Shifting Relationships towards Commerce in Net Art, Post-Internet Art and Post-Digital Art
University of Amsterdam, 27 June 2014 New Media and Digital Cultures
Department of Media Studies Supervised by Michael Dieter Second reader Marc Tuters
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
1. Art Criticism and Foucauldian Critique 7
2. Neoliberalism, Commercialization and the Californian Ideology 10
2.1 Manifestations of 21st Century Capitalism and Its Mechanisms 10
2.2 The Californian Ideology and the Rise of the Commercial Web 16
2.3 The Post-Digital as a Point of Departure 19
2.3.1 Defining the Post-Digital 20
2.3.2 The Post-Digital Commercialized – The 2012 NEXT Conference in Berlin 21
2.3.3 Countering Technological Determinism – The Post-Digital as an Academic and Cultural Phenomenon 23
3. The Commercial in Art: An Investigation into Net Art, Post-Internet and Post-Digital Art 27
3.1 Jodi’s Atom Bomb – Net Art: Negotiating the Status of Digital Art 29
3.2 Artie Vierkant’s and Cory Arcangel’s Color Gradients – Post-Internet Artists and their Relation to Art Institutions 33
3.3 Neil Thomson’s The Economic Computer – Post-Digital Alternatives 39
3.4 Analyzing the Commercial in Net Art, Post-Internet and Post-Digital Art 45
Conclusion 47
Introduction
In the post-Snowden world of 2014, digital technology is increasingly met with a certain
skepticism. Messaging systems such as email, chat services and voice-over-internet protocols are now known to provide easy access to secret services around the world. “Private communication” in online social forums such as Facebook is the company’s property and can be sold on when seen fit. Information stored in the so-called cloud is subject to commercial companies’ data mining, as in fact agreed upon by users in the first place in the often somewhat obscured terms and conditions. Phones can be tapped, information rewired and even hardware used for purposes of surveillance (cf. Applebaum). 2014 is, moreover, seven years since the first upheavals of the financial crisis swept the world. Its consequences still reverberate today in the form of a global recession, low employment rates as well as an ever-shifting European debt crisis (cf. DeLong). The financial meltdown brought about a never-before seen questioning of the merits and pitfalls of neoliberal economic systems, as well as repeated calls for establishing alternatives. One such call manifested through Occupy in 2011, a protest movement that originated in the United States, but was influenced both by the Arab Spring and the Indignados movement. Camping on squares before big banking districts, the participants of Occupy in part demonstrated against the
unfettered power that the banks were and are enjoying in shaping global politics (cf. Tharoor). “Are enjoying”, because in fact, despite the protest and the questioning, neoliberalism still remains the predominant economic system in the Western world, some would argue more strongly than ever (cf. Dardot and Laval).
The rise of neoliberalism in the eighties paired with the proliferation of digital devices has brought about a technologically fueled capitalism that unremittingly infiltrates all aspects of life. Communication and information circulation is incessant, eroding the boundaries between free time and working life, aspiring to fully integrate the individual into market mechanisms (cf. Crary 73-74). Global information technology corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon likewise actively encourage the proliferation of digital devices and infrastructures, increasing their market share of digital platforms and services. Representing a critical investigation into the consequences of increasing digitization of all spheres of life, the
‘post-digital’ can be seen as a manifestation of the resulting disillusionment with the promise of technological progress. The term, moreover, coincides with emerging critical discourses on neoliberalism as an economic system drawing together complex lineages in challenging an over-idealized notion of the digital. This thesis will touch upon how both these moments of discontent converge in works from the field of digital art.
This investigation thus moves between economic theory, the arts and digital technologies. Taking three artistic movements as core case studies, the thesis examines the shifting
relationships between those areas. As a whole, this thesis represents an engagement through the lens of art criticism with three recent phenomena in digital art. Digital art is in the following used as broadly incorporating all art forms concerned with the development of digital technologies, whether they explicitly use them as their material, or withdraw from them in the case of the post-digital. In order to establish this investigation, a methodological and theoretical framework is introduced and developed during the initial chapters. Methodologically, this thesis employs an understanding of critique that is indebted to the writing of the French philosopher Michel
Foucault. Foucault relates the emergence of critique to the development of the concept of governance in Europe in the late 15th century. Parallel to the rise of certain forms of governance, according to Foucault, questions for alternative relations of power developed to form the basic notion of critique (cf. Foucault, Politics of Truth, 44). His analysis of this development interlinks with his concept of problematization. Problematization for Foucault is a method of questioning, not to be taken in a literal sense but as being based on an analysis of various sources, in his case a certain political structure by confronting it with a set of topics, in order to see how the political movement under investigation relates to them (cf. Foucault, “Polemics”). In this thesis
problematization will be employed to question and analyze the three digital arts areas as to their intersections with commerce. The theoretical overview provides a short introduction to 21st century capitalism, to debates concerning neoliberalism as well as new processes of
commodification, followed by a historical account of the widespread emergence of digital infrastructures during the last decades, relating counter cultural and libertarian ideals from the 60’s to the Californian Ideology. This framework will provide the background context for analyzing the post-digital as a theoretical, social and artistic phenomenon in form of a short case study at the end of the chapter using the example of the NEXT conference, a meeting point for the young start-up scene of Berlin held on the topic in 2012 (cf. NEXT).
The chapters which follow in the second half of the thesis examine three areas of art production through specific case studies: net art, post-internet art and post-digital artworks. Firstly, the example of net art with the piece Atom Bomb from 1995 by the Dutch-Belgian artist duo Jodi presents a work that critically engages with the affordances brought about by the rise of the World Wide Web. Commercial viability or the possibility to present the works in a gallery setting are explicitly undermined and even complicated by the material qualities of the works. Post-internet art on the other hand, which begins to circulate a decade later, clearly places the work back in an art world setting, rendering internet imagery consumable as art pieces. Here, dynamics of commercialization are especially strong. As proponents of these works, this section
will investigate pieces and writing by Artie Vierkant, Cory Arcangel and the Jogging collective. Lastly, The Economic Computer by Niel Thomson from 2014 will represent the work from the area of the post-digital. Thomson’s analogue computer model stages a critique of our
contemporary reliance on increasingly complex digital economic models in a number of
interesting ways. While the theoretical chapter with the example of the NEXT conference shows how the post-digital can be used by businesses as a sort of brand, artworks like Thomson’s also provide a critical perspective on exactly those economic frameworks. A comparative analysis of the three works concludes the chapter on the art case studies.
