Wasting Time on the Internet (17 page)

Low-resolution, or cool media, requires you to do some work, as in the case of MP3s, where your ear has to fill in the blanks in order to give you the illusion that you're hearing it in higher resolution. Visual forms of cool media include comic strips, in which your mind is forced to make the connections between sequential frames, or television in which your eye must patch the mosaic of benday dots in order to give the illusion of a coherent and rich visual experience. We could say that the entire Internet—a huge compression machine—is a cool medium, one that demands an endless amount of participation. In this way, cool media has a web-based DIY ethos, one that invites you to customize, tinker with, and remix its artifacts.

We could say that hot media is “strong” and that cool media is “weak.” But in this case, strong doesn't mean good and weak doesn't mean bad; it's actually just the opposite. For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of “weak images,” claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one. The Internet and the artifacts that circulate through it—MP3s, GIFs, JPEGs, AVIs—are all, relatively speaking, low-resolution or weak artifacts. What makes the weak artifact powerful is not its resolution or quality but its abundance and availability—the fact that everyone can possess it, whenever one pleases, often for little or no cost. Think of clicking on a freely available but weak lo-res YouTube video from the comfort of your home versus going out to a cinema to pay for a strong visual experience. Obviously they're completely different experiences, but Steyerl and Groys argue that the weak experience is stronger because of its low-impact economics and the sheer fact of its availability. Due to its high compression rates, even HD streaming video is weak as compared to broadcast HD or DVD video.

Of course this is nothing new: bootleg VHSs and street-stall DVDs have long been a part of the democratic nature of weak images, trading hands for a few dollars and shown under less-than-optimal conditions. Taking cues from both street culture and the counterculture, Steyerl frames the so-called weak image as a type of resistance against consumerism: “In the class society of images, cinema takes on the role of a flagship store. In flagship stores high-end products are
marketed in an upscale environment. More affordable derivatives of the same images circulate as DVDs, on broadcast television, or online as poor images.” Politically, she says, the strong image is on the side of “official” culture: capital and corporations. The “poor” image is on the side of “unofficial” culture: file sharing and individuals. Her classification of image quality takes a political turn: “The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited.”

There's a humanistic strain to Steyerl's logic. File-sharing networks create communities, bridging people from all over the world through the exchange of cultural artifacts. And every time a film is ripped, reformatted, remixed, shared, subtitled, and resubtitled, that artifact bears a human trace, marked by human intention. In this way, these altered weak images are palimpsests, containing records of human experience in ways that official out-of-the-box culture, sealed and protected, can only bear one mark—that of the corporation.

Because weak artifacts are in circulation, they're useful and dynamic, as opposed to the moldering reels of 35 mm films that languish in the dark archives of institutions, trotted out on occasion as part of a film festival that few will see. The bootleg is distributed with use-value in mind. In the late 1960s, the Cuban director and screenwriter Julio García Espinosa wrote a manifesto called “For an Imperfect Cinema,” in which he went so far as to claim that “perfect
cinema—technically and artistically masterful—is almost always reactionary cinema.” Perfect cinema was made by Hollywood; imperfect cinema could be made by anybody. “Film today,” he complained, “no matter where, is made by a small minority for the masses.” That would change with the advent of Super 8 cameras and escalate in the 1970s and '80s with the widespread availability of video recorders. But Espinosa was prophetic: in the YouTube age everybody—in the famous words of German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys—is an artist. Weak images, then, are popular images in that they can be made and viewed by the many. Because compression makes it possible for weak images to travel long distances efficiently, they lose information and gain speed. Steyerl claims that “this is precisely why they end up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.”

So the problem becomes one of quantity. Who has the time to consume all of these artifacts? It's all well and good that “everybody is an artist,” but what use is it if no one will ever see your works? Boris Groys puts a twenty-first-century spin on Espinosa: “Whereas before, a chosen few produced images and texts for millions of readers and spectators, millions of producers now produce texts and images for a spectator who has little to no time to read or see them. Earlier . . . one was expected to compete for public attention. One was expected to invent an image or text that would be so strong,
so surprising, and so shocking that it could capture the attention of the masses, even if only for a short span of time.”

