Nicole’s most recent employment was as assistant curator and art advisor at g a macura inc. and assistant curator of the GE corporate art collection. She has experience in advising on fine art acquisitions, collection management and upkeep, and exhibition curation. Before joining g a macura inc. and GE, Nicole had previously worked with Art:21, The National Arts Club, and the Picker Art Gallery. In the summer of 2009, Nicole served as an art critic and panelist for the hybrid real life/Second Life art project BrooklynIsWatching.com. Nicole holds a bachelor of arts degree from Colgate University in Art & Art History, concentration studio art, and English literature.

I would also like to thank Frances Stark & Studio for being incredibly kind, generous, and responsive. It is because of them that this paper was possible. 

From the Foucauldian perspective, the definitive characteristics of the sovereign underwent a transformation in the modern era in which “…the sovereignty’s old right–to take life or let live–was replaced … And then this new right is established: the right to make live and let die” (Foucault 241). Biopolitical power takes for its nourishment the continuous collection and perpetuity of life. Foucault writes, “…death becomes, insofar as it is the end of life, the term, the limit, or the end of power too. Death is outside the power relationship. Death is beyond the reach of power” (248). Brett Levinson takes Foucault one step further, emphasizing that, “In the interest of the supremacy of life, biopower strives to erase from the scene the one ‘thing’ it cannot reach, to wit, death” (71).

This establishes a new condition of interrelation that invests state interest in the health and well-being of the individual. Whereas death once marked the apotheosis of sovereign power, death in the modern era is reassigned as something to be avoided at all costs. This avoidance of death necessarily rearranges the semiotic order of the physical body, natural life (zoë), political life (bios), and power. To the extent that biopolitics seeks to manage life does it also engender a number’s game indexed to the site of the body, but that also layers bodies upon bodies, constituting the biopolitical purview as a population of bodies. As Foucault describes it, “What we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society … nor is it the individual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple body…” (245).

Regulatory forces and institutions in biopolitics allow power to, “[become] positive as opposed to merely negative, preemptive instead of merely repressive” (Parisi and Goodman, 164). After all, as Foucault observes, “Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality” (248). In this statement, mortality stands in place for the entire class of qualities germane to the bare life of the individual, or zoë, including ethnicity, sexuality, family genetics, et. al. These trademarks of human existence delimit the upper reaches of biopolitical power in their embodiment of autonomous qualities whose contingency factor exceed absolute calculation and prediction. In its tireless pursuit of life in avoidance of death, biopolitical power shoehorns these abstractions into statistics and modes of standardization that can be managed and controlled, yielding to self-imposed demands that, “…security mechanisms … be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life” (Foucault 246). In this way, every part of the biological site of the body poses a threat to biopolitical stability and in doing so demands careful monitoring and administration for its parity.

What are the options for a resistance to this power if the very vehicles of antagonism at our disposal are precisely what has been sequestered into political subjugation? There is the added challenge that, as Paul Rabinow explains, “…a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms” (266). Instead of the classical fanfare of a power captured in a sovereign body who then demonstrates his power in the taking of life, biopolitical power “…is no longer a matter of bringing death into play … rather than display itself in its murderous splendor … it effects distributions around the norm” (Rabinow 266). This translates into a dispersal of power through mechanisms of regulation that abandons older top-down approaches to power and instead infuses the scenes of our everyday life with despotism that is both everywhere and nowhere. On this point, Laura Bazzicalupo challenges us to consider, “…how plausible is resistance if we have not entirely rethought the ubiquitous and immanent site of power?” (114).

This paper will take up this challenge by looking at Frances Stark’s My Best Thing. In this animation Stark replays, in ten and a half episodes, transcripts from her sexual interactions with partners she encounters on the site Chatroulette. The first, and most significant, of these men we learn is named Marcello. Almost half-way through the animation we find out that Marcello has been severely hurt during a protest-turned-ugly in Italy. He may also be in trouble with the law. When Marcello suddenly disappears from chat, Stark’s character spends the remaining five episodes trying to reconnect with Marcello, and instead encountering and engaging another Italian man. The animation features two Playmobil-like avatars that are sparsely dressed against a vibrant green screen and nothing else. The dialogue between characters is conducted through a text-to-speech software, with subtitles for the men who both speak English as a second language.

What Stark’s project illustrates is how digital embodiment, in rearranging conceptions of the body and materiality, presents a loophole in the biopolitical stronghold. The project also emblematizes the way in which capitalism is deployed as a mechanism of normalization and how, in its inability to account for the non-physical, non-statistical, digital body, also serves as a blind spot in the totalizing regulatory forces in circulation within biopolitical society. As N. Katherine Hayles attests, “Different technologies of text production suggest different models of signification: changes in signification are linked with shifts in consumption: shifting patterns of consumption initiate new experiences of embodiment: and embodied experience interacts with codes of presentation to generate new kinds of textual worlds” (28). One of these worlds, I suggest, is a world of potentialized biopolitical antagonism.

Laura Bazzicalupo notes that “At the center of this tension between politics and life lies the new site of the living, ambivalent body” (110). For artists working with digital media, the physical body is a site of equal ambivalence. As Hayles, quoting Allucquère Roseanne Stone, explains, “Merely communicating by email … already problematizes thinking of the body as a self-evident physicality” (27). Anna Munster elaborates this point further:

The total assimilation of flesh to machine or the erasure of the machine’s materiality in its absorption into … anthropomorphism … are fantasies of merging. These fantasies conveniently forget that the embodied zones of connection to the discrete qualities of the digital form a kind of graft, which is an unequivocal mark of connection and difference. We can name this engineered mark of alterity “digital embodiment,” an arena across which material and incorporeal forces will continue to engender further connection and differentiation.  (20)

Munster, too, argues for a conception of human-technical interactions that does not insist on the material differences between flesh and computer. She instead supports Hayles and Stone’s proposition that, “In the face of such technologies… we think of subjectivity as multiple warranted by the body rather than contained within it” (27). For Munster, “…digital machines can replicate, amplify and split us from the immediacy of our sensory capacities” in a way that extends “bodies away from immediate experience and even away from their prior inflections by other forms of media” (18). Thus an individual’s encounter with digital embodiment results in a refraction and multiplication of selves.

The format and content of My Best Thing is emblematic of this multiple subjectivity. This plurality guides the ways we can talk about the work, as Mark Godfrey writes:

I have refrained from calling the ‘girl’ character ‘Frances’. It would be crude and simple to conflate the Playmobil girl with the artist Frances Stark, and to assume that every word the character utters was once said, or typed, by Frances Stark. My Best Thing is highly mediated, the end result of months of crafting and editing. (44-45)

Though Godfrey’s point is more of a commentary on the of making My Best Thing, as an observation it cannot be divorced from the embedded processes of digital embodiment. Munster writes that, “The interval between incorporeal and corporeal experience opened up by new media sets off the play of relays, deferrals, crossings and recuperations between them” (18). In this statement, Munster reterritorializes a conception of the physical body as a disembodied boundary of informatic flows. She asserts that, in the age of digital technologies, our experience of the corporeal body exists in flux, “resting momentarily between the physical space and duration of the corporeal and the patterns and flows of the informatic universe” (62). This is echoed by Godfrey when he observes of the format of My Best Thing:

The avatars put considerable distance between the artwork and the actual events on which the dialogues are based. But of course this distance only serves to make us think about the absent and real bodies more intensely. We ask serious questions about the status of the actual body today… and how our bodies are coping with increasingly mediated encounters. (42)

As a film, My Best Thing oscillates between two horizons of imagined corporeality and digitality. The narrative of My Best Thing is driven by a motor of digitally-displaced sexual desires that, once consummated, also give way to more platonic displays. In episode two, Marcello asks, “In your opinion, can a relationship between two person be made in this way?” Marcello’s question is apocryphal of precisely the man-machine division that digital embodiment rejects. What his question exposes is a presupposed myth that the ways in which “Stark” and he are interacting are somehow falsified by virtue of their technical mediations. The reality is exactly opposite: their interactions are only made possible by these very machines. The degree to which “Stark” and Marcello come to form a relationship with each other is made clear by the genuine concern “Stark” expresses over  Marcello’s injuries. The possibility of a relationship–of “Stark” and Marcello’s actual relationship–is therefore, not a question of machines or technical mediation; it is a confirmation of it. The reality of “Stark” and Marcello’s online relationship only appears to be in excess of their physical lives:

“Stark”: Well you know i have a serious boyfriend. For six years. And

Marcello: But you love him [?]

“Stark”: Yes. And I have a son and we are a family

Marcello: And I know all this However you wanna tell me you want to end our things [?]

“Stark”: No

Munster advocates understanding the differentiations between man and machine as constructs at best–and, at worst, the “capture [of] a reductive sociopolitical program” (62-63). This latter point smacks of a snarky awareness of a similar biopolitical construction of the body to equally divisive ends. As Bazzicalupo defines it, in the biopolitical, the life of the individual is perverted into a right to life that is then “…fastened to the ‘living body’ and to its biological cycle” (110). This paradigmatic split between life captured within the body and the body as a vehicle for life’s biological cycle is played out par excellance in the global market. Bazzicalupo notes that, “Irreducible to the classic rights of the past, a right to life … takes hold and transforms these chances … of life, death, and disease, into a site of artifice …Thus the right to life explodes an already ambiguous notion of ‘human rights’” (110). Embedded in this notion of “human rights” is also a determining of the rights to a certain kind of life: a life in which the liberalist’s guarantee of space within the free market to make gains is taken up (Levinson 67).

The message of the global capitalist market is a kind of negative response to the plight of the marginalized. As Levinson writes, “Indeed, if you have not benefited from capitalism, this is due only to the anticapitalist forces which block capitalism’s competition, its arrival to you. You, the oppressed, should thereby opt for capitalism … so as to add to its field, help remove blockades, and permit it to reach you” (67). What this maxim fails to highlight are that the anticapitalist forces that block capitalism’s arrival to the oppressed is biopolitical power itself. In estranging the body from conceptions of life, biopolitics enacts and relays a kind of economic sorting that carries with it the ethics of a biopolitical resistance to death. As Levinson asserts:

The global market must exclude if it is to be. What it excludes, though, is not the foreigner or the outsider … but death …, and more tangibly, the peoples who embody death: not the “lower human” but … the inhuman (death as the “thing” the human cannot determine, as the limit of humanism). Among these are the utterly impoverished (so near absolute loss, so close to existing outside the range of choices that sustains the market), the homeless, terrorists, certain immigrants, and AIDS sufferers: any who recall or perform mortality.  (67-68)

Those who are excluded from opting in to capitalism are precisely those who cannot “add to the field” (Levinson 67).  Levinson is building this concept off of the thesis of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which posits that “the global includes (so as to build a controlling pluralism) while the state excludes (so as to maintain homogeneity)” Levinson adds an additional caveat that “if the market must both include everything and  exclude something, ought it not exclude no thing, or death? And who stands for such a death if not the ones imagined to be unable to insert themselves, properly, into the field of exchange?” (67-68).

Stark casts herself as one of these unmarketable bodies through her time on Chatroulette. We discover that “Stark” is often engaging in her webcam sex with her Chatroulette partners while in her studio or at her office; time that is otherwise designated for profitable labor is instead squandered on sex–and, from a biopolitical standpoint, the worst kind of sex: masturbation. “Stark’s” idling is a self-conscious performance of anti-productivity that, in one of many moments of self-reflexivity, makes reference to an externally situated Frances Stark, “…successful artist, and Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South California” (Godfrey 46), when “Stark” writes, “Maybe art is an opposite of working, in the sense that it is a form of resistance to productivity as is masturbation, wasted seed’” (Godfrey 63).

There is an additional layer of antiproductive behavior to consider in My Best Thing that is enabled through the current of digitally embodied experiences:

Marcello: So, you betray me?

“Stark”: What?

Marcello: In your virtual things, you have other men?

“Stark”: C’mon you must have others. Well I assume you do. What i wanted to say is that in the last weeks I have ended with everybody. Or tried to end. And i don’t see a reason to end with you.

Marcello: And where is the problem?

“Stark”: The problem is the random nature of it. To sit all day available.

Marcello: Stability kills…

“Stark”: Well I don’t know how stable it can be masturbating with a non hour time difference. Haha. 

Marcello’s comment might be the kind of awkward joke one would expect from someone struggling to be funny in a second language, but it is also, perhaps, to be taken more seriously. Marcello rightly accuses Stark’s digital counterpart of threatening the more productive Stark, the  Stark who is a professional artist and professor, of performing a death qua capitalism in spending so much time in digital chats. My Best Thing emphasizes this point in episode two and a half, when “Stark,” at Marcello’s recommendation, watches a scene from Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2.” The scene is a doubled performance and mirror of “Stark” and Stark’s positions as capitalist undesirables. The episode recap explains:

In the previous episode, a woman watched a scene from Fellini’s 8 1/2 [sic] recommended to her by an anonymous Italian filmmaker whom she’d been having virtual relations for some months and with whom she’d been half-seriously discussing a collaborative experiment. The scene she watched was the one in which the director character shoots himself at his own press conference when he can’t manage to find the words to describe his film in progress.

