Content Form:APRJA 13 Bilyana Palankasova

Bilyana Palankasova

Feminist Digital Art Practices and the Emergence of Content Value

Abstract

This article discusses feminist performance and internet art practices of the 21st century through the lens of Boris Groys’s theory of innovation. It analyses works by Signe Pierce, Molly Soda, and Maya Man, to position practices of self-documentation online in exchange with feminist art histories of performance and electronic media. The text proposes that the discussed contemporary art practices fulfil the process of innovation detailed by Groys through a process of re-valuation of values via an exchange between the everyday, trivial, and heterogenous realm of social media (‘the profane’) and the valorised realm of cultural memory (‘the archive’). Using digital ethnography and contextual analysis, framed by the theory of innovation, the text introduced ‘content value’ as a feature of contemporary art on the Internet. The article demonstrates how feminist internet art practices expand on cultural value through the realisation of a process of innovation via an intra-cultural exchange between the feed and the institution.

Introduction

This article considers feminist performance and internet art practices from the twenty-first century against Boris Groys’ theory of innovation, proposing that these practices fulfil the innovation process theorised by Groys through a re-valuation of values and intra-cultural exchange between online spaces (particularly social media), as profane, and the institution(s) of contemporary art, as the archive.

The article will discuss the practices of three multi-media artists who work with performance online, use self-documentation methods, and incorporate archival motifs in their work - Signe Pierce, Molly Soda, and Maya Man. Their practices will be framed as exemplifying artistic and cultural innovation following Groys’ conceptual framework of ‘the new’ by relying on intra-cultural exchange between feminist art histories and practices (the archive) and online content (the profane). The theoretical framework is applied to readings of the artworks constructed through digital ethnography.

Signe Pierce is a multi-media artist who uses her body, the camera, and the surrounding environments to produce performances, films, and digital images with a flashy, neon, LA-inspired ‘Instagram’ aesthetic. In her work she interrogates questions about gender, identity, sexuality, and reality in an increasingly digital world and identifies herself as a ‘Reality Artist’ ("Signe Pierce").

Moly Soda is a performance artist and a “girl on the internet” since early 2000s when as a teen she started blogging on Xanga and LiveJournal and in 2009 she started Molly Soda Tumblr (Virtual Studio Visit: Molly Soda). Her work explores the technological mediation of self-concept, contemporary feminism, cyberfeminism, mass media and popular social media culture.

Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the Internet. Her websites, generative series, and installations examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online. In her practice, she mostly works with custom software and considers the computer screen as a space for intimacy and performance, examining the translation of selves from offline to online and vice versa.

Alongside a discussion of the documentary properties and archival themes in these digital practices, the article proposes content value as an artistic attribute, having emerged out of the exchange between the pervasiveness of networked technology (profane realm) and the established tradition of cultural archives.

Theory of Innovation

Innovation is a multifaceted term with different definitions and implications depending on discipline and context, whether it is cultural, artistic, scientific, or technological. Particularly throughout the twentieth, and especially in the twenty-first century, in a cultural context, innovation and the ‘new’ have been thought of as a method of resistance to the banality of commodity production (Lijster, The Future of the New: Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration 10). At the same time, with the accelerating pace of technology, innovation gained proximity to capitalist agendas and is overwhelmingly used to describe new products or services, often aligned with techno-solutionist approaches. Because of this prominence of technological innovation and its fundamental entanglement with capitalist production, innovation has become problematic in the context of contemporary art (11). In this context of inherent contradiction, can art still deliver social and cultural critique while being subjected to the steady pace of innovation? Philosopher of art Thijs Lijster identifies some of the more prominent aspects of innovation in relation to art and social critique: innovation’s capacity for critique, the distinctions between concepts and practices of innovation, the importance of innovation to artistic practice, and the capacity of innovation to be separated from acceleration (12). This article will consider innovation and the concept of the ‘new’ in its historical and institutional dimensions by using as an analytical framework Boris Groys’s theory of cultural innovation, which he developed in his book On the New. In line with this, the use of ‘innovation’ here refers to processes of cultural innovation which are interlinked with and produce processes of artistic innovation.

