Sophie lives in BK, works, writes, plays music, DJs, puts on shows and uses twitter.
sophcw at gmail dot com
Scrape your knee, it's only skin.
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Entirely possible that my plangent cries about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and attenuates all rebellion says more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than it does about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “How banal.” Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
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‘Capitalist Realism’ is the ideology that now structures our world, the idea that, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative. Neo-liberal capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Within that framework, what does the emulation of the creative visual forms of the corporation signify? What’s with post-internet artists and all their corporate swag?[3] Looked upon favourably, it suggests an ambition for the work. The visual language of the corporation is the language of the possible. Who structures our visual environment on a daily basis, but advertising agencies working on behalf of corporations?
The move towards brand language marks a desire to engage with the visual cultures of daily life. In adopting the form of the commercial policy document, artists are shifting the context of their work back to some form of social engagement, and that’s a tacit admission of just how ineffective contemporary art discourse has been in making practical and pragmatic interventions into the real world of everyday life. Instead, the utilisation of the language of the commercial sphere, then, signifies a genuinely radical shift from the forms of post-socialist contemporary art that came before, in the form of Relational Aesthetics — an attempt or desire to produce art that engages with everyday life, which changes the social or political world it is produced in. We can lament that there is no other political framework in which radical social engagement can occur, but we cannot really deny it.
Huw Lemmey at Rhizome.
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The accidental audience’s attitude toward what it sees is deeply predicated on the neoliberal vision of cultural migration, but its willingness to strip images of their status as property is so aggressive that it deserves a term of its own: image anarchism. Whereas image fundamentalists and image neoliberals disagree over how art becomes property, image anarchists behave as though intellectual property is not property at all. While the image neoliberal still believes in the owner as the steward of globally migratory artworks, the image anarchist reflects a generational indifference toward intellectual property, regarding it as a bureaucratically regulated construct. This indifference stems from file sharing and extends to de-authored, decontextualized Tumblr posts. Image anarchism is the path that leads art to exist outside the context of art.
Video reblogged from THATS SO INTERNET with 90 notes
H∆SHTAG$ - Don’t Call It #Tumblrwave - Episode 5
This is possibly the first GOOD intro/exploration of the whole “what are these kids doing these days” aspect of tumblr culture, and surprise surprise, its actually the artists talking instead of journalists. I just really wish it was longer.
Some of the best insights in the vid (imo) are from Gucci Goth and Molly McMahon. I also like the point about tumblr allowing people to make new culture, even though 99.9% of tumblr artists just collage and rehash the past to make an aesthetic thats the web equivalent of a post-apocalyptic look made up of things we ourselves already recognize. however those people already have the context of what-it-is rather than not knowing what it is, which gives the pretext of knowing what they’re doing isn’t “new” or even quote-unquote-new, necessarily. Auerbach DOES mention seapunk as a good example of that, and imo i’d narrow it down to Kevin Heckart’s visuals ( tamagotchifuneral.tumblr.com ) because his stuff is in reference TO the 90’s, but its not quite FROM the 90’s. theres very seldom use of straight up digitized wingdings or cursors and other ephemera of typical “kids in their bedroom making net art”.
It also brings up the issue (vaguely) of the situation brought about by having high exposure of low quantity genres and artists very quickly. This sort of forces the bubble to pop before it has left the bubble wand, in a way. Not quite tumblr (and not exactly the identical problems) but Azealia Banks is probably a good example of this. Granted, she’d probably be twice as far along if she actually had some tact, but the massive exposure garnered after one single also had some impact. And arguably vaporwave had that happen as well (assuming you consider it a genre at all).
This is really great.
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Books got there first: Amazon brims with algorithmically produced “literature.” Philip M. Parker, a marketing professor, must be the most productive, erudite writer in history: Amazon lists him as author of more than 100,000 books. His secret? An algorithm to generate page-turners like “Webster’s Estonian to English Crossword Puzzles” and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Premoistened Towelettes and Baby Wipes in Greater China” (“The moist towelette is an essential part of the lunchbox, and with the new global economy, this volume is essential,” reads its only review).
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I’m writing this because I’ve found that giving other people advice helps to calibrate my own internal compass — no matter how much I try to drift into objective and wise council for others, I will be talking about myself. That’s all any of us ever does, we talk about ourselves and sometimes other people find themselves in what we write.
Quote reblogged from katherine st asaph with 35 notes
404PageFound started in May 2009 with the goal of uncovering dated websites (generally from 1994-2001) that are still active and have avoided major updates. Many people think that sites created in the years following the dot-com bubble burst (2001-2003) are old. This may be true, but the differences between a site from 2001 and 1996 are quite striking. It’s overwhelming how much data from the days of Usenet, Gopher, and FTPs still exists in the depths of the Internet.
Accordingly, 404PageFound is by no means an attempt to emulate the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (or any other site that hosts former pages). The Wayback Machine serves an excellent and necessary purpose by continually capturing instances of websites for historical, technological, and cultural purposes. However, there is something distinct and unique about discovering an antiquated site that still exists in its natural state compared to browsing a library of how modern websites once looked. However, only in rare cases will a site in the Internet Archive still look like it did a decade ago. As such, 404PageFound will not be able to showcase most major web players since they constantly update their sites. However, even large sites (CNN, Yahoo!, and Business Week, to name a few) have old pages that remain in their original layout and have escaped deletion from the server. For reference, there were an estimated 100,000 websites in 1996, and close to 1 million in 1997. Many of these still remain in their original coding, although the vast majority have been removed or completely renovated. 404PageFound strives to excavate and display these remaining buried gems.
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Others placed the source of Lil B’s appeal more on his outsized personality and the way he can transition seamlessly from seriousness to humor. Lil B’s mercurial nature is essential to the relative broadness of his appeal. Egedy took things further, saying, “Lil B is essentially the internet in rap form.” His work contains thoughts and about everything from new age mysticism to explicit sexual fantasies - just like the Internet.
Marshalek took this thread and went even further, saying, “if he wanted to quit rap entirely, Lil B could get a very high paying job at a social media marketing firm.” At this point, it was difficult to tell if the panel was about Lil B or Gary Vuynerchuk.
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