Process Journal

1. What is a Process Journal?
2. Origin and Iteration
3. Theory and Theme
4. Form and Structure
5. Further Reading

1. WHAT IS A PROCESS JOURNAL?

Combining the history of the works development with expanded theoretical and formal details too long-winded for the ‘official’ abstract, a process journal is a look behind the curtain of a given artwork. While mostly for my own benefit, as a place to put my thoughts on the work that have no other home, it is also an attempt at presenting art and artmaking outside of their currently established contexts. My practice is not only non-commercial, but actively anti-capitalist, and in order to better embody this I am making efforts to disentangle my work from the various systems and modes of thought / presentation which uphold art-as-commodity, and by extension artist-as-promoter. These journals, along with the inclusion of works-in-progress and failed / abandoned works on my website, are first steps toward this (complex and daunting) goal. It is my hope that they will help me to shift my practice into one based on transparency, and the upholding of contemporary art as discursive, experimental, social and flawed; and ultimately, one day, I hope, incompatible with capitalist platforms.

2. ORIGIN AND ITERATION

Holding Pattern (no.1) was one of the pieces created for my graduate thesis exhibition at OCAD University, in Toronto. It was the very last work created for that show, having been a spontaneous decision less than a week before defending my thesis. In form, it consisted of the first panel of this current work, but was conceptually framed within a much broader context. My work at the time was just beginning to explore Neoliberal Capitalism, and was mostly investigating the ways that Globalization has changed relationships to time, place and technology. The first iteration of Holding Pattern was a meditation on the vast reserve of resources needed to maintain the (mostly illusory) potential for travel from anywhere, to anywhere, at any time, which Global Capitalism requires to function (or at least to appear to function). In that version the active Photoshop window was a stand-in for global transportation infrastructures, and the precariousness of the selection tool, having lost the image it was a reference to, represented the potential for those infrastructures to collapse or rupture.

While allusions to 9/11 were present, at the time this was just a happy accident. The photo I chose to use, taken hastily in downtown Toronto, happened to have a U.S. flag in the foreground, cast in shadow. Combined with the plane, it evoked the 9/11 terror attacks for more than one viewer. I liked this element, as I felt it heightened the sense of foreboding and precarity which the work was attempting to speak to, but didn’t consider it an essential component at the time.

So, why a second iteration? Although the last and most quickly put together of the works from that show, it was the one that I felt had been the most cleanly resolved, and the one that stuck with me most moving forward. I also felt that the use of an active Photoshop window had a lot more potential beyond the one work. For several years I played around with potential new iterations of Holding Pattern, but nothing that I felt that strongly about. During that same time I also developed a much stronger and more consistent understanding and ideology regarding Capitalism and Neoliberalism, (enough so that I now find my master’s thesis a bit cringe-inducing to read in places) as well as a deeper appreciation for the pre-21st century history of the internet.

In mid 2019, After watching a YouTube video essay about post-9/11 security measures, (on the channel Philosophy Tube) I was reminded of the novel The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling, which is about a computer expert’s journey through both government and private cybersecurity organizations immediately following 9/11. At the time I was also attempting to think through and somehow address in my work the massive shift which took place regarding the use and perception of the internet between the late 90s and the early 2000s. A lot of the radical (and explicitly anti-capitalist) potential of the early internet was lost in those days, and the works mentioned above finally made it click for me that 9/11 had been a major instigation for this. This led me to Crisis Capitalism, an idea which I already had a passing familiarity with, and then finally back to Holding Pattern; but this time with the reference to 9/11 repositioned at the core of the work. Other elements, like the connections to gentrification, emerged later as the work began to take form.

3. THEORY AND THEME

As stated in the About section, this piece is an exploration of Crisis Capitalism, a particular form (or function) of Neoliberalism which recuperates systemic breakdowns, civil unrest, terror attacks, natural disasters and other catastrophic events to both expand upon and further entrench the powers of capital and the states which serve it. The work also looks at some of the specific outcomes of this by examining the shifts in our collective relationship to imagery, infrastructure and the internet which emerged in the wake of 9/11.

