{"title":"Good-for-nothing (no. 1)","authors":"Nathan Matteson, Nicholas Kersulis","doi":"10.1145/3414686.3427171","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"The screen's nature is to both show and to obscure. It forever hypnotizes us, seamlessly eliminating its own qualities as a substrate. It owns the characteristics of a Zelig: forever changing, unstable in any context, and destabilizing context itself. Informed by photography, film, and every meme that ever was, the digital image shifts readily between aspects of each. Its meaning is necessarily slippery and hard to define; possessing a quality that makes it hard to pin down or make fit into a neat category. Given this slipperiness, can we ever grasp the basic, tectonic components of the digital image? The bits and pixels of the screen do little to help our visual understanding of its relationship to one's perspective in everyday life. The seductive illusions and concomitant complexities of our online experiences have enabled an entirely new trompe l'oeil hell of phishing attacks, spoofs, and cross-domain tomfoolery. Digital images, precisely because of their ambivalence towards the picture plane, forever slip from our grasp. Only as Flusser's metaphorical wind blows them from our mental, perceptual grasp do they reveal aspects of their construction. Rather than fight against this liminal quality, we exploit it. Good-for-nothings celebrate the disappearance of materiality; albeit, through lack, dejection, and an embrace of the absence that seems to have brought much of our culture to a standstill. Forever shifting, always shiftless, on an endless joyride from nowhere to anywhere. How does one go about working with this shiftlessness? Each Good-for-nothing raises its metaphorical glass to Herman Melville's crème de la crème good-for-nothing anti-hero, Bartleby. They are images aligned with a scrivener of the post-modern age that can only tell us: 'I prefer not to'.","PeriodicalId":376476,"journal":{"name":"SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Art Gallery","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2020-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Art Gallery","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3414686.3427171","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The screen's nature is to both show and to obscure. It forever hypnotizes us, seamlessly eliminating its own qualities as a substrate. It owns the characteristics of a Zelig: forever changing, unstable in any context, and destabilizing context itself. Informed by photography, film, and every meme that ever was, the digital image shifts readily between aspects of each. Its meaning is necessarily slippery and hard to define; possessing a quality that makes it hard to pin down or make fit into a neat category. Given this slipperiness, can we ever grasp the basic, tectonic components of the digital image? The bits and pixels of the screen do little to help our visual understanding of its relationship to one's perspective in everyday life. The seductive illusions and concomitant complexities of our online experiences have enabled an entirely new trompe l'oeil hell of phishing attacks, spoofs, and cross-domain tomfoolery. Digital images, precisely because of their ambivalence towards the picture plane, forever slip from our grasp. Only as Flusser's metaphorical wind blows them from our mental, perceptual grasp do they reveal aspects of their construction. Rather than fight against this liminal quality, we exploit it. Good-for-nothings celebrate the disappearance of materiality; albeit, through lack, dejection, and an embrace of the absence that seems to have brought much of our culture to a standstill. Forever shifting, always shiftless, on an endless joyride from nowhere to anywhere. How does one go about working with this shiftlessness? Each Good-for-nothing raises its metaphorical glass to Herman Melville's crème de la crème good-for-nothing anti-hero, Bartleby. They are images aligned with a scrivener of the post-modern age that can only tell us: 'I prefer not to'.