In music, variation is a formal technique where material is repeated in an altered form. The changes may involve har-mony, melody, counterpoint, rhythm, timbre, orchestration or any combination of these.

According to Daryl Hall, during the recording of “We Are the World”, Michael Jackson approached him and admitted to lifting the bass line for “Billie Jean” from a Hall and Oates song, apparently referring to “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”. Hall says that he told Jackson that he had lifted the bass line from another song himself, and that it was “some-thing we all do.”

Portmanteaus1 are combinations of two (or more) words or morphemes, and their definitions, into one new word. Ex-amples include carjack (car & hijack) motel (motor & hotel) and cyborg (cybernetic & organism). The term portmanteau comes from Lewis Carrol’s book Through the Looking Glass wherein Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky where “slithy” means “lithe and slimy” and “mimsy” is “flimsy and miserable”. Humpty explains the practice of combining words in various ways by telling Alice, ‘You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

Many corporate brand names, trademarks, and initiatives are portmanteaus. For example, the brand velcro® is a port-manteau of velours and crochet.

The word emoticon comes from the combination of emotion (a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states) and icon (a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something OR a graphic representation on a screen of a program OR a sign whose form directly reflects the thing it signifies)

There has been a fair amount of critical writing on emoti-cons lately. Mostly reminiscent in nature where people deride the fact that emoticons are used to add context to our words, while proper word choice alone used to suffice

1 The word comes from English portmanteau luggage (a piece of luggage with two compartments), itself derived from the French porter (to carry) and manteau (coat), which is a false friend (faux-ami) of the French compound word porte-manteau meaning coat rack. The french word for the linguistic phenomenon portmanteau is mot-valise, which references the type of luggage commonly known as portmanteau.

for communication. I prefer to discuss the information that individuals can receive from emoticons alone. The question is one of subjectivity, for two reasons, first, because emoti-cons supposedly convey meaning or emotions and secondly, they are not based on lingual methods of communication, but graphic. Their formal qualities may point to equivalences and correspondences in the real world. A smiley is happy, a frown is sad. Easy enough, but what does the guy with sun-glasses tell us B-) and what happens as these symbols become more and more abstract? Pushing the limits, these newmoti-cons2 go beyond what we readily recognize. In these new-moticons there may or may or not be facial features present (as in traditional emoticons). Meaning, sentiments, and value are based purely on formal qualities of the emoticon (size, complexity, strangeness, perceived subject). They consist of near endless variations, often based on symmetry and pulled from the unicode language.

Certain emoticons then, are functionally ambiguous, and

may even rely on a sort of forced pareidolia3 wherein we are presented with something that seems to be (meaningful) in-formation to be deciphered, and we have to do so. Because we have always seen emoticons as having specific meaning

2 newmoticon is a term and website created by artist Ryder Ripps and design agency OKFocus. It generates emoticons like the ones pictured above.

3 Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

or information, we seek similar information in any emoticon-like assemblage, whether it is actually there or not.

The contemporary specificity of emoticons and newmoti-cons is that they don’t really do or say anything, but their functionality lies in their abstract nature, their hybridity of form and function, their open(ended)ness and ability to con-nect and link up to preexisting information.

꒰●꒡ ̫ ꒡●꒱

It’s kind of like when you look at clouds. You are si-multaneously confronted with science (the water cycle), myth (floating, impermanence, god), color, and form. The surplus of informations combine to make this a meaningful experience; enjoyed equally in childhood as in adulthood, probably for different reasons. The cloud resonates formally with other clouds and the landscape around it. The cloud is becoming the leading model for information storage.

Cartoons are a vacuum into which our identity and aware-

ness are pulled, an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel into another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it... Cartooning, like logo creation, works not just by eliminating other elements but by focusing on others, by stripping away some things the meanings of others are amplified .

