Outsider Art, Hypertext, Kitsch
Computers are not here to stay. Neither are capitalism, war, poverty, and alienation. But computers will probably be around for long enough that it’s worthwhile to learn how to use them. You might have an inclination that makes you good at coding. If you are really interested in computers and programming languages, I think it’s worthwhile to learn how they come into existence. You probably already know how to speak in images.
Programming does have not have a direct impact on my writing. My study of the Linux filesystem, and learning how to use development software like vim and git, has been a lot more relevant. If “everything is a file,”1 and if the visual system of the display is malleable, then any document can be transcluded anywhere.
“Transclusion” is one of the concepts that Ted Nelson came up with when he invented the first hypertext project, called Project Xanadu, in the 1960s. When I was a student in an art history program, I taught myself about digital culture like Project Xanadu and some other examples of hypertext or hypermedia. In one class, we learned about the concept of “kitsch” by reading the German writer Theodor Adorno’s essay on the topic. I realized that Project Xanadu was kitschy. So was pretty much every other example of hypertext or hypermedia artworks that I could think of.
“Project Xanadu” was more than just a fancy word processor. Ted Nelson imagined a democratic version of the Internet while the Internet was still a secret military project. He described thick underground cables that would transfer data between buildings. Inside there would be desks with computer terminals and friendly young staff, dressed in matching uniforms, who would show customers how to use the network. The price of using the network would be distributed in micro-transactions to authors whose work was transcluded inside other documents. It’s a crystal-clear description of how things could work in a rational, ordered manner. Project Xanadu reminds me of the American film The Evil Within (2017), written and directed by Andrew Getty.
Andrew Getty, who died in 2015 at the age of 47, was the heir to the Getty Oil Company. He financed the film himself for between $4–6m USD, and worked on it for fifteen years. The editing was eventually completed by one of the film’s producers. The coroner’s report confirmed that methamphetamine use was a factor in Andrew’s death. If you’ve ever spoken to someone high on meth, or even on cocaine (which is related to meth), then maybe you have seen just how rational and ordered their plans seem when they look at your with crystal-clear eyes.
The Evil Within has a very similar feeling as The Room (2003), or to the music of Daniel Johnson. It’s an effect I have called the “naive uncanny.” The first Christian artists were called naive artists, back when Christianity was an obscure cult and all the institutions were Jewish or pagan. The effect of reading about these works can be uncomfortable. Sometimes it makes me feel sick, like someone spun me around in circles until I get dizzy and my vision blurs. These artworks look like our world, but they’re not.
It’s possible that all outsider art is kitschy. This website is a hypertext artwork. Does that mean it’s kitschy? It seems so. I don’t want to make kitschy art, but I also don’t want to wait in hope that an institution notices me and likes me. I’d rather see what I can build on my own.
My Vision for This Website
I am always working on this website, editing the text to make it sound better, adding more pages and trying to keep things organized. One of my big sources of inspiration is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project, which he did not finish before he died. My vision is a big collection of smaller pieces of writing that build on each other, link to each other, and which are displayed with a lot of additional resources. The website also contains selections from my Diaries, writing that is emotional and confessional: private, like diaries normally are. My goal is to show how the life of the mind and the life of the heart fit together.
On this website, you will find drafts, fragments, notes, revisions, photographs, and assorted visual material: a collection of rags.2
Information, Hypertext, Aesthetics
What I learned from studying Linux and understanding how filesystems work is similar to what Walter Benjamin was trying to do with the Arcades project. It’s also similar to what Niklas Luhmann did with his Zettelkasten. I am trying to make art and critique out of the organization of information.
- URL Schema
Cosma’s website has many pages, but the URLs are all quite schematic. To my mind, they clash with what we expect from websites nowadays. Incongruous URLs produce a certain effect, but I like Gwern’s approach of single-word URLs. Social media was not a concern for older Web pioneers. Now we must prioritize short, stable, “cool” URLs.
- Page Structure
One of the classic things that hypertext theorists love to talk about is linking. In many examples of early hypertextual works, made when monitors were much more primitive than today, pages were designed for a single viewport. In contrast to this, another version of the website is based on “long” pages, like a scroll. The idea is to create anchored sections that can be linked. Sub-sectioning can be challenging to pull off if the goal is “literary,” but there is a precedent for it in works of Contemporary literature (like A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; or Flights by Olga Tokarczuk). Linking makes the website a real work of art.
