Hello Blogosphere… I have been abscent for quite some time but now I am back with a horribly erratic and often unfollowable peice of writing. A small essay trying to build a metaphorical understanding for how Art of all kinds (but particularly visual) has a virus like quality. I attempted to create a concept that was useful when trying to imagine our refined cultural practices as not overly valued financially but closer to a biological autonomous event. I am not sure I succeeded and this is a bad essay for sure… read with caution.
Abstract: One has been thinking about artistic events and methods that are potentially ant-capitalist. Throughout the past two decades global culture has been accumulating and translating large changes in culture. Changes that have been driven by a surge in the use of new technology, science’s increased understanding of biology, and societies restless creative growth. This essay describes these changes in the aesthetics of one event. The visual event one labels as an Infective Fissure, an encounter with the radical potentials of the virus we commonly refer to as art. Having tried to both accurately explain this in current visual culture, and philosophically explore this event’s intellectual points of origin. The text features interpretations of the work of Philippe Parreno, Peirre Huyghe, and Joseph Nechvatal (among others). Combining with the writings of: Victor Burgin, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nick Land, and Hito Steyrel to offer an exploration of an event that one for-sees in many of our artistic experiences today, tomorrow, and the day after. Infective Fissures are events that demand even more aesthetic reflection?
Key words: Infective Fissures, Events, Aesthetics, Politics, Techno-capital,
Cybernetics, Virology, and Art. (word count: 5515)
Viral Complexities: Art’s Old Medicine.
In the description of his personal project the video loop, ‘Virtual Amplification’ (2011). Edgor Kraft has written down an interesting sentence, ‘Each new mouse click takes us away from an answer and question just as each following step of developments of the media environment and virtualisation moves us further from the understanding of what is an authentic realityi.’ Such a sentence incubates and galvanizes contemporary thinking around new forms in art’s production and consumption. Kraft’s work immediately illustrates what one wants to articulate. One finds that the circular narrative of this video loop evokes the symmetry/asymmetry, inside/outside, of life. Post-web 1.0 an internet that was also referred to as an ‘information portal’, an environment that one could only read from. However we are now interacting with a newer version and are awaiting it’s next evolution. Art has been affected by these movement’s and we have witnessed large amounts of creativity. That use new digital media in the world of data, software, and networked communication. In the middle of all this is the potential for a unique event. A development which brings together technology and biology to invite new ways of thinking about the future of art? This writing seeks to outline, define, and persuade the reader of the importance of these new radically viral aesthetics.
In the essay ‘Recycled Electrons’ George Boole, an academic and logician, recollects his first encounter with the internetii. He says that, ‘the globe’s time and space had been instantly redrawn’ and that, ‘it’s trunk/branch/twig structure is an underlying framework that has become part of our very mode of thought’. If this is true then one believes new media art is virally complex precisely because it now serves as an ‘underlying framework’ for critical insight on arts place within capitalism. Another way of articulating this is that NMA is for today’s ‘art world’ what Karl Marx saw as the Proletariat (the workers), the first and only class. Suggesting a naive reality whereby new media artists have spawned a revolution, and the means of production the ownership of markets and wealth. Is as the internet should compel, equally redistributed amongst a community. Staying with the Marxist terminology in addition to Kraft’s and Boole’s word’s, the viral impact of media can be practically explored. Just observe the fact that in 2008 the online community Anonymous in reaction to the treatment of Wikileaks, disrupted and nullified the stalwarts of capital. MarsterCard, Visa, and Paypal, where stopped in their tracks by a community influenced by the
Evental Aesthetics: Aesthetic Inquiries 4, ISSN: 2167-1931. Submission (2017)
behaviour of online creativity and it’s circulating images. A fetishism dormant in the movements of a memeiii?
