i.
The internet
is estimated to weigh about as much as an egg.
There was an advert that used to be on telly with a man dragging a
bursting ‘shed-load of data’ through the sand; it was for broadband or
something. The internet is troubling as it is formless and unimaginable, incorporeality makes me uneasy. I want to be able to hold the internet and give it human
proportions. It has no edges that can
show a hand’s trembles. Weight is the crux. I feel like we’re living circling a void; I desperately try to fill it with scrolling.
ii
Icon
painters in the early days of Christianity were faced with the same problem;
how to grasp the infinite, humanise the unseen. There are very few icons from
the infancy of Christianity, the ones that do survive are without the weight of
history or convention. A whole new aesthetic of the divine had to be conceived.
Google is my Jesus.
There are
similarities between God and the internet; omnipresence, omniscience,
omnipotence, unfathomably, invisibility. The parallels go further, the
internet’s functions as a confessional and an advisor; it forms communities.
Just as the church functioned as an arm of the monarchy, to survey, control and
suppress, so the internet is used by the government. But there is a tension;
God is all inclusive and boundless, whereas the internet is divided from our
‘real’ lives.
iii.
This duality
of reality also makes me uneasy; if there is a division between our life online
and in the physical world, then why and how is one more ‘real’ than the other?
Reality is becoming less and less static, all is filtered. My life seems to be
losing weight, shifting digital. Yet there are more eyes, I’m seen thousands of
times over, and I am thousands of times heavier.
Does the
internet make me realer or less so? Would God exist if people didn’t pray? I
weigh more as my actions are documented constantly, archived, seen and
validated. Yet the documentation is so endless I’m buried. My actions are
becoming increasingly meaningless, I’m back at the unbearable lightness.
iv.
I’ve never
had a very firm grasp on static and singular reality. Between the ages of 13
and 15 I wanted to become a ghost, to deny my existence weight. I walked
through the corridors, milk eyed, muttering passages of The Waves like a mystic
possessed. I’d go home to read about lace, rose thorns and dead sea captains on
my Dell laptop. My first diary entry of
year 10 involves me splitting myself out into Lettuces and Lunas and Beatrices,
to rationalise and compartmentalise the formlessness.
This
dividing helps keep us sane, removes the panic of conceptualising outside the
universe. Sometimes I have an urge to stuff it down; push the air out and fold
it into a drawer. When I look up at the sky my eyes feel too small, when I open
chrome no number of tabs can ever suffice. My mind feels like blinking pixels
under a camera lens, distorting, colours chasing each other, grids shifting and
flashing. It’s making me dizzy, all this neck craning.
v.
‘Light,
lightness, about merging, about formlessness’ is how Agnes Martin describes her
late grid canvases; they look like a snow coughed sky rationalised. She
criticises the young for being too full of ideas, for jumping erratically, like
a glitch, not waiting for some sort of divine inspiration. When I picture the internet it’s a scribbled
three dimensional swirl in a room empty for all but a chair and a table. The
swirl floats in the centre morphing and bulging like a strobe light, gradually
eating everything up, even light. It becomes monolith, simultaneously
nothingness and infinite.
I can’t
accept Agnes Martin’s lightness. I want the sky to be velvet, to sag with
confetti stars, I want to wrap it around me. I want my actions to have weight,
to shift tectonic plates. Not being able to feel is disquieting - a sky made
out of 0s and 1s.
Malevich’s
‘Black Square’ reminds me of the internet; the same fear of the formless, the
same everything/ nothing paradox; when originally exhibited in 1915 it was hung
across the corner of the room like an orthodox icon.
vi.
Early Icons
were not made by artists but by miracles; imprints on Veronica’s veil. Yet
their Marys are sincere and tangible, their sliding eyes and bulging necks
showing the human despite their divinity. Though I don’t believe in God I still
adore these icons. Online you can’t pinch yourself, no spinning tops or
enchanted dice will tell you what is real.
Now I want
something to hold, to weigh my hands down. This all sounds a bit Brave New
World, the Soma as the internet-mythology to protect us from the emptiness of
reality. I’m scheduled to stand and beat my fists to my chest and declare, like
the Savage, that I want authentic experience: let’s all move to a cliff face
and ‘look up’ and feel the weight of the ‘real’ world. This isn’t the case,
nothing that specific; I just want something to hold. I’ve made a portable
altarpiece to sit by my laptop, embroidered, to be touched. Here, trace the
outline of the ‘like’, the google ‘g’. Art needs to fill in for the sensory, to
take our hands. Art needs to visualise the formless, give it human proportions.
