Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.1

Breaking news. When did it become possible to search for breaking news? Is news always breaking? Isn’t the point of breaking news that is breaks into the ordinary stream of things, the tick tock tick of daily life? If it’s breaking all the time, then it’s no longer an interruption, it’s ordinary life. Although maybe this confusion lies outside of the act of typing “breaking news” into a search engine. Dating sites for teens. School is a dating site, isn’t it? Or maybe the person who wants to find dating sites for teens isn’t a teen. That train of thought quickly runs along well worn paths, paths worn by no one person, but by a bevy of media sites who, by running the story, make it into news that others rush to cover. Adults who prey on children on the internet. Parents who aren’t concerned enough about their child’s safety. Flax seed hulls. Is there something that can be done with the hulls? If I searched for that term too, would I find out? Robots movied. Typo or new verb? Instructions to make a bridal veil. The bridal industry hasn’t won over everybody then, although I know that a search that includes the term “bridal veil” brings advertisements for all sorts of bridal services. Sea elephant sewr. What would “sic” even mean in this context? Wallpaper. Buy? Remove? Hunted like a wolf. A spoonerism from the Duran Duran song? Or maybe there’s less distance between that phrase and its referent than I think. Although it can’t be literal, can it? Ellipsometers griffin george. The world is so busy today. “Wake me up with a blow job.” The world of people who are online now is so busy today, busy, industrious, inquisitive, horny. The world of people who are searching for something. “Searching” in that last sentence means something literal and something allegorical. To be searching for something needn’t be an existential state; it’s perfectly practical. Use a search engine often enough, however, and the existential comes back into play. Not as a way to describe a life that eschews surface for depths, but almost the opposite, a life in which the relevance of a search engine to one’s daily curiosities stretches way out to the horizon, an infinite series of events which raise questions that a quick visit to a search engine can answer. A search engine is existential because it weaves itself, for anyone who has used one often enough, tightly into the weft of an ordinary life. Attend a party with the well-connected and time how long it takes for someone to wish aloud that they had a search engine, or for someone to pull one up on a mobile device. A very well-connected friend recently told me that he’s learned not to take out his phone in the middle of conversations in order to consult a search engine and answer the latest dispute thrown up by the conversation. It’s more fun, he says, to let the conversation founder on the missing data. It’s just the sort of in-situ discovery that people make all the time when some piece of technology binds itself to daily life. New morals, new etiquettes, new normativities are discovered in order to mark out something as a unwelcome interruption to daily life and something else as an ordinariness to be recovered. Even though it was the interruption that made possible the affection for a mode of the ordinary. You can’t love everything all of the time.
The website for the online version of Thomson and Craighead’s Beacon tells its visitors that it began broadcasting other people’s search queries to the web at “00:00HRS GMT on 01st January 2005” (as I type these passages, I watch Beacon in a separate window on my desktop and intercalate its search queries, in italics, with these sentences about them). Since 01st January 2005, Thomson and Craighead have produced two different versions of Beacon, a gallery installation and a railway flap sign. The gallery installation projects Beacon, borderless, onto an unmarked painted gallery wall, search queries appearing and replacing each other every 1.5 seconds. The railway flap sign is more formally multivariate. It references an older style of public information system, common to airports and train stations from the late 1950s until the 1990s when such systems started to be replaced by LCD displays driven by networked computer databases. The three versions, considered together, reference three modes of address—an untrackably diffuse Web, a rarefied art gallery, and a historically multi-sited information display in which web traffic is overlaid onto air or train traffic as evoked by the form of the sign. Three modes of address assembling three public sphere imaginaries, not actual publics, assembled and ready for action, but three publics imagined by the technologies that address them: a public unified by its intermittent presence online; a public unified by its taste in art, its refractive desire to be part of an art scene; and a public both unified and split by its juxtaposed presence to history and to the present tense. A site-unspecific public, a taste public and a temporal public. Taken altogether as an iterative system, Beacon conjoins three distinct forms of publicness via three forms of public address and a congeries of meditative technologies.
If critical publics, or what Nancy Fraser called “counterpublics,” voice a wish for political change, Beacon’s publics are driven by a different engine: a more individualized wish, desire, curiosity, although the unit of subjectivity here is not clearly the individual (much less the liberal subject), nor is it related via a part-whole relationship to critical publics. James g. king + redmond. Beacon presents search queries that hail from one searcher, or one IP address anyway, for an uncertain audience of witnesses. It’s quite possible that I’m the only one watching at just this moment, as I write this sentence. By the time I finish the next, others may have joined me, although I’d never know. Beastly stories. That not-knowing is a feature of web publics which is not unlike a feature of print publics, as Michael Warner has described them: one’s presence to the public is a technical matter, are you or aren’t you a reader. In any case, one needn’t know anything about the other members of that public. And in the life of a public, learning something about one’s fellow members often appears as an anomaly. A book itself is enough; there needn’t be a “letters to the editor” feature for the public to be self-reflexive in the way Warner intends, for it to receive echoes of itself in the form of self-knowledge or self-awareness. The existence of a book is enough, and in that particular sense, a website is no different. Value place liberty mo. When websites do fold in forms of feedback, participatory forms, these forms can be reckoned therefore not as a constitutive feature of the site’s publicness—it’s sufficiently public on Warner’s and Habermas’ terms without those forms—but as one of the forms of communication afforded by the web, or a website, as a particular site for public action.
Beacon, however, in all of its versions, bends self-awareness around a further corner by reflecting an otherwise invisible feature of search engine use: the search queries themselves, as other people formulate them. Which is to say, other people’s questions, wishes, curiosities, desires, hopes, conundrums, memory lapses, researches, investigations, idlings, typos, misspellings, secrets, embarrassments, bored maunderings, desultory semi-free associations, and etcetera. Beacon’s formalism is both understated and camouflaged, so warrants scrutiny (fig. 1). Camouflaged because it looks like a million other websites, with nothing to single it out as anything other than any other website, let alone a commentary or meta-reflection on web culture itself: simple courier font, some lines of static text that surround the one active, apparently live window in which search queries appear, then disappear, then are replaced by the next search query in the ceaseless series, one every 1.5 seconds. Each individual search query appears, left-aligned, in Beacon’s search window. Then begins a rapid fade-to-black, blinks out to an opaque blackness, then that blackness gives way, before a cinematic wipe fade, moving left to right, revealing the next search query, fed live from Dogpile, a query typed at that moment, right then, by somebody.