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“Hoard anything you can’t download.” Three aproaches to the Materialization of the Digital (2017)
2017, Taller de Ediciones Económicas, Editorial Terremoto, and PAOS
“(…) at the limit, every antique object is beautiful simply because it has survived and thus becomes the sign of a previous life.” (1)
From Paper to the Internet
The last two decades have demonstrated the enormous spectrum of possibilities offered by the internet. The treatment of information has been profoundly transformed in terms of expansion, reproduction, editing, and publication. Traditional supports for the transmission of knowledge—books, newspapers, documents, archives, publications—have become the martyrs of technophilia, the fallen casualties of the digital revolution.
One of the most visible examples of the sacrifice of paper is the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Published since the late eighteenth century, in 2012 its editors announced that the encyclopedia would no longer exist in printed form and would only continue through its online edition. Digital formats have taken control of information distribution, changing approaches to knowledge under the promise of a common benefit.
One project of undeniable relevance in this regard is Wikipedia. Presenting itself as “the free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” it has become one of the most widely used resources for publishing and consulting content. It clearly demonstrates the dynamic qualities of information: it is edited hundreds of times daily in 287 languages, relies on rigorous policies for modifications, and sustains its veracity through online references. In addition, it contains more than 37 million articles, though the number becomes obsolete every second as the count changes continuously. “The printed version of Wikipedia (in English), they say, is equivalent to 1,897.4 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” (2)
Along similar lines, in 2011 the Google Cultural Institute was launched, incorporating and extending the Google Art Project and Google Arts & Culture. The initiative is “an effort to make important cultural material available and accessible to everyone and to preserve it digitally in order to educate and inspire future generations.” (3) More than a thousand museums, archives, and cultural institutions joined the project, digitizing their artworks, contents, and documents in an attempt to conserve and protect objects composing the global historical-cultural narrative.
Both projects demonstrate the declining trust placed in physical objects in matters of information preservation and protection. Major patrimonial losses resulting from the passage of time, natural disasters, or destructive events have highlighted the importance of seeking permanence through digital supports. On the one hand, this could be considered a process of de-fetishization of objects, which succumb to the transformative nature of digitization. Likewise, by disseminating information on an unprecedented scale, these projects contribute to democratizing access to and dissemination of collective memory.
The transformation from the physical object to the digital object establishes new terms for the production, presentation, and consumption of information. This has generated dislocations in conceptions of copyright and patrimonial rights, provoking conflicts regarding the handling, ownership, and distribution of content. It is then that the dimensions of democratization processes are questioned, giving rise to initiatives such as copyleft, or rights transfer, and open-source systems for the free availability and modification of content.
When listing the qualities, attributes, and disadvantages of digitizing physical materials, the process appears organic and unilateral. The hope for permanence manifests itself as unquestionable, certain, and desired, but it is virtual. The transformation of information from paper to the cloud has also revealed a crucial change in the way we relate to it.
The treatment we give physical objects differs greatly from that given to digital objects. (4) A formal approach in reverse proves especially illuminating regarding this premise. That is: what happens in the opposite direction, when information becomes a physical object? Three recent projects developed by artists serve as a point of departure for rethinking and questioning our relationship to physical objects as a consequence of the digital revolution.
Thank You Internet
As part of the Seminario de tesis collection, in 2012 Taller de Ediciones Económicas (T-E-E) published Thank You Internet by Jaime Martínez (Monterrey, 1978). One of T-E-E’s production models is based on the creation of low-cost publications in collaboration with Mexican artists, what they themselves call “book-works.” (5)
Martínez is a visual artist who has used the internet as a production tool, a means of dissemination, and, in this case, as both theme and content. For several years, Martínez has maintained the account throwtolion.tumblr.com, where he publishes images found online or computer-generated. The artist collaborated with T-E-E to produce Thank You Internet, a compilation of this selection printed through risography. This technique combines silkscreen and photocopying: from a master image, a single-color print is produced. The process is highly manual and therefore susceptible to imprecision.
Thank You Internet compiles images of digital nature and registers them in monochromatic groupings of three colors: red, green, and blue. The selection includes cartoons, photographs, screenshots, and found material whose original format is the screen pixel and which later undergoes a formal transformation through printing. It is a process of translating the digital into the physical in which the smallest unit of the digital image becomes part of the grain generated by risography.
