M/E/A/N/I/N/G #5 by Nayland Blake
Let’s talk about the sense of dislocation that accompanies so much online experience: the rootlessness, the sense that there is always something else over there beyond the horizon. Ideas and images arrive on my screen with the barest effort on my part. Sites like tumblr immerse me in a flow of pictures that tug at my attention for a moment or two before being quickly supplanted by still more pictures. If I really like something I may right click and save the image to peruse “later,” although that later only rarely arrives. I use tumblr as a source for things I’d like to think about, and I can feel the sad way that this “future thinking” is taking the place of me actually thinking about things. When I meet with students for the first time I often ask them what do you “reread” or in the case of movies rewatch. Increasingly people tell me they don’t do that. When it comes to information online, I don’t do it. Images and words dissolve in my mind like a communion wafer on the palate of a skeptic: here for a second as a reminder and then gone. In this sense online culture turns treasure into something to be waded through, to get done with. The chores of communication, making us all into content pushers.
I was initially asked to contemplate the idea of global spectacle. I don’t think we live in such an age. We no longer have the sustained attention that allows for spectacle to work as a unifying force. Instead we live in a time of flash attention mobs, where memes “go viral” in the twinkling of an eye and the dance of a finger on a button means that thousands of people have supposedly responded to the thing you made. This is the tyranny of the Nielsen rating.
I’ve come to believe that art works are deeply contextual utterances, that much of their conception occurs when the artist is thinking about a specific act for a specific place in concert with a specific group of people. Once the work exists, it may or may not be taken up by all sorts of people in unanticipated ways, but the problem for the maker is not one of anticipating all possible responses, but rather how to understand the meanings that are fighting to the surface in that particular piece of contextual thinking that the artwork embodies. That’s another way of saying I make art to find out what I am thinking about my place in the world at any particular time and as such, knowing that 50 or 5000 people “liked” it is a metric that is useless the next time I try to make something.
The logic that governs online value is the logic of mid-century advertising, where the assumption is that the more eyeballs that see an ad, the more effective it is likely to be. Why else have friend counters in Facebook, numbers of followers on twitter? The earliest personal web pages had visitor counters, as you may remember. The information about the number of people who have seen things is useful to advertisers, but useless for artists, because the quality of those encounters escapes measurement. Art’s value lies in its ability to catalyse change, in the lives of those who make it and encounter it. It is a process that proceeds over time, with repetition and inflection. “Liking,” “+1-ing,” and “retweeting” are not responses, they are convulsions that stand in for an encounter we wish to have. The Me generation has given way to the “me-too” generation.
When the mechanisms of response are so rudimentary, when the metrics of momentary attention trump all other assignations of value, where does that leave us as makers? For many, the internalization of the advertising mindset is complete as they struggle to “manage personal brands” across multiple online forums, or try to drive their numbers up. In part this is because it’s easier, less painful to talk about the amount of something than the often contradictory or ambiguous meanings that happen with each encounter.
The only future of art that I’m interested in lies in the cracks, the spaces between screens, or where our encounter with screens is made once again slow and strange.
