Phreaking Collective's Bit Rot @ Copeland Gallery

Face ID, tap-to-pay, “select all the images with traffic lights”. Undertaking mindless interactions with technology, the glassy-eyed user produces valuable data for the development of technological systems. Swipe right, swipe left, swipe down, double-tap-to-like: in the same breath as we consume, we create. 

Bit Rot names this inversion of traditional economic roles with a particular clarity. Alvin Toffler called it “prosumption”, a term which George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson picked up to describe how late-stage capitalism blurs the boundary between producing and consuming, a phenomenon furthered and facilitated by the digital platform. Step in front of Yunzhi/Melissa Li’s “Hear How You Look, See How You Sound”, and prosumption becomes literal. An industrial surveillance camera faces the user, interjected amidst a constellation of LED screens. Black cables connect this visual system to a processor which is only just hidden: it reminds the viewer of its presence in a manner which is furtive only as pretence. The moment the viewer takes up her role in this orchestral performance, she has already supplied the system with its raw material. Pressing the unassuming button in front of her, a series of images bloom across the wall. No single “original” can be deciphered, only a set of machine derivations: one frame cross-hatched with scan lines, another collapsed into blocky quantization, another spectralized, like being misremembered by a computer.

With this concomitance of consumption and production, Li’s work shows how the interface turns spectatorship into supply. The significance of this turn proves well documented in economic and political theory: alongside Ritzer’s “prosumption” stand Tiziana Terranova’s criticism of the cultural economy’s reliance on the “free labor” facilitated through digital platforms, as well as Axel Bruns “produsage”, describing how user-led content creation renders the distinction between passive consumption and active production relatively moot.

Lagtime_Seedling’s performance at Bit Rot similarly satirizes this hazy labour relationship: the artist opens and closes YouTube videos to create electronic music. The performance brings to the fore Adam Smith’s “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production”; both remind us that none of this is wholly new. What is revolutionary here is the scale, automation and datafication of these entanglements.

Bit Rot embraced the performative aspect of computational art forms, not only through the physical works on view, but also through the performances and workshops it hosted. Zhanlan (OrangeSpy)’s Algorithmic Music performance exemplified how the shift towards digital platforms has rendered the artist a composer of executable scores and the viewer an operator. 

The show on whole exposes, literally and visually, the reproductive mode produced within a system of platform culture as mechanized routine rather than situational creative choice. Between production and consumption, reproduction is treated not as an active choice, but an autonomous action by the machine. 

From here the argument extends easily to the conditions Shoshannah Zuboff names as the age of surveillance capitalism: we are passive consumers but active producers; our participation is harvested almost constantly (if we carry a smartphone). Norbert Wiener’s insistence that, if we are to remain in control of the process, humans must stand at both the beginning and the end of a loop sounds newly fragile in a world where automation automates itself and loops open and close without us. The show makes that paradox feel not abstract but bodily, and tempers critique with a kind of wry pedagogy: it lets us see how easily we generate “content” by walking, looking, or waiting, then invites us to engage those conditions deliberately rather than sleepwalk through them.

This wry tone suggests an eyebrow-raised inquiry into digital alienation: isn’t the singularity of production and consumption a reconciliation of the maker and their production?

However, the curatorial model here reveals the artist as a composer of executable scores and the viewer as an operator, exposing, literally and visually, the reproductive mode produced within a system of platform culture as mechanized routine rather than independent choice. Production is automatic, not active; any reconciliation is thus bastardized.

There is a performance element to all the works, and Bit Rot celebrates that. Performances are structured by the artists in advance. The choice and act of reproduction is ceded to the programming. As it exposes the shift in labor relations, the performative aspects of the show likewise illustrate a new relationship between the artist and their product: in this somewhat satire theatre, the artist steps back as a sort of clockmaker god. 

