Download user script » (requires Firefox with Greasemonkey installed)
Perhaps you find it mildly cringe-inducing every time you see an Internet commentator has referred to the president as “the President, who I admire,” in some kind of combined infantilization/nutty insinuation that the coincidence of his middle name betrays DEEP SIGNIFICANCE. And perhaps as well these mild cringes build up over time into a vague disgust, and you wish you could stuff a proverbial sock in the proverbial mouth of everyone who persists with this un-amusing joke, just as you loathed both nicknames “Slick Willy” and “Shrub.”
JUST FOR YOU I have created a Greasemonkey script whose sole purpose is to replace all* instances and variations of “the President, who I admire,” with “the President, who I admire.”
*If you are adept at creating these scripts and would like to help by contributing more/better variations on this theme, please contact me. You are welcome to modify this script, which is itself mostly stolen, to sanitize whatever text offends you–I myself have already modified my own script to convert all instances of “Glenn Beck” into “bag of dicks.”
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Media fasting
We are engaging in a week-long media diet. Or “media fast” is maybe more accurate. An information diet. It is exactly as hard as I imagined not to fill every dead minute with goalless web surfing.
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The rise of “image sharing” (is this what they are called?) and group-surf blogs in the past three years seems to have exponentially increased the already sickening pace of image proliferation. Things Magazine references this quite often. Images have never been so disposable, so fleeting, and so easily forgotten. Blank spots in my schedule invariably see me following threads from Ffffound or Image Spark deep into nested rebloggery, never actually reaching the point of origin. Eventually these blogs will be the end of all attribution, as the Tumblr-style breadcrumb trail will never make it back far enough. All of these endless pages of decontextualized imagery. The most ridiculous experience is watching a single image bounce back and forth for a day between Ffffound and Image Spark as one group of the world (one set of users) goes to sleep and another wakes up and discovers it anew…on Ffffound or Image Spark. But after another day or two’s worth of images has buried it alive, it’s so quickly forgotten. Fffforgotten.
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The feeling-bad-about-it part
I think of my own complicity in this. It’s apparent that what I’m doing in “making something every day” is filling the world with more under-conceived images, as opposed to telling new stories, inventing new realities, moving a thoughtful audience, etc. (anything that would require some sustained and quiet effort in myself or you, my audience). More fodder for the infinite click trance of images unmoored from context or history, scanned and forgotten too quickly to have effect. Is this the hidden downside to art on the Internet that I’ve been neglecting to acknowledge? All images are reduced to the flat plane of advertising, visual and mental pollution.
Edit: This turned into something.
What is the (non-jokey) Internet version of a blank white canvas? I think of the tendency in Buddhist art for the Buddha himself to be represented by an empty space. How can we create a powerfully affecting aesthetics of subtraction for the Internet? A greasemonkey script that sucks all the images off of Ffffound, leaving only captions behind?
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Dude Art has become so mainstream since I first started carelessly throwing around the term that the definition is almost too fuzzy to be useful anymore. Originally intended to refer to the type of art that one finds on skateboard decks–but not the type of skateboard decks that you use, the type that you hang on your wall (“you” here referring to everyone but “me”), dude art exists at the highly profitable intersection of graffiti, skate culture, independent comics (post-Fort Thunder), “design” (advertising), collage and video games–I’ve heard most of these referred to collectively as “boy culture.” The prototypical piece of dude art will involve a naked woman, video game paraphernalia, graffiti/advertising/design flourishes and will most likely take the form of a mural (see: Coop). {More}
Though actually predating its namesake by a generation or more, the Art Troll gets its current name from the Internet Troll, a special class of Internet users who post “controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages…with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.”# {More}
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