Annotated bibliography
What follows is a selection of works and texts which have influenced how I approached the subject matter of my thesis.
Winner, Langdon,
"Do Artifacts Have Politics?"
The Social Shaping of Technology, Mackenzie, Donald A., and Judy Wajcman, eds., 2nd ed., OpenUniversity Press, 1999.
In this essay, Winner argues that technological artefacts can and do embody sites and modes of political power. He frames this ability as one subject to varying degrees of open-endedness and explicitness, and further posits that the way technologies are implemented stem from and speak to the social milieus surrounding them.
Winner begins by arguing that neither technology nor society exhibit unilateral influence on the other. This dismisses technological and social determinism, instead occupying a middle ground: Winner posits that the social effects of technologies often depend on the choices made in their implementation, which are often, implicitly or explicitly, laden with political meaning. At the same time, technologies can have uneven affinities to given structures of power. Nuclear energy, for example, requires strong central authority to prevent its weaponization by rogue actors—and so, even democratic nations keep their nuclear programs under tight state control.
In this way, social encounters with technology come as a form of realpolitik: while technologies can embed the values of the people producing them, they can also embed politics of their own. Therefore, adopting a given technology can become a question about acceptable compromise between established political values and the inner tendencies of a given technology.
Winner argues that careful observation of the choices and sacrifices made in the implementation of a given technology can outline the sociopolitical qualities of the milieu surrounding it. In this way, technologies can act as lenses into sites and structures of power.
This project draws on Winner's idea of mutual shaping and applies it to the artefacts of platform capitalism. Namely, it echoes Srnicek's stance that the market economy implements digital technologies in ways that embeds market tendencies. Most salient among those tendencies, Residuul argues, is a tendency to precarity—namely, that digital services can emerge, change, obsolesce, and disappear at unprecedented speeds. The result of this tendency is a debris trail of outmoded norm, precarious labour, and the e-waste of deprecated devices.
This fact is made more urgent by digitality's inherent flexibility, which allows to interface with and operate on a growing range of human experience and exchange. A growing number of activities are becoming dependent on demonstrably unstable services.
Srnicek, Nick,
Platform Capitalism.
Polity,2016.
In this text, Srnicek identifies and describes a new mode of accumulation emerging from the digital economy, one he terms 'platform capitalism.' Srnicek defines platforms as a new form of business— outwardly, infrastructures for exchange, but internally, tools for maximizing the extraction and control of data.
Platforms, according to Srnicek, attract users with inexpensive services, then monetize their actions as analytics. Google and Facebook, for example, take user data to create market insights for advertisers, while subscription services like Spotify analyze usage patterns to produce unique or improved products. Here, data fuels a positive feedback loop: bigger platforms have more data, and so offer better services. This attracts more usage, which yields more data.
This loop, Srnicek argues, creates a unique dynamic of expansion: rather than buy competitors or merge up the stack, platforms tend to seek untapped sites of data production, as companies with priority quickly become entrenched. As a result, platforms have rushed to occupy a growing swathe of human affairs, using a wide range of tools including wearables and smart devices.
According to Srnicek, this 'be first' tendency complement recent historical circumstances. After the 2008 recession, Western governments sought to bolster weak markets with novel fiscal policies favouring high-risk, high-yield investments. This spawned a wave of platform startups, each offering venture capitalists new, yet unproven ways to reap dividends—should they corner the data first.
What characterizes these new firms, Srnicek argues, is a tendency towards minimal assets: 'Uber owns no cars, Airbnb owns no hotels'—the only thing they touch is the data. These platforms, he argues, tend to be predicated on speculative profits only to be made once a monopoly is established. They almost universally lack profitability in the present tense, and Srnicek predicts that they are very likely to fall apart in the near future.
This is the basis for the narrative Residuul presents. In this piece, the latest wave of platforms has passed its high-water mark, stranding ashore personal investments, social norms and artifacts of material culture. Residuul attempts to integrate this narrative with a broader scale of history by echoing Srnicek's stance that market economies have a tendency to crisis, which spread to things that depend on them.
Platform Capitalism also offers a concisely-framed history of the dot-com bubble, which serves as the model for and historical archetype of this hypothetical meltdown. As Srnicek notes, both the present wave of platforms and the dot-com bubble began with fiscal policy that promoted risk—in the latter instance, resulting in a sharp correction that left thousands without work, as popular services like Pets.com went dark overnight.
The human impact of that crisis, and other crises before it, serve as a focal point for this piece's key question: what gets left behind when capital flows elsewhere?
Dragona, Daphne,
"What is Left to Subvert? Artistic Methodologies for a Post-Digital World."
Across and Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Post-Digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions, Bishop, Ryan, ed., Transmediale, 2016.
In this essay, Dragona proposes techniques of 'soft subversion'—novel methods of artistic resistance that mirror the distributed, faceless and 'soft' forms of power which occupy present interactions with the digital. Echoing Foucault, she predicates subversion on knowledge, and argues that exposing power to understanding can enable productive disobedience. Towards that end, Dragona delineates several artistic methodologies to resist powers surrounding today's network infrastructure.
