Lecture-Performance

Is the Internet a Urinal?

2018

Is the Internet a Urinal? flushes the toilet on Silicon Valley. This lecture-performance flows through popular film, architecture, literature, and queer sex to consider the enduring Californian Ideology. Paying particular attention to waterworks in California, the fountain emerges as both a monument for false publics and a figure of information. In Silicon Valley, the fountain finds a philosophical form in the writings of Ayn Rand, as a symbol of radical individualism and extreme entrepreneurship. To stymie the gushing of such toxic liquidity, Duchamp’s strategy of the readymade is evoked, and Silicon Valley is re-conceived as a pissoir, a public cruising grounds for post-capitalist possibilities.

Is the Internet a Urinal? is part of Blas’s Silicon Traces series, a trilogy of moving image installations and related works that contends with the histories, philosophies, beliefs, fictions, and fantasies that shape Silicon Valley’s visions of the future as means to domination. This lecture-performance connects to Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 (2018), prologue of the Silicon Traces trilogy. Material from this lecture-performance was adapted into the essay “Is the internet a urinal?”, published in the exhibition catalogue I Was Raised on the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif, MCA Chicago (2018).