The precious things we will never see
Excerptposting about visual sabotage in online life
(Translated version of the original text in spanish for Institute of Network Cultures)
Almost all of the time I spend at home (which is a lot) I spend in front of my laptop, whenever I draw I do it with my laptop shedding its light on me, but I have never stopped to think in a more or less deep way about the implications of my drawings (art/images/whatever) not existing in a physical form (or not what is conventionally understood as physical, I suppose the materiality of “digital art” is in the device on which it is reproduced, or in the physical servers that make the internet work, or in the retina-screen on which I am reading these words).
These exist first as a file for the simple, old-fashioned program I use to remix pencil scans (physical, "traditional") with things I find and collect on the internet (.sai2), then as a .png or .tiff file, and finally as an image processed and compressed by the social network where I share them, that “optimizes” their storage and distribution on the platform. Almost every image we create and circulate on the internet is doomed to end up as a .jpeg file without transparencies, regardless of the file type they were at the time of their creation. Most of the historically relevant functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images have no positional reference linked to an observer in an optically perceived "real" world. If these images refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of electronic mathematical data. If a mutation is occurring in the nature of visuality, what forms or modes are being left out and what are the elements of continuity that unite contemporary imagery with the old organizations of the visual?
I'm not particularly keen on talking about art, and even less so about my own. I've always felt art as a babble; as something that uncovers the clumsiness of the person who needs to create it. To be an artist is to not know how to speak, and each drawing is a deformation by iteration of a ritualistic, personal, and scarring language. An attempt to translate into a common language what I find representable within me, or the representable self, to circumvent the poverty of my language, but at the same time to hide behind a gentle ambiguity that words cannot provide.
Except for a couple of zines I printed in small runs to distribute mainly among acquaintances, all of my images exist only on the internet and on my hard drive. As someone who grew up in a town with fewer than 500 people, the internet was and is for me a place where I could meet the rest of the people who live there (chronically online). Despite everything, on good days I still view it with that naive optimism I saw at the W3C in the 90s, as a place where we can connect with the world. A place where we can communicate with personal, common, secret languages, sometimes shared between two people, sometimes among the dozens or hundreds who understand the reference of the reference of the reference. A possibility of belonging to something that is not demarcated by a specific place, but by this external, absolute, and alien appendage. The internet was born as a war machine, and the Bible says that before the creation of the world, only God and his name existed. Like any other user with a more or less superficial understanding of the technology that surrounds us, I find it very difficult to conceptualize in a concrete way what the Internet is, connections through specific protocols and, in the case of the WWW, a mapping of URLs, and yet I can't help but sense it as a place. Almost like Borges's 1:1 map of the emperor, who sought to accurately represent the entire territory. It is surrounded by a certain feeling of occultism. A map that covers everything and is everything. Like maps, images have the power not only to describe the world but are also responsible for creating it. Some Kabbalists speak of the Torah as an organism and as a subject with organs. They say that the name of God is itself the arrangement of each word that makes up the Torah (79,976 words and 304,805 letters). If the letter is the irreducible unit of the Torah, the bit is the irreducible unit of the Internet, and the accumulation of bits arranged exactly as they are every second is the Internet, which is Everything, because they could not be arranged any other way.
We understand and access this space through the interface (interface in the sense of graphical user interface, the visual environment that allows us to interact with the system). The interface that aims to achieve transparency achieves this by concealing structures and mediating processes, using the screen as a veil. There is no boundary outside of the interface, because what is found there would not be representable in terms understandable to the user.
The virtual is the abstract machine from which the actual emerges; nature is already the camouflage of matter, the veils that hide its operations. In fact, there is nothing there, beneath or behind this disguise, or at least nothing actual, nothing formed. | Alexander Galloway says in his book The Interface Effect that "an interface is not a thing; an interface is always an effect. It is always a process or a translation." The scope of operation seems difficult to expand when everything is previously delimited by a specific digital architecture in a previously codified semiotic space.
In Objects Don't Have Desires: Toward an Anthropology of Technology beyond Anthropomorphism, Alf Hornborg argues that although modern technologies are conventionally understood as politically neutral devices that put nature to work to harness natural forces, a closer analysis reveals them as strategies for shifting labor and environmental burdens to other segments of global society. Rather than simply revealing nature's potential, their role is to save time and space for those social classes who can afford it, at the expense of the labor time and natural space of those who cannot. Like other variations of magical illusions, their effectiveness lies in concealing their dependence on subjective human perceptions. It was and is our own resources that created and maintain these infrastructures. Making them ours will involve transforming them into tools that function for the common interest. It is possible to imagine and materialize a collectively constructed and managed network of substantially different technologies oriented toward radically different ends. Yuk Hui emphasizes here the need to develop a new theoretical discourse on networks in order to develop alternative software that allows for new types of social imagination.
Parallel to this need for new structures and overdosing on hopium, we can play at trying to create disruptions in those that already exist and are completely embedded in our lives and bodies, making their alienating power evident and distorting it. From the zine Abandoning the Digital Utopia: There is an invisible world connected to the handle of every tool – when we use the tool for what it was designed for, we fit the mold of those who do the same. But if we disconnect the tool from that world, we can launch ourselves into mapping others.
