Internet as playful business : interactive hypertext in net.art by Camille Paloque-Bergès, Université Paris 8, Paragraphe/CITU

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love.1 The “Internet as (f***ing) serious business” is an expression forged by Web subcultures to pinpoint the producers or users who make a fuss about having “things” stolen or their persona mocked on the personal and public spaces of the Internet. The years 2000 have seen an increase in Flash-based and other type of interfaces where it’s hard to copypaste or access the code, especially on commercial or institutional websites, and the debate on users’ privacy is raging. It seems that serious business is serious, and a lot of Internet experts would like to see the Internet less permeable to information moving around. Parallely, interactivity is a word often used to describe closed systems where a user triggers the machine’s reaction, but in the end, does not really care in the input and the output - this blackbox logic is fairly recurrent in the digital arts installation in the technology-friendly museums. A general disintest for content is the sign that the forms of interactivity remains aloof: the user doesn’t speak the machine language and does not create something of his own out of it, and does not leave any trace further than a record of his presence in front of it at some point in time. For artists frustrated with this reductive view of interactivity, the Internet has been a way to experiment further on, and especially its “gray areas”2 where code and interface are playable to any extent, and never serious. Tom Moody, an artist active in the net.art blogosphere, suggests: “The Internet is interactive; the viewer can learn any program, get educated on any subject, over time, sitting in a comfy chair. A visit to a gallery, though, places physical and temporal limits on what the viewer can take away3 .” We would like to put an emphasis on the idea that interactivity is meaningless if the interaction doesn’t allow the two parties at play to “take away” something, literally speaking - to move data around and by doing so, modifying the forms and content of the whole: Internet stuff is interactive. This essay shows how Internet stuff is made of interactivity because its matter is made of code showing on the surface in specific places: via the primary layer of user interface, hypertext, one is able to move things around (parties and whole). Two virtual properties of the stuff should be noted here: it acts as a informational conductor (like energy conductor) and it allows at every moment user’s intervention, because code comes through, even if not immediatly visible.

1

“Even Boring Blogs Are Things of Beauty In Some Artists' Eyes”, By Andrew Lavallee, 12/19/2007, The Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119801764162437835.html [All websites checked on August 29th, 2008]. 2

I am borrowing this expression from the web ring / award giving website Grayarea.com which is a good example, in terms of lowtech design and sub-culture orientation, of the cybercultural interactivity that is going to be analyzed in this paper [http://www.grayarea.com/gray2.htm] 3

Tom Moody, « Geeks in the Gallery », interview on the ArtFagCity blog, 06/13/2006 [http://www.artfagcity.com/2006/06/13/geeks-in-the-gallery-an-interview-with-artists-tom-moody-and-michael-bell-smith-part-two-o f-three/]

We chose to take a community of young net.artists gathered around a blog named nastynets.com as a prime example. First, because we were invited to participate in this community, and thus to observe it from within. Second, because the blog, opened in 2006 and closed in 2007, was the start of a buzz in the American Internet Art world, via the Rhizome discussion boards and a group of art-related blogs - a sign of its belonging to the art fashion of avant-gardes as much as of its familiarity to the Internet creative fads and microfame logic4. Third because the status of artblog gives the group’s activities a specific position in relation to the manipulation of Internet cultural and digital codes. Pierre Bourdieu warns very justifiably: “Mentioning code when talking about code is the archetypal fallacy: putting in people’s mind one studies what one should have in one’s mind to understand what these people are doing”5. In this situation though, we witness a group that performs according to the rules of “people’s art” - Internet popular, or vernacular art - when artists have traditionally positioned themselves askew on popular culture. This will raise the question of how aesthetical judgment is formed on the networks of information - question that we will answer only partially. Throughout this essay, we’ll try to define how the Internet stuff is made of a documediated matter, implying a gift economy that the net.artists are playing right into (in all meanings of the term play). Then we’ll try to show how hypertext allows for this documediatisation by playing with invariants and variations, to the advantage of an evolutionary, or memetic, model of information.