Fellini’s character in this clip symbolizes a parody of Stark herself, who admitted that the inspiration for My Best Thing came out of a real-life period of unproductiveness, in which she was “really, really freaked out” that she had “…lost language,” that she “didn’t have the ability to deal with anything discursively” (Stark). In this light, viewing the death of Fellini’s character in My Best Thing dramatically foreshadows and layers itself on top of the death that has come/has come to Stark/”Stark.”

What is notable about Stark/”Stark” performing this mortality qua capitalism is that what both characters actually experience is not simply inclusion in the market but a profitable inclusion. In episode two, “Stark” sends Marcello a review of her (Stark’s) work that was written in Italian, to which he responds, “Cool. He loves you.” We also find out (and know) that Stark was invited to exhibit My Best Thing at the Venice Biennale in 2011. All of these factors point to Stark’s commodifiable success as a worker. And yet, we have simultaneously watched her pass through the doorways of digital embodiment, and while straddling both worlds, idle away productive studio time. Stark/”Stark’s” partners, on the other hand, seem immune to this same sort of success. Marcello can only talk about attending the Venice Film Festival as a visitor–not an invited guest. And, as Godfrey points out, Marcello is marked as homo sacer, and already outside of the realm of the biopolitical when “With news of his injuries [following the riot] we confront a different idea of the body. …Unprotected by the law, and deprived of political and civil rights, all that is left is ‘bare life’. … A protester’s identity as a citizen with rights is set aside: they become a mere body, and a very vulnerable one” (60). In the subsequent episodes, while searching to reconnect with Marcello, “Stark’s” new Italian partner describes himself as “The laziest man you will ever meet” and “The degenerate son of artists.” Capitalist success does not, in short, come to these men. Their exclusion from the space of the free market maps the way in which “…regulation’s power rests not in the murder of the enemy but in the murder of a dying that some ‘other’ embodies” (Levinson 72).

Though these two men occupy very different positions of exclusion within biopolitics, they are joined in their regular participation in webcam sex. As Marcello explains to “Stark”:

Marcello: I started to use Chatroulette at the end of the summer. To try. Then I tried it for some days and closed it.

This is a clue as to the reason for their exclusion. Formally and contextually, Marcello and the second Italian man are framed as intentionally vague characters. We know that they both live in Italy and while their avatars speak in English, their dialogue is still subtitled. “Stark’s” English is not. The men’s interactions with “Stark” are, at times, choppy, incoherent, and awkward. And, of the green background that runs throughout the film, Godfrey points out, “…it ends up recalling the green screens of Hollywood studios. The green screen is a non-place where an actor’s body is suspended: their location is undetermined, to be defined at a later date, when they are long gone” (44). All of these elements make the men seem excessively foreign, othered, and all the more outside of the world that “Stark” inhabits.

Above all, we are are consistently introduced to the men on the basis of some masturbatory act. Inasmuch the men come to represent the Foucauldian figure of the public masturbator. As Foucault explains, masturbation in the nineteenth century was seen as sexuality occurring at the level of the individual body, and one that if not regulated and sanctioned would guarantee life as an invalid (252). The preconception of this position assumed that the individual who obliged this irregular behavior doubly presented the threat of genetic abnormality (Foucault 252). The indexing of sexuality to heredity forms the basis on which, for Foucault, sexual deviancy becomes a “race,” and, as Levinson notes, “The masturbator… as a ‘race’ … is the signal of a biological degeneracy– one passed down through the generations–that will eventually spread throughout the human pedigree, infecting it” (72). When Marcello warns “Stark” of her impending doom as a performer of death, it is really a self-reflected warning against the threat of his own (biopolitically determined) biological shortcomings.

When considering how the Italian men might have been caught in the biopolitical net of exclusion when Stark/”Stark” was so deftly able to escape it we can see that it is precisely because the men so intensely capture “dying that some ‘other’ embodies” (Levinson 72). Whether this biopolitical marker came before or after their missed opportunities at gainful capitalist ventures, it is clear that this issue is backgrounded to the biological threat their masturbation seems to signal. While both “Stark” and her partners are guilty of sexual transgression and non-productive idling, “Stark’s” unqiue ability to exist, even if only in part, outside of My Best Thing, as a productive worker, is rewarded. The dialogues in My Best Thing are frequently punctuated with references to “Stark’s” externally-situated status as a worker: phone calls that she “must take,” stories about work-related events, remarks on her university job, etc. In opposition to this, both men unabashedly play out their failures as capitalists: Marcello laments that he cannot go to New York because he does not have enough money, the other man lives with his parents. The men end up amounting to little more than the sum parts of their masturbatory act.

The regularizing mechanisms of biopolitics act upon Stark’s non-digital body and reward it for meeting its responsibilities with further work and occupational triumphs. What it misses is digital “Stark,” also a delinquent masturbator who opts out of the field of capitalism to engage with other biopolitical pariahs. In this engagement we find “…a formidable limit-concept that is nonpolitical: it is the life of fungible, anonymous bodies, common to all sentient bodies that experience pain, hunger, loss, and deprivation”–and to this list we might also add “desire” (Bazzicalupo 115). This marks a crucial point of biopolitical resistance in digitally embodied artwork. While there might seem to be little motivation outside of the consummation of an unrealized desire for someone as “successful” as Stark/”Stark” to pair up with these men, their union is actually emblematic of the fact that, “Our capacities for life are [our] capacities for artifice, for putting ourselves in relation to that which is other from us: the human is not a given, but that which can be modified. We graft the other onto us inasmuch as we are capable of assimilating and metabolizing it” (Bazzicalupo 115). In this grafting, Stark/”Stark” symbolically^[1] carry their othered partners into the the realm of biopolitical inclusion and into the realm of capitalism by capturing, creating, and replaying the animation. In the light of the Venice Biennale, or a gallery, or even in the eyes of a potential collector, these digital men are bathed in the dint of a new life: one in which they are, at least for a brief time, of a certain capitalist worth.

Only in the creation of the multiplicity of selves that is necessary for experiences of digital embodiment are Stark’s biopolitical antagonisms made tenable. Stark’s replication of herself gives her a distinct advantage over her male counterparts, allowing her to circulate both inside and outside of the realm of the biopolitical, reaping the rewards in one while transgressing the boundaries in the other. The multiplication of selves via digital embodiment also serves to exponentially multiply and further obfuscate the objects of biopolitical surveillance and administering, to wit the body and bodies of death. It is perhaps on this point that the masturbatory acts of Stark/”Stark” are able to go unnoticed: the monitoring eye of the biopolitical was simply unsure which version of Frances Stark it should be most concerned with and, in the end, seemed to have picked the wrong one.

Parisi and Goodman provocatively ask, “Can a power be reduced to the biological, to the investment of power in the potential of the living?” (175). My Best Thing is an answer to the contrary. It is an investment of power in the potential of the digital and digitally-lived experiences as a form of escape from the quantifying norms of biopolitics. In Parisi and Goodman’s assertion that, “The virtual should not be equated with the potentially lived but is rather a pure potential of which life potential is merely a subset,” My Best Thing gives a ringing endorsement of life potential as the apex of biopolitical resistance and, ironically, as the power of the human (175).

On January 11, 2012, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his New York apartment after hanging himself.^[1] Swartz was a well-regarded computer programmer who was facing thirteen felony charges for downloading over four million documents^[2] from academic journals stored on the online database JSTOR, which he had allegedly accessed illegally.^[3] A statement published by Swartz’s family on a posthumous tribute site described Swartz’s death as, “…not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.”^[4] The fallout over Swartz’s suicide and the legal actions that were seen to have led to his death were abundant and rabid. The case hit a nerve on a lot of issues close to the heart of online communities, such as intellectual property, hacking, and the privileging of access. The tragedy was seen as equally infuriating for the extent to which it exposed American legislation as falling short of their duties in the areas of cyber law and Internet regulation.

The overarching question that persists in the aftermath is this: are the charges brought against Aaron Swartz’s a criminalization of a digital object or a digital event? On this issue both sides of the Swartz debate are equally ambivalent. This paper assumes the position that Swartz’s alleged criminal actions were not committed in a vacuum; if so, the outcome might have been more to his favor. This paper equally does not intend to argue the morality or rightness of any of the involved parties’ actions. What is of particular relevance here is the way in which Swartz was uniquely positioned at the center of an assemblage of technical, social, and juridical forces, and that these forces, in their entirety, symbolize yet-unresolved conflicts in the overlap of the physical and digital worlds.  For what, exactly, Swartz was being charged with is a combination of these factors that far extend beyond his digital thumbprint. As Andrew Goffey has pointed out:

Algorithms obviously do not execute their actions in a void. It is difficult to understand the way they work without the simultaneous existence of data structures, which is also to say data. Even the simplest algorithm for sorting a list of numbers supposes an unsorted list as input and a sorted list as output … .^[5]

In the case of Swartz’s permissible or impermissible use of JSTOR and the MIT network, a similar principle should have been be applied, but was not. In this oversight we will see how a softwarization of access has been appropriated from the physical world and grafted on to Internet use, and how this action carries with it a presupposition of values that do not necessarily correlate to the material conditions of cyberspace.

The Event

To follow is a description of the physical process, in four steps, by which Swartz gained access to JSTOR, using the MIT network:

1. Swartz purchased a laptop and went into the MIT building to use their wireless network. He created a guest account and was assigned an IP address. He accessed JSTOR in the same way that any visitor on the MIT campus would have accessed JSTOR.^[6]

While dialed into MIT’s wireless network, Swartz executed a program called keepgrabbing.py that “circumvent[ed] JSTOR’s limits on how many articles a person could download.”^[7] When MIT and JSTOR caught on to what was happening, they blocked the IP address that Swartz had been assigned from further access.^[8]

2. Swartz countered JSTOR’s efforts by changing his IP address and continued running keepgrabbing.py. In only a few hours, JSTOR had blocked Swartz’s new IP address as well as a range of IP addresses from MIT. At this point JSTOR also contacted MIT for assistance; MIT “responded by canceling the new account and blocking Swartz’s computer from accessing the MIT address by banning his MAC address, a unique identifier associated with his laptop.”^[9]

On this Alex Stamos, one of Swartz’s expert witnesses during his trial, writes, “Changing one’s MAC address (which the government inaccurately identified as equivalent to a car’s VIN number) or putting a mailinator email address into a captured portal are not crimes. If they were, you could arrest half of the people who have ever used airport wifi.”^[10]

3. Following MIT and JSTOR’s actions, Swartz bought a new laptop and “spoofed the MAC address from his old one to circumvent the ban.”^[11] Swartz then used both laptops and keepgrabbing.py to continue downloading a significant portion of JSTOR’s database. Within two days of this renewed attempt, JSTOR responded by banning MIT’s access entirely to JSTOR for a period of a few days.^[12]

4. In his final attempt, Swartz accessed a closet in the basement of the MIT building to directly connect his computer to the MIT network. This last effort went undetected for over a month before investigators were able to apprehend Swartz with the help of video cameras installed in the closet.^[13] It was during this period that Swartz was able to download the bulk of the content taken from JSTOR.

On this point, Swartz was indicted for attempting to, “break into a restricted computer wiring closet in a basement at MIT and to access MIT’s network without authorization from a computer switch within that closet.”^[14] Stamos counters that while he cannot comment on the criminal implications of accessing the “unlocked closet” on “MIT’s open campus,” he does point out that the closet was also used to “store personal effects by a homeless man.”^[15] He also writes that the “trespassing charges were dropped against Aaron and were not part of the Federal case.”^[16]

Questions of Access

The U.S. district attorney’s office alleges “Swartz exploited MIT’s computer system … even though Swartz was not affiliated with MIT as a student, faculty member, or employee.”^[17] This statement sets up two points of possible criminality: one on the basis of exploitation of the MIT computer system, and a second on the basis of non-affiliation. While on the first point “exploitation of MIT’s computer system” is woefully vague and undefined (what is a computer system? what are the boundaries of this system?), what is subtly implied in the latter statement (and perhaps more damagingly) is that exploitation of the MIT computer system might be tolerated by individuals with affiliation to MIT. This suggestion undermines the seriousness with which we might regard a warning not to “exploit the MIT computer system.” If the threshold of permissibility for exploitation is hinged to affiliation, then what is the least amount of “affiliation” necessary to sanction this potentially criminal act?

