Re: [-empyre-] archiving

//jonCates <joncates@criticalartware.net> · Sat, 12 Feb 2005 23:54:34 -0600

On Feb 8, 2005, at 11:38 AM, Ellen Fernandez-Sacco wrote:

>Jon, where do such technopositivitst conceptions of unlimited 
progress lurk?

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow Knows!"
data.src:
title: The Shadow
dvr: CBS, NBC, Blue Coal + various
date: 1936 - 1954
format: serial radio play
>Can you say more? I ask because such concepts seem disproved outright 
when

>the tiny percentages of what actually survives is known. Am thinking 
of the

>downloadable files of early silent films archived on webpages, which 
are

>themselves a fragment of what is extant of this production, another 
time

>heralded as progress that arrived with wars.

the silent films example is wonderful...
i would certainly agree w/you in regards to experiences of archives 
disproving technopositivitst conceptions of unlimited progress. i was 
suggesting that altho sum may agree to disbelieve in them, these 
utopian logics still operate culturally + often in + among new media. 
honestly, i think these assumptions lurk in sum unexpected locations, 
hearts + bodyminds. like other [widespread/embedded] logics we attempt 
to deprogram ourselves from or have been conditioned to disbelieve (in 
01 way or another), these are {sticky|slippery} concepts that reccur. i 
am often surprised to hear hi-modernist myths echoing from or recoded 
by those who take themselves to be very counter to such goals. for 
those of us (like myself) living in capitalism as form of governance, 
i'm sure that the myth of unlimited technological progress is for us 
(to launch a McLuhan probe) much like the ever present water that fish 
breath + therefore are unable to "discover".
for instance, earlier in this conversation:
On Feb 7, 2005, at 6:48 PM, David Daniels wrote:

>Each human being will have a web domain to do with as they please. 
These are perhaps what will not die.

this statement has an amazingly + perhaps unabashedly hi-mod 
technopositivitst ring to it. the previous portion of the message 
exciting me as i was reminded of Ted Nelson's initial work on Xanadu + 
Computer Lib/Dream Machines + Douglas Engelberts' NLS while considering 
the increasing use of open source systems + OS's on personal computers 
that can be configured to run as servers. but the lines i am quoting 
above continue on from those points into the well worn (out) paths of 
the rhetoric that goes to the tune of:
everyOne will now have a *INSERT TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPEMENT HERE* of 
their own + be *INSERT POSITIVE SOCIAL VALUE HERE* by their new found 
*INSERT POLITICAL VALUE HERE*.
Nam June Paik, often positioned as progenitor of Video Art, first 
resident artist of the Experimental Television Center, studied by the 
Variable Media Network in relation to archiving, + who first deployed 
the phrase "information superhighway", provides an art hystorical 
reference to this conversation, interlinking various strands of these 
hyperthreads...
"This is a glimpse of a new world, when you will be able to switch on 
every TV channel in the world and TV guides will be as thick as the 
Manhattan telephone book.”
data.src:
title: Global Groove
dvr: Nam June Paik
date: 1973
format: [video/performance/satellite transmission/network]
the serigraph work of Paik's called A New Design for TV Chair included 
the following txt:
"(1944)
Do you know...?
How soon television will be in most homes?
How many small packages are lost annually?
The cruising range of small postware planes?
#18
TV TV
Q. How soon after the war will television be available for the average 
home?

[ ] 6 months? [ ]  1 year? [ ] 2 years?

A. Experts estimate that television will be ready in about six months 
after civilian production resumes. And one of the important production 
techniques that will help speed delivery of
DO YOU KNOW...?
How soonTV-chair will be available in most museums? How soon artists 
will have their ownTV channels? How soon wall-to-wallTV for video art 
will be installed in most homes?
A new design for TV-chair
(dedicated to the great communication artist Ray Johnson)
data.src:
title: A New Design for TV Chair
dvr: Nam June Paik
date: 1973
format: serigraph
what i have done above is to personally transcribe the txt of the img. 
you will lose the meaning of sum of it + gain sum new meaning by it's 
conversion to ASCII. in the serigraph (unlike the above txt), you can 
see where the sampled txt that Paik has cut-n-pasted begins + ends + 
where the typewritten txt that Paik has added begins + ends. in this 
piece Paik performs a hystorical remix, sampling an appropriated 
advertisement that is "from a 1940s popular-science magazine that 
depicts the home viewer of the future watching television" as John 
Hanhardt wrote in an essay featured on Paik's official site. Hanhardt 
goes on to say that "in A New Design for TV Chair, Paik posited his own 
questions to project an alternative future for television."  you can 
find this essay i am quoting @:
uri: http://www.paikstudios.com/essay.html
but the img of the serigraph A New Design for TV Chair i haven't been 
able to locate online. i am reproducing the txt from a reproduction of 
the A New Design for TV Chair as reproduced in the Paik Video by Edith 
Decker Phillips. the txt w/the img appropriates an available 30 year 
[televisual/video/media] hystory of the future as found in the 1944 
commercial [txt/img] as Paik re{members|mixes|vises} in 1973.
if this is remix then is it detournement? criticism? analysis? 
participation? sincerity? was Paik asking the questions above as 
skeptic? idealist? artist? proponent? was he asking for clarification 
in order to reframe or refine the terms of the conversation? was he 
asking to refocus attention on the "new world" spoken of in his Global 
Grove of the same year + call this new world into being as an active 
[participant/pioneer]?
perhaps these questions which i can't shake connect to:
On Feb 8, 2005, at 2:12 PM, Luciana Duranti wrote:

