“The modern artist is primarily motivated to start a dialogue, to set feelings and idea in motion.
His concern is to affirm that dialogue is possible, that is the content and the message of art now.”
-Roy Ascott Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision
When it comes to the analysis of the artistic potential of blogs, we certainly have the work of and on Net Art to build upon. However, it seems that the specificities of this medium call for a new analytical approach. The very openness of the blog-network, as well as the individual/collective duality at work, seem to be at once the medium's greatest asset and detriment. On the one hand, they allow a wide variety of work to reach a large audience, while on the other hand, it becomes harder to define boundaries between artistic and non-artistic practice. U Mean Competitor is an example of a blog that treads this boundary (though, I would say it leans toward the artistic end). Perhaps an appropriate analytical tool for blog-art would be the concept of communication the potential for communication set forward by Roy Ascott in Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision. Ascott's theories, influenced by conceptual art, are particularly applicable today, over 30 years after their publication, when describing a new, swarming sort of art medium.
Ascott's vision and blogging
A new type of art, and artist, was proposed by Roy Ascott. In Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision he proclaims that the sole purpose of the art-object and artist is to connect with the audience. The work should communicate, above all, the potential for communication, affirming simultaneously the presence of the artist and the individual audience member. He refers to a tripartite system of feedback: “The participational, inclusive form of art has as its basic principle 'feedback,' and it is this loop that makes the triad artist/artwork/observer an integral whole.” Ascott believes that the artist, audience, and artwork should merge, moving to a point where the boundaries between the three become blurred and irrelevant. In this idealized state, information originates just as much from the audience as it does from the artist as it is fed-back into the system. The artist as the localization of control has been dismantled.
What does it mean, then, to have artwork, artist, and audience on the same plane? This system refigures the artist as an open entity: accessible, creatively, analytically, and participationally, by the audience. It seems Ascott aspired to a rhizomatic art: one into which anyone can enter from any point. In this type of art and performance there would be no centrally privileged node, no special knowledge required to enter the system. Despite aspirations, however, this new rhizomatic art can not be said to have developed through the mediums about which Ascott wrote: conceptual, performance, and interactive art. In his call to move agency from the artist to the artist-artwork-audience interaction he merely justified the hidden dominant role of the artist and, later in interactive art, a significant technofetishism.
Is blog-art a medium in which this rhizomatic art, communicating, above all, the potential for communication, can exist? Given its tendencies and the structure of the medium, it appears to be. First, let's look at how this medium operates: We'll take a blog to be a time-structured, periodic Internet publication, typically run by an individual or small group. They tend to be text based and take an autobiographical first-person perspective. Mark Amerika, however, defines the medium in OzBlogby simultaneously denying and affirming these aspects: “A blog is not a diary, it is not dated, it is not autobiography, it is not a dreambook. Or: it can be any or all of those things but probably should not be any or all of them.” In this definition he acknowledges the common autobiographical use of the medium at the same time as he defines it on the reliance on the autonomous individual's creative decisions. Yet, instead of describing the medium through content, what can be said about the structure is that it exists as a collective, a swarm. A blog is not a blog without connections (through links, comments, references, etc.) to and/or by other blogs. The medium requires a collective identity: in the singular, a blog is a different work than when viewed as part of a collective. Each singular blog, though, is a vehicle for individuality, while remaining a porous entity. Communication flows from blogger to blogger, blog to blog, in a loose and free-flowing manner as a whole, creating a non-hierarchical network of these individual coherent units. Thus the medium combines the seemingly incompatible aspects of decentralized continuity and autonomous individuality: the individual/collective duality of the new swarm.
If together, blogs are a swarm of porous individual nodes, then, on the whole, the medium inherently concerns the potential for communication. To view or create one blog, is to enter the rhizomatic network and to imply connection, communication, with other nodes. Notoriety depends on interaction and porous connectivity rather than on an exclusive and hierarchical art world. Thus, it seems, blogs are an ideal medium to house this new art that Ascott looked toward: it cannot help but communicate potential for communication, it shows that everyone can be an active creative participant, and it brings the creative agent to the same level as the audience.