In summary, this thesis represents a contribution to art criticism that relies on a Foucauldian understanding of critique, viewing the works within their socio-political contexts, especially their economic settings. It furthermore provides a short overview of the mechanisms of 21st century capitalism, neoliberal theory, as well as the development of the Silicon Valley ideology in order to apply these frameworks when analyzing contemporary digital artworks. In the relatively short history of the digital arts, the relation to commerce has differed quite strongly from one artistic grouping to another. While some accounts exist that relate net art practices to those of the post-internet artists (cf. Connor), little if nothing is written that brings emerging post-digital strands of artistic engagement into dialogue with the former two. This thesis, therefore, adds to the field of emerging post-digital research, but also to research into the digital arts in general by sketching the changing developments between art and commerce in these three movements. In doing so, this dissertation investigates how relationships to the commercial shift by taking into account both the growing commercialization of the internet on the one hand and the role of the resulting artwork as commercial object on the other.
1. Art Criticism and Foucauldian Critique
The following chapter briefly introduces the general methodological framework for the thesis. As laid out in the introduction, this analysis engages in a form of art criticism that investigates how far three contemporary digital art forms relate to commercialization. Thus, in this discussion, economic and artistic perspectives are combined with the topic of the growing digitization of everyday life. Before outlining the theoretical framework and the analysis of the artworks, however, it is important to discuss the role art criticism plays in this study and how critique is understood.
Defining a strand of interpretative engagement within art criticism is in fact a difficult task, given that in the 21st century, the field struggles with the problem of its own complexity (cf. Charlesworth, Lüttiken, Prince, Wood). In “Notes on the Demise and Persistence of Judgement”, William Wood discusses the crisis of art criticism that he feels is strongly related to the “inflated art market” and “the impact of proliferating art styles” (Wood 57). To describe the current condition of art criticism Wood refers to an article by Arthur Danto, an American art critic and philosopher, in which Danto describes “a democracy of pluralism in contemporary art”, where there is no clear setting anymore for “the way art must be” (Wood 58). These broad possibilities for art production bring about a plurality of critical approaches, since the definition of what can be art and how it can be analyzed must expand accordingly. Clearly, the realm of the digital arts is not considered in this concept of democratic plurality, seeing that it has struggled to enter the traditional art world since its conception (cf. Bosma, Quaranta). Evidently, art criticism
flourishes on a number of emergent platforms, moving from traditional art journals to blogs, the press as well as other media (cf. Fraser 203).
Sven Lütticken, an art critic and professor in arts and media studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, divides the main tendencies in art criticism into two categories. One carries the legacy of the idea of critique from the Enlightenment, to which Lütticken attests a “moral dimension”, which judged works in terms of their worth for the public. Romantic criticism, on the other hand, tried to consider the work from within, ascribing it with its own kind of agency. The critics’ task was to try to do justice to the inner workings of the art object (cf. Lütticken 46). Lütticken traces how these two strands continually resurface in art criticism up until the 21st century, and singles out Walter Benjamin as one specific reaction to this development. According to Lütticken, Benjamin developed a Marxist notion of critique, namely “strategic criticism” as an answer to the model of Romantic criticism, which from Benjamin’s perspective was reductionist and not sufficiently historical (cf. Lütticken 48). From this point of view, the work of art can never be completely understood outside its historical context. Understanding critique in a
historical context, moreover, connects the work of Benjamin with the writings of Michel Foucault.
Foucault sees critique as a concept based in the rise of what he calls “governmentalization” around the 15th and 16th century. Governmentalization, also referred to as governmentality in his lecture collection Security, Territory, Population, according to Foucault, gained prominence in 16th century Western Europe as State jurisdictions and sovereign power began to ask
questions concerning “how to govern”, including questions of governing in pedagogy as well as questions of economic governance. As a reaction to this strengthening of the grasp of the
government on its citizens, however, the citizens in turn also began to ask themselves “how not to be governed like that”. What Foucault here calls “a critical attitude”, therefore questions the viability of a given type of government (cf. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 313 and Politics of Truth, 44). While his elaboration of the historical trajectory of critique, as Foucault attests, is a very crude one, it raises an interesting point that shall be taken up in the course of this thesis: critique as a mode of questioning the given arrangements in a socio-political
framework that at the same time hints towards the possibility of alternatives. Many of the works discussed in this thesis are speculative or gesture at unconventional frameworks, the post-digital being one such example, which makes using a Foucauldian frame especially germane.
Furthermore, the questions of critique in Foucault are closely interlinked with his concept of “problematization”. Foucault suggests problematization as a kind of working method in order to question without presupposing solutions or without wanting to arrive at any specific truth. So in analyzing a given political formation, Foucault never “tried to analyze anything whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the problems with which it was confronted” (Foucault, “Polemics”). Applying this method of problematization to the different artistic movements in the analysis chapters of this thesis, opens up a space for interrogating techniques and discourses in their various relations to the economic. In this sense the Foucauldian analysis is especially appropriate to this thesis as it provides a sufficiently open approach that incorporates arts, economics and digitization.
Institutional critique, usually ascribed to a specific group of artists and critics, provides a further example of art criticism that tries to take these governmental structures into account. Andrea Fraser, an outspoken institutional critic, identifies her conception of criticism as follows,
I define criticism as an ethical practice of self-reflective evaluation of the ways in which we participate in the reproduction of relations of domination which include for me the exploitation of competence and other forms of institutional authority.
Fraser herein highlights the underlying concepts of institutional critique. This theoretical and artistic grouping questions institutions such as the museum and the gallery in their role of providing some sort of frame of value for works of art. While not in the vein of any particular institutional critics, this thesis also investigates in how far the areas of net art, post-internet art and post-digital art relate to the traditional art market. In line with the overall topic the focus will especially lie on the economic relationships that play out between the two sides.
Beyond the specific institutional frameworks, the broader economic context that the works are produced in also plays an important role. Jeff Derksen attempts such an analysis in his essay “Times and Places of Critique”, where he elaborates on the relation of culture to neoliberalism, the economic system dominating Western societies during the 21st century with its mixture of privatization, deregulation and open market strategies. He proposes that the infusion of this ideology into culture has in some ways reshaped culture under the laws of neoliberalism. Derksen thus propagates a mode of art criticism that takes into account the relationship of art or culture more generally with the mode of development specifically. He describes the current state of affairs after the financial crises of the last decade as a “post-euphoric moment of
neoliberalism” (cf. Derksen 104). As one of his main sources, Derksen uses The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, which will be elaborated upon in the following chapter and will also form an important basis of the theoretical framework of this essay. An in depth consideration of neoliberalism and the post-digital will likewise follow.