>>>Recent years have shown that emancipation and subordination can be achieved with the same tools. However, it seems that these tools are all that's left for those of us who are considered users. >Buy a membership >It's wet…
Even if I tried, I wouldn't know how to describe my drawings, much less their intention, which eludes even me. I don't like the idea that every artist has to dissect and explain their art, almost excusing its existence in a format that fits on an exhibit label or a post, or that if they don't do it, others have to do it on their behalf, at least if they intend to enter certain circles that every artist is supposed to aspire to be a part of. I also can't stand (there are many things I can't stand) the concept of Art Criticism as we know it (as an apparatus focused on the production of scarcity, when it could be the opposite). Something I've always found positive about sharing my images online is the genuine and unselfish feedback I can receive, especially on places like Tumblr, thanks to its tagging system. When you reblog an image, you can add tags and, in a way, provide passive, less direct or invasive feedback than a comment. This allows people to express themselves more freely (some people use them to describe the image, add alternate text, add trigger warnings, categorize posts within their blog, or, in my favorite way: to express what they feel when they encounter the images).
One of the most frequently repeated words in the tags of my drawings is "otherworldly." In this text, the author discusses how the eerie and the liminal (specifically in relation to the phenomenon of backrooms, them being between worlds, out of place, the world behind the veil) invoke a connection with the symptoms of capitalist alienation and the social isolation it causes. They emphasize this displacement and uprooting, finding in them a way of recognizing oneself in this estrangement that recalls the unheimlich and refers to a deterritorialized "outside."
Returning to the drawings, I think it’s possible that a certain crypticism, a certain gesture of more or less deliberate obfuscation, of sensing elements out of place, in turn transforms them into more appropriable images, images from which to position oneself from a deterritorialized plurivocality, a sensation they share with other similar types of internet images that are intentionally or unintentionally weird, like weirdcore. Fisher said that experimental things often seem strange to us when we first encounter them, and that the feeling of incorrectness associated with them (the feeling that something doesn't belong where you find it) is sometimes a sign that we are in the presence of something new, that the concepts and frameworks we have previously used have become obsolete. I hope to see new things and create new things; I've been bored by a lot of things lately.
The other day I read this article that talks about a "culture of boredom," generatedm from and by boredom, which excludes those who can't afford the privilege of being bored. Yet, these people without access to boredom consume the culture created by the bored, and boredom colonizes even the imagination of those without access to the free time that makes it possible. I find myself in a very paradoxical place in this regard. I've lived my entire life below the poverty line, I'd say almost in misery. I don't know what it's like to have more than 2,000 euros in my account. For me, not having debt and having money to eat next week is already an achievement. My only jobs have been in the hospitality industry, but I'm also a disabled person, and what is ironically referred to on the internet as chronically unemployed. I've been lucky or unlucky enough to spend very long periods of time without a regular job, and those endless free hours, combined with internet access and the bacchanal of stimuli it provides, have allowed me to learn to express my sensibilities the way I do now, and to relate to my surroundings through it. I know that without this access to slow and free time, this wouldn't have been possible.
I wonder how my mother, for example, would have expressed herself. She was always interested in photography, an interest she could never devote any time to because she spent her entire life in a restaurant kitchen, sometimes 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. I wonder, with a hole in my chest, what interesting visions we might be missing out on from all those people who don't have the time or the energy to develop or share them, because they survive almost drowning (and even if there's some "free time" in capitalism, there's never time to waste), or those who develop abstractions and gestures that the aesthetic regime would never even canonize as art. All the precious things that will never exist or that we will never see.
The idea that only the expressions of people who can afford to be bored reach us and seep into our imaginations anguishes me. We see the ideas of the bored and not the strawberry picker, the cleaner, the street sweeper, the waitress, or the delivery man, even though most of us are the strawberry picker, the cleaner, the street sweeper, the waitress, and the delivery man. I can't stand the arrogance of those who think that because they have a "talent" (whatever that means) they deserve to be exonerated from performing those jobs that, whether repetitive, exhausting, dangerous, precarious... almost no one wants to do, of always delegating the dirty work to others. The idea of "making a living from art" while everyone else makes that living and life possible. The same bored people creating, talking about, and circulating art, going around in their own solipsism, their appraisals, their contacts, their pantomimes, while the world goes on outside. Right now, I'm more interested in the sticker your grandmother sends, the Paint drawing made by an 8-year-old with unrestricted internet access, the embroidery my aunt makes with patterns she downloaded from Pinterest, or the shitpost that only gets 3 likes... than in anything found at the Reina Sofía Museum or any gallery in the city. When I say things like this, some people think I'm just being provocative, but I genuinely mean it: life is out there.
I don't know if this is hopium or copium, but I think that in this sense, the internet (being aware of its shortcomings and that access to it is far from universal; my parents didn't even have internet access at home until a few years ago) has served to facilitate the exchange of ideas and create a reflective prism with millions of expressions through which to share our work and the possibility of the existence and circulation of independent art without having to jump through any curatorial hoops to end up in a seedy gallery, in a temporary exhibition, or dependent on a creation grant or residency, or, in the digital case, on the website of a virtual gallery that twenty people will see. A large group of artists has emerged, developing an activity that, although not directly linked to the conventional art market, to a certain extent defines the terrain in which art is practiced, avoiding its constraints. The possibility of escaping (or at least participating from a less disadvantaged starting point) from a constant competition for visibility, which is deliberately and artificially transformed into a scarce and limited resource by artistic institutions.
