a book, a list, a blog.

It's not easy writing a book and a blog simultaneously, especially when they're pretty similar in style, both relying on wandering descriptions and tangents of varying lengths. Have I lost readers? Did I have readers? Blog writing has always varied in purpose from themed, informative and inter-referential to chaotic, stream-of-consciousness and diaristic. I'd like it to land somewhere in between, valuing transparency and rawness over gimmick, but with purpose(s). I did get a tad verbose and confessional in some mid-00s entries. I think there is something gained from the currentness and immediacy of a writing, and even the lacklusterness. In my artwork I don't commit to endings, nor can I say a blog entry is finished by the time it's posted.

Anyways, my book is tentatively called “People I've Met from the Internet.” I wrote about it on here before (see February 18, 2008 entry) earlier in the writing process, so the way I describe it now may have evolved a bit. It's a sort of coming-of-age story about protective mothers and growing up gay with the internet and being an artist. And also a conceptual writing project about narrative conventions. And also an ethnographic study of gay internet culture and its evolution from 1998-2009. It started as an OCD data collection of everyone I ever met in person from the internet. Columns include names, screen names, the exact day we met, the city and neighborhood we met, a summary of what we did, how many times we met. The list is thoroughly footnoted to the point where some pages don't even contain the list. Annotations contain dry, clinical descriptions of what I recall of the people and the meetings. The annotations are an overwhelming, endless list of mini-narratives varying from a few words to involved short stories. They range in relevance to the annotated name, occupying both the highly scientific and the personal, linking to each other and stringing together into subplots about cleanliness, the oddness of strangers/other bodies, interconnectedness of a community, my ex-boyfriend, the act of writing such a piece as this, gossip, LA landmarks, macho sex lists, a vulnerability and naivete that evades death and danger. In the piece, I constantly find myself in parts of Los Angeles I would have never otherwise gone to, almost as though I was teleported there, to meet some stranger for who-knows-why, someone I would never have otherwise had reason to cross paths with. Just like the internet is merely a device to teleport me to new people and places, the book is sort of that way, too, for the reader, into gay internet culture. I've read from it at various venues including the Silver Platter, REDCAT and the Bonelli Contemporary gallery. And I've even gotten a publishing offer! But I won't get too big-headed about it; I haven't yet finished the project even. The best parts are still to be written, I'm hoping.

On April 23rd I opened my solo thesis show, including video installations of my projects “Home Depot Artist-in-Residence,” “Bathe and Drive,” “Customer Service” and “Post an Ad on Craigslist Inviting Strangers to Freeball (Go Without Underwear) with You at a Public Place.” And I read from the manuscript. I won't ever post anything from it on here, partly because it's highly revealing of so many people, but mostly because the writing makes the most sense in non-internet physical book form. Instead I'll give you the introduction my mentor Matias Viegener read at the start of my reading:

“ANONYMOUS is the title of Stephen van Dyck's reading tonight, but Stephen van Dyck could be the title and ANONYMOUS could be the author. Stephen's title, while perhaps coy, offers us a nifty handle on his work, which is an experimental narrative on people he's met through the internet. But how anonymous is anonymous? Is it possible to be too anonymous or not anonymous enough? Most of the meetings catalogued in Stephen's thesis are with other gay men, but not all. Some lead to romance, others lead to sex, and most lead to nothing but a meeting, or a second meeting. In some ways you can read this text as an allegory of modernity, or technology. We live in an age in which we are just as likely to meet each other in real space as in non-space. For gay men, especially gay teenagers, this likelihood is vastly multiplied, because for them there are more gay men in non-space than in real space, so the internet has become the most common vector for gay boys to become gay men.

“What Stephen van Dyck's text narrates is the key moment, the transition from non-space to real space, from personalities to bodies, and from ideas to things. Its form is appropriately doubled, with a kind of database on the top, a repetitive chronological list of names with seven categories of information for each. There would be nothing exceptional about this part, except for the annotations on the bottom. The annotations run the gamut from trivial to profound and start to really test the boundaries of narrative. you can identify at least two forms of narrating here, one being the list, and the other being the anecdote. But there's also a third, at least a third, in the echo between these two forms. And like Joe Brainard's I Remember, we start to read through the lines and through the constraint to get yet another story, which like I Remember is a gay story. It's a story of a double life which spurs a kind of double writing which we then subject to a double reading.

“Stephen van Dyck project is a form of conceptual writing: writing with an idea. Or: writing which is actually about something other than what it seems to be about. Or: the use of a text in which its allegorical function exceeds its denotative function. All of these are interesting, but to my mind what most connects Stephen's work to conceptual writing is that it attempts to use writing against itself, using a kind of constraint to make apparent what is hard to see, which is the texture of a life lived both in real space with real bodies and not.

“Forty years ago, metafiction writer John Barth wrote a seminal story called Life-Story, whose central conceit was of a writer writing a story about writing a story, or more precisely not writing a story, just writing about writing a story and never really writing the story, so the writing about writing the story becomes the story. One of the most elegant aspects of Barth's story is that is supposedly written in real time, over three hours or so on what turns out to be the day or the writer's birthday, and the end is basically an interruption of the story that ends the story. Rather than continuing to unpack this, I will simply point out that many things are being accomplished at once here. In Stephen van Dyck's tale of anonymity, many other things are accomplished as well. Along with a questioning of the nature of narrative we have an interrogation of the place of narrative – does the story happen on the top or the bottom of the page, or somewhere else? It's both a list and a story, an archive and a set of anecdotes. It's also a coming out story, a story about life today, and a life story.”