Wasting Time on the Internet (13 page)

A 1997
New York Times
profile on Knowles sounds like it could almost be describing Cornell: “Harry Jay Knowles is sprawled on the edge of his bed, clicking at the keyboard of his Packard Bell computer. It's 10
A.M.
, and he is just starting his day in a tiny airless room crammed with videos, unread film scripts, movie posters (“Bride of Frankenstein,” “King Kong,” etc.) and 8-by-10 glossies of Marilyn Monroe, Britt Ekland, Ray Milland and the original Superman, Kirk Alyn.
A grinning Vincent Price shrunken head lies in a box on the floor.” Knowles's parents ran a movie memorabilia shop in Austin, Texas, where he grew up, that was crammed with pulp fiction, fanzines, and comics. They would set up shop on weekends at comics conventions and film festivals. “I was their experiment,” Knowles said in an interview. “They unleashed everything on me. I saw porn, all the Universal monster movies, all the Charlie Chan films, all the Sherlock Holmes things, all the Fred and Ginger movies. Film for me became how I related to everything else.” Like Cornell toiling in his cramped basement, Knowles created his empire from the confines of his bedroom, at the helm of a vast correspondence network that was done mostly from afar.

A 2012 pilot for a YouTube show,
Ain't It Cool with Harry Knowles
, is shot in his father's Austin, Texas, basement (these guys love basements) and features Knowles—a heavyset man in a loud Hawaiian shirt, goatee, and chunky black-framed glasses—seated behind a desk talking to a camera, surrounded by piles of ephemera. Aping the style of
Pee-wee's Playhouse
, Knowles shows old movie clips, opens a mailbox where he finds a catalog for a Captain America auction filled with props for sale, converses about comics with an animated cardboard boiler, and browses through a leaked film script. Information flies at him from all directions, all without him ever having to leave his chair. It's a meatspace enactment of the vaporous networks that made Knowles famous, while forwarding Cornell's methodology into the heart of the digital age—accumulating and organizing vast
amounts of information, not into the art economy of boxes, but into websites, hits, and likes.

As “free culture” geeks, both Cornell and Knowles share an elastic sense of copyright. In Knowles's case, he leaked once-private information, posting documents in full. Cornell, too, subscribed to the idea of “borrower's rights,” or, as his friend the poet Mina Loy put it, “A contemporary brain wielding a prior brain is a more potent implement than a paintbrush.” Stuck in Queens, Cornell never got to go to Paris or Florence to see the masterpieces he loved so much. Instead, he surrounded himself with reproductions of them, which came to stand in for the originals, similar to how our crummy AVI rips become more beloved than the “real” 35-millimeter version of a film that we'll probably never see in a theater. In the early twentieth century, the networks that fed Cornell's proclivities were the United States Postal Service; his exposure to much of the world's great art came to him through printed reproductions in books and magazines. When he wished to incorporate an image into one of his boxes, he would photostat it, preserving the original in his archive. To him, the copy was a natural thing, more real than the original. While remix culture is commonplace today, it was much rarer when Cornell began his artistic life. He had one rule about his art—that no element in it could be original. Everything he used had to be found or reproduced.

Cornell might've been the only filmmaker in the history of film who never learned to operate a camera. Instead, his early films, like
Bookstalls
, were all recomposed from found
footage.
†
His 1936 film
Rose Hobart
is an ancestor of the Internet supercut—those fast-paced montages that compile, say, every swear word uttered in
Deadwood
or every scene in
Talladega Nights
in which the phrase “shake and bake” is roared with an accompanying fist bump. To make
Rose Hobart
, Cornell took a trashy grade-B jungle flick and, with scissors and Scotch tape, cut it up and put it back together out of order. The clichéd story line was happily disposed of and in its place appeared a series of disconnected fantasy sequences. When Cornell screened it, he projected it through a pane of deep-blue glass, imparting a dreamlike quality to it. The film was accompanied by a campy soundtrack from warbly 78 rpm discs that Cornell would hand crank.

