Tatyana Goryucheva Trash production as an anti-utopian technology

Talking of antipodes, people that, according to Carroll's Alice terms, live on opposite sides of the planet, different hemispheres, in quite different worlds (though the old world penetrates our world through small hacked out windows), reminds us of 'trash' as a slang word standing for policemen here, in Russia. On the contrary, in the USA 'trash' used to belong to quite a different structure. If the legend is true, in its early days Mafia of Chicago identified itself with dustmen. The story tells that owners of shops, warehouses, small offices received notifications explaining they had problems with garbage and offering a contract on appropriate services. No doubt, ignorant owners were reduced to dust. Anyway the Americans deserve praising because, once thrown overboard of history by the old presumptuous world as fighters with it, they were the first to respect not only the garbage of ages, but also the trash produced with their own hands. Second-hand, pop art, and trash as aesthetics, and even more - trash as a trade mark of a cultural product. Why does the latter mean more than aesthetics? Speaking about aesthetics the underwater part of this iceberg notion seems as stable as a forming-up molecular structure of a substance, a paradigm of sensual and mental interactions. But when we talk of cultural production we can foresee a particular scheme of production and technology of each product. Here, we'd like to focus on the process of production and its organization. What is it stipulated by? First of all, the subject of this discussion is art of new technologies. Secondly, the cause is in the word combination characterizing the art trend not by style, era or concrete techniques, but the age quality of technologies as means of art production. The difference here is of the same order as with the world: Old World - New World. That is what is concerning space. The time category seems to be more complicated. The far past is usually ancient time, 'once-upon-a-time', unclear features of fairy-tale narration. New age is connected with start of industrial development, with mass production, and is the new time, modern history. In processing and promotion of information the structure is quite strict: the Old Testament - the New Testament; old technologies - new technologies; old media - new media. The notion 'old' is closely neighbouring with what is usually considered as 'trash'. However, the more complicated is the world picture, due to development of various technologies and relations with the space-and-time content, the more is possibility of feedback processes not only in Newton's mechanical physics but even in the life, contrary to Bergson. Reverse, recursion, recuperation... reel the film back to watch it once more, and more, until it starts blinking, and then extract something that is new, different. Trash is put into recycle bin. Its recycling is started. So what is trash afterwards? Watch the characters of a cartoon film 'Holidays in Prostokvashino' talking of how to get money to buy a cow:

Sharik (a dog): We should sell something useless.
Uncle Fyodor (a little boy): To sell something useless we have to buy it first, but we don't have money.
Matroskin (a cat): Sharik, let us sell you.

The most 'trash' of those 'white trash' is Matroskin with its absolutely trash logics advising to eat a turned over bread-and-butter - it is much more tasteful if you touch the piece of sausage with your tongue and not the bread - and it is the most pragmatic and economical of the three.
It was his sagacious pragmatism that pushed Andy Warhol to valorize mass-culture production garbage and later the trash as it is. He shot a few trash pictures himself. In 1970, Paul Morrisey produced his 'Trash' at Warhol's Factory. Though it is not quite correct to define 'trash' through the negative word 'useless' carrying in itself a potential of positive opposition which is 'useful'. Sure, trash is something that became useless and is not needed, i.e. it stopped reproducing energy and information. Nevertheless, it carries some function and means something, i.e. it has influence on order of things and life development. Before we start to investigate the web junkyard, we'll classify the phenomenon as it is. It's possible to turn into trash in different ways - to become empty, to be broken, to be pulled off, to be worn out.
So, technological programme of turning into trash is as follows.

