The Doctrine of Internet Art
Or How To Speak Truth in the Epoch (and Apocalypse) of Noise
Want to talk to a fledgling artist of the internet age? AMA!
This was the title of my first (and failed) AMA on reddit. At that time, I was 23, had been writing for more than ten years, and been dreaming about writing for even longer. I had already released Timothy’s Book of Stories, my first short novel which I wrote in an empty room for three years before putting it on the Kindle store independently. It languished there with little success, and in the process of trying to get people to find it, I learnt a great deal about the internet and how it is changing (and has changed) art, culture, business — everything. This stuff fascinated and scared me, and prompted by it, I made a video called A Talking Face/innernet which spoke on the myriad issues I saw with our way of consuming ‘content’ online. This too garnered hardly any attention, and with the AMA I hoped to get more people to see it, not for any marketing purposes for myself — I had remained completely anonymous in the video— but because I felt it said things that needed to be heard.
I didn’t know it then (and this is why I started this story with the title of that defunct AMA), but I had struck something new during all this digging, and with the hindsight of these past eight months I can say that I was only getting started.
You see, I had already begun to identify myself as something other than a traditional writer, or even artist. Up to that point I had seen the net as being a new place of presentation and distribution, not really affecting the way I made or sought to make art. But this changed, and this is where the story really begins.
A Talking Face/innernet, as I said, was about the internet itself. Before releasing it I struggled with what it even was — what could I call this thing I had made?
It was just a guy talking into a camera for 18 minutes straight — no flashy camera work, no action scenes, no sexuality — nothing. The frame didn’t change even once. It was simply too humbly made to be called a film, I thought. But it wasn’t a typical youtube video either.
It didn’t aim to garner views for the sake of it. I had no plans of plastering ads all over it, nor was I building some ‘personal brand’. It wasn’t hollow garbage spewed out just to create more space for product placement. I didn’t share my name, or what I do for a living — I scarcely talked about myself at all. I stayed completely anonymous and talked about what? — the net. That’s pretty much it. What it is doing to us, to the way we’re thinking and behaving and being — that’s what the video was about — the silent, invisible movements of culture, or its destruction — uncomfortable things. It wasn’t advertisement or entertainment. Was it art?
As I’ve said, I am a writer. The first time I wrote a poem, it was only two lines long, but to be fair I was only six. And I still recall the thrill of it, of playing with words. I have trained myself in this craft since then, and at the risk of sounding immodest let me say that I’m quite confident of my skill with the pen.
When I decided that I cared about these issues, about the internet and how it is shifting culture in ways that are going mostly unnoticed, and cared enough to have to make something, my natural response should have been to write something. After all, that’s what I do.
As a poet, however, I believe there is such a thing as poetry in form as well. What I mean by this is that a poetic quality can be lent to anything — if we create with the care and love that poetry is created with. In this case, my subject was the net. I wanted to talk about how art is invisible on the net. I wanted to ask whether art is even possible on the net. And so it made sense to me that whatever I decided to make on this topic must in itself exist on the net. The most resonant art about the net will have to be part of it — share in its nature. You have to be part of something to truly understand it. A youtube video seemed the perfect arena for this expression, the perfect form, which is why that is what I made. This is when I believe I found something new, and that something new is what I’m trying to share with you today.
Imagine this. A world of mutes. No one has any voice at all. This means there is no language, no words, no expression or articulation — nothing.
And one day, this world is given Voice. Everyone can suddenly moan, and bawl, and talk, and listen.
What changes would this bring?
The once-mutes have found a new way to express themselves, and so they will. Over time, this form of expression (speaking) will develop, and get so deeply embedded in the culture that they might even forget that there was a time when they had no voice at all.
Another change that will occur over time, however, is that speaking itself will create changes in the way they think. The language they develop will over the ages begin to affect the meanings they give to things. From words being representations of things, they will eventually move to a world where language is so inextricable from their way of thinking that any idea or notion that cannot be put into words will be considered unreal or insane. Words will begin to determine meaning itself, and any meaning beyond the realm of words will be rejected if not entirely then by the majority at least. The words metaphysical or ineffable will begin to be used to describe such nebulous things whose very existence will be questionable, and questioned.
We see in this fantasy/thought-experiment that a new mode of expression will grow from being just that to a point where it begins to exert control on the thing being expressed, i.e, ideas themselves. And culture, of course, is the sum total of humanity’s ideas. Which means this new mode of expression will shift culture irrevocably, whether the once-mutes realise this or not.
