Diverging Paths Connect: Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant

I don't know where to begin discussing The Radicant because it takes a great deal of time to read, for me. This is not because I find it too difficult to understand or can't relate to it, but quite the opposite. I find it dense and thought-provoking. There are so many concepts contained within that I can only take in bits at a time as my head starts reeling from all the possibilities and thoughts that are relevant to my mind and my situation. I will attempt because of this truth, to limit myself and challenge myself to find and highlight only those things that I find most important and the most recurring concepts in my own mind. To start off, I find the term radicant as defined by Bourriaud to be very well-stated and aptly described. I think that the progression of the internet and technology along the current path is very much like a system of roots that spreads out and connects wherever possible. I will also say that this a very large concept when I think about what that means to the lives of us here, and now experiencing these changes and networks. It can be scary and exciting simultaneously, perhaps with a bit of beauty thrown in. When described in that way, I might start to think that new media and internet possibilities have a achieved a level of sublime, though I am not sure that is accurate to say. I think that Bourriaud's raising of the issue of video is very interesting. He has a good basis for predictions about future trends from the unique kinds of statistics he picks up about particular video content and shifts from completely original concepts to the increasing trend of borrowing, remixing, or creating any type of mash-up that has been becoming increasingly simple and more prevalent. There is a valid point here when he speaks about not a decrease in creativity, rather a different emphasis on speed and a different type of creativity to create new things from preexisting or borrowed elements. From there, the possibilities become more spread out as he discusses how much more video use and uploading exists now because of Youtube and all the similar video platforms. It is exciting, though I think also daunting and a bit frightening to consider that, indeed in a short time there may be little of our lives that goes undocumented by video or does not become digitized, transformed, and edited for display in a variety of possibilities. I have similar mixed feelings about the consideration of measuring greatly different artists and their works in the same place and time regardless of the circumstances of their works' production. The fact that such information as well as cultural, regional, and chronological aspects of oeuvre and identity could be so blurred as to become irrelevant or impossible to ascertain when judging the content of work. Will that eradicate the need for criticism, comparison, and evaluation all together? If there are no differences of creation that can be depended upon, will there be differences in result or will art just become more similar as all the divergent ideas and concepts become melded into the web 2.0 world? It is appealing to think of such freedom from stereotypes and unfair judgement or no judgement at all, but then what becomes of art? Will it continue to have value and purpose or just become a mass of indistinguishable content that is too difficult to measure or understand? If the things that we are experiencing now and witnessing the changes of are all part of the Web 2.0, what will a Web 3.0 do to change the way we disburse and collect information. I don't think art can ever be the same in times that are so quickly changing just like The Radicant explores artists' new approaches to investigating time, history, post colonialism and other themes. Bourriaud's suspicion that the next wave of art after post modernism will not be a group of concepts and trends that spread globally, rather ideas that will start off as global "from scratch." If this is true, where does that leave criticism and the art history that discusses and classifies trends once they have happened? Will it, too, have to speed up and become global to develop simultaneously with such a movement, or would it fall behind and be done away with in the process of streamlining to only necessity and removing anything that seems obsolete? It becomes evermore unreliable and perhaps futile to speculate as technology changes and updates the world so rapidly.

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Jordan Severson