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Digital Detritus Introduction by Luke Munn In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard references ‘the finest allegory of simulation’: a map of the Empire stretched taut and massive, covering the landscape of the deserts and forests it represents1. The simulation crumbles and frays, withered leather falling into the soil which it attempts to represent. Today the analogy has been flipped, he asserts, the map has been resurrected; rising up once again, as new, while the ‘real’ landscape crumbles and burns. The strewn JPEGs, truncated videos and clipped paragraphs of Digital Detritus move through Baudrillard’s four phases of images; simultaneously representing, masking, and playing with the reality they represent or abandoning it altogether. Users post an image to Tinypic, to be used on social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace. But clicking on a profile image leads to a hall of mirrors; a collection of self-edits, animated GIFs and ‘thanks for the adds’. A glove lies stranded on the edge of an intersection as we attempt to picture the rushed Tokyo business woman who abandoned it. 5 pages later into the Lost Glove Gallery, we’ve forgotten our ghost and are gazing back at the gloves; woolen gloves flopped on Central Park grass, anonymous gloves flattened in a square in the Hague, industrial gloves grotesquely twisted near Tsukiji’s fish markets. Videos like Baseball Sized Hail are cut up, reordered, shortened, and even retagged, replacing a whole set of keywords with the new ‘author’s’ own, a 30 second process made easy by tools like GoTuIt’s Scenemaker. “Life’s short. Get to the good stuff.”2 In a larger scale sampling process, users from riot rite right clit clip click scour mailing lists, collecting the most fascinating, then piece them together in long pages. Images above and below each other combine or repell each other, some in simple sets (“I’ve got way too many cats right now”), some in painful contrast (an earnest dwarf black and white is posted directly after a pair of lovers balancing on a bicycle). Similiarly, sites like lowercase Ls and Suicide Notes guide and train our gaze. In the former, hordes of bored office workers flick through lengthy pages of images in their lunch hour, scroll wheels working overtime to view maximum oddities in minimal time. Personalised grammar and typos are replaced by much more sombre details in Suicide, visitors linger, car-crash-like, studying grainy portraits for a haunted look or bios for a trademark flaw. But these pages never purport to be more than they are. The sites, like the content they host, have fallen between the cracks, into the digital dustbin of the web which has been misplaced; somewhere between legitimate artist and gallery sites and the "most popular" section on YouTube. User descriptions (tags, via bookmark hosting service del.icio.us3) for these pages are sometimes "art", but are equally "weird", "bizaare", and "pointlessly amazing". Beuys would be encouraged4. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html |
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