评论具体段落，点击段落旁边的泡状图标

在整个九十年代，数字计算和网络技术在很大程度上只应用于办公室工作，其文化影响仅限于个别专有领域的爱好者。如果说这十年的新媒体艺术形成了一种非常重要的艺术亚文化，它基本上还是孤立和自我参照的，部分原因是由于艺术家们对黑客文化的迷恋，由于长期以来格林伯格主义者 (Greenbergian) 的艺术审察, 还由于艺术机构将其边缘化. 在电脑离开有限的用户群体, 成为有广泛社会功能之前,瓦克﹒寇司克 (Vuk Cosic)，朱迪(Jodi)，阿列克谢﹒舒利金 (Alexei Shulgin)，和希思﹒班廷 (Heath Bunting) 等艺术家重演了二十世纪初的前卫战略，同时将图形与八十年代黑客文化的程序演示平等化[1].

今天，相比之下，数字技术，是日常生活中的明确无误的存在，并逐渐与地来自主流社会的需要和公约不可分割的. 网络文化是一个广泛的社会文化的转变，就像后现代性，并不限于科技发展或“新媒体” [2]. 正因为数字和网络技术的成熟与当代文化是不可分割的, 我们必须在更宽广的背景下理解其, 事实上, 这甚至比电视产生于后现代的现象更令人瞩目. 今天, 可以说, 所有的艺术都是网络艺术的一种延伸.

这种调查不能仅限于网络，但也不能仅限于“艺术”. 随着把文化产业的产品带入艺术,后现代主义提出所谓高和低的问题（认为沃霍尔或晚些的巴巴拉.克鲁格，辛迪.舍曼，杰夫.昆斯, 以及理查德普林斯, 为典型的早期现代主义的艺术家), 但网络文化将这种区别完全消除。网络文化中的艺术将观众的欲望显现化解为艺术合作, 并模糊了艺术与媒体和公众的界限 [3]. 正象艾伦.刘所建议, 随着知识的广泛传播, 对时尚的态度和机敏变得比历史的深入了解更为重要，文化产物的 ‘酷’ 或‘不酷’比其地位的高和低更重要（实际上，现在普遍认为，除非该对象首先“很酷”，将它塑造成“高级”是一种媚俗之举）[4]. 不过，作为网络艺术书籍而非网络文化产品中的一部分，我们的重点仍是艺术。但我们也将漫游得远一些，对文化产品,高，低等标准，在线或非在线作更广泛的调查. 因此，本文探讨的不仅是关于Turbulence.org 的内容，也包括电视与 YouTube 或者画廊.

具体说，这一章讲述网络文化产品如何利用现实，从电视现实节目, 博客, MySpace, YouTube 直到艺术画廊. 现实艺术为高度的即时感打造了正式结构和更深的含义. 但是这种直接是调解和分散的，而非真实与存在的. 谈论一件作品是“现实”媒体并不意味着它不是编攥的. 相反， “现实”媒体中的真实之所以迷人，是由于有现实电视节目、业余生成的内容，或以具体策略创作的专业 “艺术”：自我曝光, 信息视觉化, 文献资料员角色, 混合以及 参与艺术. 我们也不应该期望所有这些是用来区别高, 低艺术的途径；理所当然，以前的艺术也将影响原先的非艺术. 在当即现实的背景下，本文将初步调查研究5个艺术方向. 在看代这种艺术的实践时，重要的是了解它们在更广泛的网络文化中的意义，以及它们如何发挥作用.

网络文化并非对后现代的摒弃，实际上它是一种在其基础上的转移与变换. 这包括二十世纪九十年代早期的策展艺术实践发展而来的集合艺术, 或九十年代末出现的“关系美学”基础上的参与艺术. 不过，这里确实也存在一个断裂，这不但是与后现代, 也是与现代主义的断裂，即新现实诗意不同于存在的现实主义模式，不论是十八世纪伴随中产阶级崛起的, 并于十九世纪走向成熟的经典现实主义，还是后现代主义的创伤性, 碎裂与讥讽引用的现实主义.

就主题而言，与宫廷或理想化主题相反，经典现实主义歌颂日常生活. 这的现实态度挑战贵族主义审美的主导地位，打破旧秩序中高尚主题及老生常谈的审美[5]. 直到十八世纪，文化生产者认为发明创造应符合社会习俗与礼仪，他们依赖的是主观的内在能力，如洞察力与独到见解. 在这方面，像现实主义小说家亨利﹒菲尔丁（Henry Fielding), 塞缪尔﹒理查森(Samuel Richardson)，或者流派画家让-巴蒂斯-西美翁-夏尔丹（Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin）, 或一个世纪以后的古斯塔夫﹒库尔贝（Gustav Courbet）其作品平行于笛卡尔 (Rene Descartes)，对于他们来说真理是个人观察的问题，理解是通过个人感官对世界进行认知的产品. 随着将日常事物转化艺术，现实主义体现了人类想象力的改革潜力.

与早先的文学艺术相比，现实主义作品显得忽略形式，避免严格的传统结构[6]. 这种对于预先定义结构的忽略强调了生活经验的首要地位——它是高于传统的. 然而，现实主义仍依靠社会习俗来加强这一观念，人为普遍真理超越日常生活. 以小说情节为例： 如果小说家讲述日常生活中的片断，这种片断的弧形叙事形式总要显示连贯性以及揭示日常生活的更深的意义. 再以小说中个人性质为例：通过描绘内心世界斗争，小说描述了生活的全部，不只是它的公众外表，从而强调了个体的重要性，并给予个人行为和道德以新的价值. 因此，当卢卡契（Georg Lukacs）赞誉现实主义作品全面地表现社会经济生活时，他阐述的现实主义背后的基本原则（如马克思主义的形式)[7]. 现实主义的出现是伴随着资产阶级的崛起；以此类推，如果现在有迹象表明一个新的阶级结构正在形成——至少在发达国家中，劳动力的主要形式正从工厂工作转移到非物质生产与知识工作，我们不应该为这种新的认知世界的途径感到惊讶[8].

Richard Estes, “Oenophilia”, 1983

Peter Halley, “牢房里的烟囱管道”, 1985

后现代主义也是一个关键的过渡性时期，探索在大众传播媒介压力下的真实的碎片（包括符号和主题)[9]. 超现实艺术家，如理查德|埃斯蒂斯（Richard Estes）发展了一种精神分裂意识的表象与符号，一种幻觉现实，其能力超过了无论是照片或眼睛，一个条件，哈尔﹒福斯特（Hal Foster）形容这种状态是 “被表象所淹没. ” 挪用艺术家如理查德﹒普林斯（Richard Prince), 雪莉﹒莱文（Sherri Levine)，以及（早期）辛迪﹒舍曼（Cindy Sherman）在质疑作品著作权和财产拥有权时评价道，现实是由媒体表现所构建的. 像艾伦﹒麦科考伦（Allan McCollum）和彼得﹒哈雷（Peter Halley）等模拟艺术家延深了挪用艺术观念，他们创造所谓中性作品，自称既无情感、原创性也无作品著作权，而是迎合市场和媒体重复性质. 在后现代主义的后期，赤贫艺术家如麦克﹒凯利 （Mike Kelly)，保罗﹒麦卡锡 (Paul McCarthy)，琪琪﹒史密斯 (Kiki Smith)，安德烈﹒塞拉诺 (Andreas Serran) 和（后期）辛迪﹒舍曼（Cindy Sherman）捕捉代表创伤的现实符号，通过模拟人体排泄物, 受伤的躯体，或者损坏的童年物品来探索侵犯与亵渎。福斯特（Foster）指出，他们是在一种情感已殆尽的艺术氛围中创作. 对后现代主义艺术家而言，创伤语汇同时是一种批判，是对个人身份的政治问题的呼吁[10]. 总之，那么，后现代艺术是对于碎裂标志和主题的阐述[11].

直接现实

儒勒﹒米什莱（Jules Michelet）的观察表明，每一个时代都梦想下一个时代的来临. 后现代主义的梦想是网络文化[12]. 为了声明叙事的死亡，后现代主义制造了围绕的跨国资本主义网络的、新的叙事[13]. 然而，在后现代文化中，网络的作用还是新生的——显而易见，当互联网尚未私有化或被显著地资本殖民，当移动技术还是新事物——网络文化的复杂性——例如，开放资源的增长，知识工作者的崛起，信息商品盗版盛行，自下而上生产的重要性，以及报纸等传统信息产业的迅速衰落——都是未曾预见的. 因此，正如后现代出现于现代主义过程完结之际，网络文化只能产生于后现代历程结束之时. 今天，标志的破碎，主题的结束，任何媒体真实感的解体分裂都已是既成事实. 如果后现代主义欢庆主题破灭，网络文化则认为这种破灭是理所当然的.

今天从网络上涌现的自我，与其说是作为一个整体个人，不如说是与其他人联系的综合实体，是通过网络链接的已知和未知事物的混合体[14]. 作为其基础，生活经验这个当代主题依赖于直接现实，调解是特定的，生活成为一种表演形式，并一直在文化接触中交换自我肯定的反馈[15].

如果说现代主义将自身在历史叙事上合法化，后现代利用理论来批判这种合法性，并反映其自身地位，网络文化则消除任何历史或理论意义[16]. 取而代之的只是留下直接现实，避开任何合法性或批评，仅此而已。批判工业社会的同质性常见于现代艺术中，后现代主义如今已吸收进经营理念，工厂工人被具有灵活就业 “自由”（这也意味着没有任何利益或工作保障）和作为创意阶层成员、具有自我表现特权的知识工人所取代[17].

正如管理理论吸收了批评，市场比以往任何时候都更多地给艺术传递信息. 当可以挣得实际资本时，理论性象征资本有何用途？自90年代中期，考虑有关酷或回归美，艺术家们越来越多地进入了一个新的关键框架[18]. 那么，网络文化时代的艺术，其运营并非是乌托邦式或其对立面，而是更关注其本身在这场网络大游戏中的位置[19].

自我曝光

将直接真实对网络文化的重要性表现得最清楚是电视真人秀节目和网络摄像. 在90年代和21世纪初，如MTV “真正的世界”，承诺节目是对日常生活的一瞥. 但是，通过一个有长久习俗的媒介的演播，它迅速下降为剧本制作产品，像 “大哥哥”, “幸存者” 或《恐惧因素”, “美国偶像”, 只不过是改写的游戏节目，其中包括现金奖励，或对选手进行媒体明星的许诺[20]. 现实电视节目已明确地纳入电视文化，然而，在喜剧 “办公室”——被框架为一个现实电视节目——其中人物经常直接对电视镜头谈话，并维持该节目的网站博客. 2005年，在一个艺术与现实电视的交叉节目中，马里萨|奥尔森 Marisa Olson 为 “美国偶像” 试镜，并有关于该过程的博客 http://americanidolauditiontraining.blogs.com.

最纯粹的现实文化不是在电视上，而是网上摄像. 在Jennicam中，珍妮（Jennifer Ringle）为每日300至400万访客提供了一个未经审查、对她个人生活的连续窥视。像其他网络摄像，或与此类似的, 最近的实时传送网站，Jennicam 表现现实文化的重要方面：没有叙事弧线或任何更深一层的意义，而是瞥视一个希望暴露自己的个体的私人生活. 这一瞥是不是单向的; Ringley 经常与观众通电子邮件和聊天，该过程也可见于 Jennicam.