1. The stuff of the web: an environment of documediatisation A quick reminder on how Internet redefines information exchange. Theodor Nelson envisioned the network, in the context of the Xanadu project, precursor to the Internet, as an interlinkage of documents. Further on, the first experiments on social software, first known as “groupware” as designed by the Xerox PARC teams, made clear that network activity was all about the coming together of people through a software-mediated manipulation of documents. The collective reality of network sociability is the encounter of users in exchanging and making “stuff” via linking and coding (be it direct or indirect, via interface). Steven Johnson’s seminal essay on the culture of interface insists on the interlinking as giving cultural content to the Internet in the WWW context: “The Web should be a way of seeing new relationships, connecting things that might have otherwise been kept separatly. Clicking on other people's links may be less passive than the old, sedentary habit of channel surfing, but until users can create their own threads of association, there will be few genuine trailblazers on the Net.”6 The reference to “trailblazing”, borrowed from Vannevar Bush’s visionary proposals, defines the interactivity of hypertext through the appropriation of an information space that is starting to be defined as a growingly complex environment. The Memex is thought of as a dataspace that is less an environment than a territory to be explored, a technology enhanced encyclopedia. The Internet operates a shift as territory as a whole is mutating when all its parts become subject to change: there is not 4

defined by journalist Rex Sorgatz as “a new class of celebrity (in which) the lines between empowerment and self-promotion, between sharing and oversharing, between community and cliques, can be blurry.” (in “The Microfame Game”, NYMag.com, 06/17/ 2008). Here, we recycle this definition by emphasizing the quality of indistinctness and permeability that characterizes any creative environment on the Internet according to us. 5

Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus, code, et codification”, in Annales de la recherche en science sociale, septembre 1986, p.41 [my translation] 6

Steven Jonhson, Interface Culture, Basic Books, 1997, p.123

only one user exploring and taking away the data but many users exploring, changing, and passing along the material of stuff. Stuff can be considered as an approximative name for the digital matter as its content and form constantly change due to its being manipulated by networked users. The term “trailblaze”, cherished by Johnson after Bush, eventually loses its strength in the context of serendipity that is opened by networked informational use.7 A better implementation of Johnson’s vision in the Web 2.0 context might be the folksonomies, such as Del.icio.us or Flickr, where the idea of docu-mediated communities via recording, renaming and relinking practice is highly developed. The stuff of the web may be defined as an hybrid material, as much document as hypertext, which frontier is evolutive and dynamic. Early examples are the first BBS communities and web-rings, where the interlinking allows for the emergence of social relationships through collectively shared documents. Researcher Manuel Zacklad has coined the term “docu-mediated communities”: a social group formed through the “ackowledgment of possessing and exchanging documents”8 . The best expression of this being the hobbyists of the digital age: the interlinking of documents with a common theme is not only passive (access, reading) but also active (re-linking, downloading, modifying), as have argued the theorists of cultural and new media studies: from “prosumers” (Alvin Toffler), to “proAms” (Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller) and further on, “produsers” (Axel Bruns).9 Here, any account of the system of signs at play cannot be complete without and understanding a series of economic preconceptions such as the gift economy in the context of networks.

2. “Hippy gift economy”: surfing on the Social Web The formation of the collective blog Nasty Nets, which has given a name to the genre of “surfblogs”, is due to an encounter of 1990’s net.art avant-garde exploration of the Web, Internet sub-culture and hobbyism as the new dynamics of the Social Web. A first generation of net.artists, based in Eastern Europe and represented by Alexei Shulgin, Vuk Cosic and Olia Lialina, was the main influence of the new net.artists. They can be considered as pioneers in interactive practice of hypertext. They are the first art collectors of network folklore, in terms of content, forms and object, devoting a cult to the Internet early iconography such as ASCII art10 and other types of coded visuals invented out of technical limitations (such as bandwidth shortage) and vernacular design experimentation, such as animated gifs, background patterns and improbable use of html tags 11. But more importantly, they have built a network of trust (each website becoming a platform for a new kind of web art curating) and distrust (playing with the semantics of

7

cf. Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, O’Reilly Media, 2005

8

Zacklad, M., 2007. “Réseaux et communautés d’imaginaire documédiatisées”, in Skare, R., Lund, W. L., Varheim, A., A Document (Re)turn, Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 279-297 9 Alvin

Toffler, The Third Wave, 1980 ; Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society, 2004 ; Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond, From Production to Produsage, 2008. 10

The ASCII Art Ensemble, featuring Vuk Cosic, Walter van der Cruijsen and Luka Frelih [http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/aae.html] 11

for instance, Metablink by Vuk Cosic [http://www.ljudmila.org/%7Evuk/metablink/metablin.htm], Some Universe by Olia Lialina [http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/stellastar/poehali.html#onskazal], Form Art Competition [http://www.c3.hu/collection/form] by Alexei Shulgin.

