RICKROLL/OpenFile 3.

3

As notions of public space have
shifted with the advent of the internet,
social codes have been separated from
their ‘real world’ counterparts. This pub-
lication coincides with an evening of
screenings and performances exploring
forms of emerging online interaction,
memes and virtual socialisation.
“And so something has really
changed – and I think this is the real
epiphany: the ways in which culture is
distributed have become profoundly
more intriguing than the cultural arti-
fact itself.”
Kenneth Goldsmith
The programme features con-
tributions from George Barber, David
Raymond Conroy, Hannah Perry, Jon Raf-
man, Thomas Yeomans and Marialaura
Ghidini, and is the third in a series of
events that have previously taken place
at Grand Union, Birmingham and ICA,
London.
Designed by WRP
Open File III is kindly supported by the
Arts Council England
1
At £23,010, the average starting salary in teaching is high compared to the
average graduate starting salary. Experienced teachers can earn up to £64,000 in
London and £56,000 outside London.
RICKROLL Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, they get huge holidays and finish
Spike Island, Bristol
work in the mid afternoon. It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them
19th April 2013
for what they do – babysit. Okay, so lets say they’ve got teaching qualifications
and maybe master’s degrees, but they must want to do it. It’s a vocation, isn’t
PREVIOUS:
that what they say? Surely they should be prepared to do it for minimum wage,
LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH
£6.19 an hour. It is the public sector after all and in this economic climate
ICA, London we all have to tighten our belts. Also I think they should be reasonable and
12th January 2013
only charge for the hours they’ve worked; I don’t agree with this claiming for
HASHFAIL
planning time and marking time. Everyone has to manage their work; make time to
Grand Union, Birmingham do it on the job if you have to, that’s what every other profession has to do.
14th December 2012 1 Bait and switch
2 George Barber, Milk Bottle Village (2013)
4 Thomas Yeomans, YO DAWG I HERD YOU LIKE
So let’s say they work from 8.30 to 3.30 day, I don’t get a lunch break so why
RICKROLLING SO I RICKROLLED A RICKROLL WITH should they? I’m not paying for that, so that’s a six hour day. I wish I only
YOUR RICKROLL (2013)
worked six hours a day.
5 Marialaura Ghidini, On the ecology of the distributed
work of art, and it’s inter-media narrative
6 hours at £6.19 is £37.14 a day. What’s the average class size, 30? Class sizes
properties (2013) should be smaller I think, so let’s say 25 children at £37.19 each which means...
10 Jon Rafman, Kool Aid Man in search
£929.75
of the virtual sublime (2009)
12 Jon Rafman, Kool Aid Man in search
of the virtual sublime (2009) Hang on, £929.75 a day! Well I’m definitely not going to pay for holidays, I mean
14 Tim Dixon, From A to /b/ and back again (2013)
they’re off half the year. Right, half of 365 is 182.5. Round it down to 180,
17 Hannah Perry, I should go (2013)
we’re in a period of austerity remember.
£929.75 for 180 days is £167,355.00
A hundred and sixty thousand pounds! That is ridiculous, I mean it isn’t like
they’re devoted to my child for the entire day, there are dozens of children in
a class.
What do we pay that teenager who walks the dog? £3.00 an hour. She isn’t just
looking after our dog, she has others too, £3.00 an hour seems fair I think.
Okay so let’s pay teachers £3 an hour. Right, so that’s £18.00 a day from the 25
parents of each child in the class, which is £450 a day for 180 days. Well £450
a day seems a bit expensive but 25 children from God knows where… I wouldn’t
do it, and we’re only paying them for the half a year that they work I suppose.
That means 180 days at £450 so… £81,000
Hang on a moment, something isn’t right here.
2 3
Milk Bottle Village
An endearing facility funded by English Heritage for all devout milkmen who
have been rejected and made to feel unwanted by a de-historicised population who like
milk in square cardboard boxes.
At the centre’s large mock village, the retired men can whizz about on their
floats, sometimes depositing as many as 50 pints to a single address – such large de-
liveries really please milk men. Each delivery is quickly smuggled back to the depot
in tunnels so as to make way for the next. Some addresses have been known to have
accepted 700 bottles in a single day. That’s a lot of happy milkmen. Down in Milk
Bottle Village a retired milkman could really feel special.
‘In a nice place.’ as Prince Charles said regaling the crowd with a glass of the
white stuff.
The Village received high state funding as it had strong community relationship
issues and the funders could track back and see evidence that its aims exactly met its
objects and that it could therefore have permanent funder status. Like contemporary
art galleries, the retired Milkmen could really play the ‘helping’ communities card; this
wasn’t an initiative for an elite group but for the people. Everybody loves milkmen – as
long as they are not coming to their house, of course. The scheme had reams of video
promotion material in which milkman would sentimentally lay out their strategic plan