The institution, the museum, and curatorship are inseparable from exclusion, as stated in this text (which I highly recommend reading) and as almost all of us already know, but it never hurts to repeat: “Museums neither produce art nor distribute it. They sacralize it.” It is important to underline the connection between property and the sacred. To sacralize is to exclude; it is to set something aside from the world, whether because it is sacred to an individual ("private property") or sacred to something more abstract ("art," "God," "humanity," "the nation"). Any revolutionary regime changes existing forms of property, and the organization or reorganization of museums plays a crucial role in this process, since the forms of property that exist within them represent the apex of the pyramid. They are the supreme wealth that the police protects, and that the working poor can only see on weekends.” Or so I’ve heard…
In Why Are Artists Poor, Abbing writes about something they refer to as cultural asymmetry, in which judgments about art (about low and high culture) are shared by different social groups (classes). However, with judgments about their artistic choices, the opposite is true. Group A looks down on the artistic choices of group B, but group B admires the artistic choices of group A. Group A chooses what we see and what we don't, what deserves to be part of art history and what doesn't. Everything else is banished to the outside. It would be a blessing if the internet functioned as a mirror through which we could reach that outside, another world outside the hierarchical art world that restricts the distribution of meanings and the materialization of abstractions and that is lost in its own recursiveness. I am aware that this also entails several dangers, among them the potential disaster of moving from human curators to algorithmic curators, and that's why it's urgent to rethink and materialize other ways of inhabiting the web and finding ourselves and others on it.
I believe that there are and have been forums and spaces on the internet that are capable of being eluded by the logic of ownership and centralized control. I'm not talking about proposals for decentralized networks, alternative social networks, networks outside the WWW, experiments in hacktivism, etc., but rather about more accessible digital spaces that demonstrate that it is possible to articulate other forms of digital sociability, which, due to their outsider, niche, and sometimes even violent or problematic nature, elude the black hole of corporate capital. These are small forums with strident, uncomfortable, and difficult-to-navigate architecture dedicated to hyper-niche interests, successors to the virtual neighborhoods of GeoCities, where strange and interesting forms of cultural production take place. Although often marginalized by the visibility dynamics inherent in platform capitalism, these spaces persist as territories where interaction is not mediated by extractive algorithms or oriented toward economic gain, but merely by the pleasure of sharing what one likes and discussing it with people with more or less similar likes and dislikes, of sharing interests, joys and miseries, or simply having a good time.
In the 2000s, with personal blogs and networks like MySpace, and even well into 2010 with Tumblr, that spirit of unbridled visual self-expression was still somewhat alive. Social networks weren't ruled by the dictatorship of the For You Page. Back then, there was the possibility of customizing even the smallest detail using basic HTML or CSS or by inserting external widgets. I fondly remember the virtual pets that lived on some blogs (including Tumblr), a somewhat more limited version of the Japanese "ghosts" (ukagaka, 伺か), software that displays characters on the desktop (or in this case, on a web). Beyond their aesthetic function, each ghost has its own personality and speaks to its owner through dialogues generated from specific scripts called Sakura Script, from specialized programs like Sakura Script Player, which still to this day has active communities that continue to optimize it. The characters' different expressions and actions are represented through illustrations called "shells." Ukagaka can access the internet using the SSTP (Sakura Script Transfer Protocol), which facilitates their communication with other programs, browsers, and users and there are versions and clones of the desktop mascots that can be embedded in web pages. Some hyper-personalized corners still exist if you know how to look for them, but it's clear that today the most-traveled places on the internet are the social networks of corporate giants. Around 2010, a turning point was perceived: a kind of exodus from these heterogeneous digital communities to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, or TikTok, which became the main new play spaces for those of us who once lived on the internet.
In contrast to the freedom and expressive control over our online spaces that characterized these early web platforms, the trend in social media is toward complete standardization and homogenization. This creates predictable and sterile digital environments, centered on the incessant flow of content. The interface as a space that can be understood and manipulated by the user is fading away and is already pre-established in an identical experience for everyone, devoid of any aesthetic vitality, borders, or seams. When we stop seeing the interface as an interface, the ideological frameworks that surround these spaces can also become invisible. If the medium is part of the message, the message is boring and quite bleak.
It is within this ecosystem of flattening digital space, of images polished and optimized to the millimeter to please the algorithm, that phenomena such as shitposting emerge. Ideally, shitposting interrupts the impeccable fluidity of scrolling. It is a distorted rhetoric, an out-of-place image or message that you find somewhere you didn't expect to find it, and that somehow takes us out of the spell of the bland and hypnotic interface and makes its limits and structures visible again, a derailment that also often serves to evade censorship by the platforms (graped, corn, unalived, watermelons, etc.) where it is published, whether through codes that the algorithm won't detect, pixelated words, superimposed words, backwards words, hidden among garish colors, or by the possibility of hiding behind radical humor to say anything, "in case my FBI agent is reading this, this is a joke." For convenience, I'll use the word shitpost not only to refer to this way of inhabiting cyberspace, but also to a type of language, and especially the images, that this way of being tends to produce.
The shitpost could be included within what Nick Douglas coined as Internet Ugly to refer to "a previously unnamed style that spreads across various parts of online culture, but especially through memetic content. Internet Ugly can be created by amateurs without a specific aesthetic intention, or by creators who intentionally choose it as their dialect."
Images created through layers of an often self-referential sediment through the iteration of new content mixed with digital garbage accumulated for years in internet dumps (which, unfortunately, are becoming fewer and fewer). A collapse due to accumulation, a poor image, and above all, one of its attributes that I consider most valuable and interesting: it is something that doesn't want to sell us anything and has no intention of entering the Art World circuit driven by financial capital. At least in my personal and essentialist definition of shitposting, in which the post would lose its status as a shitpost the moment it is created for profit. You can emulate the gesture or the superficial aesthetic very finely, but it still won't be a shitpost. The shitpost is the image created to NOT be valued in the cultural economy, which paradoxically doesn't exempt shitposting from ultimately forming hierarchies and exclusions in specific niches, dividing those who recognize certain cultural artifacts from those who don't.