Hello Kitty is mute.Kitty-chan has no mouth.Harō Kiti as divine mirror. (Do this for the resemblance of me)

Hello Kitty was drawn without a mouth. When people look at her, they can project their own feelings onto her face,

because hers is expressionless. She looks happy when people are happy. She looks sad when they are sad. By removing emotion from Hello Kitty she becomes more emotional. Hello Kitty functions in the same way as emoticons and clouds. They are surfaces that contain some information, but become more functional with new information. These sur-faces tend to be more malleable than rigid, more virtual than actual, more interested in play than work. They are open and adaptable, completely DTF. If a cloud that looks like Hello Kitty passes overhead, and no one recognizes it, does it make sense?

Language is a form of communicating that exists within a community. Communication and community both stem from the Latin word communis which means common or shared. A language’s functions4 include transmitting infor-mation and creating or reinforcing community. Groups of friends, business colleagues, and internet groups use similar vocabulary, slang, or lexicons as a way of expressing belong-ing or allegiance.

4 Language also changes the way we perceive the world around us. A common example is the way colors are perceived and named among speakers of certain languages. There long existed an erroneous example whereby “The Inuit people have over x words for ice and snow.” Which really just underlines this fact : the way we name things or how we call someone or something can change our perception of it.

In linguistics, a lexicon is a catalogue of a language’s units of meaning, a vocabulary employed to communicate. Vo-cabularies exist in many different languages (written, spoken, music, fashion, art...) and can give rise to jargon and slang which are more specific sub-vocabularies. Below are a few ways by which newness arises in a lexicon:

• Innovation • Borrowing of foreign words. • Compounding • Acronyms • Derivation

List-making, labelling, and categorizing are ways of clas-sifying and organizing information. Although naming and categorizing are integral to the way we understand the world around us, this process participates in the balkanization of experience, production, and vision.

Take the offline/online dichotomy that once purportedly existed. It is now obsolete. There is no longer life on the internet or off the internet, just life with internet. Seeing things as oppositions kills criticality. Binary logic prevents im-agining how things may be related in the continuum where life and practice exist. Abstract/Figurative, Image/Object, Professional/Amateur, Form/Content, Beau/Moche, Art/Decoration... With reflection, it becomes clear that these lines are, in fact, blurred, and the relationships between the two terms are interdependent and complex.

There is still a tendency, in day to day speech and reflec-tion to use these words as if true dichotomies exist, to be-lieve that polar opposites never meet and black white do not blend into grey. What is most interesting, and perhaps the most powerful, is the tipping point between the two terms; the zone of indecision, the no man’s land. How people see, feel, and understand things depends mainly on their frame of reference, context, and point of view. It’s all been heard before, remembering it is the tricky part.

The above cartoon is from a project initiated by artist Cory Arcangel. The project consists of an automated script which places the phrase “What a misunderstanding!” below a New Yorker cartoon, and posts it to his blog. The New Yorker

cartoons are notoriously obscure, and like many cartoons, rely heavily on the caption to provide context. The text “What a misunderstanding!” adds information to the car-toon, but this information subverts the traditional role of the caption. When confronted with the results of an accident, it’s difficult to decipher the original intentions.

We are surrounded by emptiness but it is an emptiness filled with signs. Frames, windows, doors, and other thresh-olds are transparent devices that achieve more the less they do. Context creates a frame by which to perceive things. Context is what makes a joke funny. Things are interesting or absurd because we aren’t used to them in certain contexts. There is nothing dirty about ketchup, unless it is on my shirt

When we examine the examples of what we consider to be dirty, messy, and filthy, we realize that we are not con-cerned so much with the objects/substances themselves as with their displacement. The swastika and the yin yang have similar origins and meanings. It is their context that informs us.

Content isn’t king, context is.

The yin yang is a pictorial icon portraying formal relations, positive-negative, with elements of each necessarily belong-ing to the other. It’s meaning (content) conveys a sense of symbiosis and oneness. The yin-yang portrays two forces as complimentary rather than opposing.