The Visual Meme’s (ideas, styles, or behaviours shared within a culture) on the website 4Chan, shows how an image can become a virus, mutating so quickly, that it gave birth to an entirely new culture and community. To understand the relevancy of this to art one could choose to see these changes as what the artist and media theorist Victor Burgin, saw as an ‘absence of presence’. Writing under the same title he explores changes fuelled by postmodernism and conceptual art. Burgin, whilst referencing Michel Foucault’s metaphor of fetishism as ‘capillary action’, and describing Freud’s articulation of fetishism as Disavowal (which is a splitting between knowledge and belief)iv. Seemingly embodied in the then art establishments very relation to history. Yet finding this splitting is very rewarding and should demand that those that are concerned with the openness of art. Need only turn and see new forms of media that have an unequivocal anti-capitalist metabolism. Even Foucault’s metaphorical use of ‘capillary’ lends itself to media art’s virus like body. If you are still doubting the accuracy of the viral narrative one is considering, and how Burgin’s ‘absence of presence’ is relevant.
Then look at recent events at the Barbican in London, one exhibition in partnership with Google: ‘Digital Revolution’ (2014). Claiming to be a comprehensive account of digital art: Google’s corporate presence (DevArt) spawned a critical counter exhibition ‘Hack The Art World’ which was a completely digital online exhibition originally geofenced (only available in that location) to the Barbican. It resembled for the art critic Jonathan Jones an exhibition in Paris in 1863, the ‘Salon des Refuses’, showing art rejected by the official Salon. So are these exhibitions and artists demonstrating yet another form of disavowal? Maybe, but the lead artist of the group behind the show Jan Vantomme made a very valid point. When he stated that tech giants should help start legitimising digital artists by buying and collecting their work. The way the art in this show was used directly to illustrate this point should be seen in an extremely positive light. The demand of these artists was legitimate and positioned so as not to detract from the work of the institution. Or from the artists in the physical exhibition, instead it did something more important. It shows that resistance need not be completely dismissive or demand full blown opposition. So another angle, perspective, point of view is necessary to decipher a way in which we can harness these aforementioned antagonisms – the material question is one of dissemination. Like the notion of the meme a one cell thick lining of the capillary, art can now be micro-circulated.
Trapped in a world terraformed by our technology and it’s numerical dominance in data or information. A global conversation contaminated by the axis of encryption/decryption, either infection or defection? One way of framing these issues is brilliantly elaborated in an essay by writer Lori Wike. Wike brings together the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes on absence, presence, and temporality. In doing so interrogates the link between an image and a word – however it seems that it is actually Barthes words in this text that are more befitting to our contemporary digital creativity, ‘the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentiallyv‘. This statement by Barthes can be witnessed in the blossoming of digital affects, animation, and image manipulation due to computers. Today we unconsciously time travel through a multi dimensional sphere of representations, every single one of them manipulated. A process which is already pre-destined to increase – artists and cultural bodies need not fear these changes. Especially if like Derrida they embrace the affective enthusiasm of their parasitology, their ‘virus being many thingsvi‘.The benefit’s of being prone to infection are like a real immune system, art will develop new forms of isotope ones with an iterability, such precursory examples can be seen in recent projects.
‘No Ghost Just a Shell’ (1999) the reanimation of a Japanese anime character by Philippe Parreno and Peirre Huyghe. ‘Low Animal Spirits’ (2014), at Banner Repeater, London. A collaboration resulting in a live algorithmic score derived from the loss of the referent (presence) in both economy and language. Thirdly, ‘Dark Velocity’ (2014) which underlines the main topic that warrants the complex metaphor of this text. Brilliantly summarising, ‘The invariability of contemporary art’s commodity form makes object-ownership hold crucial levering power in the field thereby overshadowing the potential for financial diversificationvii‘. One views the separation between knowledge and belief in psychoanalysis, firmly rooted in the modernist questions of ‘why?’, and ‘how?’. As not entirely outdated in deciphering the above dilemma, the aforementioned overshadowing of diversification, has in this author’s opinion culminated in but one option. Media art and philosophy now have the unenviable task of articulating ‘what?’ and ‘when?’, as questions which will most strongly influence current and future culture. So staying with the letter V as the root linguistic pathogen we can glimpse yet more relations, associations, and paths to discuss. Moreover, art’s complexities will grow with strains and concept’s found in: virtuality, vitalism, and plasticity. Conceptually attaching themselves to the current ‘discipline’ of art’s newest media?