commercial website URLs, such as in Shulgin’s work12) that works as an evolving history of the Web - it is interesting to browse through the net.art ressources and find the dead links and the changes in overall design. Olia Lialina, now a teacher in Germany, made this heritage official when she joined the ranks of the second generation of net.artists, of American breed. Other computer art tutorial figures are Cory Arcangel, inheriting from the generation of 90’s hacker artists such as JODI, or the group Paper Rad, both diving into Web vernacular and entertainment culture. Arcangel has been performing in public with a computer screen, and building an interesting online presence with his blog, his Friendster account (and “Friendster’s suicide”13 ), and, more importantly, his del.icio.us account. According to Robert Wodzinsky (alias “jpegmess”), the founders of Nasty Nets (NN) met when a group of followers of Arcangel’s del.icio.us bookmarks found a common interest in displaying the weird things they had found on the Web and started to follow each others’ bookmarks as well as each others’ “network”14 . After several events such as “The Year in the Internet”15 , NN was founded in 2006 by Guthrie Lonergan, John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, with the support Marisa Olson (then curator at the Rhizome foundation) as an invitation-based collective blog, quickly expanding to ten members by early 200716, and ending in December 2007 with 25 “users”17 . Myself, I was approched in Fall 2007, after a two years loose interblog exchange with Tom Moody, an active member of NN, and the start of a tumblelog18 where I was posting pictures of Internet folklore that the original “Nasty Netters” thought could be a good addition to their club. The genre of art surfblogs have had since then a good fortune, along with the emergence into mainstream culture of the “gray areas” of the net, thanks to the Web 2.0 infoware success of websites such Myspace and Youtube that allow the quick modification and republication of any cultural content, or bookmarking and rating sites such as Digg, Buzzfeed, del.icio.us, that have helped expanding the popularity of subcultures and raised them into Web entertainment 19. From this quick contextualization, we can specify two major directions the net.artists have followed in Internet cyberculture: the economy of things (the growing population of hobbyists among the sub-cultures on the Web), embodied by informational objects (content and form) that are collected and shared in most of web communities, and the economy of people (triumphant in the Web 2.0’s fashion), embodied in the usage of applications, information processing and communication networks.

12

for instance, Blah-blah sites (1995), LinkX, ABC or IBM (1997) [http://www.easylife.org/]

13

Performed at PS1, New York, NY, in 2006.

14 A “network”

is composed of the users’ which bookmark collection you have subscribed too as well as users who subscribe to

yours. 15

Organized by Arcangel and Michael Bell-Smith in 2005 [http://www.burncopy.com/bestoftheweb.html] or [http://delicious.com/tag/bestof05] 16

As of January 2007, as accounted in the “Porfessional Surfer” exhibition organized by Rhizome, in which Nasty Nets is featured [http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/professionalsurfer.php] 17

cf. Nasty Nets’ “users” page - the emphasis on the term “user” instead of “members” is of significance for the rest of the argument here [http://nastynets.com/?page_id=27] 18 19

cpb.tumblr.com, since March 2007.

The Lolcats, started on the then obscure forums of 4chan.org, are the best example of the gray areas of the net joining the ranks of mainstream culture.

Following the first lead, we can relate the net.artists’ practices to “fandom”, as described by Henry Jenkins in regard to a number of subcultural environements such as gamers or followers of entertainment cults. Indeed, NN was born when a few different artists found a common interest for Internet-related topics and forms (with special attention given to the “gray areas”, or “nasty” sides of the Net) and decided to start a collective blog to document their findings while surfing the Web. The fact that the collection of Web trivia is also considered as a form of art and/or curating process through recontextualizing and representing the Internet - is not so much an aesthetical breakthrough (let’s think about the early 20th avant-garde and the history of readymade) than its evolution in the age of network but also a strong feature of fandom considered as an “an interpretive and creative community actively appropriating the content of [a media] for its own pleasures.”20 However, following this lead might not help to understand how these communities are specific, partly because the redescriptions of fan cultures by the academia tends to redundancy 21. Elaborating on the idea of “historical audience” (Jenkins) seems to be a given of fan and net.art communities, a theme that does not need to be discussed so much as to be represented. Olia Lialina’s “Vernacular Web”, and more recently the series of visual essays featured by Paddy Johnson on ArtFagCity22, testify well enough of this. It might be better to follow the second direction, so as to understand the proportions of the sociotechnical evolution of dealing with content on networks. Talking about an economy of people on the Web is first of all dealing with the idea that any online application is user-oriented, in terms of the individual’s relationship to interface as well as of the group’s interactions via online applications. Tim O’Reilly appropriately coined the term “infoware” in the late 90’s, predicting what was to become prevalent in Web everyday use: “The secret is that computers have come one step closer to the way that people communicate with each other [...] The "actions" in an infoware product are generally fairly simple: make a choice, buy or sell, enter a small amount of data, and get back a customized result. These actions are often accomplished by scripts attached to a hypertext link using an interface specification called CGI (the Common Gateway Interface).”23 One of the Nasty Nets first rallying cry was Guthrie Lonergan’s witty comparative table of the first and second generation of net.art. In this table, “default” manipulation comes as a new alternative for “hacker” influenced art, and as such, denotes a shift in Web usage that concerns not only artists but also the average net user which ideal model has changed from the hacker practice (techno savvy) to the non-expert (but Internet savvy) characterized by what Lonergan calls a “semi-naive, regular use of technology”24. In fact, default aesthetics opposes the so called independant artworld economy and its expensive white wall curatorial processes, more than it opposes the hacker aesthetics. Comparatively to hacker ethics, it follows the same DIY and make-do practice, but instead of “sophisticated 20

