Collaborators: –

Pay in Attention: On the thresholds of attentive Capital
[Text by Joannie Baumgärtner]

It comes off as the chorus of crowded media, the scream of a thousand voices, colors and shapes. It grows into the symphony of the sleek, the symbiosis of suave topics and the sensations of simple aesthetics , but it bears an eeriness, the feeling of something present, where there should be non.
It comes off as noise, not random, prepared but not curated, as frozen move and caught attention. It grows into the deep warm vibration, the echo in an cave, the split of light in a prism, the crack of ones vision in a kaleidoscope. Noise, not the hurting kind, still exceeding the generally recognized limits.
It comes off as orchestrated visual cracks, as spam sent rhythmically, as the total takeover of trash. It grows into the Gausian soft-blur of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly that compendes an exciting narrative, one that follows the outline of visual cultures, which must have visual ends.
In the Project The Chemtrails Kicked In Felix Neumann takes a broad detour from the core concept of graphic design and explores visual communication non-inductively, in a deductive yet creative way. Neumann explores the aesthetics and communicative structures of so called Clickbait-Content und submits his own aesthetic production to what is best described as an economy of attention within cyberspace.
Being, as Neumann describes his performance, on the fringes of graphic design, it actually actively inhabits a threshold. The in-between of a shift from Design as making by rules to Design as rules by making. This happens to such an extend that Graphic Design becomes excessive, a way of being in and maneuvering through that aforementioned economy of attention. But while Neumanns builds his approach on this new and predominantly digital market in a mechanical way, the splinters of this economy, as they manifest themselves in a sheer myriad of images, sounds, objects and media, seem to bear a certain animism: there is something going on, but it is undefinable by aesthetic rule, formally shapeshifting, transgressing taste.
Neumanns approach, in conventional terms best described as subversive-affirmative, transcends pure over-affirmation as a reaction to those new markets. By not choosing yet willfully sampling seemingly everything, Neumann subverts an economy where information is traded against attentiveness, destabilizing the value of attentive capital.
This inflationary surrendering of the own attentive potential allows him to establish a prognostic relation towards his subject: When the Chemtrails Kicked In is not adressing a moment or experience in the past, nor is it talking about a here-and-now, but rather about the what-is-yet-to-come in an exuberant visual culture.
It is the same one that already begins to assign value neither through formal notions of beauty and proportionality, nor via communicative content and accessibility, but through and over the so called curiosity-gap, translating to affective potential and desire. Retargeting the aesthetics of this affective potential to the viewer, Neumanns role becomes that of a medium, an interface through which information flows, gets split and restructured, but it never originates from there. This is a way of making the future present through a performance of affirmation, to let an actually dark prognosis seem conveniently contemporary.
In the future, we‘ll all be paid in attention. But as it is with all futures, they flow into the present moment already: We already pay with attention. Workers in the attentive economy include Youtubers, Influencers, Bloggers, Cloud-Rappers ... Yet it need to be said, that these markets might be intermingled with capitalist production, yet function differently: the actual good plays no role in the transaction anymore. In fact, the Clickbaiter gets paid (in monetary capital) by a third party according to the numeric value of how many times a hyperlink has been activated. The Clickbait-Content is a proxy for advertisements, clicks are the currency generated through attentive (affective) labour – and it seems to be the hope, that once one started clicking, one will keep on trading their attentive capability for information. Paradoxically the after of a click plays no role in this, as the attentive transaction is successful once the hyperlink gets activated, whether the content behind is read or not. In the supermarket of attentive economy you must buy everything you take out of the shelf for a closer look. Actually, it is not even free to look at the shelves. As attentive economy uses the “click” as currency, you already pay to enter the store, without even noticing, you pay for walking down the grocery isle, for an inspection of the bananas‘ freshness, but once you wanna go to the point of sale, you realize there is only one in the supermarket next door and this one sells sneakers (or diet pills, lawn-mowers, viagra, panflutes, porn ...).In comparison to a market economy, this temporal and spatial difference of the transaction can explain Clickbait as phenomenon: Attentive Economy means paying for access to but not the goods you‘re acessing – and the bait is there to make you access. Other than classical forms of advertisement, it is not arousing a desire for a commodified object, but one for information, in which advertisement is implemented. At this point I would like to also think around the implications of Clickbait: it is supposed to arouse curiosity – a state of affect – in its reader. It works by trigger- tension- yet for release you have to pay in attention. It is trying to squat in the curiosity gap – giving enough information to achieve an affectionate state, yet less enough to leave one greedy for more. One could think of clickbait as a form of captcha (or touring test): Not only proves the consumer that they are a conscious subject, they also prove that they are a human with a certain interest, a specific consumer. A Bot can click on a link, but it can‘t be bothered. This is the labour done in attentive economy: proving you are actually capable of affectively responding to information (that you are Human) by doing so. Affection is the way of market regulation in attentive economy, as it is the affectability created by a headline or an image that regulates demand. Supply is (theoretically) endless, as the content is not only allowed to be shared but rather created for that exact purpose. Therefore, attentive goods flow almost freely – on the other side, affect creates Feedback-Bubbles and Content-Loops. As a worker in the attentive economy, you sell your labor-power by the click. However, as it is with any capitalistic model of production, any promise of happiness must become crestfallen, and in the world of Clickbait it is almost certainly immediately the case. There is nothing to gain from these trades, only questionable content and disappointing revelations.

But Neumann still has found a way of critical exploitation: Extracting, reorganizing and de-contextualizing information, but submitting everything under a stream of contentedness. Not evaluating, but picking up and re-channelling the attentive bait. It is the point where the designer-subject becomes an interface, where any authorship becomes immediately minimalized until it is absent.
We hear Neumann speak, we see him act, but he is not embodying his own subject at that point. In fact the project bears a triple absence: the absence of an author, the absence of content and the absence of context. This triple-absence implements a vacuum of information that should bring graphic design to its limits . That Neumann establishes this empty void through a process of radical and over-affirmative production is remarkable, yet it is not the vacuum, nor the absence which is the point of interest, but the the failure of the later. What remains still, is visible and audible is a presence where there should be none, an eeriness that manifests itself in the artefacts, the mirage of a content, an information, an author. Failures of Absence that turn into the ghosts of visual communication.

Services: Art-Direction, Graphic Design, Performance, Sound Design, Music, Fine Art, Exhibition

Collaborators: –

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–

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