The GIF was succeeded by the JPEG, a compressed format that is able to render images with much greater finesse than its predecessor. The jaggy compression works similarly to the way lossy MP3s do, relying on human psychovisual systems to fill in missing information. When these images are printed, most of the information that makes them look good on the screen is lost, resulting in blocky pixelation, which is why our photographs don't look as good on paper as they do on our devices. But for some artists, the distortion of low resolution (a cool or weak image) is a gateway to twenty-first-century abstraction.

Since 2007, the German photographer Thomas Ruff has taken jaggy low-resolution JPEGs from the web and blown them up to monumental proportions, exhibiting them as framed megaphotographs. His process is one of devaluation: he takes JPEGs from the web and renders them even lower resolution than he found them, compressing them further so that they are, in his words: “worst possible quality JPEGS. Then I get my image.” The dramatic change in scale—from a thumbnail to more than seven feet tall—is shocking, as is his subject matter, which runs the gamut from porn to images of disaster from news sites, such as the burning Twin
Towers or Baghdad during the shock and awe siege. Like Steyerl's weak AVIs or Professor Berger's students who love the sizzle of MP3s, Ruff's photographs are a play of human intervention and technology's fingerprint. When blown up so large, you can really see the compression algorithm at work, as any semblance of visual cohesion is overwhelmed by the complex shades of pixelation at play. One thing these photos reveal is that the underlying structure of our digital images is the grid, a rather basic system of binaries, which when run through an algorithm trick the eye into patching together a seamless image. Because of the play between an iconic image like 9/11 and the blocky pixelation, Ruff's photographs flicker back and forth between realism and abstraction, being both and yet neither.

For his
Nudes
(1999), giant blowups of porn JPEGs dissolve objects of desire into pixelated nightmares. Ruff seems to be saying that on the web, porn—up close and enlarged—is nothing more than a pile of pixels, an illusion. What fuels your fantasies is technology, not flesh. When you see works from
Nudes
from across the room you see a coherent image of eroticism, but the closer you get, the more they fall apart. By the time you're standing in front of them you feel like Austin Powers when he realizes that the beautiful women surrounding him are not women at all, but are actually fembots.

Ruff's work reifies compression technology as the basis for an artistic investigation, one that is at the heart of our daily experience. He asks, “How much visual information
is needed for image recognition? A pretty small quantity of data will go a long way for the brain and the computer, both of which take shortcuts for the sake of speedy comprehension . . . Our brain is very brilliant; at interpreting even the lowest resolution, it creates images.”

“It was while looking at Google's scan of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that I saw my first one—the hand of the scanner operator completely obscuring the book's table of contents,” writes the artist Benjamin Shaykin. What he saw disturbed him: it was a brown hand resting on a page of a beautiful old book, its index finger wrapped in a hot-pink condom-like covering. In the page's lower corner, a watermark bore the words “Digitized by Google.”

Shaykin was an MFA student in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design when he was given an assignment to choose a book from Brown University's library that would serve as the basis for a series of projects. Even though he had the physical books readily available, he found it easier, as many people do, to access them through Google Books. Once he came across the first hand, he was hooked, and started digging deeper into Brown's Special Collections library, which was digitized by Google. He came upon many more anomalies. “In addition to hands and fingers, I found
pages scanned through tissue paper, pages scanned while midturn, and foldout maps and diagrams scanned while folded,” he explained. “The examples were everywhere. I quickly became obsessed, and filled my hard drive with gigabytes of downloaded PDFs.” He collected his strangest findings in a book called
Google Hands
, which ended up as one in a series of a dozen small hand-sewn books, each focused on a different type of glitch. Through social media, he came into contact with like-minded collectors, and they began swapping artifacts.

There are several collections of Google hands around the web, each one as creepy as the one Shaykin saw. A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books' scanning process in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitization. Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble on some glitch that hasn't yet been unearthed. This phenomenon is most thoroughly documented on a Tumblr called “The Art of Google Books,” which collects two types of images: analog stains that are emblems of a paper book's history and digital glitches that result from the scanning. On the site, the analog images show scads of marginalia written in antique script, library
DATE DUE
stamps from the midcentury, tobacco stains, wormholes, dust motes, and ghosts of flowers pressed between pages. On the digital side are pages pho
tographed while being turned, resulting in radical warping and distortion; the solarizing of woodcuts owing to low-resolution imaging; sonnets transformed by software bugs into pixelated psychedelic patterns; and the ubiquitous images of workers' hands.