第二个传送24小时的网络摄像是 Anacam，由艺术家安娜﹒伍格（Ana Voog）创作. 自1997年播放以来，像 Jennicam 一样，Anacam 是对伍格生活的一瞥. 不同之处是她的项目包括表演艺术，并指示在无形的观众作为鉴赏家与偷窥狂的不断监查下，它终将崩溃在表演与生活之间. 伍格在镜头前进行性活动，并将于1998年施行隆胸术[21].

除了网络摄像，即时现实盛产整个互联网文化. 博客, 社交网站和 Twitter 都提供了自我曝光的平台. eBaum世界或 YouTube 等网站在很大程度上具有相同功能，大多数录像据称是真实的，有的滑稽, 愚蠢, 或危险的事情，有的直接与观众对白，所有这些做法的意图都是吸引在线观众. 电脑病毒营销和媒体制作商（如“寂寞女孩15”或“小洛卡”）也利用直接与观众对白以及业余网络影像产品来达成这种吸引力[22]. 最近，甚至色情文学都失去了虚构感, 叙事弧线与利润——颇具有讽刺意味的是，在20世纪90年代 “dot.com” 时代，色情业曾被认为是一种稳定盈利的互联网企业. 相反，这类产品是由越来越多的业余爱好者制作并上传到XTube或4chan等网站.

自我曝光比较著名的例子之一是最近的艺术作品 “无题”（2003，其中安德烈|弗雷泽（Andrea Fraser）自拍她与支付了$ 20,000的赞助者的性行为，当这个行为的录像在一家画廊播放时，它的版本即被出售掉。该作品含蓄地提出疑问：赞助人付款是为了与弗雷泽发生性行为，还是为了在画廊曝光？与此形成对比的是特蕾西﹒安妮姆（Tracey Enim）的 “我的床”（1998) 它揭示了后现代主义和即时现实的差异. 安妮姆对性的探索都记录在她的床上，研究错乱行为，以便与她的赤贫艺术作品对位。安妮姆的床是以所谓的神经衰弱为框架，指向一个混乱的叙述，艺术家时而吹嘘、时而为性混杂搅扰不安. 床是作品的关键，是安妮姆的表演的指数，也是用来验证作品真实性和存在的设备. 相比之下，弗雷泽的作品更多的是事实，是经策划的自我曝光再到媒体复制.

艺术家, 理论家约旦﹒克兰德尔（Jordan Crandall）写道：“这种文化在许多方面似乎更多是表象而非具像：我们不由得要引起别人的注意，为不可见的眼睛而行动，并发展新的联结形式——仿佛这就是我们继续生存的条件，是我们价值的标志. ”克兰德尔还指出这种彰显的另一方面， 即以跟踪与监视科技的面目出现[23]. 作为福柯（Foucault）的全景监狱的现代对应物，在“监视艺术”名义下，许多艺术家如克兰德尔自己、迪勒（Diller）和斯高分多（Scofidio)，自主应用研究所，以及逆科技局在这方面探索并提出评价对象[24].

监测艺术往往扮演对一个神秘, 未知力量进行观察的角色. 艺术家珍妮|卡迪夫（Janet Cardiff）的“在劳拉眼中”（2005年）则是个例外. 卡迪夫为这件作品建构了劳拉这一角色，一名因为监视绰号“兔子”的小偷而痴狂的警卫. 在温哥华美术馆的展览中，该作品没有交待这是一个艺术作品，甚至允许参观者来控制画廊的安全摄像机（该画廊的赞助者或地理位置未在网站上标明. 如果该作品最终显得过于做作而难以维持观众的怀疑，它也还是在即时现实中考察了监视与曝光两方面（劳拉谈论她的生活和行为的愿望，同时谐谑真实的定义[25].

Burak Arikan, “我的钱包”, 2007

如同卡迪夫的”劳拉的眼睛”，布拉克﹒阿勒坎（Burak Arikan）的“我的钱包”（2007年的Turbulence委托项目）混合监督和自我曝光，披露他的三年的财务记录，并应用软件来预测他未来的消费习惯. “我的钱包” 质疑金融业坚称的透明度和财政管理问题，尽管该行业坚持它对我们的不透明政策. 此外，通过利用软件预测自己未来的支出能力，阿勒坎不仅模仿这类公司的行为，他还证明我们的选择——在此例中是金融选择——是构建于信息网络之内[26].

信息视觉化

“我的钱包” 带我们进入了信息视觉化（infoviz). 正如20世纪90年代的功能软件取代80年代的编程演示，基于高质量数据的动态视觉化程序的作品会取代20世纪90年代的自我参照的新媒体艺术.

从某种意义上说，信息视觉化 (infoviz) 是对所有即时现实注册者最直接的叠加计算. 运作即时现实的艺术家将数字技术与网络看作给定的条件，只作为一套进行创作的技术工具，而不必受深入探讨. 相反，信息视觉化普遍要求艺术家涉足编程，转入程序环境，例如编程语言 Processing 或复杂的专业环境，如GIS地理信息系统绘图软件[27].

信息视觉化近来已成为人们关注的焦点——最引人注目的是2009年纽约现代艺术博物馆（MoMA）的《设计与弹性思维》展览。乔纳森﹒哈里斯（Jonathan Harris）和2008年赛普﹒坎瓦尔（Sep Kamvar）的《我想让你要我》（2008年）是这类作品的例子. 它建立在他人自我曝光的行为上. 再者，被约会网站的成员的自我描述与对同伴欲望的追踪所吸引，哈里斯与坎瓦尔将他们的短语呈现在高分辨率的触摸屏上[28]. 金（Yunchul Kim）的“(无效）交通”（2004）是另一个信息视觉化的例子，它利用ASCII字符来表示的数据流量，从而唤起了一个“黑白数字有机体” 或 “太阳表面”的意念[29].

本鲁宾和马克汉森 “活字”，2007

但信息视觉化的涌现是源于它对数据的美化和对技术的信心. 如果说信息视觉化是现代主义的最显注的继承者，它的起源不是破坏性的20世纪20年代的前卫现代主义，而是20世纪50年代和60年代的现代主义. 为了在官僚科技化的状态下和解思维与感觉，战后现代主义是福特主义公司 (Fordist corporation) 的视觉代表。反过来，信息视觉化是对在过去10年中流行的“有效市场假说”的回应, 那是一种容易从网络上获得的所谓信息财富，它允许市场有效, 合理地运作. 举个例子，本﹒鲁宾（Ben Rubin）和马克﹒汉森（Mark Hansen）的“活字”（2007年)，采用560台真空荧光显示屏，安装在纽约时报大厦大堂中. 每个屏幕显示的资料是从当天的故事, 文件档案，以及参观者在纽约时报网站的活动发掘而来[30]. 远远超过任何晚期现代绘画，这件作品为该公司的控制和有效提取信息能力大做广告，使之变成了怀疑对象. 随着声称能够创建新的用户界面，信息视觉化往往是设计公司或程序员的职权范围，并可以得到企业赞助资金. 很难说它是最新型艺术作品的开始.

Josh On, “他们统治” (2004)

战略媒体活动家已经江信息视觉化用于进行政治进程。受到20世纪90年代后期马克﹒隆巴迪（Mark Lombardi）的关于网络丑闻的优雅铅笔素描的激发，他们开始揭露隐藏的权力网络，在“世界政府”, 乔希的“他们统治” 等“反地理”作品中进行评论. 这些作品旨在开解繁杂交织的网络权力，而耐人寻味的是，由于将网络权力削减，这些作品会受到阻碍[31]. 尽管作品仍很迷人，其媒介和意向还不大清楚.

Scott Hug, “消费者情绪”, 2009

Scott Hug, “美国生活评估” 2009

在 “个人理财, 国家状况, 消费者情绪, 美国对同性恋关系道德的认知与死刑”（2009 年）中，斯科特﹒哈格（Scott Hug）评价当今无处不在的信息视觉化和网络文化的以及对数据的过渡迷恋. 该作是他画在木料或由旧的 “国家地理” 中的图像叠加成的一系列饼状图表，颜色则是时装预测色彩表。哈格将盖洛普民调数据抽出，并填充到平淡无奇的饼状图表中，他模拟了信息视觉化如何使数据焕发令人狂喜审美魅力，同时也批判网络文化对数据的过渡迷恋.

文献资料

如果信息视觉化是将高质量数据美学化，来表现对现实的洞察，文献资料艺术则将现实表现为叙事. 对所有当即现实的注册者而言，只有文献纪录是保持叙述性和连贯性的标识. 但是，为了保持这种一致性，文献资料艺术将现实作为脚本和操作对象，并不只是给定的内容. 在这方面，今天，文献资料又是小说的继承者. 例如，大卫﹒福斯特﹒华莱士（David Foster Wallace）的写作中，小说与非小说的区别是很难加以分辨的，特别是因为两者都有丰富的脚注注明，其重要性与主要叙事相同. 但是纪录片的崛起最容易在电影中看到，在过去十年中，它深受批评家、观众与电影制片人的欢迎. 电影 “灰熊人”, “特殊尺寸的我”, “企鹅的游行”, “难以忽视的真相》以及 “华氏911″ 等，形成一种影院氛围。在这一领域，作者越来越将这些素材视作画布，对现实进行高度演绎. 荷索（Werner Herzog）是著名纪录片制作人之一，以之作为制作 “诗意的, 令人迷醉的真实”的基础[32]. 随着互联网的普及，纪录片很容易被共享，它们的脚本正迅速曝光. 例如威廉﹒吉尔萨（William Jirsa）对纪录片的审查中，他出现在荷索的 “世界末日”（2009年, 或众多反响的摩根﹒斯普尔洛克（Morgan Spurlock）的“超码的我”（2004年）和迈克尔﹒摩尔（Michael Moore）的“科伦拜恩的保龄球”（2002年）中.

网络文化中艺术的主要形式之一是大尺度摄影，特别是托马斯﹒德曼（Thomas Demand，安德烈﹒亚斯古尔斯基（Andreas Gursky)，坎迪答﹒荷弗尔（Candida Höfer，阿克塞尔﹒于特（Axel Hutte)，托马斯﹒拉夫（Thomas Ruff)，以及托马斯﹒施特鲁特（Thomas Struth)，他们都于70年代中期跟随本德（Bernd）和希拉﹒倍彻（Hilla Becher）在杜塞尔多夫学习. 这些摄影作品，连同其他摄影师如杰夫﹒沃尔（Jeff Wall）或杉本博的作品，不仅在尺度上，其对现实的描述性也可与19世纪沙龙绘画角逐. 创作如此生动、清晰的作品需要劳力以及人为处理，以达到赫尔佐格所谓的“狂喜的真相”，因而许多摄影师自由地创造他们想要的世界意象，甚至不惜进行后期处理. 德曼作为最年轻的杜塞尔多夫学校成员，通常用纸来构建作品，看起来几乎与他想要表现的现实难以区分，因此质疑文献资料的创建性质.