The earlier fantasy was only allegory, of course. But the commonality the world of once-mutes shares with our world is that there is a new mode of expression. In our world it is the internet.
A place where everyone has a voice. A new place of presenting one’s thoughts, free from any chains whatsoever, and these thoughts reach everyone, instantaneously. Will it have any less of an effect on our world than the Voice did in theirs?
This is where it all starts. We have a new place of presentation, yes — but are there no other repercussions?
Everyone talks about the shrinking of our attention spans, the effects of being ‘connected’ all the time etc, but these are very superficial statements that no one seems to consider seriously. The nonchalance with which the actual effects of continuous internet usage are swept aside is a testament to how unaware and uninterested humanity at large is in the consequences of its actions, even for itself.
Of course, I don’t mean this to be a bitter rant of no use to anybody. It does need to be said, however, that the only possible explanations for our nonchalance are: a)We don’t realise how massively the internet is changing the very intellectual patterns of the human race, which would mean that we’re stupid enough not to see the obvious, or b)We realise it but don’t care because it’s simply too fun a toy to be analysed before we start playing (and hurting ourselves) with it.
Anyhow, I am writing this to be constructive, as I said. It cannot be denied that the internet has remained largely unexamined by the populace, whether that was because of stupidity, sheer laziness or gullibility — it doesn’t really matter. My point is that this examination — and I don’t use this word lightly — needs to take place. And such examination of culture, of human life, of the collective psyche — that is the purview and purpose of art.
The best proof of our lack of skepticism regarding the internet is to be found in the art we’ve made since it became ubiquitous in our lives. Sure, references to it have popped up, but it hasn’t really changed anything in the content of art, or literature, or music — the only changes have been in distribution — as a place of presentation, as I earlier said. The incredulous thing is that a new form of art hasn’t been born from this new arena.
Remember the Voice analogy? The tradition of storytelling was oral. Then paper was invented, and it resulted in writing, which evolved into a craft of its own. The theatre was a physical experience. Then cameras that could capture video were invented, and movies were born — another new craft. Whenever technology has made new space available for creation, a new form of art has appeared.
Online, however, no such thing has happened. Only entertainment is being created online. Entertainment, not art. Success is determined by playing to the rules of what we supposedly want. Apparently our attention spans can’t handle anything longer than 3 minutes. We can only handle bite-sized pieces of information. Well, only toddlers require tiny nibbles of food at a time. This must mean we’ve become intellectual toddlers all of a sudden. Why is that information really broken into pieces? Because it’s sold by the piece. If you look at youtube’s most popular videos, it seems our minds find anything other than cat videos too complex to appreciate. And this line of reasoning is justified by saying that we want this. How do these websites know? — The data is telling them. It’s simple algorithms — nobody’s fault. It’s not like anyone is setting the algorithms. Why is this happening? It’s simple. Depth is difficult to create. Art cannot be a mass produced product. There simply isn’t enough of it to sell. So they decide to sell an inferior product that can be replicated endlessly. This can be seen in every single instance of art by the way.
Any new form of art emerges, for example a new genre of music, say hip-hop. It bubbles up, becomes just big enough for businesspeople to get interested, and that is when its dilution begins (because it turns into product, not passion.) Truly great rappers aren’t a dime a dozen. There will only be so many, and they can only make so much music — which means there is only so much music to sell. For the art form to remain healthy, only the good ones should survive. But businesspeople don’t care about that. They care about the fact that they’ve found a new demand. And they care about supplying that demand. If the supply for high quality product is not enough, (and there is no such thing as enough), then the quality will be lowered to enable mass production. Hence, garbage ‘artists’ get brought in the door and before long they overcrowd and alienate the actual good ones. And the genre begins to slowly disintegrate. The decay of literature into pulp fiction and then into mommy porn; the gradual weakening of hip-hop, or rock, or metal as genres of music — is the creative capacity of people declining, or is there a systemic conflict between quality and quantity, and the ones in control of the system responsible for the fall of every tower?
The interesting thing, however, is that on the internet this new form of art didn’t even take birth. From the get-go the focus has been on increasingly banal ‘content’. (As a writer, I can’t help but interpret the now ubiquitous usage of the word ‘content’ as a clue and proof in itself. ‘Content’ as in we-don’t-care-what-it-is-it-is-only-there-to-justify-the-ads-anyway. Novels or music or any artistic creation was never called ‘content’. Now we are content to do so. Everything online is content. Why?)