‘Discipline is no longer imposed on the body through the formal action of the law – it is printed in the collective brain through the dissemination of techno-linguistic interfaces, inducing a cognitive mutationviii.’
What exactly is this mutated cognition, and how does one come to fully appreciate it? Well the first step would be to suggest an event where the mutation is self evident. This would initially be found in a single movement specifically the aesthetic change within cultures of visual production. A transformation from the dominance of montage or collage into the current process of appropriation. This is the physical structure one observes as supporting the notion explored in this text that is the struggle to think through images as viruses, not viral images, but the virus that is an image. Exploring this positive pixel plague there are several artists and thinkers today that have been measuring this idea in a variety of interesting and sometimes semi-conscious ways. But, before referencing these creators one wants to detail the visual experience derived from ‘viral complexities’, and why philosophically speaking they are medicinal for artistic cultures. Earlier, one briefly touched upon some intriguing ideas: ‘absence of presence’, ‘parasitology’, and ‘micro-circulation’. Here Burgin and Derrida present a cloudy aesthetic which could be misconstrued as being contradictory, oppositional, or negative? On the one hand an absence, on the other the more ambiguous presence. In Seeing Sense Burgin solicites a consultation with Sigmund Freud to understand the origin of ‘visual thinking’, and through cigar smoke affirms its biologically older than words. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud suggests that after observing Varendonck’s study of preconscious fantasies, that thinking in pictures is only a very incomplete ‘becoming conscious’, resulting in his question, ‘how we make something that is repressed (pre)conscious would be answered as followsix’. Of course Freud’s answer is ‘analysis’ and is concerned with reaching into the depths of his patient during therapy. However, for the sake of detailing this therapeutic imagitus, Art’s newest infection is not to be found prior to consciousness, rather it is located in its absence? Its possibility?
‘ambition and eroticism here is economically achieved through a pair of substitutions-a ‘v’ for an ‘n’. and a ‘t’ for an ‘r’ – which tacks the manifest verbal text onto its pre-text in the pre-conscious. By this device, the verbal fragment faces onto both manifest and latent contents of the image.x’
This pre-textual birth of the virus is visible in the progressive ending of a recent social stigma; AIDS, ‘adding infinite dimensions’ is a nod to the value of experiencing a virus’s transmission. Here one implies that infection, the infectious mysteries of the image have never been nefarious. Simply wishing to allude to this blood disease’s past culture, its stigma, and how it could be both positive, liberating, and negative. Regarding the intentions of this text one does see a precedent in the overly aggressive homophobic reactions to Gay people contained within certain cultures of yesteryear. This word play alludes to this aggressiveness in the socio-visual prejudice against a body with a virus. Instead one catches a glimpse of the contemporary site of the aesthetic experience increasingly contaminating artistic creation today. Therefore, when seeking to make ‘heads or tails’ of the experience of erotic ambitions, Victor Burgin’s text details just how complex the connection between a picture and a plague really is – yet, Burgin only lifts the lid off the sample tube. In the quotation above a section throws doubt toward the notion that images are viruses; how exactly do finite humans breed such a thing, the grandest of infections named art?
Secondly, how is it that one is still grasping for fragments of language when the substitution of v for n (virus for noumena?) provides fuel for an alternative economic achievement? Artists, is it not infuriating? You are all trapped travelling psychoanalytically backwards in a pipette injecting linguistic interpretations onto a surface before consciousness. This dilutes the evidence and the current argument! Technology and it’s material territories behave virally, and art is the virus the object we can encounter. Here is one’s conclusion although the aesthetic experience one is describing has to be better described, and more critical evidence offered up to the reader. Let us look at some art where you can see the virus under its microscope. From the early 1900’s Hiroshi Kawano under the influence of the German thinker Max Bense1 created ‘Digital Mondrians’(1964), followed by Andy Warhol using an Amiga 2000 to digitise his soup cans onto floppy disks (1980’s), and recently the
- One of the originators for the idea that beauty may be measured scientifically
virus called art has manifested inside the Petri dish where E. coli is the paint for Dr. T. Ryan Gregory2. Experiences with these works are all well and good, but to fully appreciate the event: an encounter with any image and its intrusive politicised ontology, will request the human subject to be comfortable with both being possessed and possessing.
