THE THING
Since its early incarnation as a BBS, THE THING has enjoyed aself-scrutiny seldom entertained by arts media, most of all the art publication, which, in spite of its critical engagement of recent textual theory, refuses to turn such criticism inward upon its own assumptions, questioning its own notions of authorship, linearity, stability, and autonomy. As THE THING is able to embody such critique, and continually reformulate itself in response to it, it is able to structually engage alternate, social modes of textual and artistic construction. Such a collaborative process of content-construction stands against the fixity of print media, whose author-reader distinctions are written in stone; it blurs the borders of the text where the publication clearly demarcates them; it complicates the location of the artwork and opens its medium to include social and spatial elements where the publication clearly isolates it within a frame, reducing its medium to traditional materials.
While comparing online media to print media is perhaps misguided, it is however a necessary step in developing interesting hybrids with which to describe this new medium. For it takes over after the publication's failings, and in so doing proposes an important challenge to print, which must now reformulate itself, acknowledging that which it has cast out in order to uphold and secure the borders of the page, the sanctity and authority of the binding. This constitutive outside is necessary for any textual production, print or online, and it questions the distinctions that it has temporarily made visible (and which make it visible). Therefore, rather than insisting upon classifications and forcing distinction between "online" or "offline", "real" or "virtual", cyber-this or cyber-that, one can instead see textualities in symbiosis. (While immersed in the technotopian sublime of the Web, remember that the webs of relations in which one is embedded span any interface.)
Since the beginning, THE THING has embarked on a strategy of disruption and resistance. Intervening within and spatializing the elements of textual production, and engaging more social modes of construction, is an ongoing priority; actively resisting the mapping of authoritative structures onto this new domain is another. Continually distrupting and questioning the elements of artistic practice, THE THING recognizes that the current situation- fueled by a resurgent conservatism-severely undermines the need to engage more social and inclusive models of art-construction and a broader and more historical consciousness, especially among an audience who knows little about art and is all to eager, on the one hand, to succumb to the opinions of conservative reactionaries, and on the other, to succumb to the technofetishist's reduction of artwork to endlessly recombinant digitized images. At a time when the artwork, for the public, is increasingly just another image-through reproductions, which displace their referents in the popular consciousness, and through digitized graphics, which reduce and flatten out the webs of relations in which art is embedded-.its hard-won social, spatial, bodily, textual, institutional, and political elements desperately need an infusion into popular discourse, even among the artworld's elite, who are all too ready to seal off the boundaries of a work and stamp it with a signature and whose response to the public's dwindling interest in art is often to shoot it in the foot and then whip out a painting.
At a time when new forms of art, hybridized in line with the increasing problematization of boundaries and potent interstitialities that are emerging, call for new inclusive, unstable, and decentralized practices, THE THING presents a vital medium of production and discussion, structurally engaging these new modes, its systemic space continually looping back upon itself, displacing linear, vector relationships (such as author->reader) with alternate circuitries. Such circuitries link bodies, bodies of codes, and the economies and technologies that produce and are produced by them, generating performative webs that incorporate the social space of daily life, the space of representation, and "extended" space produced through the computer interface. What is instituted is not divisional space but hybrid, situational space that disrupts encapsulation. One does not look for work based in "presence" so much as in (accessed) pattern, a social, bodily, spatial, or visual configuration, nowhere present but somehow everywhere at once, interfacable.
Jordan Crandall