We rose up slowly as if we didn’t belong to the outside world any longer… like swimmers in a shadowy dream who didn’t need to breathe.
Under Old Earth
Livius: They have a god.
The Lord Sto Odin: A god? What do you call a god?
Livius: A person or an idea capable of starting wholly new cultural patterns in motion.
An image or a link can be used anywhere on the web. The idea of ownership is antithetical to the internet. In fact, sharing images is one of the more interesting aspects of the internet. There has been a discussion about the whole notion of gatekeepers and aesthetic filters that has put the high-art curators in an odd position. They have insisted that they (and by extension, the whole art gallery/museum system) are the only true arbiters of quality. This is actually an interesting discussion. Artists are the ones who create the initial aesthetic products; they define what art is at any moment in time. The gatekeepers, on the other hand, simply verify that the work is of good quality. Of course, this is a simplification of the idea of curating, but it’s interesting to note that the recent past has had artists acting as curators and conversely curators who consider their projects to be art. On the internet, you might look at content conglomerators as curators with various degrees of aesthetic filtering, from un-curated to narrowly focused.
We can now look at the way files (text, image, video, sound) on the web have two or maybe three different values. One is the intrinsic value of the artwork. That is the original meaning and intention of the work — the meaning of a word is its meaning. A second is the extrinsic value of the artwork (the meaning of the word is its use). We can also say that there is a collective unconscious (memory) that has been created with the World Wide Web, which many view as a new form of global consciousness.
By G.H. Hovagimyan. Also peruse: Tumblr as Art by Ben Valentine and The Social Ties That Unbind by An Xiao, all essays part of Hyperallergic’s The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium.
…architects and artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. […] When we speak of metamodernism we do not refer to a particular movement, a specific manifesto or a set of theoretical or stylistic conventions.
The metamodern structure of feeling evokes an oscillation between a modern desire for sense and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all, between a modern sincerity and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy and empathy and apathy and unity and plurality and purity and corruption and naïveté and knowingness; between control and commons and craftsmanship and conceptualism and pragmatism and utopianism. […] Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings towards fanaticism, gravity pulls it back towards irony; the moment its irony sways towards apathy, gravity pulls it back towards enthusiasm.
That opening of a door changed her own world and changed life on thousands of planets for generations to come, but the opening was not itself strange. It was the tired caprice of a thoroughly frustrated and mildly unhappy woman. Nothing more. […] She was shocked because the door opened on steps and the steps led down to landscape and sunlight—truly an unexpected sight on any world. She was looking from the New City to the Old City. The New City rose on its shell out over the Old City, and when she looked “indoors” she saw the sunset in the city below. She gasped at the beauty and the unexpectedness of it.
There, the open door—with another world beyond it.
