creating in the internet age, i feel there are two options:
1) create a new internet
a) that spans across one's work, say, with cf's powr mastrs or
b) in the physical confines of an enclosed network like fort thunder
2) create 'content' that allows itself to be an aspect within the framework or frameworks of the internet.
option 1 seems pre/post internet (like fort thunder) while option 2 is internet with a capital 'i', and in many ways seems unavoidable today. in fact it's hard to imagine anything resisting the internet.
thoughts:
it is interesting to me that cf is resistant to the internet yet he is very attuned to its presence. he has a blog, he is easily googleable, and he is highly meme-able. fort thunder created giant memes that infiltrated every strata of the 'cool' demographic, from 13 to 35. i wonder how aware of this they are, how it affects them. i almost imagine it would be similar to being a child star, where one is 'blissfully ignorant' of the effects of their performance/fame until a certain point when they have to 'grow up' (fort thunder demolished) and find they have been exploited.
But 'exploitation' has no negative connotation on the internet. everyone is exploited, everyone exploits themselves. creators copy and paste to create new content. to resist the idea of 'self-promotion' is to hold on to a pre-internet romanticism.
comics memes have tended to be stylistic and content-based in the past, like, say, triangles and antlers. but this kind of meme seems to be dying. image-based memes are linked in my mind to 'the pictures generation' of the late 70's/early 80's. images still abound but the way of viewing them is now all about the 'web' of associations they trigger. the divide between content and meta-content is obscurred. is there anything of value inherent in the image? or is its value only determined by what it references, where it is located in the viewer's nostalgic memory bank?
comics creators seem to be slow in using 'meta' for their memes, or creating meta-content. john campbell seems a lone exception. does anyone else out there create with a meme-mentality? or a 'meta'-mentality? by the opposite token, does anyone still make 'content-as-content'?
images by guyton/walker and jt rogstad
10 comments:
24.7% of the world population uses the internet (pornography). Art is going to suck when Snake Pliskin pulls the plug.
my guess is that some similar percentage has a word for 'art' (as a european practice) in their vocabulary. all these voices that are left out probably were not heard before the internet either.
i guess it is 'all your eggs in one basket' but that is how i am rolling these days. i want to invest in disney, levis, and nintendo, if not monetarily (definitely not monetarily) than culturally. i want the whole world to be one big corporation.
the next 9/11 will happen online
Somehow to older dudes like me print adds authority to work that can be more easily dismissed online. The content is essentially the same, but the context is different. Plus, you can see it all at once better when it's not on a tiny screen. But maybe this is just a artifact of the time I grew up in. Maybe work should be made for the puters. Maybe the authority of print is partially undeserved, a way for the people who print things to decide what is and isn't legitimate culture...
i think print still exists online, just as a different form. when i browse around the nieves website i'm interacting with zines (and their texture, etc) just in an online context. reading generation x online seemed even more fetishistic (big, blown up pages, seeing every crease) than actually reading the pamphlet (which no longer had a cover, etc.) i think there is an authority to print but i wonder how long that will last. for me the online taffy hips was just as 'authoritative' as the print one you showed me, but i think there still has to be that 'print presence' to appeal to that 'trustworthy' sense.
Yeah, true about Taffy Hips, but, yes, it does make it feel more weighty than an online zine because it has a physical aspect. It is more fetishistic to look so closely at scans of the pages, but, for me at least, it's not as comfortable to read things online that were meant for a vertical print format. For sure, though, I might change my mind if Apple comes out with a touch-screen tablet...
I think I missed an evolutionary development. I find reading or "looking" at anything online incredibly uncomfortable. I mean, we all know staring into light for hours on end doesn't promote eye health, right? I'll take print (sorry trees).
i heard somewhere or imagined that we stylize most aggressively that which has recently ceased to become un-radical. bikes are a good example.
physical community is another good one. starting in the 60s i guess. i think Fort Thunder really really pushed that impulse as the anxiety of an oncoming post-human community (interwebs) became apparent.
i suppose internet-influenced design has lately become such a part of 'physical' art practice because design is the aestheticizing (or de-radicalizing) of context, previously the domain of 'challenging' art.
all of this relies on a lame truth>art>commodity hierarchy but i find it useful sometimes.
People can't write as well on the internet as in the good old days of zines and typewriters. people in the days of typewriters couldn't write as well as the days of beautiful script, when a real writer would fill manuscript pages with a fountain pen. Fountain pens destroyed quill pens. People with great penmanship ruined the beauty of oral storytelling, and the invention of language ruined the beauty and silence of caveman existence, and mindless cavemen totally fucked up how sublime it was to be waddling fish eels, and being an eel was a total step down from being an amoeba.
Also cf made punctuationless comics 'de riguer' for all you twats born in the 80's!!!!Inow comics suck.must puncture speech ballons with puncturation.
today i made dialogue using slashes, which i feel cf is pushing as 'the next meme'. i think this meme might be related to the 'italics' meme.
in fact punctuation like * and ' seem to be 'very contemporary' as well. in this 'texting' culture we leave out vowels and punctuation ie 'powr mastrs'
feel maybe we shouldn't have dredged up the old 'word word' meme in naming this blog 'comets comets' but i can never foresee a time when referencing will fall out of fashion. (i know it will, i'm just being honest, i can't see that far ahead.) maybe we should shut down the blogspot and move it into twitter, would that be 'even more' contemporary?
when will someone make 'art manga' (oh wait yuichi yokoyama - but i want to see it done by an american) i feel that will be the 'next thing' or something.
will 'being contemporary' ever fall out of fashion?
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