Overview of the Theory

In On the New, Groys suggests that contemporary culture is driven by the urge to innovate, and the process of innovation is closely entangled with the economic logic of culture. He claims that the idea of the new has changed and rather than meaning truth, utopia, or essence in cultural difference (which it did in modernist discourse), the new is defined by its positive and negative adaption to the traditional and established culture. Groys applies this principle to artworks in the sense that their value is determined by their relation to other artworks, or cultural archives, not to extra-cultural dimensions. At the same time, he suggests that there is a constantly shifting line of value between these cultural archives and the superfluous, profane realm of the everyday. Innovation occurs when an exchange is realised between the cultural archive and the profane. In this context, innovation means re-valuing what is already valued or established and cross-contaminating it with what is trivial, every day, and profane, so the new can emerge. Groys discusses his theory via examples from art, writing, and philosophy but the epitome of this process of innovation for him are Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.

In this theoretical framework, I propose a reading of contemporary feminist internet practices as exemplifying the process of cultural innovation as described by Groys. The incorporation of content strategies into contemporary performance practice on the Internet is framed as a process of exchange and re-valuation of values between the established tradition of feminist practice and the vulgarity of contemporary networked social media. In this context, I propose ‘content value’ as a feature of contemporary art, having emerged at the interface of critical creative practice, documentary performative practices online, and Web 2.0 social platforms.

The article is divided into three parts, each considering a segment of the theory of cultural innovation as developed by Groys to draw an analytical framework for thinking about artistic and cultural value at the intersection of art and content. The theory is presented in three subsequent parts, reflecting three key features of the process of innovation as described by Groys: "The Archive & The New", "The Value Boundary", and "Innovation as Re-evaluation of Values". Each theoretical part is paired with a discussion of the cultural and artistic conditions pertaining to the application of the theory to the subject of the article. In the first part, I discuss the cultural archives, or established art historical values, against which contemporary practices are valued. In the second part, I elaborate on how the value boundary is crossed by the use of content-as-document. In the third part, I suggest that ‘content value’ emerges as a feature of contemporary art in the last decade, as part of a process of cultural innovation based on exchange between institutionalised and valorized culture and networked social technologies.

The Archive & The New

On the New

On the New was first published in 1992 in German in the already mentioned context of increasing distrust towards innovation. Groys offers a theory which rejects the modernist implications of innovation, such as utopia, creativity, or authenticity, and instead positions innovation as a process of re-valuation of values. He wrote On the New against the debate of impossibility of new culture, theory, or politics and rather than supporting this impossibility for new culture to emerge, he positions the new as an outcome of the economic mechanisms of culture through a reinterpretation of older theories of innovation, to argue that the new is, in fact, inescapable. To understand or establish what the new might be, Groys stresses the importance of firstly dealing with the value of cultural works and where it comes from.

Groys posits that a work acquires value when it is modelled after a valuable cultural tradition - a process termed ‘positive adaptation.’ He opposes this process to the process of ‘negative adaptation’ – when a work is set in contrast to such traditional models (Groys 16). In this way, Groys positions cultural value as constructed by objects and practices’s relationship to tradition and established cultural and artistic norm; or their relationship to other objects and practices existing in certain cultural archives in a hierarchy of public institutions. These cultural archives are institutions such as libraries, museums, or universities, fulfilling a role of storing works in particular value hierarchy. In this context, the source of a cultural object’s value is always determined by its relationship to these archives: in the measure of “how successful its positive or negative adaptation is” (17). Or in other words, a cultural object’s value is based on its resonance or dissonance with ‘the archive’ where the use of archive stands for the institutional cultural spaces which collect, preserve, and disseminate cultural knowledge within an established hierarchy of values; the archive is the collective expression of institutionalised histories and practices in art and culture.

