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the aesthetics of misinformation I
I've been thinking a lot lately about misinformation.
In particular, I've been thinking about misinformation as an aesthetic response to the "information revolution" of the 1990s. Information is now available on nearly any conceivable topic, no matter how obscure, and I don't think that I'm alone in noticing that the end result is a world that feels flattened out somehow.
For a long time now, artists have created new forms of meaning from the raw materials of their culture. I've noticed more and more that contemporary creative types have begun to appropriate the very rhetoric of information as a texture, and are using that texture to create pockets of "non-information," packets of data which make sense by the way that they cancel out useful meaning...
I see something like The Onion as a high-profile example of this trend, although no small percentage of the "meaning" of The Onion derives from its heavy reliance on more-or-less traditional sorts of gags.
Perhaps a better example would be the 100 Lies sequence, currently in progress over at Geegaw.
I have more examples. Stay tuned. Labels: information |
Thursday, April 04, 2002
8:49 PM
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