…so many to choose from…
Daily news add-ons:
…Time-code yoo experiences with of-the-moment news feeds and crawls.
Branded taste filters:
…For example, a Monocle filter that formats all imagery to a standardized template.
Here’s a list of support I think yoo requires:
Gmail
…access to emails
…access to all shipped files in all formats
…access to links embedded within emails
…access to personal search histories
What’s most important for all data streams is a methodology for locating material that’s psychosensitive and then linking it to similar sensitive material elsewhere in the user’s datascape. It would also be necessary to psychologically correlate forms of charged content (sex/death, money/shit and so forth). I’m unsure if/how Google does this. I imagine it’s part linguistics and part mathematics with a dash of psychiatry.
Linked material needs to be visualized in a way that’s dynamic but not too frenetic and that segues into other material without jarring. This applies to all the other data sources listed here. And again, if you’re in a texty mood, yoo can turn into an interface that finds text that is interesting to you, in much the same way Amazon recommends books.
Google Images
Obviously.
YouTube
A limitless supply of moving imagery.
Google Maps and Street View
A powerful nostalgia tool, plus a way of generating moving backgrounds.
Is it possible to go from street address directly to Street
View?
Google Translate
…to read aloud text files in any number of voices
…to translate files from all languages
Google Glass
An amazing trove of link options.
Google Trends
Data visualization is important, whether it’s a neutral display or dynamic/subjective.
…basically Google everything.
GPS
Preferably using a device that tracked all daily movements plus flight and driving data. This would link to data visualizations about driving. Most people are obsessed with statistics.
SketchUp
For entering models in orbit mode and creating spaces using other 3D systems.
Film and photo archives
As many as possible.
GIF ranching
Punctuate yoo experiences with collections of animated
GIFs.
Porn sites
There must be one or two out there.
Sports
Replays. Stats. Interviews.
Instagram
Is it possible to access if users give passwords?
…Create instant stop-motion animations from identically hash-tagged postings.
…Dissolve and quilt together static images.
Tumblr archives
Obvious source of all kinds of images. Image blizzards can be created.
Flickr streams
Possible to access?
Ditto…
…Facebook
…Pinterest
…Vine
…Twitter
…all the usual suspects—predictable, no?
The iTunes universe
Is it possible to tap into this?
Wikipedia
For facts and images. Entries can be read aloud by synthetic voices.
Screensavers and wallpaper
I suspect there are thousands of underappreciated dynamic full-screen graphics out there just waiting to find eyeballs.
yoo can be shared…
…between two people or by millions or billions.
There are situations in which people might want to share aspects of their yoo data:
…People in love can share deep levels of data to feel closer to each other when separated.
…Highly sexual people can lend one another sexual yoos.
…Political and religious yoos can be shared broadly.
…Self-curated and modified yoo segments can become funny beautiful tools to move people.
This document was created in Microsoft Word, which in the year 2014 is pathetic.
Afterword
Filtered by Experience: An Algorithm Called “Me”
If we look at historical photographs of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, A Picture Series Examining the Function of Preconditioned Antiquity-Related Expressive Values for the Presentation of Eventful Life in the Art of the European Renaissance (1924–29)—an organized set of images that Warburg arranged in such a way that they illustrate one or several thematic areas—we can see that each picture series strongly resembled a Google image search result, both in its ambition and layout. What to make of this resemblance?
From the cabinet of curiosities and the encyclopedic projects of Diderot and d’Alembert, to the iconographical studies of Warburg and the Google image search engine: where there is man, there is stuff, and man wishes to organize this stuff in a way that mimics the way he thinks. It seems that by now, the Internet is simply mimicking the way human brains have always worked, rather than invoking radically new ways of thinking, as some e-optimists might have us believe. If we were infinitely smarter than the first computers, the time has arguably now come where artificial intelligence has outsmarted us. Has it, though?
It is a platitude to say life imitates art, but it is less so to say that the Internet imitates a specific sort of thinking, one I would like to identify as artistic thinking.
The other day someone showed me a website that generated clusters of images based on some finely tuned algorithm. It struck me as a terrifying vision of future ways of creating collections and exhibitions. Or was this the ultimate curatorial tool? Logarithmic technology always raises the question: Who is making the data dance to his or her beneficial rhythm?
The exhibition Bit Rot, which prompted this eponymous publication, was made up of disparate and heterogeneous images and objects both by Douglas Coupland himself as well as others. What is then the glue keeping it all together? An algorithm called “Me.” Or, in this particular case, called Douglas Coupland, born in 1961 on a NATO air force base in West Germany, etc., etc. You can look up the details online.
When reading Coupland’s text “An App Called Yoo,” included in this collection, it struck me as the description of a mindscaping tool, where logarithmic technology allows us to create something that would closely resemble the exhibition this book was named after. Did Coupland invent an app that mimics the way his brain works? Or, differently put: Does the Internet speak our language? Or have we learned to speak its? Are the search entries we have come to master actual reflections of our own thoughts and desires? Or are they, rather, mere substitutes for them, developed to match the by now barely concealed commercial interests of the World Wide Web?
As Coupland writes in his essay “Stuffed,” also included in this book, people cannot help but collect or even hoard, and he is rightly suspicious of people who do not possess any accumulations of any sort. We crave more of what we enjoy most, be it Japanese bottles of detergent or empty space. The things we surround ourselves with are telltale signs: “Show me your house and I’ll tell you who you are.”
The art world’s equivalent of this cliché of interior-design-pop-psychology might be “the artist as collector.” Indeed, collecting can and should be seen as a creative act in its own right. However, as is always the case with art, what matters is not so much what an artist collects, but how it is presented. Whether they will share a set of references and interests beyond their own work is a personal choice artists must make for themselves. One can think of it as a mental group exhibition, a spiritual library, or a Warburgian mood-board. Some prefer to carefully shield their collecting from the outside world; others make an entire oeuvre out of displaying this inner database.
If the dialectics between collecting and deaccessioning always entail a sense of loss, as implied by Coupl
and in “Stuffed,” and if these respective acts always occur through an applied filter—be it computed or human—we are left with the question: What are these losses we try to compensate for?
Recurring in Coupland’s writing are characters who have lost their story: their lives stopped feeling like a linear event-based narrative. Certainly some acts of collecting are attempts to solidify the fleeting storylines that make up our lives. Art has always been a rich source of simulacra that tell our story for us. When life seems to be escaping us, we reel it close again in the shape of things, fragments possibly shored against some ruins.
In the realm of organizing stuff in order to make sense out of it, an artist’s position is perhaps to be located somewhere in between Warburg and Google: not quite systematic and scientific enough, yet definitely not ruthlessly efficient or devoid of actual embodied knowledge either. It makes me cringe writing this, for it sounds so very cheesy, yet it seems necessary to write it today: there is no finer filter than a human brain thinking artistically. Intuition seems to have been replaced by algorithms, making it an obsolete notion to some, and the most precious and unique human capacity to others.
If you think about it, almost every human undertaking—increasingly so, even—seems to involve some degree of information filtering. And if art seeks to reveal what is not immediately visible, there is an unveiling to be done; some things need to be shown, causing others to remain hidden. A conceptual or formal grid is laid over the world and the world appears anew, altered, filtered. This is how an exhibition can be made, but it is also the process of organizing one’s wardrobe, or arranging books on shelves.
I remember that when I discovered the colour filter options in Google’s image search function, I thought, This is amazing. But like with most computer technologies that reach us today, the awe wore off after about five minutes.
Filters are supposed to be flawless. Yet the human brain and its output are far from flawless. Brain rot will always occur, causing glitches both devastating and beautiful. When filtered by one’s life experience, the outcome will always be less than perfect, yet never entirely wrong.
Flying to Vancouver for the first time in early 2015, I thought about how, even when we’ve never been there before, we often already have some sense of the place we’re going to. In my case Vancouver brought up mental images of Jeff Wall’s landscapes and a quote I might be erroneously attributing to the photographer, which says that you can make Vancouver look like anywhere, hence the movie industry’s interest in this Canadian city.
Vancouver also triggered a set of references related to Coupland, who in many of his books describes the city and its natural surroundings. Perhaps it was Coupland who said that the city he grew up in could be made to look like anywhere else. It sounds like something he would say. Of course I could look up who actually said it, and where and when. But this blurring of memory entries, this set of subjective data, is precisely what makes up our inner landscape, our mind and, as such, who we are and what we do.
Samuel Saelemakers
Bit Rot is the title of this book. Bit Rot is also the title of an exhibition of the author’s visual work at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in 2014-15, which then traveled in 2016-17 to Munich’s Villa Stuck Museum. A small catalog, also titled Bit Rot, which contained material from this book was produced for the Witte de With exhibition.
“Vietnam”; “George Washington’s Extreme Makeover (pilot script)”; “361”; and “Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown” are appearing in print for the first time.
“The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team”; “Nine Point Zero”; “Fear of Windows”; “The Anti-ghosts”; “Beef Rock”; “Yield: A Story about Cornfields”; “The End of the Golden Age of Payphones”; “666!”; “George Washington’s Extreme Makeover”; “Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis”; “Zoë Hears the Truth”; “The Preacher and His Mistress”; “The Man Who Lost His Story”; and “Bartholomew Is Right There at the Dawn of Language” were first published in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation A, published in 2009.
“Creep” was first published by DIS magazine online.
“Black Goo”; “Pot”; and “Grexit” were first published in Vice online
“Stuffed” and “Shiny” were first published by e-flux.
“Temp” was first published by Metro International.
“Nine Readers”; “Smells”; “Coffee&Cigarettes”; “Public Speaking”; “Notes on Relationships in the Twenty-First Century”; “Stamped”; “Future Blips”; “Futurosity”; “Worcestershistershire”; “Bulk Memory”; “The Mell”; “Little Black Ghost”; “New Moods”; “Globalization Is Fun!”; “Unclassy”; “Wonkr”; “The 2½th Dimension”; “Living Big”; “The Ones That Got Away”; “Duelling Duals”; “Got a Life”; “Peace”; “iF-iW eerF”; “McWage”; “Lotto”; “Frugal”; “IQ”; “My TV”; “5,149 Days Ago: Air Travel Post-9/11”; “Glide”; “Klass Warfare”; “3.14159265358”; “The Great Money Flush of 2016”; “Ick”; “World War $”; “The Valley”; “3½ Fingers”; “Bit Rot”; “Retail”; “Trivial”; and “Über That Red Dot” were first published in FT Weekend magazine and edited for this book.
“An App Called Yoo” was first published in Monopol magazine in Germany.
Bit Rot Page 34