Let us also consider its place as a shitty pop culture relic

used by hippies, sold in malls, and plastered all over the in-ternet. The lowbrow marketing aspect of the yin yang is due to an act which is quite common in commodity culture; the evisceration(appropriation) of an icon(symbol/sign) and the exploitation of remaining traces of meaning and power.

For the mall-going internet crowd the yinyang is only the shell of its meaning, but by some bizarre Zen shortcut, the ghost isn’t that hard to find. The way in which the yinyang functions in popular culture (low) is only loosely based on its (high) origins. The symbol now has more affinity with skateboards, California, and weed than it does with intercon-nectedness and impermanence. But what can skateboards, California, and weed tell us about interconnectedness and impermanence? Maybe these things are just as Zen as the yinyang? It’s not what it is, it’s how it works.

No poet, writer, or artist has his complete meaning alone. His significance and appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to dead poets, writers, and artists. Memory and history sit in Zen opposition to each other, like the yinyang,

with each part containing the seed for the other. Combin-ing passion, imagination, fantasies, and facts, memory is the result of human experience, where time extends out in all directions and chronology doesn’t count, only heritage and inner beliefs. History is a vision of the past with forged and codified rules. History shapes human experience from a dis-tance and with supposed scientific rigor, by subjecting it to an analysis that attempts to separate the true from the false.

History and memory are intertwined. Just like individu-als make up a group, or wolves make a pack, memories constitute a history. Although history is viewed as more institutional, more directly linked to power (history is writ-ten by the victors), it is only through individual appropriated and codified memories that a collective history can form. Proust’s madeleine is now our madeleine, a convention that sheds light on the idea of memory, now part of the history of literature. The grease and felt so important to Beuys were first his memories, then part of art history, and now part of ours.5 Creations released out into the world have effects beyond our control and enter into complex relations of in-dividual and shared histories and memories. What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.

5 This myth was famously debunked in a 1980 issue of Artforum, but it is proof that even fabricated memories can endure in history and memory.

WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME:

ON REFERENCES & INFLUENCES IN CONTEMPORARY ART

Early man moved on the savannah in tribes, creating a smaller circle of individuals within the larger circle that was the horizon. With the invention of fire came the need to protect it. The proto-wall. The wall that divides, the wall that protects, the wall that receives our ritual and celebra-tory creations. Walls were built for things to be put upon them. I posted on your wall.

Creations are inherently iterative. You have to emulate the masters before you can make your own masterpiece. So as you construct a body of work, you are just repeating your-self while you repeat others, who repeated those that came before them. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Refresh, Refresh, Refresh...

Why make art? So we can make more art. It has no other aim, nothing for society other than the excitement of art. Art is what makes life more interesting than art.

Abstraction is about displacement and perhaps all art is about displacement. Art is like show and tell, it consists in finding something and bringing it back. Origins and sources are often neglected but they lie latent in the work, more or less hidden depending on its displacement. Did Luc Andrié catch himself in a fogged up mirror in just the perfect pale light? Maybe Andy Warhol wished he was a grocer?

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradi-tion where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

-Andy Warhol

I’M ON ONE : ON CONSUMPTION

Everything is a question of taste. A true copy cannot ex-ist. Even two (industrial) objects of consumption which are purported to be physically and chemically identical cannot be so. Why? Because our experience of them can never be identical. The ice cold Budweiser enjoyed at your neighbor-hood bar will never be as ice cold and refreshing as the one you drank one summer at the pond on a raft with your girlfriend. Nor will it be the same as the ice cold Budweiser sipped at your neighborhood bar years later as you reflect on that same moment with melancholy. But how cool and refreshing the ice cold Budweiser shared years later at that same bar with that same girl!?

The package has replaced the product. A brand’s image in the eyes of an ADD public is becoming more and more important in all aspects of society, and hence design(form) is too. Consumer-attention6 and image-retention gain in power as daily encounters of images and brands become more rapid, frequent, and violent.