但是，这种为画廊和茶几艺术书籍而创作的摄影是过渡的，它那自认为是绘画——视觉艺术顶峰形式——的继任者地位是值得疑问的. 随着传统结构的解体，特别是繁荣在洛杉矶的自发织组织机构, 那里, “地用途释义中心” 调查被忽略的用于工业, 军事以旅游的自然景观，“数学研究所” 探讨计算数字，Velaslavasay 公司显示全景成像，……. AUDC（最初在洛杉矶，现在在纽约）通过似乎非现实却是真实的情况来探索现代文化，他们既利用理论, 也通过建筑图纸, 模型和图片进行研究[33].

侏罗纪技术博物, “The Sonnabend Model of Obliscence”

如果一些自发组织机构（如土地用途释义中心、AUDC）从事非传统的研究，另一些创造虚构（或部分虚构）的现实，这往往是尽其能事地打破艺术与现实, 艺术家, 策展人, 真实和构造之间的界限. 这些作品借鉴了文献资料和后观念艺术实践. 80年代后期开始,伊利亚﹒科巴科夫 (Ilya Khabakov) 和马克﹒狄安(Mark Dion)等艺术家，离开了简单的挪用模式和后现代艺术家所实践的简单学院式批评, 而走向更复杂的关系. 一般而言，这一代的出发点是16和17世纪好奇心，为博物馆制作的模型，其中自然和人为的奇迹并列在异质系统 (idiosyncratic system)中，因其感官刺激能力而富有价值. 如果好奇平行于对美的迷恋，它就是一个精致的时代错误，它取代美，作为到商品化时期的过渡. 返回自治艺术与博物馆，这些作品让人想起现代艺术以前的时代, 那时, 即使预计艺术会在网络文化时代消溶, 艺术还是与生活结合，没有自成一体.…… [34]

The Chadwicks, “The Genretron” (2008)

又如，在查德威克(Chadwicks)合作，作为“著名鉴赏家, 船长,海军工程师和业余史学家”的（假）家族后代, 追溯其荷兰扩张时代的起源. 他们恶意地努力说服公众以博取各种索赔，制造了破坏性, 甚至完全疯狂的历史重构，这引起了对即刻现实的质疑. 为了造成混淆，在最近的出版物 “查维克家庭论文：公开掠影” 中，”内阁杂志” 编辑斯纳|纳杰菲（Sina Najafi）以讨论方式发起对这件作品的假攻击.

战略性媒体也从事这类虚拟，例如，“是，伙计”（其中一人，伊戈﹒瓦莫斯Igor Vamos，也参与“地用途释义”工作）制作了一些假网站，并假装为政府机构和企业的代言人，进行狠毒的批评. 这其中包括世界贸易组织的模仿网站（http://www.gatt.org/)，假埃克森产品网站，它将十亿气候变化的受害者的尸体转化为石油（http://www.vivoleum.com，被ISP关闭）以及假的印刷版 “纽约时报”（与相应的网站http://www.nytimes-se.com/)，发行《伊拉克战争结束》等标题文章. 除了以颠覆和幽默的方式传递他们的信息，这些作品使观众质疑，媒体可以如何轻而易举地为权力阶层编造事物的意义.

艺术家作为集合体

即刻现实使我们信息超载. 在网络文化中，信息处理的主要战略不是释义，而是聚合. 因此，如报纸和电视网络传媒已将自己的文化主宰地位割让给基于软件的聚合体，如“谷歌新闻”（它吹说：“新闻的选择和在页面的位置是由计算机程序自动确定的”), “亚马逊”（Amazon), Netflix公司和 iTunes. 该软件引擎能根据使用者兴趣自动选择，并提供前所未有的大量信息[35]. 聚合体也有自助端. Amazon, Kaboodle, YouTube, Last.fm, Imagefap, Rhizome和, Flickr等网站鼓励用户编写自己的选择表；社交网站的个人资料页则都是由社会关系, 文化利益和专业背景构成. 其结果是最常见的“网络大众”宣言. 聚合体成为一种描述网络中的自我的手段，这比其他任何个人鉴定或自白更有效. 博客也体现了网络聚合体造成的作者权的变化. 为了利用博客自我曝光，作者也经常引用来自其它博客, 网站, 技术产品, 文章与书籍评论的内容. 像“美Delicious” 社会书签, FFFFOUND！或Tumblr等网站是更胜一筹，后者为简短博客文章而设计，包括照片, 格言, 链接, 音频或视频的引用内容. 唯一的评论往往是该作品的策划情况. 艺术家——尤其是“职业网民”——也在这个名单之列. 以格思里的“MySpace介绍播放表”为例，这是一组策划的视频短片集，由个人向MySpace观众进行自我介绍（因而是一个自我曝光的集和).

在网络文化中，艺术家作为集结者的角色逐渐取代了先前的制作者角色. 在这里所讲的网络艺术里,艺术家都将以前的艺术策划经验与集体自助的方式实施于网络文化. 这种艺术实践通常更积极的方式讲述消费主义,而不像后现代主义时期艺术家倾向于将消费作为一个没有文化, 缺乏反思、轻信媒体的个人活动. 如理查德﹒普林斯 (Richard Prince) 和杰夫﹒昆斯 (Jeff Koons) 等后现代艺术家将消费描绘成令蠢人欣喜若狂的活动. 这种作品总是有点玩世不恭，因为它本身就是在经营奢侈品（众所周知，理查德﹒普林斯的一件作品是第一张销售超过100万美元的照片)，是艺术传统的非异化[36]. 但在80年代末和90年代初，当艺术市场达到新的高度, 使之成为最疯狂的消费形式时, 艺术成为了社会学批判的主体. 同时，艺术家开始从事策展实践，例如，1988年，达明﹒赫斯特 (Damien Hirst) 为他的学生策划了 “冻结” 展览.

今天，策展作品被视作艺术实践的一部分，艺术家将消费理解为一种反复现象，认为市场不单是谋求资金的地方，更多是为人之间的互动作用，是生产制造的艺术版本，以及在诸如eBay和Etsy网站上的贸易. 在此模式中，生产者和消费者双方现在都有媒介和能力来积极地塑造自己的生活[37].

“高漠试验场” Noah Purifoy Site, photo by Guy Lombardo

以《高漠试验场》为例，有些艺术家安德烈|齐特尔（Andrea Zittel）和丽莎|安妮|奥尔巴赫（Lisa Anne Auerbach）与画商肖恩|雷根（Shaun Regen)，约翰|康纳利（John Connelly）和收藏家安迪（Andy Stillpass）在莫哈韦沙漠创造了一个周末之久的活动，那里有实验艺术场所, 烧烤场地交换集会和地方活动[38]. 或以司各特|哈格的另一件作品为例，”K48″（以及相关博客，http://thek48bullet.blogspot.com)，其中他不仅展示自己的, 更有其他艺术家的作品——包括音乐CD ——他的兴趣所在。如果K48是肯定自我表达，这种表达是由他的艺术产生的集合内容组成. 另一个例子是“随机规则：选自YouTube一个艺术家频道”（2009 年)，其中玛瑞娜（Marina Fokidis）聚集了一群艺术家——安德烈（Andreas Angelidakis)，Andreas Angelidakis, Aids 3D, assume vivid astro focus, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Eric Beltran, Keren Cytter, Jeremy Deller, Cerith Wyn Evans, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Dora Garcia, Rodney Graham, Annika Larsson, Matthieu Laurette, Ingo Niermann, Miltos Manetas, Ahmet Ögüt, Angelo Plessas, Lisi Raskin, 以及 Linda Wallace——他们将喜欢的YouTube作品搁在一起放映[39].

其它艺术家还有“职业网人，”像马里萨﹒奥尔森（Marisa Olson）称呼的那样他们，在一种似乎是美感停顿的状态下，寻找平庸、设计糟糕的网络元素. 2006年， “冲浪俱乐部” nastynets.com 出现为这次运动的震中（它本身与www.worstoftheweb.com或4chan.org网站并没有太大区别)，最近www.spiritsurfers.net加入了运动。

Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, “阿氏的藏匿”, 2007

但是，自我曝光, 视觉信息化以及艺术家作为文献记录者的初衷可能有所不同. 艺术家作为聚结者的角色也可以是玩世不恭，或市场狂欢. 以尼克|雷尔夫（Nick Relph）和奥利弗﹒佩恩的 “阿氏的藏匿”（2007）为例，艺术家们展示了一个短暂的收藏，这件装置是画廊主阿士﹒朗格（Ash Lange）的藏品，它模仿迈阿密海滩巴塞尔艺术展中的普拉达商店。关键性的距离与缺失都不难发现.

再合成

我们说艺术家作为聚合者就像艺术家作为混音师. 在当代网络化大众的社会背景下，消费者和生产者的传统关系已被消除. 业余艺术家的作品——往往是由传统媒体的内容混合而来——在互联网, 特别是在视频共享网站YouTube, Flickr等照片共享网站, deviantArt以及博客上广泛流传. 这些工作正被其他业余艺术家贪婪地消耗，接着可能产生第二阶混合作品.

如果混合是由于挪用艺术方式而蓬勃发展，不通于后现代主义的是，它把挪用视作给第条件。在后现代的挪用艺术中，再利用具有讽刺意味以及高度的俄狄浦自我意识. 由于雪莉|莱文 （Sherri Levine）再挪用由沃克|埃文斯（Walker Evans）和理查德|普林斯的博物馆广告照片时，人们想要评判原作者的地位. 但挪用的艺术家——最著名的算是杜尚——仍然在一个既定的艺术传统下工作，即利用挪用与加框手法。在他们的方法中，独创性仍是至关重要的，不论作为评判机构还是作为辅助——说到底，要是杜尚没在小便器上签名，这件作品就根本不存在. 因此，莱文的作品质疑启蒙时期提出的作者和原创性观念；其实这些观念早已过时[40]. 从互联网上将图像粘贴到 PowerPoint, 在博客引用上Tumblr最喜欢的图像是司空见惯的事，挪用已成为一种休闲. 那么，这类后现代主义作品是过渡性的. 以作者和原创性作为出发点已不再富于创造性[41].

尼古拉﹒包锐欧德（Nicolas Bourriaud）认为，这种缺乏独创性正使混合艺术（他用的词是“后期制作”）适合于网络文化。包锐欧德解释说, 与后现代艺术家相反，对于皮埃尔﹒于热 (Pierre Huyghe) 和道格拉﹒斯戈登 (Douglas Gordon) 等艺术家而言,问题不再是独创性，而是本能地把艺术作品视为在网络内构成的对象，它们的意义是由与其它事物的相对位置以及理用方式而定的[42]. 像DJ或程序员一样，这些艺术家更多的是重组而非创建[43]. 重要的是，由于网络的普及, 全球化和历史信息的传播无所不在, 混和艺术正是在这个时刻进行的. 包锐欧德总结道:“艺术问题不再是 ‘怎样才能新颖’而是‘我们怎样处理我们已有的材料. ’换句话说，‘我们如何能从构成日常生活的毫无秩序的大量对象, 名称和参照物中，创造出独特性与意义[44].

马克﹒莱科伊（Mark Leckey）运作画廊和博物馆，也有MySpace网页，是一个经验丰富的混和艺术家，1999年，他利用发现的20世纪70, 80年代英国舞蹈录像制作了开创性的视频作品，题为 “菲奥鲁奇让我变坚硬（Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore)”，在其中他阐发了舞蹈文化的仪式性涵义. 最近他的演讲包括网络文化理论（如 “Wired杂志” 主编克里斯|安德森 Chris Anderson 的 “长尾”）的讲座，跨越了一连串的参照——从纯艺术到流行文化. 正如他为泰特奖提名所拍摄的陈述中宣称的，莱科伊的目标是，描述概括的网络文化诗学：“改造我的世界，使之更是它自己. “在《伊文制造（Made in ‘Eaven)”（2004年）中，莱科伊再现杰夫|昆斯的 “兔子” 雕塑，当制高点推进到雕塑时，莱科伊自己的工作室被显现在电脑三维图像中.