Examples: PostSecret and Frozen Niki
If the medium seems ripe for a swarming art, have artists taken it up as a space for creation? Current blog-art projects yield some promising results. An example of reasonably successful and widely popular blog-art is PostSecret. What might make this “blog-art” as opposed to anything else, is that it makes use of the distributed, porous structure. It allows audience members to directly, and creatively, participate in the blog-as-artwork by sending in post cards and supposedly has a relatively low curatorial cut-off. It also takes advantage of the potential for nameless exhibitionism. The contributors are able to project highly personal words in a highly personalized design over the blog-network without having to reveal their name. When all these personalized posts are taken as a whole, the meaning that arises is the ability to communicate and project their personality. As Ascott had hoped for in interactive art, this is an example of blog-art that communicates communication. The ability to project individual personality without name, and the structure of the blog, pushing each older post down, are the means through which creative agency is distributed in a non-hierarchical fashion.
The fictional Frozen Niki, is an example of blog-art that demonstrates the connection between Mark Amerika's conception of a blog and the concept of a new swarming art that Ascott aimed toward. The fictional premise of Frozen Niki is that Nikolaj Osinin, a Russian cosmonaut, has been cryogenically frozen, and will be for the next twenty years, on his way to the “Magellanic Clouds.” A blog has been set up that records his thoughts over the years. Viewed as a piece of art, this blog takes unique advantage of its physical organization. Not only does the artist use text to reveal the narrative but a picture gradually unfolds in the center, each entry adding another horizontal layer to the image. The image layer for each entry often has some dreamlike association with the goings on of the narrative at the time. This work is in keeping with Mark Amerika's vision of a more cinematic type of blog (after all, OzBlog largely concerns digital screen-writing). The narrative unfolds in the uniquely bloggish, vertical fashion and comes from an indisputably autobiographical source, the inner thoughts of the narrator. The textual element of each entry is only a few words long, usually a short piece of dialogue “remembered” by Niki. These words, however, are links and also appear at the top of the page. When clicked on, the entry with the specific word and the image-layer associated with it are isolated.
The space for interaction and participation in Frozen Niki is certainly weaker than in PostSecret, in that a viewer of the site cannot physically add anything or make contact with the fictional author, but the blog still communicates communication, or rather, communicates the fascination with communication. It does so, however, through a narrative form. In fact, Frozen Niki exemplifies an idealized blog: thoughts are transmitted directly from the authors brain into the blog-network. The wider message of the piece is the fascination of the speed of communication. Though he is frozen at -20 degrees and is flying through space, Nikolaj's thoughts, and thus Nikolaj himself to an extent, are instantly transmittable. It is in this way that Frozen Niki fulfills Ascott's desire for the subject of modern art to be the potential for communication. Where this blog connects with Amerika's thoughts is in his focus on the written aspects of the medium: “The writing I speak of is more than just a diary entry with links to things found on the net and is more than just text. It is designwriting, video ecriture, mixillogical sound art, a color field of graphic disturbance.” Frozen Niki is nothing if not “design writing.” It combines text, image, memory, and transmission into a singular whole.
Potential
Blog-art seems to have the potential for housing the swarming sort of art Ascott described. It makes artist, artwork, and audience increasingly indistinguishable at the same time as it inherently communicates the potential for communication. While he was writing in reference to an interactive art more along the lines of conceptual installation and performance art, and could have had no conception of a blog, his theories provide a strong framework from which to analyze this emergent field of artistic practice. This framework is especially relevant to the medium because it can encapsulate the swarm concept of the blog-network: it allows for and encourages the creative potential of the individual/collective duality (the autonomous yet porous individual in the swarm).
The field of blog-art is nascent. Artists have begun to test the waters of this medium, but at the same time we should see unintentional artists surfacing in the network. These will be the audience members who find themselves in a creative position as a result of this blurred boundary. And this development will, on the one hand, create new and exciting work, while on the other, it will make the self-appointed task of the art-world, to determine what is and is not art, increasingly difficult.
