Digital Dynamics
Augmented Art, Online Vandalism : Geotagging Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kaia Magnusen
Artist Jeff Koons partnered with Snapchat to release an augmented reality platform that allows users to virtually see Koons’s sculptures in locations such as Central Park by using their smartphones. These augmented reality sculptures function as signifiers for works of art that exist in different locations in the real, as opposed to the online, world. One day after the project was launched, artist, Sebastian Errazuriz, virtually “vandalized” Balloon Dog by creating an augmented reality “sculpture” that was identical to Koons’s online sculpture but covered with graffiti. This online intervention disrupted Koons’s visual signifying system as Errazuriz inserted a new signifier in place of the online original. The vandalized Balloon Dog does not exist in actual reality, so its semiotic system of visual signification is closed as the augmented artwork (sign) functions both as signifier and signified. Errazuriz’s online interference demonstrates the arbitrary nature of the sign and problematizes claims regarding the “original” online work of art much as Koons’s own sculptures, which are often closely derived from extant images and are usually not made by Koons himself, complicate questions of originality. Consequently, the lines between binaries such as original—copy and online—actual meaning are blurred and destabilized.
How (Not) to Activate the Listener : Political Significance and Agency in Relational and Participatory Music Practices on YouTube
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jonas Wolf
The shift from a do-it-yourself ethic towards the ideal of (semi )professional (self )presentation, caused by the ongoing commercialisation of the video platform YouTube, has deeply affected the conceptualizations and aesthetics of popular music-related YouTube channels. Therefore, a critical examination of the platform-specific qualities and potentials of musical participation is due: My paper aims at separating formats and practices of collective expression from those whose socio-technical constitutions reveal disrupted communication lines, thus giving rise to forms of “pseudo-“ or “second-degree” interactivity. Possible reasons for this encompass artistic hierarchies, the normalizing potentials of algorithmic diffusion and performative strategies on the part of “influential” YouTube artists. With a particular focus on YouTube-specific concept music, I am going to refer to the term of “relational aesthetics”, originally coined by Nicolas Bourriaud with regard to art theoretically and practically based on “the realm of human interactions and its social context” (Bourriaud 1998). Following Claire Bishop’s criticism that “it is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is a democratic act” (Bishop 2004), theoretical adjustments to Bourriaud’s notion of relational art need to be made in order to give more weight to the process of critical reflection upon nonaesthetical relations to worldliness immanent in the artistic outcome. Therefore, examples of reflective relational concept music shall be compared to relational art driven by a “microtopian ethos” of producing “relationships between” in order to shed light on their specific political significance and scope of influence against the backdrop of our functionally differentiated society.
