"Prestidigitation"

Curator's statement:


This installment of No Commercial Value examines the many manipulations, disguises, avoidances, and convergences that happen daily in the complicated dance of identity, play, and intercourse transpiring on the internet. As we manufacture, mask, maneuver, and manipulate ourselves and each other through digital channels, we must make fast decisions that result in meaningful material consequences for our emotional states, subjectivities, perceptual faculties, and social and ideological structures. A slip in the façade, an unintended moment of intimacy, and the seemingly ephemeral liquid of the internet inflates, gains weight.

I’ve titled the series “Prestidigitation” for a variety of reasons: the word refers to a magician’s sleight-of-hand, also called “legerdemain,” which I love for the way that it conjures phonetically the sense of an Internet domain, a virtual home. Prestidigitation carries with it a feeling of instantaneity – “presto” – while also connoting the digital, with a play on numbers/hands that also refers to the tactility and manipulability of the internet (again, working from the Latin root for hand, “manus”). As a venue that maintains a substantial disconnect between its workings and the layperson (not to speak of hackers and masters of the deconstructed guts of the digital lexicon), the internet likes to portray itself as a black box: inputs enter and produce outputs through a series of essentially mystified processes. Yet many of the artists featured in this series engage with the physicality of the internet, its tactile and material qualities, or its tangible traces in our thought processes.

At the same time, the internet produces swirling eddies of play and fantasy, hiding as much as it reveals. I found that in order to complete my curatorial duties, it was necessary for me to stage a microscopic intervention, a small-scale social experiment that warped certain elements of the RSS-like feed of my Facebook wall (click the forward button below to see the stills). For five days, I “overposted” – repeatedly posted the same video, in the hopes of either seeming mundane or even appearing, through perpetual posting, that I was not posting anything new at all. That is, I played with two facets of the Facebook wall: first, the sense that the wall is an all-inclusive archive, a vertical spatialization of time; and second, that the source of interest in this format is novelty and constant change – in other words, the mutability of facts and news items as the centerpiece of the RSS or Twitter feed, and posting the same thing over and over comes to seem taboo, or glitch-like.

In choosing the video to overpost, I sought something with a minimum of message or aesthetic stylization. After some searching, I found a video entitled “Stoat Driving a Quad Bike” that depicted about a minute of just that: a taxidermied stoat driving a remote-controlled toy bike in circles around a driveway. Few political overtones could be detected in this, and the essential emptiness of the documented moment appealed to me. Why would someone go to the effort of making this event happen in the first place? Why, furthermore, would someone document it and post it on Youtube? Was the event created in service of its very representation? It seemed to be a pure product, or a meaningless meme divorced from time and place.

Surprisingly, my repeated posts of the same video generated a substantial amount of surprise and curiosity, turning the ostensibly banal into unpredictable innovation. People expressed confusion and wondered what I would do next; in response, I posted the same video again. The accretion of videos began to resemble a strip of photographic negatives, making implicit reference to the photograph as a spatial depiction of time – very forceful during the advent of photography, and exerting substantial effects on the ways that people perceived change over time (see Sekula and Crary, among others). In this way, I endeavored to make visible a certain perceptual modality that is altering how we interpret reality and organize events and concepts.

Yet even as I was accumulating and accreting iterations of the same video, I was selectively deleting – at first gently, then with increasing aggression. Finally, I erased the entire five-day episode from my Facebook record. At some points, my erasures were benign, while at others they verged on the dangerous: during the five days of overposting, for example, my Facebook account became infected with a virus – an unforeseen event – and while I posted a warning to others, I subsequently took this down (erased it), exposing my friends and relatives to potential infection.

Why was I doing this? I wanted to address Facebook’s misleading appearance of transparency – the all-consuming, all-revealing archive – to show the seams, in an almost Brechtian fashion. Therefore, as I was repeating, I was erasing – occluding, suppressing, incessantly redacting while also layering over this redaction with a semblance of seamless acquisition. A return to Gertrude Steinian language play?

Exercising a dictatorial control over my wall, I became paranoid – no detail could pass without my inspection. I noticed how frequently I was logging into Facebook and how much time it actually removed from my offline life, or the remnants of such. I also began to worry about the effects of this activist surveillance on others – their potential to be offended by my suppression of their voices. Meanwhile, I felt socially deprived or cut off from the wellspring of life while doing this. Because I forced myself not to reply to others’ posts, my usual high degree of Facebook interaction and support was greatly reined in. I felt that I might be disappointing my interlocutors and friends. It was like suddenly losing my voice – intimations of a sort of locked-in syndrome, or even a deathlike muteness.

