[-empyre-] textual community

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Sorry Melinda, I thought this was yet another pointless list
(AoIR, Nettime, 7-11 ad infinitum) of the lost and the terminally 
addicted without purpose or direction, a legacy of appalling scholarship 
and really bad art in the field of digital culture, or what is also known as ?the new media?. I apologise. The format: invited subjects presenting texts developing over time to be discussed during a period of weeks by an international community in their own time is a long overdue innovation  though it was one of the obvious applications of this set of technologies called distributed computing or ?hypermedia?. Good to see someone familiar with one of the reasons people put Internet together as a way to
1. access remote digital holdings and 2. discuss them, taking their 
intention seriously by creating 3. a textual community. The University,
the Museum, the Gallery, the Salon, the Cinema, the Rave, these are 
textual communities.

Adrian, I really like your vog project and it is all very intelligently 
laid out and aesthetically pleasing. I don?t understand what a vog is but 
it looks like cam embedded in html and I can relate to that. What's interesting about this discussion is that there is a possibility of discussing hypertext theory with what used to be called ?multimedia? (the addition of another kind of text and textuality in this case the streamed 
video) together with hypermedia theory (links across distributed computing) without necessarily falling into a historically relevant text (literary 
post structuralism) image (screen based representation theory) opposition
or antagonism. I suppose I?d like to reference the development of digital 
culture studies with a question addressed broadly to the txt->vog 
'progression' in this discussion. We've moved from the refreshing 
Blog 'confessional' of jill/txt (great to see the "History/'her story'" 
proposition alive and well in the new millennium, Jill,  but isn't this 
view a bit essentialist and 70s? doesn't it perpetuate the myth of the 
radical reversal of the roles of active male/passive female, and assume 
that gender relations must be antagonistic? Surely we?ve moved on? To 
revive this important but historically contingent method a generation 
on would require a re-pathologization of the Blokes that the Blokes 
are unlikely to go along with for very much longer [despite out collective 
regard for Angela McRobbie]) to a more 'highly or finely mediated' cam 
work speaking to the power discourse of Screen Studies. I mean, we are 
in danger of arriving at a reified notion of 'multimedia' presumably distributed on CD Rom retailed through Virgin megastores with Lev 
Manovitch signing copies as the logical outcome of a digital revolution.
And it isn't going to be like that. 

The shift in distributive relations, surely, is what permits this 
discussion and the sharing of your vog work in progress, and these new distributive relations provoke the new relations of mediation that 
Melinda is exploring through this format. 

Does the progression from txt->video have more to say about the assumed critical progression from Post-structuralist literary theory to screen studies or film and video studies in academia? Can  we consider 
hyperlinks and cam without forcing filmic discourse, despite the 
rather staid and deeply embedded institutional investments? I mean, do 
we really need film and video studies as a filter for ?a new media? 
or has that all, as October #100 provocatively suggests become ?obsolete??
 Can we weave an intertextuality between the refreshing confessional/observation of the blog ie  jill/txt and what you call 
?vog? and a hypermedia theory that takes into account interruptions 
that sit comfortably neither with Lit. Theory nor with Screen Theory, 
and certainly not Information Studies, but require a new multi-discipline? Digital Culture. 
 
I?d like to see txt<->vog, worked in intertextuality not forgetting of 
course the possibility of non-sequitors (often productive cultural 
political vectors, otherwise productive interpersonal undercurrents) 
such as those delivered by IM or email as parrishka [she?s hot] 
illustrated earlier in this discussion. 

I mean... Can't we think of text and cam as mere texts? Can't we consider
the textuality of the 'mere text' the cam work as well as
the 'matrix or mesh?, the WWW, together as an intertextual whole?

Lachlan

 


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