The Printed Internet (2013-), by Daniel Kolitz
collage, imagery, internet, post-internet, printed matter, translation, writingSunday, April 28th, 2013
With a characteristic flourish of perversity linking painting to pasta, Martin Kippenberger identified the most important problem to be addressed on canvas since Warhol in an interview of 1990–91: “Simply to hang a painting on the wall and say that it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghettini . . . . When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery that is also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls.” If we take Kippenberger at his word, a significant question arises: How does painting belong to a network?
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For Constant Dullaart digital media are not just means of transport for content and facts but first and foremost the subject of his media-analytical artistic strategy. In DVD Screensaver Performance, conceived as a series, one sees the artist in various places, such as in the Joshua Tree desert, in his living room or in the Museum of Applied Art in Vienna. He is holding a bunch of differently coloured oval signs with the DVD logo in his hand, which for several minutes he moves diagonally from one edge of the screen to the other. As soon as the logo touches the edge of the respective video display the artist changes the card and so changes the colour. If a playback machine does not contain a storage medium or is in stand-by mode, the movements right across the screen, which the DVD logo carries out in a standardised way, are imitated by Constant Dullaart and reconstructed using analogue means. DVD Screensaver Performance is about an attempt to push a technological procedure that is little noticed in everyday life into the field of view and to demonstrate both the performative potential of technological arrangements as well as their standard design.
On the screen, viewers see Constant Dullaart. The artist is lying on the floor: spread out in front of him are eight circular elements that he again has arranged into a larger circle and which are in the middle of the picture on the video. Dullaart pushes each of the individual elements a bit further in a clockwise direction and in this way sets the big circle in motion. YouTube on the Floor is about the symbol that shows YouTube users the waiting time until the video they have clicked is completely downloaded. With the analogue animation that reconstructs an object from the net in real space, the artist explores the performative potential of one of the most popular video platforms. Constant Dullaart researches the multifaceted language of contemporary images that are circulating on the Internet and their recontextualisation as “found footage” in their own medium. The artist examines their widespread and often unquestioned use as well as the internationally disseminated and standardised appearance of manipulated screen surfaces in order to research their influence on social behaviour.
There is no need to do more than mention the obvious fact that a multiplicity of languages impedes cultural interchange between the peoples of the earth, and is a serious deterrent to international understanding. The present memorandum, assuming the validity and importance of this fact, contains some comments and suggestions bearing on the possibility of contributing at least something to the solution of the world-wide translation problem through the use of electronic computers of great capacity, flexibility, and speed. The suggestions of this memorandum will surely be incomplete and naïve, and may well be patently silly to an expert in the field—for the author is certainly not such.
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Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.
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Wie die Tangente den Kreis flüchtig und nur in einem Punkte berührt und wie ihr wohl diese Berührung, nicht aber der Punkt, das Gesetz vorschreibt, nach dem sie weiter ins Unendliche ihre gerade Bahn zieht, so berührt die Übersetzung flüchtig und nur in dem unendlich kleinen Punkte des Sinnes das Original, um nach dem Gesetze der Treue in der Freiheit der Sprachbewegung ihre eigenste Bahn zu verfolgen.
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