Alexis Anais Avedisian

· artist + researcher · blogging about media theory + net art ·

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cons: when you have a full time job and 3 weeks to find a comparable apartment; pros: you have beautiful and supportive girlfriends

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drafts i'll never release

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This passage is from Sandy Flitterman, “The Real Soap Operas” (1983)

Advertisements shouldn’t be regarded as the opposite of “content.” More typically, they are “content” perfected, presenting the pleasures of narrative, repetition, and vicarious participation in the most efficient possible form. Failing at that, they establish the terms by which we can recognize “content” — that is emotionally manipulative material that is ambiguous rather than explicit in its aims. The ads, in their necessary narrative closure, help us see open narratives elsewhere. We get some doses of closure to make overwhelming interminability of “content” manageable and pleasurable.

As always, the “content” depends on ads just as much as ads depend on “content.” This point, obvious but sometimes overlooked, seems relevant to how ads change social streams. The ads change the way all the content around them is understood. Not only do the posts from those we choose to follow now function as bait to get us to see ads; they also tee up the ads and allow them to perform the functions Flitterman describes with respect to soap operas. The ads become reassuring “oases” of clarity and narrative closure that stand in contrast to the ongoing, open-ended drama of our friends’ posts. The kinds of closure inherent to ads are then structurally denied to non-ads — we read them as non-ads, as incomplete, as teases, regardless of what they depict.

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the most epic battle shots

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does this blog run on queue?

It runs on human ingenuity, anon.

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writing

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Feels like there’s a lot of implicit whore stigma in this piece. Would Barbie be any less racist or body shame-y if she was based off of a business women instead? I often wonder if critiques of Barbie are really veiled critiques of women who embrace conventional femininity.

(Also, fwiw Ariel Levy, who’s cited in the piece, isn’t just a contributor to the New Yorker, she authored the best-selling Female Chauvinist Pigs.)

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Michael Bühler-Rose – Camphor Flames

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by fax-only

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In practice you become coextensive with the data-constellation you project. Social scores of all different kinds—credit scores, academic scores, threat scores—as well as commercial and military pattern-of-life observations impact the real lives of real people, both reformatting and radicalizing social hierarchies by ranking, filtering, and classifying.

Hito Steyerl, A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition

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Bureaucracy is based on utopian thinking because it assumes people to be perfect from it’s own point of view.

Hito Steyerl, A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition

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Jacques Rancière tells a mythical story about how the separation of signal and noise might have been accomplished in Ancient Greece. Sounds produced by affluent male locals were defined as speech, whereas women, children, slaves, and foreigners were assumed to produce garbled noise.10 The distinction between speech and noise served as a kind of political spam filter. Those identified as speaking were labeled citizens and the rest as irrelevant, irrational, and potentially dangerous nuisances. Similarly, today, the question of separating signal and noise has a fundamental political dimension. Pattern recognition resonates with the wider question of political recognition. Who is recognized on a political level and as what? As a subject? A person? A legitimate category of the population? Or perhaps as 'dirty data'?

Hito Steyerl, A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition

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More than simply a protest demanding this or that finite reform, occupation from this angle involved the blockage of official flows and functions in order to reappropriate time, space, and resources for the reproduction of collective life against the relationships of the wage and private property. Thus, holding space per se is not an end in and of itself, but it provides a base of operations from which to expand and deepen the struggle beyond its immediate site.

Yates McKee, Occupy and the End of Socially Engaged Art

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In a kind of historical displacement, contemporary art was at that moment thrown into relief as a distant prefiguration or prophecy of what was now happening in real time, too close for the comfort of the exhibitions, conferences, and catalogues within which the radical aspirations of contemporary art had sought refuge. As an historiographical provocation, one that admittedly borders on the eschatological, it might be said that this moment of passage represents the end of socially engaged art.

Yates McKee, Occupy and the End of Socially Engaged Art

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Rather than a unique realm to be protected from either brute instrumentalization or compensatory gestures of participation, art was an essential part of the imaginary and practice of the movements as they engaged in life-and-death struggles involving both antagonistic protest and the affirmative cultivation of new forms of democratic.

Yates McKee, Occupy and the End of Socially Engaged Art