In order to unpack this we must look at the core ideology of Neoliberalism, which dictates that all activity be understood and made to conform to the logic of the market. All activity, no matter how large or small. No matter how history-breaking or globe-spanning, or how internal, abstract or transitory. This extreme market fetishism, and the resulting disparity, forced scarcity, exploitation and ecological devastation which arise from it, when carried across all aspects of life and to all corners of the globe, leads inexorably to violent faults erupting within the system. These faults are then themselves marketized, (as Neoliberalism allows for no other response) and therefore lead to the creation of new capitalist channels through means too unpredictable or destructive to be carried out intentionally or legally. These new markets arise not only by taking advantage of the physical conditions created by such crises, but also their intellectual and emotional aftermath. Anything capable of shifting cultural understanding or values can also be used to create new products, laws and infrastructures that benefit capital and expand its control.

The massive explosion of control mechanisms is an especial hallmark of the post 9/11 era, and listed among the consequences of this are the complete capitalist recuperation of the internet and its related technologies, (understanding that state monitoring is ultimately a tool which benefits capital) and a radical shift in our collective relationship to images and surveillance. In both cases this process began with a state response to a violent and high profile crisis, (itself an inevitable outcome of imperialist and capitalist expansion) followed by corporations adapting these state measures into new products and marketized infrastructures.

The internet, which had previously shrugged off all attempts at direct marketization, became the business of state intelligence (and its corporate contractors) and not long after became the tool of capitalist exchange (whether that capital be monetary, social or cultural) that we know it as today. Likewise, state security measures led to the proliferation of digital surveillance, rapidly expanding both the technologies and legislations needed to do so while simultaneously making the constant production and reproduction of one’s likeness and personal information commonplace. This was followed shortly after by the invention of smartphones, social media platforms and data firms which capitalized upon this normalization. Our entire relationship to images and privacy, and the fundamental purpose of the internet (one of the most radical technologies ever invented) have been profoundly redefined by the 9/11 terror attacks, always in ways which directly benefit capital.

This is not an attempt at conspiracy theory, nor to frame terrorist activity (or any other catastrophic event) as having been engineered consciously by state or corporate actors. Neoliberal Capitalism is simply structured in a way that makes crisis inevitable, and then uses that crisis to both expand its reach and strengthen its control on what it already possesses. These crises are not, as they are presented to us, external events which happen in contradiction to the established system. Rather, they are an internal process which is happening continuously as a part of that system, and their particular details are irrelevant to those whom they benefit.

Another related outcome in this vein is the subtle but significant shift in how gentrification and other ‘urban renewal’ projects have been framed following 9/11. While there have always been efforts made to position gentrification as a positive or even ‘progressive’ process, or as evidence of the ‘uplifting’ nature of Capitalism, after the 2001 terror attacks these efforts began to incorporate a new narrative. Specifically, gentrification began to be framed as triumphant, or even as a form of resistance in the face of terrorist activity. Developers, backed by the state and popular media, heralded the construction of new (and prohibitively expensive) highrises with the same victorious tone often heard in the decades immediately following the Second World War. While this narrative itself has not endured, the pace of gentrification (and the degree to which its social costs are accepted) has been permanently accelerated. A momentary cultural shift was capitalized on to lay the permanent foundations for new and higher profit yielding infrastructures.

When these infrastructures in turn exacerbate housing shortages, urban decay, food deserts and countless other forms of capitalist violence, the debilitated state of non-gentrified areas (which has come about as the direct result of gentrification) will be used as the justification to repeat the process again and again; forever expanding capitalist infrastructure while deepening disparity and planting the seeds for yet further catastrophe, reclamation and control.