In summary, this thesis will employ an art criticism that takes a Foucauldian understanding of critique into account. Critical means investigating the social, political and especially economic factors that form the work. At the same time, the critical attitude employed in this essay will follow Foucault’s concept of problematization, questioning the various art movements in their relation to the economic. Finally, certain chapters will bear elements of an institutional critique, however, this is not the only or main frame of this thesis. The following chapter will provide the theoretical framework that together with the methodology can be applied to the final chapter interpreting the artworks.
2. Neoliberalism, Commercialization and the Californian Ideology
Interpreting digital art works in the context of commercialization means that specific economic factors apply that have to be elaborated in more detail. This chapter, therefore, provides the theoretical framework and historical background for the analysis of the artworks in the following chapter. It will be divided into three parts. The first provides a short overview of the working mechanisms of contemporary capitalism, especially neoliberalism, as well as of the concept of commercialization in broader terms. The second part introduces a historical account for the rise of digital technology in the last decades, relating hippie ideals from the 60s to Silicon Valley ideology. An applied reading of this framework in relation to the post-digital as a theoretical, social and artistic phenomenon serves as a small case study at the end of this chapter. Analyzing the relationship of economics, digitality and art in the case of the post-digital provides the frame of reference for the solely art based case studies in the last chapter “The Commercial in Art: An Investigation into Net Art, Post-Internet Art and Post-Digital Art”, where this relationship is also explored in the field of net art as well as post-internet art.
2.1 Manifestations of 21st Century Capitalism and Its Mechanisms
There is no one form of capitalism, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval attest in their book The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. But capitalism in general can be defined as an economic system based on “an imperative to unlimited accumulation of capital” (Boltanski and Chiapello 4). Capitalism appears in varying ‘economico-institutional forms’ with neoliberalism being its most persistent manifestation in 21st century Europe as well as the United States, the two geographical areas most important to this thesis (cf. Dardot and Laval 11). The following section will briefly flag the characteristics of 21st century capitalism in general, as well as of neoliberalism in particular, that will become important for the analysis throughout this thesis.
England is as much the origin of the market economy as the industrial revolution (cf. Polanyi 42). In The Great Transformation, a classic text of economic theory, Karl Polanyi sketches the interconnection between “the doctrines of free labor markets, free trade, and the self-regulating monetary mechanism of the gold standard” (Stiglitz viii), beginning to unravel this history in the 19th century. Polanyi’s book can be seen as a treatise on the deficiencies of said self-regulating markets. At the same time, he exposes the myth of them ever-having existed, showing that European governments in the times of their great industrial transformation always had a hand in shaping their markets (cf. Polanyi 3). In providing this broader overview of the rise of market economy, Polanyi also the sketches particular mechanisms pertaining to it. One of those being
the concept of commercialization, which will be applied as a tool for analysis in the later parts of this thesis. Commercialization in fact forms one of the underlying processes that allow capitalist economies in general to continue running, given that systems of self-regulating markets and the need for commercialization are intimately interlinked. The process of commercialization is also famously known under its Marxian counterpart “commodification”. For Karl Marx, as the German economist and philosopher elaborates in his work Capital, a commodity is “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (Marx 26). Marx departs from his analysis of commodities to elaborate in how far they are interlinked with the creation of value through labor, and how this process underlies capitalist systems (cf. Marx 29). In this thesis, however, Polanyi’s concept of commercialization will form the main precept, seeing that his book in general provides a good lead into the topics of neoliberalism.
In his work, Polanyi explains how a system solely based on price is dependent on a process of commercialization. His chapter “The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money” lays out the basic premises of the process of commercialization. While the mercantile system revolved mainly around land and labor (since currencies had not fully developed yet), in the market system everything is based on money and needs to be priced in some way. This need for pricing meant that, “accordingly there [were] markets for all elements of industry, not only for goods (always including services) but also for labor, land and money” (Polanyi 72). Under this token, where every labor, every good, and every product needs to be priceable in order to enter the chain of supply and demand, thus entering the bigger system connecting all markets, commercialization of all spheres of life is the basic premise that keeps the system operating. Foreshadowing theories of neoliberalism, Polanyi was already well aware of the broader social consequences this form of economy held. Attesting that it did in fact not only demand a change of the economic system, but of society at large, he claimed that if the self-regulating market was to work on a system of “barter and exchange, then man and nature must be brought into its orbit, they must […] be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale” (Polanyi 136).
The concept of commercialization also plays a role in explaining the persistence of capitalist economies by helping them to incorporate their own critiques. Using the example of how this has happened in the case of the question of authenticity by the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello explorer this dynamic in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism. In their work, Boltanski and Chiapello trace how capitalism as an ideology, understood by them as shared beliefs that inscribe institutions and citizens alike, has changed in France from 1968 to the late 1990’s. While they themselves admit that their theory is based on a specific country and time frame, their observations do apply to a broader set of questions that inform this thesis. Boltanski
and Chiapello ascribe a spirit to capitalism that is necessary to keep it going. This spirit provides capitalists as well as wage earners with some sort of justification for pursuing an aim that in itself brings very little gratification, but demands a whole lot of risk taking and personal sacrifice (cf. Boltanski and Chiapello 4). Their concept of the spirit of capitalism is indebted to the German sociologist Max Weber. While they list personal as well as general reasons (the common good) of why people buy into the spirit of capitalism, they also name critiques of capitalism as one of the driving factors. This section will focus on these critiques.
As possible criticisms of capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello enumerate disenchantment and inauthenticity of objects and persons, capitalism as a source of oppression, capitalism as a source of poverty and inequality for workers, as well as capitalism as a source of opportunism and egoism by only developing people’s private interests (cf. Boltanski, Chiapello 37). Concentrating on the topic of authenticity, Boltanski and Chiapello list mass production, massification of human beings, the forms in which work was organized as well as the massification of political action as some symptoms of an increased homogenization of society in general (Boltanski, Chiapello 439). The reaction of capitalism to these complaints was to internalize the demands, by creating products that could meet the need for authenticity. They did so by means of
commodification.
Commodification is the simplest process through which capitalism can acknowledge the validity of a critique and make it its own, by incorporating it into its own specific
mechanisms: hearing the demand expressed by the critique, entrepreneurs seek to create products and services which will satisfy it, and which they will be able to sell.
(Boltanski, Chiapello 442) Thus, commodification can also be used as a method to disarm the critiques of a capitalist system. Boltanski and Chiapello argue, moreover, that the process of commodifying goods that lay formerly outside the capitalist system brings about an inherent paradox. These products must by the very nature of what they are always end up as a disappointment to their buyers. Seeing that once they entered the capitalist market, they lose the aspects that defined their authenticity in the first place – having remained original and not having become massified. This brings about a new form of anxiety inherent to capitalist systems, where citizens can no longer be sure, whether something is in fact authentic or fake or under which criteria to assess this state at all. Boltanski and Chiapello frame this whole discussion around the question of the position of artistic critique in relation to capitalism. One possible route they suggest is to “reformulate the issues of
liberation and authenticity” to see what they realistically can and should still mean in such an economic system. Furthermore, quite pragmatically, they propose to regulate the end of the
supply chain, determining what goods should even be offered up for commodification (Boltanski and Chiapello 468-472).
