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https://www.facebook.com/kaspars.groshevs
http://instagram.com/_0x20
http://www.draugiem.lv/user/22400/
https://twitter.com/_0x20
http://00x20.tumblr.com
http://72noes.tumblr.com
http://klab.lv/users/raidijums/
https://soundcloud.com/

Kaspars Groševs, Artist

 
I woke up tired on the morning of march 4th, having slept badly. Woozy, as if i’d spent the night trying to fall asleep in a loud nightclub. though it happens only very rarely, i passed my sleepy fingers across the cracked screen of my tablet even before having a cup of coffee – nothing new, luckily war hadn’t started in the middle of the night. those same images and the same curt phrases were still flying around. Battling nausea, i opened one window after another, even though there was no time left before the next bus. As usual after returning from a short trip, i’d spent the previous few days straying between the walls of Facebook and Twitter columns, but these searches had yielded almost nothing: i knew everything about nothing and nothing about everything.

I was unable to remember the exact moment in my communications with other people that the virtual began to dominate – maybe it happened quickly, but imperceptibly? it seems one day i simply became more interested in anonymous comments and possible “letters” from strangers instead of the possibility of meeting someone i knew coming towards me on the street. i should immediately add that i’ve never been anything more than an average internet user – the World Wide Web simultaneously entertains and dispirits me; however, any real enthusiasm for its unexplored possibilities has always been distant for me. the fault may possibly lie with my year of birth or my poor results in the exact sciences, as i can but admire, for example, e-Lab’s early activities and the desire to use the “new free space”1. As an easily irritated young person from liepāja’s MPLab pointed out to me in a conversation in a summery bar, “the internet doesn’t end with Facebook!” i had to agree, even though my response to the question seemed inappropriate at the time: rudely generalising, don’t creative ideas more and more often just stop right there, in Facebook or its surroundings?

As for many, my life on the internet became more interesting with an increase in the number of users and the branching out of Web 2.0. the daily virtual life of latvia’s loafers and employees changed significantly with the appearance of draugiem.lv. the portal, which unashamedly borrowed a lot from the Friendster social network that was flourishing at the time, was opened in march 2004, and a year later there were almost 200,000 users on it. in an interview for the sestdiena magazine, lauris liberts, one of the creators of draugiem. lv, boasted: “We have 13,000 people sitting online... Well, that’s a lot, a hell of a lot... there is no other portal in latvia that’s as big, where so many people are simultaneously sitting, clicking, placing pictures and looking at each other’s portal.”2 And people really were doing that – clicking and looking. the portal’s income was, to a large degree, guaranteed by people’s irresistible desire to find out who, when and how often someone had been “looking at them”; profile statistics, which could be purchased for 35 santims per month, solved a previously impossible challenge, namely, to measure attention. draugi attracted the apathetic and thrifty with anonymous silhouettes, which they left after visiting a profile, entertaining thoughts and hopes about virtual and real interconnections. But, images and words became bait for virtual passers-by when the good times ended and the number of visits lingered close to zero. Soon, we knew everything – where our friends had spent their holidays, what they’d eaten, how they’d joked around – and we provided the same in return, namely, a virtual illusion about our own lives. i can’t really remember any more what my virtual double looked like, but when, for example, long unseen acquaintances asked me if i travelled constantly, i pretended that the person who roamed the dirty corners of paris in the pictures was me, visiting here for only a brief moment. i, just like many, was ready to pay 35 santims for 35 pictures to bring a message to my friends and acquaintances about how i was actually faring.
 
Džons Rafmens. Kool-Aid Man in second Life Tours. virtuāla tūre gida pavadījumā. ekrānšāviņi. 2009
 
Viestarts Gailītis chose to conclude that same sestdiena interview from early 2005, which made even those who didn’t sit at keyboards talk about the new internet phenomenon, with a quote from a women’s forum: “Sinja: it’s terrible that once again i caught myself checking draugiem.lv, and how many times already today. man, it’s an epidemic! to those who are uninfected – don’t register with draugiem, it’s an epiDemic, from which i’m really trying to escape....” the orange3 epidemic, which could only be caught following a friend’s invitation4, stretched from Rūjiena to Dublin and further, already reaching a million users by 2007. employers and teaching institutions soon began to battle with the portal, but users were also satisfied with early mornings and late nights, jumping from letters to pictures, from comments to diaries and so on. But among the tireless friends, some strangers turned up as well – people more enthused by anonymity or a safe hideout for sociological observations. the best known among the countless collectors of specimens and searchers for a clear naivism seems to be ivars grāvlejs’ collection of pictures, Latvian Girls and Boys5. Boys and girls boldly pose for us in the pixelated photos, which, as betrayed by the date stamps in the corners, were collected from the draugiem.lv portal during its boom (2005–2007). perhaps at the time they had some specific viewer in mind – some of the images show quite cryptographic scenes, for example, a girl in pink holds a weapon to her friend’s temple, the latter having fallen to her knees in an imploring pose. or a middle aged man sitting at his computer monitor, in which we see an image of that same man sitting by that same monitor. however, in all the images the authors have tried to construct their virtual doubles: seductive or nonchalant, dangerous or someone who loves a drink. But we, the shameless peeping toms, are unable to draw ourselves away from these private pictures; we continue to wander further and further in unending networks and often unwittingly end up in surprising corners.

