Bishop, Claire. ‘INFORMATION OVERLOAD’. _Artforum_, 1 Apr. 2023, https://www.artforum.com/features/claire-bishop-on-the-superabundance-of-research-based-art-252571/. [[../writing/Bibliography|Bibliography]] describing research-based art as having an “archival impulse”: The artist demonstrates a will to “connect what cannot be connected,” akin to the paranoiac’s ability to make connections among disparate points, always with him- or herself at the center. Foster refers to the internet, but primarily to oppose its interface to the tactility of archival art; he doesn’t mention that, in fact, the internet is the technological enabler of this art’s connectionist mentality. – Claire Bishop, *Information Overload* I would thus revise Foster’s argument: The links made by artists are less the result of an unconscious pathological response to social conditions (in Foster’s telling, a will to relate in a time of disconnected social order) than an effect of internalizing the apparatus through which their research is increasingly conducted. – Claire Bishop, *Information Overload* ^ebe414 Green suggests that knowledge is networked, collaborative, and in process. Significantly, her model is not the internet but hypertext: a form of nonsequential writing based on links between verbal and visual information that went on to become the key structural protocol of the internet. Permitting readers to navigate their own paths through masses of information, hypertext was heralded by literary critics like George Landow as a realization of poststructuralist theories of authorship, a virtual instantiation of Deleuze and Guattari’s centerless rhizome – Claire Bishop, *Information Overload* ^2c3c5c In the strongest examples of research-based art, the viewer is offered a signal rather than noise, an original proposition founded on a clear research question rather than inchoate curiosity. If this sounds like a crypto-academic call to apply traditional research criteria to works of art, then it is, to an extent: Earlier, I differentiated between search and research, and I unabashedly prefer the latter. – Claire Bishop, *Information Overload* ^c1d25e Knowledge is the aggregation of preexisting data, and the work accordingly invites meta-reflection on the production of knowledge as truth. In each case, though, despite creating the look or atmosphere of research, artists are reluctant to draw conclusions. Many of these pieces convey a sense of being immersed—even lost—in data. – Claire Bishop, *Information Overload* ^2ecfca Drifting from signifier to signifier, the artist invents meandering trajectories between cultural signs. – Claire Bishop, *Information Overload* ^7b5d6a > research-based installation art—its techniques of display, its accumulation and spatialization of information, its model of research, its construction of a viewing subject, and its relationship to knowledge and truth—cannot be understood in isolation from contemporaneous developments in digital technology. > My point is that the craft of assembling language, and how it is presented, needs to transcend quotidian communicational efficiency. Text is never neutral but is shaped by the mode of its delivery.