In the Avant-Guardian Musings "Bonus Assignment" series, I will occasionally post creative prompts for students to explore and expand their understanding around a range of art history and visual culture studies topics. These assignments will be collected under the Resources section of my website, hashtagged #bonusassignment under Search, and available as an Open Education Resource for educators.
It would only seem fitting that I begin my foray back to musings on this blog with an idea sparked by Kenneth Goldsmith. Poet, conceptual artist, and founder of UbuWeb-- an early proponent of open access and web-based educational resources for avant-garde works, writings, and films-- Goldsmith is the individual who inspired me to begin Avant-Guardian Musings back in 2010. In my very first blog post, I spoke about how I had come to believe that through opening access to alternative spaces of dialogue beyond the university classroom, new fields of radicality and potential could emerge to break down traditional barriers.
Goldsmith has continued to evolve his message and approach to thinking about accessible learning with an avant-garde mindset. Back in 2014, he sparked controversy by proposing and teaching a course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time On the Internet.” Writing about his rationale for the creative writing class in The New Yorker, Goldsmith explained how the framework, mechanisms, and spatial/temporal elements of the Internet are tailor made for avant-garde experimentation:
“The Surrealists’ ideal state for making art was the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, when they would dredge up images from the murky subconscious and throw them onto the page or canvas. Proposing sleepwalking as an optimal widespread societal condition, André Breton once asked, “When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?” It seems that the Surrealist vision of a dream culture has been fully realized in today’s technologies. We are awash in a new, electronic collective unconscious; strapped to several devices, we’re half awake, half asleep. We speak on the phone while surfing the Web, partially hearing what’s being said to us while simultaneously answering e-mails and checking status updates. We’ve become very good at being distracted. From a creative point of view, this is reason to celebrate. The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature. Disjunctive, compressed, decontextualized, and, most important, cut-and-pastable, it’s easily reassembled into works of art.”
To his credit, Goldsmith found a way to create the course and went on to publish a fantastic manifesto-like book with the same name, accumulating many of his own reflections, ideas, and luckily for us, actual assignments and directives to re-create aspects of his course. Over the years, I have borrowed ideas from the book’s Appendix: 101 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet in a number of my new media and visual culture courses. But now, as we collectively isolate at home in the midst of a global pandemic, I figure what better time to spark creativity, critical thinking, and new perspectives around something we are all doing—“wasting time” on the Internet.
INSTRUCTIONS:
1) Select 1-2 of the tasks listed in the curated list below. I have chosen strategically from the original “101 Ways” list. Choose a task that you know will be a challenge and moves you out of your comfort zone. Trust me, it will be more of a benefit to the outcome of the assignment.
2) Execute the task(s) as faithfully as possible. While doing the task(s), or immediately afterwards (all will depend on the nature of your instructions), keep careful track of your thoughts, reflections, and the outcomes of your experiment. Ideally you can capture this more spontaneously via video or audio diary, captioned photographs/screen shots, and taking written/typed notes.
3) Take a few days to think and reflect further on the outcomes of your task(s). Assemble your findings from above into a document, video, visual presentation, or art work. To accompany your final submission, write a rich paragraph discussing how you understand the task(s) challenges/subverts/upends/disturbs the unspoken “rules” of the Internet/social media and its social norms. Include discussion about how your chosen task generates new perspectives or exposes problems/issues/inequalities/shortcomings of the Internet/social media.
Curated List of “101 Ways to Waste Time on the Internet”
2. Instagram something with the intention of it being taken down by Instagram. Take a screenshot of it; keep a record of it. Instagram the screenshot. Screenshot that Instagram. If it is taken down again, repeat the process until all you’re posting is a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot . . . of the original photo.
7. Go on Netflix, and look at the first suggestion for your Top Picks. If you’ve already seen it, then pick the next suggestion. Read a generic Wikipedia article about the show/movie, and write a Facebook status using what you’ve learned (develop an opinion or a question or a statement). The status should not mention that you haven’t seen the show/movie. Tag at least one person in the status.
29. Take an article you vehemently disagree with, post it as your Facebook status, and then say how you align yourself with everything it’s saying. Like this status. Share it. Post it on other people’s walls. Do the same thing on Twitter.
32. With a partner, watch a short video in turns with one both recording the other with a camera as well as taking notes on the other’s affective response. Put the original video, and the two reaction videos side by side in a new video.
41. Ask each other about passwords. Talk about how you picked your password. Ask how other people picked their passwords. Share your password if you want and explain what you like and don’t like about it.
54. Clog as much as you can. Clog online forums for your school or work. Post a series of blank posts on your Facebook feed, send a bunch of blank e-mails to everyone you know, open a bunch of blank tabs, and just clog everything. CLOG. What does it feel like to apply force to the Internet?
71. Pick a genre of music you don’t usually listen to or that you dislike. Listen to five minutes of it without doing anything else. Once you pick a song, you have to listen to the whole thing. Don’t touch the computer as you listen. After the five minutes, write about what you felt/were thinking about. How did it feel to do nothing but listen to something you don’t like?
73. Exchange phones with a partner and text someone from that phone whatever you feel like.
80. Look through your Facebook messages and go back as far as you can. Find the oldest message to which you never responded. Write back. Make the responses really long and detailed. Make it super awkward. Don’t explain why you’re writing back now or apologize for not writing back earlier.
98. For fifteen minutes, see who can tally the largest dollar amount by putting things in their Amazon shopping cart. The one with the most at the end of the time wins. Delete everything in your cart. Or don’t.