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joculumhyperobjects and hyperobjectives: notes towards an exhibition I do not actually plan to curate, but wish I did
I have the dubious distinction of being an increasingly elderly white male who still owns a considerably battered copy of the Marshall McLuhan issue of Aspen, “the magazine that comes in a box” that was the forerunner of numerous deconstructed pieces of print media (mostly artists’ books, though a 1968 issue of a college literary magazine I edited and an entire 1986 “bagazine” architecture issue of Art Papers took their cues from Aspen’s example). I assume Aspen took its inspiration from Fluxus’s intermingling of the highly aesthetic concept and the commonplace object, since Fluxus itself was the topic of one of the later issues. (All the contents of the seven years of the magazine can be viewed via ubuweb, but of course the point was to handle this incredible variety of objects and textures, and that sensory experience can’t be communicated online—yet.)
I bought said volume with considerable excitement because it was clearly attempting to extent McLuhan’s insights regarding the impact of media by defeating our expectations of what a magazine ought to be while forcing us to think, via what a subsequent generation would call the deconstructed print medium, about the new electronic media. In so doing, it questioned the limits and the legitimacy of both.
Or so we thought, anyway, even if we didn’t quite understand what McLuhan was telling us about the dialectic in question.
The reason we didn’t quite understand was that a great deal of what McLuhan was saying was nonsense. And this is a problem I have encountered again and again over my lifetime: the writers who perceive the full dimensions of a previously unconsidered question almost always articulate their perceptions unintelligibly, with explications of the topic that are frequently just plain wrong when they can be deciphered at all. But the fundamental perceptions behind the wrongly conceived articulations are completely valid.
This generalized insight could be pursued in so many different directions that for once I do not wish to attempt to analyze all of them in a single blog post. However, I do want to present references to two or three ideas that I may never get around to pursuing beyond these preliminary notes. (My blog seems to be turning into a series of prefaces to projects that are never begun, something that in itself has a distinguished history, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project being a classic example of the larger category of books for which there exist an immense amount of preparatory materials but no actual product beyond a few preliminary fragments.)
Anyone who wishes to pursue this topic on the other side of an LJ-cut is welcome to click
The “yet” that ends the opening paragraph of this quasi-essay is an acknowledgement that after decades of misguided attempts at virtual reality, we are getting closer to multisensory experiences with digital media, and more importantly, we are bridging the gap between digital media and the type of actual physical object that has thus far been unrelated to the digital revolution. (The effects—on users’ bodies—of the physical objects that deliver the output of the digital revolution are a different topic.)
I have already engaged in an essay-length set of back-and-forth comments on Facebook regarding the Museum of Arts and Design’s “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” an exhibition up through June 1. (See madmuseum.org for details.) I hope to expand these into a blog post, probably unimaginatively titled “The Work of Art in the Age of (Post)Digital Reproduction.” Since they were written at blog-post speed but without the possibility of subsequent editing (or at least I don’t know how to edit a Facebook comment rather than just deleting it), their insights need to be rewritten substantially and to a large extent just plain rethought. They don’t warrant reposting in their present form.
But this exhibition, which I know only through online descriptions, raises important issues regarding the conceptual revolution that comes when there are, indeed, no originals other than algorithms that are not themselves works of art, but that produce works of art via 3-D printers and other sorts of digitally based output producer. (The non-art things that the 3-D printers can produce are already raising significant issues, as the possibilities for home manufacture begin to penetrate the awareness of the general public.)
As an Atlanta-centered art critic, I am somewhat depressed that the exhibition’s curator Ron Labaco (who was hired away from Atlanta’s High Museum by New York’s Museum of Arts and Design) seemingly wasn’t aware of the exquisite hybrid paintings by Cheryl Goldsleger that incorporate 3-D-printed bas-relief architectural models into their surfaces. But those were made when three-dimensional printing was the purview of a few university departments; now anybody can afford to buy a 3-D printer, and the social effects have yet to be assessed.
When they are assessed, the predictions will turn out to be wrong; I remember Jason Epstein’s assertion that the rise of on-demand publishing meant that bookstores in the future would have nothing in them except onscreen viewers and a high-quality printing and binding outfit that would generate the book while the purchaser waited. The reality of e-books and tablets turned out to be quite different, and I gather that on-demand publishers are having the same difficulties that oldstyle publishing houses are having in terms of distribution, though they have additional challenges based on how Amazon handles questions of inventory and billing.