Jenkins’ notion of “fan” applies to appropriation of the “content of television” specifically, but we took the liberty to use this deifnition for any type of media consumption, in our case a group belonging to the networked subculture of Internet heavy consumers”, in “Media Consumption” on Jenkins’ homepage [http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/consume.html] 21

This has been the main criticism encountered by Jenkins’s fan studies, as Rochelle Mazar observes in her blog Random Mazar Access, “Henry Jenkins and Fan Culture”, 10/07/2007 [http://www.mazar.ca/2007/10/20/henry-jenkins-and-fan-culture] 22

Tom Moody, “IMG MGMT: Psychotronic GIFs”, 08/05/2008 [http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/08/05/img-mgmt-psychotronic-gifs/] 23

Tim O’Reilly, “Hardware, Software, and Infoware” in (collective), Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, O’Reilly, 1999 24

Guthrie Lonergan, “Hacking vrs. defaults chart”, 1/10/2007 [http://guthguth.blogspot.com/2007/01/hacking-defaults-hacking-nintendo.html]

breaking of technology” (as Lonergan describes the 90’s net.art of groups like JODI), it operates by small touches, often using and diverting the infoware CGI but not hijacking them with the help of virus or complicated code performances. Recently, Nasty Netter Tom Moody summed up the logic of this new form of collective publication: “The group blogs similarly intervene into the largely unapprehended Net in an active, quasi-architectural way. Not through dismantling the code but through cogent choices and alterations of subject matter from the great ‘out there.’”25 This takes several forms twisting in unexpected ways the gift economy of the web 2.0 years. A quick look at the Nasty Nets page will shown how the use of a classic blog template, blue links on a white page, plain sidebar, times new roman font, is a hommage to the non-expert design of the “regular user” - but also a statement on the everyday economy of web design. Lonergan, again, in his blog, celebrated the fact that his expenses for 2007 were less than $40, expenses among which webhosting was significant26. Once again, artworld-economy-bashing apart, this testifies of a will to join the ranks of the regular user, short on money, and dedicated to the non-profit activity of hobbyism. The extensive use of web services to host their images, videos and links is an obvious step into the web 2.0 economy, and allows for easy redistribution of the ressources, as Marisa Olson’s “Free Gift Economy” set on her Flickr account shows27. But beyond the simplicity of an informational stock free market, the Nasty Netters recollect more than merely collect, so as to make dyamic paintings of Web culture as visual recontextualizing of cyberculture, such as in Robert Wodsinsky’s Hippy Gift Economy, playing with blogspot templates and stocks of web images 28, or Lonergan’s montage of similar ressources on his website29. To that effect, the programming of a simple applet named pic see ! by John Michael Boling30 , is highly useful for visualizing databases of images, as well as playing with the habits of the image-obsessed, peeping tom Internet user. Recollecting and recontextualizing would be dead letter without attention paid to the coded nature of their appropriation, recombination and republication - the “stuff”. Not so much a exercice in deconstruction style, which would be the obvious post-modernist conclusion, than a quest of balance between “hackability and usability”, to borrow from Jean Burgess’s analysis of the “convergence of user-generated content and social software to produce hybrid spaces, examples of which are sometimes described as ‘social media’”31. A strong emphasis on self-reference, as illustrated by Lonergan’s del.icio.us bookmarks bookmarked with del.icio.us, or his search for “Artists looking at the camera” in the Getty Image database, is the first step into allowing representation into the folds of the code - “default” style, without any code breaking. The second step is to play with the default

25

Tom Moody, “More on Net Concrète”, 8/14/2008 [http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2008/08/14/more-on-net-concrete/]

26

Guthrie Lonergan : "Total artwork related expenses income", 3/26/2007 [http://guthguth.blogspot.com/2007/03/total-artwork-related-expensesincome.html] 27

Marisa Olson, “Free Gift Economy” set on Flickr [http://flickr.com/photos/marisaolson/sets/72157601010781424/]

28

Robert Zodwinsky, Hippy Gift Economy [http://hippygifteconomy.blogspot.com/]

29

Guthrie Lonergan [http://theageofmammals.com/]

30

John Michael Boling, “pic-see !”, 9/5/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=902]

31

Jean Burgess, Vernacular Creativity and New Media, PHD dissertation, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, 2007

parameters of hypertext, such as in Lonergan’s Youtube video embedded in a Youtube video32. Selfreference leads us right into code.

