Even if we inhabit it, the online content space is vast beyond the imaginable. It would be easy to rip the fabric of reference points that we progressively accumulate, sometimes diverting from our usual digital paths, just sketching a provisory map of what happens outside of them. Especially in both social media and blog/news online publishing styles, there is a specific structure that we have rapidly get used to, imposed by the online industry: it’s the ‘endless’ structure of content, based on the possibility to scroll ad-infinitum with new content uploaded as needed. Capturing even just a few moments of this endless scroll on some analogue media is like looking at a single photograph in a whole life. It’s just a frozen instant, but it helps a lot to understand the whole structure and reflect upon it.
Recording the endless stream
The uncatchable infinity of internet content can be only temporarily caught in analogue media, in a process that blocks the scrolling and becomes firm, enabling an overview and giving enough time to consider the ongoing flow and the possible connections within it. One of the effective strategies to produce an analogue picture of a complex and structured digital process is, for example, to select a certain amount of time, and deploy on the analogue medium the whole production in that time interval. So, for example, it is possible to explode the invisible simultaneous online production of texts, in a circumstantiated environment over a tiny amount of time. Philipp Adrian has used this strategy in “#oneSecond”, printing in a structured and sorted way all the tweets posted in one second, precisely 2:47:36 p.m. GMT on November 9, 2012. He aggregated 5,522 tweets, categorizing and investigating them in various aspects (writers, colors, popularity and identities), in each of the four books, totalizing forty-five hundred pages. The number of produced pages highlights the naturally emerging paradox when comparing their weight, so altogether the amount of content, with the almost insignificant amount of time they express in that specific platform. It is not difficult to relate this work with “0.01s: The First 1/100th Second of 1-Bit Symphony” where musician Tristan Perich documented in a seven-hundred pages book the very first hundredth of a second of its computational “1-Bit Symphony”, an autonomous generative music machine assembled within a classic music CD case. The book just extensively documents instructions, processes, calculations and memory states through a systematic graphic design. In both cases, they take a descriptive ‘snapshot’ of a complex and vast digital process, which has been part of the respective endless flows of digital information, and possibly very prone just to be forgotten. They use traditional analogue media. But printed page is not the only analogue medium to render digital content. We can think as a back-up strategy to start printing out all our digital photographs, or record our digital files on CD, or tape, or record our digital movies on DVD digital video tapes, in a kind of reverse process, re-materializing the digital. The consequence is that analogue media “validates” (and possibly deconstructs) digital content, which is particularly valid on social media.
Remembering the endless stream
The endless structure of digital content is articulated as a flow of information, which is progressing over time with or without our intervention. It’s a constant ‘ever-changing present’, that we perceive as faster than our surrounding present because it samples reality in many other places and directions, concentrating them back into our digital social space. Since it changes so quickly, it makes hard to elaborate or ponder on what we scan, briefly read and see, especially in the demanding social media environments with their bidirectional nature. Here we are teased, tempted, or sometimes provoked to react to a specific content. And we do. This amount of activity lessens even more the time to pause and reflect, and consequently it challenges the way we remember the content we’re exposed to, which is sensibly increased, so we also have to filter and select much more intensively than in the past. Remembering, in fact, is a process that requires a lasting process of information in order to remain in time. So on one end there’s undoubtedly more fatigue to biologically select and remember, and on the other end we’re progressively outsourcing memory to digital sources, through our smartphones. So we don’t have time to fix memories, but we collect a lot of ‘temporary’ ones, and sometimes store them digitally, in an apparent effort to remember as much as possible. But remembering a lot is not what we’re meant to do. Taking it to the extreme it reminds of pathological conditions like ‘hyperthymesia’, where people remember an abnormally vast number of their life experiences, ending up living in a very uneasy state. Jorge Luis Borges described this paradoxical condition in his “Funes the Memorious” (1942), where Funes, the protagonist, is doomed to remember everything. Over the course of the story his inability to forget is dooming his own life, slowly destroying it. In this case memories are formed and stable in the protagonists’ mind, while we’re living now the opposite condition, having a high number of transient memory statuses. Umberto Eco was giving print the role of challenging our memories, as a reliable source for history, describing its unbeatable authenticity. But what authenticity, instead, can be retrieved from a structure which is perceived as ever-changing, endless, and based on our will to ‘scroll’ information in order to find new interesting bits of it?
