PART ONE

Greetings from Astoria, Oregon, the small, scenic, historic town founded by the Columbia River, close by its turbulent juncture with the Pacific Ocean! The intersection of these two mighty bodies of water has a reputation for pulverizing ships. The stretch of coastline between Tillamook Bay and Cape Scott is known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. The Columbia Bar alone has accumulated more than two thousand recorded shipwrecks. In a park over which the remarkable Astoria-Megler Bridge looms on the Oregon side of the river, one finds a memorial to some of the local mariners and fishermen, many of whom were lost in the frigid waters of the river and ocean. Just a couple of weeks ago, some nut stole a yacht in Warrenton and tried to make a getaway past the Bar, precipitating a rescue operation by the Coast Guard, the spectacular video footage of which appeared on The Guardian website, and the story went viral. I often swim at the Astoria Aquatic Center, where the “coasties” train, and have some friends among them. Their post-session conversations in the hot tub are on occasion really something - what a day job! Nearly all are impressive physical specimens. Our kids play together in area youth sports.

Another pair of parks, on the Washington side, mark the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Named respectively the Dismal Nitch and Cape Disappointment - two of the greatest park titles anywhere - these points memorialize the explorers’ mindset, when they realized they had missed their return passage to civilization, and were made to suffer a bleak and stormy spell of deprivation in Northwest Coast winter. The pioneering colonization of the region is fraught with tales of courage, carnage and perseverance. A robust indigenous population occupied the lushly wooded hills and mountains, their tribal encampments ensconced on both sides of the Columbia. The land’s natural beauty and abundance supported a fully realized society, which the influx of European settlers to a great extent obliterated. Through the present, conflicts over fishing practices and rights between the first nations and the immigrants persist, although these terminologies seem awkward in the post-contemporary period. Bumblebee Tuna is long gone. Now we have The Deadliest Catch. All of these realities are compressed here, in a peculiar perceptual framework.

That guy from up north rescued by the Coast Guard? He was on the lam after inexplicably traveling from Victoria, Nova Scotia, to leave a dead fish on the porch of the Goonies house, after which he allegedly did a mad dance in the yard, before vacating the premises. Goonies, a movie cult favorite, was filmed in Astoria. As was Kindergarten Cop, and Free Willy, among others. I don’t really vibe with any of these films, which is not to say they aren’t entertaining, as such. The movie I think resonates with the place best is Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of fans visit Astoria each year to get a glimpse of the cinematic artifacts, much to the consternation of some. Recently, a row between the new owners of the Goonies house and the neighbors got frothy. Signs were erected in their respective yards. Letters were sent to Council members and the Daily Astorian. Feelings were high on either side.

By the way, my son attended second grade at John Jacob Astor Elementary, the primary location for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star turn in Kindergarten Cop. In actuality, Astor’s a terrific public school. In case you were wondering, the Oregon Astoria and the New York one are rooted in the single personage of Astor, America’s first great robber baron. An immigrant of German descent Astor made his bones in the trade of fur, of opium and Manhattan real estate, among other ventures. He was an internationalist, doing business with China, Russia, England and elsewhere. Eventually, he became the wealthiest person in the USA, and was known as a generous philanthropist. Documentation of Astor’s success is plentiful. For a literary history of the area, though, I prefer local author Karl Marlantes’ Deep River, the follow-up to his popular Vietnam War novel Matterhorn. Deep River weaves the tales of Scandanavian immigrant communities into a memorable depiction of the often harrowing challenges and struggles of the people who forged the City of Astoria into the topology at the northwestern edge of the North American continent.

“From the weekend (February 2023) driving toward Portland on 26. We lunched Saturday after Lachlan's game in Forest Grove at Camp 18. It is must-visit PNW! The mini-park (museum) next to the restaurant and gift shop (both wonderful) are rich in the obsolete artifacts of logging industry, exposed for years to the elements, which implement their distinct patina on the brute materials of the trade. Over time an autonomous beauty attaches, the partner of decay.”