This carnivalesque subversion of producer-consumer relations was on full view at Bit Rot. Walking through the Copeland courtyard into the gallery, Louise Wan’s Mouthless greets the eager visitor with a satirization of our relationship with digital consumption. eerily-isolated tongues, powered by exposed stepper motors, lick a pile of USB drives in a grotesque liturgy of consumption. Echoing Sarah Lucas’s use of the grotesquely-abstracted body as a metaphor for  economic relationships and political site, Wan explores a reductive display of bodily elements as a means to establish critical distance. The body here becomes a site for social struggle; However, Wan also builds upon Lucas’s feminist model to show how abstracted bodily elements become a network through the pre-programmed mediation of technology. The choice to open the show with this digital Bakhtinization foreshadows the performative aspects of the show, not only as an active bodily experience for the viewer, but also and importantly as using this performance to create a carnival space which subverts expectations around political and social positions. The most significant aspect of this carnivalesque structure is the show’s forensic revelation of how technological networks mediate a novel relationship between the viewer/user and the dominant mode of production. 

Phreaking Collective’s Bit Rot does not simply offer a critique of the system of production mediated by the digital network; the apparatus of the show also offers a model for how to make use of the network as a site of power. Even before stepping into the exhibition, Phreaking Collective’s announces this carnival synchronicity of production and consumption, defining interactions between people–mediated by technology–as a site of power. Visitors, most having discovered the four-day-long show through a post reproduced through instagram’s algorithm, are asked to contribute to the Collective’s crowdfunding campaign. Already, not only are technologically-mediated networks on full view as a source of power, but this power is actually put into action. 

The infrastructure of display likewise underscores the show’s exposure of technological networks as a strategy for curatorial organization: a sticker accompanies each artwork, which allows the user/viewer to participate in a chat about the artwork by tapping their phone against it. 

An infrastructural undertone is present throughout the show. Zepu Li’s A Rather Favourable Storm plays with the imagery of technological infrastructure. Other works exhibited treat cables and protocols as materials, defining the artwork's aura through the constraints of these fixtures.

Like Zepu Li's work, Jack Jesse and Paula Andrea Molina Osorio's joint installation of screens explicitly models its substance upon the substrate, rather than the final product. The screenprints are taken away by the viewer as an artefact, while the means of production and reproduction remains.

Xach Hill’s The Place where its Buried echoes this network aspect, with a focus on emotion as mediated through technology. LED screens, stacked in a seemingly-ad-hoc pile, display a cacophony of corrupted language; then, all of a sudden, the apparent disorganization is undermined: the displays come together to illustrate the continuous skeleton of a body. Hill’s work illustrates Bakhtin’s theorization of how performance can unite a disorganized mass into a powerful collective. The work symbolizes as an assertion of an Arendtian definition of power, where power is not zero-sum, but rather something that can be created only through joint action in concert. This assertion acts as a synopsis of the overall philosophy of the show, making it stand out against more institutional displays of programming-adjacent artwork.

Yes - why write about this show, rather than alternatives such as Electric Dreams at the Tate, or White Cube’s Alien Shores? Phreaking Collective’s strategy offers a novel framework for how we share, consume, and preserve digital experiences and hybrid artwork, defining the politics of the new digital materialism as a web3-like shared repertoire of maintenance, repair and commons-based coordination. This show’s model,  exposes the network as a site of power, and incorporates visitor participation to show how our relationship with technology has revolutionized our the acts of consuming and producing. It poses questions about ownership and the means of production. 

For me, the Bit Rot was instrumental in defining a set of aesthetic and conceptual aspects of a new, digitally-attuned art. These aspects include performance: satire, and particularly a bodily satire on the one hand, and interaction / viewer activation on the other; infrastructural elements, seen through the inclusion of "hardware" motifs within finished products; a certain nostalgia (visible particularly through the use of vintage display systems); and a video-game sensibility, which I think is really interesting because the show treats this gaming aspect not only within the scope of this sort of alt-cultural aspect to which it has formerly been relegated, but rather makes a really energetic and almost pop-like move towards the aesthetic.