The more concerning issue in this last point is that the conditions of “affiliation” with MIT seem to have been, in practice, as loose and limitless as the term itself might suggest. In an article written for io9 Stamos writes that as of Fall of 2010, the MIT library provided access to JSTOR to anyone on campus, “including visitors with no connection to the Institute.”^[18] In keeping with this offer of open access, MIT’s system also lacked standard safety restrictions limiting potentially abusive Internet use, as one blogger noted:

Very few campus networks offer you a routable public IP address via unauthenticated DHCP and then lack even basic controls to prevent abuse. Very few captured portals on wired networks allow registration by any visitor, nor can they be easily bypassed by just assigning yourself an IP address. In fact, in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open.^[19]

In sum, MIT seemed to invite anyone to plug in to their network and access the Internet, from their network, with remarkably little management and supervision.

JSTOR is, in contrast, much more prescriptive about who can and cannot access their database. Although a copy of JSTOR’s precise Terms and Conditions of Use (T&C) from the time during which Swartz was accessing JSTOR is unavailable, this paper will look at JSTOR’s current T&C with the assumption that any major changes made to the T&C in the three years since Swartz’s alleged criminal access would have been documented.

JSTOR’s T&C makes it expressly known that access to their database is only available for “authorized users.”^[20] “Authorized users” is in turn a three hundred-plus word definition that outlines every possible kind of user from, “…public library Institutional Licensees: full and part-time staff” to “educational non-profit and for-profit Institutional Licensees (such as colleges, universities, and secondary schools).”^[21] In contrast to the policies on MIT’s campus, affiliation for JSTOR is something that is earned, whether it is through gaining physical access to a campus or accreditation through one of JSTOR’s licensees. While Swartz was not technically affiliated with MIT, JSTOR’s T&C would have extended authorized access to Swartz by virtue of his status as a “Walk-in User” and the extent to which he fulfilled the requirement of being  “physically present and authorized to be on the Institutional Licensee’s premises.”^[22]  In his final, and most “productive,” connection to JSTOR, Swartz violated JSTOR’s requirement of being physically present (if we don’t want to make the more complicated argument that Swartz’s computers might have served as proxies for his “physical” presence). However, in his first three attempts Swartz was physically present on the MIT campus precisely because of MIT’s informal admittance policies.

Authorized access to JSTOR is siphoned through a tight pinhole of affiliation, leaving little recourse for those who find themselves excluded. If Swartz’s access was in question as a walk-in user, then certainly his access was guaranteed through his affiliation with Harvard. Orin Kerr, a research professor of law at George Washington University, “confirms that Swartz was granted access to JSTOR by virtue of being a fellow at Harvard” at the time of his actions.^[23] The U.S. district attorney’s office points out that, “Swartz was … a fellow at a Boston-area university [(Harvard)], through which he could have accessed JSTOR’s services and archive for legitimate research.”^[24] One reason that Swartz accessed JSTOR through MIT instead of Harvard might have been due to the fact that Swartz was a long-time friend and collaborator of Lawrence Lessig’s, a professor of law and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. While Swartz and Lessig shared a passion for online activism, Lessig had vocalized his misgivings about Swartz’s civil disobedience-style approach to activism and protest.^[25] Conceivably, out of respect to Lessig and for his protection, Swartz set up his project at MIT.^[26]

There is a potential weak spot in JSTOR’s T&C at the point in which JSTOR joins up with external institutions. JSTOR’s T&C is carefully written so as to ensure that a particular kind of user is gaining access to their database. According to JSTOR, access to their database is warranted by not just individuals looking to engage in scholarly research but, more importantly, by individuals that have been “vetted;” that the kind of research these individuals are engaging with is the kind that either gets institutional approval, institutional esteem, or both. Vise versa, the kinds of research that could garner this attention are presumed to be executed at the hands of a certain kind person, the values of whom we might assume are tacitly complicit with JSTOR’s own ethics. The onus of responsibility is thus placed on the institutions entering into an agreement with JSTOR to provide JSTOR with the “right” kind of individual users. But, as Stamos points out, MIT went outside of this complicit agreement because “At the time of Aaron’s actions, the JSTOR website allowed an unlimited number of downloads by anybody on MIT’s 18.x Class-A network.” Given this, not only did MIT allow for a much broader range of users to access JSTOR, but they also allowed these users to then make use of JSTOR in ways that were in direct contradiction to JSTOR’s own expectation of user operation.^[27]

Quantity and Content

What comes up in looking at JSTOR’s current T&C is that while prosecutors seemed to have been mounting the case against Swartz on a the premise of unauthorized access, the rhetoric of JSTOR’s current T&C seems to align delinquency with mistreatment of Content, rather than access to their database. The capitalization of the word Content, as well as the limited reference to access and authorization, throughout the T&C seems to only further prove this prioritization.

Commentators on the case have noted “Swartz violated JSTOR’s terms of service [sic] by downloading the articles in bulk rather than one-by-one.”^[28] JSTOR’s current T&C strictly prohibits “bulk” and “systematized” downloading of content from their database.^[29] But how exactly should we understand “downloading” here? The algorithm that Swartz was running, keepgrabbing.py, was able to find and save copies of articles in a way that fell outside of the predetermined modes that JSTOR allows for–that is, quickly and in large quantities. At a reduced rate, the action this algorithm was performing is exactly how JSTOR operates: users download articles from the JSTOR database. What is the analog equivalent to Swartz’s allegedly criminal, digital action–at what point would a library, for example, consider the taking out of more than their maximum number of books as a criminal offense? The answer is that there really isn’t an analog equivalent, because it is the architecture of the Internet, of JSTOR’s digital services, that provides the benefit of limitless access that necessarily demands regulation to ensure commercial viability in the physical world.

There is an additional point to be made if we consider the ferocity with which JSTOR seems intent on guarding its Content. What precisely is the Content of JSTOR? It is the journals that JSTOR has digitized and stored in their database. Contained within these journals are scholarly articles. These scholarly articles are the end product of commodifiable time spent researching, writing, and thinking, by individuals who are in some way paid for precisely this kind of work, whether through employment as professors and research professionals, or through various kinds of research funding. As Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC Berkeley, notes:

Centuries ago, when printing and mailing paper journals was the most efficient way to disseminate new knowledge, a symbiotic relationship developed between scholars, who had ideas they wanted to share, and publishers, who had printing presses and the means to convey printed works to a wide audience. Transferring copyright to publishers, which protected their ability to recover costs and profit from their investment, was a reasonable price for authors to pay to further their disseminating mission.But with the birth of the internet, scholars no longer needed publishers to distribute their work. As NYU’s Clay Shirky has noted, publishing went from being an industry to being a button.^[30]

Consider this in contrast to the fact that, “the world’s colleges now collectively spend at least $10 billion … every year on subscriptions to academic journals and archives like JSTOR,” and that rates are rising: in fact, ”by one calculation, the amount that that a typical college library spends on annual journal subscriptions rose by more than 300 percent between 1986 and 2005, much faster than inflation, tuition, and most university budgets.”^[31] It seems like a disjunction that JSTOR charges such disproportioned prices for Content given that previous publishing overhead costs–ink, paper, distribution–have been removed from the equation. Of course, some of these costs might be recuperated in time spent on programmers manning the digitization of this content.

The point is not that JSTOR over or under charges for their services but instead that this economic model legitimizes JSTOR’s privileging of access to some people over others. It is the bedrock of their access policies. Authorized users are paying great sums of money for access to this information, ipso facto there can be no justifying making this same information free for others. Publishing on the Internet allows this economic model to be possible in the first place. Yet, it is the cycle of institutions continually obliging these terms that keeps this model evolving in perpetuity, despite any arguments to the contrary. This system is a recurrent circulation in and out of the benefit afforded by digitality and capitalist demands, or analogously, the physical world and cyberspace. On this point, Lawrence Lessig’s perspective is illuminating:

People do things “on” the Internet. …Cyberspace, by contrast, is not just about making life easier. It is about making life different, or perhaps better. ….It evokes, or calls to life, ways of interacting that were not possible before. I don’t mean that the interaction is new… But these cyberspace communities create a difference in degree that has matured into a difference in kind. There is something unique about the interactions in these spaces, and something especially unique about how they are regulated.^[32]

What Lessig’s distinction underscores for us is the way in which, as has consistently been the problem in Swartz’s case, the expectations associated with appropriating experiences and services in the physical world are often grossly misaligned with the realities of their practical implication in the cyberworld. This process of displacement from the physical to the cyber world skips a step in determining all the practicalities of regulation, and does so to the detriment of many already marginalized users.

Hacking

That the algorithm Swartz wrote could be scaled down to a comparable offense of taking out too many books at the same time, and as such is a laughable offense, is both true and valid. More salient, though, is how the digitization and automation of a physical process on a scale that exceeds human capability is emblematic of the processes and mechanisms that propel digital innovation. There is a shared will amongst programmers to compute and automate the abstract experiences of the physical world, compacting them into manageable and efficient expressions of code and mathematics. Backed by the superhuman computing power of the machine, there is a thin line that separates digital innovation from perceived hacking.

Part of the challenge here is the vague and indistinct criteria for what actually qualifies as hacking. In popular culture, the terms hacking or hacker are associated with criminal activity of the Hollywood variety, à la “Monster’s Ball” or “The Score.” Among online communities, and in particular amongst self-identified hackers, the term connotes ingenuity.^[33] For the casual computer user, the term can sometimes be applied to crafting projects that serve as a sort of efficient repurposing or DIY, as seen on LifeHacker.com.

MIT puts a decidedly different spin on things: MIT was famed for its culture and history of hacking that goes as far as to have its own celebrated archive on the Internet^[34]. As Larissa MacFarquhar points out, “At M.I.T., hacking … was a tradition. It was taken to be part of the culture that led to technological innovation and was rarely punished.”^[35] In an interview with Swartz’s lawyer, the head of network security at MIT admitted that in keeping with this ethos of their hacking culture MIT deliberately chooses not to install controls that could prevent potentially abusive actions, such as downloading too many PDFs from one website or utilizing too much bandwidth.^[36]

The U.S. District Attorney’s office charged Swartz with, “computer intrusion, fraud, and data theft in computer hacking incidents.”^[37] On the specific charge of digital hacking, Stamos’s account is most damning, writing:

…Aaron did not “hack” the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of “hack”. Aaron wrote a handful of basic python scripts that first discovered the URLs of journal articles and then used curl to request them. Aaron did not use parameter tampering, break a CAPTCHA, or do anything more complicated than call a basic command line tool that downloads a file in the same manner as right-clicking and choosing “Save As” from your favorite browser.^[38]

A curl is a command line that allows for URL manipulations and transfers, making requests, getting the data and then retrieving the information. It is, in other words, a tool that programmers can employ but one that ultimately is “not written to do everything for you” and most likely requires “using some kind of script language or repeated manual invokes” to piece the entire process together.^[39] Swartz did precisely this: stitching together a series of algorithms that searched for journal articles to a curl that downloaded a copy of journal articles, and then automating the entire process. There is a kind of philosophical question in this: once the algorithm was set into motion, it ran autonomously from Swartz. Does, or should, this still be considered within the purview of Swartz’s actions? When someone commits a crime, do we prosecute their mother for giving birth to them?

The obscurity of what defines hacking worked both for and against Swartz. In conjunction with MIT’s culture of hacking and tacit celebration of hackers, the case could be made that Swartz’s actions against JSTOR were in pursuit of research objectives. The United States’s legal definition of hacking is equally unhelpful in settling this matter: computer hacking is broadly defined as, “intentionally access[ing] a computer without authorization or exceed[ing] authorized access,” with very indistinct markers of what authorized access might be.^[40] On the other hand, prosecutors were able to charge Swartz “under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act [CFAA], a federal law … that makes it illegal to ‘intentionally access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access.’”^[41] However, the CFAA is a law passed in 1984, when the “Internet was still in its infancy to crack down on computer hacking” and, on top of not having been updated since it’s creation, the law’s “language is too vague, potentially criminalizing a host of benign online activities, such as visiting online shopping or online matchmaking sites at work.”^[42]

What Swartz’s case exacerbates is the way in which the concept of hacking (and all its relevant offshoots) has become a communicative software that enables individuals and institutions to talk about particular digital actions in pointed ways without knowing or understanding the exact events that took place. The concept of hacking as it exists today functions as a confused conflation of events and actions ranging from forced, illegal accession to theft. In Swartz’s case, simply using the word hacked outside of MIT was a way to frame Swartz’s actions as criminal instead of innovative. The U.S. District Attorney’s press release quotes Carmen Ortiz, Swartz’s prosecutor, as saying, “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollar.” We can assume (or hope) that this maxim might have been decidedly different coming from the mouth of an MIT alum.

Digitality: Cutting Both Ways

Throughout Swartz’s case, there is a persistent, unequal treatment of digital and analog experiences that, more often than not, end up casting digitality in the role of “delinquent.” The automation, computation, and ease of access that is made possible through digitization can be seen here as forming a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the very appeal of JSTOR is that it allows access to millions of articles from a pool that is even larger than that. Swartz made use of this very architecture when he committed his alleged felonies. Yet the ways in which JSTOR limits and permits access to their database is arcanely modeled on an existing understanding of the library in the physical world (justifiably so; it is the closest analog equivalent). Access and the potential for access to the benefits of JSTOR are tantalizingly locked away behind these ciphers of library-use, compounded by ill-defined notions of downloading “in bulk” and the prohibitions against it. What is more sinister about this framework is the way in which it legitimizes while at the same time obfuscates what is really the key to access: exorbitant subscription fees.

