I am a heinous hoarder of tabs.

You know how it goes: an article peaks my interest, or I tumble into a rabbit hole of research and open multiple resources at the same time, I never get around to reading all of them, but each one is exceptionally important and so I leave them open. First, for days. I mean, surely I'll find a 20 minute slice of time to read the text in the next day or two, right? Then before I know it... it's been months.

Today I've decided: why don't we let the cat out the bag? I'm airing out the dirty laundry and sharing a few of the websites and texts that have been rotting in my browser for the better part of this year. The goal of this blog post is twofold:

1) document these resources in a more efficient manner, and

2) write them down as a partial form of accountability so that I actually get around to reading them sometime in the near future.

1) 'Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture' by Aymeric Mansoux, Brendan Howell, Dušan Barok, Ville-Matias Heikkilä

Time since opening tab: 3 weeks

Link to text: https://monoskop.org/Permacomputing_Aesthetics

'Permacomputing Aesthetics' discusses the opportunities and limits of using permacomputing as a framework through which artists, designers and creatives can approach their practices. Originally published for Computing Within Limits in June 2023, this wiki version of the text defines permacomputing as the following:

Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice centred around design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing in computational culture, and on creativity with scarce computational resources. As a result, permacomputing aims to provide a countervoice to digital practices that promote maximisation, hyper-consumption and waste. It seeks to encourage practices as an applied critique of contemporary computer technology that privileges maximalist aesthetics where more pixels, more frame rate, more computation and more power equals more potential at any cost and without any consequences.

It thus adopts a mentality of constraint in order to cultivate a sustainable relationship with how artists create with technology. Indeed, 'permacomputing' as a term itself is a portmanteau that combines the words 'permaculture' (an agricultural approach that encourages the creation of self-sustaining ecosystems) with 'computing'. What interests me the most about this text, however (I've only read about a third so far 👼), is its exploration of the aesthetics of digital art practices, more specifically how we need to rethink how we approach aesthetics to go beyond the purely formal or visual, and instead apply an aesthetics that also considers 'systems of relations, sensing and making sense that are already present in the process of making.'

My friend Benoit (and curatorial partner at LAN Party), suggested I read this text when we were discussing areas of research that interest us. It's a topic that has definitely captured my attention throughout this year (notably through the work of Fabbula), and this text will definitely be one that I finish. When will that be? Who knows, but the tab stays open for now. >:]

2) 'Circumventing the White Cube: Digital Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Media Landscapes' by Wade Wallerstein

Time since opening tab: ~7-8 months ago??

Link to text: https://anti-materia.org/circumventing-the-white-cube

The more I work in digital art, as both an artist liaison and curator, the more I have become disenchanted with how we display most digital art in Web3. Before yapping off my mouth about how I think it should be done on social media, I decided to dig into the history of digital art curation, looking to those who are much more experienced than myself to see how they have approached the topic. A quick Google search along the lines of 'digital art curation' brought me to this article by Wade Wallerstein (who I was happy to stumble across during my search, as I have been following his work as a curator at Gray Area for quite some time now), written for [ANTI]MATERIA. I also used this text as a resource for an article of my own, 'Notes on Curating on the Internet', which I began earlier this year but have yet to publish (~stay tuned~ n all that).

In 'Circumventing the White Cube', Wallerstein provides an overarching view of what digital curation is, what we talk about when we speak of 'digital' artworks, and how curating digital art presents a challenge to traditional art institutions, with their almost incontestable 'white cube' display approach.(1) Of course, I haven't finished reading the text, but I feel it is an essential read and so! The tab stays open.

3) 'Third World: The Bottom Dimension' by Gabriel Massan & Collaborators exhibition catalogue, published by Serpentine Arts Technologies

Time since opening tab: God knows

Link to text: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A91663635-0a71-3704-a809-c7efaf37cb30

I stumbled across this 44-page exhibition catalogue of Gabriel Massan's artwork, Third World: The Bottom Dimension, which was commissioned by Serpentine Arts Technologies, powered by Tezos, and was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London between June - November 2023. Third World: The Bottom Dimension is an experimental exhibition and digital artwork that platforms the queer afro-diasporic Brazilian experience, with the aim to ‘reveal rather than replicate systems of inequality’. It (world-)builds an alternative universe where, through gameplay, viewers can imagine solutions or remould their thinking around how they view the world today, hopefully towards a more equitable and sustainable future.

