[iDC] Enduring Messaging: are microcommunications an art form? Tom Sherman 2008

[Tom Sherman]

[the following text first appeared in the Fall issue, Vol. 25, No. 3, of Canadian Art, Toronto, September 2008]


Enduring Messaging: are microcommunications an art form?

by Tom Sherman, 2008    twsherma at syr.edu


           The 21st century is awash with messaging. Instant messaging, text messaging, voice messaging, email and social-networking profiles with digital photos and video galore. Messages are traded in real time and left all over the place to be picked up later. Messages are signals that confirm and reaffirm one's presence. I send messages daily, hourly, periodically and relentlessly; therefore, I exist, and control the way I'm perceived, to a certain extent.

           Microcommunication technologies adorn our bodies. This gear augments our senses and teleports our appearance. Where are you now? I'm over here. I feel like getting a bite to eat. I'm all dressed up and looking for action. Listen to me. Check out my new look. I'm completely up to date. I'm wired and I smell good.

           Messaging is where it's at. Meat space is still ground zero. Our physical bodies are the base track, the flesh and bones architecture for our fashion statements. But we are connected to satellites and a vast menu of other social worlds through little screens, buttons and earphones. The rhythm of our walk is punctuated with ring tones, beeps and voices that come out of nowhere. There is no such thing as an interruption anymore: attention is defined as the heavily perforated veil of our consciousness. I give away my attention by the split second to incoming traffic. The mobile phone I pack demands my voice and fingertips and mug shot. My phone is my lifeline, a sweet nothing, a rant waiting to happen, my eyes and ears at a distance-a game, television, jukebox, tiny movie theatre and art gallery.

          Back in the mid-1960s, prominent artists like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys were saying that everyone was an artist and anything could be art. Few took them seriously. Warhol said he wanted to be a machine so he could make and spew out images without giving a thought to their meaning. Beuys was one of the last German romantics. He said everyone in our societies, including the bakers and bankers, had great creative potential that they should and must realize, or our societies would fail. Surely Warhol and Beuys were tossing rhetorical grenades to threaten the status quo of an art world straitjacketed by the marketplace-driven conformity of galleries and museums. Stuffy, elite, commodifiable art was wearing very thin in that volatile epoch of civil rights and emerging ecological awareness. Fluxus and neo-Dada sentiments were making a lot of sense. Art has always had a tendency to define and segregate itself, to pull away from life through refined aesthetics and social and economic exclusivity. Art and life must be reunited in a major way from time to time.

          Of course, Warhol and Beuys did very nicely in the system they were attacking. They understood that art was about ideas and social energy, and that materialistic cultures would attribute great value to drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture, the hard currency of creativity that anchored magnitudes of free-flowing ideas and images. Warhol made art about publicity, celebrity and ubiquity. Beuys built social sculptures, transforming dialogue into political organization, methodically and comprehensively. Both changed art radically for the balance of the 20th century and into the millennial decade.

          We are now scurrying around in this post-historical heaven or hell (depending on how you look at it), a hybrid space where anything and everything goes. There are patterns of organization, pockets of order within chaos: classic natural forms are overwhelmed by the ornate clutter of glue-gun assemblage; photography and video get bigger and brighter than paintings; theatrical cinema dies and is reborn on the walls of museums; abstraction and geometry make a comeback. The figure and hand are everywhere again. The artist makes something out of nothing (quilts made from belly-button lint); the artist takes rare and valuable things and reduces them to rubble (smashing violins and pianos in acts of reverse alchemy).

          The early 21st century is a time of collapsing boundaries: between disciplines and roles, between nations and societies, between corporations and institutions and networks. Art and life are no longer easily differentiated categories of experience. Great masses of individuals across the globe are acting like artists, composing and grooming self-portraits and building their own social sculptures on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. Locative technologies, mobile telephony and computing, including GPS, encourage the exploration of landscape and reports from the road. Digital photography and streaming video pour into riptides of voice and text messaging.

