Abstract
Olga Goriunova’s first monograph is a welcome contribution to the field of media studies. In less than 200 pages, the author offers media artists, cultural theorists, art curators and philosophers alike a resource through which to think about the development of culture on the Internet. The book unfolds an attentive empirical analysis of the aesthetics of networked media technology. These empirical observations are, however, accompanied by a clear and coherent mobilization of concepts drawn from within and beyond the field of digital culture. This conceptual reworking gives direct voice to a set of Internet practices, often creating a new vocabulary where the words to articulate them did not previously exist. Yet, at the same time, the book avoids framing phenomena through theories that are too readily available. As a result, the reader is presented with the solid thinking-in-practice of the author on the one hand, and a generous pool of theoretical experimentation and innovation on the other.
The aim of the book is to investigate the integration of digital networks within contemporary cultural dynamics. Cultural production on the Internet, Goriunova affirms, is always ‘immanent to societal unfolding’ (p. 21): if ‘the technical is aesthetic is political is cultural’ (p. 21), then one needs to invent new ways to look at this multidimensional character of Internet cultural practices. Goriunova introduces the notion of ‘art platforms’ as a means of opening up this new perspective. An art platform is a particular kind of cultural production: it is both a type of network and a kind of practice; it is flexible, self-organising and continuously coproduced by its users and the aesthetic outcomes that it promulgates. Goriunova writes: ‘an art platform can be a stand-alone website that, together with other actors, forms an ecology of aesthetic production, but it might also take place as a subsection of a large platform, or even as a space between a corporate service, artists’ work, hacking, collaborative engagement, and a moment of aesthetic fecundity’ (p. 2). As the name implies, art platforms make art; the latter has, however, to be placed in the wider context of the culture of the digital age. This is because ‘art platforms engage with living practices in their blurred and “dirty” forms between a more broadly defined swathe of culture and art’ (p. 7).
An art platform is thus ‘a fragile concept that is broad and very specific’ (p. 111). The contradiction is necessary, as, in order to forge the notion the author explores a variety of positions within the history of thought that have dealt with networks, organization and creativity, whilst retaining a focus on the specificity of the technical medium under investigation. The concept of art platforms thus entails elements of a Latourian treatment of objects and a Guattarian reading of autopoietic systems, while at the same time drawing from open-ended theories of media ecologies. Nevertheless, Goriunova’s art platforms are not strictly reducible to any of the above positions: art platforms ‘emerge’ from the aesthetic paradigms that are proper to contemporary societal and cultural operations on the Internet, whilst generating ‘a cultural organizational mechanism powerful enough to disrupt some of the domineering and stratifying tendencies of digital media, culture and society’ (p. 1).
The book proposes a materialist aesthetics of digital networks; that is, an aesthetics concerned with the material genesis of the technohuman ensemble's processes of subjectification. There is, in the author’s opinion, a living and lived dimension to art platforms that makes them inherently cultural and inevitably propagative of aesthetics. It is perhaps this ‘life character’ that better summarises Goriunova’s approach to aesthetic creation. Life is here to be understood in a Nietzschean sense, as a force of affirmation that cuts across the sensible but which is never flattened down onto it. The book then offers an ‘intensive’ articulation of the active dynamics within digital culture, contending that there are various levels of actualization of the sociocultural and the technical alike.
Goriunova’s commitment to the materiality of the digital is best expressed through her use of two other concepts – ‘autocreativity’ and ‘organizational aesthetics’ – both of which are coined to explain the energies that art platforms enter into negotiation with. Autocreativity is an automatic, autopoietic and autonomous type of creativity; a concept that, in virtue of its impossibility of being localized, distances itself from the neoliberal jargon of creative capital. Organizational aesthetics is instead a tool for the investigation of digital objects that treats them as emergent processes of becoming. It aims to account for – yet without pacifying – the mismatches amongst practices and experiences, perceptions and ways of knowing, and to thereby accommodate the ‘difference’ (a word to be taken here in a very philosophical sense) that catalyses them all.
The book’s project of concept-creation and its empirical observations are mutually informing each other. Readers are introduced to the ‘geeky publics’ (p. 89) of communities such as Dorkbot and Micromusic.net in order to consider issues pertaining to political force, amateur practices and the potency of art. Similarly, Second Life artist Gazira Babeli and the Russian literary platform Udaff.com are analysed, so as to discuss how one can achieve, through amplification, ‘aesthetic brilliance’ (p. 50). The years that Goriunova (an academic, a curator and an organiser) spent at the forefront of software culture become very manifest in this empirical reflection, especially when the author addresses the experimentation of Runme.org (a software art repository which she co-organized) and the ‘digital folklore’ of computational technology; an aspect of the latter that is ‘affective, habitual, digitally crafty, and funny’ (p. 84).
In her empirical analysis, Goriunova deliberately avoids ‘things that are too known’ (p. 111–12). However, the book never falls into elitist positions. One can perhaps note this when the participatory web is addressed: whilst it is commented that an art platform and the Web 2.0 are different in terms of their intents and expressions, the former is not excluded from partaking of the structures, creative capacities and sociality of the latter (and vice versa). However, this does not imply that the author is blind to the implicit totalisation that could arise from contemporary technologically mediated imperatives to be connected and participate. Quite the opposite: the whole book can be understood as an account from the frontline of the opposition to totalising forms of cultural production. In this sense, Goriunova’s ‘digital avant-garde’ does what the word itself suggests: it scouts and moves towards that which lies ahead, whilst remaining unafraid of what might happen.