Net Note:
Unintentional Oracle
7 February 2014
“Conceptual art” is an oxymoron to me. Such a thing simply cannot exist, and every time I come across the term, I think of Confucius and his gu. Turning the matter around, I seek out a better rubric for the products described in this blithe, brainless manner. Lately, I’ve been fond of “applied philosophy,” but let’s be honest: I have no use for regular philosophy. “Cognitive criticism” might be more apt, because the purpose of most “conceptual art” appears to be a realignment of the viewer’s awareness. It casts a spotlight on habits of mind and half-conscious assumptions. It “makes you think.” That’s why it has nothing to do with art. Art stops you thinking.
It’s interesting to me that so much of this stuff is created by young people. They’re criticizing a world they’ve barely discovered. Perhaps criticism is a mode of discovery? The natural response of clever people to new things?
I want to get these ideas out of the way before writing about Susan Orlean’s piece, “Man and Machine,” in this week’s New Yorker. I want it understood that none of the activities described in the report struck me as having any relation to “art.” Orlean begins one paragraph with the statement, “Art has never been easy to define…” That may be, but for all its relevance to “Man and Machine” it might as well be a polynomial equation.
It’s not that I want to belittle the projects of Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, two young men who have been friends and co-conspirators since the third grade. I just believe that they’re easier to consider if the associations of “art” are swept away. Art draws your eye away from yourself. It does not require you to provide its meaning, because, if it is good, it has no meaning at all.
***
Orlean discusses what I count as five major Bakkila/Bender projects: Cowboy, This is My Milwaukee, Pronunciation Book, Horse_ebooks, and Bear Stearns Bravo. (They were all news to me, which is not very surprising, given the falling-off in my attentiveness to once-absorbing Web sites that marked 2013.) Of these, Horse_ebooks caught and held my attention, not because of what it “did” but because of its effect upon followers. Originally a spam bot controlled by a Russian seller of ebooks such as Sexual Fun and Games for Christian Couples, Horse_ebooks was acquired by Jacob Bakkila in order to provide him with an existing Twitter account with which he could gradually replace the mindlessness of the bot with his intentional imitations. He exploited the bot’s incompetence at capturing complete sentences, so that a text that he discovered, “Everything happens so much faster when you’re retired,” became the “koanlike” “Everything happens so much.”
Bakkila never wrote anything original for Horse_ebooks; like a bot, he just combed the Internet for text. (He had pulled the phrase that I watched him tweet at our first meeting from The Essential Beginner’s Guide to Raising Swans.) “There are so many weird, unindexed sites out there. When you go down the rabbit hole of spam, it’s an infinity of infinity.” He added, “One person could curate or remix endless amounts of information.” The first pulled text that he chose to tweet was “You will undoubtedly look back on this moment with shock and,” on September 14, 2011.
Following tweets of this nature appears to have become obsessive for thousands of people, many of whom were wounded when they learned that the tweets at Horse_ebooks were not a natural occurrence: “they felt cheated that Horse_ebooks wasn’t … an unintentional oracle but the work of one person who plotted its course.”
You’re probably waiting for me to roll my eyes and throw my hands up at this massive waste of time. I agree that it would be ridiculous for me to make a point of savoring a daily dose of amputated banalities, but I’m an old man, and an old man who hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be young.
One of the things that I don’t miss about being young is restlessness. Restlessness seems to enliven many people, but it enervated me. It was simply uncomfortable. I regarded it as a physiological problem, and I still do. In my day, there was nothing to be done about it, but now there is Twitter. Twitter shapes the pointless distraction of restlessness by providing it with a minute terminus, making aimlessness feel purposeful. There is no need for focused effort, no need for any kind commitment. You might just as easily look up into the sky to see a passing balloon, although the variety of tweets is more comparable to counting stars. That’s certainly what made Horse_ebooks attractive: it was accidentally interesting (or so followers thought) on precisely the scale of a tweet. “Everything happens so much” is the compleat tweet, and yet at the very same moment it constitutes an anti-tweet. There is no more to be said, no link to be followed. The thread begins and ends in four words, offering the relief of stillness in the torrent that is Twitter. In my twenties, I might very well have made a religion out of Horse_ebooks, retweeting its Delphic nonsense with vigor. I understand the appeal very well.
It also occurred to me that the “big data” generated by Horse_ebooks — what if you could tabulate the location of all the followers, the time of day at which they registered the tweets, which ones they retweeted, the commentary of those retweets; what if you could treat the following as an organism, and anatomize it in detail — has something to tell us about curiosity and cognition, something unavailable at the local level.
In short, I propose a joint humanities/computer science program of sociological cognitive study.
Bakkila and Bender are aficionados of corporate babble and the unintentional humor of bad advertising; in the course of ordinary conversation, they often quote commercials and sales pitches. They thought that tourist-promotion videos, with their unalloyed cheerfulness and obfuscation of inconvenient truths, were wonderful in an awful way, and therefore perfect for repurposing.
The repurposing of language intended to gull the naive into entertainment for the sophisticated is not just idle fun. It illuminates the nature of sophistication itself; it puts some precision into our grasp of things like “irony.” It might do so more efficiently without the obfuscating talk about art.