The games people play. Tumbling is like some kind of scavenging game in which you go trawling the internet looking for the golden coins hidden deep between the sofa cushions of the web. It is pleasingly democratic with any newly found wealth too, anything found is offered to its community in the hope that it may be shared amongst all and any who are interested to be reblogged and loved elsewhere.
In the early days of the web, people kept lists of sites they wanted to remember. These developed into blogs. They became structured, themed and carried agendas fired by the revolution in personal publishing. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs took a step back. They are defiantly anti structure. They are a close to random list of photos, videos, quotes and links that people post in purgatory before forgetting. They are entirely ephemeral in the nature of their content, they are neither resource nor collection, simply disconnected flirtations with the present. Completely absurdist.
When I say tumblr in this context I am using it as a shorthand, the same concept also applies to other images gathering sites like ffffound. The big and interesting difference though is that tumblr relies on the unconscious and ffffound the automatic. The process of accumulation in both is the same, but there is a subconscious narrative flow to the image relationships on tumblr as they accumulate like a crumb trail on the sojourns of a web flaneur, whereas ffffound will automatically generate and suggest its relationships. On the basis of whatever criteria it uses, it will suggest other images similar to the one just posted, potentially signposting the next turn on the ffffinders journey. Where ffffound seeks to suggest context, tumblr creates its compositions automatically in the surrealist sense of the word through chance, luck and error. The visual ideas it generates reveal hitherto unknown truths.
It is no stretch to suggest that tumbling is the 21st century cousin of the surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse. Like tumblr, Exquisite Corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images are collectively assembled. Everyone knows this game: players in turn write or draw on a sheet of paper, it is then folded to conceal part of the previous image before being passed to the next for a further contribution. The process of collective accumulation and nonsensical narrative; the disconnect between one image and the next is prevalent in both. This sort of automated game play was important for the Surrealists as a creative process free from conscious control, some considered it to be a source of inspiration, while others saw it as a finished work in itself.
The better games of Exquisite Corpse (if it is possible to judge such a thing if you are going to be strictly surautomatist about it) come about when the divide between the subconscious and the collective unconscious is bridged. Like the “Plate ‘o’ Shrimp” theory suggested by Miller in Repo Man of détournements into the “cosmic unconscious”, the social element is important to both. The tumblr dashboard, the social hub of the tumbleverse, offers users the chance to follow the cached exploits of others.
Images from a users network – people that they have chosen to follow in their dashboard – are charted chronologically as they are posted and displayed in something that in effect is a separate and distinct tumblr in itself. A group tumblr of the collective unconscious rather than the individual subconscious. Each image is presented absent from its primary or secondary context – the site it was taken from or the tumblr in which it is resituated. It has multiple contexts, it is diluted and disassociated from any semblance of meta-narrative, reduced to the absurd and indecipherable before being reassembled through the chance relationships unique to each user and their network.
The above post from cpb tumblr shows this to be a source of context in itself as it humorously looks at the cult of reblogging from a stance of mock and awe. It is a phenomena that forms the underlying meta-narrative of the tumbling universe. One in which the medium becomes increasingly indecipherable from the message. A conversation along the lines of “What I say is what she said, is what he said, is what they say”. And as such, a game of Exquisite Corpse in condensed form. Rather than creating a new image that connects to the one made by the previous player, the next player decides instead to simply draw on top of it. Or rather and better still, use the previous image as their own contribution and to add nothing further to it, using it as a readymade. But in this context, accumulation without addition. How much more automatic can you get?
Gherashim Luca and Dolfi Trost put it best in their book Dialectique de la Dialectique, although talking specifically about painting, it still counts:
We have returned to the problem of knowledge through images… by establishing a clear distinction between images produced by artistic means and images resulting from rigorously applied scientific procedures, such as the operation of chance or of automatism. We stand opposed to the tendency to reproduce, through symbols, certain valid theoretical contents by the use of pictorial techniques, and believe that the unknown that surrounds us can find a staggering materialization of the highest order in indecipherable images. In generally accepting until now pictorial reproductive means, surrealist painting will find that the way to its blossoming lies in the absurd use of aplastic, objective and entirely non-artistic procedures.
The blossoming of tumblr lies in its absurd reassembly of the constituent parts of the internet; its borrowing from a grander narrative of context that rapidly – and speed is of the essence here – creates its own sub-plot filled with deviations scrambled from corrupted summaries. It is not trying to recreate in the image of the original like say Frankenstein’s monster, but create a being of an entirely different nature. A collection that serves only to animate itself. There are themes, memes and continuously changing currencies that are traded daily between communities and those that satellite them: animated gifs; retro computing, fashion and design; sci-fi and cult-ish illustration; kooky and kinky photography; lol cats; computer geekery and any imagery that mocks and lays on the fringes of consumer culture, such are the tastes of those who contribute to the internet two point oh. It is an ephemeral, unstructured collage of readymades that operates through chance discoveries, the discovery of chance. That these discoveries are already happening is why I can so confidently predict them.
