title: covfefe: language in a meme economy

artist: by Ami Clarke

(1st edition)

Cries of ‘fake news’ characterise these very particular times, but fake news is anything but new, with words and language having long been weaponised.  Artist Ami Clarke takes us on a romp, thinking through artworks of her own that emerged during the semiotic boom, in which hyper-speculation, via the loss of the referent in both language and the economy, was shared across the trending behaviour of neoliberal/free market dynamics in finance, as well as emerging media ecologies.

Drawing an equivalence between blockchain and the derivative contract via the work Ami Clarke: Author of the Blank Swan, a conceptual conceit borne of Elie Ayache’s writing in the Blank Swan, she touches upon Elaine Sturtevant’s early practice of ‘making works of other artists works’ to consider how contingency provides an opportunity to consider what it might be to ‘act’ within the protocols of both art and the derivatives market, as well as the highly volatile ‘text as market’ of new media ecologies.   As truthiness snakes it’s way through memetic media, via the magic sauce of Cambridge Analytica’s psychograms, and a granular scale statistical analysis underwritten by the secret sauce of right wing billionaires, though, it becomes clear that contingency is writ large in the dynamics of a highly neoliberal meme economy, riddled with a jouissance invested in transgression, purely for the sake of it.   Here, the inconsistencies in claims of ‘fake news’ amidst rights to ‘freedom of expression’ converge in the shortcomings of older colonial practices of extraction, and new hyper-networked neo-colonialisms, that congeal in the contractual condition of insurance and the financial markets in the pressing urgency of the environmental challenges ahead, as the future comes up increasingly short.

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Published by Banner Repeater.
First paperback edition printed 2020 in the United Kingdom

Published by Banner Repeater
Text by A Clarke
colour cover,

paperback format.