#digital sublime

The video contends with a digital virtuosity; or, the Internet's ability to associate key terms with desired outcomes, and do so immediately. This revolution of data retrieval and mediation, born of digital networks and search engines, competes with the old guard of the archive. Henrot approaches the Smithsonian’s vast holdings with the casual irreverence of a Google search, like browsing Wikipedia. Her cross-hatching of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources produces a bombardment of information that carries, in its grosse-ness, a greatness: a sublime particular to the Internet age.

Grosse Fatigue begins with an unpictured omniscient, an end-user who interfaces with a computer and conducts the information on-screen for our viewing. This individual, perhaps Henrot herself, breathes proverbial life into the universe (or rather, a picture of the Andromeda galaxy set as the desktop wallpaper). These heavy breaths set the tone against a top-down view of this computer—a system running Apple’s OSX Lion.

From this desktop, two icons for external hard drives are visible: one titled 'HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE' and the other ‘HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE_2’. We presume, perhaps, that all worldly information is held therein, plus a backup. Beside these icons is a video file titled 'GROSSE_FATIGUE_'. The Creator moves the cursor over and selects the file, putting things into motion. The narrator begins:

In the beginning there was nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath... The world had no time, no shape, and no life, except in the mind of the Creator. In the beginning the word already was... And there was violent relaxation. And God said, “let there be light!” And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

Performed by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, the narration takes off in the tradition of spoken-word narratives in the proto-Hip Hop style of Gil-Scott Heron. The use of this genre harkens to the oral traditions through which myth has historically been passed down, altered, and re-mixed in the absence of writing systems.

Sound is the first of two competing levels of interaction that vie for the viewer’s attention, pitted against imagery. These narrative elements function as dense and disjointed packets of cultural reference. Occasionally the two programs are interdependent in laying claims and evidence, at other times they diverge or miss the mark. Together, they force a weaving of attention that vibrates between both conditions, only adding to the frenetic nature of the experience.

Sound is divided into two parts: language and music. Language, as in Orraca-Tetteh’s narration, follows suit in a poetic archaeology of sorts, whereby creation myths from across world religions are excavated and recombined with the contemporary scientific understandings of life’s origins. The first identifiable reference alludes to the creation myth of the Native American Muskogean tribe: “In the beginning there was a single hill called Nunne Chaha”. The video invokes the “great god Bumba” of the Boshongo from Central Africa; Pan Gu of Chinese mythology; a “dark ocean [that] washed on the shores of nothingness” from the Hindu creation myth; Amma, the creator god of the Dogon of Western Africa; the god in the form of a “man with no bones”, referring to Con, the creator god in one of three Incan creation myths; and Ra and Hathor of the Egyptian pantheon; among Judeo-Christian conventions. Together this forms a grand narrative of creation; a pastiched and globalized modernist project that collapses cultural divisions into a global village; Edward Steinchen’s “The Family of Man” for the globalized Internet generation. This is set against a pulsing beat that slowly builds, falls, and paces the activity onscreen as well as the observer’s ear and eye. There is a narrative structure—a beginning, middle, and end—that follows through the birth, proliferation, and death of the universe, and this beat follows rhythmically in turn.

The video’s imagery is sourced from Henrot’s time at the Smithsonian’s libraries and archives, among Google searches, Wikipedia articles, and social media websites. Program windows, web browsers, and video screens organize the imagery within the frame of the computer desktop, allowing for stacking and overlap to take place in a way familiar to us through our own interactions with user interfaces and computers. Henrot ignores hierarchies of information, anthropologizing Internet memes of space monkeys and funny cats alongside preserved animal specimens and tablets of early written language. The progression of imagery is largely jumbled, but at times associative: an amorphous spotted blob gives way to the splatter pattern on a pair of black jeans gives way to a picture of Jackson Pollock dripping paint onto a canvas. In her orchestration of data, Henrot leaves traces that can be revisited outside of the video: we can all readily access the Internet sources she cites—the websites the visits, the Google searches she initiates—further grounding Grosse Fatigue to our own experience of the Internet.

While there is nothing remarkable in the individual images Henrot shows us, their sheer volume gives way to the immensity and diversity of information in the Smithsonian’s archives and on the Internet; what we have chosen to preserve, archive, and share. This networked and multi-media experience imposes a curated lens on the viewer, guided wholly by Henrot’s hand: we see only the information she chooses for us to see. The top-down view implicates us in the perspective of the Creator; we get to look through the eyes of gods (any one of those from the creation myths the video calls upon), if you will, as the universe’s timeline unfolds. But the passivity of our spectatorship within this experience enforces the ultimate disruption to the quest for infinite knowledge: our own physical limitations, even within the networked landscape, to know or experience everything, particularly on our own.

Grosse Fatigue accomplishes what the physical never will: it shows us ‘everything’ at once. Henrot presents different objects from across archives and libraries spanning physical and temporal distances, flattening the experience of the Smithsonian in a way only a search engine could. The video collapses two months of research and content into 13 minutes. And its Babelization of the Smithsonian pushes forward what, in the end, Henrot might have been moving toward all along: while there exist many Encyclopedic Palaces (the Smithsonian among them), the Internet is the only one that is readily accessible and publicly our own, cultivated from many sources, passed down from hand to hand (or network to network), and compiled across myriad perspectives.