The case against Swartz is by no means a unique instance. What this class of legal conflicts foregrounds are the problems of a software of access that take its cues from the conditions of regulated access in the physical world. A corollary of the outcome of these events also implicates a discussion of how activism might be reconstituted in cyberspace. Swartz was a dedicated activist who applied the same ruthless calculability from his days as a programmer towards his activism. Swartz espoused an approach to activism that sought “to launch micro-campaigns on a local level, where you could test various strategies and see what worked and what didn’t.”^[43] The way in which Swartz challenged JSTOR’s accessibility was an extension of this belief. Under what taxonomy of activism in the physical world might we classify Swartz’s actions, beyond civil disobedience?

Activism performed on the Internet signals a blind spot in the way a software of access in the physical world meets up with access software in the cyber world. If we think about sit-ins or strikes as two popular examples of protest, activism often seeks to block access as leverage in demanding that a certain set of demands be met in a timely manner. On the Internet, activists’ demands often call for an opening up of access, such as with the Open-Source, Copyleft and Free Software movements. Activist protests are juridical rights that are (technically) guaranteed in physical spaces. How can cyber law provide similar protection of rights in this area? A resolution on this point proves significant to the extent that activism represents a non-commodifiable action through which human rights are interpreted and debated. The response to Swartz’s death by the online community is a signal that just such debate has already been picked up digitally; now we can only wait for it to circuit back into the analog.

In 2010, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was translated into emojis with the help of over eight hundred people employed through the website Amazon Turk (Emoji Dick). Each of Moby Dick’s approximate 10,000 sentences was individually translated three times by Amazon Turk employees (Emoji Dick).  A different set of Amazon Turk workers then voted on the most popular translation of each emojified sentence for inclusion in the final Emoji Dick book. Using money raised through the online platform Kickstarter to fund the project, “over eight hundred people spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds working to create this book [and] each worker was paid five cents per translation and two cents per vote translation” (Emoji Dick). Emoji Dick’s critical reception is perhaps best encapsulated in the comment of one BoingoBoingo.net user when he wrote, “That’s astoundingly useless” (Emoji Dick).

Emoji Dick succeeds in perverting one of America’s great novels into little more than a paperweight. Despite this, Emoji Dick is now the first book written in entirely emojis to be accepted into the U.S. Library of Congress (Rebecca Nelson 2013). Such a rite of passage marks Emoji Dick as significant, though the reasons why remain unclear.

I wonder if perhaps Emoji Dick was not admitted into the wrong institution. Art critic and Art F City founder Paddy Johnson authored the book’s introduction in a gesture that seems to cast Emoji Dick as an actor in the digital art world more so than the literary. Paddy herself sees Emoji Dick as having roots in contemporary art, citing artist Francis Alys’s When Faith Moves Mountains (a project in which five hundred volunteers with shovels moved a sixteen-hundred-foot-long sand dune four inches from its original spot) as a parallel undertaking (xiv). The book’s editor/compiler/overall project manager, Fred Benenson, also has connections to contemporary digital art having graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ ITP program (About Me) and also having designed a version of The New Yorker’s iconic Eustace Tilley entirely from emojis (Read).

It would seem that Emoji Dick has received a certain amount of accolades from both of the worlds it purports to straddle yet the book itself is immune to immersion in either of these worlds. What I mean by that is this: Emoji Dick is an unreadable book recently admitted into the U.S. Library of Congress and a work of contemporary art that has never been considered for exhibition. How, then, are we to understand this seemingly lost, useless, object that’s been (at least metaphorically speaking) dropped into the cultural lap of the American nation? I propose that the significance of Emoji Dick lies not in its qualities as an object of art or literature but rather in the experiential circumstances of its creation in both regards. These vector forces call up present-day issues of authenticity and materiality in the age of digitization. While ultimately these issues might be left unresolved, they are important to investigate to the extent that they contribute to an on-going process of understanding our physical world more and more from the perspective of a co-habitation with the cyber world.

Emoji Dick, or, The Non-Bookiest Book You’ve Ever Non-Read

The complexity of Emoji Dick is that it looks like a book, is structured (in many ways) like a book, and takes for its operative ground a very well known and established book. Any analysis or engagement with Emoji Dick to date has been under the assumption that Emoji Dick looks like, functions as, and therefore is a book. Those who encounter Emoji Dick do so with the same expectations and understandings that they bring to any book: they open the cover, they look for content to be printed inside, on the pages, they read from left to right, top to bottom. What they are met with is an antagonism of all these postulates. Lines of emoji are interspersed with lines from the original Moby Dick text, and while such a formatting choice might have initially been intended to guide readers through Emoji Dick, the printed results actually exaggerate the extent to which the emojis fail to capture Melville’s original text and story.

The discordances of Emoji Dick as a literary book are further emphasized when we compare the building blocks of a literature–words, sentences, punctuation–to the building blocks of Emoji Dick–emojis. Some words from Moby Dick are easily transferred into a singular emoji–as in a picture of a ship for the entire word ship–and in doing so fall in line with readers’ expectations of how to read a book. In other cases, words are phonetically broken down and assigned emojis whose particular names (in English) might phonetically be strung together to produce a new word altogether, with little relevance among the individual units beyond that. The rules for when and where this kind of translation happens in Emoji Dick’s text are haphazard and unknowable.

This absence of relations among the individual emojis introduces a detrimental breakdown in any attempt to graft the experience of reading a book on top of Emoji Dick. Rules of English formal language and grammatology become optional as the emojis reveal themselves as erratic and vaguely relational. The sum effect of this is immediately visible when one expects to read a reasonable facsimile of Moby Dick’s iconic first line “Call me Ishmael” and instead is presented with a picture of a red telephone, the face of a dark-haired mustachioed man, a sailboat, a whale, and a strangely-posed hand. Though syntactically the emoji translations attempt to follow along with the original text, ultimately the restrictions imposed on the translators by virtue of the sheer lack of emojis available for translation produce inept interpretations.

Failure to successfully translate the original text–and by that I mean to recreate and replay the actions of Moby Dick in the new language of emojis–sets up the experience of reading Emoji Dick as one in which we are constantly being shuffled back and forth, so that forward motions, propelled by text in the Roman alphabet, follow on the heels of lines of emoji, whose vagueness and abstractness serve to reverse, confuse, and expunge any meaning from the previous line. The interrelations between the text of Melville’s Moby Dick and Benenson’s Emoji Dick form a blockade that prevents our accessing the story of Moby Dick. To read Emoji Dick in the manner most apropos to its creation is to attempt to interpret and decipher emojis, an almost impossible task in itself, and in doing so sacrifice comprehension for sheer endurance. To read Emoji Dick in the manner suggested by its form, as literature captured in a book, is to disregard the emojis entirely, and in doing so reject Emoji Dick as a translation altogether.

The choice to render Moby Dick in emojis was a creative decision to effectively shelve, if not entirely dissolve, Melville’s plot. To speak through a language of emoji is like shouting out in high volumes the names of all the things around you, with total disregard for verbs and adjectives. These points form the basis for our understanding of Emoji Dick as being in no way a book or literary work except for the fact that it appropriates from the realm of the literary the form of the codex book.

Emoji Dick, or, The Miniaturized Whale

In light of how Emoji Dick functions as non-book, what interest then does this object hold for the Library of Congress? Paradoxically, Emoji Dick’s accession doesn’t seem to fill a void in the Library’s collection; the list of translations and adaptations of Moby Dick are by no means absolute. In the Library of Congress collection alone:

Emoji Dick joins many other versions of Melville’s Moby Dick … including a 2008 graphic novel version, a 2007 pop-up book and a 1984 adaptation for young readers. The classic novel also appears as part of Melville compilation volumes, with different editors and introductions, translated versions in Chinese, Russian and German, and of course the original version from 1851. (Shaw)

What is noteworthy about Emoji Dick’s inclusion is that, despite operating in an entirely pictorial language, it is not being classified as a graphic novel or any kind of similar category. According to Michael Neubert, the recommending officer for the Library’s collection who first advocated Emoji Dick’s acquisition, “What is striking for the Library’s collections about this work is that it takes a known classic of literature and converts it to a construct of our modern way of communicating, making possible an investigation of the question, ‘is it still a literary classic when written in a kind of smart phone based [sic] pidgin language?” (Shaw). It is unclear from Neubert’s statement how the language present in a graphic novel might distinguish itself from a “smartphone-based pidgin” that employs visual imagery as its means of communication. However, a point of significance in Neubert’s acknowledgement is the extent to which it confirms and situates the creation of Emoji Dick in a time of the hyperreal, as conceived by Jean Baudrillard.

For Baudrillard, the hyperreal is a conception of postmodernism that effectually rearranges the relations of time and space, sign and signifier, so that “signs no longer represent or refer to an external model” (Massumi 1) or in other words, a shift of perception in which the real is replaced by a simulation of the real (Hyperreality). More salient to our discussion of Emoji Dick is the way in which Baudrillard’s conception of miniaturization as a consequence of living in the hyperreal is played out. Miniaturization can be seen in the broad-reaching, diminishing scale of technological advancement. Such an effect parodied by both Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller, in SNL’s D&G Skit and Zoolander, respectively, wherein both scenes the characters are seen using cell phones miniaturized to the point of uselessness and absurdity. These dramatic reenactments of miniaturization take for their comedic inspiration Baudrillard’s earnest lamentation that miniaturization makes the body, and experiences of the body, superfluous as scale is driven down to such a level as to elude experiential understanding. Miniaturization as both concept and action neutralizes our capacity to search for “an ideal principle for these things at a higher level, on a human scale” so that “What remains are only concentrated effects, miniaturized and immediately available” (Baudrillard 129).

While Baudrillard’s understanding of the miniaturization effect draws from a line of reasoning that prioritizes human experiences as excluded from digitization[1], his observations on the “concentrated effects, miniaturized and immediately available” that remain after this process might be the mechanisms that make emoji an appealing means of communication. The evolution of emojis out of SMS messaging seems to support this notion: often-referenced phrases such as “Happy Birthday!” or “I love you” can be quickly and easily substituted by an emoji depicting a cake with candles, or a heart. However, we can see in this scenario how miniaturization engenders a “[relegation] to total uselessness, desuetude and almost obscenity all that used to fill the scene of our lives” (129). To translate into emoji is to attempt to shoehorn all the volumes of emotion, action, nuance, entendre, etc. embedded in everyday speech into solitary, static images, with the naive expectation that any recipient can correctly read both the specificity and universalities of these figures. This is not the case; Paddy Johnson notes in her introduction to Emoji Dick: “I added the Japanese emoticons known as Emoji to my iPhone last week and, unless I’m reading hearts, I still don’t know what I’m looking at” (xiii).

The un-readable lines of Emoji Dick play their part in razing the immense landscape of Moby Dick to utter nothingness, but there is also a doubly blistering process layered on top of this that further nullifies the grounds of perceived scenery. Baudrillard points out that miniaturization effectively renders “The countryside, the immense geographic countryside [or perhaps in the specific case of Emoji Dick, the immense geographic ocean]… to a deserted body whose expanse and dimensions appear arbitrary” (Baudrillard 129). Emoji Dick is married in reference to Moby Dick, a book whose tale (pardon the pun) is arguably too deeply rooted in the collective cultural conscious of, at the least, American society to be divorced from Emoji Dick. In other words, while the translation of “Call me Ishmael” might be unintelligible as emojis, there are few who would have opened Emoji Dick and not have expected that whatever string of emojis they were confronted with was intended to express this very line. It is in this misalignment of expectation and confrontation, in what we expect of Moby Dick and what we are confronted with in Emoji Dick, that we are able to see the form of Emoji Dick (as a codex book) as secondary (if not completely irrelevant) to its existence and functionality.

Emoji Dick embodies the enigma of a story without a narrator, a plot without a book. Where, then, does the action of Moby Dick, exist? How does Emoji Dick, with its porous references to Moby Dick and infidelity to literary and linguistic modi operandi, continue to traffic in the literary world? It would seem that Emoji Dick rides on the coattails of its inspiration, Moby Dick, as a simulation, echoing Baudrillard’s point that in the era of the hyperreal “… what was projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor, as mental or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation” (128). We often think of a book as being the absolute capture of a story. We view literature as a repository for an author’s thoughts as well as a space in which readers are able to access, add to, and experiment with an interpreted narrative. From one perspective, the book represents the model experience of storytelling from other vectors in the hyperreal. The act of reading, from the position of reader, has no other copy; it is a model of itself. The story of Moby Dick exists in excess of the book that seeks to capture it (Emoji Dick) but in doing so is also dispersed into Baudrillard’s field of “absolute space which is also that of simulation” (128). What I am setting up in this discussion is a paradigm that positions reader in direct relation to story, bypassing any and all hylomorphic conduits in the process. Emoji Dick is just such an instantiation of this process, wherein the book and text of Emoji Dick and Moby Dick have no place in our, as “readers,” understanding of what both books ultimately say.