Rose Hobart
was an influential film that spawned genres of “cut up” films, the best known of which is Christian Marclay's
The Clock
(2010), a twenty-four-hour film that is literally a clock, displaying in real time the passing minutes of a day. Comprised of thousands of recycled film clips,
The Clock
is an epic work of montage. To create it, Marclay and his assistants watched thousands of DVDs and extracted scenes that had clocks somewhere in them. They collected them until every minute of the day was accounted for, then strung them together chronologically. Narrative, genre, or style were of no concern; the only thing that mattered was the presence of a clock in the shot. These scenes were edited
down to exactly one-minute lengths and synced to real time so that if you, for example, entered the theater at 4:34
P.M.
and looked up at the screen, the clock in the background of the film at that moment would read 4:34. Walk into the cinema at noon, a clock would read 12:00; the following minute the clip changed and another clock would show 12:01. The entire project was mellifluously sequenced by Marclay, so that one scene seamlessly melded into another, binding the entire enterprise into a smooth, sensual, and riveting experience. In one way, it's a giant work of montage; in another, it's actually a clock that tells the correct time.

Befittingly, the film has been widely celebrated and crowds around the globe continue to this day to queue up to view the piece in person. Critical praise has been superlatively lavish: the art critic Roberta Smith called
The Clock
the “ultimate work of appropriation art.” What's more,
The Clock
manages to bridge the art world with popular culture, which might account, in part, for its popularity. While Marclay contemplated crowdsourcing the project on the web, he felt that the supercut's jagged and rough editing style would be at odds with the seamless quality he was after.

So far, so good: a massively popular work constructed in the style of broad-based web trends, which is also acclaimed, valorized, funded, exhibited, and collected by the most powerful art world institutions. And yet, the elephant in the room is copyright: few have mentioned that Marclay hasn't cleared any permissions with Hollywood for his work. Marclay explained his idea of copyright in an interview with the
New Yorker
: “If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.” It's something he's stood by for the past three decades, weaving a career out of sampling, appropriation, remixing, and plunderphonics; clearly, for Marclay, it appears to be working.

Yet there seems to be a schism between popular culture and the museum. While Marclay's actions are hailed, media policing agencies like the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) have been waging an ongoing campaign against file sharers who create remixes out of copyrighted material not unlike what Marclay does.
The Clock
is a product of the digital age—it's hard to imagine it being constructed out of celluloid—but, for a work borne of preexisting material and exuding free culture frisson,
The Clock
is tightly controlled: a full-length version can't be found on YouTube or on the Pirate Bay. Instead, like a conventional market-based work of art, there is only an expensive, limited edition available to a select few institutions that can afford its half-million-dollar price tag. More so, at a time when much cultural power is based on multiplicity, nongeographical specificity, and wide dissemination,
The Clock
can only be viewed during special times under pristine conditions—often for a steep museum admission price—which sends mixed signals to the Internet-savvy public. Although the work is predicated on a complex computer program that syncs the film with the actual time in any given location, one assumes that a web version that
does the same thing wouldn't be too hard to create, a move that would satisfy both worlds.

Time is an obsession that both Marclay and Cornell share. There's something both temporal and atemporal about
The Clock
: it tells the exact time of day, but as an artwork it has no expiration date. Since it's comprised of used and mostly classic materials, the work has a timeless feel, riding an edge between the momentary and the eternal. Furthermore, its site specificity ensures that it's always current: when it shows at noon, there are usually big crowds in the theater, but at 4:00
A.M.
—if the museum is open—just a few diehard fans are scattered about. Those quiet moments in the middle of the night belonged to Cornell, who was an insomniac. To him, every day was—as he called it—an
eterniday
. He came up with this idea by working all day at a crummy job, and then coming home to take care of his mother and brother. Then, when the house quieted down, he would stay up all night doing his work in a sleep-deprived dream state—a state between states—half-asleep, half-awake. Like his antecedents the sleeping surrealist poets, he came to prefer being in that twilight zone and later, when he was able to quit his job, would nap sporadically throughout the day so that he could work all night.