Such an ideal would be welcomed if even attainable? Let us focus on ‘possessing’ because that is what images do and are constantly being subjected to … imagine the words of a wealthy collector or informed curator, ‘I’m in possession of an original Mondrian’, and ‘this painting possesses such and such a quality’ are both defunct utterances. Why? Because remember this discussion is exploring the event created by the very real material reality of the visual virus. Hosting the potentials of such an experiential artistic encounter, and its increasingly pertinent presence in the dispersion of new technologies in Art makes one contemplate what kind of laboratories or weather best transmits this pathogenic phenomenon? Today, encountering art as a virus has almost entirely become computational the repercussions of this are difficult to understand. Yet whilst recently reading one of Jacques Rancière’s books this great thinker adds more depth to a seemingly parasitic reality. Disagreeing with Walter Benjamin’s thesis that the mechanical arts of photography and film gave members of the public, the Masses visibility. Rancière demands that through what he calls the Aesthetic Regime of Art there exists a revolutionary kernel inscribed into Aesthetics.
‘This programme is literary before being scientific: it shifts the focus from great names and events to the life of the anonymous; it finds symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilization in the minute details of ordinary life.xi’
For so many people ordinary life is programmed in such a way that there is a real threat that art will become auto-immunised, and the experiences available lost behind some unhelpful capitalist protectionism. If one cares about the infectious qualities of new images then referring back to the insights of the exhibition ‘Dark Velocity’ (2014) enables the question: what exactly nullifies the potential for ‘owner-less objects’, and ‘financial diversification’ innate within this primordial power of the artistic virus? How does the artist who sees the aforementioned potentials think through, and resist
the frequent habit of Capitalism to bleach, erase, and develop new anti-art antivirals? The biggest threat to art, its pathogens, and culture is that monetary habits continue to destroy free association and chain libidinal and sexual inhibition to profitability – a kind of, ‘you can have desire, but only through a screen!’ like attitude? Completely shattering the capacity for appreciating there has never been the right to copy, rather it is appropriate to appropriate; do not let the screen take from you! You take from it! Correct? Opting for passive consumption over infection does not bode well, one has to respond to this event, ‘The seductive force of simulation transformed physical forms into vanishing images, submitted visual art to viral spreading,xii’ Perhaps, Post-modernism’s empowerment of surfaces traps the above process on the screen, so eventually the visual event one seeks to detail is deprived of autonomous animation, and its transmission is terminated?
Wait, really, how to stop this termination? First, by naming the event under consideration, and protecting it with a clearer definition. Infective Fissures are events that allow for both the artist and the audience to gain a full appreciation of the relations innate to the possessive, or that what possesses? This includes the best articulation of this erotically ambitious economy, ‘When a hypercathexis of the process of thinking takes place, thoughts are actually perceived – as if they come from without and are consequently held to be true.xiii’ But, again does this psychoanalytical obsessiveness, a patient’s hypercathexis, an over investment in an object not present us with the need to libidinously battle against the conservative exclusionary economy. The industry that promotes a possessive obsessive ownership and deletes a sexy creative subjectivity? Therefore when thinking about Infective Fissures it is this synthesis of truth, a synthetic truth, that re-enacts potentials for a new biopolitical understanding of aesthetic experience in these new cybernetic techno-capital spaces. These events are somewhat unpredictable because of the omnipresent systems that violently enforce object ownership. By unpredictable one means that an Infective Fissure has a great potential to disrupt the market dictatorship, and offers very promising future transmutations. However, at the moment these events are too easily uncontaminated. The fate of ‘No Ghost Just A Shell’ (1999) is the best example of the need for communities involved in artistic creation to acquire temporal understanding. If a new way of sharing the rich wealth of possibilities is to appear, it wont be an aggressive territorialization?
