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Blogbot

28/10/2006
Victoria Guglietti

Blogbot and productive inertia

Sometimes silence is unbearable. Alex Dragulescu’s graphic novel What I Did Last Summer inundates our screen with words that we can almost touch. The phrases are intermittent, fragmentary, irrevocably silent – “I don’t ask why” – “Now, you’ve got all that on” – “I read the Stars and Stripes” and “These are textual bombs”; scattered sentences harvested by Dragulescu’s software agent Blogbot. The phrases are actual extracts captured from the famous war blogs My War[sub]1[/sub] and Baghdad Blogger[2], two of the most famous blogs written by participants and witnesses of the war in Iraq.

The experience of reading What I did Last Summer is different from more orthodox hypertext experiments. In fact, Dragulescu’s novel is presented as a game whose goal is the experience of textual bombardment. Captions appear in syncopated succession, overlapping and wiping out precedent sentences. Some of these phrases linger before our eyes before disappearing behind fumes. This is a game in which we have no chance of reaction, no say and no option. Ironically -or not- the novel seems to evoke the same sense of fatality that results from watching CNN’s green screen the first days of the bombing of Baghdad.

Dragulescu reinforces the game aesthetics of the novel by reproducing military and civilian units of Civilization 3. These “protagonists” emerge, fight, and die randomly. The figures are highly impersonal, but easily recognizable to those initiated in the well-known Civilization. Nonetheless, they feel uneasy, too trivial once contrasted to the density of the text. They are inert as much as we are before the events but, being less than puppets, they do not let us intervene. They condemn us to passively witness.

In line with the cadavre esquis

The fascination with automatism in art has a long history. It became particularly relevant during the early 20th century among Dadaist and Surrealist groups who sought to demolish the bourgeois ideal of the creative genius. Involuntary, hazardous, mechanistic movements were systematically explored to bring to the fore the irrational residue. In this exploration technology often promised the means to test the limits of Western rationality. Indeed, in Dadaist and Surrealists experimentations with automata, photography and film, technology is both celebrated and questioned. Technology was seen as enhancing human capacities as much as destroying and confining humanity. If technology was a crucial instrument of rationalization, it was also perceived as a means that could easily get out of control. Dadaists and surrealists witnessed the irrational side of warfare technology and they were both captivated and horrified by it. As Hal Fosters explains: “rationalization not only does not eliminate chance, accident, and error; in some sense it produces them. It is around this dialectical point that the surrealist satire of the mechanical-commodified turns”.[3]

In a surrealist vein, Blogbot explores the creative -and political- possibilities of technological automatism. In a new turn of the cadavre esquis, the famous surrealist game that consisted of writing a sentence in a piece of paper, folding it, and passing it to the next participant to obtain a collective surrealist text, Blogbot harvests words written by others and combines them according to a keyword-matching algorithm. The resulting text is the new cadavre esquis; a collage that rejects authorial intention and reveals chance as an intrinsic element of technological rationalization.

If Blogbot is an artifice of chance, it is also a political commentary. The software is described as an “agent” that “crawls the web and takes snapshots of weblogs”.[4] The image evokes a soldier on a secret mission; a mission that involves the discovery of an underlying truth. This is the logic of the gambler that sees sequences and rhythms in chance. This is the logic of warfare that reduces complexity to a zero-sum game. The truth awaits us; we only need to make the right connections and – voila . In Blogbot this hope is smashed to the ground by introducing connections that only reveal our own impotence to make sense; a snapshot of the irrationality of our old ambition to control events through technology. It is here that I see the politics of Dragulescu’s work.

This is why silence is so heavy in What I Did Last Summer. It is the silence of impotence before automatism, chance, inertia and information overload. The most compelling aspect of Dragulescu’s work is that this inertia can be turned into an aesthetics that, far from being sterile, moves to reflection.

[1] http://cbftw.blogspot.com/. The blog was created by Colby Buzzell, an American soldier deployed in Iraq.
[2] http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/. The blog was written by Salam Pax, the pseudonym used by a resident of Baghdad who witnessed the beginning of the war in Iraq.
[3] Hal Foster, “Exquisite Corpses”, in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), 150.
[4] Blogbot’s description in http://www.sq.ro/blogbot.php