I discovered Astoria, Oregon by way of a dream and a Google search in the spring of 2018. At the time my family and I were living in a loft in trendy Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC. I had been researching options for our next homestead for months. We had considered hundreds of possible options, none of which seemed, for one reason or another, to be viable. I awoke one morning with “Northwest Coast Realty” in my head, walked immediately to the computer and entered the term into the search engine form. A listing for an incredible, recently renovated property, leased at an unbelievable price, appeared in the results. Astoria. I mistakenly assumed the house existed in nearby Astoria, Queens. I realized my error in a short time, but by then the listing had disappeared, the house rented, before I could reach the agent or owner. Nonplussed, I embarked on a cursory investigation of Astoria, Oregon, growing more enthusiastic with each bit of data. Within an hour, convinced by what I found, I phoned my wife to inform her I knew where we were going to move next. By fall, my son Lachlan was enrolled at Astor, and we had landed in our current home, after a complicated cross-country relocation. I won’t bother with colorful details, here, except to suggest the logistics were tenuous, though not comparably, if the scale incorporates Lewis and Clarks’ arduous journey.

Shortly after our arrival in Astoria (Oregon), I constructed an outline from my impressions of the place. The series of paintings I produced over the couple of years before we emigrated from Brooklyn were titled ViNYL. “Network” and “Worknet” were completed sub-series. The medium was Flashe, a French water-based vinyl commercial paint line with a unique matte finish. I was an early adopter, having been introduced to Flashe by the good folk at Artist & Craftsman in Williamsburg, my go-to neighborhood art supply shop. Flashe enjoyed a popular surge among serious practitioners, for a minute, but I have stuck with it now for five years or so. Golden even released a new line of matte colors to compete with Flashe, but through dedicated usage, I found the latter more in tune with my project on a number of levels. I have been attracted to vinyl materials for decades, and used them diversely. My first association is the vinyl record and album, which was one of my earliest connections to the creative world outside Beckley, West Virginia, where I was born and raised. My parents loved their 78 rpm record collection, which consisted mostly of pop swing, crooner jazz, classical, Holiday and Broadway stuff, plus odds and ends. My older brother amassed an impressive Rock’n’Roll 33 rpm record collection to play on his dope wedge stereo over blowout speakers, none of which I was allowed to touch. I started with those groovy kids’ record players, and assembled a pretty respectable library of 45’s, mostly of radio hits, and a few seminal albums.

Vinyl-borne tunes were one of my earliest focal creative obsessions. Others included comics, pulp fiction, military models, illustrated war histories, baseball cards - the typical middle class American fare for boys coming of age in the 70s. Decades later, when my vocation as pro artist blossomed, I returned to vinyl, not only records - which were being displaced by discs and drives - but the material as utilized by commercial printing services. I got wild about next-gen adhesive-backed vinyl stickers, then the rolled vinyl for large-format digital image printer output. I integrated vinyl in its various forms throughout a sequence of collective and solo exhibits, for which I generated push campaigns. Vinyl seemed a proper analog for creative web-based practices, projected and screened. The plasticity element was real and metaphorical or theoretical simultaneously. Vinyl functioned proficiently as a meta-component or -matter of early- post-contemporary methodology, circa Y2K. It (vynil) exposed the flux dynamic binding obsolescence and innovation. To gin up the analytic concoction, if one wanted to go really real, one could note how poisonous industrial vinyl production is. Harmful to man and beast, but so lovely. A peacock feather of pollution, in a dynamite range of mixable hues. Vinyl ain’t organic, man.

Continuity #1 [2023]
30" x 20"
Vinyl on panel

Painting with Flashe is labor-intensive. It is a medium suggestive of a slow approach, involving lots of layers, and the emphasis on edge. Which is why I assume many artists who picked it up for experimentation before long abandoned it, and reverted to other mediums, like acrylics. Of a certain age, at a stage of artistic maturation friendly to less-impulsive modes of expression, possessing a formal catalog of visual devices, I gravitated towards Flashe as a more or less exclusive painting application. I noticed with usage manifold effects that resisted photographic translation, Germaine to the discourses on image reproduction, aura, optics and visuality, and so on. The vinyl paintings translated well on social media, and inferred scalability. In the architecture for dimensional composition, the structural nature of the medium required a specific technical sensibility. On the other hand, the vinyl paintings were extremely fragile, and susceptible to water-damage and chipping, especially. I learned this from hard and bad experiences in my New York studios, as the result of skylight and plumbing leaks, and other calamitous events of gross fluid exposure. In short, vinyl proved to be a demanding expressive tool, requiring diva-like attention and protection from the elements.

