Performing Publishing: Infrathin Tales from the Printed Web (2014)

Hyperallergic invited me to publish a piece on their site to accompany my presentation at Hypersalon, which took place at Art Basel Miami in December 2014. This essay builds on “Search, compile, publish” and goes deeper into the concepts I was beginning to explore with Library of the Printed Web. I had just started publishing Printed Web and the essay discusses specific examples of digital art that appear in issues 1 and 2. Soon after, I presented this essay as a talk at Interrupt 3, a literary conference held at Brown University in March 2015.

“Printed Web is a digital work disguised as printout material; it performs the web offline. It’s a hybrid, transductional creature that mixes screen-based practice with physical thingness. Printed Web builds upon a trajectory of artists who push material between contexts, publishing work continuously and publicly.

These places where materiality spills off and onto networks reveal current conditions, but also provide a glimpse of something yet to come, some kind of intense, slippery state where hybrid works replicate continuously, translate automatically, and move seamlessly between media, beyond the frames of printed page, web page, or physical space. A ‘neverending becoming.’ Brian Droitcour describes art’s current disposition as more ‘proto-’ than post(-internet)—that the proto- points to the future, to multiplicity and transformative potential. As image and world become increasingly entangled, I expect we’ll see more self-aware, proto spaces like Hike, Hack / Hic et Nunc and Printed Web blown open for artists to mix, embed, circulate, and perform publishing to the network. ‘The possible, implying the becoming—the passage from one to the other takes place in the infra-thin.’”

Read “Performing Publishing: Infrathin Tales from the Printed Web’ →