WikiPedia as Art?
Posted by patrick lichty on February 14, 2009 3:10 pm
On WIKI as Art
On Valentine's Day 2009, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern launched the Wikipedia art page, which resonated with the history of media art, authorship, and media formalism on many levels. Has this particular piece updated Beuys' admonition of the openness of art? Not only that, does art based on open Web 2.0 standards like the Wiki define art that is a palimpsest by definition? What is interesting yet disturbing about this is not only the obliteration of discrete authorship, but the total indeterminacy of intellectual ownership whatsoever.
For example, what happens when the conceptual work of art is left open, such as Douglas Davis “World's First Collaborative Sentence”, but is allowed to be opened to anyone, without “gatekeeping”, and the work is open to repetitive writing and re-writing to the point where it is possible that the only remnant is the gesture itself. I'm sure that Kildall & Stern, and their initial collaborators will be documented as the progenitor of the form, but the destination of the vector is by no means assured.
This is very similar to Andrew Keen's complaints of Wikipedia as being an unreasonable request upon internet society to create cultural foundations (encyclopedias, art media, etc) without compensation, thus devaluing production. However, is this devaluing of production an Achilles' Heel of cultural production and economics in the digital age including the proposed “Web 3.0” in which producers meet and produce for one another for free under the aegis of the provider, signifying the ongoing “race to the bottom” or concentration of wealth? Is it a byproduct of the hypercapitalistic devaluation of goods and services, or an updating of the conceptual work of art? In the online work of art, there is a gravity that remains with the author, even in the piece of net art, but in Wikimedia/Wikipedia art, the work becomes solely a locus initiated by agents, and left for intervention.
But again, left as a discursive Web 2.0 Exquisite Corpse, each visitor invited to complete the work, what becomes of it? I have recently been considering in terms of threads and moment of translation, such as my text on Duchamp->Hamilton->Ascott (Dada to Pop to New Media), and links involving Abramovic->Abramovic 2005-> Mattes ->Second Front (disembodiment/decontextualization of performance art), Wikipedia art creates its own arc of representation. One could say it roots on elements of chance, also with the free association fo the Surrealists, but with the dematerialization of Conceptualism, and the anonymity of elements of Web 2.0. We could possibly draw the epistemic arc of Wikipedia Art as Breton ->Klein/Manzoni or Debord or Cage/Fluxus->Davis->Kildall/Stern. However, as the inception of the genre is minutes old at time of this writing, my speculation is of the highest order.
Therefore I ask, whether Wiki can be made as art... However, as a writer who is about to write a chapter in a book on distributed narratives, my position is that it can, but its indeterminacy makes it largely conceptual, and slippery at best, making it a strong relative of networked conceptualism or highly formal online media art. It will be interesting to see if it does, in fact become a genre, and what form it will take. But I hope this winds up in the Wiki, and you can have your way with it as you will.
On Valentine's Day 2009, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern launched the Wikipedia art page, which resonated with the history of media art, authorship, and media formalism on many levels. Has this particular piece updated Beuys' admonition of the openness of art? Not only that, does art based on open Web 2.0 standards like the Wiki define art that is a palimpsest by definition? What is interesting yet disturbing about this is not only the obliteration of discrete authorship, but the total indeterminacy of intellectual ownership whatsoever.
For example, what happens when the conceptual work of art is left open, such as Douglas Davis “World's First Collaborative Sentence”, but is allowed to be opened to anyone, without “gatekeeping”, and the work is open to repetitive writing and re-writing to the point where it is possible that the only remnant is the gesture itself. I'm sure that Kildall & Stern, and their initial collaborators will be documented as the progenitor of the form, but the destination of the vector is by no means assured.
This is very similar to Andrew Keen's complaints of Wikipedia as being an unreasonable request upon internet society to create cultural foundations (encyclopedias, art media, etc) without compensation, thus devaluing production. However, is this devaluing of production an Achilles' Heel of cultural production and economics in the digital age including the proposed “Web 3.0” in which producers meet and produce for one another for free under the aegis of the provider, signifying the ongoing “race to the bottom” or concentration of wealth? Is it a byproduct of the hypercapitalistic devaluation of goods and services, or an updating of the conceptual work of art? In the online work of art, there is a gravity that remains with the author, even in the piece of net art, but in Wikimedia/Wikipedia art, the work becomes solely a locus initiated by agents, and left for intervention.