Quoting @ghostofchristo1 in Cringe Dialectics on what I think could be applied to shitposting in addition to cringe (shitpost also involves and uses cringe, but often by embracing it, holding a mirror up to it, and turning the feeling it provokes on its head): While for some witnesses, cringe can generate a strong desire to look away, for others it can evoke an almost magnetic fascination. The impulse to collect and curate cringe can arise, as in the subreddits r/cringe and r/cringepics. When divisions between rival aesthetic regimes seem to demarcate a political boundary, this impulse to collect and comment can be even stronger. (...) At the same time, these exchanges have an escalating, mimetic quality. Cringe [like shitposting] has the ability to force others to play by their own rules, to get caught up in the dialectic of cringe. There's something about the extravagance and disproportion of "cringeworthy" spectacles that seems to demand a proportionally disproportionate response. Responses to cringe (even, or perhaps especially, those of those who consider themselves "cringeworthy") thus often become "cringe" themselves.
The fear of causing or being cringe often increases the ironic detachment that characterizes some forms of shitposting. "The ironic stance occurs when one adopts a position with which one sympathizes or toward which one has some feeling. However, when one receives pushback, criticism, or significant conflict, one disengages from the idea or position. Instead of clinging to and defending one's values, those values and positions are abandoned and can be easily discarded and replaced by others."
Based < —--------???----------(you are here)----------> Cringe
>>>"I Am Cringe" or "I May Be Cringe", often expanded to "I Am Cringe But I Am Free," is a phrase that often accompanies macro photos of animals and other characters. It is often used as an acknowledgment of a person's characteristics that may be perceived as "cringeworthy." WAOW (BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED)
I would like to be able to communicate with less dependence on the use of terms with enormous semantic loads like art (◞ ‸ ◟ㆀ), but for the sake of understanding, I believe that even within those narrow and fluctuating parameters of what is or is not considered art, these images could be just as much a movement of visual art as any other, with specific, common, and cohesive qualities, regardless of whether they are created with the intention of being art or not, like a form of poetry. Bifo says that only poetry will contribute to reversing the dominance of the financial sphere over language in the process of osmosis with chaos (chaosmosis), where a new harmony emerges, a new sympathy, a new attunement through which we can regain the rhythm of our own breathing (a kind of deceleration resistant to techno-acceleration) and learn to breathe within chaos.
______________◝(ᵔᵕᵔ)◜wwwww
Forums like FYAD (Fuck You And Die) or certain imageboards could be considered the birthplace of what we now identify as shitposting. These spaces didn't have the validation systems (followers, likes, RTs) we have today. Legitimacy wasn't achieved by being someone, but by how many layers of irony you were able to identify, and by your acuity and ability to adapt and transform the fleeting codes that shaped them, which gave you a certain social capital within these spaces. The ways of posting in these forums anticipated many of the characteristics of shitposting: referential saturation, their own grammars, an embrace of the absurd and the out of place, and immediacy. The inhabitants of these forums gradually moved to Twitter, giving rise to what some would call Weird Twitter.
Dril, the almost undisputed king of that scene and one of the few profiles still active, said in an interview with Buzzfeed: "Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of "Hell" that I was banished to upon death in my previous life. In this abstract realm, the only thing I am certain of is that my cries are awarded "Favs" or "RTs" when they are particularly miserable or profane. These ethereal merits do nothing to ease my suffering, but I have deliriously convinced myself that gathering enough of them will impress my unseen superiors and grant me a promotion to a higher plane of existence. This is my sole motivation. (...) Thank you for this opportunity, and good luck with your article. I give you full permission to post this on every blog and forum that exists on the web. Please send a check for $400 to "Dirty Ass" at Crimetown, NJ. Piss Piss Piss PIss 69 Piss Ass Shit . Bye”
Quoting Deleuze: Perhaps speech and communication have been corrupted. They are completely permeated by money, not by accident, but by their very nature. We have to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key may be to create vacuoles in the lack of communication, circuit breakers, so that we can evade control.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Other manifestations, such as glitchcore, also played with a certain disjunction and visual abjection, and with the illumination of error, the evidence of the functioning beneath the interface, they also seemed to inflict a certain sense of estrangement that attempts to resist being absorbed by the logics of legibility, beauty, and coherence that predominate in hegemonic digital imaginaries. However, they still ended up being almost completely assimilated within the logics they sought to destabilize, and it is common to find them in all types of advertising and cultural products, as has happened with many other similar phenomena. Shitpost might offer greater resistance to being completely absorbed by market logic thanks to its very chaotic nature.
There are many brands that try to emulate the nature of the shitpost in their advertising strategies (often linked to the unhinged-social-media-manager trope) or accounts with astronomical follower counts that seek virality through this type of image, but it's more than evident that it becomes deactivated and drained of spark and vitality when inserted into these circuits. It becomes harmless. You see it and you know you're looking at something inert, it's the artificial corpse of something.
