repetition is a form of fucking change. The Work of Art(&facts) in the Age of Viral Remixing

(full txt available in mid november 2011)



ghosts in daylight on a crowded street
Tumblr, 4chan, youtube, facebook &co are not exactly where one would suppose art to happen. And yet, it does. Platforms, networks, communities and specific formats are not only used to represent, but to create through viral dissemination and sequential modification. Social Media introduce virality as a novel and oftentimes subversive practice to art. They are not the cathedrals of museums and galleries, but market places for negotiating cultural significance; camp sites, temporal, unstable, nomadic habitats, surrounding us like ghosts in daylight on a crowded street (W.S.Burroughs), as the paraphernalia of everyday life && culture. Their vernacular derives from happy accidents and insider knowledge and changes at fast pace. In all these processes, an 'original' and its many resurrections and versions enter in a dialogue, a dialectics of original and copy, sameness and difference, obsolescence and progress, memory and forgetting, survival and death. And as the original as a concept dies, it is at the same time reborn. I suggest that openness, copying/modification and dissemination change and challenge the notion of aura and original. With Media Art being process, not product, what after all can be considered original?

da[r/w/k]in/s, srsly?
Viral behavior has become part of the art making machine in digital communities. The survival of the fittest is core to forms such as memes, animated gifs & the like. Where Darwin meets Dawkins, entropic, wide && wild dissemination, reception, forwarding, modification, etc amount cultural value && currency. The faster and more furious something spreads, the higher the value, the more present the aura. While for Walter Benjamin the aura of an ®work was determined by its presence as well as destroyed by its omnipresence, in Digital Art dissemination has become the most vital aspect of presentness. In my paper and presentation, I will give examples of shape-shifted emergences of the aura in practices specific to networks, online communities and free ranging dissemination processes. Through this investigation, the notion of the artwork as a closed entity will no longer hold, but has to be replaced by rethinking it as an open system. The concept of the original – the holy cow of art history – will be slaughtered and Walter Benjamin's seminal text 'The Work of ® in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' has to be reread with a different mindset... as this paper suggests as 'The Work of Art(&facts) in the Age of Viral Remixing', or, more blatantly, as repetition is a form of fucking change.