Level I. Trash crucial mass

Trash in art or trash-art as a style, or even as a whole trend, appeared exactly at the time of total development of 'popular culture' accompanied, as usual, by chips, trash and garbage hills. Hollywood became a sort of Jerusalem, cloister of 'stars' and place of pilgrimage of those that were possessed with lust to see live celluloid images, and to watch their own bodies immortalized on films. Cunning producers worked out the flock attracting method bringing great dividends which was not less witty than the one which had been invented by the church. Fathers of the latter, acting in accordance with property and social inequality of feudal production and structure, offered the geneses of saint martyrs, anchorites and ascets that quit the world for the sake of soul purifying and getting into the heavens as an example worth imitating. In the time of modernization of new and the newest historic processes closely interwoven with each other humanitarian, democratic, technological, psychoanalytical and even feministic gains helped to drill off the ill-fated needle eye wider, up to incredible sizes, and to replace consumers' attention and efforts from spirit developing problem to the problem of embodied constructions. Multicopied wide-screen genesis were presented in accordance with precisely calculated 'iconography' based on effort to produce the most intensive emotional effect. Stable effectiveness of the show can be guaranteed by steady production technology. Though any technology as a sort of assemblage of details constructed together in a mechanism is profitable merely if its structure is potentially able for modernization. So, all its components can and must be critically and destructively revised in order to study new possibilities and terms. Thus, after an anxious signal, a number of crises at the post-war star factory and other studios, alternative avant-garde trends started developing in the 40s followed by the 'trash' which appeared amongst them in the 50s. Not burdened by enthusiasm of avant-garde radicalism, the trash developed in the junkyards of mainstream cinema production, and was most likely creative recycling of trash or even wasted or missed material, if not just a discounted version of expensive 'industrial' cinema. Later production of trash pictures, regarded as a low genre not only in the USA but in Europe as well, was aesthetically rehabilitated by Kventin Tarantino and became a fabulous success with the tempted public when his 'Pulp Fiction' got the first prize of the Cannes Festival. So the trash was valorized at a more high level, and the trend was flooded by cliches of video-fiction production, acquired its second life. That was a standard commercial industry operation on recycling of its own trash that had been already digested by culture. And crowds of Tarantino's followers started expensive production at large film studios all over the world. Who knows what the life has in store for the Internet which has just become mature, with its rubbish sites and becoming obsolete and speedy changing 'softs'. 
The subject of web-art is the net itself and its on-line pulse. Internet content, its body pierced with nervous and blood systems is not merely decorated by web-designers but is being ruined by wounds, abscesses, ulcers and treated by web-artists. All its functional zones, both visible covers and invisible mechanisms, can be creatively interpreted. And on-line magazines, mail lists, application lists, check boxes and option buttons, tamaguchis, codes, pornosites and sites of trade companies may become articles of art.