The obsession with digital errors in Google Books arises from the sense that these mistakes are permanent, on the record. In 2013, Judge Denny Chin ruled that Google's scanning, en masse, of millions of books to make them searchable is legal. In the future, more and more people will consult Google's scans. Because of the speed and volume with which Google is executing the project, the company can't possibly identify and correct all of the disturbances in what is supposed to be a seamless interface. There's little doubt that generations to come will be stuck with both these antique stains and workers' hands.

Paul Soulellis is the proprietor of the Library of the Printed Web, which is housed in a pristine industrial space in Long Island City. Soulellis, a graphic designer turned book artist, has built a library that consists entirely of stuff pulled off the web and bound into paper books. One book is nothing more than dozens of images of highways rendered flat by flaws in Google Earth's mapping algorithm. There are grubby, stapled zines consisting of printed Twitter feeds, books of CAPTCHAs (an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) presented as visual poetry, collections of photos of dogs with glowing eyes culled from Flickr, and lots of books
where “photographers” have selected uncanny moments from Google Street View. While most of them are cheap, print-on-demand editions, a few are highly produced art books. One of the most beautiful books in the library is a collection of hundreds of crummy JPEGs of variations on the
Mona Lisa
(think the
Mona Lisa
morphed with E.T., made by a fourteen-year-old), printed on thick, handmade paper, and accordion folded into an expensive slipcase; the combination of the crappy and the crafted is weirdly effective. Then there are absurdly large projects, such as a ninety-six-volume set called
Other People's Photographs,
which scoops up material from random Flickr pages.

Amusing and titillating as these images are, it's easy to forget that they're the work of an army of invisible laborers—the Google hands. This is the subject of an art work by the Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson called
ScanOps
. The project began in 2007, when Wilson was contracted by a video-production company to work on the Google campus. He noted sharp divisions between the workers; one group, known as ScanOps, were sequestered in their own building. These were data-entry workers, the people to whom those mysterious hands belonged. Wilson became intrigued by them, and began filming them walking to and from their ten-hour shifts in silence. He was able to capture a few minutes of footage before Google security busted him. In a letter to his boss explaining his motives, Wilson remarked that most of the ScanOps workers were people of color. He wrote, “I'm interested in issues of class, race and
labor, and so out of general curiosity, I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” In short order, he was fired.

His video later became an art installation called
Workers Leaving the Googleplex
, a play on the title of the first film ever shown in public, the Lumière brothers'
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
(1895), as well as a remake by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki simply called
Workers Leaving the Factory
(1995). Wilson's Google experiences have also resulted in a series of beautiful gallery installations, with large, saturated color photos of those same workers' hands. Wilson reminds us that we, too, are contributing our own labor to the company's bottom line. He writes, “Everyone who uses the free Google perks—Gmail, cloud-storage, Google Books, Blogger, YouTube—becomes a knowledge worker for the company. We're performing freestyle data entry. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as we know it and use it, is a factory.”

Soulellis calls the Library of the Printed Web “an accumulation of accumulations,” much of it printed on demand. In fact, he says that “I could sell the Library of the Printed Web and then order it again and have it delivered to me in a matter of days.” Since the advent of electronic readers, there's been a lot of hand-wringing about the demise of the printed page. And for a while, it looked like things were headed in one direction as bookstores folded and e-book sales soared. In an unanticipated twist, in 2015 e-book sales began slow
ing and print sales began climbing again. It turns out that people read both formats—the Kindle on the train and the paper version at home. In addition, cheap print-on-demand services like Lulu, which offer free PDFs along with physical copies for sale of any given title, have made it possible for people to publish and to buy the kinds of books Soulellis traffics in and proves once again that we're neither one way nor the other. Straddling the physical and the digital, we're inhabiting many spaces at the same time in ways that were unthinkable just a decade ago.

What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way Elvis has left the building? Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the back door and onto the Internet, where it is taking on new forms that look nothing like poetry. Poetry as we know it—sonnets or free verse on a printed page—feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality. But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more extreme forms of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.