The thematic linkage to my predominantly abstract vinyl painting sequences, communicated through the serial titles, drew specifically from Internet-based experience. The behavior of ideas, as they travel through networks and public-private systems, is the subject of my representation in this art. The paintings themselves, with bright colors and rudimentary shapes, arrayed in all-over designs, were superficially readable as decorative and fun. This diversionary strategy was intentional, which is not to say cynical, sarcastic or ironic. Conversely, it was my deduction that the shadowy digital universe is optimized to cohabit within our most shallow and enjoyable pleasures. Therein, somewhere, lies the rub, of why and how virtuality has become ubiquitous. I meant to describe subtly the dynamics of post-contemporary ontology, a fine line between dispersion and immaterial accumulation. The trick was locating this speculation objectively, while preserving the potentiality in a viewer’s subjective encounter with the visible, in its embodiment, on a continuum containing object, painting, image, and in rare cases, a recognizable or distinguishable subject-not-subject, like an iconic ultramarine blue foot, suspended in a concoction of visual complexity and convolution, layers upon layers, faceted and gradiated.

One of the first things I became aware of in Astoria (OR) was the relative scarcity of noise, of sirens, car alarms and auto honks, specifically. In hindsight, I will submit to you that the sonic detox, coming from BK to here, extended for months, even years. The other kinds of decompression and recovery, attending the transition from metropolitan to small-town rural lifestyles possess their own timelines. Our trans-continental move was partly a retreat, an escape from New York. The impulse to get away is a commonality among City dwellers. As a topic of conversation, it is one of the commonest, at cafes, dinner parties, on calls with other New Yorkers. Nearly half-a-decade with the Big Apple in the rearview, unpacking is still happening. My urgency to vacate Gotham was instinctual, and as it turned out, spot on. We got out pre-pandemic, and missed much of the worst of the widespread unrest associated with BLM and other movements and the pervasive social dishevelment that emerged after Trump was elected, which intensified the social shifts that had been manifesting prior. I never witnessed Manhattan boarded up and abandoned in person. Once we had emigrated, I only saw the images documenting the eruptive change, heard about it secondhand, or through feeds, news, and anecdotal stories. Videos didn’t make it seem more real, to my mind’s eye. Virtual witnessing is not the same thing as being there. So much of the conversation centered on collapse. In faraway Astoria, the upheaval was reduced to murmurs and echoes. We only experienced the ripples emanating from the what was happening. One by one, or in pairs, all but a few of our NY buddies did what we did, and relocated. Most moved to cities like Pittsburgh, Austin, Seattle. Some chose Cali. Others shifted into country living, maintaining relationships and workflow via the web.

I never have gotten used to Zoom. My paranoia regarding social and communications networks, especially post-Snowden and Occupy, would never permit me the comfort of naive participation on that or similar platforms. The Panopticon effect - rooted in the post-9/11 drive toward Total Information Awareness (TIA), conjoining the interests of industry, economics and the state - had disrupted and subverted my technoptimist tendencies. I began to show signs of novelty bias, against the latest digi-widget. On a deeper level, the biases were coagulating into a sort of determination to separate or drop out of the hive mind, the tech-herd. Sometime in the early- or mid-2010s, before I consciously realized what I was doing, I had begun to disentangle my virtual and actual lives. I understood the nature of the procedure, based on previous episodes. It is incremental, involving a quality of duration peculiar to online connectivity, which is patterned. A solid comprehension of metadata is helpful for this exercise, as is the multiplying of Self as a network phenomenon. Baudrillard prospected the value of appearance and disappearance for the emergent art form which would be post-contemporary. Judd thought of it in terms of permanence and the temporary. Marfa is an expression of the profundity of the relationship, which dials into a wider stream of speculation on the finite and its opposite, which for me will always be associated with a seminar I attended with Badiou in Saas Fee, the opener in my second summer session at EGS (European Graduate School. Alain’s several day course, entitled “The Ontology of Multiplicity: Omega As Event,” blew up my brain and cemented within my heart a true love of philosophy. You can watch it on YouTube, if you’re so inclined.