Nevertheless, I need to get a few preliminary reflections out there. Someday. Really soon.
In a bad pun on a recently coined word (or recently redefined word, more likely), I might call the near-viral spread of 3-D printing a hyperobjective—an immense, ultimately uncontrollable agent of social transformation that is being marketed for quite different reasons than the outcomes that seem likely to result. (The printers are indistinguishable as commodities from drain cleaners, cigarettes, potato chips, or luxury automobiles—the reason for putting them out into the world has to do with the profit motive, and they presumably are sold with the same lack of emotion that goes into the sale of sacks of potatoes.)
But many commodities considered as a single entity have unpredictable effects, or statistically likely side effects that are unrelated to the motives for their production—a currently contentious oil pipeline or the effects of fracking on delicate aquifers being only a couple of examples.
In that collective effect, they become what philosophical ecologist Timothy Morton would call a hyperobject—in the same way, perhaps, that the individually deposited objects in the swarm of plastic discards cluttering the Pacific Ocean become a single hyperobject. We are surrounded by networks of objects and environmental effects too enormous and often too amorphous to map accurately, or even to form adequate categories in which we might put them. Hence Morton’s coinage of “hyperobject” seems to be getting at a reality of our troubled time, in which decisions made by a relatively few individual entities end up affecting the entire planet in ways they did not intend, and ways that they frequently attempt to deny.
My initial spotty reading of Morton, unfortunately, suggests the same thing that my initial spotty reading of McLuhan suggested almost fifty years ago...that the author has a perception that is on target and an interpretation of the perception that is frequently total nonsense.
Although I would like to curate an art exhibition titled “hyperobjects and hyperobjectives” that would feature works of art exploring the topics I have hitherto listed (I already have a tentative shortlist of Atlanta-based artists), I am unlikely to do so, or even to finish reading the relevant books in time to write sensible essays on the subjects before they cease to be current. Hence this latest of many “preliminary notes” on the joculum.livejournal.com blog for which there were never any followups.
I have the dubious distinction of being an increasingly elderly white male who still owns a considerably battered copy of the Marshall McLuhan issue of Aspen, “the magazine that comes in a box” that was the forerunner of numerous deconstructed pieces of print media (mostly artists’ books, though a 1968 issue of a college literary magazine I edited and an entire 1986 “bagazine” architecture issue of Art Papers took their cues from Aspen’s example). I assume Aspen took its inspiration from Fluxus’s intermingling of the highly aesthetic concept and the commonplace object, since Fluxus itself was the topic of one of the later issues. (All the contents of the seven years of the magazine can be viewed via ubuweb, but of course the point was to handle this incredible variety of objects and textures, and that sensory experience can’t be communicated online—yet.)
I bought said volume with considerable excitement because it was clearly attempting to extent McLuhan’s insights regarding the impact of media by defeating our expectations of what a magazine ought to be while forcing us to think, via what a subsequent generation would call the deconstructed print medium, about the new electronic media. In so doing, it questioned the limits and the legitimacy of both.
Or so we thought, anyway, even if we didn’t quite understand what McLuhan was telling us about the dialectic in question.
The reason we didn’t quite understand was that a great deal of what McLuhan was saying was nonsense. And this is a problem I have encountered again and again over my lifetime: the writers who perceive the full dimensions of a previously unconsidered question almost always articulate their perceptions unintelligibly, with explications of the topic that are frequently just plain wrong when they can be deciphered at all. But the fundamental perceptions behind the wrongly conceived articulations are completely valid.
This generalized insight could be pursued in so many different directions that for once I do not wish to attempt to analyze all of them in a single blog post. However, I do want to present references to two or three ideas that I may never get around to pursuing beyond these preliminary notes. (My blog seems to be turning into a series of prefaces to projects that are never begun, something that in itself has a distinguished history, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project being a classic example of the larger category of books for which there exist an immense amount of preparatory materials but no actual product beyond a few preliminary fragments.)