These are the ideas of the Canadian media scholar Darren Wershler, who has been making some unexpected connections between meme culture and contemporary poetry. “These artifacts,” Wershler claims, “aren't conceived of as
poems; they aren't produced by people who identify as poets; they circulate promiscuously, sometimes under anonymous conditions; and they aren't encountered by interpretive communities that identify them as literary.” Examples include a Nigerian e-mail scammer who writes out the entire
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
in longhand, a data engineer who renders the entire text of
Moby Dick
into emoticons, and a library scientist who converts
Ulysses
into QR codes.

Wershler calls these activities “conceptualism in the wild,” referring to the aspect of 1960s conceptual art that concerned reframing, and thereby redefining, the idea of artistic genius (think of Duchamp's urinal). Conceptual projects of the period were generated by a kind of pre-Internet OCD, such as Sol LeWitt's exhaustive photographic documentation of every object, nook, and cranny in his Manhattan loft, or Tehching Hsieh's yearlong practice of taking a photo of himself every hour, on the hour. Today's conceptualists in the wild make those guys look tame. It's not uncommon to see blogs that recount someone's every sneeze since 2007, or of a man who shoots exactly one second of video every day and strings the clips together in time-lapse mashups. There is a guy who secretly taped all his conversations for three years and a woman who documents every morsel of food she puts into her mouth. While some of these people aren't consciously framing their activities as works of art, Wershler argues that what they're doing is so close to the practices of sixties conceptualism that the connection between the two can't be ignored.

And he's right. Younger writers find it stimulating: they
are reclaiming this “found” poetry and uploading it to the self-publishing platform Lulu. They create print-on-demand books that most likely will never be printed but will live as PDFs on Lulu—their de facto publisher and distributor. These are big, ridiculous books, like a 528-page book that reprints every single tweet that contains the word “McNugget”; or a book that appropriates more than 400 pages' worth of Discogs listings of small-bit session players from long-forgotten 1970s LPs; or a project that converts Gertrude Stein's difficult modernist text
Tender Buttons
into illegible computer code; or a fifty-eight-page list poem of poets' names followed by their presumed economic status: “John Ashbery is a rich poet.” “Amiri Baraka is comfortable.”

Quality is beside the point. This type of content is about the quantity of language that surrounds us, and about how difficult it is to render meaning from such excesses. In the past decade, writers have been culling the Internet for material and making books that are more focused on collecting than on reading. It's not clear who, if anyone, actually reads these, although they are often cited by other writers working in the same mode. There are few critical systems in place to identify which books are better than others. For now, these authors function on a flat, horizontal field creating a communitarian body of work in which one idea or one author is interchangeable with another.

This ethos is evident on the smart art blog the Jogging, where artworks in the form of JPEGs are posted semi-anonymously and, like all blogs, last only until they
are pushed off the page by newer works. It is an ephemeral amnesiac data flow, one that swaps the art world's market-driven frenzy for networked global visibility. On the Jogging, it isn't really the individual posts that count: the blog's métier lies in its ceaseless and restless stream of information.

The best images on the Jogging are the ones that walk a fine line between sharp humor and weird ambiguity, such as a hacked black-and-white iconic photo of Fidel Castro chomping on his famous cigar. The only alteration the artist made to the found image is a photoshopped blue dot at the end of his cigar. The title is the reveal:
Che Guevara Smoking an E-Cig
. Not obviously funny enough to be a meme, it's a sly twenty-first-century mutation of a twentieth-century icon, one that welds critiques of power, commodity, history, advertising, and technology into an Internet readymade. Another image is entitled
wlan router under water
, which shows exactly that: two wireless routers photoshopped onto the floor of a swimming pool while the legs of swimmers dangle nearby. It looks like something out of
Jaws
, ciphered through the digital age. The surreal warping of entertainment and technology—hallmarks of the Jogging—conflate leisure with danger: Wouldn't plugged-in routers electrocute everyone in the water, killing them faster than sharks would? Or is this a new technology that allows Wi-Fi underwater so that the swimmers could tweet while diving? For now, it's a sci-fi idea, but in the forthcoming “Internet of things”—where intelligent everyday objects such as appliances communicate with one another over the web—we'll
surely be able to tweet underwater while swimming via a network that's hardwired into the architecture of a pool.