The trajectory from yesterday's various “shrines” on the early net (e.g., Bob, Wedge Antilles, (cough cough) Chuck Norris) to today's memes of the #chans, to my mind, directly instantiates the structural critique of Olia Lialina regd. home pages --> Facebook.

Certainly the shrines were pilgrimage sites rather than a way of life like some of today's sites (cough cough Rhizome). Maybe that's because I actually had to pay for each hour of 14K connection I wasted on the Church of the Subgenius!

Oekaki bulletin boards are one of the purer pleasures of the Internet. The genre's aesthetics call to mind those of 15th & 16th century Mughal miniatures: fineness of detail, order, steadiness of line, microcosm, compartmentalization, ...

Vijay

An Example of Masquerade vs. Bathroom Wall Anonymities:

Consider the art of "Pedobear," a meme on #channish imageboards, vs. Mouchette. Both pieces deal with the dark side of the Internet, the a medium of pedophilia, child pornography, and predation. But they deal with these taboo topics in different ways, and I think part of the difference is the instrument of anonymity used in each.



The art of Pedobear uses the bathroom wall style anonymity of imageboards to make a series of one-shot funnies that neutralize nervousness with laughter, deadening emotion a la Bergson.



The artist(s?) behind Mouchette, on the other hand, constructs an online persona that moves about the Internet like we do, writing web sites, writing us personal emails (creepy!), and so on: s/he is an entity on par with us in the Internet masquerade. Mouchette always provokes nervousness.

Now, I'm not sure if the power to create emotional response comes with being more of a person (i.e., if you stay anonymous, staying at least at the masquerade degree of anonymity), whereas the power to deaden emotion comes with being less of a person, or at least less of a need to be a person (i.e., scrawling funnies on a bathroom wall), but it's a thought...

It would be interesting to see more critical exercises in delineating types or kinds of anonymity, and their various powers and weaknesses in different contexts.

Vijay

Within the constraints of masquerade anonymity, a genre of corporate epigram has come to define certain strata of Rhizome. In the art of MANIK, D42Kandinskij, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, et al., we find (at least supposed) collectives emitting wit, brio, and angst in the form of epigram, a form which, folk wit notwithstanding, had often been associated with the concentrated, pyrotechnic effusions from individuals of genius: the Martials, Callimachi, Nietzsches, Jouberts, Bodhidharmas, Tzus, Holmeses, Berras .... Bon mots condensed a life well lived.

With the rise of modern mass-marketing, the genre of epigram has really been taken over by the corporate slogan, which enters everyone's lives along comparably diffuse trajectories. For example, I am as accustomed to encountering “Just Do It” in a conversation in a Dallas bar as on a knockoff T-shirt on a Mumbai street.

These slogans are carefully engineered not by individuals as much as by groups: art and marketing departments and firms.

Memes can be seen as a variation on this theme. Many, if not all of the more successful memes have a bit of text, some kind of jingle or textual handle on a defining image, like “I can has cheezburger?” or “Shoop Da Whoop.” These are corporate manufacture, too, in the sense of a group of people crafting the mantra.

What the groups MANIK, D42Kandinskij, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, et al. do, on the other hand, is to bring it full circle, to make the epigram personal again. The unity of these collectives brings a piquant irony to the table when they eviscerate foolish consistencies of corporation-style corporate slogans (the power of the logo is that it never changes), bringing jingles back to something like epigram, a talent prized in 5th century (B.C.E.) Greece, 18th century England, etc.

Historically, maybe the evolution looks something like:

proverb(folk) --> epigram(individual) --> jingle(corporate person(=folk&individual)) --> corporate epigram((corporate person(=folk&individual))


Vijay

The masquerade differs from the bathroom wall not only formally but also dynamically, following, respectively, Michel de Certeau’s differentiation between “strategy” and “tactics”:

“I call a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’ A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thereby distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clienteles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.

“I call a ‘tactic,’ on the other hand, a calculus which cannot but count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of the tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’ Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are able to combine heterogeneous elements (thus, in the supermarket, the housewife confronts heterogeneous and mobile data—what she has in the refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and possible combinations with what she already has on hand at home, etc.); the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form, however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner in which the opportunity is ‘seized.’

“Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many ‘ways of operating’: victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’ (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. The Greeks called these ‘ways of operating’ metis. But they go much further back, to the immemorial intelligence displayed in the tricks and imitations of plants and fishes. From the depths of the ocean to the streets of modern megalopolises, there is a continuity and permanence to these tactics.

“In our societies, as local stabilities break down, it is as if, no longer fixed by a circumscribed continuity, tactics wander out of orbit, making consumers into immigrants in a system too vast to be their own, too tightly woven for them to escape from it. But these tactics introduce a Brownian movement into the system. They also show the extent to which intelligence is inseparable from the everyday struggles and pleasures that it articulates. Strategies, in contrast, conceal beneath objective calculations their connection with the power that sustains them from within the stronghold of its own ‘proper’ place or institution.”

(The Practice of Everyday Life, xix-xx)


1.
Strategy requires own-ership (propre) of space in addition to time—it is webspace that the masquerade artist employs, in a variously linked relationship with its contextual circuit of other web sites, entities, feeds, posts, links, etc.

The bathroom wall artist, on the other hand, has no space other than what she comes across on the fly, nor any materials save what she scavenges up.


2.
Strategy orchestrates a mode of production, “writing.” Strong position. Producers.

Tactics represent a mode of (albeit productive) “reading.” Weak position. Consumers.

...

Imageboard art is forged of the raw material of pop culture symbols (Chuck Norris, cats, anime, Jean-Luc Picard, etc.). The artist on these imageboards follows much of the same impulses as the “smart shopper”:

“…in the supermarket, the $housewife (ARTIST) confronts heterogeneous and mobile @data (.GIF, .SWF, .PSD, etc.)—what she has in the $refrigerator (HARD DRIVE), the @tastes, @appetites, and @moods of her @guests (CHOICE OF THE BOARD, TONE OF THE THREAD, THE LOCAL BALANCE OF GIFT ECONOMY INCENTIVES, etc.), the best @buys and possible @combinations with what she already has on hand at home (PHOTOSHOP BRICOLAGE)…”

3.
The distinction between strategic and tactical action prima facie suggests itself to that venerable distinction between bourgeois and proletariat. The bourgeoisie owns proper-ty with which to produce, whereas the proletariat can use only time, not the richly productive free time citizens would have in Plato’s unicorns-and-rainbows-Polis, but a fugitive time Dedekind-cutting its way into work (for all the world art is little more than the footprint of a worker’s failure of nerve). As I think Gramsci put it, the free time of some is bought at the expense of the lifetime of others.

Yet I do not want to read historical-materialist categories into the distinction, since webspace is free, and so, crucially, one’s “class” as a net artist is really a free choice. That is to say, historical momentum, at least formally, figures into that decision very little. That evaporates much of the social, philosophical, and/or material weight we associate with class dynamics, and so those categories may not be worth much here.


Vijay

Here's why that embeddded youtube video makes sense: It's from the 90s (not 80s!) and as you can see it has the same euphoria about technology as the net art of that time. The reason why it looks "bad" today is the same reason why 90s net.art looks "bad" today (even though you're right that "bad" turned into awesome)