Emoji Dick, or, The Relayed Real

This previous point is important insofar as it breaks down and exposes the “ecological niche” of simulations in the hyperreal to their respective parts (Baudrillard 128). For Baudrillard, the circulation of simulations and exclusion of the real in the era of the hyperreal requires for its operational sanity “… a relational decor…informed of the respective condition of the others and of the system as a whole, where opacity, resistance, or the secrecy of a single term can lead to catastrophe” (128). This seems to suggest that all simulations, existing as such, must be in possession of a sort of awareness of their existence as simulations, in order to not upset the balance, not speak out of turn, and risk–horror of horrors!–exposing themselves as phonies.

The caveat I would present to this is not entirely a rupture in the age of hyperreality but perhaps a deflating pinprick in the all-encasing bubble Baudrillard has built around the model and the simulation. Such an idea is picked up by Brian Massumi in identifying a loophole, by way of Deleuze and Guattari, in the totality of the model-simulation relationship in hyperreality. Massumi identifies two predominant modes of simulation: one of quasi-causality, in which certain traits are taken up through human replicants and made regularizing, and the other mode as belonging to Art, in which all properties are selected and multiplied (Massumi 5). The latter mode marks a space that, “… is less like the earth with its gravitational grid than an interplanetary space, a deterritorialized territory providing a possibility of movement in all directions” (Massumi 5). For Massumi, “Deleuze and Guattari invent a vocabulary enabling them to discuss both modes of simulation without lapsing into the terminology of representation. The key concept is double becoming. There are always at least two terms swept up in a fabulous process that transforms them both” (21). The concept of double becoming allows for considerations of what can be seen as model and simulation with regards to both surface level imitations as well as experiential imitations, or perhaps better said, re-playings.

The experiential is crucial for our understanding of Emoji Dick. In 2009, Benenson explained to The New Yorker, “The story behind Moby-Dick is about this huge, seemingly insurmountable challenge, told using metaphors and stylized language … And in a way, that’s what translating a book into emoji is—a weird, huge challenge told in metaphors and stylized language” (Law). Benenson’s comment reveals his desires to translate Moby Dick into emojis not for its literary benefits but instead for the experience of such an undertaking. The process of translating Emoji Dick fixates not on the translation of a story but instead on the translation of the phenomenology of writing such a story. The question of the author is likewise taken up; for Benenson, his goals in translating the experience of writing sidestep the traditional author-translator relationship. In its place Benenson appropriates–not mimes, mirrors, or copies–Melville’s experiences writing Moby Dick in a model par excellence of Deleuze and Guattari’s double becoming.

This expression of double becoming exhibits both of modes of Massumi’s simulation. Quasi-causality takes hold in the human replication of those positive qualities that can be abstracted from Melville and transferred to Benenson. Quasi-causality identifies Benenson as contemporary author, scholar, academic; as respecting the virtuosos of the past while embracing the technologies of our futures; and lastly as having bestowed upon him all the good will and criticism that has garnished Moby Dick’s reception. At the same time, simulation as “Art” selects for its object all the properties of Emoji Dick and Moby Dick and “multiplies potentials” (Massumi 5). This multiplication of potentials can best be seen in the dualities that are set at almost every level of Emoji Dick’s relation to Moby Dick: living, contemporary author to deceased, past author; pictorial to textual language; writing at the wane of technological and industrial revolutions; etc.

Emoji Dick, or, What Next?

What should be clear from this discussion is how Moby Dick and Melville’s experience of writing Moby Dick are not just simulated in the era of the hyperreal vis-à-vis Benenson’s creation of Emoji Dick. To arrive at such a conclusion would mean only considering the superficie of both projects and disregarding the experiential elements that Benenson has so explicitly sought. Whereas Baudrillard might have regarded Melville’s experience writing Moby Dick and the book itself as the model for a simulation performed at Benenson’s hands, Massumi’s conception of Deleuze and Guattari’s double becoming designates Benenson’s project as a model unto itself. Emoji Dick resists being mere simulation because it is the experiences that circulate in and around Emoji Dick–Benenson’s experience in translating a huge story into a new set of metaphors, the experience of scores of Amazon Turk workers translating a single text, writing a book via votes and mechanized labor, etc.–that take priority in its evaluation. When we talk about the significance of Emoji Dick, it is never in terms of its materiality; it is always a conversation about the conditions of its production. You could even say that if the book had never gone into production we could still be having a discussion about the hypothetical consequences of its creation.

Benenson’s engagement with the double becoming of Melville’s process and of Moby Dick “… appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on the new full body that replaces the earth” (Massumi 4). Emoji Dick, in attempting to simulate aspects of Moby Dick, intermingles and eventually outgrows this project, establishing itself as a model arising out of simulation. The simulation that is present in Emoji Dick is one of a quasi causality that produces a reality in which time and space are conquerable in new ways: for a nominal fee and limited taxation on any one individual’s personal labor, technology can cut across centuries, resurrect a classic from its chronological stronghold and breathe new, trendy life back into it. But, as Massumi asks in his own work, “How does all this apply to our present cultural condition?” (7).

Emoji Dick, or, Swimming Through Space

The way in which Emoji Dick captures the experiential relays that originate with Melville and Moby Dick and extend all the way into present day and beyond represents a paradigmatic mirror of the functions and physicalities of maps. This folding of time onto itself is even incorporated in the evolution of cartography. In the early history of maps, routes were punctuated by pictorial characters that “had the function of indicating the operations–traveling, military, architectural, political or commercial–that make possible the fabrication of a geographical plan” and also doubly “[marking] on the map the historical operations from which it resulted” (120). In this regard cartography was an aestheticized capture of a passage of time, a narrative of the traveler and the frontier entangled and funneled into a series of marks, lines, and symbols (de Certeau 120).

With Emoji Dick’s shortcomings as a literary classic, and the forces of the hyperreal casting a shadow of arbitrariness over the physical dimensions of the book, there is a redistribution in our aesthetic encounter with Emoji Dick as an object. What is wrought from this is a moment of aesthetic primacy that moves us from reading to seeing; from an inattentive vista that glides over and takes in whole words to the sharpened examination of characters, symbols, and the spaces that surround, insulate, and organize these features. Released from the coercions of reading (namely how to read), we transform into skeptical purveyors of Emoji Dick’s physical, visual ecology. The process I am describing here is in sensual parallel to that of Deleuze and Guattari’s milena, in which, “language torn from sense, conquering sense, bringing about an active neutralization of sense, no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflection … Children are well skilled in the exercise of repeating a word, the sense of which is only vaguely felt, in order to make it vibrate around itself” (21).

The accenting of the word, the inflection, is for us in Emoji Dick this rarely encountered ecosystem of emojis. We are betrayed by the optic expectations of a book, of Moby Dick as book, and this sense, torn from sense, finds its reterritorialization in the sense vaguely felt and visually vibrated around itself. This visual vibration occurs in the accentuation of those observable characteristics made secondary or overlooked entirely in the process of reading written language: kerning, figuration, compositional order, negative spacing aroudn characters, etc. In this milieu, no detail is too functional to be disregarded; every inch of Emoji Dick seems important and up for grabs in finding our way in, out, and through it. This moment becomes the fatal break between Emoji Dick and the literary. In its place Emoji Dick continues on as markings on a page that simultaneously feel foreign and familiar. This split feeling echoes maps in their representation of the untraveled, unknown land as presented in the visual rhetoric of familiar markings (green land, blue water, trees) and orientation (compass, key).

Emoji Dick, or, Mapping the Seas and Sailing the Digital

It would seem that maps require for their activation a certain level of suspended disbelief. Modern-day maps ask us to trust that one inch on their printed surface is equal to some much-larger unit of measurement. Google maps offers a key for their scaling that seems obligatory, or at least arcanely and idiotically traditional given GPS localization features, and this features is made less relevant with the option to change units of measure to a range of whimsical units such as Smoot and Babylonian Cubits. The early maps in de Certeau’s account required a tacit understanding that out-of-scale pictures of animals or ships drawn on a map are not actually present in real life at that size but rather that these drawings symbolize their presence or function. The map of popular board game Settlers of Catan stretches the limits of imagination in declaring nineteen hexagonal units as comprising the island of Catan, a demand perhaps most earnestly upheld because these hexagonal units are surrounded on all sides by water.

But perhaps nowhere does the fantasy of maps feature most prominently than in video games, utilizing semi-literal reference to maps in their mapping of “video game worlds.” Different levels in video games are represented as worlds, and maps of these worlds range from pertaining to epochs past, future, and imagined.  Video game maps vary in structure from the classic, such as SNES’s Looney Tunes B-Ball Tournament, to the elaborate, as in NES’s Paper Mario’s aerial world view, to the abstract, as in the arcade game Alien Syndrome, where spaces and worlds are reduced to Euclidean sections floating in a vacuum of space (Video Game Atlas). The function of mapping as a tool in video games exaggerate the essential characteristics of maps that have allowed for their deployment in perpetuity, despite those situations that make their presence seem little more than nostalgic.

Unlike maps in the physical world, digital mappings of video games do not actually chart any space at all; they merely reference an imagined space and time that is abstracted from our experiences and encounters with code. However their believability is derived from the very principles at work in de Certeau’s discussion of maps. For de Certeau, notions of space are linked to the practicing of place; space arises out of an ecology of “vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables … composed of intersections of mobile elements … actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it” (117).  Space in the cyberworld too is dependent upon this dynamic practicing. As N. Katherine Hayles explains, spatialization in the digital is driven by the POV, or point of view: “More than an acronym, POV is a substantive noun that constitutes the character’s subjectivity by serving as a positional marker substituting for his absent body” (37). The POV’s movement through the visual landscape of a game narrativizes and abstracts the layers of code as they are enacted; in this process, “Data are thus humanized, and subjectivity is computerized, allowing them to join in a symbiotic union whose result is narrative” (Hayles 39).

The union of classical maps and digital maps on the basis of movement and space, as seen here, is analogous to the development of Emoji Dick and Moby Dick. In both situations, time is folded on to itself, so that characterstics of an object from a particular place and time–whether in map making and voyaging or storytelling and writing–are plucked from their place on the chronological spectrum and repurposed in the present. Their existence in the present does reference an external model, but as we have seen, the state of their current existence cannot as easily be reduced to mere simulation. Again it is helpful here to think of Massumi’s discussion of the double becoming. For both Emoji Dick and the digital mappings seen par excellance in video games, the inspiration for their creation is the materialist relic that captures certain creative and adventure-seeking processes. Benenson looks to Melville’s Moby Dick to inform and generate the course of his creative project while similarly video game creators take the embedded values and directives of analog maps to guide the user experience. Where these two examples depart from and pervert their source models is in their present-day replications. Dynamism, action, movement and experience form an intersection of vector forces that take up these projects at the level of simulation and thrust them into the age of hyperreality. This hyperreality, however, is not the totalizing vision that Baudrilllard had put forth in his hyperrealist eulogy for human drama. Rather, these creative undertakings mark the boundaries of a hyperreality that bears more in common with Massumi’s vision of a hyperreality fraught with double becomings, where the simulacrum, Massumi notes quoting Deleuze, “is less a copy twice removed than a phenomenon of a different nature altogether: it undermines the very distinction between copy and model” (2).

Emoji Dick, or, The Whale Swims On

The viscera of the spectacle, or as Chiyoko Kawakami quoting Guy DeBord has called, “‘the spectacle,’ in which ‘the world one sees is its world,’ a world of surface without interiority,” has long run its course as the object of scrutiny (325). When Baudrillard first wrote of hyperreality he did so at a time that predated society’s immersion into all things digital, technical, and interactive. The imperative now is to ammend and rethink Baudrillard’s theorization with consideration for a life lived part-digitally. Projects such as Emoji Dick serve to highlight the necessity of such a rethinking to the extent that we seem be getting it wrong. That Emoji Dick was included in the Library of Congress and is being considered a literary translation of Moby Dick seems to be a myopic categorization. More than this, Emoji Dick represents an earnest reshuffling in the taxonomical classes of text, image, sign, and signifier. The visual qualities of Emoji Dick betray it in the service of literature: images do not elucidate ideas but instead further confuse them, the Roman alphabet is redacted and sublimated by emojis. The emoji alone cannot exist as a signifier, as Deleuze and Guattari attest to when they quote Wagenbach as saying: “The word is master; it directly gives birth to the image” (21).

