Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the “open” text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as “The Open Work”). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one’s potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best—although valuation terminology is not his primary area of focus. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather, they operate in the context of utterance.
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“Western cultures share a tradition of subordinating images to the textual, of lending the textual an authority over pictures. Text defines, anchors, and names the images, the motives and spaces of which are cut off at the frame. The frame is what makes an image, but it is also a violent tool; it isolates the visible and differentiates it from that which is outside of it, thereby producing a new “not-visible.” To make up for the sudden removal of an entire universe through the said frame, a text is added: a title, a place, a date; a name of a person, animal, building; or perhaps an explanation of an object and how to use it. The text gives us a guide to that isolated and free-floating fragment; it gives us the possibility of re-establishing some kind of order around it. But this new order pertains to the world of the spectator—a subject who not only looks at images but also reads and speaks and hopes to identify something.
[…]
Different search engines suggest different routes through ever-expanding clusters of images. And so far, most search engines cannot actually see images. Most of them sort and categorize images in terms of what they are told the images depict, that is, through text—through tags. A tag is similar to what in traditional taxonomy is called classification. A tag gives an image a handle, an ability to be placed somewhere and to be found through a search. A tag is a name for a category, but unlike traditional taxonomy, a tag doesn’t have to be predefined. In traditional archives, a limited number of classificatory terms are defined beforehand, and so each item will have one correct way of being classified. In a tagging system, however, a user or author can use any word to classify an item at any point in time. There is no “wrong” categorization, and an item may have an unlimited number of different tags, corresponding to an unlimited number of categories. Instead of many items being related to each other by belonging to the same category, one category—or name—is related to another by being assigned to the same item.”
Things I “Learned” March, 2012
looking at daniel: stand-up in chicago, February 2012
i have a lot of things in progress
![Emily Wardill
Untitled [Killer Whale], 2010
Silkscreen print on 250 gram archival grade paper /framed / 52.7 x 42.7 x 2.5 cm
40 x 50 cm / 15.75 x 19.69”
1/3 + 1AP / SOEW/SI 2010-002/1](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m09cgecA4w1qbul95o1_500.jpg)
Things I “Learned”, 2012
Things I “Learned”, 2012
Things I “Learned”, 2012
Post-irony, as I understand Pallasvuo using it, as opposed to sincerity, is a strategy that still steeps itself in irony, uses it as a jumping off point. Therefore, “sincerity” is somehow something completely new and different in the context of art concerned with the Internet and our relationship to it. Pallasvuo suggests that “sincerity” is what will finally slaythe old and cold, bitter and dry net art and what might be the “new casualist” aesthetic in painting.[2] Yet – obviously – nothing is 100% “sincere” / “authentic” and the creation of these categories is problematic. What is sincere is not opposite to what is ironic: many of Pallasvuo’s pieces, like much of today’s net art, leans heavily on a nostalgic affection for early 90′s internet and “folk” aesthetics (the title of his blog being DawsonsCreek.info). To me, constantly referring to a sort of overall objective nostalgia for the early Internet is yet another layer of distance placed between the artist and his intention. As viewers, we get in on the joke, which is a trademark move by ironists.
Some net art uses poetry and emotional content opposed to what I consider to be the predominant ironic, distanced, slick and surface-based aesthetic of the (art of the) “information age.” Perhaps as we continue to suffer from the Internet’s commoditization, alienating and distancing power over us, we are finding the positive parts of it. The parts that allow us to meet other people, and to be honest online about ourselves – or not. There is an extremely varied way of codifying our emotions online, and these artists emphasizing how we can defer our emotions through technologies, or at least face them.