3. Interactive hypertext as a locus of digital code The idea of interactive hypertext is based on html tags () and custom manipulation via the attributes (, , , etc.). For instance, the tag is the mascot of NN, and its recurrent use on the blog might be an element of its identity 33. What the Nasty Netters turn into an “artform” happens to be an everyday basic manipulation of information on the Web, a new form of language. If the social sciences have analyzed the objects of exchange (P2P, Torrents or Open Source communities for instance) or the new vocabularies (netspeak, chat jargon) in the hobbyist cultures, little attention has been paid to how Internet-savvy users practically handle information on the Web, which provides a larger background for all other sub-cultural particularities. Looking into the most basic structures of hypertext coding, one can find the fundamental level on which cyberculture is built, what turns digital matter into “stuff”. Copypasting, hotlinking and applet tricks are three good examples of this. We argue here that these shifty hypertext manipulations are interactive in the sense that they apprehend interface as a porous surface through which code can be manipulated, even in the slightest ways - the interactivity taking place in an interval between usability and hackability - and thus “stuff” moved around. The way NN insert itself in this interval is representative of the anti-”Internet is a serious business” popular in the Web subcultures. Hotlinking as a way of wittily diverting ressources, for example, is a recurrent topic of this play, as featured in Joel Holmberg’s “hotlinking some dot gov favicons (you are stealing bandwidth from the united states of america)”34 . Or, for self-reference, recollecting the hotlinking safeguards themselves, as a way to “own” the Internet, as in Paul B. Davis’ “Blog pwn3d by ImageShack”, or PJ Baldes’ “No Hotlinking please”35, a listing of “condemnatory messages [showing] in place of the expected image or media clip”36 . To be “owned”, also frequently spelled “pwned” or “pwn3d”, is to be played on the Internet, the best “ownage” being usually performed by script kiddies knowing all the treats or tricks of online applications and their default tools: the embedding of an unexpected image, a pointer saying it links to one place but links to another (“Rickrolling”!), etc. PJ Baldes comments on his own post and the multiple forms of playing with the default ways of hypertext: “Im [sic] stuck on this ‘web as material/non material’ thought exercise. Spacer gifs exist to not exist, finding the 404, linking to the unlinkable. Paradox. Irony. It’s really basic/elemental stuff…about code and servers and people and practices.” This “basic” level of hypertext interplays forms the elementary level of an Internet language. Irony, the most widespread expression of Internet subcultures, is not so much a tone than a feature of hypertext writing, based on its paradoxical nature of being always hidden just below the interface level, but never black boxed. Says Steven Johnson in Interface Culture, whose analysis of Suck.com is one of the 32

Lonergan’s del.icio.us account [http://delicious.com/guthrie/delicious], “GettyImages video search: “artist looking at camera””, 11/ 12/2006 [http://nastynets.com/?p=301] ; “2001 2006”, 1/29/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=412] 33

In the member section of the blog, the tag howto is only tutorial under the “Technical Help” category [http://www.draac.com/marquee.html]. Cf. also the Halloween prank, a highlight in the use of marquee tags associated with a java applet, documented by Marisa Olson in the “Halloween” post on NN, 10/31/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=1189] 34

On NN, 4/1/2008 [http://nastynets.com/?p=1464] - part of the 2008 April Fool’s resurrection of NN.

35

On NN, Paul B. Davis, 12/5/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=1334] and PJ Baldes, 11/3/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=1211].