Emoji Dick thus reaches beyond the reins of literature and authors a time and space of writing. In this way, Emoji Dick serves as a tour guide and map, a kind of narcissistic itinerary detailing Melville’s journey as writer, Benenson’s journey as translator, and then lastly, our own journey as interpreters. To this end we might consider de Certau’s own line of questioning:

How are acting and seeing coordinated in this realm of ordinary language in which the former is so obviously dominant? The question ultimately concerns basis of the everyday narrations, the relation between the itinerary (a discursive series of operations) and the map (a plane projection totalizing observations) that is, between two symbolic and anthropological languages of space.  (119)

In his invocation of the “symbolic and anthropological languages of space,” de Certeau unknowingly anticipates a rhetoric of the state of hyperreality that we currently face: one in which lived experiences in the realms of the digital and the analog circulate interchangeably. In this state, code and speech convene to flesh out the practiced place of space. The importance of this gesture is that it demands a confrontation with our prejudices in thinking about space–prejudices that necessarily exclude possibilities for an interpreted space of code. Just as Emoji Dick disembodies literature from the grasps of the codex book and wrests forward a new kind of story about translating layers of experience, digital maps too extend beyond themselves to foreground a conception of space that finds increasing relevance in our daily lives. Movement experienced through the POV and narrativization make the case for the closing of the gap between analog and digitality, asking if space and other experiences of phyiscal life are not actually so different when caught and replayed in the digital. Ultimately, such characteristics point to a kind of milena of the analog, wherein objects like Emoji Dick and digital mappings activate a vibration of the social space around them in latent expectation of a reterritorialization in a reconsidered space of the hyperreal.

The chance of a person randomly, or accidentally, finding themselves in the middle of an art exhibition in the physical world is remote, if not entirely unlikely. To arrive at locations where art is exhibited, such as a museum or gallery space, requires a physical traversal of space and time that is often on too large a scale to warrant haphazardness. However if one was to accidentally enter a physical space that exhibited artwork, it would not be too long into the experience before one would realize their mistake. Physical spaces intended for the exhibition of artworks are often, by design, built to mark off an area specifically reserved for some form of aesthesia. As Carol Duncan observes, “Although fashions in wall colors, ceiling heights, lighting, and other details have over the years varied with changing museological trends, installation design has consistently and increasingly sought to isolate objects for the concentrated gaze of the aesthetic adept and to suppress as irrelevant other meanings the objects might have” (17). This consideration of setting extends farther yet, to the origins of the public museum and their exterior facades. Duncan adds, “Art museums have always been compared to older ceremonial monuments such as palaces or temples. Indeed, from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, they were deliberately designed to resemble them” (7). In this sense, the work of art is secondary to reading the physical exhibition space. It is instead the environmental design that asserts itself as a “‘liminal’ zone of time and space in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience” (Duncan 20). It is not a subtle gesture, and one that is ultimately up to the visitor to accept or deny.

In the case of websites created with the specific purpose of exhibiting net art (henceforth referred to as “exhibition websites”), this scenario is decidedly different, but not entirely abandoned. On the one hand, the corporeal experience of traversing physical space is excluded; constructions of space on the Internet occur on the level of “transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives can happen” (Hayles Virtual 38). Traveling within this space is then manifested in the form of cybersurfing, in which, as Steven Johnson notes, individuals “[shuttle] from site to site across the infosphere, following trails of thought wherever they [lead]” (110). These shifts in experience highlight the structure of the Internet as a network. In Albert-Laszlo Barabási’s terms:

The architecture of the WWW is dominated by few very highly connected nodes or hubs. These hubs, such as Amazon.com, Yahoo, are extremely visible — everywhere you go, you see another link pointing to them. In the network behind the Web many unpopular or seldom noticed nodes with only a small number of links are held together by these few highly connected websites.  (58)

Thinking of the Internet as a scale-free network consisting of interconnected high and low visibility nodes draws an interesting parallel to the urban landscape of many major cities. European baroque cities in particular offer an accurate physical metaphor for Barabási’s conception of the Internet. In this comparison, the Internet’s “high visibility” is replaced with the city’s “power,” and both entities are harnessed through considered design. As Spiro Kostoff explains:

Cities designed in the Grand Manner employ conventions that make power physically manifest. …The staging of power is a matter of managing appearances. …The nexus of this web of illusion is the ceremonial axis. …It is the predicate for the focal point of power, the sovereign’s palace or its modern substitute. …The colonnaded avenue of the Roman provincial metropolis supplies a visual model for an urban prospect that wants to be significantly entered, and traversed in ceremony.  (271-272)

In this example the Internet’s links between hubs are made analogous to ceremonial axes and the hubs themselves focal points of power.

Reimagining the Internet as a baroque city sets up a cognitive model through which we are able to examine the ways in which the lived experience in such cities might be problematized when replayed in the digital. In specifically thinking about the experience of viewing art in the physical world as opposed to on exhibition websites, the resulting inquiry is one of the signals of aesthetic experience. In the physical world, structural and interior design help to create a sanctioned space for aesthesia. In the absence of such opportunities, how and where does the exhibition website replicate such a designation? By focusing on two net art exhibition websites in particular, LaFiac.com 2012 – The End of a World / La Fin d’un Monde (LaFiac) and Temporary Stedelijk I will show how the use of hypertext and engagement with proprioception can either facilitate or hinder aesthetic experience from entering exhibition websites.

In continuing to think of the Internet in terms of a baroque city it is also apparent how the absence of large-scale physical space can allow for a kind of accidental arrival not normally conceivable in the physical world. If we imagine a visitor in Paris, while on foot, the inconvenience of following the ceremonial axes but making a wrong turn and accidentally arriving at the Musee Louvre would certainly cost him/her unrecoupable stretches of time. However on the Internet, one can effortlessly zoom between Google and www.louvre.fr and back again, just as fast as an Internet connection with allow. With irredeemable time and physical exertion at stake, our forays in the physical world are less often accidental or unanticipated. On the internet, just the opposite is true: links are accidentally clicked, web pages time out, and boolean searches go awry, all of which resulting in our landing on pages we did not originally set out to visit.

The opportunity for these kind of chance encounters form the operative foundation for LaFiac. Curated, conceived, and created by Julien Levesque and Caroline Delieutraz, this exhibition website functions as a kind of cybersquat of the Parisian contemporary art fair FIAC and their site’s URL (www.fiac.com). The simple addition of the French article la (whether intentional or not) is all that is necessary to transport an unsuspecting net surfer straight into the middle of an art exhibition. The landing page of LaFiac is a slightly cropped digital image of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1562 painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels. The page is static until one begins to hover their cursor over the image, wherein a rectangular frame and banner appear, an appropriation of the tagging format of Facebook, highlighting the linked net art works (Levesque LaFiac). The site features the work of twenty-seven unique net artists, all created in 2012. The frames linking to the artworks are scattered throughout the image on the landing page, with no discernible link between the net artwork and the landing site’s featured painting. No curatorial statement is provided, so the interpretative process is handed over to the user entirely open-ended. The exhibition website as a general model for exhibition represents a mutation in the long-standing negotiations between artist, institution, and location. What is particularly problematized in LaFiac is the website’s attempt to, in many ways, directly replicate a lived experience in the physical world–going to see art–with little to no reference of the experiential conditions of such an experience.

Primary to the experience of viewing art in physical institutions is its characterization as what Duncan regards as “a performance field”– a zone of expressive actions that circulate through the relations of the visitors and visual rhetoric of exhibition display (12). To this end Philip Rhys Adams writes:

…the museum is really an impresario, or more strictly a régisseur, neither actor nor audience, but the controlling intermediary who sets the scene, induces a receptive mood in the spectator, then bids the actors take the stage and be their best artistic selves. And the art objects do have their exits and their entrances; motion-the movement of the visitor as he enters a museum and as he goes or is led from object to object-is a present element in any installation.  (4)

The individual units of these installations that benchmark one’s movement through a physical exhibition can be seen in literalized relics of the curation process. Passage through a museum is often guided by the presence of unassuming conventions: title cards accompanying individual artworks, temporary walls erected to display surplus objects, sculpture pedestals and plinths, etc. The presence of these items contributes to a reading of the physical space as falling into two categories–sights seen and yet-unseen–that push the linearized passage through an exhibition forward. While on the one hand the appearance of these objects might just be out of pragmatic necessity their role as ciphers of a prescriptive experience of the physical exhibition cannot be overruled. The objects’ mere presence contribute to a quality of space that requires rapt attention and constant negotiation. Any slips into distracted meandering will no sooner elicit the harsh whispering of a gallery assistant guiding you farther away from an artwork than it will a crash into some unexpected, temporary wall. In this shaping of space the objects become vehicles of some programmatic, unseen force ostensibly grounded in the high-browed convergence of aesthetics and institution. This force bids visitors to “behave with a certain decorum” and marking out an area “culturally designated as reserved for a special quality of attention– in this case, for contemplation and learning” (Duncan 10). Since our earliest experiences with art are often in these kinds of physical art exhibitions, these imposed behaviors become conditionally indexed to a reception of aesthetic experience.

In contrast, the experience of “moving through” LaFiac as an exhibition is entirely unregulated, to the detriment of the exhibition’s success. As Julien explained to me in an email:

The idea of this exhibition was to show online creations that are often absent from contemporary art fairs. Using a URL address close to …[the] website ‘fiac.com’, we create a potential error rate and turn away a number of visitors to another ‘FIAC’. While these designs already exist on the network, with lafiac.com we try to make them more visible. …Users can fall randomly on the site, they discover a novel navigation interface [sic].  (Levesque LaFiac)

In execution the site becomes an investigation of hypertext wherein the visitor, thrown into the discontinuity between Bruegel’s painting and the assortment of hypertext, seeks a unifying explanation and a way out of the slippery curatorial chasm. The structure of the exhibition website prioritizes interface design geared towards savvy Internet users as opposed to one that more directly references installation design in the physical world. LaFiac eschews the pomp of museum architecture or gallery installation and in doing so fails to situate the user within an aesthetic context.  The realm of cyberspatial exhibition space claimed by LaFiac is relegated to a compressed conception of exhibition space manifested in the serial experience of tabbed net art works. Clicking around the landing page’s featured image results in an abrupt launching of a new, foregrounded browser tab displaying the selected net art work. This feature of LaFiac’s design continually shuttles the visitor outside of the exhibition arena. The result is a dizzying confusion of non-situating that is compounded by the possibility of errant arrival at the website. Visitors to the website fail to understand lafiac.com as a vehicle of aesthesis and instead launch into an investigation of what the website is and how it functions. As a result, when visitors are detoured into net art works from LaFiac, the sites are appraised solely on the level of their design and the extent to which they can help determine what the content and purpose of lafiac.com was intended to be.

The missed opportunity in LaFiac’s design is in a failure to recognize proprioception as a possible assemblage annexing analog experiences of physical art exhibition into the realm of the digital. The faculty of proprioception is the “ability of humans to orient more by the ‘shape of the space’ than the visual characteristics of what’s in it” (Massumi 180). Proprioception is the body’s ability to register and recall “rhythm[s] of movement” in the absence of any visual cues” (Massumi 180). From this we understand that it is not from the visual qualities of the physical art exhibition–white walls, scattered plinths, concentrated spotlights, etc.– that condition us to read aesthesis into an experience but rather that we are able to identify the aesthetic experience from our proprioceptive recall of negotiating the space inside the exhibition. Proprioception is significant in this “inversion of the relation of position to movement” signaling a philosophical shift that acknowledges position as emerging “from movement, from a relation of movement to itself” (Massumi 180). Through the physical reenactment of archived, lived experiences, we are able to orient ourselves more efficiently than if we were to do so solely through the employment of cognitive reasoning. Physical art exhibitions are often standardized to the point of homogenization, so our proprioceptive cataloguing of these spaces bare little variation from a centralized norm. What is then necessary for the successful infolding of these proprioceptive qualities is to isolate and identify the key muscular movements, twists, and turns, that register our lived experience of viewing the physical art exhibition and to contrast this with what is possible for capture in the digital.

An example of this successful capture is present in the exhibition website Temporary Stedelijk. Similar to LaFiac’s cybersquat approach, Temporary Stedelijk is a riff on the name of a physical art museum (the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam) and displays net art. However in the case of Temporary Stedelijk the possibility of errant arrival does not pose the same threat of an experience devoid of aesthesis. The cyberspatial exhibition space is limited to a single, un-flourished browser window that is traversed by scrolling up and down, and left and right. Passing over the rectangular image frames that are scattered throughout the interface activates the appearance of linked net art works in a sort of preview. Each frame is flanked with a description of the net art work formatted in a style akin to museological title cards, as well as blue buttons bearing the names of the net artists that populate the left corner of the browser window as one passes over their corresponding works. In the description passages is also a hypertext that, like LaFiac, transports you out of the exhibition browser to a new tabbed window displaying the corresponding net art.