混合艺术不仅限于音频或视频形式. 在“明星日记”（2004-2007）中，爱德华|纳瓦斯（Eduardo Navas）将 “安迪|沃霍尔日记” 放在博客上作为样品，以此反映网络上名人与隐私的角色. 又如《最后的晚餐》中，沃霍尔异常出色地模仿他的模仿者……[45]. 纳瓦斯还加入了安迪可能浏览的, 有关日记内容的网络链接到. 值得注意的是，尽管艺术家往往选择比较现代的因素进行混和，并没有来自任何一个时代的材料是禁用的[46]. 怀旧文化由于过于地方性而在后现代主义时期消亡，现代主义的阵痛也早已逝去. 网络文化则无视现代和后现代[47].

除了聚合，职业网人也混合网络语汇. “鲜红电气公司”（Scarlet Electric）的MrsCoryArcangel.com，约翰﹒迈克尔灵（John Michael Boling）的 www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com和“哺乳动物的时代”（Guthrie Lonergran）都是职业网人创作的例子.

奥利弗|拉瑞克（Oliver Laric）是当今最善于混和创作的艺术家之一，他的作品风格在互联网、尤其是YouTube上令人瞩目. 拉瑞克通常在网上展示作品，他把业余视频看作被发现的媒体环节. 在 “50 50 2008″（2008年）中，他混和了YouTube上的业余作品片断而组成一首连续的, 由“50美分”演唱的歌曲，它本身就是他早期作品的混合. 在 “87幅剪贴画”（2006年）中，他把787幅剪贴画图像组装成一分钟五秒的影像，这件循环录影作品流畅地汇集了所有种族和活动，不仅表现他自己的能力，而且还暗示一切早已被完成了. 在 “史提夫|汪达双人舞（Stevie Wonder Duets)”（2007年）中，他将从YouTube上找到史提夫|汪达的歌曲——一个是音乐，一个是演唱——并置一处，在发送回网络，由此使我们认识到时间的流动. 马里萨|奥尔森 (Marisa Olson) 认为，拉瑞克的目的是把他的作品送回它的发源地[48]. 最后的 “版本（Versions)”（2009年)，拉瑞克创作了有些类似莱克伊的表演的叙事，一件时而合理、时而有点荒谬的理论作品，包括篡改的伊拉克导弹照片, 非法盗版电影、嫁接到色情明星上的名人头像，等等. 拉瑞克告诉我们，混合艺术允许平行世界的无限性得到扩展. 不过，目前还不清楚，混合方式除了能产生大量疯狂作品，它那泛滥的网络产品是否会受到职业网人或拉瑞克这样的艺术家的青睐.

参与

在世纪之交，伯瑞奥德（Bourriaud）首先确立了“关系美学”，参与艺术是开放性的，作者的任务只是在观众行为的基础上编程. 瑞克瑞特|尼加（Rikrit Tiravanija）是最重要的参与艺术家，他在画廊里放满纸盒子，里面装有汤或布丁，供参观者做饭, 食用，并构造著名建筑结构的混合体（如用镜子制成的辛德勒众议院，由木头作成的Maison Dom-Ino结构)，他由此鼓励观众参与, 创建到活动中来[49].

从90年代初开始，“关系美学”预见了10年后联网大众和开放资源文化的发展. 用户生成的网上内容，诸如Flickr, deviantART以及同行生产的共享的软件，如Apache网络服务器软件, Linux操作系统或Drupal内容管理系统，现在已不是非同寻常的事，而只是日常生活的一部分. 伴随反对版权斗争的持续的地下盗版运动，“互联网文化”走向这样的未来：信息失去其作为商品的地位，随着其扩展，资本主义将会消亡. 或者相反，由于缺乏开放性，对Flickr或deviartART的选择暗示着自由文化可能永远不会到来，而免费同行产品可能变成另一种资本寄生的方式，迫使我们在自由时间工作. 令人不安的是，参与可以成为顺从的载体，如同 “哈珀杂志” 编辑Bill Wasik创作的闪族现象，验证对时髦的轻信[50].

最好的参与艺术体现了互联网的乌托邦雄心及其对所有人的开放. 对此，我们要举个例子——Rhizome.org，它是一个艺术互联网的机构，也是一个任何人都可以加入的俱乐部，经营意图是建立一个自由论坛. 洛杉矶的非盈利网络艺术组织“泰利奇艺术交流（Telic Arts Exchange)” 是一个没有课程的“公立学校”，由个人建议设立课程，其它人可以参加.

Aaron Koblin, “绵羊市场” 2006

当一些艺术家以观众直接参与的形式工作，另一些则探讨参与与市场的关系。例如，在http://dziga.perrybard.net，佩里﹒巴德（Perry Bard）邀请世界各地人民参与重新编辑维尔托夫（Dziga Vertov’）的 “一个扛摄影机的人”（1929). “羊市场”（2006年)，阿伦﹒考林（Aaron Kolblin）则在Amazon.com上的支付了10,000名工人（机械土著）每人0.02美元来 “画一头面向左的羊”，从而制造宏大的绵羊景观。与Takashi Kowashiba合作，考林也创作了“一万美分”，一张由10000幅影像组成的100美元的钞票，分别由Amazon的机械土著画成，他们每人挣一分钱.

网络，意义何在?

本章的目标既不是颂扬也不谴责网络文化和即刻现实艺术，而是利用它们促进历史和理论性理解，即使这违背了网络文化的实质.

现代主义成为最新的为资本服务的视觉技术. 想想莫霍﹒纳吉（Moholy-Nagy）一生，从建构主义到在设计学院教授如何设计广告与产品，或格罗皮乌斯（Gropius）从共产主义到社团主义（Corporatism）的历程. 更糟糕的是，对立的后现代主义艺术的立场常常是冷嘲热讽，算计着为艺术市场创作高价的“抗衡”艺术. 现在还不清楚是网络艺术更广泛的历史作用将是什么. 有时作为空想家，或重要一点，也只不过是一个技术部门或上升知识工作啦啦队长. 我们仍然缺乏对进步的网络艺术的完整观念, 甚至是对网络文化的进步认识. 我们无法回避网络艺术——在网上或博物馆里，它是这么闪闪夺目，魅力无穷，所以我们迫切需要从一个新的角度来审视这类作品.

*作者希望包括理查德﹒普林斯的 “无题（牛仔)” (1987年)，但理查德﹒普林斯工作室拒绝了我们的复制要求.

尾注

[1] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).

[2] If, following Fredric Jameson, the colonization of all parts of life by capital drove the postmodern turn, the colonization of all parts of life by telecommunications, digital technology, and globalization drives the emergence of network culture. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism,” New Left Review 146, (1984): 59-92. On the importance of the network today see and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) and Kazys Varnelis, “Introduction,” The Meaning of Network Culture. A History of the Contemporary, http://varnelis.net/network_culture/introduction.

[3] Kazys Varnelis, “Conclusion. The Meaning of Network Culture” in Varnelis, ed. Networked Publics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 150.

[4] Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[5] Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 9-34.

[6] In this, modernism can be seen as a subspecies of realism, representing individual interpretation of universal truths more thoroughly than could be done within the strictures of mimesis.

[7] Georg Lukacs, “Realism in the Balance,” in Ronald Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno (New York: Verso, 1980), 28-59.

[8] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 289-294. Liu, The Laws of Cool, 14-76.

[9] Generally speaking, where modernism, like realism, still holds out of the promise of a unified subject and a whole sign, postmodernism abandons that.

[10] See Foster, “The Return of the Real” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 127-170 and Whitney Museum of American Art, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Selections from the Permanent Collection, June 23-August 29, 1993, (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993).

[11] Jameson, 71-73 as well as Hal Foster, “(Post)Modern Polemics”, Recodings (Seattle: The Bay Press, 1985), 121-138.

[12] Michelet writes “Chaque époque rêve la suivante in Avenir! Avenir!, Europe 19 no 73 (January 15, 1929), 6 quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 97.

[13] Leo Marx “Live History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 256.

[14] Varnelis, 154. See also Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality. For A New Cultural Critique,” http://www.16beavergroup.org/brian/.

[15] This idea relies on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulation, but in its very language, the simulation still holds out a premise that it is produced by the media industry for us to occupy indirectly. Immediated reality is produced by everyone, constantly, and the media industry’s influences fades in it, or rather is transformed.

[16] Margriet Schavemaker, Mischa Rakier, eds. Right About Now: Art & Theory since the 1990s, (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007), 9-10.

[17] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005).

[18] A foundational text for theories of beauty in art is Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon. Four Essays on Beauty in Art (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993). It is important to note that to avoid accusations of his definition of beauty being kitsch, Hickey makes it cool by framing it within a discussion of Robert Mappelthorpe’s photography. With Harvey’s guidance (along with that of the likes of Peter Schjeldahl and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe), abject art — from Mappelthorpe to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ to Damien Hirst’s sharks — was reconstructed as beautiful, leaving behind postmodernism for the cool art of the post-critical era. See also Bill Beckley and David Shapiro, eds. Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics. (New York: Allworth Press, 1998). The same is true of decon in architecture. When Bilbao was completed, instead of being seen as decon, it was received as a project to be understood solely in terms of its beauty and the transformational potential of that beauty on cities.

[19] Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009).

[20] Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2003).

[21] Denise Grady, “Cosmetic Breast Enlargements Are Making a Comeback,” the New York Times, July 21, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/21/science/cosmetic-breast-enlargements-are-making-a-comeback.html.

[22] Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters, “Culture: Media Convergence and Networked Participation,” in Varnelis, Networked Publics, 62-66.

[23] Jordan Crandall, “Showing,” http://jordancrandall.com/showing/index.html.

[24] On surveillance art, see Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohine, and Peter Weibel, CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002).

[25] Sarah Boxer, “When Seeing is Not Always Believing,” http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5D91730F932A25754C0A9639C8B63.

[26] Greg J. Smith, “Burak Arikan Interview” Serial Consign. Digital Culture & Information Design, http://serialconsign.com/node/184.

[27] There are, to be fair, other artists working with code, most notably those, such as Natalie Jeremijenko, who explore it in a critical way, creating a critical version of maker culture. It is a blindness of this essay to not include that sort of work and the original author hopes that an astute reader/editor will add a section on this.

[28] See also Nell Boeschenstein, “I Want You to Want Me,” http://therumpus.net/2009/05/i-want-you-to-want-me/ for an essay embedding the work into the convoluted condition of immediated reality, including her own self-exposure and discomfort with it.

[29] Yunchul Kim, (void) traffic, http://www.khm.de/~tre/void.htm.

[30] http://www.earstudio.com/projects/moveable_type.html

[31] http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/network-maps-energy-diagrams/.

[32] Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” http://www.wernerherzog.com/main/de/html/news/Minnesota_Declaration.htm.

[33] Jeremy Rosenberg, “Postcard from L. A.,” Exhibitionist, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2007/07/postcard_from_l.html.