36

“Inline Linking”, Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking].

most relevant in Internet studies: “The links were a way of cracking the code of the sentences; the more you kew about the site on the other side of the link, the more meaningful the sentence became. [Suck.com writers are] adding another dimension to the language by using links like squarequote; self-referentiality as the easiest code of the suck language.” Internet language as “a way to string information”37. Hypertext can thus be considered as a new grammar that is highly hybrid in nature not only because formed of words and code but also because speaking through media objects as well. We can now come up with a better definition of hypertext as an interactive medium of expression. Hypertext is closely associated with a context of documediatisation, implying that how informational documents become media is a key to understand Internet as social media. Talking about media necessarily implies evoking the act of mediation (how the document is created on the networks) as well as the result of becoming media (i.e. rendered public via the use of technologies). Our definition does not separate these two levels because hypertext, in terms of usage, is showing through interface, which itself is porous in nature. This peculiar showing is not the representation of text and image on two-dimensional surface of the webpage but the expression, via hypertext writing, of a code that can be manipulated as language. This showing becomes literal in such occasions as in the invitations to copypaste and embed codes in services such as Flickr, Youtube, Photobucket, and a myriad of less reknown media hosting services - think of the “Embed this video/image/gif” function associated with Web 2.0 infoware. The idea of interactive hypertext as the making of documents via mediatisation implies 1/ a potential access to the codes, 2/ the manipulation of the code even through interface use, 3/ the republication and transformation of documents via this manipulation. For illustration purpose, we can use the metaphor of a locus and its variants the allele, borrowed from the vocabulary of genetics. A locus is what what gives the coordinates of a specific piece of code, more specifically a “gene map [that] describes where a gene can be found on a chromosome”. By nature, it is invariant, but variants can be associated to it (alleles). I would like to point out that the tag elements, in the html language, performs the function of loci, as they map out the characteristics of a document. But associated with them are the attributes, by definition variable. One can modify the locus and allele without touching the code directly but playing with the default tools of an application. The combination of invariants and variants define the identity of a user or a group of users - what Nasty Netter and professional surfer Travis Hallenbeck once called the “style”38. See for instance, John Michael Boling’ searching for alternative NN Surfing Club’s domain names and commenting: “a journey to nasty”39 , or the idiosyncratic use of an online applet by Joel Holmberg40 . A simple screenshot and republication of an image / copypasting of a link or text, or several Youtube videos embedded next to one another, or a montage of several media objects borrowed from various sources: all these figures of hypertext interactivity take part in the variation of invariants in Internet language. We are using this genetic metaphor also because it is a bridge to memetic theory, as the application of the theory of evolution and genes, considered as replicators, to cultural matter, in which replica37

Steven Johnson, op.cit., pp.134-136

38

originally in a NN blog thread, but exact source is lost.

39

jmb, “What might have been...”, 11/12/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=1250]

40

Joel Holmberg, “All of the phony names from spam emails that I have received this month as a rockyou textpix slideshow”, 11/13/ 2006 [http://nastynets.com/?p=302]

tors are called “memes”. Says Liana Gabora, in “Meme and Variations”: “Each component of a meme is referred to as a locus, and alternative forms of a locus are referred to as alleles. The processes that generate variation -- the cultural counterparts to mutation and recombination -- are referred to as operators. Forward mutation is mutation away from the initial or wild type allele, and backmutation is mutation from an alternative form back to wild type. Changes in the relative frequencies of different alleles due to random sampling processes in a finite population are referred to as drift”41 . It seems interesting to envision cyberculture in terms of information patterns that can generate variations thought as exploration of the possibilities of a space and in time. To quote John Michael Boling again, interactive hypertext operate a “journey through nasty” in which you take something from an information pool and give it back modified. And the spatio-temporal features of this journey is subject to change, as formally shown in Petra Cortright posting of “Webring.org” outdated icons 42. “Memes often appear to be stored in a distributed, network-like fashion, connected through webs of association [...] there is not necessarily a definitive rationale for saying where one stops and another begins, in semantic space [as well as] in physical space.”43 A drift is the result of a propagation combined to a variation. Internet has recently been claimed “one of the most fertile vectors in memetic history [...] due to its unique properties as an information medium, extremely well-suited to meme propagation.” But its “interactive nature” presented as a determinant factor, is reduced to the reductive definition of a “simple, direct communication between users”44, without any explanation of the socio-technical tools for information propagation. Wikipedia has a good definition of Internet memes: “the propagation of a digital file or hyperlink from one person to others using methods available through the Internet (for example, email, blogs, social networking sites, instant messaging, etc.) [and which] may stay the same or may evolve over time, by chance or through commentary, imitations, and parody versions, or even by collecting news accounts about itself.”45 The emphasis on the “methods available” does not mean that techno-determinism should take over cybercultural studies, but that a focus on the “savvyness” of users might help understand better new social structures. The appropriation of the word “meme” by Internet cultures is not only a vulgarisation problem, as some memeticians like to think, but the emergence into Internet jargon of hypertext interactivity. The drifts of “macros”, which are images with superimposed text, a self-referent structure that calls for variation and propagation, from the forums of 4chan.org to the mainstream channels are pretty eloquent46. The NN group once again provides a good example of how the potential of memes, beyond a mere updating of the ancient word-to-mouth phenomenon, resides in the way hypertext is interactive, i.e.

