RafaelFajardo

LR: A lot of the excitement behind the book was trying to use characterizations of information to start rethinking all these kinds of things you wouldn’t think of in terms of information. Information exists to be instrumentalized. I mean, you can think of knowledge as a thing that is instrumentalized, but information is the ur-form of instrumental knowledge. And it’s limited in that way: it’s only good in use. It’s just there to be handled, it pushes on you and you push back on it. The light turns green and you hit the gas, an email comes and it’s either saved or deleted or forwarded or file-name-changed, put in a certain folder, kept in this kind of file tree. It’s how Eve Chiappello talks about labor itself, it can be put on hold, it can be deleted, it can be retrieved instantly—that’s how I now see artists starting to operate more and more. It opened things up in terms of studio visits with my grad students or with artists I know, especially painters. Painters do blogs, they curate, they run an apartment gallery—painting is something that they get to when they can, you know? It’s one of the things that they operate in a field of instrumentalization. They’ll have a lot of things going on. And they’ll move them around and link them up in different ways. It’s a manipulation of spheres, activities, intersections, and so on.