Compared to printing methods promising high fidelity to digital images, risography appears archaic and obsolete. Nevertheless, the possibilities it offers for image experimentation have proven fertile for the production of artists’ books. Through the printing process, the digital content gathered in Thank You Internet is altered at its most radical unit in order to transform into a physical form. In this sense, the image sacrifices color and definition in order to gain materiality.
Printing Out the Internet
Internetausdrucker (6) is a German term referring pejoratively to people who need to print internet content in order to understand it. However, for Kenneth Goldsmith (New York City, 1961), the command+p combination became a way of making democracy. (7)
On May 22, 2013, Goldsmith launched an open call asking participants to print any content found online and send it to Galería LABOR. The call proposed a collaborative project to print the entirety of the internet. Printing Out the Internetresulted in the accumulation of ten tons of paper within a gallery space, (8) and inspired a marathon of public readings of the gathered material.
The initiative was announced as a tribute to hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was part of the movement for the liberation of information and documents online. Swartz was arrested in January 2011, accused of stealing a large number of JSTOR files (9) through the data network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After apologizing, returning, and paying for the files to JSTuOR, Swartz underwent a criminal process whose resolution sentenced him to 35 years in prison and one million dollars in fines. Upon hearing the verdict, Swartz committed suicide on January 11, 2013.
Printing Out the Internet became the object of many controversies. On one hand, a petition on change.org predicted the environmental impact implied by responses to the call. Despite plans to recycle the received material, the petition denounced the expenditure of energy resources and the contribution to greenhouse effects and global warming. (10)
On the other hand, because of the dynamic nature of content creation and dissemination online, Printing Out the Internetwas considered a failed project from its conception. However, Goldsmith was not searching for the project’s success. Rather, he was interested in the idea of the internet as something material and in the transformative power of printing over information.
Furthermore, this proposal entered into dialogue with UbuWeb, another major project by Goldsmith. Notable for hosting and making avant-garde materials accessible to the public, UbuWeb is one of the most important archives for freely consulting works in video, sound, and digital art formats. It is another attempt—this one quite successful—to liberate content in a non-commercial way for its study and recognition in the contemporary context.
The printing of protected materials and personal documents became modes of protest against the limitations imposed in attempts to control the internet. In this sense, Printing Out the Internet functioned as a form of sedition against information-distribution policies, a rebellion against the corporations managing and establishing the terms under which content is released or restricted. “When our content is printed, it becomes something different.” (11) In its concrete form, content is liberated from the policies controlling its upload and download.
Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age
Developed by curator Domenico Quaranta (Brescia, 1978), Collect the WWWorld “seeks to show how the internet generation is giving new impetus to an artistic practice opened in the 1960s by conceptual art and developed in subsequent decades through appropriation and postproduction: a practice in which artists explore, collect, store, manipulate, and reuse large quantities of visual material taken from popular culture and the world of communication.” (12)
Collect the WWWorld began as a Tumblr compilation of material created by internet artists. In this case, the platform functions as a historical archive of net art, hosting works by artists such as Evan Roth, Aleksandra Domanovic, Jon Rafman, among others. Subsequently, the project materialized into exhibitions across three physical spaces: 319 Scholes, House of Electronic Arts, and Spazio Contemporanea. Finally, Collect the WWWorld completed its materialization process by taking the form of a book documenting the processes and results of the work of 26 artists whose practices originate in online supports. The book is available both in print and digital formats. (13)
The notion of the internet artist as archivist reveals the common practice of accumulating digital materials permeating the behavior of our generation. Accumulation ceased being a spatial problem thanks to the storage capacities offered by contemporary devices. However, the forms of appropriation, use, and presentation of these materials distinguish these artists from the common e-hoarder, who accumulates without filters and out of fear of letting go of digital objects.
Hoard Anything You Can’t Download
Stated by artist Douglas Coupland (Germany, 1961) as part of his interpretations of Marshall McLuhan’s theories for the internet age, “hoard anything you can’t download” appears as an initial conclusion to the processes of transforming information from physical supports into digital ones and vice versa. However, given the dynamics of transformation now accessible through a single command, the statement could also be completed with the idea that “everything downloaded can also be hoarded.”
In the difference between the treatment of physical and digital objects, the material accumulator beyond the limits of order—beyond the archivist and the collector—is accused and singled out, victimized as suffering from an abnormal disorder. Meanwhile, through a Spartacus effect, we are all e-hoarders.