The logo is the purest expression of form and color. It is the root of modernity. A logo must be: intelligible, distinc-tive, memorable, and reproducible. A logo will likely include three universal design elements – elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony. These are tested factors that drive consumer behavior. Anthropomorphic logos are simulacrum of living things, through elimination remaining elements gain new function and autonomy.

The design, color, and graphic lettering of corporate logos have long been used to position the brand identity of new corporations and product lines, establish associations or af-

6 As content has grown increasingly abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of information.

fects that are linked to particular histories and specific ideas of taste. Branding has emerged as a way of managing the relationship between products and consumers; it has become a strategic means of structuring and stabilizing volatile mar-kets.

Products aren’t “about” anything. The first relationship one has with a product is through basic visual cues7: color, form, size...While the product truly has no meaning, these cues nonetheless contain information. They help give the illusion that these products have an identity, a myth, terroir, a personality, a philosophy. This gives rise to narratives or truths shared by the public about these objects. For exam-ple: this cracker is extreme, that water is feminine, this jack-et is about tradition, that computer is artistic. If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you may even come to believe it yourself.8

Traits and formal elements combine to create identity.9 Brown paper and light green inks on a package of chips speak to nature, wholeness, and goodness. The jet black injected molding of an Axe body spray bottle conveys per-formance, technique, precision, and durability. The propor-

7 Consumers often deviate from optimal information processing and decision making. Recent work in visual neuroscience suggests that the way in which the brain processes low-level visual information (i.e., color, brightness) might also bias the decision making process. It is well known in visual neuroscience that the visual attributes of stimuli (such as brightness or color) determine their visual saliency or prominence, and thus affect the location and duration of eye fixations when individuals approach complex displays such as a vending machine or a supermarket shelf. This visual effect has been shown to persist for several fixations. As a result, more salient stimuli are fixated on (i.e., looked at) longer than less salient stimuli. Further, a recent series of neuroeconomic studies have shown that the values assigned to stimuli at the time of choice depend on the amount of attention the stimuli receive during the decision making process

8 This is purportedly attributed to Goebbels, Hitler, or Naziism. This quote about falsifying history has itself dubious origins. Was it borrowed? Stolen? A lie about a quote lying to people. Does the authenticity or origin matter if the meaning is still conveyed?

9 During the 1950s, it became the practice in all large industrial concerns to create a recognisable style to identify their products or services. Where unification of style was undertaken as part of an advertising campaign it was called ‘fixing the brand image’’

tions and shape of a Redbull connote difference, originality, slenderness, even health. The shape of the Redbull can was so radically different that Coca-Cola started bottling coke into similar cans. Formal imitation as a sign of success, mi-mesis as evolutionary necessity. Information comes from form.

The art object can be seen as an object of contemplation, not to be analyzed or decoded, but to be puzzled over. Its secrets may have to do with art, but with something else as well, with no name forthcoming. What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. Excessive importance on content provokes arrogant interpretation. Materials and the forms they take can communicate as loudly and clearly as content purportedly does.

Any person, any object, any relationship can mean ab-solutely anything else. Translation is the act of conveying meaning through the approximate correspondence of two different vocabularies.

Interpretation indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or un-conscious) with part of a vocabulary, and wishes to replace it with something else. Interpretation, based on the theory that

a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. Footnotes on Wikipedia pages provide trivial context and

E-Z Info10 for just about anything that needs justifying. This has contributed to a cheapening of the narrative(content). Is it possible that the internet and data/information ubiquity have created a sort of impoverishment of information? In economics, supply and demand govern systems and markets. If a surplus exists on the supply side, the demand will not be able to keep up and the value of the surplus will decrease. Marx said that improvements in technology and productivity can increase wealth but at the same time diminish the value of this wealth. A corollary of this is the idea that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. As information grows more abundant and immediately available, attention becomes the limiting factor in the consumption of informa-tion. Attention is now divided between more and more information that has less and less value.

