Baudrillard in the means Marxist theory of objects uses value vs exchange value and commodity fetishism. Baudrillard proposes a third value metric - sign value. He thought sign value overtakes use and exchange value, further fetishising the commodity. Sharing a similar notion with Adorno and Horkheimer expressed in their enlightenment and culture industry.
Sign value dominates the postmodern world. We might argue that sign value dominates the reason for culture, capital investment, and pseudo-identity and culture. In Baudrillard's second work “The Mirror of Production” he breaks away from Marxism by attacking Marxist notions. He quotes Marshall McLuhan saying “The medium is the message” - materiality and reality blurred in the postmodern world by the representation of science. Sign value replaced the material value as the computer age developed. - “Simulacrum is a copy or representation of something, a pictogram, a letter, a gesture, a signifier”. Society freed itself from the signs signifiers such as assigning reason to God, from “tree meaning tree and good was what God said was good”(An intro to Baydillard yt). The dominance of the signifier was represented by a democratic choice of one's own will mostly seen in science. “The signifier tree can detach from the real tree” - One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth.

Baudrillard proposes three orders of Simulacra in the symbolic exchange of death:

1. Natural law of value/Natural imitations: era of counterfeit, harmonious, finding the ideal of the natural. Data
2. Market law of value/ Productive copies: the materialisation of the natural by human and machine impact with the aim of globalisation and expansion along with the liberation of energy. Disneyland, data applied in functions. Governing mode of production. Pure operationality.
3. Structural law of value/ Code and simulation: hyper-reality, the aim of total control, automation utilisation of reason and the ideal driven by profit. Social media, metaverse. Algorithmic reign remembering how much of fun it was in Disneyland.

They all move towards objectivity- enlightening the scientific observation where society moves to statistical reasoning “where identities become commodities” - Similar to Adorno and Horkheimer in their culture industry theory.

Each step widens the border of the value reasoned by its use value and prefers the sign value. Society keeps being out of touch with the natural representation of their commodity and the material. Thus prefer to let others/automation decide what is best for their interests by the societal dependence on the sign value. Applying fake news to buying an iPhone using Facebook or even slang language. “The super-ideology of the sign and the general operationalization of the signifier everywhere sanctioned today by the new master disciplines of structural linguistics, semiology, information theory and cybernetics - has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system.” Society breaks away from signifying anything real and thus Baudrillard claims we already live in a simulation by the means of any algorithmic reasoning of human existence and behaviour.

Artist Ben Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political effects of software. How is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing conceptions of friendship? Who benefits when a software system can intuit how we feel? What changes in democracy and society when platforms designed for growth and engagement become our primary window to the wider world? To examine questions like these, he constructs interactive experiences, machines, and systems that make the familiar unfamiliar, revealing the ways that software prescribes our behaviour and thus, how it changes who we are.

Tokenize This: 
A central construct of the booming cryptoart market is the creation of artificial scarcity through the “tokenization” of digital objects using NFTs. These certificates of ownership act as indexes to digital artworks, pointing anyone to the objects themselves (e.g., an image file on a server) and making possible the easy sale and resale of (presumed) ownership rights. This push towards commodification not only comes with high ecological costs (due to the energy use incurred with each cryptocurrency transaction) but also threatens to reconfigure the focus of many digital/software/net artists into the production of saleable and non-threatening work that is easily recognizable as “art” to the speculative finance crowd. Tokenize This is a net art work that proposes one possible structure of resistance against the threats posed by NFTs. The site, available from https://tokenizethis.link, produces upon each new visit a “unique digital object” that includes a custom color gradient and guaranteed exclusive identification code, all referenced by a matching URL. Yet different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once. While this structure doesn’t block someone from selling an NFT that points to a Tokenize This page, it does ensure that the page it points to will never be seen by the purchaser of that NFT. Most broadly, the work acts in opposition to the capitalist ideologies embedded in NFTs and the ways in which cryptoart markets have already thrust an often anti-capitalist and anti-corporate art medium into a 21st century gold rush get-rich-quick kind of frenzy.

Reflection:
Grossers’ Tokenize this does either intentionally or unintentionally play with Baudrillard’s structural and marketed law of value of the intangible unique object effectively and effortlessly. His concept is not overthought and decorated and thus points out on the importance of the website’s ecological lightness. As much as I do like aesthetically designed websites, in this case I do appreciate the artists’ decision of not intefering in the web’s aesthetic very much. Moreover, from my subjective interpretation, the visual design that lacks in this work does degrade the value of the generated token and therefore plays with the artists’ critique of the NFT and the digital artefact commodification boom.




Order of Magnitude:
As the founder and CEO of the world’s largest social media corporation, what does Mark Zuckerberg think about? While we get clues from his posts on Facebook and elsewhere, a primary window into this question is through his public video recorded appearances. Covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up through Zuckerberg’s compelled appearances before the US Congress in 2018, these recordings reveal what’s changed and what hasn’t changed about the way he speaks and what he says. For ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, I viewed every one of these recordings and used them to build a supercut drawn from three of Mark’s most favored words: “more,” “grow,” and his every utterance of a metric such as “two million” or “one billion.” The result is a nearly fifty minute film that reveals primary topics of focus for the tech CEO, acting as a lens on what he cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain.