The problem lies deep, and began far before the net ever became part of our lives — it is just that now it has taken over the means of creation — the online product is intellectual, and the algorithms it is following are based on business and mass production, not quality and collective elevation. Again, aside from bringing this to public attention I want to recommend things we can do to remedy the situation. There is only one thing we can do. Make Internet Art.
The only solution is art.
Not of an old kind. Not highbrow and exclusive (again, if we only looked at the words…exclusive as in the opposite of inclusive — that which excludes — how in the world is that used as a positive adjective?). Not insincere garbage made by pretenders. Not more crowdsourced noise.
What kind of art then? What would Internet Art look like?
In addition to using the net as a place of presentation, it would explore the internet as a subject — as something to be laid bare and examined.
Further, the most powerful works about the net will be those that share in its nature, i.e those that exist on it, that are made of it, meaning not novels or paintings in the old manner, but ‘works’ that include the net in themselves.
This is why ‘old’ art isn’t enough, or isn’t optimal, to say the least. Dead things have no place speaking of living things. Hierarchies, systems, movements, self-congratulation, self-absorption — none of these things have a place in this new paradigm. There is simply no time for all that, and old ‘high’ art is weighed down by these chains in almost every way.
Internet Art will involve a certain democratisation — for both the creator and the viewer. (This, rather poetically, is the primary strength of the internet in the first place. The speed of information reaching everyone, the absolute equality of its availability, and the strength of larger numbers than ever possible before in the creation and appraisal of its works — if this happened to art, the results would be something to behold.)
These works could be larger in scope as well as larger in resonance — they would mean much more to a much larger number of people than ever before.
Another element that will make these works unique is the idea of accretion over time. Not only does a work of Internet Art have this place on the net where it exists for all time — that existence itself is visible, and so, an object for viewing.
For example, my stuff at this point. If you go to the links, you can see what I made, but you can also see that it laid ignored. You can watch it not being understood, and that was never possible before. When it does become understood, that will be visible as well — it’s entire history will be there to see in the comments section. The responses to a work of art being visible themselves — this was never possible before, but online not only will they be there to see, they will also collect over time.
And so the history of it languishing — no one will be able to forget that, and that is a first. Only Internet Art will provide that spectacle for examination — the time for which a work didn’t resonate. Does that have value? Art is supposed to be a mirror to humanity. Does this not act as a much better mirror— when you can see each successive ripple caused in addition to the actual work?
It’s an incredible thing. It is almost a freezing of time — and for artists still alive. This happens in real-time to artists that are alive and working right now. You can see the process of them becoming — which was not possible before.
This in itself will have manifold repercussions, the least of which will be that being someone like that will seem possible for a lot more people than before. More artists will be born, more potential will be tapped in humanity as a whole. Of course this is not all positive. The accessibility opens up the way for charlatans to enter. This is where the noise comes in again. However, the fact of the matter is that the net is here to stay. There is no point in real artists running away from it — that way only charlatans rule the most important space of all in our time. (This is what seems to be happening right now.)
So we must make Internet Art, and we must cut through the noise.
How to cut through it? Truth.
There is no other way — there never has been. This essential morality is what makes art art and not entertainment or advertisement or propaganda. And this will be the most important element of Internet Art as well.
This I say to all artists: instead of moaning about the noise and shying away from the truth of our time, we must embrace this change, use it. As material, as place of creation and presentation, as a new art itself.
Walking on my path I met a man named Friedrich, and he said that a creator must first destroy — that which is already dead. I learnt much from him, and in his glory and the glory of many like him today I present this to the world. A New Tablet. May it do much good.
After that first video(?), my second work of this nature was The White Noise Project. It is a deeper look at the net, and has six videos of roughly three minutes each. Each video has one one obvious topic it confronts, but there are many other layers of meaning to them. The first one is called Addict and focuses on Porn Addiction. The second video is called Hater and speaks on the all-too-popular (and entirely internet-based) phenomenon of haters. The third video is called 0–0. It is about the numbing effects of excessive social media exposure. The fourth part, Illuminate, comments on the Illuminati conspiracy theories that are omnipresent on the web. The fifth part is called Object and concerns Influencer Marketing and the idea that teenagers are actually considering these to be stable career choices. The sixth part is called PC and speaks on Political Correctness, an inverted form of controlling public opinion.
You can try these if interested. Wear headphones and keep the volume low initially.
