The concurrent development of science, media and capital under the aegis of digital technology produces a kind of fast-forward effect in which everything appears to take place at an accelerated rate and to produce dramatic change in a very short time. This excites both euphoria and terror, not least because of the shocking pace at which things happen …
Digital Culture
(2002)
by Charlie Gere
Art, Time and Technology (2006)
Non-relational Aesthetics, with Michael Corris (2009)
White Heat Cold Logic (2009)
Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2010)
Community without Community in Digital Culture (2012)
Allegories of the Information Age (2013)
Community without Community in Digital Culture: An interview with Charlie Gere. | http://www.furtherfield.org
http://www.scoop.it/t/embodied-zeitgeist?page=4
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/community-without-community-digital-culture-interview-charlie-gere
I greatly admire and like the work of the artists you mention and others doing similar things. For me they exemplify the complexity of the idea of hospitality. In general the Web is about exchange, whether that of money for goods, social links and relational exchanges in social networks, or the exchange of speech and dialogue in on-line fora. The work of these artists refuses this demand for exchange and profit within a restricted economy. Thus they are in a sense parasitical on the Web. The word ‘parasite’ comes from ‘para sitos’, meaning ‘beside the grain’, and refers to those animals that take advantage of grain stores to feed. They are the creatures to who must be offered hospitality, as a gift, without expectation of return, which means that while they are bound up with the technological systems that comprise the Web, they are not part of the restricted economy of exchange, profit, and return that is at the heart of capitalism, and to which everything else ends up being subordinated and subsumed. Thus they find an enclave away from total subsumption not outside of the market, but at its technical core.