Feed Time (2019)
“Feed Time” was commissioned by V-A-C Zattere (Venice) and published in 2019 in Time, Forward!, an exhibition catalogue edited by Omar Kholeif and designed by Experimental Jetset. My thinking around the feed as a contemporary form in network culture began with “Notes on Feeds” in April 2017 and “Performing the Feed” in November 2017, continued in “The Post As Medium” for Net Art Anthology, and then with “Feed Time.” Together, these essays propose ideas about the evolution of media consumption in relation to narrative, publishing, platform politics, and surveillance capitalism.
“Network culture is a smooth texture. It’s no longer a destination but an edgeless condition infusing every aspect of daily life with distortion and disorientation. In the past, the network was a discrete destination, a location found by “going online.” Today, it’s a continuous state of connectivity, a delirious flow between humans, interfaces, and algorithms. It’s a condition that emerged out of American counterculture in the late 1960s, first in print with Stewart Brand’s “back-to-the-land” Whole Earth Catalog and then in the earliest networked communities, like the Bay-area bulletin-board service Community Memory and The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link). Fifty years later, ubiquitous connectivity has evolved to support ideologies of data, profit, speed, and prediction. Once the promise of radical communalism, today’s network is an engine of cultural sameness, packaged as authentic individualism. Twenty-first century surveillance capitalism is thriving under the rule of GAFA (Google Apple Facebook Amazon) and its astounding ability to convert user data into prediction futures. It’s a market that trades in human behavior and addiction, our insatiable desire for never-ending connectivity, convenience, and the sensation of flow. In return, we feed our preferences into enormous ecosystems of profit and inequity that seem to stretch further and further away from the internet’s feel-good origins. Is there any way to resist?”