Zany Systems: Information Overload and Contemporary Art

Abstract

Information overload and algorithmic systemisation have come to characterise our everyday experience. While this state of hyperconnectivity facilitates communication and instant retrieval of knowledge, our networked systems overwork and overwhelm us as users. In particular, the total integration of the Internet into lived experience has had undesirable effects on our workplaces, attention spans, decision-making and emotions. Workplace employees are expected to be contactable and productive at any time; the novelty produced by information feeds rewards inattention; algorithms choose songs, meals and romantic partners for us; and lifestyle performances on social media provoke a fear of missing out. This is to say that our hyperconnected reality places us in a forever switched-on world where the lines between work and play have become obscured. According to theorist Sianne Ngai, the state of being constantly ‘on’ in this way manifests culturally in what she calls the ‘zany aesthetic’. This thesis uses an experimental arts based research methodology that relies on drawing, animation, and installation to uniquely reflect how our world has been shaped by this kind of stressful hyper-connectivity. In particular, this thesis explores the meaning of ‘zaniness’ as a symptom of this kind of contemporary information overload. By exploring the zany in visual terms, this thesis aims to reveal new qualities of this aesthetic category by reflecting on the exhibited creative outcomes produced over the course of this project. Ngai, in her Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), claims that zaniness appears across film, television, video games, poetry, literature and art as a reflection of how we perform our labour in late capitalism. Specifically, Ngai suggests the non-stop action of characters like Lucy Ricardo of television’s I Love Lucy or Looney Tunes’s Wile E. Coyote offers a way of seeing the aesthetic in the 24/7 world of production and consumption. However, unlike Ngai, the present research project does not examine the zany aesthetic in regard to how we sell our labour. Neither does it explicitly examine a performance or character-driven art. Instead, this project examines the zany aesthetic as it appears in visual art contending with information overload and systematic methods. To understand the zaniness in systems, this thesis examines art history’s first reaction to information in the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s. Art historian Eve Meltzer, in Systems We Have Loved (2013), claims that conceptual art reacted enthusiastically to the figures of information and systems. Specifically, Meltzer claims that conceptual art mimicked the systems in structuralism, information technology and institutions to create an impersonal and rational art. This thesis examines how conceptual art pictured information systems and diagrams to create a form of anti-expression. In this research project, I compare the diagrams and systems popularised by conceptual art to the busier, messier and zanier outcomes created by contemporary artists responding to the information overload in our time. I argue that unlike conceptual art before it, contemporary art has an emotional investment in information and systems. This thesis examines zaniness as one such emotional, aesthetic and expressive reaction to the present-day information overload and systematic convolution. The creative outcomes discussed in this thesis explore Ngai’s zany aesthetic category and the legacies of conceptual art to reveal the zany characteristics of the algorithmic world. These outcomes include three exhibitions from an installation about conspiracy theories, an animated story about a sentient artificial intelligence and an exhibition of drawings of fantasy worlds determined by rolling a 100-sided die. While these exhibitions take up a different medium, by virtue of their differences they each point to a unique way of seeing the zaniness activated by a world with too much information.