going forward for issues to be covered by the Milk Bottle Village in the future. There
were plans (rather like Mormons’ neat trick of converting the dead after they’ve died)
to have plaques made of all the dead UK milkmen ever and lay them out in glorious
designs across the Milk Bottle Village Educational and Bereavement Centre. (Disabled
access; having trouble reading this?)
Fur covered trucks patrolled the streets handing out free glasses of milk to
visitors. Others flatbeds carried cows with clever theatrical scenery and visitors would
jump up and learn how to milk. It was all about people, friendships via milk; engage-
ment and inclusivity via milk. Widening participation and affirmative action via milk.
Like the Tate Modern – objects in a gallery weren’t enough anymore – you had to
patronise the public and make them wear hats, badges and preferably pick up a paint
brush and participate in some easy creative process. Send them down a slide or get
them to volunteer to walk in circles. (Sad really but this is the fashion in modern arts
support.) Creativity is not an exalted state done by an artist at the top of their game
but more a process open to all; a ‘learning experience’ where the results mustn’t be
judged. (In fact; it is the old ‘taking part’ sport routine transferred to culture.) Fancy
banging on a drum in groups? Lonely? Fancy meeting people in an art gallery? Want
to learn how to cook? Dance? Use the internet? The people and the public are to be
valued way above anything that is finished, brilliant and of importance. There must
be no barriers, all are welcome, and must feel equal. Anything, like being able to actu-
ally draw, actually contribute to the canon, actually say something or actually be able
to play a musical instrument is all to be side-lined. In this cultural formation Milk
is no longer just Milk – it is a creative medium and meeting place for all our diverse
community - and Milk Bottle Village is no longer an initiation for Milkmen but for all
people on earth – in fact, especially for those who aren’t Milkmen. The people’s Milk
Bottle Village was filled with people who had never even had a Milkman. Footfall and
attendance is the goal.
Milk Bottle Village slowly scratched an indelible mark on the international
arts and visitor attraction scene. Like property developers using artists to make an
area cool, Milk Bottle Village’s ‘people’ approach would soon come to be viewed as a
global standard. People could sing in Milk Bottle Village, impromptu choirs with words
projected to help them and while they sang other people could throw milk on them,
much to the amusement of all. The Tate Modern went on to copy Milk Bottle Village
so professionally, visitors genuinely got mixed up sometimes in the Village. ‘Is this
conceptual art?’ They might innocently ask a passing milkman, ‘No, it fucking isn’t!’
might come the reply of a small man struggling with a crate of 15 full cream and four
semi-skimmed. I’m delivering milk mate! What’s it look like?’
The cultural logic soon came to work the other way around too – for example
this year’s Turner Prize:
“The young artist Cattie Doyen has set up a whole secondary
school in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern. This ‘school’, cleverly
named St Christopher’s, for the purposes of her intervention has a
perpetual Open Day. The Open Day, like Exam day in most schools,
is in fact being held in the school gym. As a gallery visitor you are
to think of yourself as a prospective parent with a child who is not
doing too well at the school. You walk into the ‘school’ and as you
do so one of the Tate’s attractive European volunteers gives you a
list of staff and appointment times that you have and also the name
of your fictitious child – who is doing quite badly - at the school.
Slowly, in the laborious queues within this cold but smelly
gym, the exhibit visitor realizes that just as in real life, none of the
teachers really know who you are, have minuscule affection for your
child and lastly, the appointment system is completely ruined by
parents going on and on about their lovely offspring when really
all they want to do is talk; venting their ‘feelings’ and anxiety about
little dear Da Vinci. So secretly everyone in the queues starts to
resent each other and on the sly have very bad thoughts about other
parent’s partners, choice of clothes, children, transport, implants,
addresses and their profound inability to talk about anything in a
less than earnest manner. Animosity spreads rapidly in the queues
at this exhibit and that is obviously the artist’s point.
Finally, when the open day at the school is finished – to fully
enjoy Doyen’s piece you have to stay in the gym 2 hours, you leave
the exhibition really exhausted and wondering – just like in real
life – if as a society we have really got it badly wrong somewhere in
Education. For one, you wouldn’t want to spend 5 minutes with any
of the other parents so why on earth does your child want to spend
all day with their offspring?”
This exciting exhibition at the Tate Modern represents the definitive way that
the Milk Bottle Village format came to dominate and influence all future arts policy.
4 5