The wish for an image or object to convey a specific message (or specific messages) is becoming impossible due to increasing cultural fragmentation and the different contexts and meanings created by widespread dissemina-tion and consumption of information, images, and culture. Narratives(contents) are now plural, open-ended, and malle-able. Sign, signifier, and signified have moved beyond three chairs. Today, strategies similar to ones Kosuth mapped out can be applied to ANY set of any things. Call it furniture sculpture, call it post-modern, call it what you want bitch,

10 E-Z Info - Easy Information.

call me on my Sidekick.11 There may be a few misunder-standing along the way, but thank Buddha there are curators and press releases to put some content in that form!

Using a form with blatant disregard to content or by pur-posefully emptying it of its content is fantastic, literally fan-tasy. No matter how we intervene or act on an object, form, or symbol; whatever exists a priori in that object and more importantly, in those that perceive (receive) it escapes us. It is beyond our control. As has always been the case, knowl-edge and cultural objects are trafficked, remixed, consumed, and redeployed into systems that effect the way individuals and groups understand this information.

It is arrogant and disrespectful to believe that meaning can be forced onto someone’s experience. It’s similar to the way that urban planning is a shitty attempt to control public space and predict human behavior by intervening across large swaths of cities. “By deploying the aforementioned urban strategies we’re confident these modifications and adjustments will change X, Y, & ZZZZZZZZZZ.....” Boring. Bullshit. Hausmann should have put in more crosswalks.

11 A milli, a milli, a milli

Benjamin Franklin, while spending time in France wrote this:

Are there twenty Men in Europe at this Day, the happier, or even the easier, for any Knowledge they have pick’d out of Aris-totle? What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his Bowels! The Knowledge of Newton’s mutual Attraction of the Particles of Matter, can it afford Ease to him who is rack’d by their mutual Repulsion, and the cruel Disten-sions it occasions? The Pleasure arising to a few Philosophers, from seeing, a few Times in their Life, the Threads of Light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven Colours, can it be compared with the Ease and Comfort every Man living might feel seven times a Day, by discharging freely the Wind from his Bowels?

This was written as a response to an open call for scien-tific papers from the Royal Academy of Brussels. Franklin wrote this letter, also known as “Fart Proudly”, while living in France because he believed that academic concerns of the period were increasingly pretentious and impractical. By writing to the Royal Academy of Brussels imploring them to dedicate more resources to the question of the fart (TQOTF), he was mixing high and low, Franklin was interested in Pop...and Pffftthh, he was playing with context, making a joke, he was trolling.

TQOTF is delicate. As William Walker Percy (WWP) said in his seminal novel The Moviegoer 12 “Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks great malaise.” How does WWP then relate to TQOTF? Simple, Gamble and Lose (G&L) better known as the wet fart.

12 The Moviegoer was WWP first novel, where a young stock broker in New Orleans strolls around town, goes to the movies and get’s deep about life’s big questions....“What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

The question of the wet fart (TQOTWF) is once removed from TQOTF but perhaps doubly as intriguing. Mentioned earlier, questions of form cannot be avoided, and shitting yourself is the ne(c) plus ultra of poor form. Kids “have ac-cidents.” And TQOTWF is just that, an accident, the result of a well meaning action gone horribly, humidly, awry.

TQOTWF differs from The Happy Accident (THA) in that it has none or few redeeming qualities. THA is something that yields pleasant unforeseen results whereas TQOTWF provides only a call to immediate reevaluation of dietetic and lifestyle choices or a Proustian trip back to childhood’s questions and concerns. We used to call people “wet farts” that were habitually maladroit or clumsy. A faux pas uttered? A bodily spasm resulting in damage to prop-erty? Wet Fart. You just spilled my ice cold Budweiser? Wet Fart. But the wet fart isn’t all bad, its a charming mishap, a slight transgression(digression) an inevitability on the road to something better. All of this because you rolled the dice, and came up short13.

When striving for exceptional results, we must make radical decisions and take risks. One must be ready to accept fail-ure. Beyond that, failure is folded into great success and it is what makes it something worth striving for.