Draw a line between Astoria, Queens, and Astoria, Oregon on a map. Meditate on the interstices. The liminal space is just as real as the points at either end of the diagram. In a car, the reality of America exists in both the middle and the ends, and all along the route. One can crash, be maimed, fall ill, die anywhere on the road, starting at home - the most likely chance - or once one reaches the destination. The directional rules of movement flesh out the dramatic arc of the journey, which is elliptical in narrative nature. Think about the way a road trip story is shaped. The accumulation of episodes generally builds toward the center point of the drive and diminishes as the finish approaches. The cathartic sensation of “being halfway there” is accentuated by calculations of mileage. Across America, though, are sprinkled a Photoshop Bezier shape tool-like progression of landmarks that link the passage to the passenger’s unique experience through time and space. The entire thing is dimensional. The unity of the Trip is renderable as documentation. My parents’ generation ritualized this in the perfunctory slideshow and the scrapbook viewing, infused with cocktails and tobacco smoke. Friends and family were invited to attend. Obviously, social media is the post-contemporary extension of the practice. The question of whether travel created the story, or the travel was undertaken for the purposes of storytelling post-facto is blurry. The answer depends on the subject, the epic’s hero or heroine. In the post-contemporary, everyone is (or can aspire to be) a hero for fifteen minutes on the Gram, for the logged in.

“Logging” has a different meaning in Astoria. So does “net”. Crabs and spiders do not refer to code or web-based phenomena here. Fishing and phishing are dissimilar practices. Scaling a fish has naught to do with platform scalability. The language of things echoes between the virtual and actual worlds, but in painting, we discover the means to mesh those sounds and symbols outside their originating context. The world of painting synthesizes the multiple meanings into a compressing layer of experience: the visible; to which we can attach or add the sonic sensation to mold the mind’s interpretation of the seen. Coherence can be suspended temporarily, in the technical presentation of art. Impressionist brushstrokes can mingle with splatters and the figurative. Realism is always juxtaposed with the Real (art object), and the viewer participates in the play between the concept of reality and the thing in which existence is manifest as thing. For paintings the gift stops at the boundary of the tactile, because paint is fragile. The oil on human skin can be enough to damage surfaces, depending on the type of pigment and finish. The desire to touch a painting with which one has become enthralled is palpable, and so the seductive in art can be thought to situate as a liminal space separating the viewer from the art beheld. The urgency of the beautiful is in the handling of the relationship involving the viewer and art, which is the artist’s immediate responsibility, and choice. The artist can just as easily embrace repulsiveness in the selection of content, for effect. There are reasons to explore the difference between the abject and sublime, and this fact is indicative of creative agency.

All the content available for imaging constitutes a data set, from which the artist can draw to establish a subject. Conversely, the artist can choose not to select any pictorial anchor to construct the image. We have come to refer to that category of image as abstract, but there is more to it than negation of representation. The suspension of identification contains its own associative qualities. Nothingness as the subject of creative labor emphasizes the absence of utility. During the pandemic, we noticed a profound demarcation of essential versus non-essential activity, applied systematically to society, from the top-down, as policy for crisis intervention. The consequences of this programming of value as a reaction to widespread bodily infection, in a controversial effort to maintain basic service for the a priori status quo, have carried over into the post-COVID 19 scenario. One doubts that the political administrators foresaw the full impact of the orders they implemented. The evidence has not been submitted for proper societal critique. Among the notable areas of concern are the vulnerability of the medical industry, the economic system, transportation, the military - basically the national infrastructure, which showed itself to be precarious generally. Further, the masses, the general population, proved ill-prepared to grapple with isolation, lockdown, widespread disruption of all manner of deliverables that we normally take for granted. People’s reactions were in many cases extreme. The plague, beyond its physical profusion, affected the mind, emotions and spirit of the population, and not equally. The pandemic precipitated a massive shift in our reliance on collectivity for survival, while simultaneously disrupting and distressing the individual on every level.

