In her much-contested article 'The Digital Divide', published in Artforum September 2012, Claire Bishop addresses, among other things, the diversification of the artist's role since the inaguration of our new, dominant social sphere, the internet. Firstly, Bishop mentions artists whose work reflects the appropriative agency of our existence online, citing Carol Bowe and Rashid Johnson. She then goes on to discuss the archival inclination of any competent web user, likening the practices of artists Kader Attia, Zoe Leonard and Akram Zaatari to her own rigorous maintenance of her iTunes collection, a task that has turned us all into 'de facto archivist[s]'. Furthermore, the artist's role, Bishop argues, is increasingly curatorial. Examples she includes are Mark Dion and Fred Wilson from the 1990s, as well as more recent exhibition examples such as Mark Wallinger's 'The Russian Linesman' of 2009, Vik Muniz's 'Rebus' from the same year and Grayson Perry's 'The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman' of 2011. Equally, the artist's role as researcher has changed somewhat, and examples are given here, too.
In an age when cultural practices are homogenising under the broad umbrella of immateriality, Bishop fails (or chooses not) to identify the increasingly artistic agency of the prosumer; a term coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980 but which today might understood as defining the online civilian whose collaborative relationship with the digital sphere is one of both producer and consumer. The civilian's proactive consumption of online material implements the streamlined feedback systems of web 2.0 social-networking and hyper-democratic user-generated sites to constantly produce content, connections between content, social grouping and sub-groupings. Where the consumer of yesteryear would passively digest the spectacle provided, whether capitalist, political or cultural, the prosumer likes and shares, rates and reviews, remixes and uploads.
Bishop is absolutely correct in her assertions about the new roles being taken on by artists, and is correct in her assertion that these are bleeding into the artist's practices. For an artist to function socially and professionally a certain amount of social networking is necessary. Equally, a competency with digital technologies in general is now a prerequisite for artistic practice and lifestyle. The logistical back-up that these technologies provide in the everyday, however, has drawn artists and non-artists alike closer to these roles of curator, archivist, researcher and appropriator. Through this
digital social field and the new cultural languages developed online, artistic practice is becoming steadily more proximate to the daily social practices of the 'everyman', and my thesis here is that where initially the constant expansion and contraction of these social enactments could be attributed to individuals striving to identify with their own changing agency through social-networking cultures, now I believe the artist and the layperson are each shifting their own agency in reaction to the other. While people of all classes and social backgrounds are engaging with visual culture exponentially because of proliferating memes, curated blogs, the performance of self through web 2.0 sites and so forth (Features AM343), artists of a certain inclination are striking back and defiantly delving further into practices that either undermine the new languages of the web, in which the public are becoming fluent, or that seem entirely non-artistic and exclusively sociological.
In his Character Date project, launched in 2012. Ed Fornieles has conceived and online dating service. When user sign up on the Character Date website they are assigned, in the words of Charlie (a satisfied 'participant' whose testimonial can be viewed at characterdate.com), 'a new profile a new backstory, new clothes, new props; everything I need for the new me'. The Character Date website is prominent in Google searches, but try affiliating your search criteria with Fornieles and you will be unable to locate the website or anything to do with it, save for a few blog posts and reviews relating to an instillation version of the work hosted at Frieze Art Fair 2012. Character Date seems to have no open affiliation to Fornieles, as would an artwork, and even by the standards of performative, experiential artworks there is little in the way of an outcome: no objects, no video documentation, certainly nothing saleable. What allows this sort of work to exist is the web presence, and were it not for the project's impressively broad reach, it would be comforting to classify Character Date as browser-art. The agency given to an artist to appropriate the visual and corporate languages of commerce when they design and develop a website is not exclusively responsible for this sort of artistic practice, but it has certainly allowed these kinds of projects to evolve.
In the project's only manifestation that came close to looking like what is generally considered art, at Frieze in 2012, Fornieles' gallery, Carlos Ishinkawa transformed its booth into a Character Date kiosk of sorts, with reps approaching passers-by and asking them to sign-up. The reps assisted the new participants in the conception of their new characters, while sitting with them in the bizarrely furnished booth, a sort of physically manoeuverable web space. Participating characters were then paired off and sent on 'dates' around the fair. There is something manipulative about Character Date that smacks slightly of interventionalist intent: to hijack the unsuspecting public into an unusually profound interaction, such as they would never seek out without being prompted. There is a conflict in my reception of this work. I find it enlightening and insightful in its attempts to 'create a shared experience' and 'foster a culture of dialogue'. But at the same time I find it repulsive in its simultaneous dependency on the habits of audiences of contemporary art
to flourish and in its rejection of, and aloofness towards, contemporary art practice, In the PDF catalogue from the 2012 group exhibition 'Net Narratives', Fornieles stated: 'We have no interest in the art world, the artwork of others or the recuperation of others' practices.' In the wake of Tino Sehgal's massively successful 2012 Turbine Hall commission (Features AM359), I understand the value of this sort of performed social interaction, and of its critique of contemporary, digital modes of social interface, but there is something problematic in the way an artist such a Fornieles isolates projects such as Character Date from his practice as an artist, as if an open affiliation with art would undermine the success of the project's ambush of its public.