Issues of markets and continuous commercialization also lie at the heart of neoliberalism, itself an outgrowth of capitalist economies that appears in various manifestations. Two such divergent manifestations that Philip Mirowski identifies in the “Postface” to The Road from Mont Pèlerin are what he categorizes as the Chicago School wing of neoliberalism and its European counterpart – the Austrian/Hayekian wing of neoliberalism (cf. Mirowski, “Postface”, 442). The Chicago School is the American birth place of neoliberalism around which
intellectuals congregated in the post-war period to debate the first tenets of their new theory. Debates between the two camps were, for example, held over the question whether to
pragmatically carry over certain aspects of traditional liberal and economic theory, or whether to base neoliberalism on a wholesale renovation of both concepts (cf. Mirowski 442). Despite these specific differences, Mirowski identifies some overall characteristics that pertain to all forms of neoliberalism. The following will shortly elaborate on a few that will become important to this thesis. Mirowski highlights the fact that neoliberalism actually relies on a strong presence of the state and its regulations in order to function. Simply describing neoliberal economy as
“laissez-faire”, based on a minimum of regulation by the state, thus does not fully grasp its essence (cf. Mirowski 435). Neoliberalism asks for new systems of techno-managerial governance, while it is at the same time is skeptical whether a democratic government could provide such a reliable source of control (cf. Mirowski 436). Two specific aspects of neoliberal theory are particularly interesting for the section on Silicon Valley ideology in this thesis: firstly, the emphasis on entrepreneurship in neoliberal theory. Michel Foucault’s The Birth of
Biopolitics traces back the history of this concept to the 18th century. Foucault discusses how the figure which he describes as “homo oeconomicus” appears in classical liberalism and from there finds its way into neoliberal theory, now meaning the following: for neoliberal theory, homo oeconomicus no longer is a partner of exchange but an “entrepreneur of himself”, which means “being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Foucault 226). The figure of the entrepreneur will return both in the section on the Californian Ideology as well as art criticism. Secondly, neoliberalism in fact interprets the market as an information processor, likening it to processes of brain or computer work. All necessary information is contained within the prices of a given market. The market, therefore, supersedes all individual human or state attempts at its interpretation (cf. Mirowski 435). The likening between the way a market and a computer works as self-regulating cybernetic systems already provides some indication of how both neoliberal thought and discourses
After the economic crisis of 2008 loosened its tightest grip, far from being over,
neoliberalism prevails as strongly as ever (cf. Laval and Dardot 1). In their book The New Way of the World Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a French philosopher and sociologist, argue that this is the case, because neoliberalism in fact is a “normative system” infusing institutions, governments and citizens alike,
More specifically, it is a question of understanding how neoliberal governmentality is based on a global normative framework, which in the name of liberty and relying on the leeway afforded individuals, orientates their conduct, choices and practices in a new way.”
(Dardot and Laval 7) Neoliberalism, thus, cannot only be understood negatively, but also as producing new forms of social relations and structures that thoroughly reshape how human beings relate to each other and to the institutions they frequent. Laval and Dardot are herein indebted to a Foucauldian
framework, since rather than understanding neoliberalism as an ideology or economic model, they see it as a rationality – the rationality of contemporary capitalism. Foucault defines this concept of governmental rationality as the way a certain type of government plays out and develops to its fullest (cf. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 4). In this understanding
neoliberalism can be defined as a “set of discourses, apparatuses and practices that determine a new mode of government” (cf. Dardot and Laval 4). Mirowski comes to a similar conclusion as Laval and Dardot in his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, insofar as he also attests that instead of being over, or having somehow disappeared after the crisis, neoliberal ideas are spreading more strongly than ever. According to Mirowski, one of the reasons for neoliberalism having so easily shaken off the crisis is the fact that its doctrines in practice have become an intricate part of everyday life. Mirowski calls this phenomenon “everyday neoliberalism” (cf. Mirowski 89).
The everyday mechanisms upholding present day capitalist systems also play an important role in Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7. While he does not write specifically about neoliberalism, the scenarios Crary describes precisely fit with the overall mechanisms
enumerated in the preceding paragraphs. Crary sees contemporary society as characterized by the idea of 24/7; a state in which everyone has to be alert, available and ready to work twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Even sleep, the last recluse from working life, is beginning to be optimized: “most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship have been remade into commodified or financialized forms” (Crary 10). A particular focus lies with the role that technological developments,
already 19th century capitalism carried features of the credos used today, such as considering human needs a transformable and malleable entity, or seeing the commodity as potentially including abstract goods such as image or sound, the constellation shifted slightly in the late 20th century. Now the dominance of companies such as Google and Apple and their drive to create ever-new products, their need to keep loyal consumers, and the increased control they have over said consumers develop in parallel (Crary 42-43). Crary summarizes this development by stating, “any apparent technological novelty is also a qualitative dilation of one's accommodation to and dependence on 24/7 routines” (Crary 43).
Taking up a slightly different perspective, Lauren Berlant provides further details into the experience of 21st century capitalism in everyday life. For Berlant, neoliberalism brings about what she calls the cruel attachment of human beings to dreams of the good life. In her work Cruel Optimism Berlant investigates “the fraying relation between post-Second World War state/economic practices and certain postwar fantasies of the good life endemic to liberal, social democratic or relatively wealthy regions” (Berlant 15). Methodologically, Berlant achieves this by interspersing her theoretical framework with case studies from postwar film, literature and poetry. Berlant’s main precept is that people remain cruelly attached to dreams of the good life, because giving up the dream of a specific good life fantasy is not an option, despite the existence of clear impediments. In this way, human beings cope with disappointments they encounter, leading a largely frustrating working life. In the chapter “After the Good Life, An Impasse” Berlant attests that “neoliberal economic practices mobilize instability in unprecedented ways” (Berlant 192). As a consequence, achieving a satisfying life only through one’s work has become increasingly difficult and other areas need to serve as compensation. Digital technologies and the internet with them, promising to give everyone tools to work more productively, faster and to reach markets they might otherwise not have access to can serve as one such area of
compensation. Evidently, neoliberalism must be understood not only from the vantage point of an economic theory, but also as a broader social mechanism. Even though it creates largely frustrating, competitive and exhausting work environments, it survives by slowly infusing every sphere of life and making its precepts the norm.