My ideal next project would be to stage an Orson Welles-style calamity on Facebook, scare everyone, and then delete it. One friend actually came close to this, staging a marriage and a birth on Facebook and then insinuating that it had all been false after about thirty people weighed in with their congratulations. I was impressed by the way he’d had us all fooled, threading in his information subversively to integrate it with the many weddings, babies, and suburban lives unfolding in that forum.

Included in this edition are artists whose work plays with and investigates aspects of the internet’s capacity for prestidigitation. While Jason Lazarus introduces us to the Flickr accounts of US soldiers in Iraq, he withholds the actual contents of the photographs, reproducing the titles as images in themselves. This sleight-of-hand plays with functions of witnessing, testimonial, and photojournalism, selectively revealing and concealing the visual creations and giving us a tantalizing – and forbidding – desire/fear to see what these soldiers are depicting. As photographers, the soldiers whose titles Lazarus reproduces are as “embedded” as possible in military service, yet they produce representations filtered through the many veils of cultural, ideological, and social sensibilities and acts of self-structuring that compose their roles within the military as well as outside of it, as US citizens (or soldier-citizens, their citizenship facilitated by their military participation). As visual matter is sublimated, the organization of experience into categories – and its display for viewers and readers – becomes paramount, and we are left to ponder the ways in which these soldiers may be interpreting their daily experiences trammeling camouflaged through a foreign land.

Seizing upon the sensory aspects of our daily interactions with the internet, Colleen Asper focuses upon different aspects of the digital – namely, the processes by which we produce language in emails and Google searches, as well as through other portals – and the signals that we send as we build our repertoire of digital habits, comings and goings, and relationships. Asper renders these virtual screens material, via media and venues such as sculpture, video, and paint. Asper’s fascinating interview with Judith Donath sheds further light on themes of signaling and mediation while also exploring our methods of daily coping in the internet, as we adapt our socialization and self-presentation or styles to new forums. As long emails are replaced by short bursts of twitter-like information, communication’s form and content is changing, and theories of identity and the “performance of everyday life” (cf. Goffman) must change with it.

Where Asper incorporates performance in her work – tapping out her name on a wall overlaid with a keyboard – Awilda Rodríguez Lora and André Austvoll foreground the performance of social (mis)communication in their piece, Log-in/Break-up. Dancing together in a Skype-style platform across a nine-hour temporal difference between Norway and California, Lora and Austvoll repeatedly connect and disconnect as they (and we) view their dancing bodies on a series of screens inset within the monitor of the other. In infinite repetition, they make a new mise en abyme: wearing white-on-black and black-on-white, the two perform a duet of dialectics, dancing binary codes and attempting to touch, but (inevitably) in vain.

Reflected in another camera, to which Lora’s attention occasionally darts, are the viewers who are observing this live-streaming performance on their own screens, “in the comfort of their own homes.” As the performers lace fingers and arch backs to bridge materiality and screen-presence, they maintain contact with their audiences and with each other despite occasionally break-ups, missteps, and gaps in transmission. Can messages come through intact and relationships be maintained in this venue? And what of the emotional ruptures that may result from these breakups and stutters? These are questions that the dancers seek to address, applying bodies and movements to the task.

Playing with another side of the material reproduction of language is Aay Preston-Myint’s application of popular karaoke refrains onto banners and screens often associated with political protest and nonviolent forms of civil disobedience. Inherent here is a queer modality – a certain theatricalization of protest, or the convergence of politics and fantasy that queer cultural expression has achieved so effectively, taking the form of the festive procession, for example, to new heights of social and political expressivity and publicization. Yet another aspect of this decontextualization of the song lyrics emerges in their placement in installations – “The Future’s Owned by You and Me” hanging from an abandoned warehouse building in postindustrial Chicago, for example – which brings these messages into sharp contrast with their depressed, distressed, or repressed surroundings, manipulating the affect communicated by their slogans and orienting passers-by to possible new meanings in clichéd and slogans of beer-soaked suburban hedonism. Likewise, Jorge Nieto’s collages of colorful and spiritual memes evoke the visual equivalent of rave music: fast, shocking, and meant to involve our bodies in their transcendent and incessant sensuality, they waver between cliché and a Jodorowsky-flavored aspect of the fractally psychedelic. Nieto weaves consumerism with religiosity to present us with a veritable Babylonia – or at least its hanging gardens – in repetitive figures with third eyes, Hare Krishna leis, yogic postures, and neon-orange arcs of light disappearing into piles of Christmas trees, bowler hats, and trash. The accumulative, consistent nature of Nieto’s collages suggests the installations of Félix González-Torres, yet the repetition of forms strewn together in orgiastic poses implies the state of the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction run amok.

I hope that you enjoy this installment of No Commercial Value. In the meantime, I will keep tunneling into the internet, repeating and deleting – accreting and occluding – like a snail building and sloughing off its shell, to create an ongoing history whose accumulated scales hide the mechanisms of their manufacture.

- Katie Zien