Abstraction and color in art are often interwoven, as in convention, a modern device. The tonal palette is also conventional. Language is at a loss, beyond the descriptive technical analysis, when it comes to abstract painting. The critical voice must resort to a poetic response to an encounter with non-representational art. Or the analysis can shift to the artist biography, or a situational history encompassing the object. In the post-contemporary period, however, the situation has changed. The mediation of art has undergone a substantial reformation. The number of critics with major influence in the art world can be counted on a hand or two, or a few. The number of critics-at-large, or amateur commenters on art, has scaled upwards exponentially. Everyone is an art critic, to put it hyperbolically, thanks to the Internet and social media. Or rather, anyone connected to the web can with ease post an opinion on practically anything, including art. The diffusion of critical significance, from high-profile or elite figures in cultural discourse, to the massive virtual opinion machine that is the net, is a key story in media over the past two decades-plus. The post-contemporary is post-critical. The quality of art criticism has itself become a locus of critique, given the lack of definition established for art over the past century or so. Authentification is a process reserved for marketable art. The art that rises to the top of the marketplace is ratified or justified, in an opaque process that can, however, be tracked, and to some extent, exposed or deconstructed. Provenance is a tool in art market programs, a nod to historical narrative, the canonical golden thread. The NFT, in one aspect, is simply a digital provenance widget. The NFT boom was, to a great extent, nothing but smoke and mirrors.

“The End of the West” (CODA #9-h, November 2022-February 2023; hybrid variation) > Media: Fish tank, bird house, bricks, stone, water, glass cracking, ice, snow; digital superimposition of Construct #13 on Coda #9 > A time-based outdoor sculpture installation performed and documented in Astoria, Oregon.

I suppose I’m writing on these issues at my desk in Astoria, because one must acknowledge that the game has changed. What is art? Who is an artist? What is art for? These questions have always attracted contention, and no answer is so far conclusive. What has changed over the past few years, or maybe since the 2007-8 Crash? I propose that the basic issues pertinent to art, its existential issues, are intertwined with the issues of privacy, of free speech, of personal freedom defined in terms of civil liberty, which has gone the way of the cuckoo. It is endangered, on the verge of extinction. Many factors drive this historical moment. To unpack it is a monumental task for anyone. The question of what is fake or real dominates all discourse, and the problem of any aspect of the malaise drifts towards the generalization of conditions that affect us all. The effects are keenly personal, which can explain much of the despair expressed at the margins of society variously. At the levels of monopolized and preponderantly privatized, for-profit, mass media, functioning as an ersatz megaphone for state- and syndicate-propaganda, the disconnect between personal expression or concerns and the concerns of power players is marked. The sophistication of the communications apparatus is extreme. The algorithm, the test group, demographics - these mechanisms fabricate new regimes of consensus, disrupting democratic norms for mobilizing ideas. The organization of the social is harder to discern from tactical or strategic disorganization and dysfunction. It has become vastly more challenging to formulate common truth, or any semblance of consensual agreement. Truth, of the sort on which philosophy has traditionally focused on, to get at or settle on meaning and values, is in the post-contemporary period a mirage.

Religion has been re-integrated into the scheme of political nationalism, the result of decades of machination. The overturning of Roe is an emblem or sign of that campaign. Citizen’s United is the subtext. The disempowerment of bottom-up democracy must be witnessed in the context of rising economic inequality, which in turn drifts into adjacent domains. The technologies of globalism, the globalist sensibility, has subsumed the indelible local perfunctorily. Resistance and dissent are combatted with all the implements available to those for whom the syndication of humanity is to their great benefit. Art is caught up in this. So am I, and not just through my art and career, but in my citizenship. I am also aware that this is not my exclusive experience: it is my family’s; my community’s; my country’s; and so on. At some point one wonders what are one’s options, here and now. As the American Dream dissolves, along with the illusion of upward mobility, merit-based evaluation, the commons, and particularly the common good - et cetera - one struggles to orient to a viable future. Climate change doesn’t help here. The hysterical fetishization of catastrophe is now normalized culturally and discursively. All-directional incitement of hatred - among races, genders, political parties - displace the necessary accountability for what is going wrong everywhere. We do have a protected class. As far as they’re concerned, the art world belongs to them. It is a site of possession, through which largesse is distributed, or not.