On the ecology of the distributed work of art, and it’s inter-media

narrative properties

During a conversation about online distribution and popular culture someone

said to me: “Rick Astley owns 4chan”, meaning that musician Rick Astley would have
not made it into music history, or better still business, hadn’t his music video “Never
Gonna Give You Up” become an Internet meme. Namely, hadn’t it come to really matter 1 Cloninger, C., 2009.

as a hyperlink widely spread across websites via randomly being connected to other Commodify Your
Consumption: Tactical
online material with little apparent relevance to the content of the music itself, let Surfing/ Wakes of
alone its author [image 1]. Resistance. Available

We are here navigating through the realm of social phenomena on the Internet, online, http://lab404.
com/articles/commodify_
for which – as we all know well – notions of originality and authorship are put into your_consumption.pdf
question even as plausible concepts in themselves, along with historical givens
pertaining to the science of classification, such as activities of categorisation and
labelling which have been entrenched in the understanding of culture and creation of
knowledge. At least, thus far.
Within such online-induced social phenomena, it seems that a thing exist
as an in-between other things, that cultural material is a sort of fluctuating whole in
which its parts always exist as and in connection with something else, most likely the
everything else. There is no chronological order, no beginning nor end, because sources
and conclusions do not matter anymore in the same way they mattered before. In
this in-between, subjects often turn into objects of and in transmission; they are virtual
packages gone viral, such as the one introduced above, the meme which becomes a
sort of content-means. This is the in-between for which receivers – our unaware users,
the rick-rolled – turn into consumers and often active producers in themselves – see
the theorisation of the figure of the “prosumer” by artist Curt Cloninger.1
Moving away from our metaphorical Astley, I wonder what sort of reverberations
the scenario above has had and has in context of contemporary art production, in relation
to its ecology. If we take forward the aforementioned workings, the cultural material
that circulates in such manner seems likely to have an equal and simultaneous
existence, impact and therefore significance both online and offline. It also exists
not as a static form but as a form and content in movement, likely to be subjected to
continuous transformations which disregard neat distinctions between that online
and this offline. It is all part of our socio-cultural scenario, after all, a scenario which
by being highly related to communication infrastructures sees an erasure of the
that and the this.
That said, how might we discuss the ontology of the contemporary art product
in the wake of such Internet-induced phenomena, its condition of being? I am using
the world product because what I have just sketched out dispute with the established
and institutionalised system(s) of the contemporary art world, in connection to
economic models and critical methodologies for example. A straightforward example
of how this friction could emerge might go as follows:
If a work of art exists as a web-based artwork encompassing textual elements,
visuals and an appropriated video from YouTube, but it also exists as a limited-edition
poster which stems from its online precedent as well as a looped video which reworks
the other two versions, all while bearing the same title and author – to whom perhaps
the creator of the appropriated video could be added –, where would its value lie?
Would it be considered as one piece comprising all three, as a distributed artwork?
Would one format, perhaps the most stable, be chosen amongst the other two?
Moreover, how would a critic analyse and describe the work? Under what kind of
category, or labelling, would this work enter, if at all, the history of contemporary
art? Under the label of inter-media narrative work, perhaps? [image 2]
6