[34] For the Museum of Jurassic Technology and its deployment of wonder see Ralph Rugoff, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York: Verso, 1995).

[35] Nicholas G. Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 2008).

[36] Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), 87.

[37] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 39-40.

[38] http://www.highdeserttestsites.com/mission.html.

[39] Marina Fokidis, “Random Rules — Artists’ Selections from YouTube,” posted on Networked_Performance, by Jo-Anne Green (March 26, 2009), http://turbulence.org/blog/2009/03/26/random-rules-artists-selections-from-youtube/

[40] See Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

[41] On remix see Edouardo Navas, “Remix Defined,” http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3 and William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired 13.07 (2005), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html.

[42] Bourriaud, Postproduction. For Bourriaud, “Postproduction apprehends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the Net.”

[43] Bourriaud, “Public Relations,” interview by Bennett Simpson, ArtForum, (April 2001), 47.

[44] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 17.

[45] Eduardo Navas, “Andy: Meta-dandy,” http://navasse.net/star/navasWarhol.pdf.

[46] By this I mean they tend to be done recently but can be taken from as far back as the early 1960s, when it had become clear that modernization, in its first phase at least, was complete and the idea of “the contemporary” began to emerge. Among the first cultural institutions to recognize this, the Museum of Contemporary Art, was founded in Chicago in 1967. On “the contemporary,” see, for a start, Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997), 10-11.

[47] On nostalgia in postmodernism, see Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 67. On allegory see Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” parts 1 and 2, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52-87. On periodization and network culture see Kazys Varnelis, “Network Culture and Periodization,” http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/network_culture_and_periodization.

[48] Marisa Olson, “Putting the You in YouTube,” Rhizome.org, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2026.

[49] Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002). See also Claire Bishop, ed. Participation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

[50] Bill Wasik, “My Crowd, Or Phase 5: A Report from the Inventor of the Flash Mob,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2006), 56-66

Throughout the 1990s, digital computing and network technologies were largely employed in office work, their cultural implications confined to niche realms for enthusiasts. If that decade’s new media art formed a vital artistic subculture, it was mainly isolated and self-referential, in part due to the artists’ fascination with hacking the medium, in part due to its position as the last in a long line of Greenbergian interrogations of the medium, and in part due to its marginalization by established art institutions. Artists like Vuk Cosic, Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, and Heath Bunting replayed early twentieth century avant-garde strategies while emulating the graphic and programming demos of 1980s hacker culture, before computers left the realm of user groups and became broadly useful in society.[1]

Today, in contrast, digital technology is an unmistakable presence in everyday life and is increasingly inextricable from mainstream social needs and conventions. Network culture is a broad sociocultural shift much like postmodernity, not limited to technological developments or to “new media.”[2] Precisely because maturing digital and networking technologies are inseparable from contemporary culture — even more than the spectacle of the television was from postmodernity — they must be read within a larger context. All art, today, is to one extent or another, networked art.

This investigation can’t be limited to online venues, but it also can’t be limited to “art.” Postmodernism called high and low into question (think of Warhol as the quintessential early postmodern artist, or later Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, and Richard Prince) by bringing in products of the culture industry into art, but network culture levels that distinction utterly. Art under network culture dismisses the populist projection of the audience’s desires into art for the incorporation of the audience’s desires into art and the blurring of boundaries between media and public.[3] With the spread of knowledge work, attitude and a quick wit for fashion have become more important than knowledge of historical depth so, as Alan Liu suggests, whether a cultural artifact is cool or not matters more than its status in high and low (indeed, unless the object is first cool, styling it as high ensures that it will be seen as kitsch today).[4] Still, as a chapter in a book on networked art instead of, say, on networked cultural production, our focus here is on art. Nevertheless, we will also roam afield to a broader survey of cultural products, high and low, online and not (if it is possible to say that there is anything not online today in some form). Thus, this essay examines not only what is on Turbulence.org but also what is on television, on YouTube, or in the gallery.

Specifically, this chapter looks at how networked cultural production draws on reality, from reality television to blogs to MySpace to YouTube to the art gallery. Reality art leaves behind formal structure and deeper meaning for a heightened sense of immediacy. This immediacy, however, is not so much authentic and present as mediated and dispersed. To speak of this work as “reality” media is not to imply it is not coded. On the contrary, the fascination with the real in “reality” media, be it reality TV, amateur-generated content, or professional “art” is constructed around specific tactics: self-exposure, information visualization, the documentarian turn, remix, and participation. Nor should we expect these transactions to be one way for if the distinction between high and low is tenuous at best, then it stands to reason that the discourse formerly known as art will also influence what was formerly considered non-art. After laying out a context for immediated reality, this essay will examine these five registers in a preliminary survey of the field. In looking at such art practices, it’s important to understand both how they fit into broader aspects of network culture and how they work within the discipline.

Network culture is not a rejection of postmodernism but rather a shift or mutation that builds on it. Take aggregative works, for example, which elaborate upon curatorial art practices of the early 1990s or participatory art which draws on the “relational aesthetics” emerging at the end of that decade. Nevertheless, there is also a break and this break is not only with postmodernism but also with a long modernity: the new poetics of the real is distinct from existing models of realism, both the classical realism that first emerged in the eighteenth century, accompanying the bourgeoisie’s rise to power to mature during the nineteenth century, and the postmodernist realism of trauma, fragment, and ironic quotation.

In its subject matter, classical realism embraced everyday — as opposed to courtly or idealized — life. This matter-of-factness challenged the aristocracy’s dominance of the aesthetic realm, inverting the old order’s aesthetic of high themes and established commonplaces.[5] But more than that, classical realism was produced by an epistemological break. Until the eighteenth century, cultural producers saw invention as a matter of elaborating on convention and conforming to decorum, thereafter however, they would rely on internal capacities of their subjectivity, e.g. insight and original thought. In this, novelists like Henry Fielding or Samuel Richardson and genre painters like Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin or, a century later, Gustav Courbet paralleled the investigations of philosophers like René Descartes, for whom truth was a matter of individual observation, and understanding the product of an individual comprehending the world through his or her senses. In taking the everyday and turning it into a work of art, realists demonstrated the transformative potential of the human imagination.

When compared to earlier forms of literature and art, realist works appeared formless, eschewing strict traditional structures.[6] This very absence of predefined structure underscored the primacy of experience over tradition. Still, realism relied on conventions to reinforce the notion that beyond everyday life lay universal truths. Take plot in the novel: if the novelist presented his text as a slice of everyday life, that slice took the form of a narrative arc that demonstrated, by example, the coherence and deeper meaning of everyday life. Or take the private nature of the novel’s narrative: by depicting the inner struggles of the individual in the world, novelists described the totality of life, not just its public face, thereby stressing the importance of the private over the public and giving new value to individual action and personal morality. Thus when Georg Lukacs lauded realist works expressing the totality of socioeconomic life, he articulated the basic principle behind realism (if in Marxist form).[7] Realism accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie, so if signs now point to a new class structure emerging as, in developed countries at least, the dominant form of labor shifts from factory work to immaterial production and knowledge work, then we should not be surprised to see a new way of understanding the world emerge.[8]

Richard Estes, Oenophilia, 1983

Peter Halley, Prison Cell with Smokestack & Conduit, 1985

Postmodernism, in turn, was a key transitional moment exploring the schizophrenic fragmentation of the real (together with the sign and the subject) under the pressures of mass media.[9] Superrealist artists such as Richard Estes induced a schizophrenic perception of surfaces and signs, a hallucinogenic reality exceeding the capacity of either the photograph or the eye, a condition that Hal Foster describes as “overwhelmed by appearance.” Appropriation artists like Richard Prince*, Sherri Levine, and (the early) Cindy Sherman critiqued how reality is constructed in media representation while questioning ideas of authorship and property. Simulationist artists like Allan McCollum and Peter Halley extended the idea of appropriation to create neutral works claiming to be void of emotion, originality or authorship, embracing instead the market and reproducibility in media. In the latter days of postmodernism, abject artists like Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Kiki Smith, Andreas Serrano, and (the later) Cindy Sherman hunted for signs of reality in the traumatic, exploring the violated and the defiled by simulating bodily excretions, wounded bodies, or damaged objects from childhood, but as Foster observes, they also worked in an artistic milieu from which emotion had been drained. For postmodernists, appealing to trauma discourse was a matter of simultaneously playing out the critique of the subject while calling for an identity politics.[10] Throughout, then, postmodern art was concerned with articulating the schizophrenic fragmentation of both sign and subject.[11]

The Immediated Real

Each era, Jules Michelet observed, dreams the following. Postmodernism’s dream was of network culture.[12] For to declare the death of master narratives, postmodernist theory forged a new master narrative around networks of multinational capitalism.[13] Still, the role of networks was only nascent in postmodern culture — most obviously, the Internet was not yet privatized or significantly colonized by capital and mobile technology was still new — and the complicated nature of network culture — for example, the growth of open source, the rise of knowledge workers, the widespread piracy of informational commodities, the importance of bottom-up production, and the rapid decline of traditional informational industries such as newspapers — was as yet unforeseen. So just as postmodernity emerged after the process of modernization was complete, in turn network culture could only come after postmodernity had run its course. Today the fragmentation of the sign, the end of the subject, and the dissolution of any sense of authenticity in media are fait accompli. If postmodernism celebrated the shattering of the subject, network culture takes that shattering as a given.

Today’s self emerges from the network, not so much a whole individual as a composite entity constituted out of the links it forms with others, a mix of known and unknown others it links to via the Net.[14] As its ground, instead of immediate, lived experience, the contemporary subject relies on the immediated real, a condition in which mediation is a given and life becomes a form of performance, constantly lived in a culture of exposure in exchange for self-affirming feedback.[15]

Where modernity legitimated itself on the basis of an historical narrative and postmodernity used theory to critique that legitimation and to reflect on its own state in the world, network culture undoes any sense of history or theory.[16] In its stead is left only an immediated reality that eschews either legitimation or critique but just is. The critique of industrial society’s homogeneity that was common in art under modernism and postmodernism is now absorbed into management theory, the alienated factory worker replaced by the knowledge worker with the “freedom” of job flexibility (which also means no benefits or job security) and the privilege of self-expression as a member of the creative class.[17]

As management theory has absorbed critique, the market informs art more than ever. What use is the symbolic capital of theoretical resistance when real capital could be earned? Since the mid-1990s, artists have increasingly entered a new post-critical framework, concerning themselves with the cool or a return to the beautiful.[18] The art of network culture, then, operates within a culture that is rarely Utopian or oppositional but rather more concerned with its own position within the vast game of the network.[19]

Self-Exposure

The importance of the immediated real to network culture manifests itself most clearly in the reality television show and the webcam. In the 1990s and early 2000s, shows such as MTV’s The Real World promised unmediated glimpses into everyday life. But, broadcast on a medium with long-established conventions, these swiftly degenerated into scripted productions like Big Brother and Survivor or in the case of shows like Fear Factor or American Idol became little more than rewritten game shows, incorporating cash prizes or the promise of media stardom to their contestants.[20] Still, reality television is now firmly incorporated in television culture, for example in the comedy The Office — which is framed as a reality television show — characters frequently address the television camera directly as if on such a show and maintain blogs on the show’s Web site. In 2005, in a crossover between art and reality TV, Marisa Olson auditioned for American Idol and maintained a blog about the process at http://americanidolauditiontraining.blogs.com.