Tumblr and the spirit of surrealism
The games people play. Tumbling is like some kind of scavenging game in which you go trawling the internet looking for the golden coins hidden deep between the sofa cushions of the web. It is pleasingly democratic with any newly found wealth too, anything found is offered to its community in the hope that it may be shared amongst all and any who are interested to be reblogged and loved elsewhere.
In the early days of the web, people kept lists of sites they wanted to remember. These developed into blogs. They became structured, themed and carried agendas fired by the revolution in personal publishing. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs took a step back. They are defiantly anti structure. They are a close to random list of photos, videos, quotes and links that people post in purgatory before forgetting. They are entirely ephemeral in the nature of their content, they are neither resource nor collection, simply disconnected flirtations with the present. Completely absurdist.
When I say tumblr in this context I am using it as a shorthand, the same concept also applies to other images gathering sites like ffffound. The big and interesting difference though is that tumblr relies on the unconscious and ffffound the automatic. The process of accumulation in both is the same, but there is a subconscious narrative flow to the image relationships on tumblr as they accumulate like a crumb trail on the sojourns of a web flaneur, whereas ffffound will automatically generate and suggest its relationships. On the basis of whatever criteria it uses, it will suggest other images similar to the one just posted, potentially signposting the next turn on the ffffinders journey. Where ffffound seeks to suggest context, tumblr creates its compositions automatically in the surrealist sense of the word through chance, luck and error. The visual ideas it generates reveal hitherto unknown truths.
It is no stretch to suggest that tumbling is the 21st century cousin of the surrealist parlour game Exquisite Corpse. Like tumblr, Exquisite Corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images are collectively assembled. Everyone knows this game: players in turn write or draw on a sheet of paper, it is then folded to conceal part of the previous image before being passed to the next for a further contribution. The process of collective accumulation and nonsensical narrative; the disconnect between one image and the next is prevalent in both. This sort of automated game play was important for the Surrealists as a creative process free from conscious control, some considered it to be a source of inspiration, while others saw it as a finished work in itself.
The better games of Exquisite Corpse (if it is possible to judge such a thing if you are going to be strictly surautomatist about it) come about when the divide between the subconscious and the collective unconscious is bridged. Like the “Plate ‘o’ Shrimp” theory suggested by Miller in Repo Man of détournements into the “cosmic unconscious”, the social element is important to both. The tumblr dashboard, the social hub of the tumbleverse, offers users the chance to follow the cached exploits of others.
Images from a users network – people that they have chosen to follow in their dashboard – are charted chronologically as they are posted and displayed in something that in effect is a separate and distinct tumblr in itself. A group tumblr of the collective unconscious rather than the individual subconscious. Each image is presented absent from its primary or secondary context – the site it was taken from or the tumblr in which it is resituated. It has multiple contexts, it is diluted and disassociated from any semblance of meta-narrative, reduced to the absurd and indecipherable before being reassembled through the chance relationships unique to each user and their network.
The above post from cpb tumblr shows this to be a source of context in itself as it humorously looks at the cult of reblogging from a stance of mock and awe. It is a phenomena that forms the underlying meta-narrative of the tumbling universe. One in which the medium becomes increasingly indecipherable from the message. A conversation along the lines of “What I say is what she said, is what he said, is what they say”. And as such, a game of Exquisite Corpse in condensed form. Rather than creating a new image that connects to the one made by the previous player, the next player decides instead to simply draw on top of it. Or rather and better still, use the previous image as their own contribution and to add nothing further to it, using it as a readymade. But in this context, accumulation without addition. How much more automatic can you get?
Gherashim Luca and Dolfi Trost put it best in their book Dialectique de la Dialectique, although talking specifically about painting, it still counts:
The blossoming of tumblr lies in its absurd reassembly of the constituent parts of the internet; its borrowing from a grander narrative of context that rapidly – and speed is of the essence here – creates its own sub-plot filled with deviations scrambled from corrupted summaries. It is not trying to recreate in the image of the original like say Frankenstein’s monster, but create a being of an entirely different nature. A collection that serves only to animate itself. There are themes, memes and continuously changing currencies that are traded daily between communities and those that satellite them: animated gifs; retro computing, fashion and design; sci-fi and cult-ish illustration; kooky and kinky photography; lol cats; computer geekery and any imagery that mocks and lays on the fringes of consumer culture, such are the tastes of those who contribute to the internet two point oh. It is an ephemeral, unstructured collage of readymades that operates through chance discoveries, the discovery of chance. That these discoveries are already happening is why I can so confidently predict them.