You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-Imagination imagined by Kafka before the Internet.

I wonder about the Internet. Does it in fact exist? Or does it prove an alternate universe? If you sit there surfing long enough it starts to pour right into your head. I’m in the middle of writing or editing something, and for some inexplicable or at least forgettable reason, I’m lead elsewhere and halfway down a rabbit hole to read a joke about some cartoon bears. So, like anyone, I bookmark it as distraction for later. I bring a plum out of my bag, but Allison Cobb won’t let me eat it:

“I know, like Subway low, like bread puffed up

with yoga mat chemicals. Yes I did

steal everyone’s detournement”

Am I now looking at a desert mountain range, a gorge, a rattler’s skin, sand designs left by a Mojave sidewinder, a natural Mandala, the mouth of a deep sea creature, or a series of close-ups of a person’s eye? I can rarely stay on one of these pages long enough to reach its end. All the subsequent descriptions and associations lead in 100,000 directions; exploring the Internet is more divergent than a Raymond Roussel stanza, more plentiful than The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Appealing to my at best curious intentions, as much as distraction and forgetfulness, artcritical’s Bookmarked feature seems a fun idea for anyone willing to share their abandoned to-dos and tabs for inspiration, or for any readily charmable reader. (I’m pressed in this moment to express just why this is. Voyeurism, compulsion, affinity, or just plain curiosity?) Sometimes I fear I won’t find my way back to the new thing I’ve discovered, as if associations won’t work without some kind of guide. Years ago, taking notes while receiving instructions from someone of my grandparents’ generation, I was admonished that excessive notation beguiles memory, which in turn can cause its loss. I think this is true.

My fits and starts on the Internet are, like anyone, a daily occurrence. Everything’s in here, and its access is seemingly ubiquitous. It’s no surprise that the saved tabs the folder of URL shortcuts are ones that I can scarcely remember any reason for having saved. As I continuing to flip through read-later tabs, I’m at a sudden rapt to the ticking of a bedside clock, followed by a soothing French voice that nevertheless sounds as if it’s awoken from a long night beside an ashtray. A sideburned fop pours hot water into a bowl in black and white. It’s Un Homme Qui Dort (1974) Full movie with subs! What is it? Why is it there? I have no recollection, but I love it.

It’s a dream. Wonderful, terrifying, stupid, very ordinary. Researching wildlife online (again, why? because we can), I half-expect a gazelle to leap out of the liquid crystal screen, still baffled by the endless deluge that is the Internet — in the way an early motion-picture crowd feared the train arriving at its station in L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) might burst right through the screen and into the cinema to overtake them. They ran to the back of the room, then returned to their seats for more.

Here I’m totally distracted by a singularly interesting, eccentric guy. I was a bellhop and John was in town from NYC, needing respite from some unpleasant associations, situations he’d describe to me at the front door on successive nights and mornings. He was cool and a great conversationalist. Told me his brain is swelling and that I ought to get the rich guests to buy all his paintings. He also once commanded, upon my delivery of the Wall Street Journal, that I return to the front desk to have it burned at once. In his underwear, no less. More on this in another essay, but I will add that John is generous, no-bullshit, very funny, and every bit of the creative spirit evinced by his many musical, on-screen, and visual-art works. In his After Dark Episode 1, you’ll catch the above-mentioned attributes straightaway.

Now I remember what I was supposed to do: read an essay by Raphael Rubinstein.

Have you heard of Sue Tompkins? This remains in my read-later tab, and though I’ve heard it many times I don’t think I ever reached the end. Being “heat-faint,” in ecstasy, longing for islands or “24 hours on my favorite planet alone” (my favorite of her hypnotic refrains here), irritation for standing by, wondering “if you feel like I feel.” How about Carla Harryman’s Memory Play? Mile’s Champion’s How to Laugh? Every different emotional state represented outside avatars to distract you. Avert your eyes awhile, you’ll come back soon. Fog everywhere. Sun whenever. Festooned in little pics of food, or all the cute pets your landlord won’t let you house. Years ago, they even foreshortened your audible laughing. What a rotten, wondrous place.

