Crip Infrastructures for Mad Art
A Memorial Architecture for Net.Art
An archive built to honor what it cannot keep.
The Ontology of Net.Art
Structurally crip. Structurally Mad.
Net.art's commitments share ground with crip technoscience and Mad Studies.
The case studies.
The works listed below are not the works that would be included in the hypothetical net.art museum. Instead, they are analyzed here as structural case studies to think critically about the design of the museum itself and its potential infrastructure needs.
- My Boyfriend Came Back from the War Olia Lialina, 1996. Net.art.
- Mouchette Martine Neddam, 1996–. Net.art.
- Excellences & Perfections Amalia Ulman, 2014. Instagram-based performance.
- Untitled Game JODI, 1996–2001. Software modification.
The glitch tradition.
Ant Scott (Beflix), Rosa Menkman, the databending and circuit-bending communities. Machine failure as medium.
The breakdown is the work.
Care, Not Cure
The institutional reflex.
Format migration. Emulation. Code repair. Each presented as neutral stewardship.
Curative violence (Kim 2017; Kafer 2013).
The non-normative object treated as pathology awaiting intervention.
Three cures in practice:
- JODI's Quake: forced playability.
- Mouchette: 1996 navigation smoothed into modern flow.
- Ulman: a four-month live feed flattened into a slideshow.
Care maintains the ramp.
The work decides how to enter.
Theoretical Frameworks
Mad Studies.
Madness as legitimate identity and standpoint. Sanism as the structural bias against non-compliant cognition.
Crip technoscience (Hamraie & Fritsch 2019).
Non-compliant knowing-making. Disabled and Mad people as designers, hackers, and critics.
Crip time (Kafer 2013; Samuels 2017).
Lag. Loop. Asynchrony. Fatigue. Rest.
Net.art lives in crip time.
The institutional database flattens the temporality that constitutes the work.
Williams's Spatial Logic
The interface is space, not text.
Meaning emerges in the embodied encounter with platform, cursor, scroll, and load.
Place and space (de Certeau).
The database is place. The interface is space. The user's tour is the second register.
Two failures of curation:
- Overclaimed: Gorée Island Memorial Museum.
- Displaced: Kigali airport memorial, 1998.
The third mode: absence.
Berlin's Topography of Terror. An open foundation. A loss held visible.
Friction as Value
Mainstream UX:
Friction registers as defect. Each click is a failure of flow.
Crip technoscience:
Friction is where interdependence, deliberation, and coalition happen.
Search as inquiry.
Surface ambiguity. Return related-but-not-matched. Treat search as practice.
Navigation as choice.
No autopilot. No countdown. No abandoned-cart pressure.
Sessions persist. Idle is not abandonment.
Build the Infrastructure
Stabilize the platform so the works can maintain their ephemerality.
The static-HTML foundation is the wheelchair ramp. It is not the work. Ephemerality should be supported.
Govern cooperatively.
Academic libraries. Disability-justice organizations. Mirrors hosted by participating communities.
Render static-first.
Plain HTML. Progressive enhancement, never dependency. Open source. Copyleft.
Publish decay schedules.
Every URL declares its own mortality on the page that hosts it.
Digital Architecture
Intended Structures:
- Memorial Wall: names and dates of ended works.
- Open Foundation: works in active decay.
- Chance Encounter: one random work. No algorithm.
Three layers per work, always visible:
Documentary (metadata). Surrogate (labeled stand-in). Conditional (emulation, with disclosure).
Curatorial Ethics
Ask, don't scrape.
Build curatorial relationships years in advance. Refuse preemptive capture (Caswell & Cifor 2016).
Honor the right to decay (Windon 2012).
Plan the ending into the acquisition agreement.
Document endings as curatorial acts.
The retired URL becomes the memorial page.
Allow withdrawal at any time, without penalty.
Withdrawal is an expression of the work's lifecycle.