          A lot of this social-networking activity involves simply using micro-telecommunications technology, wireless transceivers, to develop identity/security blankets, a way of fighting against the crushing void and lonely vacuum of urban life. Artists have always sought attention for similar selfish, survivalist reasons. For those who choose to fortify their identities through social discourse, there are plenty of good socio-political reasons to send messages, such as collapsing civil liberties and environmental devastation. Networks are a dream come true for activists of all stripes.

          There is little money to be made in personal messaging today. Messaging doesn't pay unless one is manufacturing or selling a messaging device, or owns and manages a network, or authors software for social networking, unless the messaging activity is directly linked to supporting currencies of scarcity and exclusivity such as the stock market, bonds, real estate, precious metals, unique physical objects, limited editions, "smokestack" media like television or movies or the transformation of celebrity into rare live appearances. Messages that support these firmer, more economically viable activities function as references, instructions and indexing mechanisms for the economy of scarcity.

          Untethered personal messages, discrete and free-flowing, have little concrete value on their own. Messages by their nature are fleeting, short-lived and impermanent. For the most part, messages are not archived, although virtually all messages are retrievable by date and time. Increasingly, place is also embedded into a message, thanks to packet switching and global-positioning systems. Occasionally, recorded messages are used effectively in criminal cases, where their content, date, time of issue and place of origin establish evidence of guilt.

          It is interesting that Andy Warhol published transcripts of his recorded phone conversations in his 1968 book A: A Novel, and that Joseph Beuys went to some trouble to document his public interventions, defining his dialogues with his audience as public sculptures, experiments in distributed or decentralized authorship. For Beuys, a failure to control the content or flow of a public meeting was not a sign of an unsuccessful interaction within the social sphere: the record of engagement became the currency of involvement.

          Today, personal messaging is our primary mode of communication. Messaging is the act of going public with a thought or image or video stream instantly, hourly, daily-a kind of thinking out loud or speaking in media. Marshall McLuhan predicted a return to orality with the introduction of electronic, speed-of-light modes of communication. How much fun would it be to bring McLuhan back to life and hand him an iPhone!? Today's digital, electronic orality is practised across a full range of media.

         The act of writing a novel, or spending a year improvising in a studio before bringing out a suite of paintings for a public exhibition, or pulling together the resources to make a feature film, is a different kind of communication: perhaps Messaging with a very large capital M! With these more deeply considered, more substantial compositions, value is created by concentrating thought and action into a self-critical, rigorous process of refinement and selection, leading to releases of greater complexity, density and scale. Surely a work of art and a phone call made to order a pizza are not the same kind of message. As storm after storm of raw messaging rages and howls, maybe the public's hunger for considered, seasoned releases of well-cooked art will increase and deepen, and traditionally respected art activities, no matter how arcane (or perhaps the more arcane the better), will be appreciated and devoured by people with a natural immunity to psychologically and socially addictive messaging behaviour?

         The problem with a strategy of Messaging in-depth (art is Messaging with a capital M) is that you may become too deep for your audience. In the 21st century this increasingly means just about any audience. The absolute erosion of our attention spans and our lack of compassion for anomalous, eccentric, complicated thinking have contributed to a profound diminishment in the global appetite for resolved art. Scanning the surface, skimming and searching for patterns and sharing reactions through more-or-less constant real-time banter (instant collective feedback) is the most common mode of perception for the time we live in. Launching open-ended, unfinished statements that elicit equally open-ended, generative responses, like a never-ending phone conversation or a rapid-fire instant-message exchange, is the order of the day.