Thus, having laid out some basic premises of economic realities today, the following chapter will provide a short historical overview of the development of one very important sector – the production of digital information technology.
2.2 The Californian Ideology and the Rise of the Commercial Web
One important area of growth for 21st century capitalist economies has been the area of digital high-tech goods. In how far these two strands, the economic and the digital, overlap and can inform the theoretical background of the thesis will be explicated in the following. The outline begins with the development of digital technologies initiated in the 60s, being born out of certain set of ideological underpinnings at work in the United States at the time that influence the way Silicon Valley ideology operates today, more than fifty years since. The term Silicon Valley will be used to describe, following the colloquial denomination, the area of the San Francisco bay where most of the big players of the digital high-tech industry and start-up scene from the United States have their main seat. As a main source, Fred Turner’s work From Counterculture to Cyberculture shows how the entrepreneurial spirit, the vocabulary and the ethos surrounding the early ventures into computer technology were born out of a hippie or countercultural context. At the same time as Turner elaborates, they shared many beliefs with the American right. Especially with the rise of the New Economy in the 90s, defined by technologically based progress, based on the work of individual entrepreneurs moving flexibly through the workplace, the two strands began to overlap (cf. Turner 7). Thus, a short discussion of the relation of counterculture and Silicon Valley can assist with introducing a framework for analyzing the relationship between commercial and digital technologies with the art case studies. The chapter will then be rounded off by applying those frameworks to the phenomenon of the post-digital.
In his book, Turner retraces the origins of the contemporary utopian visions of networked computing. Turner elaborates how a very influential group of San Francisco Bay area journalists, figures from the American counterculture and technological enthusiasts from the forming Silicon Valley hub grew together into a network of people that was to form the basis of a positive vision of digital technology. Both “helped to synthesize a vision of technology as a countercultural force that would shape public understandings of computing and other machines long after the social movements of the 1960s had faded from view” (Turner 6). In the course of telling this history Turner shows how the ideas, methods and technologies that came out of the “military industrial research culture” and those of the American counterculture converge (cf. Turner 3).
Before sketching this convergence, one important qualification should be made. The reactions to the legacy of the Second World War in fact created two countercultural movements in the United States – one that Turner calls the New Communalists, as well as the “New Left”. While the New Left was grounded in the anti-war movement and concerned with questions of class, race and labor, the New Communalist branch of the counterculture was more heavily indebted to a cybernetic understanding of the world (cf. Rushton 101). According to cybernetics “reality
could be imagined as an information system” (Turner 5). The New Left saw the emerging technologies critically as mechanisms of alienation and state power, whereas the New
Communalists saw them as empowering and liberating the individual (cf. Turner 12-13). The following outlines how those latter countercultural thoughts turned into the Californian Ideology.
The writings of Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller and Marshal McLuhan – the output of the American research culture – became common reads amongst the American counterculture. Through their writings the members of the counterculture developed a cybernetic vision of society. At the same time, they were also introduced to the free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit that became the predominant working method at research institutes during and after World War II. For the counterculture, the vision of society as a self-regulating system made up of
individually operating and technologically empowered actors was a promising alternative to hierarchic and bureaucratic post-war society they grew up in (cf. Turner 14).
As the initiator of the Whole Earth Network, Steward Brand, like no other managed to articulate and spread this vision of society. He did so by connecting corporations, employees of the defense departments and technology enthusiasts with the counter culture. They first met through the pages of The Whole Earth Catalog, later through The WELL community and under the banner of Wired magazine. The Whole Earth Catalog offered a collection of writings, tools, methods, forms of living, and techniques that would enable the reader to lead life in a commune. In its pages, the technologies and theories of the American military-industrial-research culture became available to the members of the counterculture (cf. Turner, “The WELL” 488). The Whole Earth Network later formed into the WELL, a text-only bulletin board system (computer network). In the WELL, old acquaintances from the times of The Whole Earth Catalogue could now meet in a digital environment (cf. Turner, “The WELL”, 485). Wired magazine, meanwhile, was founded in the early 90s and still covers topics surrounding emergent technologies (cf. Wired).
In the mid-1990s the term “The New Economy” began to circulate, designating an economy based on flat hierarchies, horizontal organizations and technologically fueled economic progress as well as “corporate layoffs and restructuring” (cf. Turner 7). The now predominant work ethic was grounded in individual entrepreneurship, flexibility and self-education. Thus, in the form of the New Economy, the hippie cultural legacy of favoring shared and innovative forms of work and governance and seeing entrepreneurship as a liberating strategy began to fit in well with the ideas of the American Republicans of the 1990s (cf. Turner, “Counterculture to Cyberculture”, 7). In Wired, its writers now could publically voice their entrepreneurial visions, connecting the ideas of the New Economy with a good portion of techno-utopianism. In fact, as Turner attests, for the people at Wired, “the public Internet appeared to be both the infrastructure and the
symbol of the new economic era” (Turner 7). Through Wired, these ideas began to spread to a larger audience. Evidently, sketching the confluence of the two sides of the same coin, instead of understanding the hippie culture of the communes as a force simply opposed to Silicon Valley corporate logic, it also played a decisive role in shaping this logic in the first place.
To embellish the historical overview given by Turner, “The Californian Ideology” by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron provides further insights. Along similar lines as Turner, they sketch how an undying faith in the “emancipatory potential of the new information technologies” (Barbrook and Cameron) could bring together and transform the hippies from the communes of the 60s into the more business minded crowds of the 90s. This unfettered optimism constitutes the basis of the aforementioned Californian Ideology, a very positive outlook on the relation that insurgent technologies have to the world. An interesting outgrowth of the combination of both liberal ideals in the right- and the left-wing sense, according to Barbrook and Cameron, is the fact that while the Republican’s favored a free market economy with limited government interference, much of the development of the computer was actually state subsidized. Furthermore, while the hobby technicians do not get the credit they deserve in the business developments of Apple, Microsoft and others, many of the influential innovations are based on their ideas (cf. Barbrook and Cameron).