THA is of course the first of many strategies to be as-similated as one begins dealing seriously in the creation, dis-semination, and evaluation of forms. In art school it goes like this. “I was going to hang it straight, but then it fell, and I

13 We could also make a play on words here, something to the effect of coming up short and something or other in your shorts...

actually think it’s more interesting like this.” or “It was sup-posed to be really smooth and square, but the fact that it is bumpy and not quite straight is actually kind of cool.” Un-clear whether this trend comes from Duchampian The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors logic, laziness, or an I-Ching respect for chance and randomness. In an effort to assimilate attitudes of the avant garde, the young artist may quickly and strongly adapt the adage “Honor the mistake as hidden intent”. Allowing chance into practice provides a fresh way of thinking about (or ignoring) the relationships between cause and effect. Appreciation for the malformed, the ma-chine error, the irregular has existed for centuries, but as our society becomes more and more industrialized and standard-ized, accidents and errors take on new importance. Chance can be allowed for or it can be programmed into a process. Submitting to the material is a sign of the avant garde.

The important thing is the position of the mass, and above all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or wolf mul-tiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity. [...] To be fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge.

-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

Edging is a sexual practice wherein orgasm is delayed, of-ten known as peaking or surfing. Since orgasm control pro-longs the experience of powerful sexual sensations that occur during the final build-up to orgasm, the physical demands of being kept or keeping oneself in this highly excited state for an extended time can induce a pleasurable, almost euphoric

state. At times this creates changes within an individual’s perceived consciousness.

The edge is also the frontier, the boundary, the limit. Edges can be sharp and hard, they can break and cut. Edges can also be soft, vague, less discernible. If you see someone in the street how do you know if they are jogging or if they are in a hurry? What are the differences?

At what point(s) do I no longer perceive my Budweiser as ice cold? As we move away from the center, we move towards the edge, the fringes, the margins14.

What about blur? At what points do images become leg-ible? Where does a form become more abstract than figura-tive? This type of uncertainty is grounded in relativity and subjectivity...and rightfully so, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s what inside that counts? Yes, it’s what on the side that counts. Whatever inhabits these indiscernible zones escapes naming and possesses greater freedom and power.

A form approaches from the distance becoming more and more recognizable, until it becomes too close, and vision is obscured by proximity.

14 Marginalia are the scribbles, comments, doodles, and illuminations in the margins of a book. In what ways does this secondary information relate to the first? More abstract? More personal? At what point does a comment become a non-sequitur?

Proximity is the measure of nearness in space, time, or relationship. Proximity, like context, helps frame objects or ideas, and often creates context. Language and communica-tion are questions of proximity. Therefore much of how the white cube functions and contemporary art in general is due to proximity. The white cube functions because art-objects are isolated there by the artist, in proximity to nothing else. The fact that they are isolated reinforces their nature as objects that have been displaced, objects that have been selected, objects to be considered, art-objects. The poet, writer, and artist constructs using proximities.

No matter how different objects may seem, proximity or sequence alone will create resonance or relationship. These relationships won’t necessarily make sense; but they will pro-duce sensations.

Looking for deeper meaning means sometimes finding nothing at all. That’s why they call it fishing and not catch-ing. Folksy wisdom and clichés mirror high theory. Often times the journey is more important than the destination.

Sometimes what you’re looking for is right in front of you.

If I call someone by their first name, that’s a sign of prox-imity, of closeness, or familiarity. In the French language the switch from the formal vouvoiement to an informal tutoie-ment is a sign of proximity.

Constructed proximities create correlation where there is none preexisting, they confuse cause and effects. By calling someone by their first name it implies intimacy and familiar-ity, by using the tu form in French, I allow for proximity. By preemptively doing either, I may be forcing proximity and although it may not correlate to intimacy, it may manifest itself as such.

Does calling Hans Ulrich Obrist “Hans” make me (seem) a more important artist?