In this sense, Groys’s reading of the new and innovation is opposed to the modernist understanding of the new as utopian, true, or an extra cultural other of the orienting mechanism of culture itself. This intra-cultural new is atemporal, it is not reliant on progress, it is grounded in the now and stands as much in opposition to the future, as it does to the past (41). According to him, the new is not an effect of original difference, is not the other, but emerges in a process of intra-cultural ‘revaluation of values’ - the new is always already a re-value, a re-interpretation, “a new contextualisation or decontextualization of cultural attitude or act” conforming to culture’s hidden economic laws (56–57). This new is achieved through the re-interpretation and re-contextualisation of existing values in a process of exchange between cultural domains. The revaluation of certain culturally archived values is the economic logic of a recurrent process of innovation.

To ground this in the article, I will discuss the cultural memory context, or the art historical background against which the works in questions are considered and valued. This part explains the relationship of the new to the cultural archives and elaborates the role of new technologies in a process of exchange with histories of feminist art.

Cultural Archives

The first part of Groys’s theory suggests that the source of a cultural object’s value is determined by its relationship to cultural archives and in the measure of how successful its positive or negative adaptation to these archives is. And through this adaptation and exchange, the process of re-valuation of values produces the new. In this section, I will establish the cultural archive, or art historical tradition, against which the practice of Pierce, Soda, and Man adapt to produce the new.

To determine what these practices’s relationships to established cultural and artistic norms are, we need to consider them against a tradition of practices existing in the cultural archives. Following Groys’s theory, the cultural value of ‘new’ feminist internet performance art is determined by its relationship to art historical context or lineage of similar work, in the measure of how successful the positive or negative adaptation to them is. The works of Pierce, Soda, and Man are underpinned by rich histories at the intersection of performance art, moving image, net art, and post-internet art dealing with gender, identity, and femininity.

The artistic traditions in question could be traced back to the 1970s, when Lynn Hershman Leeson started experimenting with fictional characters. Works like Roberta Breitmore (1973-1978) and Lorna (1979-1983) employed interaction and technology, such as TV and new video formats like LaserDisc, to critique the performance of gender (Harbison 70). Later, Hershman started making Internet-based projects, such as CyberRoberta (1996) (Harbison 71) to further examine the authenticity of self and the complications and anxiety emerging with the arrival of the Internet. Hershman’s The Electronic Diaries (1984-96) is a video series representative of a period in the 1980s and 1990s when artists were experimenting with cyberspace as a social space for self-representation and liberation (Harbison 7). In the videos, the artist confronts fears and traumas through recoded confessions, speaking directly to the camera. The tapes are fractured and use digital effects to reflect the psychological changes and misperceptions of self the protagonist experiences (Tromble 70). The series became a key work for the artist and for artists’ video more broadly as it restated and resonated with a lot of the feminist video themes of the preceding decade. At the same time, her work engaged with the new politics of representation that had emerged with the affordances of new communication and media technologies (Harbison 66).

Hershman’s contribution to what Rosalind Krauss at the time had termed ‘aesthetics of narcissism’ (Krauss) was suggesting that the separation of the subject and its fictional manifestations in the electronic mirror, need to be considered not just in the immediacy of the technological medium, but in the entire system and network of televisual environment (Tromble 145). Exploring early ideas around surveillance and confronting your image in real-time through new media, Hershman stresses the need for the mediated reflection to be understood not simply as a reflection of reality but as a force which actively manipulates and constructs reality. Thus, her work presents the screen as a space where identities are negotiated, constructed, and reconstructed. Through embedding the subject’s image within a larger television context, Hershman highlights the complexities of identity as mediated, fragmented, and entangled with fictional representations in the context of the pervasive influence of television.