Apple, Microsoft and Google have in the 21st century turned into stand-ins for what is now termed the Web 2.0 economy, which will be elaborated upon in the following. Julian Stallabrass in his book The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce describes how since the 1980s financial markets have grown enormously on the basis of computational networks. With markets
becoming more globalized, “giant transnational companies” began to dominate the scene, a development which can be seen especially in media and entrainment businesses. The vast conglomerates regulating the internet also transform the way content is provided to its users, as cooperation between content and service providers, seen, for example, in the case of AOL and Time Warner; all of which facilitate new online advertising strategies (cf. Stallabrass 69-71). Tim O’Reilly summarizes the changed appearance of the net at a media conference he organized under the name “Web 2.0” in 2004. Whereas what now can be termed Web 1.0 saw a thriving culture of so-called personal pages, hosted on the server of a subscriber’s ISP or free hosting services like GeoCities, Lykos or Anglefire, Web 2.0 is characterized by user accounts on
so-called social media platforms, such as blogs. While the early web required a lot of investment by the user, having to acquaint oneself with HTML coding to build web pages from scratch, Web 2.0 is characterized by minimal required interaction with the technical aspects of the website and instead asks users to focus solely on content. O’Reilly writes that especially the centrality of platforms, usage of crowd wisdom as a business model, light-weight software solutions that
cooperate between different service providers, services designed to be provided over various devices and the rise of marketing systems based on data (to name a few characteristics) form the basis of Web 2.0 (cf. O’Reilly). O’Reilly mentions Google as a major proponent of these
mechanisms, but clearly the online retailer Amazon or more recent social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter also fit into the categorization. Google is, however, a good example of how the values Turner traces already in the counterculture, such as the entrepreneurial self and the wish for flat hierarchies, get applied in a modern business context. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Jared Cohen, director of Google ideas, elaborate in The New Digital Age the way technological progress will bring about a better and more equal world, restructuring institutions fundamentally for the better,
As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society [...] Communication technologies will continue to change our institutions from within and without. We will increasingly reach, and relate to, people far beyond our own borders and language groups, sharing ideas, doing business and building genuine relationships.
(Cohen and Schmidt) Here, the Google executives, apart from elaborating on the concept of flexible hierarchies, capture the fundamentally positive view towards the progress of technology that marks the so-called Californian Ideology.
Obviously, the relationship between the counterculture and the Californian Ideology has always been ambivalent, but at the same time, technology has remained a driving force in the development of both sides. Thus, in fact, the digital utopianism seen so critically today in light of the Snowden leaks has its roots to some extent in the countercultural movement. This brief elaboration of the rise of the Silicon Valley Ideology and the digital high-tech sector in general serves the purpose of providing further context to the digital artworks in question. All of them in some way or another relate to the history of computing, Silicon Valley and Web 2.0 companies. While Jodi specifically comments on the military origin of the computer, the post-internet artists play with the commercial imagery used in the Web 2.0 period, and the post-digital as a whole can be seen as a reaction to the overly commercialized and homogenized state of the web. Thus, stating the history of these ideas in more detail assists with contextualizing these works. 2.3 The Post-Digital as a Point of Departure
Now that the digital technology revolution is over (cf. Cramer), a point in time arises that might be termed post-digital, where one can take a step back and reconsider our current relationship to
technology. To conclude this chapter, the insights and analysis developed in the last paragraphs will be applied to the contemporary phenomenon of the post-digital. In the following section, the post-digital will be treated as a broad concept encompassing theoretical, social and artistic aspects. Towards the end of this thesis, it will again be considered from a specifically aesthetic perspective in conjunction with examples from net art and post-internet art. The concept as such is granted a more in depth consideration in this thesis due to the way it has served as the initial trigger to rethink relations between critique, economics, the digital and the arts. Firstly, an overview of the definitions of the post-digital will be given in order to situate it as an emerging trend. Then an example of the commercialization of the phenomenon follows, discussing in particular how the post-digital can be appropriated as a new branding logic. Finally, the relevance of the post-digital as a conceptual phenomenon and as a reaction to both the consequences of neoliberalism as well as the precepts of the Californian ideology will be discussed.
2.3.1 Defining the Post-Digital
When looking through writing on the post-digital the common denominator of existing
definitions appears to be the following: the post-digital describes a time when the ubiquity of the digital is a fact. The ‘post’ thus does not denote a phase in which the digital is left behind, but in which it enters into a new intensity – one in which all enclaves of the analogue world are at the same time infused with a knowledge of the digital. The earliest source for speaking about the general tendency of the post-digital in this respect is ironically a piece by the Wired author Nicholas Negroponte in his article “Beyond Digital”. Here, Negroponte describes the point in time when the digital is no longer something fascinating and new, but rather provides the basis for thinking about new strategies that deal with this integration of the digital into everyday life (cf. Negroponte). Kim Cascone’s article “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music” from 2002, meanwhile, reinterpreted the term in a different, specifically artistic context. Cascone discussed how now that digital technologies had become mainstream, specific tools are being used in non-commercial, non-academic contexts that play with aesthetics of noise and failure as a counter-reaction to the increasing perfection and
homogenization of music produced with commercial digital tools. The tension in the post-digital between its commercial and artistic applications already becomes apparent in these two initial usages of the term.
While these articles also discuss aspects of the post-digital in a broader sense, the artworks and design pieces used in the course of this thesis will take the specific focus of the hand-made
and the crafted. Following Florian Cramer, for the purpose of this thesis’ definition, ‘digital’ is employed in the colloquial sense, denoting not its scientific use, where digital simply means that something “is divided into discrete, countable units”, but its common one. That is, in everyday usage, the digital describes everything produced from a computer, and carrying its current clean and sleek aesthetic (Cramer, “What is ‘Post-Digital’?”). The post-digital, therefore, functions as a reaction to this overpowering present of the digital. In the Post-Digital Research Journal publication from 2014, the term is further defined as rejecting a distinction between old and new media as well as by reusing and re-purposing analogue technologies. However, while the
post-digital as a gesture wants to break free from the monopolies of digital corporations, it has likewise already been commercialized (cf. Cramer, Post-Digital Research Journal). The case study that follows builds upon the definition of the Post-Digital Research Journal by expanding the aspect of commercialization in particular. The crafted and hand-made works mentioned in Florian Cramer’s definition, are especially appropriate to the topic of this thesis since they negotiate most strongly the intersections of the commercial, the digital and the arts, often verging explicitly into commercial design practices.
2.3.2 The Post-Digital Commercialized – The 2012 NEXT Conference in Berlin
As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron explain in “The Californian Ideology”, many of the digital high-tech giants grew so successfully, because they knew how to integrate ideas and innovations into their products that were based on the work of hackers, tech-enthusiasts, and hobby programmers. To take this premise one step further, as outlined in the section on Luc Boltanski’s and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, what made capitalism especially strong and persistent is its way of having integrated its critique. Looking at the business models of the Silicon Valley firms, and their imitators in the start-up scene around the world, a similar logic can be seen at work in this context. An example where this becomes especially apparent is the NEXT conference in Berlin.