While there is little curatorial artifice included in Temporary Stedelijk the aesthetic of the exhibition site is clear and present. The presence of pseudo-title cards and the opportunity to remain within the domain of the exhibition ground the experience in a more immediate recall of the experience of moving through a physical exhibition space. Of further significance are the physical actions evoked in “moving through” Temporary Stedelijk’s exhibition space that mark a successful capture of the most essential proprioceptive registers of the layers of physical experience that amount to the analog experience of viewing an art exhibition. These layers form an undercurrent to the mechanisms at play in the shaping of navigated space in the physical art exhibition and that take their inspiration from a subconscious grammar of corporeal motions. Reading wall text moves the eye from top to bottom, left to right and creates a rhythm of motion that drives the viewing experience forward, never backward. To move backwards through a physical art exhibition is to traverse the redundant, the already-read and already-seen. While such a rhythm might be based on an artificially created entry and exit point the goal remains the same: to circumscribe the viewing experience into a linearization of the visual display, continuously moving from point A towards point B. Temporary Stedelijk in turn reinterprets this linearization of space as a combination of the motion of the eyes up and down and left and right. In doing so Temporary Stedelijk captures and digitally reconstitutes the proprioceptive registers of a visitor’s exit, entry, and meandering through an exhibition space in making these actions tantamount to the subtle motions reenacted by the extraocular muscles of the eyes as they pass over the exhibition browser window.

What emerges from this discussion is how the organizing of space and the privilege of corporeal movement act as bookends to a middled aesthetic experience that is as easily instantiated in the analog as it is in the digital. Such a function of interchangeability signals the candidacy­ of aesthesis as a potential conduit between the body and the informatic. This dynamic of relations supports Anna Munster’s rethinking of Katherine Hayles’s conception of embodiment to be a “differentially produced mode of living or experiencing the body” (64). Munster sees Hayles’ conception as falling short insofar as Hayes “does not provide an account particular enough to circumscribe the kind of interaction that occurs in the relation between new media technologies and bodies” citing that “This is because Hayles’s conception of interaction rests on the assumption that information and materiality are pregiven formations” (63). In this regard Munster views the digital and the corporeal as ebbing and flowing in and out of each other and from their intersections emerge new offshoots of the digital-plus-corporeal that are equally as subject to interaction with an exclusively digital or an exclusively corporeal.

Such a motion of interaction commands incessant renegotiations of the formations of information and materiality in a way that echoes Temporary Stedelijk’s appropriation of the proprioception of the analog experiences of viewing the physical art exhibition. Through an interlocutor of shared aesthesis, the informatic and the material collapse to allow for a passing through each other to yield new possibilities that merge the exclusively digital with the exclusively corporal. This is best articulated in the contested use of tabbed browsers in both exhibition sites. For LaFiac the failure of the exclusively digital to capture the exclusively corporal results in a passing next to, and not through, the digital and the corporal. What remains of this failure of digital embodiment is an agitation of two sides of a mutually exclusive aesthesis. LaFiac fails to fully-enough embody qualities of the exclusively digital or the exclusively corporal. The result is a continuously replaying of an aesthetic phenomenology: in the absence of any situating, hypertext relays that take you outside the exhibition browser are perceived as aggressive and the websites of the net art works transform into the perceived agents of said antagonism. For Temporary Stedelijk, however, the successful intertwining of digital and corporal experiences relays into new possibilities of yet-unclaimed experiences and territory, namely the possibility of a successful aestheticization of the hypertext.

With regards to both of the exhibition websites examined here, what comes to the fore in a discussion of the future of net art exhibitions is a question of how the hypertext will be inscribed into the aesthetics of exhibition websites. Massumi’s current response to the possibility for an aesthetics of affect in the hypertext seems to be annexed into an overall conception of affect and analog as the necessary precursors for an a potentialization of code, wherein he writes:

…coding is not the whole story…the digital always circuits into the analog. The digital, a form of inactuality, must be actualized. That is its quotient of openness. The freedom of hypertext is in the openness of its analog reception. The hypertext reader does something that the co-presence of alternative states in code cannot ever do: serially experience effects, accumulate them in an unprogrammed way, in a way that intensifies, creating resonances and interference patterns moving through the successive, linked appearances.  (138)

I feel Massumi’s conception of the potentialization of digitality stands to be rethought through the lens of an affective conceptualization of the hypertext.  While Massumi concedes that the digital  “can, it turns out, potentialize” he does so with the caveat that such a transformation is, at best, “indirectly, through the experiential relays the reception of its outcomes sets in motion” (Massumi 141). Why should we accept that these experiential relays are indirect? The digital code of hypertext in particular allows for a unique series of experiential relay that are initiated by the cybersurfer, not completed through him/her. This initiation might signal the discretizing act in itself, in constituting what a displayed text that is adorned as hypertext (through the use of blue font and underlining or the transformation of the mouse cursor in hovering over the text) does and does not do; in confirming that a displayed text is in, fact, hypertext, and thus not belonging to an entire class of digital code and possible outcomes.

What might be missing from Massumi’s theory is an earnest consideration of the semantic nature of digital code with particular respect to the code constituting hypertext. Such a qualification is dramatized by the fact that hypertext display rarely, if ever, exists as an avatar of its own code. The duality of the digital code supporting hypertextuality cleaves a space between computational aesthetics and an aesthetics of affect in which to renegotiate the thresholds of binary-ism ever-present in debates on digital code and embodiment. Included in Massumi’s definition of affect is a realm of the potential/virtual that is comprised of a “pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies” in which these tendencies are described as “pastnesses opening directly onto a future, but with no present to speak of” (30). If we introduce the programmer into a discussion of semantic hypertext code we can perhaps realize an interpretation of such a “pastnesses opening directly onto a future” to the degree that code allows for a previously prescribed experience to be accessed in front of the speed of the user, as evidenced by the fact that website content downloads faster than the ability of a cybersurfers to ascertain the content of a website (Massumi 30). In this scenario there is no present to speak of; there is only what is previously noted from which we can only wait for what will emerge.

Does the denotion of discrete characters of digital code necessarily herald a zone of the discrete, the possible, the informatic? Does the showing of the outcomes of the interactions between the informatic and the organic necessarily exclude a discretizing? And can these two opposite sides of the same coin be seen as contingently hinged to a contextual interchangeability? Munster’s rethinking of digital embodiment seems to support such revisionist claims about the potentialization of hypertext. What is at stake in such an alteration for the exhibition website is the possibility of a propriocentrism that is exclusively digital and that might, in turn, constitute a new analog of the digital to be incorporated in the physical exhibition of art. Such reversal of circulation would be a significant advancement in the inclusion of digital arts in the physical art institution. For now, the challenge remains in identifying increasingly authentic ways for the digital to embody and reference physical space so as to create new possibilities for aesthetic experience.

Works Cited

Adams, Philip Rhys. “Towards a Strategy of Presentation.” Museum International 7.1 (1954): 1-14. Print.

Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. New York: Plume, 2003. Print.

Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture: How Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Condition of Virtuality.” The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000. 68-95. Print.

Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Print.

Levesque, Julien. “LaFiac.” Message to the author. 3 Dec. 2012. E-mail

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. Print.

Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2006. Print.

The image featured in this post is ”Noses & Ears, Etc.: Blood, Fist, And Head (With Nose and Ear)” (2006) by John Baldessari.

“I always gravitate to stories where there’s an element there that many people never get to go inside and see, and I try to go and uncover that,” explains Don Sikorski, producer, director, writer, cinematographer, journalist, and born-and-bred Norwalkian. “Why I make documentary films is I find a story and I want to know more about it, I want to learn more about it, I want to meet the characters that are involved in it.”

 Don Sikorski and Douglas Stewart are the masterful filmmakers behind recent release Article 32, an investigative documentary that follows the Pendleton Eight controversy from origin to present day.

“I had been researching the project for probably about six months, and had gone and shot a few of the interviews, and I was looking for someone to come on board, so a friend of mine put me in touch with Doug,” explains Don of the Article 32 project. “At the time he was just going to be the editor, and I was going to shoot and provide him with the footage, and then we would collaborate toward the end. What ended up happening, as the life of a documentary filmmaker, I had other obligations and projects at the same time, so Doug took on a larger role. There were a lot of government documents that we had to go through and scan and address, and so the work load really started to overwhelm me, and it was at that time that we really decided to collaborate; that he would not only edit [the film] but also come on board and help me write it and be a co-director on the project”

Don does a good job of embodying the “life of a documentary filmmaker;” he is notoriously hard to get in touch with due to a constant juggling act of any number of investigative projects. His first documentary RAP SHEET-Hip Hop and the Cops was released in July of 2007, of course followed up shortly thereafter by Article 32. The leap from urban culture and music to the political mine-field of the Pendleton Eight story might seem like an unlikely disconnect, but to Sikorski they are all stories that share a similar draw to him.

“I think eighty percent of the stories I dig up and investigate are sort of crime narratives. The stuff that interests me the most seems to be sub culture, crime-driven, law enforcement-drive narratives. I’d say even the projects I have going now are all crime-driven narratives.”

Don laughs, a welcomed pause in his otherwise rapid-fire speech. “I’ve never spent any time in jail or anything like that, I don’t know why I’ve gravitated toward [these kinds of stories]. It’s kind of interesting to myself actually.”

If the speed at which Don talks is any indicator of the speed at which his mind is running then it’s no wonder that in the short time that Don has been a documentary filmmaker that he has been able to accomplish as much as he has. In addition to RAP SHEET-Hip Hop and the Cops and Article 32, Don directed a documentary on pop singer Sean Kingston (Sean Kingston: Kingston’s Road) in 2008, is in production on a television documentary on the collapse of the global economy and Wall Street (Governors of Greed), is directing a documentary titled Homecoming about the stories of successfully rehabilitated inmates, developing a TV series (Ransom) and is on work for a TV show option that will examine conspiracy theories within the Hip Hop industry.

In comparison to Don’s frenetic work life is his partner on Article 32 and other various projects, Douglas Stewart. Doug originally hails from New Canaan, but currently lives in Norwalk with his family. He is credited as director, producer, writer and editor on the Article 32 project, but served a much more important role than anything his career titles could suggest. While Don conducted most of the interviews personally, Doug was in the editing room serving as arbiter of objectivity. He explains how one of his and Don’s goals was trying to strike a balance in tone in comparison to the many documentaries that are already in circulation: “on the one end, documentaries are often too opinionated and polemic, and on the flip side they can almost be too sterile and devoid of emotional connection.”

“I think Don was very passionate about these Marines and their stories, and I became too, but sometimes I think you need another person that wasn’t in the room with them at the time of the interview and hadn’t really gone through all of the emotional processes of interview first hand,” Douglas notes. “I was a little more removed and I think that was important. We had kind of a healthy discussion, sometimes debate going, through the process about what the tone was, what we show, what we don’t show, making sure that it was objective but also that it had a personal connection.”

It’s interesting to listen to both Don and Douglas talk about the film independently of each other. Don personally conducted most of the interviews for Article 32, and as a result he is very much the beating heart of this film, all spitfire and limitless passion for justice to prevail—for all the characters of his many stories. Douglas, on the other hand, is much more patient and methodical. Even the cadence of his speech is measured and evenly paced, like a deep, quite metronome.

Though Don and Doug, in many ways represent two ends of opposite ends of a spectrum of personalities, they are inextricably linked together by a common passion for what they do. Neither Don nor Doug holds an undergraduate degree in documentary filmmaking, yet the work they have been able to produce would indicate otherwise.

“I went to NYU, I did the whole journalism thing, I worked for a lot of magazines so the writing aspect of wanting to be a journalist was always there,” says Don. “I think [the way I became] a filmmaker was I had this idea for the hip hop film and I had done a number of smaller, short films where I was the producer, and those sort of did not work out in my favor because I was not the director—I was the producer, so in doing the hip hop film I picked up a camera and said ‘I’m doing this project, I’m going to direct it, it’s going to be my vision, my choices,’ and I went out …and learned about filmmaking by doing actually doing a film.”

Doug adds, “I grew up in New Canaan, I didn’t go to film school, I was actually an English major in college, [and I] kind of explored film as almost… not a hobby, but more of a side project. I did a documentary a few years ago on a local man who had Hydrocephalus, and that was about a thirty-minute documentary. I work primarily as an editor, so I teamed up with Don about two and half years ago…We were working on some music videos together and some other smaller projects, and he did the initial research on [Article 32]… and we determined this was definitely something we wanted to work on together.”

As far as the two men’s ambitions for their separate career paths, they stay true to their similar-yet-opposite personalities. When asked what his ultimate career goal is, Don doesn’t hesitate in elaborating on his dreams to become a hard-hitting, CNN news reporter, chasing all the biggest and most dangerous stories. For Doug, one goal he has hits a little closer to home:

“I would love to get involved with the upcoming Norwalk Film Festival. I think it will be a great showcase for filmmakers and I’m confident it will be a success! And I’m always on the lookout for interesting local stories to document.