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Considering the clamorous and literally unbelievable results of the life-editing that has corrupted our presentations of who we are — replacing them on social media with desperate assertions of who we would like to be seen as — rather than contrive a list of what I would prefer my topmost visited sites to be, thereby concocting some intellectual fantasy about myself, I remonstrate here against digital self-denial and provide the list of my actual recent most visited sites, and what impact they have on my life as an artist. They are in no particular order.

www.pornmd.com

This site is the Kayak of porn, alleviating of hours whirring about the web in frustration, by efficiently finding the pornographic clips that a person most responds to. Type in the word or phrase that you are looking for, and it searches all the top porn sites in an instant. It even makes suggestions. PornMD frees up oceans of time for considering my next exhibition, while simultaneously offering up the male physique as artistic inspiration. And anyway, it’s on doctor’s orders.

Kate Bush Youtube/Google searches

She is only considered bizarre or banshee-like by incompetent journalists without the capacity to consider a songwriter/singer existing beyond the narrowly defined societal prescriptions of what a female artist ought to be.

The worlds, sentiments and experiences that she has conjured through her intellectual, sonic and visual individualism have been a constant source of reference to me since youth, outstripping that of any visual artist. The two minutes and seven seconds of “Under the Ivy” (1985) are among her most excruciatingly beautiful retreats. Bush is one of three principal figures who anchor my artistic sensibilities by forming a trajectory of sweeping gothicism across art, music and literature; the others are Emily Bronte and Casper David Friedrich.

Wikipedia entry on Scottish castles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_castles

Having left Scotland at age 19 to live among the tumult of London and New York, I often long for the solitude, brooding history, and enchantment of my ancient home. When the rigors of urban life mount, I’m afforded distance from the present by an Internet journey back in time through the presence of spellbinding buildings that embody the gruesome, captivating march of humanity.

Castles have lent me an artistic dowry since I was young and spent time investigating ruins, searching for secret tunnels and seeking the supernatural. The experience of such places endows the mind with boundless imaginative force, lowering the divisions between reality and the mythological. Related artworks include Portrait as a Gargoyle (2013), photographed at the Tolkien-esque Castle Glume, situated above the Burns (rivers) of Sorrow and Care in the Ochil Hills; and Portrait as the Devil (2014), taken at Glamis Castle, and referencing the Devil’s visit there one stormy night to play cards on the Sabbath with the fiery Earl of Crawford.

www.wordsmith.org

Words are to me what clay is to a sculptor. As a text-oriented artist, words are the pleasure and pain of my existence. The limitless potential that text contains for communication, connection and harm, positions words as the most powerful tools for construction, and weapons of destruction, that humans possess. This website remains a source of delight, humor and alternate truths in relation to my ongoing series of anagrammatized vinyls.

www.darrenjonesart.com

Physical exhibitions of contemporary art in galleries have been around for perhaps 200 years. They ideally present much art, which is often created with consideration as to how it will appear in the gallery. It’s hard to imagine now, but they may not always exist. The computer disseminates work far more efficiently and to a larger audience than a traditional gallery, while the computer screen need no longer be considered a virtual gallery but an effective and autonomous exhibition space. If the requirement to experience the work in person is reduced or eliminated, and if the sentiment or intention of the work can be liberated from the physical and adequately conveyed across the internet, then the need for an actual site is lessened. I visit my website a lot, to regard and refine the work, and what I say about it. It is a working platform not dissimilar to an artist taking up residence in a gallery space. It functions as a studio, and a place to present work, ideas and observations that are sometimes fabricated and pictured in situation as completed pieces, but increasingly that exist entirely in sketch, or conceptual format on the screen.

www.maploco.com

Maploco enables viewers to create personalized maps of the states, countries or continents that they have visited by clicking to highlight each territory. The thrill (or disappointment) lasts about 10 seconds. By inserting various maps into photoshop, cutting, resizing, flipping and rearranging various regions I have formed a series of geographic motifs that include responses to empire, gay marriage and the recent tragic events in France.

www.thesaurus.com

Another marvelous tool for an artist enamored with vocabulary and words, who also writes about art. Clichéd phrases and art-world gibberish so quickly become bankrupt husks exhausted of impact and meaning, and deft new ways of saying something are refreshing. However, there are artists whose descriptions of their work are so stuffed with superlatives and overwrought language that they are downright fuliginous… I mean opaque.. I mean, well, confusing.

www.logolalia.com

Concrete poetry is the use of visual or typographical arrangements or patterns of words to convey the meaning of a poem or text. It wasn’t an art form I was familiar with until discovering this site, which is a portal to some brilliant, simple combinations of word, image and meaning.