Anyone who wishes to pursue this topic on the other side of an LJ-cut is welcome to click
The “yet” that ends the opening paragraph of this quasi-essay is an acknowledgement that after decades of misguided attempts at virtual reality, we are getting closer to multisensory experiences with digital media, and more importantly, we are bridging the gap between digital media and the type of actual physical object that has thus far been unrelated to the digital revolution. (The effects—on users’ bodies—of the physical objects that deliver the output of the digital revolution are a different topic.)
I have already engaged in an essay-length set of back-and-forth comments on Facebook regarding the Museum of Arts and Design’s “Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital,” an exhibition up through June 1. (See madmuseum.org for details.) I hope to expand these into a blog post, probably unimaginatively titled “The Work of Art in the Age of (Post)Digital Reproduction.” Since they were written at blog-post speed but without the possibility of subsequent editing (or at least I don’t know how to edit a Facebook comment rather than just deleting it), their insights need to be rewritten substantially and to a large extent just plain rethought. They don’t warrant reposting in their present form.
But this exhibition, which I know only through online descriptions, raises important issues regarding the conceptual revolution that comes when there are, indeed, no originals other than algorithms that are not themselves works of art, but that produce works of art via 3-D printers and other sorts of digitally based output producer. (The non-art things that the 3-D printers can produce are already raising significant issues, as the possibilities for home manufacture begin to penetrate the awareness of the general public.)
As an Atlanta-centered art critic, I am somewhat depressed that the exhibition’s curator Ron Labaco (who was hired away from Atlanta’s High Museum by New York’s Museum of Arts and Design) seemingly wasn’t aware of the exquisite hybrid paintings by Cheryl Goldsleger that incorporate 3-D-printed bas-relief architectural models into their surfaces. But those were made when three-dimensional printing was the purview of a few university departments; now anybody can afford to buy a 3-D printer, and the social effects have yet to be assessed.
When they are assessed, the predictions will turn out to be wrong; I remember Jason Epstein’s assertion that the rise of on-demand publishing meant that bookstores in the future would have nothing in them except onscreen viewers and a high-quality printing and binding outfit that would generate the book while the purchaser waited. The reality of e-books and tablets turned out to be quite different, and I gather that on-demand publishers are having the same difficulties that oldstyle publishing houses are having in terms of distribution, though they have additional challenges based on how Amazon handles questions of inventory and billing.
Nevertheless, I need to get a few preliminary reflections out there. Someday. Really soon.
In a bad pun on a recently coined word (or recently redefined word, more likely), I might call the near-viral spread of 3-D printing a hyperobjective—an immense, ultimately uncontrollable agent of social transformation that is being marketed for quite different reasons than the outcomes that seem likely to result. (The printers are indistinguishable as commodities from drain cleaners, cigarettes, potato chips, or luxury automobiles—the reason for putting them out into the world has to do with the profit motive, and they presumably are sold with the same lack of emotion that goes into the sale of sacks of potatoes.)
But many commodities considered as a single entity have unpredictable effects, or statistically likely side effects that are unrelated to the motives for their production—a currently contentious oil pipeline or the effects of fracking on delicate aquifers being only a couple of examples.
In that collective effect, they become what philosophical ecologist Timothy Morton would call a hyperobject—in the same way, perhaps, that the individually deposited objects in the swarm of plastic discards cluttering the Pacific Ocean become a single hyperobject. We are surrounded by networks of objects and environmental effects too enormous and often too amorphous to map accurately, or even to form adequate categories in which we might put them. Hence Morton’s coinage of “hyperobject” seems to be getting at a reality of our troubled time, in which decisions made by a relatively few individual entities end up affecting the entire planet in ways they did not intend, and ways that they frequently attempt to deny.
My initial spotty reading of Morton, unfortunately, suggests the same thing that my initial spotty reading of McLuhan suggested almost fifty years ago...that the author has a perception that is on target and an interpretation of the perception that is frequently total nonsense.
Although I would like to curate an art exhibition titled “hyperobjects and hyperobjectives” that would feature works of art exploring the topics I have hitherto listed (I already have a tentative shortlist of Atlanta-based artists), I am unlikely to do so, or even to finish reading the relevant books in time to write sensible essays on the subjects before they cease to be current. Hence this latest of many “preliminary notes” on the joculum.livejournal.com blog for which there were never any followups.