More than an aesthetic or core of the internet (terms used to refer to microaesthetics and digital cultures) that can be classified and has clear margins, I would say that the shitpost is an attitude and a mutant language wielded from bad taste and ugliness, ugliness instrumentalized as a space of social belonging that refuses to be confined within aesthetic standards and the desire for legibility. Quoting cute_noumena, "The term 'vibeshift' has been used to conceptualize this constant materialization and dematerialization of online publishing trends. In essence, it comes down to who can out-schizz the algorithm."
Rosa Menkman asks herself how to out-schizz the interface: "Am I, as a user, consumer, and producer of data and information, dependent solely on my conditioning and the resolutions imposed on me, or is it possible for me to create new resolutions? Can I escape the interface, or is every decontextualized materiality immediately recontextualized within another existing paradigm or interface?"
Talking about the low-resolution image that characterizes shitposting is difficult without referring to Hito Steyerl's defense of the poor image, according to which, as the image becomes poorer, it also acquires new attributes. It mentions this possible phagocytosis of the image, in which the dematerialized art object turns out to be perfectly adapted to the semiotics of capital and the conceptual shift of capitalism. The poor image works against the fetishistic value of high resolution. But it is precisely for this reason that it ends up perfectly integrated into an information capitalism that thrives on compressed attention spans. It allows access to normally excluded images, but is also permeated by the most advanced commodification techniques. It facilitates the active participation of users in the creation and distribution of content, but does so by involving them in its production.
While the poor image Steyerl speaks of is poor because of the process of circulation eroding it, in the case of the shitpost, the images are often conceived as already deliberately poor and deteriorated. This is an intentional stylistic decision and not passively demarcated by their own transmission process or by the compression that images suffer simply by being on the web, by being digested by the image processing technologies through which we access them and which generate distortions in our own perception. These images are intentionally "badly made." Then these already conceived low-res images are further degraded in the process of their circulation; the more degraded they are, the more times they have been shared and manipulated.
>>>>> Poetry is invasion, not expression (...) True poetry is hideous, because it is basic communication, unlike pseudo-communicative discourse, which presupposes the isolation of the terms it unites. (I don't think I'd ever quote Land if not through a Genius song page | Song Lyrics & Knowledge. Shamanic Nietzsche Lyrics.)
A shitpost is almost always a poor image (in the sense of a low-resolution image), technically easy to create and recreate. It can be the result of combining two images you have in your phone's gallery, it can be a photo to which you add text from the Instagram story upload option, it can be a screenshot of something stolen you changed a word from... in short, something that, due to its intrinsic qualities, you can create from your bed in 30 seconds, between the last minutes of doomscrolling of the day. It is a low-resolution but highly accessible image.
The collective rewriting of these images, the creation from hyperspecific places with shared languages, and the lack of a clear original author reminds me of the minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari speak of, in which "everything acquires a collective value." Here, there is no possibility of individual genius and enunciation (or there shouldn't be); authorship is diluted in the constant circulation, distortion, and reworking, and becomes a collective and fragmented expression. Here, I distort and stretch the concept of minor literature as a minority literature that uses the language of the majority to include the predominant digital spaces in that majority language, where minor literature would be not only our language but also our posts inserted in those spaces. The concept of authorship is becoming completely disfigured as never before. Cixous drew from this literature the "impossibility of writing and the impossibility of not writing" as that liminal space demarcated by the writer's own feminine identity that places her in a specific context. I find it interesting to think of shitposting (or any alternative and fun way of posting and inhabiting hegemonic digital spaces) as an exercise that could free oneself from this impossibility, being a form of expression that doesn't require any higher legitimacy and transcends the need to "write from oneself." Posting from the lack of self-awareness that can only be achieved from a certain anonymity and as part of something much larger, almost a polymorphous collective entity that spits out meaningless things. The context remains situated (and in fact, the shitpost is often created with a strong identity component), but at the same time, it is said from nowhere and could have been said by anyone. The creation of a new type of object is developing, constituting a new spectator whose deepest nature would consist in the conviction of his absence from the scene of representation.
Continuing with the Deleuzian terms, the shitpost could be a counter-diagram. If the task of the artist confronting the blank canvas is to erase clichés (clichés as dominant flows, as already codified signs) and bring forth the diagram that operates without being constituted by the repetition of known figures, opening the way for new forms, then where does the image, which is precisely created from the sum and reverberation of images-signs-clichés, emerge? Not only could the meme be the hypercliché, but in its creation, there isn't even a blank canvas from which to erase elements. The shitpost could be a counter-diagram as a parasitic machine that, without invoking anything eminently new, inserts itself into the flows of digital signification and severs them.
I think that even though 90s cyberfeminism gave us interesting and beautiful visions of a disembodied future (or the opposite, as Plant said speaking of how the desire to escape from the body into the digital matrix is born from the same desires that have guided the (male) dream of technological authority that would become the collective nightmare of a soulless integration), it's time to invent new narratives, new games, new utopias, new plans and strategies that don't necessarily carry the burden of any pre-designed doctrine (probably by French or German men in the last two centuries). Still, out of optimism, I cling to the reflections of these thinkers on the rhizomatic and decentralized nature of the internet and all that it can offer us.
Alberto Bejarano, writing about Cixous, says that "a palimpsest <let's say a shitpost here, or also one of my drawings with borrowed elements> is a text that questions the regime of authorship, that confronts academia with its formalisms and its inability to understand the contradictory, the paradoxical, that which generates complementary meanings. It could be said that the palimpsest is a translation of oneself as an other, as long as one understands that the text experiments with the multiplicity of meanings of literature." Everything is intertextual to some extent, but there are ways of creating that impact that intertextuality and make it more evident, like the images we are talking about, my drawings, or this text full of clumsily stitched quotes (I don't know how to sew).