Cornell was 24/7 before we were 24/7. When I address a global audience late at night on social media, I am acutely aware that the people I am addressing may be on the other side of the world, wide awake in the middle of their day. I sometimes tailor the content of my posts to appeal directly
to that audience across the planet, forsaking my local community because I assume them to be sleeping. The digital age has ushered in atemporality; the hum of the computer and the grinding of the network exists outside of subjective, personal, local, traditional, and even communitarian, traditions of time, a condition explored in Jonathan Crary's book
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
. Crary gives a Cornellian example of where labor, technology, sleeplessness, and the cosmos meet. He tells of an effort in the 1990s by a space consortium to build and launch satellites to reflect sunlight back on the earth with the intention of creating, literally, an
eterniday
. (The company's slogan was “Daylight all night long.”) Outfitted with paper-thin reflective material two hundred meters in diameter, it would have the capacity to illuminate a ten-mile-square area of the earth in the middle of the night. Originally intended so that miners working in Siberia would have more “daylight” hours under which to toil, it was quickly embraced as a way of extending office hours in cities. There were protests, however, from groups who argued that the night sky was “a commons to which all humanity is entitled to have access, and the ability to experience the darkness of night and observe the stars is a basic human right that no corporation can nullify.” The project was killed, but that didn't stop us, our machines, and our networks from working
eternidays
.

In the winter of 1955 through 1956, Cornell held an exhibition of boxes in a New York City gallery entitled
Winter Night Skies
, which incorporated star charts of constellations.
The series was stark: white boxes with deep-blue images of night skies, framed in architecture he called Hôtel de l'Etoile. Joseph Cornell loved the winter stars at night. Gazing out his kitchen window at 4:00
A.M.
at the bright stars embedded in the pitch-black sky over a silent Queens, half-asleep, half-awake, he was an armchair voyager traveling the cosmos basking in—as he called it—“light from other days.”

Like Joseph Cornell's basement, my many hard drives are packed with downloaded books, movies, images, and music. While I spend a lot of time downloading them, copying them, renaming them, and organizing them into their respective folders, once they're neatly filed away, I tend to forget about them. Rummaging through them, I'm often surprised at what I find, as was the case when I was recently in the mood to listen to the music of the American midcentury composer Morton Feldman. I dug in to my MP3 drive, found my Feldman folder, and opened it up. Among the various folders in the directory was one labeled the Complete Works of Morton Feldman. I was surprised to see it there; I didn't remember downloading it. Curious, I looked at its date—2009—and realized that I must've grabbed it during the heyday of MP3 sharity blogs. I opened it to find seventy-nine albums as zipped files. I unzipped three of them, listened to part of one, closed the folder, and haven't opened it since. In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding
the cultural artifacts are often more engaging than the artifacts themselves. In an unanticipated twist to John Perry Barlow's 1994 prediction that in the digital age we'd be able to enjoy wine without the bottles, we've now come to prefer the bottles to the wine.

Back in 1983, the media critic and philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) described this exact phenomenon in a little book called
Towards a Philosophy of Photography
. Flusser claimed that the content of any given photograph is actually the camera that produced it. He continued with a series of nested apparatuses: the content of the camera is the programming that makes it function; the content of the programming is the photographic industry that produces it; and the content of the photographic industry is the military-industrial complex in which it is situated, and so forth. He viewed photography from a completely technical standpoint. In Flusser's view, the traditional content of the cultural artifact is completely subsumed by the apparatuses—technical, political, social, and industrial—surrounding, and thereby defining, it.

Although he was writing about analog, print-based photography, Flusser's ideas go a long way to explain our changing relationship to the cultural artifact in the digital age, reminding us of Moholy-Nagy's prediction that “those who are ignorant in matters of photography will be the illiterates of tomorrow.”