Reflecting on this unanswered set of questions, I cannot help recalling a more

historical example of artistic practice. In 1968 Marcel Broodthaers founded the Musèe
d’Art Moderne - Department des Aigles which over the course of 5 years presented 12
sections, all of which, despite taking up different formats of display and including
material spanning various mediums and forms of arrangement, examined the symbol
of the eagle in relation to ideas of power and supremacy - see the theorisation of “the
eagle principle” by critic Rosalind Krauss.2 The Musèe d’Art Moderne - Department
des Aigles, Section XIXem Siècle was the first iteration of the project, a fictitious
museum which was installed in Broodthaers’ own house. This museum displayed
empty crates upon which there were projections of images of 19th-century paintings,
with no sign of eagles, were it not for the title. After other and different iterations,
the Musèe went to the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf as an installation in 1972,
presenting various sections such as those des Figures and Publicitè, for which the 2 Krauss, R.E., 2000. A Image 1 Screenshot of Google

artist included 300 objects – from brooches to stuffed animals – and images, many of Voyage on the North Image search for Never
Sea. London: Thames & Gonna Give You Up
which were taken from advertisements and comic strips, representing eagles. Such Hudson Ltd, London.
material was on display along with plastic plaques with numbers – such as Fig. 1, 2,
etc. – and the following sentence “This is not a work of art” [image 3]. The display
chosen by Broodthaers was fictitious as it was the museum itself, it functioned
as a parody of the classification and value systems which had developed within the
institutionalised world of contemporary art, of the process of selection of artworks, their
inclusion or exclusion. In a nutshell, the way in which the Musèe operated throughout
time is – as Krauss aptly describes it – by “internalis[ing] the field of work, such as
the mass media forms of production” of the artist’s times which predominantly lay
in the photographic image spread across billboards and magazines, the new means
of communication of the 60s. The fact that for Documenta V, in 1972, Broodthaers’
Musèe was included in the catalogue in the form of a full-page advertisement does not
only symbolise the artist’s act of “internalisation” of communication systems but it
also brings forward his attempt to disrupt notions of authorship and object-hood
by moving the artistic product through different sites of display and experimenting
with appropriation and what site-specificity might be in relation to processes of
repetition and transmutation. To quote Krauss one last time, “the triumph of the eagle
[Broodthaers chosen symbol for the Musèe, perhaps a sort of content-means in the
context of this text] announces not the end of Art but the termination of the individual
arts as medium-specific; and it does so by enacting the form that this loss of specificity
will now take”; in some ways we could read this as an attempt to bypass dichotomies
as well as a straightforward engagement of the receiver.
Going back to the condition of being of the contemporary work of art in
relation to Internet-induced social-phenomena, we might then catch some resemblances
with the characteristics and workings of Broodthaers’ Musèe, at least for that which
concerns the narrative of a distributed object, its mode of existence in and across
multiple sites and the complications related to its contextualisation(s) as issues that
have been brought about by social phenomena generated though the spread of new
means of communication into the everyday.
What unites these two scenarios, the Internet-induced one and the print-
induced one, is the fact that they both aim at disrupting power structures, in relation
to their economy and critical values, by appealing to mass mediatic communication
infrastructures. But here is where we might also see a difference, or better still,
a possibility; that is the possibility of moving from creating a conceptual disruption
with such power structures to that of practically shifting the power structures in place.
The ecologies that might arise from the in-between I briefly described above
have still been little explored, while there is a growing number of practitioners, artists
and critics who are attempting to creatively devise other models, other methods
of classification and judgement, other ways of thinking about what value might be
and mean nowadays, a time in which many previously established and stable
systems have been falling apart. And this is because within this Internet-induced social
phenomena, there are the potentials inherent to readily-available web-based tools,
which, for their being simultaneously means of production, display and distribution,
allow us to break with previous more recognised ecologies.
Image 2 Damien Roach, Michigan
parachute/Kitchen/
Arp 147, 2011-2013 Astley is a metaphor and its only value in our context lies in making transparent
the movement, and the possibilities ingrained in this movement in-between the
online and offline. But it still operates as a product, a distributed product that little
has to offer to the creation and understanding of other narratives; narratives that
are scattered through sites, that are overarching, that disregard stability in favour of
erasing dichotomies and setting into place other ecologies.