NEXT brings marketing decision-makers, business developers and creative industries together in an annual conference in Berlin (cf. NEXT); in 2012, the conference was held on the topic of the post-digital. In the following, different examples from blog entries, talks and official statements documenting the event will help to paint a picture of how the post-digital was
reshaped in the course of the event as a useful selling point in the information economy. If one believes the blog entries, the term was coined by the British entrepreneur Russell Davies, Wired author and creative director of the Government Digital Service, who recasts the post-digital as a new business niche (cf. Tinworth “What is Post-Digital?”). Adam Tinworth, a British business
blogger and journalist, proposes that Davies coined the post-digital anew in 2009. Davies’ coinage takes Negroponte’s lead from “Beyond Digital”, discussed in the section above, and clearly places the concept entirely within a business frame:
Screens are getting boring. It’s really hard to impress anyone with stuff on a screen any more. However clever you’ve been. However much thought you’ve put in. However good the tech is. No-one’s impressed. They’ve all seen better stuff in ads and movies anyway – when will onscreen stuff be as good as that? Whereas doing stuff in the real world still seems to delight and impress people. Really simple stuff with objects looks like magic. Really hard stuff with screens still just looks like media.
(Davies) Davies here propagates the seamless integration of technology into all spheres of life. Then technology is no longer a cumbersome outsider but becomes something “real world”. Seeing that doing things with screens has become boring, a more tactile, approachable and retro trend like the post-digital seems to promise good profits.
In a follow-up post, Tinworth draws the even more promising conclusion, that the post-digital is not only about the new, it is giving a new context to the old. In this way, it allows for wholly new marketing strategies that use the digital realm to market products existing offline. Now downloads could, for example, enhance the sale of vinyl. All of this clearly leads to better products, according to Tinworth (cf. Tinworth, “Week 18”). The post-digital is further
appropriated as business jargon in the following entry to the conference, where Martin Recke, one of the organizers of the NEXT conference, declares Apple to be a post-digital company. Apparently, Apple is post-digital, because the company has managed to become so ubiquitous that it starts to blend in. The best design is the design you do not notice, “because consumers just want to do the things they do, without having to worry about technology” (cf. Recke). Echoing the statement by Davies above, Recke highlights an interesting point. One important lesson of the post-digital for the business world is that radically novel or unconventional technologies possibly discourage buyers. What in fact makes a good digital product, integrating digital technology more seamlessly into the world than ever, is when the products seem somehow natural and familiar. A short post by Fora TV summarizes this vision to the point. Will Sansom, a participant at NEXT and a writer for Contagious Magazine, a business quarterly, here introduces the concept of post-digital marketing to his listeners. Sansom presents the post-digital as the latest trend in product design. It was introduced because there is an inbuilt threshold to the amount of content that the buyer can be confronted with on so many devices. The easy way to keep people interested in your product is to serve them with a “human truth, something tangible and real world that people can grab hold of” (Sansom).
The NEXT conference thus provides a good example of the way commercial systems can deal with the critiques voiced against them. Once the digitalization and commercialization of everyday life has become saturated to the point of becoming unbearable, adopting some sort of tangibility and faux authenticity keeps users at peace. As Joseph Pine, one of the authors of Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want elaborates in his TED talk, the current economy is based on selling experience. And when working with experience, the “consumer sensibility” that should accompany it is authenticity. For Pine, however, nothing is truly authentic. All businesses need to do, is to convey this feeling to their customers. Good ways of doing so, according to Pine, are trying to stay true to oneself as a business and trying to remember the business heritage (cf. Pine). A further good possibility to sell authenticity is, following Will Sansom from
Contagious Magazine, by branding something as post-digital, which for him in essence means adding a human touch to the consumer experience. Clearly, this example fits in perfectly with the way Chiapello and Boltanski describe the process of commodifying a possible critique of the neoliberal system; in this case manifested through the digital high-tech industry by rendering it as a familiar product.
2.3.3 Countering Technological Determinism – The Post-Digital as an Academic and Cultural Phenomenon
Thinking through a phase after digital technologies have become commonplace is an important question not only in business contexts, but also in academic ones. Theoretical applications of the post-digital take the same premise as the business ones as their basis – ubiquitous digitization as a fact – but they disembark from this premise in various directions that are critical of this
development. Firstly, the publication from the Post-Digital Research Journal, an academic workshop in Aarhus in 2013, will be considered again, in order to give some academic perspectives on the topic. As especially articles by Lotte Philipsen, Josephine Bosma, Jonas Fritsch and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen make clear, the post-digital framework provides a way of thinking through topics related to the computational in a more fruitful way than just from a medium-specific angle. Applying the concept with varying degrees of success, it becomes clear that the post-digital also serves as a testing ground for treating impasses that stem from the techno-centric outlook of 1990s and early 2000s, where the digitality and technological aspects of a work were the main focus.
Philipsen on the one hand, a Danish researcher of aesthetics and communication at Aarhus University, in her article “Who’s Afraid of the Audience? – Digital and Post-Digital Perspectives on Aesthetics” argues that the post-digital allows for interpreting artworks from different subject
positions, the audience and the artist respectively, which in her opinion the techno-essentialism of digital art criticism often does not allow (cf. Philipsen). While it is debatable, whether this position actually holds true, Philipsen shows that the post-digital is seen as an alternative to techno-essentialism. For Bosma, a Dutch art critic whose position will be expanded upon in the art criticism paragraphs below, the post-digital also provides a solution to the insufficiencies of digital arts criticism. In her article “Post-Digital is Post-Screen – Shaping a New Visuality”, Bosma proposes new ways of “visual thinking” as a post-digital interpretation method based on the scientist Rudolf Arnheim that allows the critic to overcome solely screen-based analyses of digital art (Bosma, “Post-Digital is Post-Screen”). Finally, to bring one example of the
application from outside of an artistic field of study, namely from urban studies, the article “An Ethology of Urban Fabrics” by Jonas Fritsch and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen provides a further example of the application of the post-digital in academia. For the two Danish academics, the post-digital opens up the possibility to intermix several theories concerning urban space, such as interaction design and urban design activism, fashion, cultural theory, philosophy, urban computing, and to bring them together in new ways. Instead of just focusing on physical or digital effects in the city, they investigate how, for example, the speeding up of the city through digital facades and billboards and the slowing down of the city through movements such as urban knitting or gardening, building temporary urban recluses, coalesce (cf. Fritsch and Thomson). Evidently, all three writers see the post-digital as a chance to overcome certain medium-specific interpretations that delimit questions about digital technologies and their effects. In this way, the writing on the post-digital also presents a broad attempt to counter perceived instances of technological determinism. The latter posits that history is inevitably and unstoppably predetermined by technologies, which “are bound to produce certain social, cultural and political effects”, a view that often diminishes the role human agency can play in shaping history (cf. Morozov 289). As these writers are trying to create subject positions and readings of the present outside or at least removed from a solely digital viewpoint, the post-digital functions as an attempt to create less determined readings of digital technologies.