Post-Occupy, which revealed the circumstances mapped above, in all their dimensional complexity and convolution, I pretty much decided to drop out. To find a safe harbor and do what I could do, which was make the best art I could. To reduce my reliance on network. To center attention on my family. To be in a still-functional natural small-w world. To deal with my aging body’s increasing demands. To be mindful and selective about which fights I would participate in and which I would reject or skip. This path would not be possible for my younger self. That said, he (my younger version) would have fewer of the skills and sensibilities that are required for this phase of my life, which I think of in terms of completion. Sure, from time to time (daily) I entertain notions of re-entering the fray, but these notions are tempered by pragmatism, and I daresay, a bit of humility, even wisdom. I would love to pretend that these good qualities are integral, but I come by them in small measure, the hard way. It is unnecessary to catalog the long list of “lessons,” let’s call them, that have incited my recalibration. I will mention that I had a plan of action, which I projected onto the Northwest Coast, when I relocated here. I will add that by the end of the first year, it was reduced to ashes, and I won’t chronicle the incremental obliteration of those plans. Finally, I will remark that I’m not totally out of the game yet. The game metaphor, by the way, is a joke. The “game” is life, and not at all a game.

If you’re wondering what style of writing you’re reading, it’s called Bloggish. I thought I had cleverly invented this term last night, only to discover an entry for it already exists in multiple online dictionaries. In my case, the descriptive suits the material and method. I came by Bloggish honestly. The blog has for a quarter century been my primary or most consistent vehicle of (self-)distribution. I started out writing fiction of varying length, and poetry. In the late 80’s and into the 90s, the publishing industry was already changing dramatically. The Internet radically altered the models for dissemination, exchange and interaction. The launch of Blogger shifted the action to the Platform. Then came Tumblr and others. Advances in WYSIWIG site design, of Wordpress, CSS, and so on evaporated the concentrations of text- and image-driven online Webrings. The website morphed to fit the mobile networked devices of the 21st Century. In hindsight, the stupendous speed of change in communication in my lifetime, as my Dad would put it, makes your head spin! I sometimes published in print, and even got paid to do it once in a while. In pursuit of post-graduate degrees, I did my best to produce academic texts, but am not very good at it. The blog ruined me for most other types of more formal writing. I have only recently come to understand and accept that, for better and worse, Bloggish is my native writer’s language, now.

The advantages of blogging have been obscured by the emergence of the content management system, especially as it has evolved for the platforms of media distribution, like Facebook and Instagram, what we think of as Web 2.0. Streaming, viral video has claimed the center of attention. The reduction of thought-in-words to meme fodder is a symptom of the shortening of typical user attention spans, which cycle with and within the mass-message delivery systems. The latter are constantly redesigned in response to usage and user desires for their content. Data-hoovering and access to search drive the GUI modeling, which in turn shapes the interests of user-consumers, to a great degree. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful user-drivers are sex and violence. These urges overwhelm up to a point the desire to understand experience, the world, other people and so on. Sure, this narrative is over-simplified. It gets at the truth of the Internet now. Its an addictive drug, a stimulant, the overuse of which transforms the drug into a depressant. Our bodies are the medium for the activation of this dimensional drug. Wired network computing devices are integral to the operations of civilization. The digital experience for most of us is at best conflicted. “End user” as a poetic term has resonance in the post-contemporary period. We are confusing the nature of our consumption.

