Zany Systems: Information Overload and Contemporary Art

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Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Visual Arts (DVA)
Queensland College of Art
Arts, Education and Law
Information overload and algorithmic systemisation have come to characterise our everyday experience. While this state of hyperconnectivity facilitates communication and instant retrieval of knowledge, our networked systems overwork and overwhelm us as users. In particular, the total integration of the Internet into lived experience has had undesirable effects on our workplaces, attention spans, decision-making and emotions. Workplace employees are expected to be contactable and productive at any time; the novelty produced by information feeds rewards inattention; algorithms choose songs, meals and romantic partners for us; and lifestyle performances on social media provoke a fear of missing out. This is to say that our hyperconnected reality places us in a forever switched-on world where the lines between work and play have become obscured. According to theorist Sianne Ngai, the state of being constantly ‘on’ in this way manifests culturally in what she calls the ‘zany aesthetic’. This thesis uses an experimental arts based research methodology that relies on drawing, animation, and installation to uniquely reflect how our world has been shaped by this kind of stressful hyper-connectivity. In particular, this thesis explores the meaning of ‘zaniness’ as a symptom of this kind of contemporary information overload. By exploring the zany in visual terms, this thesis aims to reveal new qualities of this aesthetic category by reflecting on the exhibited creative outcomes produced over the course of this project. Ngai, in her Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), claims that zaniness appears across film, television, video games, poetry, literature and art as a reflection of how we perform our labour in late capitalism. Specifically, Ngai suggests the non-stop action of characters like Lucy Ricardo of television’s I Love Lucy or Looney Tunes’s Wile E. Coyote offers a way of seeing the aesthetic in the 24/7 world of production and consumption. However