On Internet and Internet Cinema
What life doth?
Obstacle 1: The Internet Is Not An Object
“Baby girl, you know what I want
Let me do it to ya, do it to ya
Let me do ya like
Uh, uh-uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh”
Modern criticism of the “Internet” and its relation to art seem to focus primarily on the notion that the Internet exists as something “novel,” eg, exterior to everyday relations and as such something that must be “signaled” to through reference, in particular that of the visual variety. This takes the form of, in its weakest manifestations, ideas like:
Painted memes
Anime art
Computer, but its a cross
Computer, but its a cross, but its on an iPhone
Computer, but evil
iPhone, but evil
iPhone, but good
This is not good art. The fundamental thesis of work like this rests on the presumption that the Internet and its language, eg, its images, are something to be farmed for a revelation that the artist “reveals” to the ignorant masses. But this is simply inaccurate with regards to contemporary life - everyone has a phone. Everyone is on the Internet. A painting of a meme, for instance, is, when “read” as art, a sentence devoid of syntax, not in such a way as to bypass biopolitical filtration, but rather as a half-formed, incoherent, self-effacing run on sentence. When we understand the image as word, the image explicated by referential art collapses linguistic distinction into slop. In the creation of works like these what is in essence done is no different than a Subway Surfers montage overlaid with a Reddit Scary Story. There is no affect in failed pieces like these, which, in turn, negates the image and in doing so violates its autonomy on a fundamental level. The image, referencing nothing exterior to itself, functionally acts as a degradation of art, eg a product placement. The image cannot claim affect because the image cannot speak for itself, and in doing so, cannot claim autonomy. What we then can note definitely is that it is a fundamental error to view the Internet as an object. The Internet is not static (in both senses of that word). The Internet is a fundamental extension of human consciousness, just as the television, radio, and printing press were before it. As such when working artistically with the Internet its content needs to be given form and voice, rather than provided as received. To simply “depict the Internet” means to self-reify and brutally subjugate the image to a life of servitude… it’s cruel! Now this fundamentally presents a dilemma for the aspiring Internet artist - what does it mean to operate with the knowledge of the Internet as a collective mainframe for human thought? The noetic quality of the online is fundamentally flawed and requires a human hand to raise to fullest form - so what does this mean for art?
Obstacle 2: All Art Is Internet Art
“The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls
Make noises for company
Long distance callers make long distance calls
And the silence makes me lonely”
All art is preceded by its image. As noted by Artie Vierkant in 2010:
“The second aspect of art after the Internet deals with not the nature of the art object but the nature of its reception and social presence.”1
The image forms, as previously stated, a word or unit of linguistic expression. When working in conjunction with the Internet, it becomes imperative to understand the image produced by the artwork as inherently existing in relation and conversation with the Internet. No matter the medium, be it a painting, sculpture, photograph, or video, your art is INTRINSICALLY Internet art, because it inherently exists simultaneously as something in the “real” (or devirtualized) world and in the online (or virtualized) world. As such any artist working today is an internet artist at birth, and should understand themselves and the images they produce as being not just in dialogue with the typical arts crowd, but the entirety of the global consciousness. Because of the degree of saturation the Internet has produced with regards to images, the space a singular image occupies is now no longer just a particular frame but a cosmic, borderless non-frame, one that stretches from iPhone to computer to television to radio. “Mechanical reproduction” has become “information reproduction,” and images are the foot soldiers in a massive war to shape the emergent global network consciousness.
The “Internet artist”, in their highest form is therefore a linguistic conductor. The Internet artist transforms themselves into a conduit for the explication of human relations and consciousness through the medium of the art-object - which is in turn, of course, always inherently the image-object. This means that a work of art produced which takes its only basis for existence as signaling the artist’s involvement online is simply redundant - but not just redundant, but unfair to the image! Every work of art produced post-internet has two forms, its base, “real” form, which is almost always subservient to its debased, “surreal” form, that which exists online and by extension in the brains of info-consumers worldwide. A painting of a meme, or a sculpture of a popular Internet persona, therefore, is an self-masturbatory, redundant, hyper-image. In works like these the inherently dominating character of the sign implicit in the image takes charge and dissolves any liberatory potential left in the image, making it a reproduction of a reproduction, a commodity perfectly distilled to its essence, a pure nothingness. The image needs something to anchor it, to refer it outwardly, to extinguish itself and be freed from the domain of the sign.