An anonymous author says in this crimethinc article:
“The same could be said of our advocacy of plagiarism; a decade ago, we thought we were taking an extreme stance against copyright and intellectual property, when in fact, we were little further than that. The weeks we spent combing libraries for images to reuse heralded a world where virtually everyone does the same thing with Google Image Search for their blogs. Conventional notions of copyright are being overtaken by new forms of production.”
Creators who cling tooth and nail to intellectual property rights and are outraged by the idea of AI chewing up and spitting out images are fighting a war that ended long ago. If you don't want someone (or something) to appropriate an idea or image that you consider yours, keep it in your bedside drawer (or in a museum or gallery, which are almost the same thing). Sharing it online means accepting that it's being thrown into a torrent of distortions, circulation, and redefinitions. The ease with which the internet allows for copying and sharing content makes it a territory where traditional intellectual property laws are difficult to apply.
(In my opinion, this is brilliant and a good thing: "Archives like Aaaaarg, Monoskop, or UbuWeb are created by makers rather than guardians, and for us, this implies an imperative: to embrace redundancy, to promote the dissemination of their content through as many nodes and sites as desired. We can see copying not simply as a mirror or a backup, but as an opening to the possibility of creating new libraries, new platforms, new databases.")
When we share anything on the internet, we are turning our own voice into a minefield into which another voice can creep (not only by being seen and interpreted; I've seen my drawings in other people's collages, on Pinterest boards, tattooed by other people with and without permission, copied, used as profile pictures, edited, quoted), and at the same time, we are constantly intervening in another's voice, making it our own. For years now, all the images I create incorporate not only the references I accumulate in my memory and my way of interpreting the world, which condition my ways of representing it, but also direct references to words, shapes, or images I see on the internet and that somehow permeate me, which I store as if they were a treasure in folders with thousands and thousands of files, which increasingly fill the image, sometimes displacing the drawing into the background. I used to scan more books and things on the street. Now, the images I find on the internet are the ones that have the greatest presence in my life and the ones that accumulate the most in my head, so they're the ones that creep into my images the most. This hasn't been a conscious or intentional gesture, but rather the result of all the time I spend online, during which I've been developing this kind of dialect of my own. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who speaks it, but a dialect is still a regional variant of a language, so even though there are sometimes important nuances that get lost in the gap between the dialect and the common language, there's still a foundation of understanding and complicity. Furthermore, having been online for so many years and having maintained some mutuals for a decade, I feel like there are a handful of people who can understand my dialect fluently.
These images are a reflection or glimpse of my imaginary, of the stimuli that surround me, and of the tools at my disposal. They involve choosing two dolls from a toy box and putting them together to talk to each other. Sometimes the dolls are mine, and other times I steal them from another child the second they look away. They're also an excuse to interact from strategic points that don't seem like an unravelable tangle, as they do in certain social contexts.
All these years sharing my drawings online (I've been doing this for over 15 years) has provided me with opportunities for unusual connections with brilliant, thoughtful, and kind people who have enriched my world in indescribable ways.
Returning to Menkman and the limits of digital images: I wish I could open Google Image Search, search for "rainbow," and simply listen to any rainbow image Google offers. I wish I could add textures to my fonts and embed text-based videos that played at specific times. I wish I could render and present my videos as circles, pentagons, and other more organic shapes. If I could do these things, I think my use of the computer would be different: I would create modular relationships between my text files, and my videos would have jagged corners, multiple timelines, and changing soundtracks. In short, I think my computing experience could be much more like an integrated collage if my operating system allowed it.
I’m bored to death of talking and reading texts with expressions like the democratization of art, the union of low and high culture/theory. I bore myself by also being a victim of this academic wormhole, when someone suggested talking about my drawings in the context of shitposting, one of the first ideas that crossed my mind was to draw that imaginary line that could unite shitposting and other current digital expressions as heirs to certain avant-garde movements like Dadaism or found art (the Dadaist gesture can only be done once, as Plant would also say), I, too, end up resorting, like a bored and boring person, to Deleuze or Fisher instead of, I don't know, @twinksauce69. We have to make an active effort to try to stop being slaves to the past, because it will be impossible to imagine new things while we are.
Moving on to something that interests me more (the world of the zine, of DIWO (Do It With Others)), the shitpost reminds me of the DIY spirit of the zine scene, not only in the superficial visual aspect and the act of copy-pasting, but in the sense that those who participate don't just circulate images; the simplicity and freedom of its conception allows almost anyone to participate in its creation, in a sort of chorus of remixed, overlapping voices in which the concepts of intellectual property are diluted. On a micro level, it serves as a margin in which we can meet; on a macro and ideal level, it would aspire to dismantle the hierarchies of good taste and a sense of universal value that privilege one sector of cultural production while condemning all other modes to oblivion.
In the contemporary digital ecosystem, images are displacing text as the primary form of communication. To say something, it's no longer enough to simply write it; you'll probably have to take a screenshot of the text to share it as another photo, or superimpose it on top of a video and share it as a Reel. Not only are images condemned to be a .jpeg without transparency, but text will also be .jpegs with no option to copy or select without OCR. Images are already "impoverished" when compressed into a jpeg, and they spiral deeper into this state with each screenshot, crop, screenshot of a screenshot... in a process of decomposition that sometimes turns them into cacophonies unrecognizable from their original. This visual degradation is part of what gives them this gift of revealing themselves as objects embedded in a specific context and flow. Irit Rogoff asks (I forget where): Are we developing "the mean eye, the jaundiced eye, the skeptical eye"? Is the critical eye the one that jealously guards itself against pleasure? ... I have opted for the notion of the "curious eye" [Laura Mulvey] to counter the "good eye" of the connoisseur.
