from spam and scrap. (123)
Baudrillard Jean and Sheila Faria Glaser. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press 1994.
Articles, Essays Etc
The Image Object Post-Internet by Artie Vierkant
This should come as little surprise as, especially after the Internet, the far more instantaneous and safe method of communication is through imagery. Dealing with language can too forcibly illustrate the thoughts behind an image, or belittle a work if the text is not as clever or aesthetic as the image itself.
The Laws of Lorecore by Shumon Basar
Lorecore is the name I’m giving to this prevalent stage of reality in which we’re all characters. Characters who are also audiences. Audiences who are also potentially Siberian spam bots…Your social media feeds are a factory of myth-making. Lore is the new myth you make about yourself. You live inside these myths mythically. I’d like to suggest that lore is to the self what Sigmund Freud’s death drive was to life: it’s the horizon that makes the here a thing that feels like it’s actually happening to you.
Artworks
Horror Chase, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
This work is based on the climatic chase sequence from Evil Dead II. The artists re-enact the scene on a specially designed stage set. Each shot in the sequence is individually digitized. Custom computer software selects these clips at random, playing them back in a seamless but continuously variable way, changing the speed and direction of play. The images are projected at cinematic scale and the computer hardware is installed in a black briefcase, which forms part of the installation. (written by the Artists)
Gretchen Bender, TV Text and Image
Bender conceived this iteration of her series TV Text and Image (1986–91) for the front window of the Donnell Library Center, located across Fifty-Third Street from MoMA. Each television set is tuned to a different channel and features a pointed phrase superimposed on its screen in vinyl lettering, creating a critical rejoinder to the flow of commercial programming. Continually updated, the work today may include “channels” from digital streaming platforms or internet TV. “I’ll mimic the media,” Bender noted, “but I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there. (MoMA)
Kevin Mead, Take A Closer Look
Exploration of internet video semiotics, subjecthood, digital criminal imagery and neurodivergence