Deep Code: Artists and Poets Are Manipulating Language in Ways That Challenge Digital Culture’s Most Persistent Myths
Feature essay published in Art in America, September 2013
Jordan Wolfson, still from Con Leche, 2009.
Excerpt
Today, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their ideological allies hail the internet’s power to spark revolutions and heal social ills, artists are using the Web to unsettle such optimistic accounts, responding to the supposed openness and accessibility of digital culture with a poetics of opacity and illegibility. Significantly, though perhaps unsurprisingly, language plays a central role in an increasing number of artworks being made with, on, or about the Web. Alphanumeric code underlies the Internet; languages intelligible only to machines and specialists define our every online movement and encounter, even if end users primarily experience graphical interfaces laced with pictures. The simultaneous centrality and invisibility of code online is an animating tension and a thematic motif in work by Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz, Jordan Wolfson, and Ryan Trecartin. Their practices are emblematic of broader tendencies in contemporary art that stress the constraints online interfaces place on users while underscoring the Web’s entanglement with government and corporate protocols.