Christiane Paul’s Digital Art has been an essential index, contextualization, and history of digital art going back to its first edition 20 years ago; this version is updated to capture the turbulent changes since the 3rd edition in 2015. I haven’t read Joanna Zylinska’s book yet, but plan to do so shortly. Rhea Myers’ anthology is beautifully designed* and captures her work and writings over the last many years.
*I should add that Urbanomic is one of my favorite publishers right now, so nice to see this title getting published there
While in residence as a guest professor at Aarhus University last fall, I gave a talk that (re)frames my art practice and artworks as establishing and enacting an aesthetics of degrowth. Titled From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite, I examine the growth aesthetics embedded in today’s big tech platforms, showing how their designs reshape our conceptions of life as limitless in order to convert our time and attention into endless profit. Then I walk through a series of projects that counter, subvert, and reimagine this digital landscape, discussing how net art makes possible a “tactics of bounding” that helps us recover a sense of finitude in the face of the digital infinite.
Here’s the original abstract:
From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite
17 November 2023
Peter Bøgh Andersen Auditorium
Aarhus University, Denmark
Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s leading social media platforms primarily emphasize one singular concept: more . These capitalist software machines are designed to stoke an insatiable cycle of production and consumption in order to maximize corporate growth and profit. To achieve this, they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep users engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for growing shares of our time and attention. This talk presents a series of art projects that resist these accumulative logics, works that employ an aesthetics of degrowth that reconfigures and/or reimagines the social apps that aim to trap us in endless loops—until there’s no more time left to give.
I recently spoke with Mark Hurst, the host of Techtonic on WFMU Radio in NYC. We talked about Silicon Valley’s obsessions with growth, their war against sustainability and ethics, and artistic counteractions that invert big tech’s growth-obsessed capitalist logics.
After the roughly 40m discussion, Mark plays a recording of a performative reading he did of my redacted version of Mark Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. This reading was spectacular; when I first heard it in October I reached out and we ended up planning the interview.
The Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona. Original photograph by StoptheRoc, widened by generative AI.
My work Computers Watching Movies (2013) is part of the exhibition AI: Artificial Intelligence at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona. This ongoing traveling exhibition, which began at The Barbican as AI: More than Human in London in 2019, is “an unprecedented survey of the creative and scientific developments in artificial intelligence, exploring the evolution of the relationship between humans and technology.” The exhibition in Barcelona, which opened on October 18, 2023, is on view through March 17, 2024.
“…this large-scale, interdisciplinary exhibition seeks to define the phenomenon of creativity from a broad, humanistic perspective. What are the conditions for creativity in society today? And is there reason to fear that artificial intelligence will take over and surpass human creative abilities?”
You’ll find my work in the Work-Life section opposite Rineke Dijkstra and just ahead of Trevor Paglen. The exhibition is up through April 4th, 2024.
Screenshot of redaction poetry version of Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto
Yesterday, the influential Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published what he titled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, an anti-regulation anti-ethics hyper-capitalist growth-obsessed screed that, sadly, highlights the thinking that’s led to so much exploitative toxic tech. Instead of writing a point-by-point critique, I instead chose to simplify Andreessen’s arguments using redaction poetry. The result leaves in place the little bits one needs to get a decent sense of Marc’s thinking.
Article about Radically Finite Social Media for the Institute for Rebooting Social Media
As part of my recent fellowship with the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University, I wrote about some of my preliminary findings in an article titled Minus: Radically Finite Social Media and Alternative Futures. This text stems from my deep read and analysis of Minus’ early days. I draw several conclusions about the cultural effects of Minus’ finitude, and contrast that with the pseudo-infinite frame of big social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
My social network Minus was featured in yesterday’s New York Times. In an article titled The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social, journalist Brian X. Chen writes about the increasingly impersonal nature of big social platforms, and the space that shift is creating for smaller online spaces. He quotes Jonathan Zittrain talking about Minus as an experimental alternative that treats our time and attention as the finite resources they are:
One app that emerged from the program, Minus, lets users publish only 100 posts on their timeline for life. The idea is to make people feel connected in an environment where their time together is treated as a precious and finite resource, unlike traditional social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that use infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible. “It’s a performance art experiment,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science at Harvard who started the research initiative. “It’s the kind of thing that as soon as you see it, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
If you haven’t tried out Minus yourself, give it a try.
In fall 2020, I gave an online artist talk with Telematic Media Arts in San Francisco as part of its exhibition of my work ORDER OF MAGNITUDE. Telematic recently posted this talk on YouTube, and you can now watch it there (or above). The talk is followed by a discussion with Telematic director Clark Buckner.