- Metadata
Like the URL, metadata is another element that is both aesthetic and technical, and which sits at the core of the website as a hypertext artwork. We want to think up metadata categories that can be used to represent the important aspects of a page. They will need to be standardized, somehow.
Our Cyberpunk Future
When John Anderton goes on the lam in Minority Report, he employs a black-market surgeon to replace his eyes.3 Spielberg images a cyberpunk Panopticon in moralistic terms, rather than as a technological reality. Omnipresent facial scans are present in many parts of the world,4 but as a control technology, it’s anachronistic, like the payphones in Neuromancer. Power economizes and will always prefer a passive mode where the boss doesn’t have to do any work. He would prefer that we report on ourselves, rather than have to pay attention to some scanning device.5 The contemporary subject participates in their own surveillance.6 Foucault’s no punk: he just turned into a liberal at the end of the day. The only ones who are punk ’til the end are the communists.
I would take Paris in the 19th century, I would take New York in the 20th. I would take a hut in a forest so long as there’s a lake nearby. A babbling brook to piss into. Instead we get this life mediated by the digital. I’d take anything other than a life without the Internet. Analogue technology is okay: I’ll take a computer the size of a room, operated by moving switches on a board. No programming languages. No digital technology.
We were both already born into this slipstream moment. Let’s go on.7 I’m going to try to figure out what exactly is going on in the world, if not just so that I can get my bearings.
Bibliography
Linux was invented by Linus Torvalds in 1991, when he released the first version. It descended from the UNIX operating system, which was invented by the big company IBM. In UNIX, an important concept is that “everything is a file.” Macintosh and Windows operating systems are designed for clients. In order to provide value, those operating systems have to cover up how they work. They’re for people will quiz you, but the location of certain files is hidden by default. means that any document can be transcluded anywhere. “Transclusion” is one of the concepts that Ted Nelson came up with when . The sidenotes that this website uses are a form of transclusion. It was a big milestone in my vision of this website when I finally got them working. (They mostly work.)↩︎
“‘Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.’ This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.” Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, vol. 4 (1938; repr., Harvard University Press, 2006), 48.↩︎
Peter Stormare has an excellent turn as the crusty drug-addict doctor. Equal parts Peter Berling in Sátántangó, and Doctor Nick from The Simpsons.↩︎
“The precedent established by the end of the student struggles for pre-emption, technological surveillance and increasingly severe punitive response, was consolidated in the state’s handling of the riots. And the country was exceptionally well equipped for it too, having sleepwalked its way into being one of the most spied-upon nations in the world, with an estimated one CCTV camera for every 11–14 people. What followed was one of the biggest investigations in the history of the police force, Operation VERA, in which hundreds of specialists trawled through video footage in a race to identify the thousands of faces caught on camera.” Endnotes, “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats: Crisis Era Struggles in Britain,” in Gender, Race, Class and Other Misfortunes, by Endnotes (Endnotes, 2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/a-rising-tide-lifts-all-boats.↩︎
“The true objective of the reform movement, even in its most general formulations, was not so much to establish a new right to punish based on more equitable principles, as to set up a new ‘economy’ of the power to punish, to assure its better distribution, so that it should be neither too concentrated at certain privileged points, nor too divided between opposing authorities; so that it should be distributed in homogeneous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a continuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 80.↩︎
“It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance, and will not think it humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man. But in a free republic (respublica), on the other hand, nothing that can be devised or attempted will be less successful. For it is completely contrary to the common liberty to shackle the free judgment of the individual with prejudices or constraints of any kind. Alleged subversion for ostensibly religious reasons undoubtedly arises only because laws are enacted about doctrinal matters, and beliefs are subjected to prosecution and condemnation as if they were crimes, and those who support and subscribe to these condemned beliefs are sacrificed not for the common welfare but to the hatred and cruelty of their enemies. However, if the laws of the state ‘proscribed only wrongful deeds and left words free’, such subversion could not be made to proclaim itself lawful, and intellectual disputes could not be turned into sedition.” Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (1670; repr., Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.↩︎
Must go on. Can’t go on. I’ll go on.↩︎