As a countermeasure to data collection, she describes a technique of obfuscation: the intentional inclusion of useless or incorrect information in one's data footprint. Her examples include Ben Grosser's "Scare Mail," a G-Mail plugin which hides terrorist keywords in your outgoing mail; and Dan Howe's "Ad Nauseum," a browser plugin which silently clicks every ad it encounters, rendering your ad profile useless.
Dragona also describes a technique of overidentification, in which one applies a sovereign ideology's rules and aesthetics more thoroughly and vigorously than the rest of society. Dragona frames this technique as a means of appropriating the aesthetics of power in order to undermine it. She finds examples in The Yes Men, who impersonate corporate entities; and Tobias Leingruber's "Social ID Bureau," a web service which produces physical ID cards from your Facebook information.
Dragona also advocates playwright Bertolt Brecht's notion of entfremdung, or alienation, which re-presents the familiar and mundane as something novel and unprecedented. In other words, estrangement does not permit the subject matter to be natural or self-evident, instead encouraging fresh ways of seeing and thinking. Dragona points to Evan Roth's "Burial Ceremony"—an infinite loop of fiber optic cable—as art that connects this idea to the digital. In Roth's piece, an invisible instrument is stripped of its utility and made visible as sculpture.
Residuul significantly draws on Dragona's presentation of Brechtian alienation. Here, the everyday aesthetics of tech company are re-presented as ruins—the shattered and bricked e-waste of Internet of Things devices mingling with flat design sagas charted the end of the hypothetical platform bubble.
I also take notes from overidentification without necessarily occupying it as a strategy. Rather than mimic corporate aesthetics to show knowledge of its workings, I do it solely to evoke it as subject matter; to clarify the piece's topic.
Michael Connor,
"I Have Nothing to Say and I'm Saying It."
I Was Raised on the Internet, Khaleif,Omar ed., Museum ofContemporary Art,Chicago;2018.
In this essay, Connor charts a multi-decade history of net art'sentanglement with corporate aesthetics. He situates the relationshipin the quiet, yet significant political changes of the 1990s andearly 2000s, a time in which global financial powers consolidatedtheir influence over social and cultural affairs.
At first, this provoked a period of electronic civil disobedience,a term coined by the Critical Art Ensemble in 1994. This style of artand activism used cheap electronic equipment like e-mail spam anddenial of service attacks to make poetic gestures against establishedpowers. Connor finds a salient thread here in the work of RicardoDominguez, who employed these techniques as part of the DigitalZapatistas, an anti-globalization group with concerns based inMexico.
Connor argues that this period of activism began to wind down bythe late 1990s, as artists turned their attention to the increasinglycommercial context of software. He theorizes that this turn, which heterms 'corporate aesthetics,' spawned from net art's overt emphasison the affordances and limitations of the network.
Connor finds a salient example of this style in Jennifer and KevinMcCoy's "Airworld," aseries of procedurally-generated banner ads which deployed genericlifestyle imagery and gibberish slogans over Google's new DoubleClickservice.
Connor states that this first wave of corporate aesthetics felloff by the mid-2000s, only to re-emerge after the 2008 recession.This time, it wore the clothes of branding agencies and marketforecasters. Connor highlights K-HOLE's "YOUTH MODE" as asalient example of this tendency—here, the artists frame themselvesas a trend forecasting firm, describing novel and expanding pressuresto have a 'personal brand' in the rhetoric of an emerging marketopportunity.
This project uses Connor's framing of corporate aesthetics as astarting point for its treatment of the subject matter. WhileResiduul shares the described interest in the commercial contexts ofdigitality, it does makes some intentional stylistic departures.First off, instead of doing a close impersonation of an activeenterprise, as The Yes Men might, my project depicts one which hasalready folded.
In this way, Residuul abdicates a direct narrative of the nearfuture, instead depicting it as something which has already happened.This very intentionally inverts K-HOLE's style: instead offoregrounding the artist's knowledge of the present and the future, Iattempt to handle my subject matter as a future tense lookingbackwards—in this case, through ruins.
Wilson,Andrew Norman,
Stock Fantasy Ventures.
2013, DIS Magazine,dismagazine.com/dystopia/50574/stock-fantasy-ventures-investment-proposal.Accessed October 15, 2019.
Stock Fantasy Ventures is an online stock footage company which doubles as an art project. As a business, clientsfund theproduction of speculative image conceptsin exchange for usage royalties and a share of the footage's sales on the fine art market. Here, Wilson entwines commerce,digitality and the art market to outline where thesedomains interact.
Wilson's project offersa model for Residuul's delve into corporate aesthetics. Ventures wholeheartedly adopts the visual rhetoric of a digital media firm,presenting itself in highly-polished slide decks and intentionally gauche video concepts. Wilson is so thorough in this mimicry that the project eludes easy categorization between art and business.
Wilson'sproject also offers an interesting model of detournement:the image concepts themselvesdeal with new economic realities after the 2008 crisis, leading tounconventional prompts like 'Goth college student listening to Russian emocore dubstep projectile scream-vomits onto Acer laptop while online banking.' Stock Fantasy Venture's combination of mimesis and entfremgdung has guided this project's approach to depicting the precarious dynamics of present platform capitalism.