Bloggish allows for subjective hard switches, hot takes, and ideological concentration. Twitter obliterated much of the coziness connecting reader and writer that is foundational on the blog. The blogger provided the reader of blogs access to the journal, the diary, the sketchbook. One attraction of blog practice for both reader and writer had to do with frequency of posts, which could be slow (mindful) or routine (streaming). Twitter’s frequency waves were more extreme. Short posts were chirpy. Posts with more temporal length had the air of profundity, of deeper thinking, reflection. Strategic retweets, meme-ing and other space fillers, often animated by GIFS or micro-video, or hi-intensity graphics or images, seems on a technical level to propose contemporaneity had its own multimedia language. The tweet on this level distilled the energy of blogging and accelerated its pace. The driver of the former is social currency on the 24/7/365 communication network exchange. An adept user could on twitter get the scoop faster than major news systems and domain experts. The blog’s orientation was more towards competing on the scales of expertise as daily practice shared universally. The list of followers of both platforms indicated the juice the poster had. Robots and SEO apps eventually subverted an organic evolution of either mode of transmission. Industrial search and promotion rather quickly crushed the potential democratic value of the medium as a free speech commons.

Brilliant young cyberpunk Bruce Sterling presenting at ICA in 1994. Bruce was one of the EGS faculty during my first summer intensives in 2010. His lecture series focused on Design Fiction.

One of the most important developments for auto-publishing online is the link. I don’t think I have ever read a good think-piece, focused on the link, on what it means and how it has changed reference in virtual space. It is a tool with diverse applications. I remember discovering that an image could be linked to another object or URL, what a novel sensation this was. Suddenly, illustration became navigation, a node in a constellation of visual and textual nodes. The rhizomatic quality of intellectual or creative curiosity - one thing leads to another (i.e., the Fixx) - became programmatic. Over time the link was subsumed by the commercial web, re-integrated into a materialist scheme whose prime motivation was driving the user-consumer eventually to a shopping cart and the “continue to purchase” button. The post-contemporary ubiquity of the link has been further undone by algorithmic channeling of the user-consumer’s attention into poison holes of anti-consciousness. The link sequence is now the phenomenon of one’s immediate history itself compressed and flattened into the browser’s history of you. You can pretend to yourself it is secret, but we all know the truth. Our links are ourselves, and tell the story of one’s immersion into a net-reality with a tenuous relationship to the natural world. Whatever the “natural world” is anymore. Anyway, it’s collapsing. We can learn how the internet - especially social media or web 2.0, but also games, gambling, porn - can be designed to be addictive, and to have other arguably deleterious impacts on individuals and our collective bodies. Are we prepared to at depth critique the link’s technological reformation of connectivity as a human experience?

The pandemic illuminated the stakes of this question, bringing into focus the limits of virtual reality for us. Mech-flesh hybridity, it turned out, was not at all sufficient, with respect to one’s sense of well-being, after a few seasons of lock-down or weeks of quarantine. One of the problems is memory. Where will it belong in the post-contemporary? When people were forcibly isolated during the COVID-19 outbreak, the linkages between experience and memory were relocated to the network, which redefines memory in terms of data transfer and storage. The conflation of lived experience and the virtual version, which is convoluted, engendered a complex conditioning of interpretation of events. Now, the screen is relied upon to be the medium through which experience is visited upon the user-consumer, who must filter the information and then incorporate it into a world view. We have become aware of how vulnerable a world view is to manipulation. The recycling of information into global data flows through channels and platforms allows for the amplification and magnification of narratives by those who largely control the media system. Another problem is curiosity. The desire to know more about what is happening and why. Memory and curiosity activate sequential processes that allow time to link past and future within our experienced present. There is something innate in people that makes us prone to cross the bridge connecting our collection of memories to reach the wilderness, the unknown, on the other side of existence in the now, pressed upon from behind by the compilation of what we gathered - of the world, of life - from before now. Whether we think we should be curious is a moot point. Fear enters the picture here, and it brushes up against the Unspeakable, out of which all art originates and within which art is most expressive. Fear is a root feeling, most keen in the present. Dread is associated with the future, or the uncovering of secrets from the past we wish to remain hidden. In the post-contemporary all of it is compressed in the image. So it does not really matter, if the image is true or false, you see.