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

[mathew kabatoff <mkabatoff@ucsd.edu>]

I don't know if it in the end seems so much of an issue...I am reminded
constantly of images present in the text of literature (the chart and cost
of kidneys as well as the musical score) in joyce or in sebald where plunk
he just drops in an image, not as an illustration but as another point of
signification, that of image means something to and has a particular
language so why not use it. I think of code in many ways, moving towards
software mostly, in some ways an omission of text structure, and not so much
any longer involved in net.art...what I think is useful and resonates with a
strange nostalgia is what sylvie parent said a few weeks ago regarding the
space in net-art to accommodate narrative and filmic techniques...truly
requiring, like software produces...a team and a collective...yet each of
these pull away from the conceptual practices found in the net-art
hacktivist gestures (unless you are ricardo dominquez developing the 'tribal
port scan')

I don't know if the binary talk is useful, after binary is sometimes useful
and sometimes not quite as fixed (philosophically) as one would like to
believe. It seems more useful to think, web text image code as really this
site of potential, that there is now this new space to flood with knowledge,
and this knowledge can now be generated (ha!) a created (double ha!) like
there is no tomorrow...
mk


On 7/29/02 9:23 PM, "melinda rackham" <melinda@subtle.net> wrote:

> 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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