Extending the thematic line of fictionalisation and trauma in another artistic context, mouchette.org (1996-ongoing) by Dutch artist Martine Neddam is an influential work of net art which takes the form of a personal website of a fictional character – a 13-year-old girl named Mouchette. The website takes the form of an interactive diary of a girl who shares thoughts on death, desire, and suicide. Neddam uses the characteristics of the web in ways which serve the story, such as confusing hyperlinks circulations, interactivity which layers the story, and constant identity play performed through a virtual character. The interactivity of the web and the nature of the work foster an active community of engaged audience which follows the work and could even use the website for their own projects (Dekker 152). Because of its expansive and pervasive character, the artwork has been a key case study in documenting and preserving net art since the project has generated documentation based on people’s experiences and memories, as well as documents of the site itself, making Mouchette a performative site and its own archive (Dekker and Giannachi 10). The interactivity and technological conditions of HTML also mean that the artwork facilitated these exchanges through anonymous interactions allowing the exploration of ambiguity and ethics in a way which today’s regulated online environments would impede.

Another key communication technology which was used in artistic performative experiments and became a transmitter of online female identities was the webcam. Ana Voog was the first artist to call her work ‘webcamming art,’ using her webcam as a tool to create Anacam (1997) – a twenty-four hours a day live broadcast of the artist’s home. Voog streamed daily activities, such as cooking, cleaning, having sex, chatting with cam-watchers, and hosting visitors. Alongside her vernacular, domestic activities, Voog also included performance art and visual experiments (Lehner 119). Blending performance and authenticity, Voog was one of the first artists to engage in continuous webcam streams and interacting directly with her audiences. Her use of technologies like a webcam and the Internet created art which was personal and had a new kind of immediacy for the audience.

A decade later, Petra Cortright took a different approach to webcam art with VVEBCAM (2007). The artis recorded herself staring into her webcam while playing with the various visual effects of her 20 USD webcam, including overlays of animated pizza slices, cats, and snowflakes (Lehner 120). The video was uploaded on YouTube and marked a significant departure from the typical camgirl genre where rather than addressing the camera and audience directly and engaging with erotic themes, Cortright documented herself as an immersed user, interacting with her computer ("Net Art Anthology"). In the video, Cortright appears to not wear makeup and is dressed casually, seemingly purposefully ‘unsexy’ (Lehner 120). When the video was uploaded to YouTube, she added tags, which rank higher in search engines and attract users looking for explicit content, like “tits vagina sex nude boobs britney spears paris hilton” (Soulellis 428). VVEBCAM took place on the cusp on a massive transformation in the way online users engage with posts, as soon after, the feed emerged – Facebook’s newsfeed ‘The Wall’ was introduced in 2006 and the iPhone was launched in 2007 (Soulellis 428). At the same time, artists started experimenting with posting on surf clubs and other blogs as a method to draw attention to the artistic value of user content (Moss 149).

Posting originally evolved into a metaphor for an online condition in the early days of the Internet but especially with the expansion of networked activity in the 1980s, and was a term which transitioned from newspaper bulletin boards and drew on wider traditions of announcement by and within a community (Soulellis 425–26). Relatedly, the origins of ‘content’ can also be traced to publishing metaphors and related to the visual or textual material in books, magazines, and newspapers. At the turn of the century, open and participatory web and digital media tools, like blogging, and particularly in 2005 with the launch of YouTube, brough fundamental changes in the media and information environment, in the way that audiences responded to culture online (Burgess 60).

In this context, another key moment for creating performance and video art for the new Web 2.0 platforms was Ann Hirsch’s The Scandalishious Project (2008-2009). For eighteen months, Hirsch’s fictional character Caroline Benton, a self-described camwhore, hipster, and freshman college art student in upstate New York, uploaded over a hundred monologic, blurry, low-resolution webcam videos to her YouTube channel Scandalishious (Steinberg 47). In the series, the artist danced in front of her webcam, vlogged, and engaged with followers, which responded to and commented on the videos ("Net Art Anthology"). The videos are satirical and humorous and play on stereotypes about sexiness and heterosexual desire (Brodsky 91–104). Scandalishious is a very early example of social media-based work and in the performance, Hirsch addresses the subject of girls online via an exploration of self-representation as feminist practice ("Net Art Anthology").