Continuing with Irit: Who we see and who we don't; who is privileged within the regime of specularity; which aspects of the historical past have visual representations in circulation and which don't; whose fantasies and about what are fueled by which visual images. Rogoff speaks, referring to a poem by Trinh T. Minh-ha, that by reading/looking we not only rewrite ("talk about") the text, but by reclaiming and reinterpreting the narratives ("talk to") we alter the structures through which we organize and inhabit culture.
In this interview, Trinh talks about how some readers of her book, An Art Without Masterpiece, were bothered by her use of so many quotes, even though they acknowledged that these quotes flowed so well together that it was almost like having one voice in multiplicity: When quoting, I visually separated the voices. The traditional way to do this is to indent the quote. But in my books, I prefer to use italics, or better yet, a different font, connecting the quotes in the same paragraph, letting them extend or become part of my lines without losing their distinction. One voice overlaps the other. So you assume that voice, but you recognize that it is not “yours” in the strict sense of the term. Instead of paying homage or speaking in concert with other voices, people often use quotes, especially in academia, to validate what they want to say. We cite references as a way of validating ourselves with someone else's authority.
I've always liked being able to quote without quotation marks, and that's what I do with my images. The meme format, in general, is open to more open uses of reusing information without the constraints of intellectual property. Referencing something directly is legal if it's done in the form of a parody. Article 39 of Royal Legislative Decree 1/1996, April 12, which regulates Intellectual Property in the spanish state, states that "a parody of the disclosed work will not be considered a transformation that requires the author's consent, as long as it does not imply a risk of confusion with the work itself or cause harm to the original work or its author." It's not as if we needed permission either.
This lack of taking ourselves too seriously allows us to quote not as a way of hiding behind an external authority, but on the contrary, chewing it over and appropriating it only when and how it's convenient for you and for whatever you want, taking it completely out of context and without the need to explain or situate it.
I think we should all strive to dare to write and create like this. To write (create) with an artist's work and not about it. To disobsess ourselves with that self-absorption that insists on searching for static meanings in all images, in embedding them in theoretical frameworks and specific currents, in explaining them down to the last detail, crippling their plurivocality and questioning their very existence. Fortunately, on the internet, we have countless elusive and interesting expressions that will inspire, impact, and start conversations without ever having to go through the grinder of critics and theorists who see art as a single ontogenetic unity.
To echo Plant again: processes defined as works of art also yearn to overcome the definitions imposed on them. It makes no sense to translate this into ethical categories: it is not "good" for something to work, nor is it "bad" for it to simply wait to be passively observed by a viewer in a gallery. Likewise, there is no doubt that the most reactionary tendencies present in contemporary culture are always those dedicated to erecting obstacles, barriers, and mechanisms to regulate and control anything that tends to spiral out of control and threatens to exceed regulation and control. (...) The titles of artist and art tend to restrict the potential of the activities carried out in their name. (...) Privileging the conscious intentions of an individualized creative subject reinforces the arrogance implicit in Western humanism, which assumes that one is in a position to dictate the outcomes and effects of a particular act or work, and the emphasis on the meaning expressed by a work of art suggests that any effect that is not intellectually assimilable tends to be left off the agenda.
Almost every day I find something on the internet that either amuses me or stabs me, that makes me think about things I wouldn't think about without that input, that makes me feel directly challenged. And that something manages to pierce through all the "layers of irony" I've been building by toughening my skin throughout my time here. As one of my drawings above said, "if you pay attention, everything interests me," curiosity implies a certain restlessness; a notion of things outside the realm of the known, of things not yet fully understood or articulated; the pleasures of the hidden or the unthinkable that abound in every corner of the web; of what remains to be thought, the optimism of discovering something one didn't know or hadn't been able to conceive before, of the possibility of encounter.
As in the zine scene, meme/shitpost culture has been fragmented into hyperspecific subcultures, or in other cases, these subcultures/cores use the shitpost as another form of communication. Although the shitpost is often read as eminently frivolous, there are variations of the shitpost, primarily related to traumacore, or to spaces like shtwt (self-harm twitter), goretwt, edtwt (eating disorder twitter), and drgtwt (drug twitter), where it is used to express afflictions with a rawness that often no one would dare to express without that subtle ironic distancing and depersonalization that the shitpost format provides. It's easier to share an image with the text "I can't remember the last time I felt like a whole person, I want to suffer, I want to bleed" when it's not even clear whether you wrote those words, or if you simply found the image online and shared it for its aesthetic value without necessarily feeling exactly what the image expresses.
I realize I use that same concealment trick in my drawings. I think it's obvious that in almost all cases I feel what the borrowed words say, but it still feels easier, with less friction perhaps, less vulnerable or less uncomfortable for others to do it that way, with other people's words, taken out of context, with some room for ambiguity, than to write a caption that says that many days I can't take care of even the most basic functions or leave the house, that the state and hostility of the world and all the atrocities and pain that surround us added to my condition as an autistic person often makes me unable to imagine a future and a world worth living in, although I continue trying, that from time to time I still think about suicide even though I decided years ago that I'm not going to do it so as not to hurt the people around me, that many of the sexual encounters I've had throughout my life have been rapes, and so on. (oops) I'd better say it like this:
人(_ _*)
Even outside of these spaces where people gather specifically to share their suffering, the shitpost often tends toward the visceral, reflecting hyperbolic anguish and collective rage, without ever losing that element of recreation, of malleability, which somehow reminds me of that unfinished acid communism developed by Fisher, of those ideas of a plastic and changing reality, of the conviction that anyone can revisit these revolutionary/communist ideas of the past and expand and mold them in new, yet-to-be-imagined directions through improvisation and creativity.
