“video games didn’t start as an industry, they started as timetheft by programmers in university, government and military labs who were meant to be doing something else.”
“While its entanglements with the military and technological control society which are pillars of capitalism are also strands of videogaming as a field that must be reckoned with, I would say it is shaped just as much by these illicit beginnings, as well as software crackers, personal computer users, and those who maintain their own strange gardens online”
“I subscribe to the theory of personal art practice as a type of excretion; it’s going to come out anyways.”
“working against the odds that a process like “enclosure” has happened to basically every new media that has emerged from people’s everyday culturally reproductive activities.”
“The sociologist HS Becker wrote the study Art Worlds out of his interest in all of the social and physical elements that went into, perhaps, one work of art reaching the pinnacle of ‘masterpiece’. It needs to exist in a tradition of others who did the same, and surrounding critical infrastructure to draw attention to masterworks. It requires a variety of professional artists and passionate amateurs invested in the medium, and participating in the contextualizing and critical work around it. It needs the staff at museums and galleries, it even needs the materials and workers which make the standardized art supplies that are made available to the public. Studying contemporary art production, Gregory Sholette identifies many of these practices as “dark matter” of the arts as a field; kept invisible by, and invisible to “official” culture, yet essential to the form it takes and processes it involves.”
“The philosopher Georges Bataille called the immense output of solar energy that hits the earth beyond what existing organisms need to fulfill their biological functions “the accursed share,” which he theorized as an excess that underlies all life and must be wasted.”
“It could be wasted on beautiful things, like artistic expression and non procreative sexuality, or terrible things, like war and violence. This excess can reinforce the existing order, as pressure release valve or monuments to its glory, or be used to disrupt it.”
“Past a certain point, we start feeling like cultural abundance has to be culled to a representative sample and archived as a “style” or Movement, disciplined into proper artistic techniques and subjects, made into something that’s optimized within arcane algorithms for hits or likes, and, most importantly, commercial success.”