For a while jon Rafman, whose alter ego the Kool-Aid Man, a huge anthropomorphic jug of red lemonade6, offered services as a guide for a journey through second Life. like many social networks, the 3D virtual world, opened in 2003, attracts a huge number of people who build their virtual doubles, or avatars, on the website in order to communicate with other users, organise various activities and to participate in the construction of a mutual Universe. in a similar way as Kool-Aid Man, who always busts his way through walls to slake the thirsts of the thirsty, jon Rafman offered to break into the odd corners of second Life (koolaidmaninsecondlife.com), searching for situations created by its users and getting involved in virtual orgies, discussions and collective dances. With his grotesque smile, Kool-Aid Man often became an uninvited guest, making other users perceive his presence as mocking, destroying the integrity of their imagined virtual world.

When draugiem.lv, following another global network called Myspace, introduced a music section, new horizons opened up to indefatigable collectors. Among the popular musicians who willingly used social networks for self-advertising and communication with fans, a world of previously unknown and hidden talent was discovered: schlager nuggets with hundreds of compositions, dance music producers from places no longer served by public transport, and people who finally had an opportunity to offer their versions of music to a broad but unseen range of listeners. And, even though in recent years people seem to mostly use draugiem.lv to share advertisements, tired jokes, cat videos and observations from life, the collection of music continues to increase with each day, though some of the compositions will most likely never get played. Nowadays, logging into draugiem.lv7 does at times get compared to visiting relatives in the countryside, drawing parallels with the once popular Myspace, which now often tends to get called “the Detroit of the internet”. in recent years, user activity on second Life has gone down, too, and it seems that this eventually happens to every social network. A few months ago, a lot of media were publishing “worrying” news about young people abandoning Facebook in droves. however, Facebook celebrated its tenth anniversary with more than a billion active users, and the picture sharing network Instagram, which attracts ever more young people who have “jumped ship”, belongs, after all, to Facebook.

When i registered for Facebook in 2008, i had no idea that one day “everybody” would be lured there: grandmothers, anarchists, official state representations, non-commercial galleries and taciturn artists. i, an average internet visitor, thought at the time that this would be just another site for contact with some friends overseas; at that time Myspace had become rather chaotic and ambiguous, battling itself in agony. But nearly six years later i continue to write “f” in the search window each day and end up in the middle of a discussion between strangers or suddenly realise i’ve been looking at photographs of people i don’t know. in 2006 Facebook adopted a farsighted decision that made ‘news feed’ the central element of the social network, allowing each user to see the activities of their virtual friends – whose birthday it is today, who feels tired, who has terminated their relationship with their partner. Soon it was possible to not only watch the virtual activities of others, but to also get involved in them – to comment, like or share. As opposed to other popular social networks of the time, the user no longer had to make the effort to search for something of interest – all of the latest information was right there before his or her eyes.8 At the same time i can see personal photographs, a friend’s recommendation to read this or that book, an acquaintance’s latest composition or find out about this or that person’s political views and – and in the midst of it all – i can see a distraught bald person advertising a hair restoring product. Sometimes i draw conclusions about acquaintances i don’t know all that well by observing their activity on social networks. Sometimes it seems to me that a person has lost his or her mind right in front of everyone’s eyes. At times i quietly watch arguments, all the while trying to control the desire to get involved. At first many users were dismayed about their virtual lives being made public. opportunities were then provided by Facebook to determine how much of your personal information could be viewed by others. And still, a large part of my daily life continues to be swallowed by pseudo Facebook news; obviously, there are things in there i really want to find out about, but around breakfast time i already feel tired from all the information. therefore, when i complete this article, i’ll most likely activate my internet browser application again, permitting me to spend a certain time per day on Facebook, for example, just ten minutes. When the timer has counted off the last seconds, my internet browser will close Facebook and will ask me in huge letters: sHOuLdn’T YOu Be WORKInG? And, even if i decide at that point that this is all quite stupid and no restrictions are required, i will still have to wait until the next day to deactivate this tool.
 