Level II. Sanation of imaginative exchange

Artist is he who with unshakably firm seriousness makes things needed by no-one, i.e. he absurdizes human life under various positive pretences. We trust the best of them because it is absurd. Valorization of absurdity is the corner stone of cultural politicy. In the sense that it is not the subject of valuerisation which is so absurd (works of art, results of creation) but is being constructed during the process, hence acquiring some valuable qualities, generalized ideas on particular cultural phenomena and on cultural aspect. These ideas draw vectors for further production, copying and promotion of particular imaginative models. Thus is formed the imaginative information exchange which functions basing on deeply rooted in collective unconscious and put into cultural archive stable stereotypes, a sort of vocabulary necessary for communication. Absurdity (i.e. actual non-sense non-reflectively taken for reality) of appearing ideas is made up by methods of production. Crystallized stereotypes that have gone through all phases of valorization become ready for copying and easily converted sterilized formula. Methods and stages of 'cultural production' valorization are well-known. Initially the product must conform to a number of programmed terms and in accordance with them is to be promoted on the imaginative market. The terms are general: precise context orientation, clearly articulated transposition to current cultural codes, potential projecting of individual strategy towards operating the general institutional programme. Definite terms are given, as a rule, in opposition 'either - or': conventional - radical, commercial - non-commercial, expensive - cheap, mass - elite, copied - unique, representing - antirepresenting. According to appropriate characteristics, a product or a project is launched into cultural turnover based on the general scheme: presentation (shows, exhibitions, festivals) - articulation; publication - archivation; collecting and museum (research, analysis/ systematization) - copying (reproduction, recycling) - reduction to immediately readable sign. Any innovation, conceptual, technical or technological, is an attempt to overcome the dictated during professional adaptation (education, first of all) planning of ideas=expectations=desires. At the same time, it is also an internal necessity not simply to be (self)identified through creating one's own style, but, giving up the limiting appropriate methodology, to be personalized and to gain the status of a historic hero.
Heroic history of Net-art started as striving for avoiding control, planned dependence from conjucture of the art market. The Net which happened to be a tabula rasa for artists in the beginning of the 90s, with its modest devices and lack of context, imperatively impelled to follow the strategy of radical avant-garde a la dada both ideologically and methodologically. And that is the reason why artists so easily articulated as a piece of art actually any fragment of on-line life or any part of net technologies. Though a number of modes actively used in contemporary 'analogue' and other electronic arts seem to have alike content, evaluation of a concrete network demands a more precise content and functional definition. Lack of content in net-art is based on criticism and subversion to the Internet content, the latter being an essence of symbolic, both pure informational and imaginative, exchange in modern society. The thing that irritates and therefore stimulates deconstructive and annihilating activity is an obvious disbalance and chaotic distribution of differently acting data, i.e. the data that influences a person on different levels of his(her) perception. If, for instance, in a polygraphic magazine, combination of different bright-coloured pictures, informational and commenting text articles on one page plus using of different prints of different colours might irritate, though as a single-measured structure it is rapidly and easily read and processed. A hyper-textual character of a web page puts a few serious problems before a user. Firstly, potential multi-measureness of a document and continuous spreading of any data make concern of its highly dynamic study. Secondly, combination of various types of structural design elements, within one field, making different imperative affect advertisement banners, lists giving comprehensive data classification, texts, visual imaginative information overweight communication channels and reduce reflexive opportunities of a percepter. Thirdly, on-line specificity generates a particular stress field due to high possibility of random mistakes, incompatibility of codes and sets disconnection, access deny, site delete.
Apparently, the user is provoked to be active, and in fact he can't stay a passive consumer such as a TV watcher. And he becomes active as much as he can be activised as a person who was made to orientate in permanently changing environment, to search for a way-out and to provide for his own life. So, everything around him that potentially might be used in one way or another, be activized, is tactily percepted, and the type of his actions depends on operative or situational mode of thinking leaving consciously made choice and its consequences for later on. Psychology of a computer game player. Therefore, structure and character of data content, navigation devices and net communication facilities are main elements of the Internet operating mechanism in general, i.e. changeable elements of regulation of data exchange. Even pure subversial activity of web artists doesn't lack creative enthusiasm and avant-gard, negative towards the contemporary reality, projectiveness because it exposes its aching points and stresses attention on vulnerability, depicting the problematic tension of electronic net which focuses creative energy of all the interested, and feeds further development of net technologies. Invention of the Internet as an artificial medium of a pure human intellectual environment basically is a construction built-up of multilevel structural analysis of reproductive components forming an abstract picture of the world. Rationalism and functionalism of this medium determines forms of artistic irrational activity not changing the essence, metaphoric paradigmatic reflection of counter-zones of life. Therefore, elements of user's interface, become the language or expressing means of the Net-art implemented by creators and producers of computer and Net technologies. And the subject is determined by actual functioning of the net. Inspite of seemingly total programming implemented into the safety ground of any machine, including various mistakes and breaks, there's much space for random and unpredictable incidents which gives way to fantasmatic intrigue both for artists and the public. The artificial medium has its peculiarities due to the human being who produces it while searching maximum satisfaction for his desires, therefore it is permanently attacked by him, since anyone who is familiar with its processing might pretend to be one of creators and change it. That is why each programmed pressure attempt to demarcate spheres of influence is taken for an illegal encroachment over the rights and freedoms of the net community. In situation of total and close interaction of participants that declared their presence and membership and simplicity of level changing it is a priori impossible to differentiate Net artistic creation into an independent closed mode of aesthetic activity. Therefore the conflict between terminally characterized determinist and dynamic methods of research and processing of material occurs, as well as between the desire for stability realized through definition and fixing of an object as an article of art - non-art, and necessity of watching connections within functional elements of the whole mechanism of cultural activity where the art plays a role of a sort of accumulator. Odd program products, senseless sets of options, generators, recycling that seem to be just chaotic combination of signs and pictures for a technological or artistic pragmatist, in fact make the result of a concrete logic operation. It is a logically completed efficient work of net technologies. Where the pragmatic mode of thinking builds up a pure utilitarian scheme of interaction of different elements limiting each other's activity, the moving into depth artistic mind brings to the absolute the action of each concrete element and studies its possible consequences.