“While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?”
Claire Bishop
“One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”
George W. Bush
Without falling into tautological gimmick, Jogging seriously reconsiders Tumblr as a "site". The team produces images from outrageous combinations of everyday objects, including batteries, Powerade, Ugg boots, Whole foods bath salts, fish, and a host of other common objects. At first glance, the project looks like a Dada-esque assemblage of random things, presented simply for absurdist shock value. In some ways, it is possible to read it this way, and it stands alone as hilarious pastiche of the range of contemporary culture. However, it is the site-specific nature of the artworks which gives it its most power as an experiment. Tumblr, with a blank white background, becomes an online gallery, and its specific means of presentation and reception animate the art as social-media commentary.
The striking images of odd everyday situations which are obviously staged, are presented as serious artworks, with proper art gallery titles such as "Found Photograph", "Still Life", and "Installation Image". On the website, this posits the images as art, but as users reblog the pictures on their own blogs, they become completely de-contextualised, existing alongside other images, and without artistic treatment.
Rather than acting as an internet version of an existing power structure (i.e. a gallery), Jogging lets the Tumblr network act as a fluid, decentralised gallery, run by thousands of people, which proliferates its images inside of this unique digital landscape, sending the images through the tubes of the internet, and positioning them in many different contexts. The random ways in which the works end up de-contextualized and re-contextualized (for example, next to a picture of a half-naked girl with a gun, or a .gif of Will Smith), is precisely Bishop's call for an art which "[reflects] deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence".
Turning the hive-mind of Tumblr into a place for what could be thought of as a site-specific installation makes the de-contextualized randomness and apparent authorlessness of the objects seem even more familiar yet unfamiliar. What happens when Jogging decides to move to the context of another site?
All the works tell a story about things that are just on the verge of collapse, like Red Hook