Image
2.1 Web-based work on
display at or-bits.com

Image 2.2 Digitally printed

poster on Newsprint,
57.8 x 38 cm as part
of On The Upgrade
edition box set
Image 3 Musèe d’Art Moderne
- Department des
Aigles, Section Publicitè;
installation shot of display;
Documenta V, 1972

Image 2.3 Digital video,

10 min 48 sec (looped)
as part of (On)
Accordance exhibition
at Grand Union
11
14
From A to /b/ and back again
“The scale of the Internet is something not yet fully grasped by philosophy:
websites like 4Chan are like the cities of the Internet.”1
4chan is a user-driven, image-sharing website, with an anything-goes policy and
a variety of themed boards. Launched in 2003, it was originally used for Manga and Anime
discussion, it’s founder Chris ‘moot’ Poole based the coding and the structure on Japanese
image boards he’d been trying to use despite speaking very little of the language.
You can go there and discuss more or less anything you wish. Categories include
Japanese Culture, Interests, Creative, Adult and Other. Within these you will find themed
boards such as Anime & Manga, Video Games, Technology, Toys, Music, Fashion,
Literature, Food & Cooking, Handsome Men, LGBT, Paranormal, Travel, the list goes
on. And then there is the miscellaneous section, here you find a board called ‘Random’
better known as /b/. /b/ is the everything else board, the anything goes board, and it is
the heart of what 4chan does and what it represents.
4chan is structured to be free and open and, most importantly, it is anony-
mous and unarchived.2 For the new user (or newfag3) the speed is dizzying and the rules,
modes of interaction, and language can be confusing.
You must post an image. You can attach a little text to it. You cannot post
an image that you have already posted. That’s about it (aside from the local rules
governing some particular boards which are largely ignored anyway). These simple
protocols, coupled with the fact that people interact at incredible speed, lead to bizarre
1 Harry Halpin, The
Philosophy of Anonymous,
Radical Philosophy
176, Nov/Dec 2012
2 There have been attempts
to archive it, particularly
when it gets good (when
a thread becomes an ‘Epic
Thread’), see https://
encyclopediadramatica.se
3 Note ‘On 4chan, EVERYONE
is a faggot (regardless
of sexuality), and a need
came up to differenti-
ate between types of
faggotry. A homosexual
would be a gay fag, and
a fan of Japanese car-
toons would be an anime
fag.’ A straight fag is a
development company Kixeye uses
the popular meme Insanity Wolf to
15
and new ways of interacting and socialising that originate here and spiral out across
the web and into real life.
A simple example is keystroke errors that are left in to facilitate speed at
first and then getting imitated, and later taking on meanings of their own (‘an hero’)
or simply becoming inflected or hyperbolised versions of the words first intended
(‘pwned’, or ‘zOMG’).
It is fairly common to see a randomly chosen image with an attached text pos-
ing a question or making a statement with a closing disclaimer: image unrelated. These
images are often incongruous, inflammatory, or offensive and demonstrate a taste
for non-sequiturs and uncanny humour. Text/image combinations (Image Mac-
ros) are popular. Images are displayed as small thumbnails and so bold text overlaid
straight person, a new fag, on an image is common to make it readable at a glance. Recognisable characters be-
a newbie, noob or new
come shorthand as images are reworked and reused over and over with just the overlaid
user. (http://www.urban-
dictionary.com/define.
text changing. 4chan is also a notoriously merciless place – the natural home of the
php?term=Straight%20 Internet Troll. It is here that the Internet meme – the imitated trope or repeated and
fag&defid=5813890)
reworked joke – originates, and where many specific memes individually originate.4
4 See: http://know-
While /b/ may be - and indeed frequently is - belligerent, obscene, vulgar, tasteless,
yourmeme.com/ puerile and disrespectful it also has a curious way of managing itself and a strange
ethics. Many things that may be beyond the pale for the regular net-user are fine
5 Christopher “moot” Poole,
The Case for Anonymity
on 4chan, and yet there are still boundaries or areas that will see the wrath of the
Online (TED.com) Internet poured upon a user; the figure of Pedobear may appear if a user seems to
http://blog.ted.com/2010/06/02/
be edging too close to paedophilic content for example, or there is the case of the
the_case_for_an/
Internet coming down upon the young man who posted a video of himself being cruel
6 IRL – In Real Life to his cat. 4chan users made it their mission to find out who he was and where he lived
and reported him to the police.5
And here we begin these web-specific activities and agglomerations influ-
encing behaviour IRL.6
One of the ’net’s best known memes is the practice of Rickrolling – tricking
someone into watching the video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up instead
San Francisco videogame
of some promised impressive video content. Astley himself appeared unexpectedly on
a float during the 2009 Macy’s Day Parade and personally Rickrolled the whole crowd.
And there are large-scale orchestrated pranks: Also in 2009, 4chan decided its founder
advertise for new developers.
should win Time Magazine’s Top 100 poll. They managed this easily, and followed it
up by making an acrostic of the top 21 that spelled “marblecake also the game” – a
in-joke refering to the IRC channel used by members of Anonymous.
And it’s these slippages into with the real world that provide us with a chance
to consider the wider implications of a web-place like 4chan. While the above may
be funny instances, there is a more serious political side to all this and it seems to
be that when the real world gets a bit too close to the virtual world, the virtual world
bites back.
Perhaps the best-known example of this is Anonymous, the so-called ‘hack-
tivist’ collective, identifiable by their Alan Moore-inspired Guy Fawkes masks. Often
acting in areas that involve web-freedom and censorship, or against what they view as
abuses of the Internet, Anonymous take threats from real-world entities imposing
upon their territory - the virtual terrain of the web - very seriously, standing up against
online practices that are likely to lead to further regulation or defending what made
the Internet great in the first place: a right to remain anonymous.
After several years of online activism Anonymous came to widespread
public attention in 2008 when the Church of Scientology tried to get an embarrassing
video of Tom Cruise that had leaked online removed. An obvious threat to freedom of
speech and a dangerous precedent to set, this finally brought members of Anonymous
away from their computer screens and onto the streets. Thousands of self-proclaimed
members showed up outside Scientologist headquarters in cities across the world,
carrying signs whose slogans ranged from ‘Scientology Kills’ and ‘Obviously A Cult’ to
‘Honk If You Are Driving A Car’ and ‘Don’t Worry We’re From The Internet’. This revel-
ling in silliness alongside a head-on tackling of the issue at hand really captures the
spirit of this type of activism, a refusal to take the issue seriously can be as subversive,
if not more so, than a direct critique.
16 17

