Cluster Blog

Jared Boger, a Baltimore-based artist, carefully curates his tumblr, which is a conglomeration of photos he takes, screenshots of conversations he has, and bits of appealing internet detritus. Like most tumblrs, it might not be more than the sum of its parts. Actually, it’s exactly the sum of its parts. Whether or not each upload is particularly compelling, after scrolling down page after page, they begin to wash together into a certain cohesive logic.

The best blogs appeal to user’s attention spans, which are usually attuned to their respective blogging platforms. Tumblr viewers expect to scroll down pretty quickly, and thus the aesthetic of tumblr posts is generally a hurried, casual one. Tumblr is advertised as the “easiest blog ever,” after all. Boger’s posts make good use of this format, and come across as just the right amount of self-conscious yet casual, as in, “it must not have taken him too long to post that.” Of course, this invariably means that he spends a lot of time crafting his posts to ensure that they appear sufficiently uncrafted. 

Boger’s tumblr is mentioned in an excellent essay by Sofia Leiby entitled “I am Such a Failure: Poetry On, Around, and About the Internet in the August 2011 issue of Pool. She writes in reference to Boger: “The screencap, which appears “unmanipulated,” provides an illusion of transparency to the work, a slice of real time, although of course, the cap is often manipulated by the artist.”

Leiby’s essay as a whole focuses on the notion of “new sincerity” (à la David Foster Wallace) in internet art, examining the ways in which irony functions in work that is made for the web. She suggests that current modes of irony are often even more layered than possible in pre-internet times, but that this does not necessarily efface the capacity of the work to reach new and different levels of honesty and emotional connection.

I’m unsure of the possibilities for New Sincerity Online; to me, irony 5.0 is still irony. This is probably why I don’t love Boger’s screenshots of texts as much as I like a lot of the images, whose irony is often displaced by the other, more interesting, transparent, and even intimate elements of formal composition and humor.