Issue 23: Where Taste Comes From (a review of Kyle Chayka's "Filterworld")
Soft Labor, is an occasional newsletter about trends in visual culture written by Sarah Hromack. Related/Unrelated is a highly heterogeneous, link-heavy feature whose style harkens back to my earliest days as a digital editor. Soft Labor is a reader-supported publication and I invite you to share this newsletter and/or subscribe at either the free or paid level.
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I wrote about New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka’s just-published book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture for the website Hyperallergic. Thanks for reading the review. Filterworld performs a swift cultural synthesis — it reads like an extended version of Chayka's New Yorker writing around Internet culture, which I deeply enjoy. Buy the book!
Reading Filterworld made me think afresh about a perennial — and deeply personal — question: Where does one's sense of taste come from?
I've been lugging my copy of French sociologist, ethnographer, and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste — the Harvard University Press version from 1987 with the bronze-colored cover some of you likely remember — since my graduate school days in California, one in a hoard of books that I simply can't abandon. In Distinction, Bourdieu executes a revealing study of the French middle class, identifying and analyzing how shared tastes commingle with social class to establish an invisible caste system. Grad students tend to idolize Bordieu as his theories can be affirming — they certainly were for me when I first encountered them — and they are comparatively easy to engage with and apply.
Chayka’s thesis — that the powerful and ever-shifting algorithms that power the Internet have effectively distorted not only culture but cultural production itself — is influenced, in part, by Bourdieu, whom he name-checks in the book along with countless other figures. In its earliest iterations, the Internet functioned — did it really, or did we simply imagine that it did? — as a sort of tertiary social space where people could assume self-divined identities while encountering one another freely, ostensibly escaping the trappings of class. Chayka’s Filterworld-as-place is a homogenous Internet, one controlled by deeply biased systems that simply feed our tastes and preferences back to us in a never-ending loop — a never-ending doomscroll of crap to consume while reifying social class and its discontents.
Reading Filterworld, I was thankful for the fact that I was born the year Bourdieu wrote Distinction, 1979, placing me at the very, very tail end of Generation X. I was hardwired in the failed industrial working middle-class suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; I spent many childhood weekends in the city, drifting around the Carnegie Museum of Art and Natural History, where a yearly family membership — less than $100 in the 80s — kept my brother and me infinitely entertained. Otherwise, I consumed my best popular culture at my neighbor’s house. Her dad was an engineer who let us tinker, unsupervised, with BBS's and later, AOL chat rooms. Her brothers and sisters were inveterate fans of The Smiths and Sinéad, Headbanger’s Ball, The Real World, and Sassy and The Wire magazines — all a bit too "old" for me at the time. My first tour of art school (MICA, Baltimore, 1998-2002) coincided with Y2K and 9/11, just barely preceding the launch of the earliest widely-utilized social networks: MySpace and then, Facebook. I characterize my tastes as "Internet-adjacent," even though I wrote the HTML for my first blog, Forward Retreat, around 2000.
Along with Distinction, I maintain a trove of books and magazines that collectively trace my own ever-evolving taste. Hanging onto this stuff isn’t just about nostalgia — I think it’s very important for us to reach backward, materially, for the memory of a time when curiosity and taste felt like natural inclinations — not professional mandates or technical inevitabilities.
Here’s a (very) partial inventory of the printed ephemera that informed my earliest sense of personal style. Read Filterworld. And then, take a moment offline and make a list of your own.
Colors! Oh, Colors. My tween worldview was changed by Tibor Kalman and Oliviero Toscani. You see, I went to Catholic school and worshipped Bennetton, which my parents couldn't afford or wouldn't let me buy, or both; the magazine, I probably found at Barnes and Noble. (Naturally, I still pick up the occasional Bennetton piece as an adult because I can. And if I'm wearing color at all, it's usually hyper-saturated — I attribute that to my early Bennetton aspirations.)
I was thrilled to track down (from a San Diego thrift store) this out-of-print copy of Fruits, a document of the work of Tokyo street photographer Shoichi Aoki with a forward written by the artist, published by Phaidon in 2001. Fruits was first introduced to me by Akemi, my art school roommate who would bring copies of the mag back from her summer visits to her dad's place in Japan for us to pore over. I was fascinated by them, to say the least, and though my taste in Japanese fashion leans more toward minimalist Issey with the occasional blown-out CDG piece, Fruits holds a deep place in my heart. The mag has enjoyed a bit of a resurgence as Aoki somewhat recently began shooting in the streets of Tokyo once again and publishing to Instagram as @aoki_street.1985.
Curated by Francesco Bonami, Maria Luisa Frisa, and Stefano Tonchi, and organized by Pitti Immagine, Uniform: Order and Disorder was an exhibition that considered the influence of formal military wear on contemporary fashion and popular culture. The show traveled to PS1 in 2001, but I saw its original iteration at the Stazione Leopolda, in Florence, Italy, just down the street from the apartment I lived in while studying there during the first half of 2001. It was a massive display of fashion and contemporary art — a rarity in Florence, at the time— at a moment when the Pitti Immagine was just establishing itself as a foundation that would go on to influence men's fashion, in particular. I was riveted.
Related/Unrelated
Read:
- Speaking of Distinction, Monoskop still exists, thankfully, and you may find the aforementioned HUP version there in all of its bronzed glory.
- Published to coincide with the release of Filterworld, "Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet," Chayka's latest New Yorker essay, borrows heavily from the book. So nostalgic! Not unlike this issue of Soft Labor, in fact. He wrote another essay adapted from the book for The Guardian; I prefer this one.
