Dolls behaving truly madly, but not really badly…
French Absurdist artists Antonin Artaud and Eugene Ionesco would be proud of some of the cruel and absurd organized nonsense that is flaming through the Internet art world right now. Accidental-on-purpose artistic endeavors in today’s developing Net.Art world are dizzying enough to make one want to just sit down and read a book. Anticipating this archaic return to exercising the imagination instead of typing the brain into pap, prescient Net Artist Kate Armstrong has contrived a book that infiltrates a decidedly non-literary universe. Billed as a graphic novel the piece is created to be experienced within the Facebook platform. Why Some Dolls are Bad invites the user to a collection of streamed images culled from the Internet, which take on random editorial positions in the frame of an original text written by Armstrong. The result- a bespoke book for the users of Facebook is an infinite precipitation of stirred structure a ribald evolving commentary on our world of Good and Bad dolls. Bold and occasionally wry, nonlinear storytelling has become high art. In the cinema, for example director Quentin Tarantino has made banal, albeit shocking and grisly tales buzz by cleverly rearranging their story lines. In his wild musical chair structures the story remains the same while the viewers’ experience of it is shuffled. In Armstrong’s work the images shift perpetually and this re-invents the meaning of the narrative.
Capturing precious Doll moments
The idea of this work more than its execution is the compelling element. Anyone who has clipped articles out of a newspaper, saved snippets of poetry or edited together their own home videos has experienced the process that is re-created in Dolls. But Armstrong cleverly nurtures a circumstance of wry tension that illustrates the fraying tether between traditional literary and neo-digital expression. The same page never appears twice but the user can capture and save a favorite page. This is an intriguing re-enactment of the experience of reading a narrative book where particular passages haunt the imagination and are saved to our cognitive hard drive. The impact of these literary moments etched in our psyches sometimes leads us to rave and recommend books to friends. Sending off custom tailored pages of Dolls however is rather like sending postcards from a literary journey. “Can personal moments sent to a friend – ever be re-captured” by said friend?
At the very least, Dolls explores a fabulous range of themes including but not limited to everything from ethics to fashion. These themes are explored through an absurd collection of systems and materials, from Mohair, through contagion to Venus Fly-traps. Absurdity is perhaps the resuscitated and re-fertilized Venus Fly-Trap of today’s digital art world not to mention the now myriad ‘send to a friend’ online communities. Everything old in the recent history of culture is new again online. Repetition begets re-examination.
In the Valley of the Dolls ad-infinitum
In 2002 Armstrong published a book CRISIS & REPETITION: ESSAYS ON ART AND CULTURE (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan, USA). The Dolls experiment neatly addresses the phrase by essentially erasing the possibility of repetition. In this respect, Armstrong’s work is reminiscent of Chris Borkowski’s aleatory video piece CODEX (2007, HD & SD video/ Jitter/ Mac mini/ 24inch Flat Screen) wherein a program culls images into a film that is ceaselessly being extended and re-edited. Unlike more Classical storytelling mediums (books and movies) neither Armstrong nor Borkowski’s re-inventions really implicate the user. It is curious to consider these eternal electronic works calculating incessantly, while somewhere on some rickety caf’e seat someone may actually be reading a book. The engagement of imagination involved in reading a book, be it graphic or pure text, is less important in these new works where the reader is more passive observer.
Who plays with captured Dolls?
Whether or not her project will successfully infiltrate the ‘send to a friend’, realm and restore art to the masses remains to be seen. In an informal survey of Facebook users the most common observation was that this was not what they went on Facebook for. But Googling Dolls confirms that Net.Art aficionados who are also Facebook members are game to participate. In a way Armstrong has leveled the playing field with her choice of platform. Her story becomes everybody?s story so Facebook groups like ‘If all men looked like Johnny Depp I’d be such a Whore’ could potentially join book clubs that are born of Net Art bastions like Rhizome.org or, um, Furtherfield.org. In fact Facebook groups like ‘I like Cupcakes and making out’ (mostly girls) ‘and Beer…it’ll get ya drunk’ (mostly guys) may actually be the perfect audience- in spite of their apparent disinterest. Aesthetically inclined Avatars in the Net art community who interlope on such sites might also discover that a crisis like Facebook could actually beget innovation.
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