The mistake most make in reading Flusser is to assume he's talking about analog photography. Yes, he is, but that's
the least relevant part. Imagine, instead, that everything he's saying about photography he's saying about the digital. This requires an act of imaginative translation on our part, but once you make that leap, you realize that this 1983 text astonishingly directly addresses our situation some three and a half decades later. For instance, Flusser claimed that the camera was the ancestor of apparatuses that are in the process of “robotizing all aspects of our lives, from one's most public acts to one's innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.” And when we look at social media—from blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, and to Instagram—we can see he was correct. Like the camera, the Twitter apparatus coerces us, seducing us to tweet, and we dutifully obey. Once we're hooked in to the game, we become compulsive: the more we tweet, the more we enrich the program, thereby increasing its standing within the larger social media apparatus and ultimately boosting Twitter's share price. In Flusserian terms, it doesn't really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). For Flusser, the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.

In fact, content plays little role in Flusser's writing. A photograph is not a carrier of memories—your baby pictures are interchangeable with a million other baby pictures—but a predetermined artifact spit out by the camera apparatus. The camera is a voracious, greedy device, programmed to stalk images the way an animal stalks prey: the camera smells blood and (literally) snaps. On Instagram, the more you shoot, the more you become addicted to the photograph
ic apparatus, which Flusser likens to opium addiction or being on a “photograph-trip.” In the end, you wind up working for the camera and the industry that produced it. The more people who use an apparatus, the more feedback the company receives about its camera, the smarter it becomes, and the more users it draws to its base, thereby increasing the manufacturer's bottom line. For this reason, Instagram keeps adding new filter sets and features in order to retain and broaden its users. To Instagram, what people are photographing is beside the point; the real point is that they keep posting.

Photography is easy. Anyone can push a button and produce a good photograph without having a clue as to the inner workings of a camera. A recent Apple ad underscores this: “Every day, millions of amazing photos and videos are shot with iPhone. That's because the iPhone makes it easy—for everyone—to shoot amazing photos and video.” If taking good photos were difficult—once upon a time it took a great deal of mastery to take a good photograph (f-stops, light meters, shutter speeds)—Instagram would never be as popular as it is today. The programmers of cameras also strive to keep their interfaces as simple as possible, to discourage experimentation outside of its parameters. The simple interface keeps the photographer pushing the button so they can produce, in Flusser's words, “more and more redundant images.” The free cost of digital photography keeps the photographer playing the photographic game. (How many people snapping photos with a smartphone only take one shot of any given scene?) Those photos are uploaded to the cloud,
where ever-more-redundant photos are stored. Your photo of the Eiffel Tower on Flickr is identically redundant to the millions already stored on Flickr, yet you keep on snapping them (just as I keep downloading MP3s).

I shoot therefore I am. The camera doesn't work for us. We work for the camera. Our compulsive behavior leaves no scene undocumented. When we take a holiday to a foreign country, the photos don't show the sights we saw, they show us the places where the camera has been and what it's done there. We think we're documenting our own memories, but what we're actually producing is memories for the apparatus. The digital photograph's metadata—geotagging, likes, shares, user connectivity, and so forth—proves much more valuable to Instagram than any subject matter it captures. The image is irrelevant in comparison to the apparatuses surrounding it.

Once we buy into a specific apparatus, it's awfully hard to leave it. Your cultural artifact is locked within that system, constrained by its programming. Notice how an Instagram photo can't be resized, e-mailed, or downloaded to your hard drive. It can't exist within any ecosystem other than Instagram's. Notice how easily Instagram can be integrated into the interface of its parent company, Facebook, but how difficult it is to share on Twitter, a competitor's platform. While we play the Instagram game by liking and reposting photos, the apparatus knows otherwise: a like is a way for the shareholder to verify that there are consumers populating the program; the greater and more verifiable the user base, the more valuable the apparatus.

Unless the market determines otherwise, the physical value of most printed photographs are negligible: they're just pieces of paper with information on them—cheap, ubiquitous, unstable, and infinitely reproducible. As opposed to paintings, where the value of the objects resides in their singularity, the value of photographs lies in the information on their surface. Their surface is ephemeral and, in the digital age, rewritable. The photograph is a pivotal artifact, bridging the industrial and postindustrial, embodying the transition from the physical to the purely informational. How that information is distributed determines much of its meaning.

