rato verde

comics are like squats. lacking basic infrastructure, it's required you build your own architecture. everything's falling apart so you can't just make stuff hoping to be discovered. you have to actively participate in the gnarly business of making a public-facing collective while at the same time constructing the boundaries needed to make your own work in private. publishing is a house of cards destabilized and reorganized by every update to the print medium since guttenberg. (and every update in post since the pony express.) each generation of printers attempts to obsolesce its predecessor. with print the medium really is the message because the formal properties of print are the direct result of the technology and the technology is interconnected car-sized machines housed in specialized facilities in southeast asia. in other words it's much more than the canvas and stretcher beams that undergird paintings. it's a very specialized technology on a scale in which geopolitics matter. especially now that silicon valley has exfiltrated the very essence of print, abstracting away all the friction that once surrounded it except the social networking effects and the means of turning a profit. the word "print" now evokes this very obsolescence, pointing to the era of communication that directly preceded our own, before "print to screen" became so ubiquitous it superceded print, before "publish" and "post" were buttons we could press anytime we felt like it. it's just as strange to think that a "printer" was once an actual human being rather than a piece of machinery. in the 90's american comic books reached their industrial zenith. the entire industry was revitalized by the advent of photoshop and color printing technology. it was the last gasp before paper was obsolesced entirely. in its wake the folk art of webcomics and memes spored like mushrooms. these new things were products of vast networks of effects: you were seeing the tip of what could be a mountain of lore. but they felt (and still feel) germinal. revolutionary in their lack of continuity with the past. net artists hoped the art world would be similarly revolutionalized, but why would it? the art world is defined by the distance of its images from the public and the security of the insitutions hiding them. by contrast print aspires to be as homeless and ephemeral as a zeitgeist.

happy decade to the horrible beast i have wrought