Re: [-empyre-] text, criticism + geography

["melinda rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

going back to someone else's comment earlier that the web is by its coded
nature ie HTML, a space for text rather than image then
so that makes the "text" part of  HTML open to a very wide interpretation
then..,
and obviously inclusive of anything at all which we read, see, hear,
process, or sense in any way.

which makes net.art a sort of chaotic anti heirarchical collage of
sensation, totally unrelated to any language or geographical structure,
without the necessitry to define values of form content , without value
judgements of good and bad etc.... it flattens the playing filed.. which i
don't think is the way it works in the hard space of realism. we arent being
globally idealistic any more in net.art (and everything else) then language
matters, position matters, geography matters..

sometimes a good old simple binary, like text-image, is very useful - we all
know its an arbitrary inclusive value, but it makes everything so goddamn
easy  to talk about .. not having to expalin infinite shades of grey in each
sentance..

melinda



 and > I think there is a reductionist take on 'text' here.
> Written languages (ie English, French, Korean etc.)
> placed in opposition to 'graphic' or 'multi-media' forms.
>
> Perhaps we should be more clear on the fact that written
> text, an image, a moving image, or a hypermedia work connected across
internet are all <very strong em> TEXTUAL</very strong em>. And of course
'code' from
> html to world wide web worms, including
> recent distributions and aesthetic articulations of
> the 'packet sniffing' Carnivore technology, are 'text'
> too. Music, likewise, is another kind of text, and
> perhaps the laguage of mathmatics.
>
> If we consider film, written narrative, or multimedia
> game as 'texts' then we have a common kinds of textual analyses and
several traditions of analyses and criticism
> to draw upon and to compare, from the literary, the cultural historical,
the filmic and of course art
> historical. These ways of knowing, or coming to know and understand text
and textuality, illuminate discursive
> 'con-texts' in which 'text' is produced.
>
> Of course these contexts include the 'extra-textual', the social,
material,historical and geographical contexts in which any artistic activity
resides.
>
> And, of course, textual analyses, even 'art' and 'art criticism' can be
applied to these contexts too. The
> institution is textual, it is there to be read. Just
> as the city is a text, open to a range of different
> interpretations and readings. Just so the criticism
> formed around the work of art, it is textual and open
> to competing readings depending upon ones background,
> ones gender and sexuality, ones ethnicity, and ones
> geographical location.
>
>
>
> Lachlan Brown
>
>
> Centres for Cultural Studies
> and Urban and Community Research
> Goldsmiths College
> University of London
>
>
>
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