Reality culture is at its purest not on television but on webcam sites. In Jennicam, Jennifer Ringley offered an uncensored, constant glimpse into her personal life to the three to four million daily visitors. Like other webcam or, for that matter, the more recent lifestreaming sites, Jennicam manifested key aspects of reality culture: no narrative arc or any suggestion of a deeper meaning, but instead a glimpse into the private life of an individual hoping to expose himself or herself. This glimpse was not one-way; Ringley frequently reached out to her audience through e-mail and chat, a process that she made visible on Jennicam.

The second webcam to transmit around the clock is Anacam, this time by an artist, Ana Voog. Broadcasting since 1997, like Jennicam, Anacam is a glimpse into Voog’s life, even if her project, unlike Jennicam, includes performance art, pointing to a breakdown between performance and life under the constant scrutiny of the unseen audience as connoisseurs and voyeurs. Voog, who engaged in sexual activity in front of the camera would get cosmetic breast implants in 1998.[21]

Beyond the webcam, immediated reality abounds throughout Internet culture. Blogs, social networking sites, and Twitter all offer platforms for self-exposure. Web sites such as eBaum’s World or YouTube do as well, in large part being made up of videos that claim to be true, such as scenes of people doing funny, stupid, or dangerous things or direct addresses to the audience, all done with the intent of appealing to an audience who would view them online. Viral marketers and media producers (e.g. Lonelygirl15 or Little Loca) have embraced this appeal to reality as well, utilizing the direct address to the audience and the amateur production values of net video.[22] Even pornography has recently lost its sense of fiction, narrative arc, and profit — an ironic note given that in the 1990s dot.com era pornography was considered the one reliably profitable Internet enterprise. Instead it is increasingly being produced by amateurs and uploaded for display on sites like XTube or 4chan.

One of the more famous examples of self exposure in recent art is Untitled (2003), in which Andrea Fraser filmed herself having sex with a patron who paid $20,000 for the privilege, then displayed a video of the act in a gallery where editions of the video were subsequently sold. The work implicitly raised the question of whether the patron paid for sex with Fraser or to expose the act in the gallery. Contrasting this to Tracey Enim’s My Bed (1998) reveals the difference between the postmodern and immediated reality. Enim’s sexual exploits are recorded in her unmade bed, which in its studied dishevelment, is meant to align her work with abject art. Enim’s bed is framed by a purported nervous breakdown, pointing to a confused narrative in which the artist alternately boasts of and is disturbed by her promiscuous sexuality. The bed is key to the project, an index of Enim’s (sexual) performance and a device that serves to validate the project through its appeal to authenticity and presence. In contrast Fraser’s work is much more matter of fact, a calculated act of self-exposure to be reproduced in media.

Artist and theorist Jordan Crandall writes “In many ways this culture would seem to be less a representational than a presentational one, where we are compelled to solicit the attention of others, act for unseen eyes, and develop new forms of connective intensity — as if this were somehow the very condition of our continued existence, the marker of our worth.” Crandall also points to another aspect of showing, the desire to submit in the face of technologies of tracking and surveillance.[23] Under the rubric of “surveillance art,” a contemporary counterpart to Foucault’s reading of the panopticon, a number of artists — such as Crandall himself, Diller and Scofidio, the Institute for Applied Autonomy, and the Bureau of Inverse Technology explore this drive to submit as an object of critique.[24]

Surveillance art often ascribes the role of the watcher to a mysterious, unknown power. The Eyes of Laura (2005) by artist Janet Cardiff is an exception. For this work, Cardiff constructed the character of Laura, a security guard who had become obsessed with watching a thief she nicknames “Rabbit.” As presented, the project gave no clue that it was a work of art, even allowing visitors to control a security camera at the sponsoring Vancouver Art Gallery (the Gallery’s sponsorship or location was not identified on the site). If the project may have ultimately been too contrived to maintain the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, it nevertheless examined both surveillance and exposure (Laura’s desire to talk about her life and activities) under immediated reality while toying with our definition of what is real.[25]

Burak Arikan, MyPocket, 2007

Like Cardiff’s The Eyes of Laura, Burak Arikan’s MyPocket (a 2007 Turbulence Commission) mixes surveillance and self-exposure, disclosing three years of his financial records to the world and employing software to predict his future spending habits. MyPocket questions the finance industry’s insistence on the transparency and management of our finances even as the industry insists on its opacity to us. Moreover, in introducing the capacity to predict his own future spending through software, not only does Arikan mimic the acts of such corporations, he demonstrates how our choices are constituted within a network of information, in this case financial.[26]

Infoviz

MyPocket brings us to information visualization (infoviz). Just as the functional software of the 1990s replaced the programming demos of the 1980s, so works consisting of dynamic visualizations of quantified data replace the self-referential new media art of the 1990s.

To some extent, infoviz is the most directly imbricated of all the registers of immediated reality in computation. Artists operating in the other registers of immediated reality take digital technology and networks as a given, generally relying upon it much as “prosumers” might, as a set of technologies to build works out of without necessarily getting deep under the surface. In contrast, infoviz generally demands that artists get involved in programming, turning to coding environments such as the programming language Processing or to complex, professional environments such as GIS mapping software.[27]

Infoviz has received much attention recently — most notably in the 2009 MoMA show Design and the Elastic Mind — and thus warrants less discussion here than other aspects of immediated reality. Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s I Want You to Want to Me (2008) is an example of this sort of work, building on acts of self-exposure by others. Captivated by how members of online dating sites describe not only themselves but the traits they desire in their mates with brief phrases, Harris and Kampvar present this data on high-resolution touch screens.[28] Yunchul Kim’s (void)traffic (2004) is another example of infoviz, utilizing ASCII characters to represent data traffic, thereby evoking the idea of a “black-and-white digital organism” or the “surface of the sun.”[29]

Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Movable Type, 2007

But infoviz’s downfall is its spectacularization of data and faith in technology. For if infoviz is the clearest inheritor of modernism, its origins are not the disruptive, avant-garde modernism of the 1920s but the modernism of the 1950s and 1960s. Aiming for a reconciliation of thinking and feeling under the bureaucratic technologizing of the senses, postwar modernism was the visual representation of the Fordist corporation. In turn, infoviz corresponds to the “efficient market hypothesis” prevalent in the last decade in which the purported wealth of information easily available to us over networks allows the market to operate efficiently and rationally. Take, for example, Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen’s Movable Type, (2007) a grid of 560 vacuum-fluorescent display panels mounted in the lobby of the New York Times building. Each panel displays information mined from the day’s stories, the paper’s archive, and the activities of the visitors to the nytimes.com web site.[30] Far more than any late modern painting, this work advertises the company’s ability to control and efficiently extract information, turning it into an object of wonder. Claiming the ability to create new user interfaces, infoviz is often the purview of design firms or programmers and can be sponsored by venture capital. It can be hard to tell the latest art project from the latest startup.

Josh On, They Rule (2004)

Tactical media activists have created politically progressive uses of infoviz. Spurred by Mark Lombardi’s elegant pencil drawings of networks of scandals in the late 1990s, they set out to reveal hidden power networks and critique in “counter-geographic” projects such as Bureau d’Etudes’ The World Government (2003) or Josh On’s They Rule (2004). Such works aim to unpack the complex weave of network power, nevertheless, if intriguing, such projects can be hampered by reducing network power to mere relationships.[31] Agency and intentionality may remain unclear while the work remains an object of fascination.

Scott Hug, Consumer Mood, 2009

Scott Hug, U. S. Life Evaluation, 2009

Scott Hug critiques both infoviz and network culture’s pervasive obsession with data today in Personal Finance, State of the Nation, Consumer Mood, U.S. Perception on the Morality of Homosexual Relations, and Death Penalty (2009), a series of pie charts that he paints on wood or superimposes over images lifted from old issues of National Geographic, using colors from forecasts of pallets in upcoming fashions. Taking data from Gallop polls out of its context and stuffing it into the banal form of the pie chart, Hug parodies how infoviz makes data an object of rapt aesthetic fascination while also critiquing network culture’s overall obsession with data as form.

The Documentarian Turn

Where infoviz aestheticizes quantified data to represent a vision of reality, documentarian art presents reality as a narrative. Of all the registers of the immediated real, only the documentary maintains narrative and coherence as its hallmark. But in order to maintain that coherence, documentarian art treats reality as something to script and manipulate, not just to take as given. In this, the documentarian turn is the inheritor of fiction today. For example, in the writing of David Foster Wallace, the lines between fiction and non-fiction are difficult to discern, especially since both are annotated with copious footnotes, as important to the text as the main narrative. But documentary’s rise is easiest to see in film where, during the last decade, it has become popular with critics, audiences, and filmmakers. Films such as Grizzly Man, Supersize Me, March of the Penguins, An Inconvenient Truth, and Fahrenheit 911 form a growing strain in cinema. More and more it is also a field for the auteur for whom the material serves as a canvas for a highly scripted interpretation of reality. Werner Herzog, to take one well-known documentary filmmaker, uses it as the basis for a “poetic, ecstatic truth.”[32] As the Internet makes information sharing about documentaries easy, their scripting is rapidly exposed, as for example in William Jirsa’s review of a documentary he appeared in, Werner Herzog’s At the End of the World (2009), or in the numerous responses to Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004) and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002).

One of the dominant forms of art under network culture has been photography reproduced at large scale, especially that of Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hutte, Thomas Ruff, and Thomas Struth, all of whom studied in Düsseldorf with Bernd and Hilla Becher in the mid-1970s. The works of these photographers, along with those of a number of other photographers such as Jeff Wall or Hiroshi Sugimoto not only rival nineteenth century salon painting in size but also in their depiction of a constructed reality. Producing works so vivid and sharp requires effort and manipulation on the scale of Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” and many of these photographers take liberties to produce the vision of the world they want to create even if it needs to be constructed in post-processing. Demand, the youngest of the Düsseldorf school members, constructs sets, generally out of paper, that appear almost indistinguishable from the reality they aim to represent (the almost is key), thus questioning the constructed nature of the documentarian turn.