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http://eastmanhouse.org/events/detail.php?title=burley_2014-15
http://robertburley.com/disappearance-of-darkness-2012/

I leave tabs open as reminders to myself — references or links to things I might, could, or should be doing. Often, these sites serve as surrogate memorials, remaining open only so that I can allow myself to feel better by acknowledging that attention is being paid, and that I have a plan. A part of me is invariably trying to forget, to ignore the ignored, and leave behind the burden of everything I cannot or simply will not do.

I track the memory usage of my web browser. My computer is showing its age, and it is usually these unread, unexplored tangents that bog down its ever-shrinking resources. It serves to further remind me of all that I might be doing. For months now, lurking in the background, I have had a tab open to the personal website of the photographer Robert Burley, who for five years documented the demise of analog image making. Burley traveled around the world photographing what amounted to a literal dematerialization of his chosen medium. Captured in his photographs is the corporate contraction experienced by all of the giants of the industry. There is the never-ending stream of building implosions at the Kodak Park in Rochester and the simply deserted factories of the bankrupt Polaroid, companies both decimated by the rapid shift to digital imaging. This shift proved inevitable, and yet, caught so many entirely off guard. Although the finality of the transition was never quite clear while it was unfolding, now, after the buildings have fallen and the thousands of layoffs completed, Burley’s images serve as a succinct summary of this abandonment of the analog.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transformation of technology; I attended art school during the thick of it, to study photography, and watched as it unfolded. At times, I felt like I was being abandoned by my own medium, falling behind in the future I had always embraced. As it no doubt is for many in college, the alchemical thrill of photography was nearly extinguished in me, the sheer magic of watching images emerge from the baths was something that played little role in the work I found myself making. Preoccupation with craft proved to be the undoing of many of my friends, lost in the labs spending hours upon hours in overly complicated modes of printing, making perfect, airless photographs. I fought against such elaborate production in my own work: I wanted something else from my images, a reason for the photography to have occurred. The weight of technicality is a burden not easily shifted in the making of photographs; it’s an inescapable fact of the medium that many can never seem to reconcile their work with. This fundamental problem has, of course, been discussed to no end, always to rear its head every decade or so, critically.

Such are the problems of art school. I never entirely resolved my concerns with craft, and my work most likely reflects this. Perhaps these are the building blocks of many photographers’ educations. I can only speak to my own experience, but I will say that there were many questions that certainly should have been asked of us as students, but were not. All artistic mediums, to varying degrees, contain their own material-based justifications, an inherent logic to their representative ends and uses. Photography obviously has its own, and yet we constantly ask for these once-simple definitions to be expanded and reconsidered.

This compulsion to define the medium is further complicated by our world’s full-scale digitization, and now these conversations often shift toward this electronic inevitability faced by photography. While the allure of the darkroom seems to be something that many fondly remember, few speak of it. Rather, when it is invoked, the analog era is employed as an all-encompassing nostalgia, and merely another emblematic loss of the well-worn past, demolished for a harshly gleaming replacement. In the wake of prolific, all-seeing, skill-less iPhone photography, such an assessment is inevitable, but also understandable in light of the endless of hardware and software upgrades we must all take part in, brought on by corporate-imposed planned obsolescence. The past, as we remember it, was never plagued by such artificial limitations.

There is something both wonderful and deeply depressing about this act of photographing the systems and places central to the development of photography, yet now no longer needed for its practice. Appropriately, the final venue for the current traveling exhibition of Burley’s photographs in the United States is the George Eastman House, named for the founder of the now much diminished Eastman Kodak, and the oldest museum dedicated to photography. In 1932, faced with severe disabilities, Eastman chose to end his own life, leaving behind a legendarily brief suicide note, now viewable in his namesake museum’s permanent collection. “My work is done, why wait?” Eastman wrote; could there be a more chillingly upbeat assessment of death?