IF IT LOOKS LIKE A DUCK, SWIMS LIKE A DUCK, AND

QUACKS LIKE A DUCK, THEN IT PROBABLY IS A DUCK.

If artists wish to create something that is original, taking into account that all creations are iterative, they should strive for something authentic, genuine, or bona fide. What is to be avoided is the that which is in-authentic, unoriginal, counterfeit. (I will avoid using the word copy and prefer counterfeit because of its legal, moral, and artistic/aesthetic implications). We can recognize counterfeits by a certain set of defining characteristics (traits15) that describe their rela-

15 Trait also means line in French. Traits function by claiming to represent an object. Traits may not faithfully correspond to the object depending on how abstract the representation is.

tionship to objects they are aiming to imitate (supplicate). Acquiring a counterfeit can be done knowingly or un-

knowingly, as can selling, trading, using, or consuming one. Producing a counterfeit cannot. The main difference of a counterfeit from other duplicates, copies, simulacres, etc is that it is an imitation produced with intention to deceive or to defraud. When faced with an object or process, what are the ways of determining authenticity? How can one deter-mine counterfeit-ness? Does it really matter?

Take the standard case of a Vuitton bag purchased on a Chinatown sidewalk, or under the Barbès metro station (here I am letting you in on my “global” view of authentic-ity.) The purse is simply a replica made only in the image of the original, with no attention to material or craftsmanship. Knowledge of its origin and a survey of its formal elements indicate counterfeit-ness.

Counterfeit Eurorail passes are printed on the exact paper and by the exact printer as authentic passes, but they do not pass through legitimate channels. Visually, the counter-feit passes are identical to authentic Eurorail passes. They tend to function just as well as authentic passes (rarely do conductors have the time, technology, or desire to check serial numbers, call into a central database and verify infor-mation on the tickets, which if they did, would reveal the fact that the serial numbers do not correspond to an actual purchase.) So then, what authenticity value to assign a coun-terfeit that is physically, visually, and functionally identical to its ergafeit16?

Depending on the expectations of the end user, the coun-terfeit-ness of an object varies. Imagine a factory producing name brand shirts (Lacoste, Polo). The shirt is made, passes all quality control tests, but the logo is never sewn on at its habitual spot. The shirt is, for all practical purposes (quality, functionally) a shirt, all that is missing is the signifying brand trait that may differentiate it from other shirts, and authenti-cate it as bona fide branded product.

In the case of the train pass and the shirt the products are certainly not authentic. But they could very well perform their functions (fill their roles) expected of them by end users. The shirt is viewed differently if the hope was to get some social currency, than if you just wanted a “well made shirt”. The validity or authenticity of an object depends on (perhaps solely) who is using it and for what.

Is the large canvas print of Times Square from IKEA less

16 Ergafeit - the source material for counterfeits.

real(artistic, valid) to the person that gives zero fucks about art/photo/aesthetics? What complicated processes involv-ing aesthetics and economy have led to its production and acquisition? What proximities and contexts could change its status and how? Information comes subjectively from an object’s context. For whom does the Budweiser chill? It chills for thee... THE PLEASURE OF COUNTERFEIT AESTHETICS

Individuals strive for originality, and loathe to be seen as anything less than 100% authentic, so how is that aesthetics of counterfeits are of interest to today’s hitmakers? For ex-ample, more and more people are buying counterfeit goods on vacation17. The counterfeiters wild attempt to (approxi-mately) replicate the aesthetics of a product yields unique results (misspelled brand names, malformed logos, improb-able combinations and juxtapositions of color, brand, and images). Todays hitmakers are tired of being marketed to by tired brands using tired strategies. Pop up stores, pack-shots, and Brand x Brand collaborations, each more predictable than the last. BB King sells us diabetes medicine, yes it really is true, the thrill is gone.