ERGO
The art object is always inherently the image object, meaning the image is the unit of language itself, NOT the art. As such artwork containing Internet-derived imagery or themes must by necessity refer to something external to itself, because in not doing so the image fails to function as language and collapses into representation and reification - devolving into something “beneath” art - the commodity. In the age of brainrot and sloptimism it should be all the more evident why a simple reproduction of the existing features of Internet production - content - would be, on its most basic level, the production of bad, non-art.
The production of merely self-referential “art” is the production not of “art” in a meaningful sense, but content, content that is easily consumed and spat back out by mass media and the information economy. To produce “content” is to be not an artist but a designer, an artisan, a craftsperson - and a lousy one at that. To produce “content” in the name of art is to engage not just in an act of self-commodification, but commodification of the audience. Within the realm of poor Internet art, the realm of the hyper-image, the audience, image-art, and artist are all united in self-debasement, self-enslavement, and quieting of the SOUL. There is nothing to be found in the lowest and worst Internet art, and it is that nothingness that makes it a commodity. The Internet artist who believes in the need for their work to explicate its roots in the virtual world mistakenly shoots themselves, accidentally reproducing the very means of their oppression.
To produce artwork is to produce non-content.
The sentence of the artwork containing a pre-existent image that refers to nothing outside itself is redundant. All art, within the context of the Internet existing, is Internet art, as it exists first and foremost as something online. Therefore artwork using sourced images that have no higher purpose are self-destructing and KITSCH. The Internet is simply the transposition of thought and action into an immaterial form - “Internet art” (that is good) is the displacement of human thought into a fuller form through careful manipulation and utilization of the image.
Obstacle 3: Drive It All Over Me
“Did you ever say Yes to one joy?
O my friends, then you said Yes to all woe as well.
"If ever you wanted one moment twice, then you wanted everything in return!”
Walk to me
and say:
when the Time
hits-
3 in the morning,
I will no longer speak to you,
the way a sea of piercing sheet once did before.
Do you understand the
complexities of
a makeshift weather-vane
One was told that
they might look to
and see the sky.
And from that place
Further back and still
Further back and still
And still
The lightning hits so clearly now
On the reflection of a pale-blue starlight suit of
Wearable leather coats
That shout out in defiant cry
“What is this world to me
but the most impure form
of that before in tedium?”
Obstacle 4: The Violence Done to the Image
“Everybody makes mistakes
But I feel alright when I come undone
You are not making me wait
But it seems alright as long as something's happening”
An image is a representation or sign denoting or showing something else.
To utilize images in art is inherently an act of appropriation, whether it be the active appropriation of photography, video recording, or in some other sense capturing something, or the passive appropriation of recycling and recontextualizing existing imagery, what is often dubbed “appropriation.”
Because of this, the image that takes itself as referential only with regards to itself functions as a devolution from linguistic expression of images-as-vocabulary. As such, the artwork aware of itself in relation to the Internet but seeking to go no further extinguishes the potentiality of meaning that it holds intrinsically within its image(s) by collapsing its place of origin back in on itself - a redundant sentence. Image NATIONALISM, basically, is the M.O. of a lot of Internet artists. An image longs to explore the world… it needs to let loose and discover itself! But bad internet artists want to keep it tied down - fuck that! A good internet artist knows that an image is more than the sum of its parts, it is more than its country of origin, it is, in fact, a beautiful and full thing reaching its fullest potential in the realm of the artwork. Because an image should be understood as having been traumatized at birth we should understand the image as inherently brutalized. The only rectification of brutality is found in growth. Artwork, then, for the image, is a process of healing. The artwork, that is, with affect. We will define affect as simply that which orients the image towards something exterior to itself - what Zoomers might call the “vibe.” No cap. When we understand images as words, and the connection of images (words) as language, we can only then assume that this language must have some form of tone - or affect. Language without tone is shape without form, content without body - but basically just shitty art. In addition, affect is unique in giving a formless form to the intrinsically disjunctive mass that is the lump deposit of the image- affect is non-narrative and non-representational, while also possessing form and shape. In this way affect circumvents the inherent problem of representation within the image, which gives the image a chance for salvation. It allows the image to be raised above its place of origin and heard, rectifying both the violence done to it and by it through releasing the latent transcendental characteristics within it. As such an image-based artwork without affect is an act of continued violence towards both the image and the author - and bad art!
