Nils Jean

My Ph.D. is a historicising and speculative exercise aiming at investigating the re-appropriation of discarded pieces of information in online art practice. In this thesis I am arguing that the digital debris of Internet Art represent an allegorical and entropic resistance to the knowledge embodied by the Epistemology of Search. Thus, the thesis reverses the Renaissance notion that ruins are a repository of knowledge and defends instead the assertion that digital debris are critical agents that intervene in the network paradigm created by and for the Internet. I am defending the position that digital debris are the projection of a cultural concept onto a technical reality which allows them to instill a dialogue between the computational and the cultural. Here, digital debris in their plural form, are understood as words typed in search engines and which then disappear; bits of obsolete code which are lingering on the Internet, abandoned web pages or pieces of ephemeral information circulating on the Web 2.0 and which are used as materials by practitioners. By Epistemology of Search I am referring to the work of David Joselit in After Art (2012) where the Art Historian described and theorised the ways in which, in contemporary culture, images hold value not in what they convey but in the patterns of dissemination they create once they enter into circulation.