Recently in Culture Category

I love books. At art school we learnt how to print and bind them, but I was reading them long before that and I'm one of those people for whom death by bookpile is not an unrealistic threat. So it's the physicality of books as artefacts as well as the knowledge and fantasy they contain that has always appealed to me.

Here is a list of PDFs of books from the Victorian (and Edwardian) era that Steampunks can take ideas and illustrations from. There are many more that can be found, see my post on how to search to help you find them. Let me know in the comments if you find anything good!

Airships (1909)

http://www.archive.org/details/airshipalmanacli00browiala

Aircraft (1910)

http://www.archive.org/details/flyingmachinesc00jackgoog

The Aether (1886)

http://www.archive.org/details/luminiferousthe00woodgoog

Clockwork (1859)

http://books.google.com/books?id=9QnSAAAAMAAJ

Etiquette (1860s?)

http://www.archive.org/details/routledgesmanual00londiala

The Great Exhibition (1851)

http://books.google.com/books?id=lLgXAAAAYAAJ

The Magic Lantern (1888)

http://www.archive.org/details/bookoflanternbei00hepwrich

Mediumship (1891)

http://www.archive.org/details/experimentalspi00kardgoog

The Phonograph (1879)

http://www.archive.org/details/telephonemicrop00moncgoog

Steam Engineering (1867)

http://books.google.com/books?id=4Y5sBNn5NwAC

Steam Engines (1857)

http://books.google.com/books?id=w2UpAAAAYAAJ

Spirit Photography (1894)

http://www.archive.org/details/veilliftedmoder00taylgoog

The Telegraph (1860)

http://books.google.com/books?id=NK83AAAAMAAJ

The Telephone (1889)

http://www.archive.org/details/telephone01maiegoog

Theosophy (1891)

http://www.archive.org/details/isisunveiledama02blavgoog

The Typewriter (1890)

http://www.archive.org/details/howtobecomeexpe00barngoog

The way artists make art often reflect the means of production of their age. The artist of feudalism was an artisan or alchemist, the Renaissance artist was adept at mathematics and geometry inspired by trade and war, and Andy Warhol's factory embodied the spirit of mass production.

If you looked in the jobs pages in the early 1990s, you'd see adverts for "Mac Operators". A Mac Operator would use the only Apple Macintosh in the company to do design work using Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark at a low rate of pay.

When I got to art school at around that time I begged and borrowed access to Macs to make art using Photoshop and Illustrator. I acted out the role of the Mac Operator (rather than alchemist, merchant or factory worker) without realising it to make art.

The Mac Operator is a kind of knowledge worker. Knowledge work is post-industrial work. Another example of post-industrialism is brand-based outsourcing. The production of Jeff Koon's artistic brand is outsourced. But Koons is a manager rather than a worker.

Mac Operators were representative producers of mass culture at that time. But Web 2.0 means that everyone can now use a computer to produce culture as part of the crowd. Outsourcing has become crowdsourcing. Mac Operators, like sign painters, are not now a contemporary phenomenon.

I started out remixing images, and I continue to do so, aided now by the Creative Commons licences so beloved of Web 2.0. I am still sat at a computer producing art as an individual, rather than using the crowd to do so. But I am using a GNU laptop rather than a Power Mac desktop system.

The laptop-based knowledge work figure is the "laptop warrior" or the Bay-area coffee-shop wifi leeching "bedouin". These are the people who start the Web 2.0 companies and web applications that the crowd use to produce their culture.

So I haven't ended up as far from the contemporary creative practice of computing as I'd feared. And I'm not criticising artists who mimic Web 2.0 strategies without adding anything to them, when I do criticise them, from a position of historical irrelevance. I'm just reflecting a different aspect of current computer-based production.

Adbusters have noticed hipsterism:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation

Apparently The The aren't on Gnutella.

K-punk has a good critique of the article and Hipsterism in general that is well worth reading in full:

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html

the problem with "hipsters" is precisely that they are pathologically well-adjusted, untroubled by sexual anxieties or financial worries. Vulgar Freudianism is not without its point - where is the motivation to produce art in people who can get any satisfaction they want, at any time? The very seamlessness of these unalienated, guilt-free lives leaves no material for sublimation.

I loathe hipsterism, but what else *can* there be in a society where most of the history of mass culture is a mouse click away and where everyone can broadcast their lives (also with a click of the mouse) in a way that only mass media personalities could previously? The cultural smog of the post-Napster Internet works against the scarcity and instant obsolescence that defined previous mass culture.

And besides, the aim of youth culture has always been to upset the eldsters. ;-) Punk parents would need something pretty radical to upset them. The laid-back ambient historicism of hipsterism certainly does the trick if its lack of something new is something new.

I remember watching a 1960s documentary from Swinging London that announced in a voice-over that "The Forties Are Back". As a kid in the late 80s, 60s psychedelia was big with my cooler friends. The past has always been big. And postmodernism was an 80s thing.

If it's not the case that hipsterism is just the usual 20-year cycle hitting 80s postmodernism and sample culture then perhaps the hipster generation is just the first with both the economic and technological power to beat the twenty year limit.

(Extended from a comment on Art Fag City.)