What really caught my attention in searching through Nicolas Maigret’s work, was that the totality of it pertained to technology. Prior to this class, I would have seen work like his in a museum, and wouldn’t have looked twice. Looking through the lens of our discussion, though, I tried to think more deeply about the works I was seeing. I found looking at Maigret’s work really helpful in getting my mind on the track of commenting on the Internet. I am used to, in a way, consuming the Internet mindlessly, and not doing a lot of critical thinking about the way I tweet, like, view, post, etc. This artist allowed me to continue our class discussion with myself, and look at how the world is being fed to me online, and a lot of his projects really show where the Internet evolved from. He has explored so many different concepts; information on the Internet, hardware, and a lot of works not really pertaining to the Internet at all. I am inspired by the fact that he can think so creatively about, and represent so creatively, the universal Internet that we all use.
In a way, I really think this is his point. We use the Internet kind of robotically and habitually, but looking at some of his projects really forces the viewer to think about ideas like concept restriction, the difference in the Internet of different nations, where the Internet came from, how usage can look in the physical space, etc. It is pretty important, as I talk about with the project I chose, to think about the way content is fed to us. All of the discourse on the web basically feeds into itself (Twitter into the news into Facebook, and vice versa), which does not leave much room for the creation of our own thoughts and opinions (or at least original thoughts). We are slowly merging with the screens in front of us; yes, we manually input our data, but there is so much output, and meaning is sort of disappearing. There is a lot of thinking to be done about our usage.
The project of Maigret’s that I chose to focus on is Predictive Art Bot. This is an algorithm Maigret co-created, which mixes up words found in Internet discourse to create completely randomized and new ideas. I have actually encountered similar projects to this, where my own data has been used to formulate tweets and such, but I have never seen it explained in this way. I went and found the Predictive Art Bot online, as it is still functioning, and the ideas that it came up with were amazing because the language was so familiar, yet you know it’s actually nonsense. The actual project was done in the form of an installation, with some elements (such as neon keywords) added to it. The main piece would have the viewer sit in a chair in front of a large screen, and watch the Bot work. The whole thing has so many dimensions to it, and is an incredible commentary on how the Internet has come to feed into itself, and has given everyone an opportunity to influence how the group thinks; aside from the commentary, there is an aspect that pushes beyond what the human mind could conjure on its own. The algorithm makes the box of what is possible bigger, so to speak, by bypassing our innate desire to make things make sense. The viewer will sit and watch the new concept being typed, and is shown on the left screen the source material. Even just watching it happen on your computer screen works; the way that the Bot is set up makes it look a little all-encompassing (as it takes up the screen), and the minimalism of the black-and-white headline allows the viewer to just read the headline and make something of it themselves. The language and phrasing of the results is familiar, and reads really easily for a viewer. The whole project is really creative and successful overall.
I think since I’m doing this project that is such a commentary on the Internet, there is a lot I can learn from Maigret and others I’ve found in my search. As I said, I have never really had an interest in this type of art, but there is really so much that can be done with it. Already, what I’ve learned in this process is that pieces based on the Internet can really be based so much on your own footprint. My final project is a commentary on the evolution of the Internet, but it’s being done only with images that I remember as being impactful. With Nicolas Maigret, I see that my own discourse and word choice on the Internet can affect how algorithms come out. I also found, in his project called The Pirate Book, that he does a comparison of piracy in previous centuries compared to the modern concept of piracy. This is a really interesting concept to put next to the concept for my project, which is comparing Bauhaus organizations and aesthetics with those of the modern Internet. In terms of what I would do differently than him, I would only say that the scope of my exploration of the Internet is much more limited. It has never been my main interest, but I can take a lot of what I’ve seen in Maigret’s work and use it to strengthen my own. I also noticed that much of his work is information based, whereas I am a little more interested in the aesthetics and experiential side of the Internet.
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