- In "How Anxiety Becomes Content", which ran on The Atlantic's website back in December, Derek Thompson aptly criticizes the way social media has grossly distorted the public discourse around (and understanding of) mental health. An excellent piece on an under-considered yet increasingly-relevant subject.
- I will forever hold Triple Canopy and its founding crew in my Brooklyn mind's eye; I lived around the corner from their old Greenpoint headquarters (the one once shared with Light Industry) for the better part of a decade and have watched the platform evolve over the past sixteen years. TC's latest, Issue 28: True to Life, features Cairn, An AI-generated poem by the design studio AUTHENTIC (Christina Janus and Desmond Wong), and a video by Eric Ko. It's gorgeous.
- Just a couple of issues into production, Heavy Traffic is a so-called fiction magazine edited by Patrick McGraw and designed by the indefatigable Richard Turley. The first issues were printed in limited edition — it's sold out at MoMA, but still available at Casa Magazines, apparently, and in LA and abroad. I'm an undying fan of Chris Kraus's super awkward fiction-as-theory, so I caved — I essentially love, yet have little patience for limited-edition print publications — and ordered Issue 3, which promises new work of hers. Heavy Traffic is currently in residence at New Models, the extra-fascinating Berlin-based media channel; McGraw is a guest on the most recent episode of the NM podcast (which is only accessible at the paid level on Substack) where he discusses the role of fiction in a time of "technical imagination."
- I just received the galley for British provocateur Adam Phillips's aforementioned book, On Giving Up, and it is as juicy as a psychoanalytically informed read on the subject can be (which, in Phillips' hands, is pretty juicy). Pre-order? Sure.
See:
- Opening in February, Poetics of Encryption is a new exhibition-cum-Internet project curated by Nadim Samman, based on his book "Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene," for Berlin's KW Institute. "Poetics of Encryption explores how artists picture our relationship with inscrutable tech, through three thematic frames: Black Site, Black Box, and Black Hole." The exhibition includes more than 40 artists (Trevor Paglan, Kate Crawford, American Artist, Josh Citarella, UBERMORGEN, etc.) and a (hellishly designed) dedicated website-as-catalogue featuring three 'web-first’ artistic commissions, rich media, and a bespoke AI chatbot; a conference is also planned. So Berlin.
Listen:
- Are you in Düsseldorf at the moment? If so, the always-prescient Cory Arcangel is debuting a new work, Terms and Conditions, in an organ concert with Hampus Lindwall at the Julia Stoschek Foundation on 1/20/24 from 9-11 pm. An artist talk and screening will follow on 1/21/24 from 2-4 pm. I would be there if I could be.
- For the latest episode of The Art Angle podcast, Artnet editor Ben Davis spoke with the elusive Cem A., also known by the Instagram handle @freeze_magazine, an artist who is, hands down, the most interesting and devastatingly funny meme slinger online. His criticism of the art world is undeniably spot-on.
Wear:
- Researchers in Hong Kong are considering the role AI could potentially play in reducing waste in the fashion industry — by producing color-changing clothing that will ostensibly reduce the need to own so many clothes. Science and art aren't exactly colliding here — the stuff is ugly — but the idea is aspirational. I'm a long-time fan of the British Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan and, of course, Alexander McQueen, whose respective engagements with technology — I wrote a bit about them in Issue 14 — long precede the conventional use of AI. Chalayan is teaching in Berlin at the moment. I propose a semester abroad to the folks in Hong Kong.
Watch:
- I first watched filmmaker Iara Lee's Synthetic Pleasures around 2000 — five years after it was released as an incredibly prescient — yet completely under-recognized and now even forgotten — consideration of, loosely described, the speculative role of technology in society and popular culture. I think about this documentary quite frequently, in fact, and have subjected more than one class of NYU grad students to it, most of whom were horrified by the segment wherein the artist Orlan undergoes plastic surgery on live television! Synthetic Pleasures is a wonderful window into a time gone by when technology felt not exactly less possible than it does now, but much differently so.
- Organized by Agnieszka Kurant, Alien Intelligences and Cybernetics is an online screening featuring films by Neil Beloufa, Liu Chuang, Tim Graham and Jasper Sharp, Brittany Nelson, Trevor Paglen, and Jenna Sutela; interviews and responses by Shumon Basar, Stefanie Hessler, Tom McCarthy, Lucia Pietroiusti, Noam Segal; and a short story by Ted Chiang. It is part of E-flux film's Artist Cinemas series and runs through 1/21.
- If you haven't yet seen what just might be Hayao Miyazaki's lifetime masterwork, the deeply metaphorical and ever-fantastical The Boy and the Heron, get out there as it's screening now. Absolutely stunning. I won't ruin it — just go. (I thought it was wonderfully well-done in English — an all-star cast of voices including those of Florence Pugh and Robert Pattinson. My seven year-old son preferred the subtitled Japanese version.)
Scroll:
- I stumbled upon the Instagram account of CoOl_life recently and am now oddly obsessed with this anonymous video artist (note my pointed disavowal of the word "creator") whose vividly intricate scenes of tranquil, traditional domesticity I find incredibly soothing. I see deep Kurasawa scenic influence here (the weather!) and also, major early-aughts Paul Chan animation vibes for those who remember — especially where the sound is concerned. Do give Co0l_life a follow.
Finally, if you've read this far: I found the red dress. And yes, it's by Issey Miyake.
Copyright 2024 Sarah Hromack; all rights reserved.