Output details

In the Long Tail

In the Long Tail was an hour-long science-fiction lecture delivered from a dark stage among various moving image projections, elevated objects and props, all of which are tethered, visually or conceptually, to the concept of ‘the long tail’.

The work is an attempt to resolve the question of where new forms of internet-based research belong within contemporary art, and how art might be transformed by the convergence of Internet and digital technologies.

The title refers to the economic theory of ‘The Long Tail’ popularised by Chris Anderson, which is about Internet consumerism and the new global distribution of goods. Its graphic ‘Pareto curve’ represents how a small number of things, previously available through selected distributors in the mass market, are now replaced by a proliferation of Internet dealers distributing a larger number of niche products to smaller markets. The work imagines what it is to be within the long tail, a place for niche images and clandestine consumer behaviour.

The work is also concerned with ‘prosumerism,’ and the activity that these new forms of consumerism require. It touches upon the utopian ideas of Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue and the origins of the Internet. The Internet’s productivity and capacity to ‘expand outwards’ are considered, alongside its more reductive or constrictive dimension. From this, I constructed and performed a representative grid of the long tail, the axis of which is ‘cosmic’ and ‘autistic’ at the same time, representing both the potentially expansive impact of the Internet on everyday life and its other more limiting effects..

The project brought me from video to live event, a transition that allowed various ideas to converge dynamically on a place where excess information could find a body within a unique performance.