And how better to protect freedom of speech that to exercise it and find its limits?
At the heart of all this is a desire to be allowed to remain anonymous and to
have the freedom to say whatever one wants to say without fear of retribution. Anonymity
on the web used to be a given; the idea that you could be whoever you wanted to be was
touted as a fundamental building block of its revolutionary potential.
As journalist Gia Milinovich noted, in the early days of the Internet you could
be a woman online and your body didn’t matter – your mind did, what you said mat-
tered and it was disconnected from your real life identity. The Internet was anonymous
and free and now that’s just not the case.7 Law suits against Twitter users abound, social
networking pushes the notion of maintaining a persistent online identity, we’re obliged
to trade our personal data in for ease of communication, and the Google empire expands
linking your email account to your blog, to your YouTube account and so on. 7 ‘Which Way to Techno

Perhaps in order to protect our own anonymity we need to protect the some- Utopia?’ Little Atoms,
Resonance FM, May 2011
times-insane behaviour of those who wish to remain anonymous.

eye and wondering. The spray of

lilac fell from his hand upon the
gravel. A furry bee came and
buzzed round it for a moment.
Then it began to scramble all over
the oval stellated globe of the
tiny blossoms. He watched it with
that strange interest in trivial
things that we try to develop
when things of high import make
us afraid, or when we are stirred
by some new emotion for which
we cannot find expression, or

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