[Disclaimer: I know that the shitpost format is also prevalent in far-right circles, and that it's actually being used to radicalize young people. Just like technology, it's something that can be used in multiple ways. I don't consider myself a particularly techno-optimistic or cyber-optimistic person, but today I decided not to drown in that mud. I also know that the gravity of the moment (a moment of climate crisis, in which we are witnessing genocide live every day, in which reactionary ideas that were thought to be outdated and unacceptable in public discourse are once again heard in every corner, in which belonging to certain groups makes it scary to go outside, in which people are being kidnapped in the streets, in schools, in their homes, and deported to concentration camps, in which almost all of us are one bad month away from homelessness, in which the majority of people live miserable lives crushed by capital) also requires solemnity and urgency, direct action, and being in the streets touching grass or concrete. Although I think that both things (organization, action, and direct movement — thinking and rethinking what role art, technology, and specifically the internet play in all of this, and ensuring that they don't work against us) are not incompatible, and that we should grab onto any tool that serves to change the order of things or shake them up, no matter how small the chance, ultimately, I know that this (like all roundtables, workshops, all "rethinking" this or that…) is simply an imaginative game, and that it's far from enough. But if escaping digital media is practically impossible today, and part of the struggle must be and is being fought within this already marked and defined terrain, the least we can do is try to use it to our advantage, or at least prevent it from working against us.]
Returning to the encounter, Levinas understands the encounter with the Other as a radical ethical moment, not as contemplation but as a drama in which subjectivity is formed in the presence of the Other, in their face and in their irreducible alterity. It's not that I "see" the Other as an object, but rather their appearance invokes me, demands of me, and makes me responsible. The Other interrupts my world. What is an encounter on the internet like? What is an encounter without a face and without drama? If I only exist to the extent that I respond to the Other, how do I respond to the Other asynchronously, with the Other being data that only reflects the remnants of their steps in the form of pixels on my screen and the Other is already elsewhere by the time I reach those?
Another exercise in imagination: a strange, uncanny, eerie, striking image... whatever you want to call it, could function as a digital face in that it confronts us with something we don't control, something we don't fully understand, and something that demands a response, that summons us. But does it really demand a response, or is my situation already hopium poisoning? Can the screen be that blank canvas on which I create myself for you and you create yourself for me? Even in theater, that is, an artificial construction where the desire to impress the viewer and solicit their applause has destroyed the elements of persuasion and dramatic illusion. The theatrical signals the awareness of being contemplated, the grimace.
I think it was Tischner who said that human drama only begins where there is a face (that is, a presence that questions us). There can be no drama without faces. Are there faces or presences on the internet? And if there are, what form do they take? I don't know how to speak, but I show myself anyway. My face could be the metadata of my Instagram profile in its entirety (like the internet and the Torah). I create myself for you, and you for me, also on the internet. The Other is the terrain on which I configure myself as a subject. The internet is the terrain on which I configure myself as a subject, and the internet offers me ways of representing myself that would not be possible without the veil of digital theater. I glimpse a face (or imagine it as a mirage) every time someone sincerely exposes themselves through these images. The only way to save myself is to respond to the call of the You.
Looking at my Instagram profile, I notice that there are hardly any drawings that are just drawings anymore. They are collages of stolen words, stolen from Tumblr posts, tweets, my notes app, images I find on religious forums, conspiracy forums, video game forums, questionable incel forums, flyers on the street, all kinds of advertising, subtitles of movies I watch and quotes from books I read, screenshots from video games and YouTube, images I find myself searching for on Flickr or dead pages. I find it very difficult to write or share what I write, because it feels like a form of expression that leaves you more exposed, although the quotes serve as a deceptive prosthesis here. In images, I always sense a certain ambiguity, a greater margin for interpretation. Vulnerability is protected like a small crystal ball covered in snow, revealing only certain parts, depending on how you shake it and from what angle you look at it. I like to think that whoever looks at my drawings does so with a curious, loving, and kind gaze. Although I also find the idea of them making someone angry amusing, because the distance from the screen protects me, because it's still a reaction and perhaps an encounter, and because my drawings, like most images circulating on the internet (and most of the shitposts), are propaganda, sometimes more obvious than others, but always propaganda.
I'm glad I've developed a way of doing things in which I can juxtapose Mao saying, "If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only then can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and understand them," alongside a drawing by Dejiko from Di Gi Charat or Utena, a shopping list I found on the ground on the street, a phrase from the Quran, and an excerpt of a lyric from this song by Gúdar that constantly plays in my head, and which will make a random New Zealander or Brazilian say, "This is literally me," because I am also literally them.
We have something to say (and to do), we have several languages to say it, and we have several positions (more or less volatile) from which to speak and meet.
I read a tweet yesterday regarding the uprisings in Los Angeles that said: Liberals need to believe our enemies are invincible because it's the only way they can justify their absolutely undignified position of settling for crumbs.
Our enemies are not invincible; the world worth fighting for already exists and is not a mirage ˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗
