Issue 30: Ecologies
…the image of nature that we spontaneously accept – balanced, harmonised, is destroyed through excessive human agency. That nature doesn’t exist. Nature is in itself a series of mega catastrophes, nature is crazy, things go wrong all the time. —Žižek, 2011[1]
A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell. —Foucault, 1976[2]
There’s a new ecology at the end of the internet and it’s a hyperreal network of reproduction—it’s the Deep Web Inter-Trash (DWIT). Videos, sometimes slideshows, sometimes incidental cameraphone footage, sometimes mass media so often reproduced and pirated it adopts its own aesthetic. It’s both a trash heap and a recycling plant. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls absolute negation ‘repetition’[3] and perhaps that’s what’s embodied in these videos—a horror vacui (fear of the vacant). Why do some of us end hours of procrastination here, at a DWIT video that brings us back to reality only through its dystopian emptiness? Well, only after watching juuust a few more of them… Jacques Lacan says that fantasies have to be unrealistic because the moment you get ‘it’ you don’t want ‘it’[4] anymore and I think there’s an element of this in why we watch them. We want to watch it but we don’t want it to be real. There’s a degree of obscurity coupled with a new, hyperreal, low-resolution aesthetic primed for mass consumption. We want to be there, we want to experience specific moments and realities, but we wouldn’t want to be there. There are fragments of mass media that Umberto Eco calls a ‘furious hyperreality… [which] creates a network of references and influences that finally spread also to the products of high culture and the entertainment industry’.[5] As he says, they have to be discovered.
DWIT videos are post-linear time, in their own sense—specific moments are repeated in broader wedges of time with each creating their own meridian. DWIT videos lead us closer to contemporaneity, to universal time, to ‘the sense of being in a time together’[6], as described by RAQS Media Collective in 2010. Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio became fleetingly known on mass internet ‘memedia’ (shall I say?) for his ‘stink eye’ at the Golden Globes earlier this year. Lady Gaga bumped into him when she was on her way to collect an award (so talented) and he pulled a face. WHY? Slow-motion videos, .gifs and videos of stills of this instant went viral. Ecologies, huh? There was a mass hysteria centered around one moment—this moment—for… a moment. If you were foraging along the forest floor of the internet at the time perhaps you speculated and existed in that moment too.
Then there’s ‘forgetting: the true vanity of contemporaneity’[7], which perhaps we can only hope for. What will be the broader cultural/historical impact of mass memories/afterburns of trash media? It’s a bit worrying. Taking for example Geordie Shore Season 11 Episode 7—which rates quite highly at the bottom of the internet barrel—that has a huge broadcast-quality budget. In this season they shipped the whole cast to a luxury villa in Greece. I watched this through a low-quality streaming server on a high-quality projector in a dark room with good sound. There was an ad every four minutes. The buffering kept freezing and my internet connection was so bad it was largely a blurry haze… AND YET I STILL KEPT WATCHING?! Geordie Shore is an MTV reality show about a group of early twenties party animals from Newcastle, UK, who are paid to sit in a mansion together and fight/have sex by day and go out to clubs to fight/have sex/get drunk by night. The drama is addictive: Gaz and Charlotte hooked up in most of the first seasons and now they both have respective partners but we all know they’re going to “tash on” again this season; Holly has a huge meltdown because her ex-boyfriend is living in the house too (awks) and he kissed another woman in front of her at a pub; the other people are just kind of blending in in their drunkenness and for some reason they’re sometimes on a luxury boat. Film director Jean-Luc Goddard said “he could not make us humble so he made us humiliated”[8] and that couldn’t be more accurate here. The humiliation of Geordie Shore delves even further into hyperreality when the broken aesthetics of reproduction are introduced. It becomes an obscene feedback loop—HD/stream/download/upload/stream—that’s blurred, tinny, glitchy, dreamlike and watchable.
…more, more, more… This is the reason for this journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake —Eco, 1976[9]
Are we inadvertently contributing to a ‘mobilisation of jouissance’ (joy) of inequality in consuming trash video? From the nineties, what we were participating in on midday television was a type of poverty porn, the underclass of the United States fighting it out in the arena of the studio (Jerry Springer), pulled apart by security while we watched on the couch. What we now participate in is the idiocy of the ruling class, one Kardashian drunk on TV incestuously asking her sister’s exes which of the other sisters they’d ‘F*ck, Marry, Kill’[10]. Here there is the joy of an unattainable, (and unfortunately popular) provocatively disgusting wealth. First there was Jerry Springer, now there is the inverse—Kocktails with Khloe. Khloe Kardashian has her own talk show. She sips cocktails with gal pals on plush couches and talks about nothing. Presumably her massive audience is divided—the disdainful who want to watch it end (please) and the Lacanian fantasists who want to be there (but not really).
The best of DWIT video surfaces in the most unfathomable portals of the information superhighway, the videos that are impossible to believe exist but are somehow oh-so-watchable. Maybe you haven’t made it this far, even I only stumble across them every now and then and I love them. They’re pretty much slideshows of screenshots, panning slowly across the screen with Creative Commons music, they’re deadly boring but they have millions of views. The quality is amusingly ‘bad’ but captivating—the audio is compressed, recompressed and tinny and the visuals are so lossy they just appear as blurs of colour and shapes. Much like bootleg videos shot on camera phones of broadcast TV (yep)—if it’s online, no matter the look or sound—you were there. These videos are the best places to glean the ‘mega catastrophe’[11] of deep web ecology, and make art to hold onto a fading projection of reality.
[1] “Slavoj Zizek – Nature does not exist,” admirim youtube channel, accessed January 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGeDAZ6-q4
[2] Michel Foucault, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” in Michel Foucault; with ill. and letters by René Magritte, trans. James Harkness, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 11, accessed online http://foucault.info/documents/foucault.thisIsNotaPipe.en.html
[3] Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, (London, Verso, 2010), 112 accessed online http://cnqzu.com/library/Economics/zizek/Zizek,%20Slavoj-Living%20in%20the%20End%20of%20Times.pdf
[4] “Chomsky on Zizek, Lacan and Theory,” ömer bozdogan youtube channel, accessed January 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Nz03cROXA
[5] Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality – Essays, trans. William Weaver, (New York, Harcourt Brace & Company,1976), accessed online http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/eco_travels.pdf
[6] Raqs Media Collective, “Now and Elsewhere” in e-flux journal #12, January 2010, accessed January 2016, http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/images/pdf/9e843ea2-7f3c-426c-aa5e-28072bdfccf7.pdf
[7] ibid.
[8] Jean-Luc Goddard, Goodbye to Language, 2014, film and video, 1.78:1, 70 minutes
[9] Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality – Essays, trans. William Weaver, (New York, Harcourt Brace & Company,1976), accessed online http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/eco_travels.pdf
[10] “Khloé Challenges Scott and Tyga to a Game of F*ck, Marry, Kill | Kocktails with Khloé | FYI”, FYI Television Network youtube channel, accessed February 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmfbJixEaUc
[11] “Slavoj Zizek – Nature does not exist,” admirim youtube channel, accessed January 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGeDAZ6-q4
Tessa Rex is a documentary artist working across photography, radio and video influenced by social justice, architecture, mass media and lo-fi formats. In 2016 Rex had her second solo installation, ‘No Matter’ at GAFFA Gallery in Sydney and two-person collaborative installation ‘Vapid Cut’ with Patch Sinclair. She has made short documentaries about the Arab spring in Bahrain, the Night Bus in Brooklyn and The Williamsburg Houses, among others. Rex was a collaborative fellow at Union Docs Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, New York, where she was a recipient of the Ian Potter Cultural Trust Travelling Fellowship and exhibited at FLUX Factory in Queens. She has exhibited in Sydney, Istanbul, Berlin and New York. By day she produces videos for online magazines.
Tessa Rex is a contributor to issue #30 [ECOLOGIES].
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.