But again, left as a discursive Web 2.0 Exquisite Corpse, each visitor invited to complete the work, what becomes of it? I have recently been considering in terms of threads and moment of translation, such as my text on Duchamp->Hamilton->Ascott (Dada to Pop to New Media), and links involving Abramovic->Abramovic 2005-> Mattes ->Second Front (disembodiment/decontextualization of performance art), Wikipedia art creates its own arc of representation. One could say it roots on elements of chance, also with the free association fo the Surrealists, but with the dematerialization of Conceptualism, and the anonymity of elements of Web 2.0. We could possibly draw the epistemic arc of Wikipedia Art as Breton ->Klein/Manzoni or Debord or Cage/Fluxus->Davis->Kildall/Stern. However, as the inception of the genre is minutes old at time of this writing, my speculation is of the highest order.
Therefore I ask, whether Wiki can be made as art... However, as a writer who is about to write a chapter in a book on distributed narratives, my position is that it can, but its indeterminacy makes it largely conceptual, and slippery at best, making it a strong relative of networked conceptualism or highly formal online media art. It will be interesting to see if it does, in fact become a genre, and what form it will take. But I hope this winds up in the Wiki, and you can have your way with it as you will.
I'd add Douglas Rushkoff to the wiki-art canon:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/851
Below are some thoughts from a recent interview I gave that seem relevant, particularly regarding the "discreteness" of the art object. Benjamin pinpointed the decay of the "original" auratic art object. Fluxus, Cage, and Kaprow challenged the primacy of any single instantiation of the art object, replacing it with open-ended instructions that led to an infinite number of variable instantiations. (Theater and "classical" western musical notation had already done this, they just didn't realize it. No two performances of "The Tempest" are ever exactly alike.) My practice has led me to question the "discreteness" of an art "work." Perhaps "canonizability" or "recognizability" or "attributability" are better terms.
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I am currently interested (from a critical and artistic perspective) in online meme dispersal, microcosmic and macrocosmic ways of modulating culture, hijacking specific google search terms, web surfing as a form of subjective narration, marketing/mind-control, and invisibility via hyper-saturation. Alex Galloway suggests that the destruction of the network is already inherent and dormant in its own architecture. The way to achieve this collapse is via hypertrophy -- pushing the network beyond what it is capable of sustaining. To me, this suggests establishing thousands of mySpace, Twitter, youTube, and delicious accounts, and pummeling the network with rigorously purposeful, (de/re)contextualized media -- to play the entire network as one huge, nefarious instrument. What is sacrificed in the ability to subtly control any single piece of media is made up for by the accumulation of massive agency. This is a dangerous proposition.
I'm proposing a form of resistant/tactical media, but one not afraid to co-opt and implement corporate consumer strategies. It is simultaneously subversive and overt. It is fluid enough to have discrete manifestations in offline galleries, to take on non-"new media" forms, to assume the form of critical essays, books, and talks. It is basically a project of ongoing, widely-dispersed, inflected language...
If, as an artist, I "play" the entire network as my instrument, then I don't have to wait for some art organization to curate my "work," because my work is an ongoing performance of the network. If I can hijack google and cause it to display the images and links I want for the key words that I choose to appropriate, then I blur the line between performance, marketing, and mind-control. I am no longer trying to drive people to my discrete piece of online art work, as contextualized and labeled by an online arts organization. The search results that people get when they do a key word search at google is itself my art performance...
It gets even more interesting from the perspective of an academic researcher and writer. What is the value of online listserv and bulletin board dialogue compared to having a peer-reviewed article published in an offline academic journal? What is the value of talking to a bunch of commercial web designers about web design praxis compared to talking to a few academics and curators about net art theory? For that matter, what is the value of teaching a bunch of students how to make art compared to making art myself? The good news is, I don't have to commit to just one approach.
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I would add that un-canonizability is not limited to wikimeda. The person who first rickrolled, or the person who posted the first screenshots that eventually led to "all your base are belong to us," -- these people are not simply anonymous by preference; they are historically undocumented and journalistically unknown. These moves could be considered "The Practice of Everyday Life" Online. They already have their own agency. To classify them as "art" arguably limits their original agency by sequestering and quarantining them.
I am interested in where your research leads on this topic. I'm particularly interested in the (pre-net) historical precedences you choose to track. de Certeau, Debord, and even McLuhan seem useful in this regard. Was May '68 the most (un)spectacular art performance of the 20th Century? Is it Debord's "piece?" Does it matter?
Best,
Curt
Took a romantic holiday yesterday and missed the entire thing...