41

Liana Gabora, “Meme and Variations”, in (L. Nadel and D. L. Stein, eds.), Lectures in Complex Systems, Addison Wesley, 1995

42

Petra Cortright, 8/6/2007 [http://nastynets.com/?p=811#comments]

43

Liane Gabora, “The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity”, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 1, 1997 44

No author, on the website Replicators, Evolutionary Powerhouse, 2000 [http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/ce7.shtml]

45

“Internet Meme”, Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme]

46

cf. Macrochan.org for a daily collection and a pool for spreading Intenet memes born on the *Chan forums (a web ring of teenage / Web culture communities).

allows users to take aways something and give it back altered. Not only because NN, as a surfblog, directly digs out objects from the Internet culture, but also because it creates some itself. Michael Bell-Smith’s project, “Digital Pogs”, turned the making and spreading of animated gifs made in the fashion of kids’s exchange game pogs into a collective art entreprise47. Similarly, Olia Lialina and Tom Moody have sustained a long-term fascination for involuntary memes out of their body of work. Olia Lialina documented the journey of her persona as an animated gif model from obscure Russian gif hosting websites to forum and social network pages48. Tom Moody found his visual piece OptiDisc (Fragment) on various places such as Myspace where users had made it their background49. In a recent email, Tom Moody was indicating how a gif found by myself on a Yoga website, blogged on my tumblelog, and reblogged by Moody, had finally found its way back to another Yoga-related page - hotlinking from Moody’s blog. What should be noted here is that memetic objects, in usage, do not rely on systematic patterns 50 and their journey can take surprising turns, which can be documented via the searching for files names, extensions, of inlinks/backlinks, but also can be lost if the informational object is altered, renamed, and disconnected from its source - in which case the object either takes a life on its own or ends its journey lost in informational overload. Memeticians defend the idea that memes are parasites of users, but they do not contain ther own instructions for replication : “They rely on the pattern-evolving machinery of their hosts' brains to create, select, and replicate them.”51 Says Guthrie Lonergan in an interview, “I think a lot of these artists are going in subtly different directions, though we share an interest in what the Internet has done to us, how it affects culture and consciousness-- often the art is much more about people than about technology, which is great, because I feel like this is where most media art gets tripped up...”.52

As a conclusion, while exploring the informational patterns of online culture creativity, what have we learned in terms of aesthetics in the age of Internet ? The works of these net.artists deal with “creative literacy”, which “describes the ability to create and manipulate multimedia content in ways that that serve vernacular interests and enable relatively autonomous cultural participation, including playful participation not predominantly structured around ‘information’ exchange or formal education outcomes.”53 It would be convenient to say that this literacy has to do with cultural intepretation and criticism, the NN artists then taking part in the quest of contemporary art. Contemporary currents in digital arts have pointed out that the technical and the social converge in interactive mode. This is the main stance of relational aesthetics, defined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud as a decryption of social relationships. The poetics of Software art, as promoted by Matthew 47

Michael Bell-Smith, MIKE'S DIGITAL POG PAGE [http://mikesdigitalpogpage.com/]

48

Olia Lialina, “Animated Gif Model”, on art.teleportacia [http://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/AGM/]

49 As

documented by Paddy Johnson on the ArtFagCity blog, “In Our Masthead: Tom Moody”, 02/12/2008 [http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/02/12/in-our-masthead-tom-moody/] 50 As

discussed by Gary Marshall, in “Internet and Memetics”, memes at the user level is, compared to the operational and service levels (protocol and agents), more complex, and a “a full-blown memetic system”; in Symposium on Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 15th International Congress on Cybernetics, Namur (Belgium), August 24-28, 1998 [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Conf/MemePap/Marshall.html] 51

Gabora, 1997, op.cit.

52

Guthrie Lonergan interviewed by Thomas Beard on 03/26/2008 [http://rhizome.org/editorial/5], my emphasis.

53

Jean Burgess, op.cit.

