peer pressure brad troemel (pdf) - the composing rooms

LINK Editions

Domenico Quaranta, In Your Computer, 2011

Valentina Tanni, Random, 2011

Miltos Manetas, In My Computer – Miltos Manetas, 2011

Gene McHugh, Post Internet, 2011

Domenico Quaranta (ed.), Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age , 2011.

Exhibition Catalogue. Texts by Josephine Bosma, Gene McHugh, Joanne McNeil, Domenico

Quaranta

Brad Troemel, Peer Pressure, 2011

Brad Troemel

Peer Pressure

Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia 2011

www.linkartcenter.eu

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-

NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of

this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite

300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Printed and distributed by: Lulu.com

www.lulu.com

ISBN 978-1-4709-1561-2

Brad Troemel makes and writes about art on the internet. His writing has been featured inmagazines and books. His art has been featured in galleries and sometimes even museums. Hehas earned two degrees from prestigious American art schools. He currently lives in a city full ofdiverse cultures and complicated intellectuals. Friend request or e-mail him, he'd be happy to talkto you. http://bradtroemel.com/

Contents

Brad is a Mod – by Eva and Franco Mattes 1

Introduction 5

What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan 9

The GIF’s Obsession With Compression 19

Why No Serious? A Case for Idealism in an Era of Constant Irony 25

From Clubs to Affinity: The Decentralization of Art on the Internet 33

Provocative Materiality in the Valley of Death 47

The Many Faces of Tumblr 55

Making The Best of a Permanent Pay Freeze 61

The Emergence of Dual Sites 67

New Productive Systems 71

Screens on Screens (Ben Schumacher) 85

Why You Should Make Yourself Someone Else Online 91

Tsimulacrum 99

In Response to ‘Dispersion’ by Seth Price 103

The Minor League 111

The Wealth of Pointlessness 119

Friend Request From My Mom 125

Brad Troemel – Peer Pressure

Brad is a Mod

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4


Introduction

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What RelationalAesthetics Can LearnFrom 4Chan

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The older the club the more convoluted the semiotics ofcommunication between surfers becomes. Thiscommunication entails posting organized content by achallenger, and a decoding of it by other participants, whorespond with a posting where both syntagms and paradigmsof the challenge post are identified and playfully manipulated.[5]

11


artists intuitive relationship with art history is now goingbeyond what we call “the art of appropriation,” which naturallyinfers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a cultureof use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs basedon a collective ideal: sharing. [7]

12


Don’t you think that if you wanted to look at the possibilities ofan art that’s theoretical horizons encompass the realm ofhuman interactions in a social context, wouldn’t you want tojust go out and meet people and have a good life? I mean, tome it seems as though a lot of this work is made by peoplewho are scared to live life in the first place – incrediblyunradical people [8] who play a game of a radical life in thesafe confines of some Kunsthalle or other museum inGermany or France. [9]

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The GIF’s ObsessionWith Compression

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[Many GIFs] are built around the payoff moments of Did yousee that?-style viral videos. These GIFs are structured likejokes, with the barest minimum of set-up… They get to thepoint instantaneously, and at the exact moment when onefeels the impulse to rewind and watch the climax again, theloop restarts right where it should… Like an enhanced bumpersticker or T-shirt, the GIF offers a pithy, punchy means for self-expression.

21


Human memory is intimately tied to isolated moments in time.According to the Atkinson-Shifrin model – the same one thatdivided human memory into long-term, short-term andsensory – most of the things we experience are not committedto long-term memory beyond a few select moments. So itmakes sense that we’ve embraced GIFs as these suspendedmoments in time, looping only the information necessary toconjure a particular emotion or memory.

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While the field of art online continues to thrive, art engagedwith the internet does not need to exist there; because theinternet is not just a medium, but also a territory populatedand fought over by individuals, corporations, andgovernments; a communications tool; and a cultural catalyst.

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Why No Serious? A Case for Idealism inan Era of Constant Irony

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The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden,and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do tomanage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. Thestories from that era are amazing – there were gin pushcartsworking their way through the streets of London. [1]

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A trillion dollar debt is theirs to inherit, and Social Security istheirs to give but never to receive. They feel alienated anddisillusioned, and are disparaged by the baby boomers withwhom they so often feel at war... With more than half of themcoming from divorced families, and with innumerableadvertisements targeting their massive market demographic,they are cynical, wary, and apathetic... Generation X,suspicious and indifferent, needs nothing.

All of MTV is a commercial. That’s all that MTV is. Sometimesit’s an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell aproduct. Sometimes it’s going to be a video by a musiccompany there to sell music. Sometimes it’s going to be theset that’s filled with trendy clothes and stuff there to sell a lookthat will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be ashow about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio (but youdon’t know it) to hype a movie coming out from Hollywood.There is no non-commercial part of MTV.