The artworks discussed here inform the context in which Pierce, Soda, and Man work and form the cultural archives against which the practices of the three artists are valued. They represent a lineage of works using performative and documentary strategies (similar to previous generation of feminist practice) and new technology – such as TV, LaserDisc, HTML, webcams etc. This illustrates a trajectory of feminist performance artists engaging with multimedia technologies, Web 1.0, and later Web 2.0. The arrival of Internet platforms for text and visual media, such as blogs, surf clubs, and later YouTube and others introduced online posting as an artistic method which also drew on the community fostering aspects of the digital platforms. Concerned with girlhood, femininity, hyperreality, cyberfeminism and subjectivity of identity, these artworks and practices use technology and documentary strategies to perform, curate, collect and archive selves via new media and digital technologies. The work of Pierce, Soda, and Man positively adapts to the cultural archive and steps on these histories and traditions to perform a process of innovation where new practices emerge through revisiting the established critical value of the art historical examples. At the same time, it negatively adapts to the archives by engaging them in a process of exchange with the vulgarity of contemporary networked social media.

This is not to say that the argument of the text is that the contemporary works are innovative compared to their art historical predecessors in a way which detracts from tradition. Rather, following Groys, innovation here is regarded as an ever-repeating cultural process which ultimately adjusts established cultural values to repeatedly incorporate the transitory everyday, to produce cultural and artistic newness. The practices of Pierce, Soda, and Man are interrogated as representative of the period 2014 – 2024 when the ubiquity of networked communication technologies and user-generated content (along with the existing traditions of feminist performance using technology described above) produce the conditions for the emergence of ‘content value’ as a feature of contemporary art.

Value Boundary

On the New

Foundational principle of how cultural archives function is that they embrace the new and reject the derivative - what’s new is understood as different, while also being as valuable as the old. At the same time, “organised cultural memory rejects as superfluous and redundant everything that merely reproduces what already exists” - Groys identifies this domain which comprises all things that are not included in the archives, as ‘the profane realm’ (64). He suggests that there is a constantly shifting line of value that separates ‘the archives’ from ‘the profane realm,’ where ‘profane’ consists of that which is perceived to be valueless, extra-cultural, and transitory. Within this conceptual framework, something becomes new when it moves from the profane realm to the archives, as the profane, by virtue of its heterogeneity, becomes “a reservoir for potentially new cultural values” (64). The proposition of this article is that content (or user-generated content), as a dimension of artistic work, has realised this move from the profane realm of pervasive social media to the archives (or to institutionalised culture).

To ground his theory, Groys uses Duchamp’s ready-mades as an example and discusses his work L.H.O.O.G (1919) as well as The Fountain (1917) to compare profane things with cultural values. In 1919, Duchamp drew a moustache and a goatee on a postcard depicting Mona Lisa. The title is a sort of word play and eliding the words in French sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul,” or “There is fire down bellow” (Duchamp). Duchamp’s interpretation of Mona Lisa is a “mutilated reproduction, which is basically a piece of trash” (65) and by confronting da Vinci’s work with its derivative, Duchamp exposes them as two different visual forms, suggesting there is no essential criteria to distinguish them based on their value. And if the “piece of trash” is as beautiful as the Mona Lisa, then [we should] “consider every hierarchising value distinction between the two images to be an ideological fiction designed to justify the domination of certain institutions of cultural power” (66). The newness in this comparison emerges in the act of value juxtaposition of two things which are usually assigned different values. The comparison does not eradicate the value hierarchy but means that “the trashy reproduction, regarded as a new object, gains access to the system for the preservation of culture” (66). As a result of the comparison, the reproduction is valorised and gains cultural value, since it presents itself as the other, or the profane, while at the same time due to a certain critical analysis, is also similar to existing cultural values. This valorisation, however, does not affect the fundamental distinction between the archive and the profane; the fact that a comparison’s been made across the value boundary doesn’t eradicate the boundary, it just modifies it (66).

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