‘The legal document which transfers Annlee’s copyright to a foundation That belongs solely to her is, in effect, her death warrant. Paradoxically, it Also gives her her freedom since “The acquisition of ANNLEE is part of an artistic project that consists in liberating a fictional character from the realm of representation.” “Give me liberty and give me death” could be her epitaph. …xiv’
In a brilliant review of the exhibition when it visited San Francisco writer Marcia Tanner imbues the Anime character with yet more independence. Completely agreeing with the eulogy; even the art object itself desires death? The demise of an ‘objective dominance’ in the field runs in synchronisation with a whole new generation of image consumption. It is unavoidable the changes wrought by digital technology and an increase in the speed of information have combined to challenge hegemonies. That is why an Infective Fissure is an event, offering a hypercathexical deterritorialization. Always expanding a territory; the virus travels body to body, but it is important to state this does not imply ownership just the expansion of space. Sadly, Peirre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s exhibition was an event which ultimately succumbed to the white blood cells of capital’s infrastructure. Initially the project would be fearsomely exemplar of the event one seeks. The purchase of Annlee and her exploitation by other artists was not driven by capital, but by creative contamination. The 428 dollars used to purchase her took into consideration the level of visual detail in her characteristics; the cheapness of the digital file matching the blankness of this material canvas.
This is as Tanner writes an exquisite corpse, the shared distribution of unformed matter. Resulting in the creation of identity and value is shared throughout the community’s territory. Unfortunately, this fissure, this event failed and the point of infection was blocked. Institutions and collectors moved in and bought the whole exhibition. At that time Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist saw this as a unique precedent, artists operating against market logic, disseminating/archiving information, and immortalising an undead thing. A communal sign one associates with the kind of solidarity necessary for a mutually possessive event. One in which technology, cognition, and emotion form a macro-biological wonder. Obrist question was this, ‘How can a community constitute itself on the basis of the same sign, identifiable to all, yet peculiar to each person? The first part of the question is good, and useful to understanding Infective Fissures, although penultimately what is ‘peculiar’ to the individual just encourages privatisation in an over confident individualism. Therefore more screens are erected, curtailing growth, and owning – Une mauvaise idée. Okay, if this is a process which destroys this aesthetic event then how is it possible to safeguard it from capitulation? The best way of reading this dilemma arises in a mixture of sources:
‘Whatever ultramodernity places under the dominion of signs postmodernity Subverts with virus. As culture migrates into partial-machines (lacking an autonomous reproductive system) semiotics subsides into virotechnics. 001010101101110010110101010100110010001000101010111010000101 01100101001010001100100111001000100000000010011111100010010010101 010100001000010101001111110010010001000110100100010100101011110001 010010000100 0111 … Yes No Yes No Yes Yes No longer what does it mean? but how does it spread?xv’
‘… ultimately ends up creating a culture stretched between bulimia, steroid overdose, and personal bankruptcy. This perspective—one of more traditional Cultural Studies—views image spam as an instrument of coercive persuasion as well as of insidious seduction, and leads to the oblivious pleasures of surrendering to both.xvi’
The most radical aspect of the failed Infective Fissure, ‘No Ghost Just A Shell’ (1999-2003) was brought up when Olbrist and Perrano interviewed Jean Claude Ameisen, an immunologist. Ameisen asks, ‘Can something live without death being present?’ a question which really takes the event under scrutiny into confrontation with its postmodern locality. Above, the rouge British thinker Nick Land is first to offer one’s discussion room to find its way. Moreover, the movement of the sign into virotechnics is of the up most importance for this discussion. So, after the stream of binary code Land points us again to the social question: how to transmit, avoid quarantine, and support artistic contamination? The nuances of this question coalesce with media artist, and thinker Hito Steyrel’s words. One translates her aptly named book ‘The Wretched Of The Screen’ (2012) as perhaps the best source to see the problems Infective Fissures encounter as and when they happen. One wonders if she would agree? That even Land’s ‘Hypervirus’ a super addictive art form yet to materialise has to somehow defeat this wretched screen.