Cory Arcangel. Working On My novel (twitter search). Social network search. 2009
 
Obviously, the internet doesn’t end with Facebook. Sometimes i receive e-mails, sometimes i pretend to be reading the news, at other times i end up on Twitter or searching for answers to some question, for example, why my cat stares into nothingness. Sometimes i decide to find out something more about, for example, ethiopian music. i find out about genres i hadn’t heard of before, i listen to great recordings and suddenly, a few hours later, i emerge with new but not particularly practical knowledge. often i take pleasure in public spats on Twitter, but much more often they tire me. on Twitter, just like on Facebook, there’s a never-ending stream of news – a turbid swamp, the content of which i seemingly influence. i follow a few friends, some media, a few journalists, some arts critics, a couple of bloggers, and in the end i emerge in a turbid swamp where it’s much more enjoyable, on rare occasions, to read melancholy reflections from a vacuum cleaner robot that has acquired consciousness (@selfAwareROOMBA) or a mixture of Kim Kardashian’s and Kierkegaard’s observations (@KimKierkegaard): I always regret when I try long nails. They remind me too poignantly of the sharp scythe of the reaper. Artist cory Arcangel has collated tweets in which people say they are working on their novels (@WrknOnMyNovel): someone has been given the energy to continue writing by Kanye West, someone is drinking beer and writing, someone else will clean their house first and will only start writing after that and so on. like any topic found on Twitter, the key words working on my novel show an uninterrupted flow from thousands of people who, with the good offices of their virtual double, announce to the world that they are still writing a novel. Another of Arcangel’s projects is being developed in a similar way; it is a blog in which various blog entries have been collated, in which their authors apologise to their readers about the fact that they haven’t written anything new for a long time (sorry.coryarcangel.com). the bloggers apologise about the fact that real life has taken up their time, about the fact that nothing worthy of note has taken place or that they seem to think they are not being read, they have had a longstanding headache, etc.

The initial impulse for many bloggers has been to share their knowledge – of recipes or little known amateur films – and this aspect of the internet, the sharing of knowledge, can at times be extraordinarily beautiful. everybody has the opportunity to ask a question, and hope for answers from helpful internet users, on the question and answer site Answers.com, which was started by Yahoo!. in 2011, in his spare time, artist joel holmberg began to pose more difficult questions to the users of his site, for example, “What should i search for?” possible answers: career opportunities / people / why do you ask this? / your twin. But in march 2014 holmberg’s own home page (joelholmberg.com) is no longer offering a look at the artist’s creative work up till now; instead, it shows an enigmatic slide show of advertisements, mentioning in the outline about himself that he “often characterised his neighbours based on their wireless connection”. the desire of the artist to leave his artwork off the network is understandable (if his initial goal hadn’t been their exhibition on the internet), preserving the value of their presence and his control over the documentation of his artwork. even though information on the internet appears and disappears and many home pages have disappeared without a trace, control over one’s data can be deceiving. the San-francisco-based internet archive (archive.org) imperceptibly preserves a great deal of the publicly available information on the internet, provoking discussions about whether this archive has the right to keep something without the author’s permission. in january 2013 the archive announced that it has preserved 240 billion internet uRLs. the internet has always been called a repository of knowledge. however, it is easy to get lost in the loud din of information, to end up in the next listing of “19 girls who don’t know what eyebrows look like” or to wake up in the middle of a boring argument. And that’s why i’m not surprised at the popularity of snapchat, a mobile telephone application that allows its user to send news to an addressee, choosing a time limit (1 to 10 seconds) after which the news is erased. i wouldn’t grieve if Facebook were to erase all of its users’ information once a week. in a similar way, i didn’t particularly mope when not long ago all of my 250-gigabyte music collection disappeared along with my computer’s hard drive. i flicked the dust off the cassette player, turned a record over in the morning light, and a moment later i’d already downloaded 15 recordings from the marrakesh music blog.

On the morning of march 4th, having drunk my third morning coffee and clicked through tens of sites on events in crimea, i once again verified the journalistic quality of The new Yorker. i looked at a photograph of the Riga embankment from the 1920s or 1930s for the nth time, which acquaintances continued sharing, confiding their sadness about bygone eras to each other. i began to look at three news broadcasts, saved about seven articles to read later (or never), sent a few e-mails and watched a couple of saturday night Live sketches (YouTube “knows” what i really like, despite my denials). i quickly unravelled the past week’s exhibitions from the Contemporary Art daily blog, and i wanted to write something or other, but realised i was tired.


Translator into English: Uldis Brūns

1 Šmite, Rasa, Šmits, Raitis. save As? studija, 2014, No. 94, p. 44.
2 gailītis, viestarts. draugi. sestdiena, 26 feb 2005, Accessible online: www.diena.lv/ arhivs/draugi-12326696.
3 the draugiem.lv logo features the colour orange.
4 for many years the only way of joining draugiem.lv was to receive an invitation from someone who had already registered on the portal.
5 www.ivarsgravlejs.com/pages/draugiem.htm
6 Since the 1950s, Kool-Aid Man has been the Kool-Aid Lemonade mascot, who always arrives in advertisements, busting his way through walls. When jim jones made his followers commit mass suicide on November 18, 1978, an event that was later named “jonestown massacre”, his assistants used a Kool-Aid competitor drink, mixing poison into it.
7 in December 2013 draugiem.lv still had the leading position, marking latvia on the map as one of the few countries in the world in which Facebook does not dominate. Source: vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/.
8 At an exhibition organised by RIXC, called sAVe As, at the “kim?” contemporary Art centre, a work by olia lialina and Dragan espenschied called once Upon (2011–2012) was exhibited, in which, among other things, one could see an interpretation of how Facebook could have looked in 1997 – like a two-way path, allowing one to travel from one user to the next. the project can be viewed at: 1x-upon.com/.
 
Screenshot from Google Chrome extension app Stay Focused 1.4.9. 2014
 
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