Where can one find the discussion? It looks like it's gone for good? I'm looking here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Art
answering my own question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Wikipedia_Art
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I find it interesting that the Wikipedians can't seem to understand that doing it *on* Wikipedia is just as much part of the project as the 'wiki art' part of the project. Making a collaborative artwork on a wiki isn't very interesting. But doing an intervention on Wikipedia becomes interesting as the archived debate becomes the artwork.
But I can sympathize with the Wikipedians. If these Wikipedia art interventions became a popular game it would become vandalism (the resources to clean them up would become burdensome to the volunteers). But just this one is fun.
[...]
What makes this one so special?'
Behind the encyclopedia is a notion of human knowledge as a totality (Aristotle). Such a self-referential article, then, calls attention to Wikipedia as a thing among others, breaking that totality. An encyclopedia needs a sacred space from which to look (describe) and to be looked at (peer review). (Celibate machine? As in science, observer ain't observed. Freud does not himself pen the article about him.)
To some extent the encyclopedia inherits something of the epic, in that requirement of sacred space. Homer's litanies served as an encyclopedic reference for Greek historians. The Puranas likewise did for Indians. The Bible is an obvious case. Yet these and other epics have shown themselves quite capable of self-reference, recursive narrative time, parrhesia, and the artist's speech act (see Curt Cloninger on this somewhere in the middle of http://rhizome.org/discuss-1.1/discuss-threaded_popup.php?t=article-2234). These don't break the epic's sacred space, but they appear to break the encyclopedia's. Probably because the encyclopedist's speech act is more like the scientist's.
Sigh, I'm about to get C. P. Snow-balled. Or epic p0wned.
Regarding the "sacred space" you mention. Wikipedia has that. It's the discussion page for each entry.
“Regarding the "sacred space" you mention. Wikipedia has that. It's the discussion page for each entry.”
I agree.
“I was expecting to get snow-balled/p0wned for playing the devil's advocate but Rhizome just ain't what it used to be, eh?”
Heheh, Rhizome has never been what it used to be, which makes it Rhizome, I guess!
I was just frustrated with what I had written in response to your post.
Snowball frustration since I start to draw a distinction between artistic and scientific epistemes that can slippery slope / snowball into C.P. Snow's old “Two Cultures” rant (why not a Wikipedia article! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures).
Epic p0wn frustration since, well, I got epic p0wned over in that epic net art thread on various angles and beaten giving up on the idea of epic net art, but the idea dies hard. The saga continues. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Wikipedia_Art
Why is it special - It's not - any more than anything else - except for that it is happening, and in such a way that is is causing some degree of debate and discussion, some degree of questioning. You could argue that that is happening everywhere - we might as well include some debate on a celebrity blog as worthy and interesting art. How Silly! Or the old story everyone's heard - what make it art - of the person off the street going to the museum and seeing a big blue canvas ( or what ever artwork you like - insert) and saying why the heck is that art - I could do that - my kid could do that! ) but they didn't. The artist did. But some one else will come along and as '
Blue' & 'Square' ah yes - profound.
In this case what I find interesting is precisely the intervention on the notion of encyclopedic in general - as well as the current manifestation in our contemporary context of the virtual encyclopedic, collaboratively edited, by some but not all, ever changing yet static (by the rules of insertion and inclusion ) repository of what is - Wikipedia Truth. Just like the blue square painting suggest for some a meditation on basic visual parameters of general ocular experience truth - the wiki art pedic act seems to raise questions, among others, of the purpose and necessarily? dogmatic need for encyclopedic repositories, and/or how that repository is maintained, and by whom. What kinds of people do the work of maintaining this service to our collective society. Well in this case apparently some of them who have little patience for exercises in art (their prerogative in their given task - yes agreed), and in the interesting case of the finger that finally pulled the trigger on Wikipedia Art - an 18 year old kid who disdains democracy.
http://tinyurl.com/akvlga
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Werdna
Thats interesting! If it makes people begin to dig, to question what are we preserving in our attempted encyclopedic knowledge and our organization of virtual repository projects of knowledge Data. For what purpose does Knowledge data serve if not to provide us with insight upon which to act more skillfully in the present moment. To reflect and then Act - 'More Better'
Does The Wikipedia Art project do that? For all of us? I don't know.. apparently for me yes.
But I guess in the end, for it to matter we have to have some consensus - in which case if we do it will be ART cause WE decided to make it matter, and then WE will include it in an Encyclopedia somewhere as a reference - How Fun!
http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/02/16/wikipedia-art-lasts-all-day/