The overriding effect of On Everything, Icelandic media artist Pall Thayer‘s most recent web-based work might best be summed up in two words: self-propelling excess.

Thayer’s website explicitly disregards what seems to be the crucial recipe of every successful web interface and the number one survival strategy in information-based environments: selection. Quite to the contrary, his work proposes web space as an information waste disposal site for randomly gathered media material. In On Everything, the text has become an arbitrary combination of fragments passing across the screen as an infinite stream of cooking recipes, marketing phrases, and personal diary entries, embracing any possible topic that can potentially find its way into the text. Images, meanwhile, seem similarly decomposed and fragmented. Processed by something like a digital shredder, they are cut into shavings and rearranged into colourful, collage-like compounds only vaguely reminiscent of their originals.

Suppose Thayer’s piece borrows from the profane language of garbage removal. In that case, it is certainly not because it wants to make cynical or judgmental assumptions about the media material displayed: On Everything, Thayer’s accompanying notes explain, “knows nothing of the content of these materials. It reflects everything while reflecting on nothing.” In its sheerly mechanical and automated import of content, Thayer’s version of the web points to an uncanny momentum that can be found in both the realm of file-sharing and networking tools and the reality of waste disposal: disinterested accumulation, a cancerous growth driven by an addiction to numb, latent productivity like an output device that runs on auto-mode with nobody being able to bring it to a halt.

But only switching on the audio track, the third element of the piece, fully unfolds the uncanniness of the scene. We can hear a speech synthesis algorithm attempting to reanimate imported textual remains. But its monotonous and emotionally empty timbre only bears half-lives, vocal ghosts that can never fully exceed the ontological status of mere data. And yet, it strikes one only then that On Everything does perhaps not, as it first seems, exhibit the incapability of machines to render a human voice convincingly but rather point to a collective human agency trapped in automatism, a collective agency knowing no difference between the language of love letters and the empty chatter of the advertisement industry.

To this end, On Everything registers a certain disillusionment resonating through networked cultures and the discourses surrounding them, with the latter adopting notions of “social soft-war”? Or “control”? To describe tendencies prevalent in these domains. Following Fred Scharmen’s article ‘Myspace and Control’, environments for social networking are now less freely accessible spaces of escape in which new, alternative identities can be played out than “just another layer of life”? Subsumed by the commodification and advertisement apparatuses that have integrated participation and social interaction as effective operational means. The users’ attention to web content and their potential to form new connections and networks, for example, are now fewer instances of consumption than a commodity that can be consumed and sold. Accordingly, interactions of Myspace users lend themselves far more often to the language of (self-)marketing and (self-)management than personal communication.

On Everything compels us to contemplate these schizophrenic dynamics. Stalking around aimlessly, stumbling upon some forgotten fictions of the net that are ceaselessly babbling to themselves. Eventually, we turn the thing off. But even then, we are left with the suspicion that some net slaves’ talk is always on, and no one is there to stop it.