The Immediated Now

"Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Network culture is not limited to digital technology or to the Internet but rather is a broad sociocultural shift. Under network culture both art and everyday life take mediation as a given. Life becomes performance, taking place in a culture of exposure in exchange for self-affirming feedback from the net. This chapter explores the role of this poetics of the real in cultural production from YouTube to the gallery. The new poetics of reality is not the traditional realism. Earlier codes are replaced by immediacy, self-exposure, performance, and remix." -- from Turbulence