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From Clubs to Affinity:The Decentralization of Art on the Internet

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1. The Creation of Digital Selves

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2. Art in the Social Network

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[…] a public sphere adequate to a democratic polity dependsupon the quality of discourse and the quantity of participation.Yet the transformations of the public sphere that Habermasdescribes turns largely on its continual expansion to includemore and more participants (as well as on the development oflarge scale social organizations as mediators of individualparticipation). [9]

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3. Structural Limitations and Peer Influence

protocological control brings into existence a certaincontradiction, at once distributing agencies in a complexmanner, while at the same time concentrating rigid forms ofmanagement and control.” [10]

42


I think we’ve reached a point now, in my generation, where wedon’t even know if we are celebrating something and sayingits great and affirming it or if we’re engaging in an ironiccritique and mocking it. We’ve almost collapsed the two. [11]

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Provocative Materialityin the Valley of Death

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54


The Many Faces ofTumblr

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60


Making The Best of aPermanent Pay Freeze

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The Emergence of Dual Sites

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New ProductiveSystems

71


“Technology will in the near and farther future increasingly turnfrom problems of intensity, substance, and energy, toproblems of structure, organization, information, and control.”- Jon von Neumann, member of the Manhattan Project andinventor of the first useful computer, 1949

Introduction

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1. The Hive, Bees and Honey

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The increased deployment of nuclear power facilities mustlead society toward authoritarianism. Indeed, safe relianceupon nuclear power as the principal source of energy mayonly be possible in a totalitarian state. [1]

the adoption of a given technical system actually requires thecreation and maintenance of a particular set of socialconditions as the environment of that system. [2]

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2. Administrative Cause

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[…] the artist announces the death of the author, that is, his orher own symbolic death. In this case, the artist does notproclaim himself or herself to be bad, but to be dead. Theresulting artwork is then presented as being collaborative,participatory, and democratic. [7]

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Screens on Screens(Ben Schumacher)

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What becomes apparent through the reading of printedvariants of the original file is not only differences in the modesof production but the subjective behavior of the authors of thevariants who will the original file into existence.

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Scanning software used to map large areas of terrain entersthe world simultaneously with the time of their production anddenies any notion of subject or subjective gaze. The formerlyirreducible time between an event and it’s inscription in theworld is reduced to 0 and the subject (of enunciation andoperation) has disappeared… Like Acheiropoieta, there nowexists representation that functions autonomously,independent of human intervention and inscription.

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a digital model produced and printed in 2009 can have theexact same form as the same file printed in 2050; however,the physical objects themselves may differ in their materialqualities and precision due to constantly updated printingtechnologies.

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Why You Should MakeYourself Someone ElseOnline

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What if our RSS aggregators could tune into feeds fromAmazonian forest and the daily clear-cut blog? Or critter camvideo blogs that show us how really nasty seal bulls can be to

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their pups when they’re not playing their circus act at SeaWorld. And video blogs from schools of dolphins and whalesthat will make it increasingly difficult to ignore the plumes oftoxins in the oceans and the slaughter of their kin by whalersand felonious fishing fleets. [2]

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Tsimulacrum

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In Response to‘Dispersion’ by SethPrice

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What would it mean to step outside of this carefully structuredsystem? Duchamp’s Rotorelief experiment stands as acaution, and the futility of more recent attempts to evade theinstitutional system has been well documented.

An art that attempts to tackle the expanded field,encompassing arenas other than the standard gallery and artworld-circuit, sounds utopian at best and possibly naïve andundeveloped […]

We are all members of cultural fields. We carry, in each of us,our institutions inside ourselves. There’s a museum here,inside of me, with the Corinthian columns, the grand staircase,and the mezzanine. […] Just as art cannot exist outside thefield of art, I cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not aswhat I am, which is an artist.

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[t]he film avant-garde, for instance, has always run on aseparate track from the art world, even as its practitionersmay have been pursuing analogous concerns.

[biopolitical art] must depend on a record of its interventioninto the world, and this documentation is what is recouped asart, short-circuiting the original intent [of blurring art and life].

106


Suppose an artist were to release the work directly into asystem that depends on reproduction and distribution forsustenance, a model that encourages contamination,borrowing, stealing and horizontal blur. The art system usuallycorrals errant works, but how could it recoup thousands offreely circulating paperbacks?

The rst-generation critique of the democratizing effect of theInternet was based on various implications of the problem ofinformation overload, or the Babel objection. According to theBabel objection, when everyone can speak, no one can beheard, and we devolve either to a cacophony or to thereemergence of money as the distinguishing factor betweenstatements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity.[3]

Users tend to treat other people’s choices about what to linkto and to read as good indicators of what is worthwhile forthem. They are not slavish in this, though; they apply somejudgment of their own as to whether certain types of users –say, political junkies of a particular stripe, or fans of a speci ctelevision program – are the best predictors of what will beinteresting for them. The result is that attention in thenetworked environment is more dependent on beinginteresting to an engaged group of people than it is in themass-media environment, where moderate interest to largenumbers of weakly engaged viewers is preferable. Because ofthe redundancy of clusters and links, and because manyclusters are based on mutual interest, not on capital

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investment, it is more dif cult to buy attention on the Internetthan it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use moneyto squelch an opposing view. These characteristics save thenetworked environment from the Babel objection withoutreintroducing excessive power in any single party or smallcluster of them, and without causing a resurgence in the roleof money as a precondition to the ability to speak publicly. [4]

Kosuth’s quotation from Roget’s Thesaurus placed in anArtforum ad, or Dan Graham’s list of numbers laid out in anissue of Harper’s Bazaar were uses of mass media to delivercoded propositions to a specialist audience, and the impact ofthese works, significant and lasting as they were, reverteddirectly to the relatively arcane realm of the art system, whichnoted these efforts and inscribed them in its histories.

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The Minor League

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The Wealth ofPointlessness

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Friend Request From My Mom

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peer pressure brad troemel (pdf) - the composing rooms

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