Speaking about this with a Deluezian accent one becomes aware that instead of enabling the deterritorialization of this event. The screen behaves as a divisive surface inviting a politics of consumption and evaluation, rather than perception. If we delve deeper into Steyrel and Land’s texts we see the problem with more clarity. Currently the artwork and the surfaces it is presented on are still presented as objects in markets. So, artists if they wish to live in a genuinely emancipated society that can regularly experience Infective Fissures. They have to find ways of exercising their agency and assimilating persuasion and seduction outside of ownership. This involves a narrative that has to meander its way around the dehumanising forces of currency internal to postmodernity. Rancière’s notion of revolutionary aesthetics is useful in generating resistance against what Steyrel brilliantly describes: current changes in visual culture. Particularly haunting notions include the ‘poor image’, and the potential for the virus to be mere spam of the earth. Steyrel also has disdain for the sanitising screen, ‘TV has become a medium inextricably linked to the parading and ridiculing of lower classes.xvii’. Polluting the screen with ever more powerful strains of art is her call.
One individual that is undoubtedly answering this demand is the American artist Joseph Nechvatal. In a two year period (1991-1993) he pioneered a unique practice that resulted in the creation of an extremely original way of making art. Nechvatal uses his own vocabulary to explain his art. Viractualism is a specific exploration of the interfaces between the technological and the biological. This thinking is strewn throughout this artist’s defining work. In his (2015) exhibition bOdy pandemOnium: Immersion into Noise works on display manipulate these new possibilities and showcases all the revolutionary force of new aesthetics. The reason Nechvatal’s work and Viractualism could be the definitive example of what an Infective Fissure actually resembles. Certain essential qualities are obviously present: 1) the works are collaboratively made with at least one other person. 2) The exhibition features a method that actively embraces the degradation of the image and its information.
Nevertheless, maintaining a critical analysis one has to confess that there is something still missing from this art, that makes me suggest Nechvatal as the artist who next to Philipe Perrano and Peirre Huyghe is thus-far been the closest to realising the event one has attempted to describe. One is sceptical because if you look at Nechvatal’s ‘Viral Venture’ (2011), and his painterly ‘Alife’ method (surely one of the best fusions of programming, animation, virtual reality, and biological simulation?), at no point is the audience/perceiver of this work invited in to participate in the act of creation. One deeply agrees with Nechvatal’s articulation of his creations, ‘art and the history of technology are often marked by ruptures, and most histories overlook moments where “deep fusion” occurs’ and ‘This is important because it represents the seminal function that occurs between the wild real-time and the captured/protected.xix’. Yet, until the audience transforms from passive consumer to active participant, and is invited as co-author into the moment of creation. This event will remain marginal meaning one has been thinking through an event of the near future. A future where more and more people are free to engage with art because the world has accepted universal income in response to the continued debilitating qualities of grossly unequal financial ideologies.
Infective Fissures may be happening now in the creative practices of the younger generations, the teens that are so accustomed to lightning fast communication will welcome market diversification. For this progression to happen the current impetus has to be on stressing the importance of the virus itself? What one desires to stress is that the current phenomena so visible is that ‘appropriation’ is an undead replication of non living things. Resulting in the necessity of fully promoting just how radical this change could be? If one needs even more intellectual evidence? More deconstruction of the concepts at stake then one points you to Jacques Derrida’s idea of a dissimulated contamination, and William S. Burroughs’s ‘The Electronic Revolution’ (1970), both suffice to deepen the profile of the virus and the event which enables its encounter. As Burrough’s explains quoting a scientist by the name of Mr. Wilson Smith.
‘Viruses are obligatory cellular parasites and are thus wholly dependant upon the integrity of the cellular systems they parasitize for their survival in an active state. It is something of a paradox that many viruses ultimately destroy the cells in which they are living…xx’
It is not that paradoxical anymore! The destruction at the cellular level took place in the relentless march of science and its technologies. Whereas it is a shame that it was not the coin instead of the cell? Joining these two realisations together creates an Infective Fissure; if, and only if humans embrace certain facts. Hidden inside our creative economy is a need not to repress sexuality, and at the same time master it?
