(A Review of "I Was Raised On The Internet," Museum of Contemporary Art")
There is probably an irony to be located somewhere within the fact that I experienced a good deal of this exhibit via my phone. Posts of art tend to perform well on Instagram, and the art in question was, as far as visual content is concerned, low-hanging fruit: surrealist effigies; epileptic videos; compendiums of light. So I took pictures, and later posted them.
Fitting, then, that the exhibit, which ran for four months through October 2018, billed itself as a meditation on “how the internet has changed the way we experience the world.” It’s an ambitious task. As media critics like Evgeny Morozov have noted, efforts to reduce the “internet” to one coherent referent are, well, reductive. More critically, the experience of mediation through the internet is so immersive and affectively multivalent that any attempt to distill it runs the risk of seeming derivative or incomplete. “I Was Raised On The Internet” by and large defied these creative hurdles. The majority of its installations ostensibly privileged their visual components, but it wasn’t until after I left the museum, blinking into the autumn afternoon sunlight, that I recognized the extent to which their aesthetic heft was first and foremost affective. I felt uneasy: disoriented and disturbed but unable to diagnose precisely why. “I Was Raised On The Internet” set out to showcase how the internet has interrupted the human experience; in this respect, it succeeds.
The exhibit’s most viscerally unsettling installation was the British artist Rachel Maclean’s “It’s What’s Inside That Counts,” a thirty-minute surrealist video that presents a “dystopian metropolis fueled by fevered connectivity.”[1] We encounter two varieties of the beings that populate it; neither is quite human, but just human enough to leave us uncomfortable. The city’s proletarians are with radioactive-yellow flesh that seems to have congealed as it melted off their faces; they wear tattered children’s pajamas and sleep masks decorated with cartoonishly large blue eyes, which substitute the subjects’ own. The stars of their cultural diet are rodent-like monsters who don Victorian dressing gowns as they perform a frantic tarantella to rapid electronic music, the lyrics of which encourage the proletariat’s digital consumption. Their dance moves border on the erotic.
This visual staging is grotesque, but what makes the video so disturbing is the effectiveness with which the choreography of this staging captures the frenetic experience of late capitalism online: a dizzying sensorium of the uncanny, populated by subjects who are at once familiar and inscrutable. Unlike the exhibit’s more politically straightforward installments — Andrew Wilson Nelson’s “Workers Leaving The Googleplex,” for instance, which presents the banal veneer of Silicon Valley’s insidious black-boxing — Maclean’s project comments on the online experience by meticulously perverting its superficial exteriority, instead privileging — and indeed foregrounding — the dysphoria that it engenders. It might be telling that despite its radical visual accessibility, “It’s What’s Inside That Counts” was one of the few installments I consciously chose not to photograph.
I’ve focused on this artwork because it was the most effective in fulfilling the mission of the wider exhibit. Others, like Bogosi Sekhukhun’s “Consciousness Exhibit 2,” a video that implements two distorted, disembodied heads to relay a prolonged Facebook exchange between the artist and his estranged father, are successful in articulating the dysphoria of the online experience, but what distinguishes Maclean’s is its indulgence in the visceral, and its ability to make this visceral horror deeply familiar to the viewer. As the title itself says: it’s what’s inside that counts.
[1] “It’s What’s Inside That Counts,” Rachel Maclean, May 9, 2017, http://www.rachelmaclean.com/whats-inside-counts/.