Accordingly, the post-digital also becomes part of a larger gesture trying to deal with the political, but also practical implications of the fading utopia of cyberspace. This can also explain the attractiveness of the concept in 2014, while the media scene tries to grapple with the
realizations of the Snowden revelations. Since the 9th of June 2013, when Edward Snowden, former employee of the NSA, the United States biggest intelligence agency, was interviewed by Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras and revealed the extent to which American secret services are surveying their citizens, information technology has increasingly been seen in a different light. From the tapping of the undersea cables which allows for monitoring of world wide data streams
to the collection of phone data for surveillance purposes and finally PRISM – the NSA
seemingly reaches anywhere it wants. PRISM, in fact, allows intelligence agencies to directly tap data from the servers of big US companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon (cf. Guardian). As hinted at in the introduction of this thesis, a careless embrace of digital products, art or ideologies no longer seems a viable stance. The post-digital then can also provide a ready critical view through which to reconsider one’s digital environment. It is critical in the sense that it can be seen to work against the precepts of the Californian ideology, questioning whether all new digital developments really equal a progression in a positive direction. In fact, as Evgeny Morozov elaborates in his book The Net Delusion, the combination of internet-centrism,
believing that every problem is solvable with an internet-based solution, and techno-utopianism present in the Californian Ideology can be detrimental to the cause of democracy. Rather than investigating the actual shifting power relations inherent to the infrastructure of the internet, they base themselves on a blind belief in its liberating potentials (cf. Morozov xvii).
The propositions of how such a post-digital environment that does not buy into the
techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley could look like are varied and range from Luddite moves and offline Romanticism to a more general questioning of the role of media theory. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for instance, in his recent call for a digital boycott in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has pledged for an overall reduced media usage. Seeing that the NSA can infiltrate all known messaging systems, Enzensberger proposes using them less altogether (cf. Enzensberger). While an interesting wake-up call, the article bears little practicality. Meanwhile, a different manifestation of people trying to grapple with the “unattractiveness” of new media technology has been observed by the Dutch media critic Geert Lovink. Lovink in his article “Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden” analyzes the newest work by Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark Excommunication as part of larger
phenomenon in which media theory turns away from its own object of study. Clearly, the post-digital also fits into this category. Lovink cites Cramer’s Anti-Media and the Post-Media Lab at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg in Germany as further examples. In the case of Excommunication in particular, Lovink criticizes this move as retreating into classical Greek mythology instead of facing up to the fact that media theory has to practically reinvent itself now that all cyber-utopian visions are entirely discredited (cf. Lovink 6). Lovink makes clear that naming something “post”, “anti” or “beyond” the digital does not yet form the basis of a strong critique nor does it point at viable alternatives.
Evidently, the post-digital represents both from an academic as well as a commercial angle an attempt to react to the proliferation of digital devices and communication in everyday life. It exists in an ambiguous state however, trying both to critique the digital age and commercial
processes while also being to some extent imbued in them. In the paragraphs above the
post-digital functions as a framework that tries to distance itself from the techno-centrism of the digital age. At the same time, the use of the concept in a commercial context emphasizes the post-digital as a new brand that can reintroduce a human aspect into digital high-tech products, an important selling-point, because it provides technologies with some new sense of
“authenticity”.
In summary, the first part of this chapter introduced specific characteristics of contemporary capitalism, such as the continuous cycles of 24/7 that begin to blur the boundaries between work and leisure time, or the various processes of commercialization as one aspect of how capitalist systems function. Furthermore, neoliberalism was introduced and here the concept of the neoliberal subject as entrepreneurial self was highlighted. Secondly, the section on the rise of Silicon Valley ideology provided a historical trajectory to how the ideas of the counterculture paired with the entrepreneurial aspirations of the New Economy, to result in the discourses that inform big corporations such as Google and Facebook. Lastly, the chapter on the post-digital applied the concepts of commercialization and neoliberalism as well as the ideas from the Californian Ideology to a current example. The phenomenon of the post-digital demonstrates how in practice such a commercial counterpart of an academic idea can take shape. Furthermore, the post-digital as a broader phenomenon proves the relevance of discussing this confluence of the neoliberal ethos with the credos of the digital high-tech industry at this current point in time, when with the Snowden revelations, the belief in some sort of techno-utopia is steadily waning.
3. The Commercial in Art: An Investigation into Net Art, Post-Internet and Post-Digital Art Artworks in their very own way often help bring to the fore the subtle complexities and workings of the social context in which they are produced. Given the preceding discussion of
neoliberalism and commercialization on the one hand, along with the growing ubiquity of the digital, this chapter will investigate how the relationship between the economic, the digital and art plays out in three areas of digital art production from the recent decades: net, art post-internet art and post-digital art. The three case studies used in the following sections are: Atom Bomb by the Dutch-Belgian artist duo Jodi; Image Objects by Artie Vierkant, as well as works by Cory Arcangel and the Jogging collective; and lastly The Economic Computer by Neil Thomson. Each work will be situated in its own artistic context respectively. While Atom Bomb will be placed within the theoretical framework of net art, Image Objects and the other gradient works will be theorized in terms of post-internet art, and The Economic Computer serves as an example of the post-digital.
In discussing each work, apart from the aesthetic qualities of each piece, their material properties, their relation to art institutions and relation to the web as a commercial space will all play a role. Aesthetic theory, of course, has a long tradition. While the word originates from the Greek where it means “perceive sensuously”, it really took off in modernity, firstly through the work of Alexander Baumgarten and J.G. Hamann in the mid-18th century and later famously through Immanuel Kant, where it became concerned with the study of beauty in art but most of all with questions of subjectivity (cf. Bowie 2). This thesis, however, will not specifically focus on the legacy of questions of beauty or subjectivity in art. In fact, applying these theories to the field of digital art brings about some inherent difficulties, easily stretching initial theories too far, seeing that they did not take into account the kinds of computational works discussed in this thesis (Cramer, Anti-Media, 119). If at all, the aesthetic theory by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière can be mobilized to work around questions of technology and art and its aesthetic qualities (cf. Dieter 221). In his essay “What medium can mean” Rancière, investigating the topic of photography, also proposes ways to think about the technological turn in art, a time of “the multiplication of apparatuses that themselves perform the work of the hand, gaze or artist brain”. For Rancière, this newly created intersection between art and technology created an aesthetic space where neither the ends nor means of art or technology are carried out, but both intermix in new formations, creating new spaces of what is art and not-art (cf. Rancière, “What medium can mean”). This differs from the techno-determinist readings of art criticized in the preceding chapter by opening up a space for aesthetic consideration at the intersection of art and technology. Clearly, all the works discussed in the following are situated at this overlap between