Fuller for instance, insists on the fact that, in the age of networked knowledge, the artist enters an “interactive competition” : his “skills” in digital information processing become a crucial tool for interpreting culture and criticizing the abuse of cognitive capitalism (Fuller borrows from Paolo Virno)54. An interpretive model is here prevalent: the artist operates a “service of art” that intervenes on the “useless utilities” of immaterial knowledge and gives them a new and critical meaning55 , just like a consultant in (cyber)cultural economy. Juan Martín Prada summarizes this cultural program in what he calls “net art 2.0” : “Through the most interesting artistic proposals an attempt, at least, would be made at a poetic reconfiguration of the social interactions of the connected collectives. [...] one of the major commitments of the best artistic creations in the context of Web 2.0 would be to design new paths for taking the interpretive experience model inherent to artistic practices to the field of social and communicative interaction [via] an ecological recomposition of communication”56 . Although this description of a new information environment sounds about right, the logic behind it doesn’t. The picture of the artist as expert / technologue / critic / interpreter is not sustainable, and the “interpretive experience” model of art is shattered by the very ecology that puts the net.artist in constant relationship to the Internet noosphere. Playing into the memetic game might prompt to put these online events “in the "artists might as well retire" category” (Tom Moody), and not in the exclusive sphere of the artist as culture interpreter57. Though this essay is not the place to argue about the artist status in the context Web 2.0, it is food for thought as the discursive model of interpretive knowledge performed as a service of art strengthens an ideological stance that is widespread when interactivity is brought up, based on the justification of “condensed positive values such as social relationships [and] pedagogical performance” (Joëlle Le Marec)58. One of the questions raised by art believers is to what extent interaction can become a “valuable” type of cooperation, when considering as a given the “positive implications of shared ressources”, like Trebor Scholz in an essay on cooperation and the arts. Scholz argues that “Creators invite users to participate, but then patronize them by limiting their interaction to a few customizable options. Customized user interaction has little to do with true participation, which leaves it up to the user what they do”.59 Scholz does make a point by questioning the political perspective of interaction at play in what we have described, along with the Nasty Netters, as default creativity. What is at stake is the debate on political effectiveness over the tactical perspective on a politics of systems: what Michel de Certeau called “tactics”60 , a notion that is very de-

54

Matthew Fuller, « Softness: Interrogability; General Intellect; Art Methodologies in Software », in SKRIFTSERIE, n.13, 2006, Aarhus 55

Saul Albert, “Useless Utilities”, net_user Conference, Sofia, Bulgaria, 2001 [http://art.runme.org/1043667677-8313-0/useless.htm] 56

Juan Martín Prada, « Web 2.0 as a new context for artistic practices », 1st Inclusiva-net meeting [New art dynamics in Web 2 mode], Medialab-Prado, Madrid, july, 2007 [http://medialab-prado.es/inclusiva-net] 57

Quoted in lal-blog, “As-Found - Collector as Curator” 08/22/08 [http://lal-blog.blogspot.com/2008/08/as-found-collector-as-curator.html] 58

Joëlle Le Marec, « Dialogue interdisciplinaire sur l’interactivité », Communication et Langages (128) : 97-110, 2001 [my translation] 59 Trebor

Scholz, “Working Together” in the Networks, Art, & Collaboration conference, 04/24-25/2004, SUNY Buffalo [http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/scholztext.html]. 60

Michel de Certeau, Inventions du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire, Paris : Gallimard, 1990

fault aesthetics, is an everyday life practice that helps loosen the disciplinary logic of society, but, some have argued, does not fight against it. But the idea here is to show that the logic of judgment underlying online creativity is not so much apolitical than classified as “other”, non dualistic, non confrontational. The ethical consequences of this remain to be analyzed, but not under the interpretive regime that has been leading avant-garde aesthetics since modernism. It might be useful to read Richard Susterman on the subject of a shift in aesthetics betwen an experiental model, phenomenological, affective and interpretive (still very pregnant in the doxa of contemporary art, even technology-oriented) to an informational model, modular, comprehensive and semi-automated into “intelligent habits”.61 Nasty Nets was chosen as a place that reflects on the habits and uses of Internet culture, while fully participating in them through the making of stuff, via the use of interactive hypertext and default manipulation of infoware. The fact that these net.artists belong to a specific subculture, connected to the institutional recognition of the artworld (Rhizome in particular), does not add quality to their practice, but is a methodological help in the observation of cyberculture. Their play with content and form in infoware provided us with a helpful “vision machine” - a notion borrowed from Paul Virilo by Claude Baltz to name a socio-technical device essential to navigate in a information-overload society : “a space of hypertextual nature in which one inserts formalist plays that allow for a definition of information”62.

61

Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience”, in: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55 (1999), 29-41. For further reading on Shusterman’s take on “intelligent habits”, see Beneath Interpretation, The Monist, 990, vol. 73, no2, pp. 181-204 62

Claude Baltz, “Eléments de cyberculture”, on Bosonx.org, 03/10/2005 [http://www.boson2x.org/spip.php?article129] ; my translation.