What is fascinating is the bizarre way that these counterfeit objects deviate from the storefront, e-commerce, catalog norm. Easily recognizable at first but a closer look reveals horrible abominations of style and substance. A thing of

17 It is mostly in the bastions of unbridled libido and capitalism such as Greece and Southeast Asia that these types of objects can freely circulate.

greatness. These deviations mean that the counterfeit bought at the flea market is much rarer and weirder than an authen-tic original which you can buy at the store.

Scarcity is a driving factor in consumer behavior. Artificial

scarcity occurs when it is possible to create an abundance but the producer chooses not to. The McRib18® sandwich at Mcdonalds is only available for a limited time, although it could easily be added to the permanent menu. By choosing not to permanently offer the McRib®, Mcdonald’s creates the illusion that the McRib® is rare, unique, fleeting, luxuri-ous...magical. People love what they can’t have. McRib® as POMO19 as FOMO20.

Acquiring and using the counterfeit creates a positive aes-thetic stance towards these objects. Their existence in a glob-al market is validated even though the objects themselves are not valid. Traditionally, posers acquired counterfeit objects to gain status. Todays hitmakers acknowledge the empty

18 The McRib® is a barbecue rib style sandwich. It is composed of pork product formed to resemble a rack of ribs. If you’ve never had the McRib® just think of other limited edition sandwiches offered at your Mcdonald’s. Like the Rosti Frites or McSbrinz in Switzerland.

19 post-modern

20 FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) is a form of social anxiety — a compulsive concern that one might miss an op-portunity for social interaction, novel experience, profitable investment or other satisfying event. A driving factor in social and consumer relations and actions, it implies constant use of social media to keep abreast of activities, trends, and goings on globally and locally.

thrill of brands and the status they confer by knowingly posing as unwitting consumers and thus inauthentic. Coun-terfeits reveal to us the symbolic game of chutes and ladders we play, a game in which we are as upwardly mobile as we are prone to social slide. Everyone as complicit consumers of inauthenticity.

These objects call bullshit, where only the initiated can ap-preciate and understand. And just like every inside joke, it’s a classic case of “I know something you don’t know.” Which amounts to the greatest fuck you in today’s EZ-Info society. And it’s illegal. What could be more thrilling?

A new economy is rising up around digitizing and comput-ing, in which the product is no longer thought of as an ob-ject to be produced so much as a datum to be manipulated - that is, to be designed and redesigned, consumed, and reconsumed. Creativity is the power to connect the seem-ingly unconnected. Authenticity and originality depends on the context.

ON ICE : AN EPILOGUE

Complexity theory is the idea that when complex, seem-ingly random systems are studied, traceable patterns can emerge. Thermal dynamics is a branch of complexity theory which explains the movement of heat in systems. Heat flows from places of high concentration to places of low concen-tration, in the same way smoke fills a room. Imagine an ice cube in one corner of a room and a burning cigarette in the other. The smoke and the cold move away from their corners, towards areas of low concentration. Temperatures and densities change, in graduated movements of intensities. Perhaps a slight breeze in the room creates a deformation, a bump, a curve, but the movement resumes uninterrupted.

Now imagine an ice cube smoking a cigarette dancing to a trap remix of an early nineties classic. Each bounce and spin changes the intensities and velocities that the ice cube’s cold-ness dissipates in the room. Smoke that is exhaled is cooler and thus behaves differently than the smoke that comes from its cigarette.

Ice is cool. Ice is temporal, only one of the states a liquid can occupy. Ice gives form and meaning to water. It has the ability to effect change on other objects. In doing so, it changes itself, diffusing and dissipating into its surroundings. Ice is selfless, it will sacrifice for you. Ice is status. We used to jump in the pond holding blocks of ice until they melted. Gucci Mane so icy.

POSTFACE

The topics I have chosen to write about and the manner in which I have chosen to write about them will hopefully shed light on certain preoccupations that I have at this time.

I have not given any legends or annotations to the images, preferring them to speak for themselves, or rather for the viewer to LOOK FOR THEMSELVES.

Explaining a joke is the best way to kill it, and with that in mind, I hope you got it.

Baker Wardlaw 2014