Understanding the paradoxical nature of images as being both a dominant force of organization as well as a badly brutalized and abused non-object is crucial to understanding the path forward for image-based art. To utilize an existing image in its current state is intrinsically violent - just as the act of image-creation itself is intrinsically violent. The solution is to be found in a careful handling of the image, treating it like one would a flower or soft, small animal… the image should be allowed to function autonomously of its “curator” - the curator of the image should be occupying the role of the shepard, the white magician, the nurse. Image-based art is fundamentally an act of alchemical recomposition and elevation - using an image is like raising the dead. This is especially noteworthy with regards to the ways in which images intrinsically, but especially under the contemporary age of the sign, exist as part of a globalized manifestation of underlying psychic infrastructure stretching both backwards and forwards into time. The image is the result of all that came before it, but also all that will come after it. The image is formed by a compositing of previously existing “things” and will thereafter be added to the sediment of the collective unconscious; each image is a word in the tongue of the universal order, each frame a vision in the eyes of God.
Which is to say when you do not actively work to liberate the image from itself, you participate in a form of psychic terrorism.
If each image contains a base sign-value, allowing the image to extinguish its sign-value, or correct it, and develop freely of its assigned use, should be the first task of the image-maker. Playing with images is the insertion of oneself into history as an active participant, self-alignment with cosmic intelligence and the reanimation of the Earth.
If we look back on the history of abstract expressionism we can note the ways in which the painting suggested an ability to expand beyond the limitations of the canvas - in other words, the ability for the image to move beyond the limitations imposed upon it by its framing - which for painting, is enforced through the canvas. This allows the image to be granted a degree of autonomy separate from its creator - the paint becomes part of an event, something directly inserted into time and space, rather than a static place of representation. When applying this logic to image-based art - be it photography, video, or any other practice based upon a form of appropriation - the challenge put forward is the method of release for the image. How can image-based art be liberated from its confinement within the frame of the photograph, or the cut of the film, just as the painting was released from its entrapment within the traditional relation to the picture-plane?
Abstract expressionism allowed the painting’s image (or non-image) to become explicitly connected with the expression of an act. As such the painting, and the painterly image, became directly infused with affect forged through the action taken in the making of the piece. This formed a unique relation to the audience, wherein the distinction between art and life was broken down entirely, enveloping the viewer, artist, and event of the painting into one space. The image of the painting became an event in itself existing in exteriority to time and space - an active force, an event conjured by the artist in a state resembling invocation, which in turn engendered a mindset within both the artist and audience that allowed for a break from the purely representational - liberating the audience and artist through self-sacrifice in their raising of the image’s affect. In short - the abstract expressionist painter generated affect through their action, which allowed the painterly image to become something exterior to itself, and in turn, liberate both artist and image from containment within the limitations of enforced time and space and the regime of the sign.