But such photography, produced for the gallery and the coffee table art book is transitional, its self-proclaimed status as the successor to painting as the pinnacle of visual art problematic. With the breakdown of traditional structures, “feral institutions” particularly rich in Los Angeles where The Center for Land Use Interpretation investigates ignored industrial, military, and touristic uses of the landscape, The Institute For Figuring explores mathematical figures, the Velaslavasay Panorama displays panaromas, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers appropriate the figure of the park ranger to lead counter-tours of the city, and AUDC (originally in Los Angeles but now in New York) explores contemporary culture through seemingly unreal but true situations interpreted through theory and through architectural drawings, models, and photographs.[33]

Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Sonnabend Model of Obliscence

If some feral institutions (The Center for Land Use Interpretation, AUDC) engage in research, however non-traditional, others create fictional (or partly-fictional) realities, often so elaborately constructed as to break down the bounds between art and reality, artist, curator, the real, and the constructed. Such work draws on both documentarian and postconceptual art practices. Beginning in the late 1980s artists like Ilya Khabakov and Mark Dion moved away from the uncomplicated models of appropriation and simplistic ideas of institutional critique practiced by postmodern artists toward more complicated relationships. Generally, the departure point for this generation, epitizomed by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, would be the sixteenth and seventeenth century cabinet of curiosities or wunderkammer, the prototype for the museum, in which natural and man-made wonders would be juxtaposed in an idiosyncratic system, valued for their capacity to stimulate the senses. If the cabinet of curiosities parallels the post-critical obsession with beauty, it does so as a studied anachronism, displacing beauty and wonder from the present to another time when they were not yet commodified. In returning to the origins of autonomous art and the museum, such work recalls a time before the modern concept of art, when art was still integrated with life and not divorced into its own sphere, even as it anticipates the dissolution of art under network culture. Still, if the original cabinet of curiosities was an instrument of propaganda, conveying the assembler’s ability to control the world, the new cabinet of curiosities is conceived as flawed, its knowledge fragmentary, incomplete and even outright false. Thus if these new cabinets of curiosities aim to inspire wonder, it not so much the unmediated wonder that the original wunderkammer created or even a wonder at the boundaries of art dissolving but rather a perceptual challenge forcing us to question the nature of immediated reality.[34]

The Chadwicks, The Genretron (2008)

To take another example, the Chadwicks (Lytle Shaw and Jimbo Blakely) collaborate as descendants of a (fake) family of “eminent connoisseurs, sea captains, naval engineers and amateur historians,” tracing its origins to the era of Dutch expansion. In a bad faith effort to convince the public of their rights to various claims, the Chadwicks produce somewhat damaged or even outright deranged historical reconstructions that call into question the nature of the immediated real. To confuse matters, in a recent publication, The Chawick Family Papers: A Brief Public Glimpse, Sina Najafi, the editor of Cabinet magazine, launches a mock attack on the project as a way of discussing their work.

Tactical media also engages in such fiction, for example, the Yes Men (one of whom, Igor Vamos, has also been involved with the Center for Land Use Interpretation) have produced fake Web sites and falsely posed as spokesmen for government entities and corporations to deliver their biting critiques. Examples include a parody Web site for the World Trade Organization (http://www.gatt.org/), a Web site on a fake Exxon product that would convert the bodies of billions of climate-change victims into oil (http://www.vivoleum.com, shut down by the ISP) and a fake printed issue of the New York Times (and accompanying Web Site, http://www.nytimes-se.com/) with the headline “Iraq War Ends.” Beyond delivering their messages in a subversive and humorous way, such work leads its audience to question how easily media can construct meanings for the purposes of dominant power.

The Artist as Aggregator

Immediated reality overloads us with information. Instead of interpretation, however, in network culture, aggregation becomes the prime strategy for dealing with information. Thus, mass media such as newspapers and television networks have ceded their position of cultural power to software-based aggregators like Google News (which brags that “The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program”), Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes. These software engines automatically select and deliver results based on visitors’ interests, giving access to vast, unprecedented quantities of information.[35] But aggregation also has a DIY-side. Not only do sites such as Amazon, Kaboodle, Youtube, Last.fm, Imagefap, Rhizome, and Flickr encourage users to curate and make public lists of their selections, profile pages on social networking sites are all but constituted by ones social connections, cultural interests, and professional affiliations. The result is the most common manifestation of “networked publics.” More than any testimonial or self-confession, aggregation becomes a means of describing the connected self in immediated reality. Blogs, too, highlight the change in authorship that aggregation creates. If bloggers use blogs for self-exposure, they also frequently fill them with reblogged items from other blogs or comments on other blogs, Web sites, technological products, articles, books, and so on. This is exacerbated in social bookmarking sites like Delicious, FFFFOUND! or Tumblr, the latter designed for short-form blog entries generally based on reblogged photographs, quotes, links, audio, or video. Often the only comment is the context in which the work is curated. Artists — particularly “pro surfers” (more on these later) — also make such lists. Take for example Guthrie Lonergan’s Myspace Intro Playlist, a curated collection of short video clips by individuals introducing themselves to their MySpace audience (hence an aggregated collection of self-exposing videos).

Under network culture the artist as aggregator increasingly replaces the earlier artist as producer. In this register of networked art, artists draw both on earlier curatorial art practices but also on the DIY forms of aggregation common to network culture. Such art practices generally address consumption in a more positive way than under postmodernism when artists tended to see consumption as an activity for uncultured individuals, lacking in reflection and easily accepting of media messages. Postmodern artists such as Richard Prince and Jeff Koons depicted consumption as an ecstatic activity undertaken by cultural dupes. Such work was always somewhat cynical as it marketed critical distance as a luxury product (notoriously, one of Richard Prince’s works was the first photograph to sell for over a million dollars), drawing on the tradition of art as non-alienated.[36] But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, art became subject to a Bourdouvian sociological critique just as the art market reached new heights to become one of the most delirious forms of consumption. At the same time, artists began to engage in curatorial practices, as for example, Damien Hirst did in his Freeze show of 1988, in which he curated the works of fellow students.

Today, curatorial works are an accepted part of art practice and artists understand consumption as a back-and-forth phenomenon and see the market not as a place for capital but rather for human interaction, an art version of the peer-to-peer forms of production and trade at Internet sites like eBay and Etsy. In this model, both producer and consumer now have agency and the ability to shape their lives positively.[37]

High Desert Test Sites, Noah Purifoy Site, photo by Guy Lombardo

Take High Desert Test Sites, for example, where artists Andrea Zittel and Lisa Anne Auerbach work with dealers Shaun Regen, John Connelly, and collector Andy Stillpass to create a weekend-long event in the Mojave desert composed of experimental art sites but also barbeques, swap meets, and local activism.[38] Or another work by Scott Hug, the annual zine K48 (and the related blog, http://thek48bullet.blogspot.com/), in which he shows not only his own work but also works by other artists — including CDs of music — that he finds interesting. If K48 affirms self-expression, that expression is as much made up of the content he aggregates as it is by the art he produces. One more example might be Random Rules: A Channel of Artists’ Selections from YouTube (2009) in which Marina Fokidis assembled a group of artists — Andreas Angelidakis, Aids 3D (Daniel Keller and Nick Kosmas), assume vivid astro focus, Pablo Leon de la Barra, Eric Beltran, Keren Cytter, Jeremy Deller, Cerith Wyn Evans, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Dora Garcia, Rodney Graham, Annika Larsson, Matthieu Laurette, Ingo Niermann, Miltos Manetas, Ahmet Ögüt, Angelo Plessas, Lisi Raskin, and Linda Wallace — to put together playlists of work that they like from YouTube.[39]

Other artists are “pro surfers,” as Marisa Olson calls them, seeking out banal, badly-designed elements of the Web vernacular under a seeming suspension of aesthetic sensibility. The “surfing club” at nastynets.com emerged as the epicenter of this movement in 2006 (in itself it is not that distinguishable from sites like www.worstoftheweb.com or 4chan.org for that matter) and has more recently been joined by www.spiritsurfers.net.

Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Ash’s Stash, 2007

But like self-exposure, infoviz, and the artist as documentarian, intents may vary. The role of the artist as aggregator can also be cynical, reveling in the market. Take Nick Relph and Oliver Payne’s Ash’s Stash (2007), in which the artists presented a collection of ephemera from gallerist Ash Lange’s collections displayed in an installation aping a Prada Store at Art Basel Miami Beach. Critical distance was not so much hard to find as absent altogether.

Remix

Building on the artist as aggregator is artist as remixer. In the contemporary milieu of networked publics, the traditional relationship of consumer and producer is undone. Amateur-generated content — often based on remixing content from more traditional media sources — has proliferated on the Internet, particularly in the video sharing site YouTube and photo sharing sites like Flickr or deviantArt as well as on blogs. Such work is avidly consumed by other amateurs who, in turn may remix it to produce second-order remix projects.

If remix thrives on using appropriated work, unlike postmodernism, it takes appropriation as given. In postmodern appropriation art, reuse was ironic, undertaken with a high degree of Oedipal self-consciousness. As Sherri Levine reappropriated earlier photographs by Walker Evans or Richard Prince blew up magazine advertisements to display in museums, they hoped to critique the authorial status of past masters. But appropriation artists, most notably Duchamp, still worked within an established tradition of art, drawing on avant-garde models of appropriation and framing. In their method originality was still critical, both as an institution to critique and as a crutch — for Duchamp, after all, the urinal is nothing until it is signed. Thus, if Levine’s work questioned Enlightenment notions of the author and originality, those notions are long ago obsolete.[40] For when pasting images from the Internet into PowerPoint or reblogging a favorite image on Tumblr is an everyday occurrence, appropriation becomes casual. Such postmodern works, then, were transitional. Relying on authorship and originality as departure points is no longer productive.[41]

Nicolas Bourriaud suggests that this lack of regard for originality is precisely what makes art based on remix (his word for it is postproduction) appropriate to network culture. In contrast to postmodern artists, Bourriaud explains, artists like Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon no longer question originality but rather instinctively understand artworks as objects constituted within networks, their meaning given by their position in relation to others and their use.[42] Like the DJ or the programmer, such artists don’t so much create as reorganize.[43] Crucially, remix takes place at a moment when globalization and the spread of historical information is pervasive due to the spread of the Net. “The artistic question is no longer,” Bourriaud concludes, “”what can we make that is new?” but “how can we make do with what we have?” In other words, how can we produce singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names, and references that constitutes our daily life?”[44]

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999

Mark Leckey, who operates in the gallery and the museum, but also has a MySpace page, is a veteran of remix, producing a seminal video in 1999 entitled Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore out of found footage of British dancers in the 1970s and 1980s, in which he uncovered the ritualistic aspects of dance culture. More recently his performances have consisted of lectures on theories of networked culture (such as Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail) that traverse a litany of references from high art to pop culture. Leckey’s goal, as he proclaims in the statement he filmed for his Tate prize nomination, describes the poetics of network culture in a nutshell: “to transform my world and make it more so, make it more of what it is.” In Made in ‘Eaven (2004), Leckey reproduces Jeff Koons’ mirrored Rabbit sculpture; as the vantage point zooms in on the sculpture, Leckey’s own studio is revealed in a computer-rendered three-dimensional model.

Remix can take many forms, not only in audio or video. In Diary of a Star (2004-2007) Eduardo Navas sampled The Andy Warhol Diaries on a blog as a means of reflecting on the role of celebrity and privacy on the Web. Concluding that in projects like The Last Supper, where Warhol’s brilliance shone as he mimicked the mimickers, Warhol would have made the “the perfect Web flâneur.”[45] Navas links to the sites that Andy would have explored if he had been able to browse the Web based on the entries in the Diaries.

Its worth noting that there is no particular injunction against the use of material from any era but the elements artists choose to remix tend to be relatively contemporary.[46] The nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone, the world still in the throes of modernization is long gone. Unable to periodize, network culture disregards both modern and premodern equally.[47]

Besides just aggregating it, pro surfers also remix the web vernacular. Scarlet Electric’s MrsCoryArcangel.com, John Michael Boling’s www.gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com and Guthrie Lonergran’s The Age of Mammals are all examples of pro surfer creations.

