Lazy World of Ideas

Lazy World Of Ideas.com (2010), by Duncan Malashock, is accessible on Rhizome.org, a platform for new media art that was launched in 1996 and whose program includes grants, events, exhibitions, and an active website that regularly publishes online works. When a viewer launches Malashock’s work, three-dimensional geometrical shapes on a light-blue field appropriate the screen as they move around continually, executing a weird choreography that recalls M. C. Escher’s absurd constructions. Some of the shapes seem to move up, some down, all without escaping the center of the field. Soon, the experience becomes hypnotic, as perpetual motion takes the form of an archaic digital game.

According to Rhizome, Malashock’s work is an example of art in the public space. Of course, Lazy World of Ideas.com is accessible in a public sphere, but the work does not engage with the space where it is presented, nor are its content or meaning activated in dialogue with its surroundings or its viewing public. Instead, it exists only in response to the viewer’s demand online. It floats in the limbs of a virtual network, waiting for a click to appear. And from launch until the moment the viewer decides to quit the application, the work takes up the space of the screen for its own. Through this appropriation, the audience is temporarily disconnected from the virtual community, and the work effectively merges with the Internet as a medium. Therefore, the context in which the work is experienced can no more be considered the Internet, which becomes merely a platform, but 

Still from Lazy World Of Ideas.com, 2010; digital. Courtesy of the Artist and Rhizome.org.

wherever the viewer is situated while watching the work—probably in their home. 

In this way, Lazy World of Ideas.com radically shifts the conditions of spectatorship for art in a public space. The work experiences a deficit of contextualization: it does not engage with its space so much as it appropriates it, and viewers likely experience it in private. Rather than a form of public art, as Rhizome categorized it, perhaps Lazy World of Ideas.com should be considered a kind of digital tribute to abstract painting, virtually on loan from Rhizome for a short and private moment of aesthetic enjoyment.

Lazy World of Ideas.com is on view at Rhizome.org.

Benoît Antille is a graduate student in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. He has a degree in Classical Archeology and Art History. Between 2003 and 2009, he was responsible for the exhibitions and residency program at the Cultural Center Ferme-Asile (VS, Switzerland).