Scrolling, again
Scrolling information is like swimming in an overpopulated river, with a lot of concurrent entities which are moving in the same direction. It is like having a customized TV channel which seamlessly sample on our behalf the others, knowing what we like. Hence scrolling it can be related to broadcasting, for several reasons. First, we mostly delegate the decisions about the content to algorithms, as we do to channel’s companies. Second, we trade the free access to content with (targeted) ads, beyond personal data give away. And third we ‘scroll’ content mostly with a single gesture usually performed by the thumb, similarly to ‘next/previous channel’ button that we push on the TV remote control. These repetitive gestures are manifesting a basic, instinctive interface, which historically have been proved to be the most pervasive one, becoming so natural to be almost invisible. This interface is sublimated in “Substitute Phone” by Klemens Schillinger. The artist produces objects the size of an average smartphone, with a series of sliding wood balls. They are meant to let the user to replicate the repetitive gestures in an abstract way, with no consequences. In the end they are like just focusing on the motion, with an elegant design that made them look like a therapeutic health-related tools, which the artist describe as incorporating ‘calming limitations.’ They are purposeless, detached from any other process than being perpetuated physically, and are meant to be opposed to the ‘exciting’ or ‘nervous’ unlimited possibilities associated with the smartphones. These opposite qualities are clearly associate with the presence or absence of content, and with its own very special properties, including the ability to visually reshuffling of different epochs through associations.
Visual non-stop time travelling
Endless publishing form is culturally reinforced by the ability to visually go back and forth in time. This perceptual addictive rollercoaster is particularly evident in the small galaxy of curated visual-oriented Tumblr blogs. The sequence (also perceptually almost endless) of visual material crossing the space where it is originated, and time when it was produced is not something we’ve been used to, at least not at such scale. More than design-oriented blogs, like the defunct vast ffffound.com, where the single accounts were visually consistent to a particular style, visual curated Tumblr blogs are reflecting the blogger’s curating capacity to connect quite different visually cross-referring material, often from different epochs, the more different and still coherent, the more intriguing. The perceptual consequence is to mine our ability to focus, fulfilling at the same time our visual pleasure and capacity, constantly creating new connections, aesthetically travelling everywhere and anytime. This ability to mix elements from different domains, and especially belonging to different periods of time seems to be a typical 21st century attitude. From food to perfumes, from fashion to architecture, from the avant-garde to the ancient, through the pop and the kitsch, these sequences, usually daily updated, are transversing time, while everything becomes consumable in the instant, embodying the ‘flow’, in its scrolling structure. It’s a pop media archeology, producing an uncatchable amount of historical material. Unfortunately, it also produces a collateral effect with high risk: the loss of sources and references of the different material, used then only as a mesmerizing element in the flow. In a word, technically, this means the loss of history, in its traditional definition of linear interpretation of human evolution. In the process of the digitalization of everything, the loss of sources is still a concern for art institutions, who are instead presenting their collections online, enriched with the conservators fata. But these institutional sources are a drop in the sea of the much vaster popular visual blog ‘sharing’, which shows an incredible amount of material, especially for contemporaneity, where the visual value is all what the sharing is about.
The flow is also an intimate one
Finally, on social media we constantly publish about our personal and impersonal content, often sharing it to our social media circles, looking for feedback, which is quantitatively rewarded, as in the iconic ‘likes’ numbers. Artist Micheal Mandiberg affirms that the metric of these rewards is addictive. Unfortunately, it’s not only the metrics, but the whole system which is quite attractive for our brains, who are constantly looking for new rewarding stimuli. Mandiberg’s “Quantified Self Portrait (One Year Performance) (2016–17)” is an artwork using self-tracking technology self-quantifying personal data with the aim to reach self-knowledge (and wellness, indeed). Mandiberg programmed his devices to take screenshots and images every 15 minutes for one year, tracking his mental, physical and emotional states, sketching a portrait of an overworked artist, through three screens with the same type of content. Here the fast flux of images, screenshots and notes is just giving three different perspective of something everybody is familiar with: our digital life and how it flows incessantly and attracting us more and more. But here there’s also the machine perspective, pointing at the user, which let us appreciate the artist’s identity parsed in three concurrent flows, mirroring what we, as humans, generate and are immersed into.
Philipp Adrian: http://www.philippadrian.com/project/onesecond/
Tristan Perich: http://www.tristanperich.com/#Book/0_01s
Klemens Schillinger: https://klemensschillinger.com/projects/substitute-phone
Hyperthymesia: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hyperthymesia&oldid=812251075
Michael Mandiberg: http://www.mandiberg.com/quantified-self-portrait-one-year-performance/
