How is it that one can be connected to a vast worldwide network of other people and places via digital technologies and yet also be completely alone?
Kris Cohen tackles this philosophical question in Never Alone, Except for Now by exploring how contemporary technologies are changing group formations and affiliations within social life.
He identifies a new form of collectivity that exists between publics, which are built through conscious acts, and populations, which are automatically constructed through the collection of Big Data.
Finding traditional liberal concepts of the public sphere and neoliberal ideas of populations inadequate on their own to examine these new forms of sociality, Cohen places familiar features of the web — such as emoticons, trolling, and search engines — in conversation with artworks by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, William Gibson, Sharon Hayes, and Thomson & Craighead to more precisely articulate the affective and aesthetic experiences of living between publics and populations.
This liminal experience — caught between existing as a set of data points and as individuals newly empowered to create their own online communities — explains, Cohen contends, how one is simultaneously alone and connected in ways never before possible.
Endorsements:
“Never Alone, Except for Now attends carefully to populations, publics, and the potentials of relation amid networked life. For Kris Cohen, artworks ranging from novels to performances to new media art capture both the logics and affects of distributed networks. Equally accomplished in the areas of aesthetics, history, and theory, this timely book takes seriously ordinary digital experiences of trolling, emoticons, search engines, and social media as sites of thick ethical negotiation.” — Patrick Jagoda, author of, Network Aesthetics
"Employing an original and vivid theoretical framework, Kris Cohen's book represents the next stage in the discussions of relational aesthetics, participatory art, and digital media theory, amplifying them in truly unique and memorable ways. I know of no other project that considers contemporary art's engagement with various publics together with digitally networked life and forms of online sociality. Never Alone, Except for Now will appeal to all those interested in contemporary art, aesthetics and politics, social media, and digital culture as well as those working on questions of sociality, intimacy, and new forms of community." — John Paul Ricco, author of, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes