The point is that we can’t own any one individual found item from the net, all we can do is cultivate different contexts, different data sets, and ways of posting things in sequences and archives. The context and series creates the statement and topics, the statement creates the brand. When you view a bunch of things inside one spread, one frame, or one account, that’s the new object. These are lenses — ways of looking at the object that don’t directly modify it, but modify your understanding of it instead. Essentially it’s still modifying the presentation of something. One lens is never the only lens, but lenses are also adoptable and interchangeable. You can put my lens on, and I can put yours on. We can both put both of them on at the same time and create a new, even more filtered one. There are so many options!
One image or video could fit in 4 different accounts (databases) and mean something similar or totally different in each one, depending on the context. The content (and the meme/identity/tumblr/database) mutate with each infection. By following eachother, we experiment with both reblogging eachother (infection) and diversifying from eachother (speciating). It is a pool (hottub?) from which things evolve and into which things are released, at times with eyes closed and breath held.
In order to decipher each context, each brand, you have to pay close attention to each account and each person, and it has to be done over time. A sequence can take anywhere from 4 - 400 posts to establish itself. These are impressions that are fleshing out a meta-concept, and a bigger landscape. Once it’s established, it can still slowly evolve over time, but if you’re paying attention, you can “see” it everywhere. “That’s Visual-Aids. That’s R-U-In?S. That’s Econimish. That’s Hellblau. That’s Exotica. That’s ProductLaneEvol.” Etc. That’s why imaging brands (like Toshiba and Sony) are so irresistible to approach with this method. “That’s not Toshiba, that’s TTOSHIBAA.”
You can even start to see blended examples - “That’s Perfictionism with a little bit of SonyHD and Garden Club.” You become proficient in these very specialized visual dialects.
Once the lens is made it becomes a part of the arsenal. Memetic and fetish lenses can actually completely take over and obscure your vision, if you let them. They can actually act like the material you are looking for. (This is why several of my own memes are liquids.) The scariest thing, too, is that branded lenses will start to adapt in order to stay connected to you. Hellblau won’t go away, even though I’m so sick of it. The question is whether or not these things really are in an ecosystem with its own power, and how you are playing into it.
It doesn’t take long to learn what kind of content will spread immediately and rapidly, and what won’t. Some things are slow, some are fast. Some are like black goo, some are like dust. Some are like Sony, some are like Sanyo. Other people can put on the tracking lenses and start hunting with you. It’s dangerous! But crucial. Especially as people get very attached to things they find with their lens, which is good and should be encouraged, if you want people to get invested and the output to be strong. But I still believe it can be done well and respectfully, as long as everyone is paying close attention and staying in direct contact with eachother….and is willing to really flesh out the overlaps at a deep level when they emerge (and they literally do just “emerge” from nowhere, or rather from this pool of automated processes, at times).
All of this is part of a critical practice of seeing, researching, and discussing. Art creeps in and out of the process and the pool, like an organism. The rest is essentially “junk dna” which is there to support those art moments, or the brand statement, or creation of new lenses…occasionally even products.
Inside the pool you are both getting something and losing something…it’s an exchange. It accelerates you. The people you’re interacting with often don’t even speak the same language as you, and live a thousand miles away. Are they watching? Do they get it? You could swear they do. Or they did, until the process was abandoned. Are they replicating you or creating something new? (RUINZ? BLAKM0TH?) Only 150 more posts will tell.
At the very least let’s give the pool a name and a url (r-u-ins.org) where we can keep track of the content swimming in it. (Are you still in it? Did you take yourself out to make and protect new products?) When all else fails and we don’t know wtf is going on anymore, let’s just point to the pool. It happens so fast and at times in such meta ways, it can be hard to point to anything else.
Most of my texts about R-U-In?S end up describing the processes of how it happens instead of its topics, and that is precisely because it is affected by the same forces it is trying desperately to understand.
