Last night I stumbled upon Nicolas Bourriaud’s writings on Relational Aesthetics. So far I’ve only scratched the surface, but this is the first theorist I’ve read that comes close to dealing with “Social Media” and it’s impact on art, and how we interact with information. A quick description from Claire Bishop’s 2002 article on the Bourriaud’s curatorial effort at the Palais de Tokyo.
“Relational art works seek to establish intersubjective encounters in which meaning is elaborated collectively rather than in the privatized space of individual consumption. The implication is that this work inverses the goals of GreenBergian Modernism. Rather than a discrete portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art is entirely beholden to the contingencies of it’s environment and audience. Moreover, this audience is envisioned as a community:Rather than a one-to-one relationship between work of art and a viewer, relational art sets up situations in which viewers are not just addressed as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create community, however temporary or Utopian this may be.”
The ideas expressed by Relational Aesthetics can be interpreted by looking at one of the first viral video, All your base an internet meme from 2000-2002. The phrase “All your Base are belong to us,” was taken from a cut scene from a poorly translated video game for the Sega Genesis called Zero Wing. In the viral video. The cut scene is followed by a montage of images with the phrase cleverly placed via photoshopped. Most of the images contain a quality of technological dominance, or what we might now refer to as being “pwned.” The video popularity derived from it’s connection to the spread of digital technology and the uninitiated’s inability to function. The mistranslation of the video game is reiterated in the many computer error jokes that follow, such as placing the phrase in the “blue screen on death.” To pass on the joke became a way to say that you were part of the community that knew how to function in a networked community .Once the original video was posted on Newgrounds it became famous. A community of users dedicated to the joke popped up out of nowhere, remixing and extending the video adding their own images to the montage to fit their specific community or interaction with the video. It has been so processed by this time that it may be difficult to determine the original video. The joke soon passed from the virtual realm and into the real. On April 1st 2003 in Sturgis Michigan, seven people aged 17 to 20 placed signs all over town reading “All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.” The interaction with the joke changed and was interpreted to be a serious threat given that the US was at war with Iraq and looking upon anything as a form of terrorism. In 2004 North Carolina State University students exploited a service for schools and businesses to report weather-related closing to display the phrase within a news ticker on a live broadcast on News 14 Carolina.
