Excerpt from "Net Art and the Agency of Things"

This is an excerpt from a paper entitled “Net Art and the Agency of Things.” It was written for a class at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. I presented the paper in April at the 2011 Critical Themes In Media Studies conference at the New School. Feel free to contact me if you would like to read the whole paper.


When we approach the face of the desktop [of a computer], as Shulgin has labeled it, the shifting perspectives wrap us up in cyberspace. As we traverse the internet, we move around a space constructed for our engagement, and this space mediates all that we come into contact with, just as the wood and color of [an] icon mediate the spiritual experience of engaging with the icon. As Slavoj Žižek explains, these mediations occur while inevitably eluding our consciousness: “I ‘browse,’ I err around in this infinite space… while the whole of it—this immense circuitry of ‘murmurs’—remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension.” Jordan Tate’s work New Work #30 brings this mediation to the forefront. The piece refers to the internet directly, but does not rely on the characteristics of the internet as do the other works we have looked at so far, but rather the process that happens once we incorporate the oscillation of perspectives into our interactivity. Tate uses the Graphics Interchange Format (gif) to create a repeating animation of a Mac desktop with a Safari browser window continuously loading what looks like an image of a sunset. The picture never fully loads; as soon as the blue sky starts to show the pink hue of the sunset, it restarts. The frustration at never being fully aware at what we are looking frames the time we spend in front of our computer. And yet, the image that never loads is only the centerpiece of the art work—we must remind ourselves at a certain point that there are other windows presented to us. Because of the ordinariness of the Safari browser, and behind that, the Mac desktop, we initially forget that it is not our own desktop and browser, but the desktop and browser of the art work. We could remind ourselves of this if we tried to click the close button on the browser, as though a “Do Not Touch” force field surrounds the piece as it would in a museum, stopping us from engaging with the operating system as we normally do. Instead, Tate’s work reminds us that the iconography of the computer constantly mediate our experience of clicking around cyberspace. It dislodges the image from the frame of the browser, and finally, forces us to visually step back from the piece: the GIF is of course framed by our own browser, which is in turn framed by our own desktop, and finally, the final frame of our computer.

A similar engagement of the viewer appears on the first page of a version of the Book of Hours by the Master of Mary of Burgundy. The Book of Hours was a popular illuminated manuscript in the Middle Ages, constructing a daily schedule of devotion consisting of prayers, psalms, texts framed by religious icons and décor. The medieval viewer would have seen the first page in a similar way: his eyes would jump immediately to the central image which shows the Christ Child on the lap of Mother Mary in a Gothic church setting. Various figures kneel at her side, led by a female figure, possibly Mary of Burgundy herself, who genuflects toward the divine couple. The viewer would have recognized this image as one that deserves our own admiration and devotion—of course, this is in a Book of Hours, so this is its designated purpose. And yet, like the sunset image that never fully loads, Mary and Christ are locked into a position of always expecting admiration and devotion. They are never fully “loaded” because their deserving of our attention is unending.

The Master of Mary of Burgundy makes a surprising move by framing this scene within another: the church setting is merely a window through which Mary of Burgundy, sitting at her desk with an opened Book of Hours, looks out upon. Or rather, she does not look out the window, but at the manuscript in front of her. In fact, we are led to believe that these two acts of looking are one in the same. Reading the manuscript, she imagines the scene upon which her window looks: in effect, constructing a daily routine according to the Book of Hours is just as good as paying homage to the Virgin and Christ as though they were there in front of us. And of course the Book of Hours in the miniature refers to the Book of Hours in our hands. As the first image that greets us as we open the book, this one serves as a kind of users-manual about how to treat the following images and texts: we are to allow them to help us construct a virtual world, which we should see ourselves entering. Because these manuscripts exist at a time when they were rare and new, tricks like the one used by this artist would have been important in educating an audience not used to juxtaposing the act of reading flat words to the act of seeing three-dimensional images. Just as Tate’s work takes us out of the virtual world in which we have engrossed ourselves in, the Master of Mary of Burgundy leads us in.