         Can personal messaging, the quick and dirty, fragmented messaging that is inseparable from daily life, be considered an art form? The easiest argument against ordinary messaging as an art form involves lack of quality. Most of the millions of messages issued everyday are inconsequential and inane. Then there is the broader doubt about whether something so common has any value. People are quick to point out that while there may be millions of passionate, intelligent, creative people authoring messages, freshening up self-portraits, defining social scenes and highlighting landscapes and locales on MySpace, Facebook or YouTube, how can anyone find exemplary individuals amid the clamour and roar of the networks? How would we identify and enhance the profile of truly remarkable artists without institutions like galleries and museums and their gatekeepers-the critics, curators and dedicated audiences supporting these institutions? Can important innovators and role models emerge in cultures dominated by inclusive, indiscriminate networks? Networks to date haven't functioned like galleries and museums, catalogues or magazines. And don't these massive social networks engineer psychological and social conformity through their software templates?

         The problem with messaging is that the vast majority of messages don't add up to anything substantial and they don't last. The massive quantity, habitual banality and short life of messages work against messaging as an art form. Messages are disposable and impermanent. No one can stay on top of messaging-archiving messaging is a nightmarish problem. Even if enough digital memory were to exist to archive everyone's messages, how then would we find anything interesting in the glut? CSIS, the CIA and Google are working on this problem. Maybe someday soon quality artists will be plucked out of the din like terrorists?

         Maybe someday there will be clusters of messages, retrospectively assembled by discriminating individuals, that will endure and find audiences well into the future. Correspondence (anything from love letters to key arguments over aesthetics or business decisions) will no longer just form an informative background or context for artworks. Figure/ground relationships will be completely inverted-the ground will rise up to become an undulating surface of spotlit figures as hungry audiences pan through message dumps searching for significant exchanges. Looking for needles in a haystack will become the most critical and alluring quest of all. In an information economy characterized by abundance, the new scarcity and value will lie in identifying and verifying information-rich messages that were once cloaked by privacy and obscurity. Encryption and deception will not prevent audiences from digging up messages of exceptional value.

         More than four decades ago, Warhol and Beuys offered prototypical directions for giving aesthetic form to messaging, for exalting vernacular communication. For Warhol, creating a database of personal messages, be they recorded phone conversations or quick and dirty Polaroid portraits, was a kind of research and at the same time a new kind of creative notation, a highly textured record of social interactions. Beuys recorded lengthy verbal wrestling matches in halls full of people, stressing quality over quantity as he struggled to maintain the integrity of his romantic and very green agenda. He used video recordings of his social sculptures as mediated sources of feedback that allowed him to gain strength and focus before leaping again and again into deliciously complicated and unmanageable public debates. Both Warhol and Beuys then issued countless limited-edition prints and multiples as the tissue and sinew of their respective extensive bodies of messages.

         Today, messaging surrounds art and artists with the roar of the vernacular velocity of information. Copy and paste has evolved into ripping and stripping image, sound and text files in preparation for replication, sharing and transfiguration. Compression and decompression create equivalence between messages of different material densities and very diverse content. It is no longer possible to determine the significance or place of a certain class of image or artwork. Audiences for culture and art, just like artists, navigate and concurrently propagate torrents of messages.

        The predominant voices of the millennial decade are vernacular voices, the voices of the people, in all sectors of society, armed with digital cameras, MP3 players, laptops, personal digital assistants, avatars and videophones-miniature wireless transceivers linked by global high-speed networks and spewing multimedia. Individuals of all stripes are now functioning the way only broadcasters used to, transmitting and relaying information around the clock. With copyright essentially broken, the volume and diversity of exchange are unprecedented.

       Maybe someday, common everyday messaging will be considered an art form, forcing everyone to operate with more style and aesthetic integrity if they hope for any attention. If exclusivity and innovativeness remain necessary criteria for defining art, then surely there are pockets of value, absolute gems within the drone? Vast segments of our societies, functioning the way artists, curators, reviewers and critics have functioned in the past, are already asking this question as they contribute unwittingly to a new aesthetic, purpose and definition of art in a frenzied, open-source orgy of messaging. 


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