The month before I started in art school, Kodak announced the discontinuation of traditional black-and-white photographic paper. The company’s inexorable slide into insolvency over the last decade was a protracted comedy of corporate errors, with each misstep launching several more, a latticework of insurmountable loss forming with each futile restructuring. Following this saga, I found it to be one of the more depressing episodes in the recent history of photography; in Kodak’s unraveling, I see my own failures reflected back at me. Try as I might to justify the upgrade, I know that for my purposes, there is little that a new camera could do that my long-outmoded one cannot. I see in Kodak’s failure of vision the fate of many of the things I care very much about — a broader, dark renunciation of possibility.

Burley’s photographs are laden with the latent potential that compels many to take their own, an analog security that can’t easily be replicated. In one image of a former Agfa film factory storage room, huge master spools of film are stacked upon racks, awaiting their final coating and cutting before being packaged as 35mm rolls. The spools stretch out into a florescent-lit horizon, making clear the incredible capacities once required to supply our unlimited desire to capture images on film. A part of me that pines for unchecked progress can dismiss these documents of a world that is rapidly being lost, and firmly place my faith in the perfected vision of cloud-powered futurity. There is another part, though, that finds such collectivism abhorrent, a terrifying disfiguration of placid continuity. This part longs to know the final destination of those prospective rolls of film, through chemical transformation, and it’s the part that believes in a tangible reality, and discards the well-marketed replacement.

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1. The New York Times, “Working or Playing Indoors, New Yorkers Face an Unabated Roar,” by Cara Buckley, July 19, 2012 — Yeah, most of the places you can go to socialize in New York are way too loud. Maybe I’m just getting old and I’ve blown out my ear canals with too much loud, bad music. But if we go out somewhere, I’d like to be able to hear you talking to me from across the table — not just the person I’m rubbing shoulders with. I’ve got an agenda to share with people and I want to be able to hear them when they tell me why I’m mistaken about something. I can’t learn anything if all I hear is a dull mix of some sentimental and ironic pop songs from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s blared at me at 120 db.

2. 3AM Magazine, “romanticism, punk rock, and the importance of rim jobs,” Andrew Stevens in conversation with Brandon Stosuy, March 4, 2007 — Brandon Stosuy is pretty rad. I like the way he writes a lot. There’s a bunch of cultural flotsam from the 1980s that’s in the process of being rediscovered, saved, found, or retained. That stuff is really important since there was a lot of artistic and cultural development going on then that we’re just now trying to think about a little more clearly. (Koons is an OK example of this, though there are also far, far better ones, like Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler and Richard Prince). Stosuy has shown a pretty cool dedication to that excavation work. So thanks, Brandon Stosuy, for helping with that whole thing.

3. Vice Magazine, “KOMP-LAINT DEPT.: TRUST NEVER SLEEPS,” by Bob Nickas, February 5, 2014 — I’d read anything Bob Nickas writes, whether it’s an essay on art and culture or a grocery list, or some graffiti he scrawled on the wall of a public toilet. He wouldn’t do that, maybe. He writes a column for Vice and I feel like he’s doing some of the best writing of his long, totally illustrious career. I also haven’t read this or his current essay yet, but I would strongly suggest everyone read and re-read and re-read “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, Part II,” “To be Read (Once Every Two Years),” and “Why. I Hate. Graffiti.”

4. sweettomb.com — This is the website of Trinie Dalton, who (full disclosure) was my thesis advisor. She’s absolutely awesome and makes really cool zines. Pick up MYTHTYM, Baby Geisha, and Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is.

5. seanjosephpatrickcarney.com — After reading Walter Benjamin and other cultural criticism-type stuff for a long time, SJPC and his Social Malpractice project finally explained that stuff in a way that made way more sense than a grad school seminar discussion and was also more entertaining than a grad school seminar discussion.