“The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life—whether ‘moment’ means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”2
“You are summoned and gathered into one point in the continuum of duration. The picture does this to you, willy-nilly, regardless of whatever else is on your mind […] You become all attention, which means that you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention.”3
In making the painting and its image an event, the viewer and artist became enveloped within the dynamism and rhythm of the intangible (e.g., metaphysical) contained within the painting and allowed for the viewer to engage with the work in a way that engendered “seeing without seeing” - an active contemplation beyond the merely sensual. This ability to move beyond the merely representational is important, as the non-painterly image, the subject of this text, is representational intrinsically, and as such the process of cultivating an attitude similar to abstract expressionism’s metaphysical character within the non-painterly image is an act of self-negation. The simplest method of achieving this is to reutilize the image’s sign value and orient it towards something external to itself - to allow the image to enter the world of affect - which in doing so, either negates or corrects the original sign value of the image, and allows, above all, the image to gain a voice. The sign value contained within the image at its “birth” - its mark of violence done to it - is lifted from it as it takes on a new value and gains speech, one given to it by the image artist, who acts, much like the abstract expressionists, to pull the audience, artist, and image into a singular and new space, where the image and its sign can be restored to its rightful and high status that it bore before the violence of our modern age, that of the symbol in its highest and truest sense. We can better understand the original dignity of the image by understanding the world in which it originated and its foundations - those to be found in the real conception of Tradition, which is not simply habits and customs but for us a discipline and understanding operating in relation to pure metaphysics and an ontology exterior to time. On the proper meaning of the symbol, René Guénon notes:
“Symbolism is but the employing of forms or images as signs of ideas or supra-sensible things.”4
Going further, Guénon expands his thesis by noting that in the application and study of the symbolic "one must look beyond the ‘letter’ in order to discover the ‘spirit,’”5 returning later to note that “he who possesses true understanding is always the person who is able to see beyond the words.”6
Situating the meaning of the symbol as that which is immaterial, transcendental, noetic or “beyond words” is to comprehend the pathway to a fuller and more developed understanding of the role of both the image artist and their relation to the Internet through a reconnection of the image’s roots in the metaphysical and that exterior to base appearance. Further, we may understand abstract expressionism as a basis for the liberation of the image, and the role of the contemporary image artist as continuing this liberation through conceiving of both themselves and the framework developed by abstract expressionism as working within the realm of the metaphysical. From this, we can assert that the ultimate role of the image is to function as a non-object within the space of affect, or that beyond the realm of the tangible, which may allow for the re-accessing of primordial and subconscious bases underlying the structure of reality.
Obstacle 5: Towards A Total Rebirth
“Have some composure,
Where is your posture? Oh, no, no
You're pulling the trigger, pulling the trigger
All wrong”
In contemporary society the image is intrinsically tied to a sign. Prior to the advent of modernity and industrial capitalism, this sign would be more accurately termed a symbol. We can differentiate between the symbol and the sign by what they refer to - the sign is taken at its literal, face value, as an actual representation or signifier of something - whereas a symbol contains an inherently transcendental or metaphysical character that connects the viewer to something beyond the merely representational.
"When nothing of a symbol remains but its outward form, both its justification and its actual virtue have alike disappeared; the symbol has become nothing but an ‘idol,’ that is to say, a vain image.” 7
In this section from Guénon the term “idol” is used in place of what we can call the “sign.” Distinguishing between the “sign” and “image is fundamental for understanding the liberation of the image from the sign and salvation within the symbolic, and as such can be simplified to:
A sign acts within an enclosed space, a closed circuit, one imposed on it by an external force, which seeks to replicate this function onto the external world through its imposition in media networks, e.g., the Internet, television, etc…
A symbol acts within a limitless space bound to a transcendental, metaphysical “truth,” acting outside the limitations of time and space, and in contact with that going beyond the purely representational.
The symbol is more than a one to one of what it represents, it derives itself from an intangibility or noetic quality - a symbol has affect.
As such, the affective image-based artwork is on its most basic level a recalibration of the image from a sign to a symbol - and where do we find the best examples of this today?
In Dana Dawud’s Monad there exist multiple layers upon which the image(s) of the film, Monad, exist(s) within. This, already, disperses the image amongst multiple component parts, rather than containing it within a singular instance or function. Dawud positions the images (language) of the film in a unique relation to light - which, owing to light as the fundamental organizing principle of images, serves to deconstruct the inbuilt functionality of the sign into a liquid state of affect or tone. The function of Dawud’s “blur” and usage of light to achieve this end is the enabling of the self-destruction of the image’s basic principles into metaphysically bound non-properties- the image post-blur is the affective, rather than effective, image. The blur serves to “corrupt” the functionality of the sign, and in tandem with unique lighting renders the image imperceptible, invisible, brought to its logical end through itself - self-negation.
