Hidden content #2: secret gift. The ‘unseen’ as a product of mischief or frivolity. A creator conceals or obscures what he or she creates. The ‘Easter Egg’, as it is sometimes known: a hidden track at the end of an album; a coded message or secret level concealed within the world of a computer game, or even in its source code; an additional set of images, scenes or featurettes unlisted on a DVD menu and accessed by a passcode, a sequence of keys pressed on a DVD remote control. Undoubtedly, the becoming-routine nature of such textual-technological ‘conceits’ spurs resistance to identifying the secret gift as art simply for the fact of its being hidden—a testament, to be sure, to the force that notions of originality and artistic autonomy, among others, continue to exert in aesthetic discourse. But for the same reason that Fountain’s status as art is irreducible to Duchamp’s motives, the tension (both logical and performative) wrought by the Easter Egg’s essential secrecy opens a space for aesthetico-philosophical questioning—a chance to see the work of art in such a text’s working against the interests of its own publicity by working towards its own concealment. All the more so, given the routine positioning of CDs, DVDs and video games as industrial and commercial products: how are we to account for a popular media text that actively works to secret itself from public view?
Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy
ISSN 2200-8616