And 9/11, while a dramatic example, is merely one small occurrence within a stream of Crisis Capitalism. Individual crises and their aftermaths can be parsed from the overall flow, but are ultimately drowned in a perpetual state of Neoliberalism with no clear borders or chains of cause and effect. Just as any boundary between life and the Market is being constantly eroded, so too is the border between one catastrophe and the next. Scandals, bankruptcies, natural disasters, data breaches, occupations, police shootings and imperialist wars are no longer separately clocked, but rather received as a single frequency of events, brutally yet numbingly normalized.

Neoliberalism, and the insidious controls and violent faults which emerge from it, is ever-present yet perpetually obscure; terrifying and banal in equal measure.

4. FORM AND STRUCTURE

So why Photoshop? As stated in section 2, the original iteration of Holding Pattern used an active Photoshop window to represent global transportation infrastructures. Using systems and infrastructures as works in and of themselves, (or at the very least drawing active attention to them where one wouldn’t normally do so) had been a staple of my work throughout grad school, and continues to be now. Part of what drew me back to Holding Pattern, when the connections to Crisis Capitalism and 9/11 finally clicked for me, was the realization that in its own way Photoshop was a part of the recuperation which took place in the wake of the terror attacks.

As the go-to software for image editing and management in the 21st century, Photoshop could be seen as a fundamental tool of the post-9/11 internet, and of digital imagery more generally. It, and its corporate owners, have benefited massively from the events described above, and in turn have helped to both deepen and expand the new (and explicitly Capitalist) relationships which they brought about. Photoshop, and its many imitators, play a key role in the social and cultural (and more than occasionally monetary) capital which defines contemporary social media exchanges. They also laid the technological groundwork for more insidious state and military sponsored softwares such as facial recognition, digital image forensics and other forms of image-based control mechanisms.

It is also a control mechanism in and of itself, granting the user (for a modest monthly fee) the ability to radically reconstruct and redefine digital imagery, and therefore tap into the market which it, in part, helped to create. And like many control mechanisms, Photoshop itself isn't meant to be seen. It is implicit, rather than explicit, operating at the same level as Crisis Capitalism. It defines and redefines continuously, while attempting to stay, at least at this more critical (and therefore less Neoliberal) level, undefined. Simultaneously absent and present at all points.

This is also why I have chosen to expand the current iteration of Holding Pattern from one panel to six. The nature of Crisis Capitalism, and of Neoliberalism more generally, make it elusive. It is rarely witnessed at any one fixed point, instead becoming visible only in the tissues between things. This elusiveness, the absence / presence of crisis and control, plays out within each panel in the relationship between the background and the selection tool (its referent image already lost). Each of these relationships are in turn expanded on and (re)contextualized as a loose narrative plays out between the panels, simultaneously linear and cyclical as the final panel plays back into the first. While each panel is distant enough from the others, both temporally and geographically, (in terms of their background imagery and how the user must engage with them) that they could just as easily be read as snapshots from any given time or place within the current system, it is really the spaces between them which best capture the ever elusive and unspoken violence of our Capitalist world.

5. FURTHER READING

Duty-Free Art by Hito Steyerl

A series of short essays and talks given by Steyerl which explore a lot of different facets of digital and social media, New Media art, and the contemporary relationship to imagery.

When Will Security Go Back to Normal? by Philosophy Tube

A solid video that covers a lot of ground in terms of post-9/11 security measures / culture. I also highly recommend the What Was Liberalism? series on this channel.

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

I don’t necessarily recommend this one, as it’s actually one of Sterling’s less interesting works in my opinion. Mostly included here because of its role in bringing about this piece.

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

A fundamental work for anyone interested in any facet of Neoliberalism or the contemporary world. Read this. Right now.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

I recommend the review / synopsis of The Shock Doctrine by the Youtube channel Radical Reviewer. The text itself is quite dense, and does a deep dive into several historical examples, and Radical Reviewer does a great job of breaking it down. This work also deals with the history of Crisis Capitalism from earlier state-driven models to the more contemporary Neoliberal variety.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

A fictional work, Pattern Recognition does an excellent job of conveying the feeling of the post-9/11 era. It’s also just a very entertaining novel, centering on a mystery around the origins of a piece of New Media art.