“The blur is a veil - I lose my sight, and I go out of focus, and I look in.”8
Becoming invisible, imperceptible, intangible serves to displace the image from its imposed position and allow for it to begin to function autonomously and inhabit a purely transcendental, metaphysical character - that of affect. This is further compounded by the usage of projection mapping, which re-spatializes the first projected image - the one recorded by the camera, the one that is confined by the limitations of the second projected image - the literal projection upon which the film is viewed and received. This recalibrated relationship serves to dissolve the barrier between the two projected images and synthesize them into a patchwork of affect - forming a space that exists neither dominated by the first projection or the second projection. It is within this space that metaphysics reigns, unburdened and untainted by the imposed meaning of the sign, and operating in the realm of the eternal and symbolic.
Monad’s images speak in a uniquely poetic register, one that uses a variety of different forms - webcam videos, blurred photographs, projection-mapped recordings - towards a dissolution of the standard functionality of the image into a renewed and boundless state of emotionality. The image in Monad is of a purely symbolic and emotional character, its literality or physicality divorced from it through the blur, or the projection, or overexposure to light. The sign of the image in Monad has returned to the symbol, with the transcendental quality of the non-image thereby enveloping and elevating the entirety of the film’s image as a whole to a point of ascension. Throughout almost the entire duration of the film there are extremely few moments at which the image is presented fully unobscured or unobstructed at all - there is almost always an angle, or a light, or a visual effect that prevents the receiving of the image in any manner other than an affective one. Monad’s architecture and structuring is entirely within the realm of the psychic - even the spoken word that overlays the non-images within the film is decomposed and fragmentary, forming an alien pattern of communication beyond the reach of the purely human.
But Monad also relates its non-image and non-content to the Internet - as all contemporary cinema does - and does so in an entirely unique way that serves to further dissolve any functionality left in its deconstructed signs, and in doing so, fully and totally liberates the image from itself. Monad is not a singular instance of a film but an ongoing and active process, an event, bringing us back to the original promise of abstract expressionism’s action within the realm of the canvas now transposed into the arena of the screen, both inside and outside the theater or viewing space. By conversing with the Internet in the specific way it does, by positioning its images as existing within both the space of the film and the space outside the film, that of the Internet, the language of Monad communicates its fundamental non-belonging to anything other than the world of metaphysics, situating itself in a space of exteriority to the realm of the material.
“[…] a higher level of reality, a metaphysical territory of secession with all the magnitude of a whole world of its own, the playing area where positive creation alone can accomplish the great emigration of the economy from the world.”9
Monad’s poeticized, affective images continuously reformat and deconstruct themselves, with Dawud’s role becoming that of transmission of affect, of a blurring expert. Monad is a living work of art where the image, at last freed from both the realm of the sign and its confinement to an instance within a screen, exists within the realm of the intangible and eternal - Monad is an active infinitude.
The fundamental problems of image-based art answered by Monad are how the image abolishes its sign value, and in doing so, its containment within a static or fixed “instance-” e.g., a screening, a video, or a singular photograph - and affixes itself onto the world of metaphysically-bound affect. The Internet, properly utilized with regards to the image-object, as in Monad, abolishes the limitations of the fragment and turns instead towards a state of perpetuity, a world without end. The image’s boundless nature in both content and form allows it to truly occupy the role that it ought to, that of the symbolic, that which reinvigorates, reanimates, and repairs the world so destroyed by its former occupier. The Internet for the fully expressed image is simply the means by which the explication of its true self is revealed - a stage from which to act, a podium from which to scream, a site of worship from which to commune. The image, restored to its highest form, in the presence of the Internet’s psychical infrastructure, is a non-object, one that has within its very essence the seeds of another time, another world, and another way of being.
Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet,” 2010
Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters,” 1952
Clement Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” 1959
René Guénon, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, 1921
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Dana Dawud, Monad, 2024
Tiqqun, Tiqqun 1, 1999