Reflection:
Throughout my year 2 and 3 I really enjoyed working with video footage and preferably I wish to sustain this element in my graduation project as well. Video footage can be used as a good data source for further analysis of the digitalised and reproduced reality that can be nicely juxtaposed to the digitised ideals of todays networked reproductions of life.  This brings me back to the ideas I proposed in my studio proposal at the beginning of the Semester 1 which are concerned with the critique of digital ‘ideals’ and their communication to the consumers. I do want to critique and provide a reflexion experience to the viewer of my work. I thus wish to communicate the importance of escapism in the age of attention economy, and highlight the contrast of the often fetishised and idealised digital realm of the Metaverse / social platforms with contemporary anxieties of the real world.

Why should we escape to this Zuckerberg’s proposed ‘hyperobject’ of whose citizens desperately find refuge in “resigned cynicism.. choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness.” (Zuboff, 11, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). Why can’t the metaverse point on issues of the real world instead of offering an escape to the neoliberal feudalism of the big tech. 

But back to the video element of Grosser’s Order of Magnitute. What I like about this 47 minute video compilation is the simple paradox that Grosser plays with and that examines how the quality of this work depends on the quantity of videos. This is supported even further by the artists’ focus on Mark Zuckerbergs’ repetition of words “growth” and “more” and thus builds the whole fundementals of his concept around a simple portrayal of “more meaning better”. This can indirectly point on and further criticise the quantity of data the Meta company gathers in order to complete its’ qualitative value.

This leads me to conclude that video footage can be used effectively and effortlessly if the thought through concept supports the simplicity of well chosen footage as a “data source”. Furthermore it does inspire me to think about the idea of less is more or the more the worse and could possibly represent a nice foundation of my further work development.









ANTHONY ING - Jill Uncredited
The British-Canadian filmmaker and composer was born in London, UK in 1991. Co-founder of the Loop production company, Ing has produced a range of artist-led film and television projects since 2014 which have received prizes including at the Grierson Awards, the BFI London Film Festival and the British Independent Film Awards.v

The work Jill Uncredited is based on constellating fragments from decades of film and television, newcomer Anthony Ing creates a playful, yet profound portrait of a woman who has toiled in the margins of our screens. Forget about stars: this hypnotic short is entranced with the nameless people who form the wondrous texture of life

Reflection:
Such as Grosser’s Order of Magnitude, Ing’s short film Jill Uncredited  highlights the quality by a well curated and repetitive quantitative element. Jill Goldston as an actor acting in countless movies and TV shows as a background actor is the protagonist of Ing’s composition of her appearances from other movies. This compilation of short snippets from other films and shows draws attention to the importance of a person who might have shaped our cultural experiences trough her presence in the field while none of us might have noticed. 

Both artists work with already existent video material that makes me to think again about the relevance of derivative/reinterpreted/readapted works from materials already made by someone else. In this case, both of these works share qualities of an open-source creativity and highlight the strengths of re-imagination that open source software or hardware provide for either programming as well as art and design communities. 

Reflection

One and Three Chairs as  a piece, challenging the concept and meaning of a specific object in three different ways proposes a variety of ways for interpreting the object itself and its’ simulations. By presenting these three different versions, Kosuth highlights how our perception of reality can be constructed from various sources, aligning with Baudrillard's notion of hyperreality. Additionaly, by this, both authors question the authenticity of experiences and objects in a world full of representations. Baudrillard suggests that in a world saturated with simulacra, the original and authentic are lost among copies. Similarly, Kosuth's installation makes viewers to question which version of the chair is the "authentic" one, reflecting Baudrillard's concerns about the loss of the original and his System of Objects. While Kosuth’s work is mostly presented in a form of installarion, and not concerned with digital media, it does deliver concepts that are integral to thinking about digital simulations of a reality, or multiple realities. Baudrillard emphasizes , that signs have detached from their original meanings, creating new realities and Kosuth's work plays with this signifier (the word "chair" and the image) and the signified (the actual chair), highlighting the complexities of meaning-making. These notions are often observed in his works such as No Number Twice (+216, After Augustine’s Confessions) III  and many others, playing a key role in his production

In relation to détournement:

Both Dada and Situationism as movements were concerned with the power of signs and symbols in shaping reality, while deconstructing and reinterpret ing these signs and revealing the arbitrary and constructed nature of meaning.  Kosuth’s chair as a physical object, an image, and a linguistic definition. This triadic presentation underscores the idea that meaning is not inherent in objects but is constructed through language and context, aligning with the semiotic critique central to détournement. Additionally, Kosuth’s repurposing of Mondrian’s work for  his own purposes in the work Mondrian’s Work XII  is a clear act of détournement.

Is forking and repurposing an open source project online a form of détournement?