You can’t help but view this duo as the Felix Unger and Oscar Madison of documentary filmmaking, giving credence to the idea that opposites complement each other. Despite their differences, the two men have managed to dovetail their unique idiosyncrasies in a way that has produced remarkable results. Of course, no one is more aware of this than Don and Doug themselves: the way they speak of each other is always with a nod to their respective strengths. Don and Doug share their combined and individual successes with genuine enthusiasm and respect, clearing away the possibility of anything standing in the way in the heart of their own operation, filmmaking.

As Doug said on a concluding note, “I’d like to continue telling stories like [Article 32], or really any subject…but I want to continue making documentary films.”

With talent and passion as authentic at Don and Doug’s, we’d like to see them continue making films, too.

Lauri Maclean has hieroglyphics tattooed on the entire inside of her forearm. She has a long and slender body that can put a foot behind her head with grace and ease. She occasionally signs her emails with “Good vibes” and when she smiles her whole face seems to lift along with the corners of her mouth. She warms her dancers up to deafening progressive trance music and she’s not afraid to choreograph jazz recitals to heavy metal. Lauri Maclean, in short, is nothing like what you think you know about contemporary dance.

“Most people are uneducated about dance, jazz in particular, because in our culture, it’s just not put in front of people,” Maclean posits. “Dance is one of these art forms that’s back and forth. It crosses the line. We’re not art-art, we’re kind of a sport, we’re athletic…we’re somewhere in between. Even though you historically have crossovers, dance by itself isn’t one place or the other. It kind of gets lost.”

She adds without remorse, “It’s the forgotten art, and that’s something I’ve always tried to address through JazzWorx— to bring high-end dance to people.”

JazzWorx performances forego flashy “Dancing With the Stars” extravagance in favor of stone-cold, jaw-dropping dance. From afar, the whole stage at a JazzWorx performance looks like one big, beautiful, painting with the silhouettes of dancers creating and recreating the composition right before your very eyes. Dancers perform against a backdrop of one intense and solitary color that, with the help of some backlighting, creates the perfect ambience to match Maclean’s equally intense taste in music. Some past performances have been set to the electronic grindings of groups like Chemical Brothers, Nine, and even Rammstein. For those unfamiliar with Rammstein, they are a mid-90s, German, industrial metal band most commonly known for their hit song “Du Hast.” Translated, the song’s title can either mean, “I have you” or “I hate you.”

“I’ve gone into this bent of late night, dark, eerie,” Maclean notes of her unorthodox musical choices. “I’m doing a piece to The Cure’s ‘Fascination Street’ and I want to have someone do some pretty sophisticated make up to where it is very Tim Burton, ‘Batman,’ ‘Matrix.’ I love that whole culture, it fascinates me,” she explains. “It’s the Scorpio in me.

Maclean pauses before adding, “We do a few happy pieces here and there.” She follows with an apropos cackle.

JazzWorx dancers traverse the stage in small groups in the same kind of dance-meets-fight style of West Side Story but with much more gravitas. Their arms and legs move quickly and decisively, cutting through space with determination and purpose. Then, just as quickly as the chaos of multiple dance groups begins, the performers reassemble to move in a beautiful, fluid unison. With the kind of control that could only be begotten by countless hours of hard work and discipline, the dancers slowly raise their legs to levels far higher than should be possible and gracefully extend swan-like arms towards the sides of the stage. After a handful of beats spent watching the amorphous gathering of dancers exhibit their physical prowess, the suspense is broken and the dancers begin their guerilla waltz once more.

“I’m a purist. I like to see dancers, I like to see strength in dancers, I like to see power.” Maclean states unapologetically. “My intention is always to train a dancer in the technical base, to have good strong lines. I want to see line and form. I like dance done properly. It’s like math to me. I want to put on a performance that is so technically stunning on every level that it simply takes somebody’s breath away.”

To be left breathless is to be without words, and the quality of dance at JazzWorx certainly eludes the limits of language. Just how might one conceive of an eloquent performance played against a backdrop of striking colors and musical bass and synthesizers? In that gray area between sport and art, the team of JazzWorx students and instructors are free to figure that problem out, and they do so masterfully. From age six to sixty, the instructors at JazzWorx push students to hone a craft with such a passion and devotion that cannot help but to shoot out of them from their pointed feet to their lightly proffered arms.

Of the JazzWorx instructors Maclean says, “They’re full-fledged dancers. And, when you’re a dancer, to be actually trained by someone who’s that good is so much better because you actually see it. It’s great to see somebody actually articulate it.”

In stark contrast to Maclean’s musical sensibilities is her background from wholesome Illinois. She honed her skills as a dancer/choreographer/instructor in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and New York before finally settling down as a result of her husband’s relocation (and it might also be said, haphazardly so) in Fairfield County. It seems odd that the woman who’s style of dance is described as “vibrant, sensual, and haunting” would find her perfect niche in the quietude of suburbia, but if JazzWorx has taught us anything, it is certainly that what lays on the surface is only a fragment of the whole. In 1995, Maclean injected our sedentary little community with her unique urban-style of dance and the JazzWorx Dance Center was born.

“When I came to this area as an adult you couldn’t really find the kind of studio where I had trained, where there were adult dancers and there were more open classes. Jazzworx is really patterned after those kinds of studios, to where the whole idea is that it’s a professional staff and anyone can take a class, and take a good class.”

“Good class” might just be an understatement; the staff at JazzWorx hails from the farthest and widest stretches of competitive ambition. Perhaps you’ve seen Silk Smoove, hip hop instructor, in Sean John’s recent “Like Glue” video, or working alongside Eve, Wycleff, Nas and Joe? And who better to learn ballet from than the Department Head of the Regional Center of the Arts in Trumbull, Alana Regan? Or, if lyrical jazz is more your style, then why not learn from the woman talented enough to earn a Richard Ellsner Scholarship at Broadway School of Dance, Stefanie Hasbany? Maclean herself has studied under dance greats such as Gus Giordano and Rick Atwell in the techniques of Bob Fosse, Alvin Ailey and Matt Mattox, to name a few. In light of this one can’t help but wonder—what’s the secret to JazzWorx attracting such an all-star staff?

“I think when the instructors see what I’m trying to do at JazzWorx there’s an appreciation; they want to be a part of that. As an instructor, it’s really great to work in that kind of environment. You’re appreciated for the talent that you have, and no one is dumbing it down.”

In her efforts to campaign for more accessible, high-quality dance Maclean has also founded two dance companies of her own. The first, Jazzart, is a pre-professional dance company. The second is Velocity, a professional jazz dance company that Maclean debuted in November of 2007. Through these two companies Maclean is able to balance her work at JazzWorx as an instructor with more competitive and professional-grade projects. Regardless of where Maclean is working, though, one thing always remains constant: Maclean’s focus is always on good dance and inspiring good dances in others.

“At age six I’m not necessarily tying to get you to point your toes. I’m trying to get you to connect to movement, to feel good moving, to say ‘Yeah I love sending my arm over there, and wow, jumping is fun.’ In the end, if you are a dancer then to do a leap, to do a turn, to move your body in some way… it’s just thrilling,” Maclean says, her voice picking up intensity. “You go through the tortures of making your body move this way, but in the end it’s such a great feeling to execute it.”

Perhaps inspired by reflections on her own earliest experiences with dance, Maclean has a rare moment of softness. Quite counter to the intensity with which she has discussed her dance teaching philosophy, Maclean begins to gush.

“In the end, I think what you get if you’re around me is I love dance, I love good dance, I love music, I love dancers, I love dance. That’s why I still do it! I mean, you’re not going to get rich dancing, I don’t think.” She laughs, this time a little more like a giggle.

“I… I… I,” Maclean stutters and pauses, faced with nothing but her own unbridled passion for the art form she has dedicated her entire life too. She reemerges into the conversation.

“I love it so much, and I just want to convey that.”

It would seem that so many years later, dance continues to leave Maclean speechless. As for JazzWorx, an expansive second-floor studio responsible for deafening trance and hip hop music pouring into the sleepy Norwalk streets, words were never necessary. A JazzWorx performance is the sort of thing you just have to see to understand—and that’s all Lauri Maclean is really asking for.

It is with great pleasure that we present Seeing The Same, Again and Again in honor of GLBT Pride Month. The sharpened focus of this exhibition on gay and lesbian subject matter, beyond its commitment to honoring Pride month, is in no small part representative of our present-day political climate. Over just the past six months alone monumental legislation has been passed and overturned and history-making precedents have been set in the areas involving the GLBT community. However for as much volatility as has followed this group of individuals, Seeing The Same, Again and Again could not be any more steadfast in its homage to classic totems of art history. Through overt references to classical and modern portraiture, the artists in this exhibition prove that what might be seen as an untraditional exhibition is anything but.

At first observation, the artwork in this exhibition is steeped in explicit references to famous portraits throughout history. James Rauchman uses a mirror to capture his own reflection in a style similar to Norman Rockwell’s Triple Self Portrait. The use of grapes in Hugo Fernandes’s Untitled photograph instantly recalls the long tradition of grapes in portraiture that goes as far back as Lucas Cranach’s 16^th century Portrait of Young Woman Holding Grapes and Apples. Ralph Glenmore’s Romans 8:31 also connects to portraiture of the 15^th century in its subject’s distinctive profile view and portrayal of religious themes. These elements contextualize the artwork firmly within the tradition of art historical portraiture. In this we begin to understand the portraits not as gay or lesbian work, but rather as portraits relating to the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community.

The distinction between “gay or lesbian artwork” and “artwork relating to the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community” reconstitutes the approach we are to take when interfacing with the exhibition. In terms of the latter, Seeing The Same, Again and Again is simply one exhibition in a long line of many that examines the relationship between artist and sitter. Early portraiture was often an exercise in capturing as exact a likeness as possible to the artist’s subject. As artists’ skills and the tools available to them continued to improve, so did the desire for portraiture to go beyond capturing just the likeness of a subject to capturing the subject’s social class and overall essence. An indirect result of this shift has been the increasingly intimate relationship between artist and sitter. In pursuit of capturing a person’s essence in their art, artists have often taken to creating portraits of the people closest to them in their lives—friends, family, and lovers, past and present. That practice is continued here and today, in Michael Russnack’s oil paint studies of his real-life lover Chuck and James Rauchman’s watercolor portrait series of friends from his time spent in Cuba. Kelli Connell also participates by photographing a subject she knows all too well—herself, ultimately proving that the essence of a portrait extends far beyond the sitter and artist’s sexuality.

If the tradition of portraiture has not changed, then what has? An initial, cursory overview of this exhibition might lead someone to believe that Seeing The Same, Again and Again is about gay artists, but as this essay has argued—it’s not. Thus, the overriding question of this exhibition, and one that is ultimately left open-ended, is this: how does our environment affect the way, and what, we see? It is a question that is transferrable to even the best of art historical conversations, as we continually revisit artwork from the depths of history with new eyes and new approaches. Life may guarantee us very little, but of these few certainties this much is clear: while the times may change, the artwork remains the same.

The painters exhibited here chose to resist representation in favor of exploring the nature of paint and the act of painting. There is an engagement with the materiality of paint—how it moves and what it does when it’s applied to the canvas, either straight from the tube or on top of other pigments. This general resistance to becoming overly

geometric or stylized contributes to the paintings’ timelessness. The densely colored geometric forms in Robert Goodnough’s L-Q are interrupted by lighter-washed geometric forms in the background that lend the painting a sense of depth. In opposition to this depth, dizzying, gestural black lines are applied over the top of the entire surface of the canvas, flattening the image once more. The overall effect is one in which we are pushed and pulled into and away from the canvas, making the geometry of the forms a secondary priority. Paul Manes’ Minotaur approaches representation in a much more direct way featuring a figure with a similar silhouette as an anvil, but runoff drippings from heavy paint application provide a detour from this interpretation.

The surfaces of the paintings by Sarah Krepp and Jane Couch introduce the element of three-dimensionality to the theme of abstract painting. Simple color is taken to another level of consideration by the density of its application. Viewers are inspired to enjoy the paintings not only from a direct, front-on perspective, but also from the sides. Upon closer inspection, the thickness of the now-dried paint preserves the energy of the paint application, as if you could tell the exact direction of the artists’ brush stroke as they worked. This subtle detail brings the reality of the paintings closer to home and more accessible to viewers observing the paintings here and now.

None of these artworks can be characterized by the stream-of-consciousness flow of form from artist onto canvas that is typically associated with earlier abstract paintings. Instead the artists exhibited here chose to impose a certain level of rigidity into their gesture, demonstrating a high level of control, skill, and consideration, but not so much so as to veer off into representational painting or pattern. Colors and shapes may be repeated or mirrored, but never duplicated. This conscious decision imbues the paintings with a life and dynamism that draws us in at first glance. The paintings’ lush and vibrant surfaces offer a timeless invitation to a full sensory exploration of their canvases, and our participation is a ringing endorsement of the transcendent qualities of painting, now and always.

Note: The image featured in this post is another work by painter Robert Goodnough not included in this exhibition.