Because the very same forces involved in successful reproduction are both controlling and liberating. Humorously the initials of one’s theoretical event combine to suggest a type of artistic infertility treatment? But, this is overdoing it and far from being unrealistic Infective Fissures are events that are not only set to increase. Moreover, as more and more of us become radically unhappy with a revolting pictorial reality again portrayed by Steyrel, ‘According to the pictures dispersed via image spam, humanity consists of scantily dressed degree-holders with jolly smiles enhanced by orth-odontic braces.xxi’. People will continue to succumb to the market’s overly monopolising malware. Unless the event called an I.F and those experiencing it cultivates a more confident relation to what Derrida acknowledged as παρασιτος (Parasitos), or always eating at the table of anotherxxii. Next to behaviour Nick Land clearly observed in the computational schizo-creation, called hypervirus, ‘yes yes no yes no nomadically abstracting its processes from specific media (DNA, words, symbolic models, bit-sequences), and operantly re-engineering itself… ROM is melted into recursive experimentationxxiii.’ If this clear structural evidence in support of Infective Fissures is not algorithmically acceptable, then putting it simply: the browser will close, and the event will be thrown in the trash bin of theory. Hopefully after reading this PET scan of an essay you also wish to experience an I.F, and come to agree with one’s belief. It is not that art should be like a virus, the understanding rests in appreciating it exists as a virus. Please, brace yourself for your next infection? Seek it out, share, and rejoice in the free contamination?3
- I wanted to add sentences about Stuxnetthe weaponised computer virus that shut down Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010. It is unavoidable, that we play with words: ‘Politically we need this virus lest we be just rendered useless fearing power and just stuck on a nuclear net! The work of Hannah Perry, her recent exhibition ‘Viruses Worth Spreading’ at Arsenal Contemporary, in New York could also if it had slightly more collaborative distribution, and less commercial aspects serve as an example of an Infective Fissure.
- Edgor Kraft, Virtual Amplification, Personal Project, Video Loop, 01:20, (2011) <https://vimeo.com/23609366> [accessed 26th October 2014]
- Rod Stoneman, Seeing Is Believing: The Politics Of The Visual – Recycled Electrons, Black Dog Publishing, London, p.169, (2013)
- Brian Knappenberger, We Are Legion: The Story Of Hacktivist’s, Documentary Film, Luminant Films, (2012)
- Victor Burgin, The Absence Of Presence, 1965 to 1972 – When Attitudes Became Form, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, & Edinbrugh, p.17-24, (1984) [Art In Theory 1900 – 2000: An Anthology Of Changing Ideas, Blackwell Publishing, USA, p.1071, (2003)]
- Lori Wike, Photographs And Signatures: Absence, Presence, and Temporality In Barthes And
Derrida, In[]visible Culture: An Electronic Journal For Visual Studies, Rochester.edu, (2000) <http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/wike.htm>%5Baccessed 2nd November 2014]
volatility/> [accessed 2nd November 2014]
viiiFranco Berardi (Bifo), Proliferating Futures, Vol 1 #4, Winter/Spring (1996) [Proud To Be Flesh:, Mute Publishing/Autonomedia, London/New York, p.41, (2009)
- Sigmund Freud, The Ego And The Id,The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 1-66.
- ( 1923 Das Ich Und Das Es,Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: Internationaler Psycho-analytischer Verlag. Pp. 77.)
- Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity; Seeing Sense,Macmillan, (1986) pg60- 61
- Jacques Rancière, trans. Gabriel Rockhill,The Politics of The Aesthetics: The Distribution of TheSensible, Continuum, New York (2004) pg32
- Hito Steyrel, The Wretched of the Screen,E-flux Journal, Sternberg Press, Berlin, (2012) pg.10
- Viro de Graphe-Matician, On Jacques Derrida’s Parasitology,February 8, (2011) <https://virographematics.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/parasite-auto-immunity-jacques-derrida/>%5Baccessed 10th August 2017]
- Marcia Tanner, Requiem for a Mail Order Bride (Review of Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s‘No Ghost Just a Shell’ San Francisco Museum of Modern Art December 14, 2002) Stretcher, Online Magazine, <http://www.stretcher.org/features/no_ghost_just_a_shell/>{Accessed 12/08/2017}
- Nick Land. Ed, Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007; Hypervirus, Urbanomic, Sequence Press, London/New York (2012), pg383
- Hito Steyrel, The Wretched of the Screen, pg162.
- William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution,Ubuclassics, (2005), originally published by Expanded Media Editions (1970)
- Hito Steyrel, The Wretched of the Screen, pg162.
