IF IT READS, IT BLEEDS, 2010

'If It Reads, It Bleeds' is an attempt to experience and visualise the materiality of technology in the practices and artefacts of blogging and web surfing. By creating composite images out of screenshots of selected blog pages, Joanna Zylinska aims to see 'under the skin' of the web in order to trace the pulsating connections between images, text and code. Blogs are not being examined here for their content, but rather looked at through the lens of Michel Foucault’s suggestion that ‘writing transforms the thing seen or heard into tissue and blood’. Playfully referencing the closed system of blood circulation in an organism, the video interweaves blogs dealing with blood donation, health advice, neo-Gothic TV programmes, Christian iconography and kinship networks into a multi-layer visual tissue. 

If you are watching it on a laptop, you need to use headphones or external speakers to get the full range of sound effects.

This project has been shown at the CRASSH Centre at the University of Cambridge, the Visual Culture Conference at the University of Westminster, and the 6th European Meeting of the Society of the Literature, Science and the Arts, ‘Textures’, organised by the Electronic Text + Textile network and held in Riga, Latvia.