Seth Price - Teen Image

Seth Price Teen Image

version for IMG MGMT blog, Art Fag City, 2009

Seth Price's Teen Image is an essay discussing the distribution of images online, how this influences the consumption of art, and how in turn the language of art infiltrates the styling and distribution of non-art images online.

Like many of Price's texts it has been dispersed in a variety of forms. Here on the IMG MGMT image blog, and here as a pdf.

"People keep trying to get a handle on what’s happening. There’s a fear that others are hastening to make startling connections among the raw material, tracing lines between points we didn't even know existed. Exacerbating this anxiety is the fact that despite its supposed insistence on the consolidation of knowledge and the worth of information, the Internet produces ritualized unknowing. You could say, however, that this is a good thing, for it provokes a desire to remystify the frenzy of technological change through ritual, through a personal and allegorical rehearsal of what is perceived to be a manic and distorting increase in density, a compression exponentially telescoping in reach and magnitude. To tame this frenzy we are offered the calming linearity of lists. While the persistence of the list as a constraint on the Internet’s data-cloud may simply be due to the persistence of small rectangular monitors, the list is clearly one of the chief organizational principles of the Internet. Search engines return lists; news is funneled into aggregations of that which is most flagged or emailed; blogs garnish their teetering stacks with the latest entries; a web page itself typically extends downward in a scrolling, implied list."

Seth Price Teen Image 2009 

Oliver Laric - Versions (2009)

Screen shot from Versions 2009,

Four Channel Video, 6.25

Starting in 2009 Versions by Oliver Laric is a series of three video works presenting a body of research on appropriation, the remix and the hybrid. Comprised of theoretical, thematic and aesthetic links between otherwise disparate subjects, Laric uses the dialogue in the films to describe notions of authenticity in relation to the image. 

The 2009 video starts with a widely broadcasted image published by an Iranian revolutionary group in 2008 (see above). Later proved to be a fake, the image then became the source of mass manipulation by anonymous authors and published widely online. Laric uses this example alongside others to explore historical and contemporary ideas of image hierarchies. 

In tune with Larics repeated interests on ideas of permanence, value and semblance, these works also express the problematized relationship between media and simulation. Although not a new topic, Larics work suggests that our perceptions of this has been warped further by our ability to equally produce as well as consume imagery online.

A video of the work can be found here.

Pierre Levy - Collective Intelligence

Pierre Levy - Collective Intelligence, Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace, 

published 1994

In Pierre Levy's most popular book to date, 'Collective Intelligence, Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace', he explains that thanks to the digital network there has been the development of of mass collaboration of all human intellects resulting in the creation of a collective intelligence.

As a well known philosopher thinking around the implications of the internet and digital communications Levy has written extensively about the proliferation of virtual 'cognitive workers' as a result of the developing technological, digital and virtual conditions.


"What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills… My initial premise is based on the notion of a universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity… New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge. This is not simply a matter of modeling the conventional physical environment, but of of enabling members of delocalized communities to interact within a mobile landscape of signification… Before we can mobilize skills, we have to identify them. And to do so, we have to recognize them in all their diversity… The ideal of collective intelligence implies the technical, economic, legal, and human enhancement of a universally distributed intelligence that will unleash a positive dynamic of recognition and skills mobilization." - Pierre Levy