My initial intention around opening this tab was to gain deeper insights into the work, which is a video game art piece, a medium that I adore and want to specialise more in. I never got around to reading the full catalogue, but that's okay, as I have a decent understanding of Massan's work through interviews, talks, and snippets I've read throughout the past year. This tab can now be closed (and worst case scenario, if I ever need to find this document again, I'll just come back to this blog post ☺️).

4) 'Amnesia in the Land of Hypermemory' by Danielle Ezzo

Time since opening tab: 6 months

Link to text: https://www.fotodemic.org/amnesia-in-the-land-of-hypermemory

Earlier this year, I tweeted an article Benoit and I wrote on why we curate technostalgia, published via t2. To my surprise and delight, artist and writer Danielle Ezzo responded to the post, recommending I read Svetlana Boym's writing on the 'future of nostalgia'. She also shared her own words on the topic, with the article 'Amnesia in the Land of Hypermemory', published in Fotodemic. Danielle's text is a review of artist Kat Mustatea's AR book and digital performance, Voidopolis, which re-enacts Dante's Inferno within the updated context of a New York City ravaged by the pandemic.(2)

Danielle Ezzo

@danielleezzo

I bet you’ll find Svetlana Boym’s work on the future of nostalgia really interesting. She talks about restorative and reflective nostalgia to be similar to what you’re proposing with the sentimental and the critical. I wrote a little bit about that here: fotodemic.org/amnesia-in-the…

4

11:57 PM • Apr 25, 2024

What interests me most about Danielle's text is her brief mention of the 'digital flâneur'. When she first shared her text with me, I had not yet started diving deeper into the theories of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and how the 19th century concept of a flâneur maps on to how we navigate our online lives today, including the architecture of networked states, its poetics and its politics. A few months ago, I started making the connections (due in large part to a book I am reading, The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City by Matthew Beaumont). The book, and by extension the theories of Baudelaire and Benjamin, sparked an idea in me for a long-form text that I am hoping to write in the near(-ish) future, and is tentatively titled, 'A Poetics of Technostalgia'. I will therefore surely return to the writings of both Danielle and Svetlana Boym when it is time to flesh out the arguments of this text.

Danielle's review is a short read, and I managed to finish it within the span of 15 minutes whilst writing this blog post. I am happy to share that the tab has now been closed (but will surely be opened again in the near future!).

'Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games' by Bonnie Ruberg

Time since opening tab: Truly no clue, many months

Link to text: https://ourglasslake.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Ruberg-Playing-to-Lose-Gaming-Representation.pdf

I think the title of this chapter, written by Bonnie Ruberg for the book Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games by Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm, is absolutely epic. Today, it is recognised as an important text in queer video game theory, and has been on my to-read list for a over a year (alongside the whole book in general).

In this chapter, Ruberg links queer theory surrounding failure (see: The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam) with video game theory (Jesper Juul's The Art of Failure), demonstrating that playing to lose is a distinctly queer mode of play. They ultimately argue that through a queer lens, failing at video games can both be 'pleasurable and powerful—a spectacular, masochistic mode of resistance that disassembles normative expectations in and out of the game world.'(3)

I have a strong conviction that this text will inform a lot of how I think about and approach LAN Party's next curatorial arc, which centres Gaming. The work of scholars like Bonnie Ruberg encourages and inspires me to think about digital art and how we curate it with extreme specificity, which more often than not makes for far more interesting, relevant and thought-provoking exhibitions. Good curation digs deeper, pokes, probes, wiggles, pries out the hidden stories and connections between a selection of artworks. The more specific the stories one is able to unearth from the artworks, the more powerful the message. For example, instead of: 'an exhibition about video games' (boring) or 'an exhibition about queer identity in video games' (less boring but already pretty well-documented), what does an 'exhibition exploring the queer art of failure' look like? It excites me to imagine it.

(1) For a seminal text on the politics of the 'white cube' when presenting artworks, read Brian O'Doherty's essential 'Inside the White Cube'. The first part of the trilogy can be found here on Artforum. Notably, this text was an open tab in my browser for many months, but since I had already read it a long time ago in university, and only kept it open to revisit from time to time, you will be relieved to know that I have closed the tab since. 👼

(2) The book was notably short-listed for the 2023 Lumen Prize.

(3) Ruberg, Bonnie. 'Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games'. In Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games edited by Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm. 2017. p198.