Equally comprehensive in its conceptual isolation from contemporary art practices is Iain Ball's ENERGY: PANGEA. Publicised as a 'platform for the question of energy, sustainability, environment and technology withing the role of business, global markets, art, aesthetics and the psyche', the project is more typical in its appropriation of non-artistic tropes than Character Date, but its desire to become wholly self-sufficient is comparable. The project is more typical because it generally leads to the development of 'products' that are exhibited by Ball as artworks. However, ENERGY: PANGEA is thorough in its maintenance of appearances, and instillation photographs of Ball's 'Rare Earth Sculptures' (the products produced by ENERGY: PANGEA) are organised into an 'outreach' section of the project's website. Interestingly, Ball appears to be claiming that the exhibition of these objects at various art galleries is not so much an element of his practice as an artist but the outcome of the efforts of ENERGY: PANGEA to promote its activities to a wider demographic.
In both instances the artists appear to be making a conscious effort to produce non-art. What is interesting, however, is that the artists do not make these attempts through some Fluxian rejection of the values of contemporary art, some ideological renunciation, but instead through the thorough implementation of corporate languages, tools and technologies. Through the development of the multi-limbed projects, Fornieles and Ball have both produced ventures that comprise websites, objects, installations and events, all of which promote the projects as ventures that exist beyond the confines of
contemporary art circles. The works are slipped into the capitalist system and immortalised.
What Bishop homes in on most in her assault on this fluctuating discrepancy between the web user and the web-native artist is the increasing importance of the archive. Technologies and social tools now archive our interactions in the same manner that we once reserved for our banking and tax returns. Even Charlie Brooker, whose sinfully outdated critiques of the digital sphere in his Channel 4 programme Black Mirror expresses the mentality of a definitively non-native web user, seems to have identified this archival explosion. In one episode, unfaithfulness between a married couple is exposed through an in-brain recording and playback system, whereby a limitless archive of personal experience is not only memorable, but shareable. In another, a dead lover is accessed and reincarnated through an online service that aggregates tweets, Facebook posts and online social activity to map the deceased's personality, which is then loaded onto a robot whose prosthetics are informed by the dead person's photographic detritus, their digital flotsam and jetsam, left awash in the cyber-sea long after they are gone. While Brooker seems content, and successful, in his aged 'These technologies are out of control!' critique, some artists are more acutely and reflexively implementing the ouroboric archive of the net in their address to the same. Any work of art produced or published online becomes consumed by the hungry jaws of the internet's constant refresh, and when something is produced with this in mind it becomes a deliberate insertion - an intervention, perhaps. The internet has no understanding of context, and so things will not be returned from search results with any indication that they have been produced critically or ironically. Contemporary art is at no distance from any other sort of content and so artists can easily achieve this ambition of slipping a fraudulent dating site or a 'fake' business into the machine and watching it recede into the archive, knowing that if an when it is uncovered, it will be stripped of context by Google or whichever, and thus will likely be read at face value.
While it may come across as slightly eccentric to suggest that artists would produce these kinds of works as a way of claiming back some cultural agency, and in reaction to an increased visual and intellectual engagement on the part of the web's public, I don't mean to paint quite such a crude picture. The artist has always been perceived as someone
with unique social insight. Part philosopher, part activist, part bohemian, the artist and the system of contemporary art is accustomed to having an unusual, privileged experience of the world. With culture as a whole being more widely accessible, creative tools readily and inexpensively available, and with interaction of all sorts being governed by these new curatorially and artistically provocative networking systems, it is increasingly difficult to assert oneself as a privileged cultural agent. Especially when the pursuits that once made up the notion of an artistic 'practice' are now practised every day by the masses, not as a means of earning a living by as recreation. Consequently the social sphere is maturing culturally and this widespread engagement with visual cultures is of course welcome and long overdue, and encourages these interesting niches in artistic production to harbour germinating practices.
While the artists are inserting undercover works of art into the ever-unravelling archive of the internet, the prosumption of and engagement with creative practices by the online public has equal interface with the web's archival inclination. It is as these systems of documentation develop, and through the notion of accumulating content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and so forth, that the idea of practice rears its head. Where the word practice, itself much contested and theorised (Features AM357), was once used exclusively in reference to artists, architects, curators and other 'practitioners' of a certain kind, it has now become something that all web users propagate. The notion of a 'feed' has saturated our shared experience: the temporally engaged action of presenting one's most recent status, tweet, photograph or otherwise 'creative' offering as the most prominent piece of content, followed by an infinitely receding stack of memory-stuff. A pile of data explaining your life exactly as you would like it explained; the perfectly curated archive. With so many of the net-native public engaging with notions of creative practice so thoroughly, what is left for the artist exploring the digital sphere? For some a non-practice is the next frontier of making art.
