“But even if the internet is dead this doesnt mean it’s over. It is all over.”

Collective cultural memory is the foundation on which the significance of a creative practice stands. As summarized in Emerson Rosenthal’s post for #DIGART week, online collections and exhibition spaces have been around since the pre-web BBS years—artists have been online since day one, and this is not to even begin to mention the computer-based creative practices that date back to the mid-20th Century. Then why, in the face of this history, do web-based creative practices (and so too, markets) seem to suffer from a case of eternal amnesia or perpetual newness? In this post for #DIGART week, I propose that an overlooked reality is that half the history of this medium lies in the discarded machines and software of the past.

When anyone sits down to code, they interface with and work within various abstractions and frameworks. For artists who make work for the web, the ultimate and final of these is the web browser—it is the point of delivery and consumption. It renders, encapsulates, and mediates the viewer’s experience of the web. More than a utility, the web browser is an aesthetic and cultural framework with implicit stylistic and functional biases. It is the white cube. It is a museum in flux, whose aesthetic paradigms have drifted over the course of twenty plus years. The web browser itself possesses inherent artifactual significance.

[ED: Nearly all of the text in this post is taken from R. Gerald Nelson's independently published, occasionally problematic but more often brilliantly concise treatise DDDDoomed. Anyone concerned with issues of and methods pertaining to digital image dissemination, authorship and context should make an effort to purchase and read this chapbook. I cannot recommend it enough.]

"With new blogs springing up every day, beautiful images & words are springing up with them. I try to credit everything I put on this blog. I know sometimes I fail. Many of the images I feature are scanned by me from an extensive library- I only scanned them. They are not mine to claim. I am always surprised, amused, dismayed when I see bloggers paste watermark images over images they have scanned, or even more surprising- claim ownership of images from magazines, the content of magazines barely having even reached subscribers- by adding footnotes to their blogs like:

R. Gerald Nelson’s DDDDoomed essay has been making the rounds lately and it sparked a healthy amount of curiosity and note-taking on my part that I felt I wanted to share with some reactions. The essay is published as the first volume of eight in Nelson’s Making Known Img Ctrl series based out of Minneapolis. The image heavy text is “crafted as a speculative fiction that unfolds from the perspective of a future commentator reflecting back and theorizing about the factors that brought about the dysfunctional state of the contemporary image world.” The highlights and corresponding notes aren’t presented in their original linear order, but instead I’ve decided to skip around. As a way of introducing the text, Nelson formulates a biting critique of how web-based image aggregators (abbreviated to “IA” henceforth) such as ffffound.com and tumblr are constantly undermining the cultural task of curation. Nelson points to several projects

Every day an incomprehensible number of new digital media files are uploaded to hosting sites across the internet. Far too many for any one person to consume. Infinite Glitch is a stream-of-conciousness representation of this overwhelming flood of media, its fractured and degraded sounds and images reflecting how little we as an audience are able to retain from this daily barrage.

Infinite Glitch is an automated system that generates an ever-changing audio/video stream from the constantly increasing mass of media files freely available on the web. Source audio and video files are ripped from a variety of popular media hosting sites, torn apart, and recombined using collage and glitch techniques to create an organic, chaotic flood of sensory input.