6. skeptoid.com — I volunteer copyediting services to Skeptoid’s blog. I like the science and skepticism community’s encouragement of questioning, thinking about rhetoric, doubting and thinking systematically. I do better when I’m suspicious of my own preconceptions and assumptions. Plus also science is very, very cool.

7. The “Egyptian hieroglyphs” entry on Wikipedia — I like hanging out in the Egyptian wing at the Met. And the history of how this stuff was used and later decoded is really cool. Maya hieroglyphics is also incredibly interesting and weird, and prizes inventiveness.

8. Slate Magazine, “Why Joseph is my Hero,” by David Plotz, June 1, 2006 — I tried again to read the whole Bible. I got into Exodus. It can just be so boring. I’m reading another novel right now and will possibly return to the Bible when I’m done. David Plotz, the former editor at Slate, wrote a blog about his thoughts, reactions, and curiosities while reading the Bible. He’s an atheist, but he takes the book earnestly and generously, and his insights are very cool.

9. The “Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District” entry on Wikipedia — This was a landmark lawsuit about the teaching of evolution in schools. My cousin works at a non-profit, the NCSE, that consulted with the plaintiffs and provided some of the best arguments for the difference between intelligent design as a conceit and evolution as a theory that’s scientifically demonstrable. In the arts we tend to abuse the word “theory.” What we usually mean by that word is a hypothesis or a proposition or a description. What it means in the hard sciences is very different. Here’s a good definition, from Wikipedia: “A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. A scientific theory is differentiated from a hypothesis in that a theory must explain actual observations.” Also, as you might be able to tell from this list, I use Wikipedia all the time and hope to someday be able to state unequivocally that it rivals the achievement of the Library of Alexandria. Fingers crossed.

10. Common Spark Collective, FAQ — I’m sad to say that I’ll likely never contribute to this project, even though I find it really intriguing. These people are mapping “the shared national and cultural resources we inherit and pass around.” That’s pretty amazing when you think about it. It’s an enormous project. I’d like to see what they do with it. The commons is one of the best assets we have in a free society, and recognizing what they are (both as cultural products and as shared spaces) is one step towards thinking about what we can do with them, how we relate to one another, and what our socio-cultural environment is. I found out about this project from a bumper sticker.

11. SolveForX, “Power from Nuclear Waste,” by Leslie Dewan, February 10, 2014 — Most of what we call nuclear waste and store in places like Yucca Mountain, where it will remain dangerous and toxic for thousands of years, is actually unused nuclear fuel. About 90% of the available material in nuclear fuel goes unused, so then it just gets dumped in the middle of nowhere. So, but, Dewan says that technology that allows for more complete consumption of the available fuel in the uranium pellets that nuclear power plants use has existed since the 1950s or so. It’s safer, produces a much shorter half-life (hundreds of years rather than tens of thousands), and is more energy efficient. Plus it requires smaller installations that can exist at current nuclear plants or that can be set up all over the place, which means that any given site is much less dangerous than something like Fukushima (which was a very old and more dangerous model than the ones currently being built). Look: nuclear power is kind of scary, I get that. But the accidents that we’ve seen have all been preventable and aren’t very likely with the current nuclear power facilities that can be built. It’s a way, way, way, way better source of energy than gas, oil, or coal (which, coal, by the way, dumps enormously larger amounts of radioactive material into the environment than nuclear power ever will).

There are also some cool articles from Slate that explain the attempts by various committees to figure out how to warn future generations how horrifically dangerous nuclear waste will remain. It’s a really hard project, since we have no idea what people will be like thousands of years from now. We don’t know what language they’ll speak or what various signs will mean to them. It’s like trying to figure out how to make a Rosetta stone that will retain its communicative clarity easily and effectively for dozens of centuries.

12. Giacometti: A Biography, by James Lord — Lord quoted Giacometti as saying, “In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.” Amen, man. That cat is better for people than any painting. And despite their flaws, this and Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait are amazing depictions of the artist.

13. The Bloggess, “Women Who Are Ambivalent about Women Who Are Against Women Against Feminism,” by Jenny Lawson, July 21, 2014 — Jenny Lawson’s a good writer and I really dig this essay on the difficulty that reactionary forces have imposed on disrupting structural inequalities and outright bigotry.

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