Oliver Laric, 787 ClipArts, 2006

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2007

Oliver Laric is one of the most adept artists working in remix today, elaborating on the genre as it emerges on Internet sites, most notably YouTube. Laric, who generally presents his own work online treats amateur videos as found media loops. In 50 50 2008 (2008), he remixes YouTube clips of amateurs riffing on hips by 50 Cent to form one continuous song, itself a remix of an earlier work he did. In 787 ClipArts (2006), he assembles 787 clip art images into a one minute five second loop, forming a continuous video-loop that brings together all races and activities in one fluid mix, demonstrating not only his ability but also hinting that everything that can already be done has been. In Stevie Wonder Duets (2007), he juxtaposes videos he finds on YouTube of Stevie Wonder songs, one instrumental, one vocal, allowing us to recognize the slippage of time between the renditions only to release them back onto YouTube. As Marisa Olson suggests though, it seems that Laric aims to send his work back into the Net, where it came from.[48] Finally, in Versions (2009), Laric produces a narrative that seems a bit like Leckey’s performances, a theoretical work at times reasonable, at times perhaps a bit preposterous, ranging across doctored photographs of Iraqi missiles, illicitly videotaped and pirated movies, celebrity heads grafted onto porn stars and so on. Remix, Laric points out to us, allows an infinity of parallel worlds to proliferate. Nevertheless, what remix amounts to besides delirious production, be it in the vernacular Web production celebrated by the pro surfers or the carefully orchestrated work Laric does, is as yet unclear.

Participation

First formulated by Bourriaud as “relational aesthetics” at the turn of the century, participatory art is open-ended, the author left to the task of programming by determining the code for the viewers’ actions. Take one of the foremost practitioners of participatory art, Rikrit Tiravanija, who fills galleries with stacks of cardboard boxes containing soup or pudding for visitors to cook and eat and constructs remixes of famous architectural structures (e.g. the Schindler House made out of mirror glass, the Maison Dom-Ino made out of wood) in which he encourages audiences to participate, create, and engage in events.[49]

Relational aesthetics, which began in the early 1990s, anticipates the development of networked publics and Open Source culture a decade later. Encountering user-generated content on sites like Flickr and deviantART as well as commons-based peer produced software such as the Apache Web server, Linux operating system or Drupal content management system is no longer unusual but rather is part of everyday life. Coupled with a sustained underground pirate movement that disregards and fights against copyright ownership, “Internet free culture” points toward a future in which information loses its status as a commodity and, by extension, capitalism withers away. Conversely, the present lack of open, public alternatives to sites like Flickr or deviartART hints that free culture may never arrive and that unpaid peer production may become yet another vehicle with which capital colonizes everyday life, marshaling our free time into work. Just as disquietingly, participation can become a vehicle for conformism, as the phenomenon of flash mobs, created by Harper’s Magazine editor Bill Wasik, as a means of testing the gullibility of hipsters, proves.[50]

Participatory art at its best embodies the Utopian ambitions of Internet free culture and its invitation to anyone to participate. Thus, to take one example, even if it is an institution for Internet art, Rhizome.org is also a club that anyone can join, operating, in intent at least, as a free forum. At Telic Arts Exchange, a non-profit networked art initiative in Los Angeles, the “Public School” is a “school without a curriculum,” in which individuals propose classes that others can take.

Aaron Koblin, Sheep Market, 2006

Other artists work with more directed forms of audience participation, some of which explore the relationship between participation and the market. For example, at http://dziga.perrybard.net/, Perry Bard invited people worldwide to participate in recreating clips of Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man with a Movie Camera. In the Sheep Market (2006), Aaron Koblin paid 10,000 workers (“mechanical turks”) on Amazon.com $0.02 to “draw a sheep facing the left” to produce a massive landscape of sheep. In collaboration with Takashi Kowashiba, Kolblin also produced Ten Thousand Cents a representation of a hundred dollar bill composed of 10,000 images, each drawn by one of Amazon’s mechanical turks for a penny.

Networked, But For What?

The goal of this chapter is neither to laud nor condemn network culture and the art of immediated reality but rather to take stock of it, drawing on both historical and theoretical understanding, even if that goes against the grain of network culture.

Under modernism, too much of what started out as oppositional wound up being employed as the latest visual technology for capital. Think of Moholy-Nagy’s trajectory from Constructivism to teaching how to design advertisements and products at a school of design or Gropius’ journey from Communism to corporatism. Worse yet, the oppositional stance of postmodernist art was often cynical, calculated for an art market that valued “resistant” art. It is still unclear what networked art’s broader historical role will be. Sometimes Utopian or critical it, too, is little more than a cheerleader for the technology sector or for the rise of knowledge work. A coherent vision of a socially progressive networked art — or even a socially progressive understanding of network culture — is still lacking. If we are to avoid networked art becoming just so much bling, turning into endless stimuli for our rapt fascination, be it on the Web or in the museum, a new critical perspective on this work is still urgently needed.

* The author wanted to include Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1987 but Richard Prince’s studio turned down our request for reproduction.

Endnotes

[1] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).

[2] If, following Fredric Jameson, the colonization of all parts of life by capital drove the postmodern turn, the colonization of all parts of life by telecommunications, digital technology, and globalization drives the emergence of network culture. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism,” New Left Review 146, (1984): 59-92. On the importance of the network today see and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) and Kazys Varnelis, “Introduction,” The Meaning of Network Culture. A History of the Contemporary, http://varnelis.net/network_culture/introduction.

[3] Kazys Varnelis, “Conclusion. The Meaning of Network Culture” in Varnelis, ed. Networked Publics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 150.

[4] Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[5] Ian P. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 9-34.

[6] In this, modernism can be seen as a subspecies of realism, representing individual interpretation of universal truths more thoroughly than could be done within the strictures of mimesis.

[7] Georg Lukacs, “Realism in the Balance,” in Ronald Taylor, Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Bloch, Lukacs, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno (New York: Verso, 1980), 28-59.

[8] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 289-294. Liu, The Laws of Cool, 14-76.

[9] Generally speaking, where modernism, like realism, still holds out of the promise of a unified subject and a whole sign, postmodernism abandons that.

[10] See Foster, “The Return of the Real” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 127-170 and Whitney Museum of American Art, Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Selections from the Permanent Collection, June 23-August 29, 1993, (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993).

[11] Jameson, 71-73 as well as Hal Foster, “(Post)Modern Polemics”, Recodings (Seattle: The Bay Press, 1985), 121-138.

[12] Michelet writes “Chaque époque rêve la suivante in Avenir! Avenir!, Europe 19 no 73 (January 15, 1929), 6 quoted in Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 97.

[13] Leo Marx “Live History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), 256.

[14] Varnelis, 154. See also Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality. For A New Cultural Critique,” http://www.16beavergroup.org/brian/.

[15] This idea relies on Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulation, but in its very language, the simulation still holds out a premise that it is produced by the media industry for us to occupy indirectly. Immediated reality is produced by everyone, constantly, and the media industry’s influences fades in it, or rather is transformed.

[16] Margriet Schavemaker, Mischa Rakier, eds. Right About Now: Art & Theory since the 1990s, (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007), 9-10.

[17] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005).

[18] A foundational text for theories of beauty in art is Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon. Four Essays on Beauty in Art (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993). It is important to note that to avoid accusations of his definition of beauty being kitsch, Hickey makes it cool by framing it within a discussion of Robert Mappelthorpe’s photography. With Harvey’s guidance (along with that of the likes of Peter Schjeldahl and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe), abject art — from Mappelthorpe to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ to Damien Hirst’s sharks — was reconstructed as beautiful, leaving behind postmodernism for the cool art of the post-critical era. See also Bill Beckley and David Shapiro, eds. Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics. (New York: Allworth Press, 1998). The same is true of decon in architecture. When Bilbao was completed, instead of being seen as decon, it was received as a project to be understood solely in terms of its beauty and the transformational potential of that beauty on cities.

[19] Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern, (London: Tate Publishing, 2009).

[20] Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2003).

[21] Denise Grady, “Cosmetic Breast Enlargements Are Making a Comeback,” the New York Times, July 21, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/21/science/cosmetic-breast-enlargements-are-making-a-comeback.html.

[22] Adrienne Russell, Mimi Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters, “Culture: Media Convergence and Networked Participation,” in Varnelis, Networked Publics, 62-66.

[23] Jordan Crandall, “Showing,” http://jordancrandall.com/showing/index.html.

[24] On surveillance art, see Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohine, and Peter Weibel, CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002).

[25] Sarah Boxer, “When Seeing is Not Always Believing,” http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5D91730F932A25754C0A9639C8B63.

[26] Greg J. Smith, “Burak Arikan Interview” Serial Consign. Digital Culture & Information Design, http://serialconsign.com/node/184.

[27] There are, to be fair, other artists working with code, most notably those, such as Natalie Jeremijenko, who explore it in a critical way, creating a critical version of maker culture. It is a blindness of this essay to not include that sort of work and the original author hopes that an astute reader/editor will add a section on this.

[28] See also Nell Boeschenstein, “I Want You to Want Me,” http://therumpus.net/2009/05/i-want-you-to-want-me/ for an essay embedding the work into the convoluted condition of immediated reality, including her own self-exposure and discomfort with it.

[29] Yunchul Kim, (void) traffic, http://www.khm.de/~tre/void.htm.

[30] http://www.earstudio.com/projects/moveable_type.html

[31] http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/network-maps-energy-diagrams/.

[32] Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema,” http://www.wernerherzog.com/main/de/html/news/Minnesota_Declaration.htm.

[33] Jeremy Rosenberg, “Postcard from L. A.,” Exhibitionist, http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2007/07/postcard_from_l.html.

[34] For the Museum of Jurassic Technology and its deployment of wonder see Ralph Rugoff, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York: Verso, 1995).

[35] Nicholas G. Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 2008).

[36] Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), 87.

[37] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 39-40.

[38] http://www.highdeserttestsites.com/mission.html.

[39] Marina Fokidis, “Random Rules — Artists’ Selections from YouTube,” posted on Networked_Performance, by Jo-Anne Green (March 26, 2009), http://turbulence.org/blog/2009/03/26/random-rules-artists-selections-from-youtube/

[40] See Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

[41] On remix see Edouardo Navas, “Remix Defined,” http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3 and William Gibson, “God’s Little Toys,” Wired 13.07 (2005), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html.

[42] Bourriaud, Postproduction. For Bourriaud, “Postproduction apprehends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the Net.”

[43] Bourriaud, “Public Relations,” interview by Bennett Simpson, ArtForum, (April 2001), 47.

[44] Bourriaud, Postproduction, 17.

[45] Eduardo Navas,”Andy: Meta-dandy,” http://navasse.net/star/navasWarhol.pdf.

[46] By this I mean they tend to be done recently but can be taken from as far back as the early 1960s, when it had become clear that modernization, in its first phase at least, was complete and the idea of “the contemporary” began to emerge. Among the first cultural institutions to recognize this, the Museum of Contemporary Art, was founded in Chicago in 1967. On “the contemporary,” see, for a start, Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 1997), 10-11.

[47] On nostalgia in postmodernism, see Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 67. On allegory see Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” parts 1 and 2, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52-87. On periodization and network culture see Kazys Varnelis, “Network Culture and Periodization,” http://varnelis.net/blog/kazys/network_culture_and_periodization.

[48] Marisa Olson, “Putting the You in YouTube,” Rhizome.org, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2026.

[49] Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2002). See also Claire Bishop, ed. Participation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

[50] Bill Wasik, “My Crowd, Or Phase 5: A Report from the Inventor of the Flash Mob,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2006), 56-66.