Tat For Art
This one is about art. My art. The art I invent but have not built. It's all here in my head, and as I go clinking around the web, I find more bits of it.
This art is about extending the art other people have left behind, and it is distinct from the art that is original in some sense or other. At the moment I have one piece, the inspiration for this invention. It's a photograph of a stack of blocks. The blocks were once part of someone else's art, but I collected them after he was done, and have attempted to create something as an extension of the former work. The blocks are now in my side yard, having been arranged several different ways. Occasionally I see other bits of discarded artwork and wonder what I might do with them. Usually I have no ideas, and have no way of putting a plan into action. So the invention remains unbuilt.
Today, after deciding that it's time to check out the neighbours, I clicked successively on Next Blog, flipping pages one after another; skipping any with black backgrounds (with one exception); skipping most of the foreign-language blogs; skipping the ones that seemed insubstantial in one way or another. Of the few that made me stop and take a closer look, only three made me want to set them aside for future reference. If you follow the new links on the left side of this page I think you will see why.
One of my cyber-neighbours is a fellow named Michael Winter. The headline to his blog is written in third-person, like a bit of PR copy. Turns out it is a bit of PR copy, because Mr. Winter is a published writer, and this blog functions like a bit of publicity for his latest book. It is somehow a travelogue and a memoir about his time in Newfoundland. Since July he has posted incidental stories from various places between Luton (England) and St. John's (Newfoundland). The latest entry (Saturday, September 11, 2004) has an air of closure to it, as though the blog was about to be set aside.
More than one entry has an air of finality to it, as he passes through places with a sense of departure. So the whole blog is suffused with this sense of things coming to an end. I guess that's why I started nosing around a bit more, trying to figure out what was going on. But then I noticed the comments. There are not many, only five, but they are interesting in their own right. One is from an earlier acquaintance who would like to re-establish contact. This is poignant, of course. In this case it is also public. It suggests that as one episode ends, an earlier episode returns. After the end, a beginning.
Another comment has been retracted by its author. Someone who came, said something, changed his mind, erased it, and left the envelope. A fragment left behind. I'm looking at it the same way I look at old letters found in abandoned factories and I'm beginning to wonder if the entire place is going to be left like this; if the place is already an empty house.
If so, there's my next art piece. It involves blog-squatting: appropriating excess site functions for oneself, generally the comment sections. Having looked around at a few other blogsquatters, it's pretty clear that none of them have moved onto an abandoned artist's site and continued to develop it, to extend it artistically.
I suppose that one way of approaching it would be to use one particular blog as source material. For example, with Winter's blog, his themes of closure, of travel, and maritime Canada could be carried through in a series of comments about those same things, or deviations from those themes. This would be both sympathetic and creative. There are, of course, other things one might do with an abandoned blog, such as using a whole series of them in a game of blog tag. It too would be creative, but not necessarily sympathetic.
This art is about extending the art other people have left behind, and it is distinct from the art that is original in some sense or other. At the moment I have one piece, the inspiration for this invention. It's a photograph of a stack of blocks. The blocks were once part of someone else's art, but I collected them after he was done, and have attempted to create something as an extension of the former work. The blocks are now in my side yard, having been arranged several different ways. Occasionally I see other bits of discarded artwork and wonder what I might do with them. Usually I have no ideas, and have no way of putting a plan into action. So the invention remains unbuilt.
Today, after deciding that it's time to check out the neighbours, I clicked successively on Next Blog, flipping pages one after another; skipping any with black backgrounds (with one exception); skipping most of the foreign-language blogs; skipping the ones that seemed insubstantial in one way or another. Of the few that made me stop and take a closer look, only three made me want to set them aside for future reference. If you follow the new links on the left side of this page I think you will see why.
One of my cyber-neighbours is a fellow named Michael Winter. The headline to his blog is written in third-person, like a bit of PR copy. Turns out it is a bit of PR copy, because Mr. Winter is a published writer, and this blog functions like a bit of publicity for his latest book. It is somehow a travelogue and a memoir about his time in Newfoundland. Since July he has posted incidental stories from various places between Luton (England) and St. John's (Newfoundland). The latest entry (Saturday, September 11, 2004) has an air of closure to it, as though the blog was about to be set aside.
More than one entry has an air of finality to it, as he passes through places with a sense of departure. So the whole blog is suffused with this sense of things coming to an end. I guess that's why I started nosing around a bit more, trying to figure out what was going on. But then I noticed the comments. There are not many, only five, but they are interesting in their own right. One is from an earlier acquaintance who would like to re-establish contact. This is poignant, of course. In this case it is also public. It suggests that as one episode ends, an earlier episode returns. After the end, a beginning.
Another comment has been retracted by its author. Someone who came, said something, changed his mind, erased it, and left the envelope. A fragment left behind. I'm looking at it the same way I look at old letters found in abandoned factories and I'm beginning to wonder if the entire place is going to be left like this; if the place is already an empty house.
If so, there's my next art piece. It involves blog-squatting: appropriating excess site functions for oneself, generally the comment sections. Having looked around at a few other blogsquatters, it's pretty clear that none of them have moved onto an abandoned artist's site and continued to develop it, to extend it artistically.
I suppose that one way of approaching it would be to use one particular blog as source material. For example, with Winter's blog, his themes of closure, of travel, and maritime Canada could be carried through in a series of comments about those same things, or deviations from those themes. This would be both sympathetic and creative. There are, of course, other things one might do with an abandoned blog, such as using a whole series of them in a game of blog tag. It too would be creative, but not necessarily sympathetic.
posted by d3 @ 7:18 PM
1 Comments:
At 12:43 PM,
d3 said…
Can I blogsquat my own site? I think not. It doesn't work that way, conceptually. But I can add afterthoughts, or, in this case, footnotes.
1. Kerri, the Next Blog idea is thanks to you, as you have probably guessed.
2. Blogsquatting in the way I've thought about it is probably more offensive to bloggers than appropriating an empty building is to property owners. I think that people regard blog sites as extensions of themselves, whereas buildings - particularly vacant buildings - are understood as prone to squatting, and owners are less likely to see squatting as a violation of personal space. This distinction highlights some interesting issues about cyberspace properties.
On one hand, I do not hesitate to enter derelict houses or factories - other than to proceed cautiously, as any encounter is likely to be startling and slightly confrontational.
On the other hand, I would hesitate to blogsquat, because I can imagine how disconcerting it would be to find people using my comment section for their own purposes. The curious thing about it is that there are no physical barriers to that activity. Blog sites are not secured in the same ways as real estate. There are no keys, no barriers, so it is only a social code of conduct that keeps people from 'misbehaving' in this particular bit of cyberspace.
But, since I can put hyperlinks in here, I can hop from blog to blog in the same way kids make use of other people's back yards. While I am sure some people would be annoyed, and some grouchy neighbours would raise a fuss, the layout of cyberspace allows it, and just as people get used to kids skipping through their gardens, I can imagine people developing an awareness of the same possibility in cyberspace.
I could put it this way: it is the nature of cyber-gardens to have kids, dogs, and hoboes pasing through, stealing apples, rollicking about, generally reminding us that these spaces are not separate, and that certain types of people and critters are going to live in that linked space.
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