When an image was printed on paper, its ubiquity in physical space was its distributive metric. But even then, the content in a poster or handbill was somewhere other than its image. Flusser writes, “The poster is without value; nobody owns it, it flaps torn in the wind yet the power of the advertising agency remains undiminished . . .” Depending on context and distribution, an image printed on paper could take on different meanings. Unlike, say, an image displayed on a TV screen, a photograph published in a newspaper could be clipped, stuffed into an envelope, and sent to a friend. Passed hand to hand, the movable photographic artifact anticipated our image-sharing networks.

The camera resembles a game of chess. It contains what appears to be an infinite number of possibilities, but in the end those possibilities are prescribed by its programming. Just as every possible move and permutation of a chess game has long been exhausted, every program of the camera too has long been exhausted. In the case of Instagram, with a
user base approaching half a million users, its programs are instantly exhausted, resulting in updates that include new features in order to retain users. Although finite, the apparatus must always give the illusion of infinity in order to make each user feel they can never exhaust the program. Or as Flusser says, “Photographs permanently displacing one another according to a program are redundant precisely because they are always ‘new' . . .” Your cell phone still makes calls, but you'd be foolish to think that it is about being a telephone in the same way you'd be foolish to think Instagram is about expressive photography. But criticize Instagram, says Flusser, and that critique becomes absorbed in its apparatus: “A number of human beings are struggling against this automatic programming . . . attempting to create a space for human intention in a world dominated by apparatuses. However, the apparatuses themselves automatically assimilate these attempts at liberation and enrich their programs with them.”

The only hope? Those who attempt to break the system by doing something with the camera that was never intended by industry: taking intentionally boring photos (Instagram is full of boring photos, but how many of them are made to be intentionally boring?) or blurring images beyond recognition. Twitter is trickier to break. Attempts at self-reflexive critique within the Twitter apparatus are instantly absorbed by the apparatus and celebrated by the corporation to highlight the diversity and playfulness of its expanded user base (once again making the company a more valuable entity).

Flusser's forays into media have framed, theorized, and
unpacked the new complexities of our digital world. By empirically questioning received knowledge and recasting it within crisp lines of history and logic, he's made the digital legible in a time when its theorization is occluded and murky to say the least. When Willem de Kooning said, “The past does not influence me. I influence it,” I am reminded of Flusser and how prescient his twentieth-century investigations proved to be for our digitally-soaked twenty-first.

A precursor to Flusser's ideas about apparatus was the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov's 1924 concept of the Kino-Eye. Vertov's argument revolves around the idea that the camera's eye has a neutrality that the unaided human eye lacks. It's the difference between you walking down a city street and you looking at an image of that same city street. The image can be contemplated in ways that your eye on the street can't. On the street, the hyperactive and restless human eye is connected to an equally active brain, one that is instructed to see and process images in very specific ways, whereas the camera lens—a superhuman eye—is connected to a machine, one that records with cool precision what it is programmed to capture. Like Flusser's apparatus, Kino-Eye democratizes every image it sees—one image is as good as another—cataloging a visually chaotic world by transforming it into information and creating a stockpile of images for
later use, exactly what Google Street View does today. On a darker note, Kino-Eye predicted the rise of the surveillance camera, which restlessly and indiscriminately devours all that passes before its lens. London's ring of steel is Kino-Eye at its most dystopian.

In 1971, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler set out to make a pre-Internet work of art based on Kino-Eye. His proposition, a cross between sociology and visual art, read: “Throughout the remainder of the artist's lifetime he will photographically document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner.” Understanding the futility of the project—naturally, it remained incomplete at the time of his death—Huebler attempted it anyway, roaming the streets of cities around the world with a film-loaded camera, photographing random passersby. He shot the multitudes from the roofs of buildings and rephotographed pictures of crowds from the day's newspaper. On the web, absurdly totalizing projects like Huebler's are common: one could imagine crowdsourcing digital photos of “everyone alive” on a Tumblr, yet oddly enough, it hasn't yet happened.