"transmission across space often alters the documentary form of the 
material, which does not look to the recipient the same way as it did 
to the sender."
or another way of approaching these questions, discourses + hystories + 
Paik in particular comes to us transmitted across spacetime as txt from 
Martha Rosler:
"Many of these early users saw themselves as carrying out an act of 
supreme social criticism, criticism specifically directed at the 
domination of groups and individualized epitomized by broadcast 
television and perhaps all of Western industrial and technological 
culture."
<---CUT-N-PASTE--->
"Not only a systemic but also a utopian critique was implicit in 
video's early use, for the effort was not to enter the system but to 
transform every aspect of it and - legacy of the revolutionary 
avant-garde project - to redifine the system out of existence by 
merging art with social life and making audience and producer 
interchangeable."
*
later Rosler begins the section titled Part III: Myth w/the following 
line: "At the head of virtually every video history is the name Nam 
June Paik." she continues discussing Paik positioning him in terms of 
the creation of his [patriarchy-reaffirming/hystoricized/technosocially 
constructed + elevated] mythic status as father of Video Art. this is a 
deeply intertwingled section + should be read in the context of the 
entire essay rather than excerpted via the cut-n-paste operations i 
could perform here. in her closing section, the Conclusion, Rosler 
brings her previously developed hyperthreads into a tighter + tighter 
weave @ one point writing:
"To recapitulate, these histories seem to rely on encompassable 
(psuedo-) transgressions of the institutions of both television and the 
museum, formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the 
"capabilities" of the medium, as though these were God-given, a 
technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and 
social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time space, 
cybernetic circuitry, and physiology; that is, a vocabulary straight 
out of old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism"
* data.src:
title: Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment
dvr: Martha Rosler
date: [1985/1986]
format: [essay/txt]
reapproaching Martha Rosler's shedding of utopian moments from the 
perspective of net.art rather than Video Art , Rachel Schreiber wrote:
"Although early video artists utilized the tools of popular culture, 
there was at that time a great difference formally between video art 
and broadcast television productions. While recent digital editing 
technologies have diminished this difference, enabling artists and 
television producers alike to access higher-end post-production for 
very little cost, the discrepancy persists. Some artists have used this 
to their advantage, mining the amateur aesthetic as a postmodern 
statement of non-mastery. Still, we can readily see the difference 
between a video art production and a made-for-TV sitcom, drama, or news 
show. When considered in relation to their parent technologies—video in 
relation to broadcast television, net.art in relation to the 
commerce-driven applications of the Internet—the gap in the latter 
relationship may be shrinking. The primary reason is that the means of 
production are precisely the same: net.artists and corporate Web 
designers draw from the same skill set, sit at the same computers, and 
use the same software."
<---CUT-N-PASTE--->
"Entering the Public Sphere and Other Issues of Distribution

Because net.art can enter the public sphere seamlessly, the 
possibilities for subversion are far greater than for video art. "
<---CUT-N-PASTE--->
"Net.art distribution is intrinsically easy. A URL can be given out by 
mass e-mail, in response to specific inquiries, or on a website, and 
people in varying locations may view the work as long as they have 
access to a computer and an Internet connection. More so even than with 
video, Jenik argues, the distribution system for net.art is so 
intrinsic to the medium that it helps shape and define the work itself: 
To the extent that the Web is a distribution system [which] is also 
linked to the basic tools of production (HTML), it has been granted a 
great deal of power in structuring the art created for it. If the 
network is down, there is no way to see/access the work, so in that 
case it may no longer even ‘exist.’ Also, many works are dependent on 
the ‘distribution’ or connectivity of the Web in their very 
conception--in a way, the distribution becomes a theme or layer within 
the work itself."
data.src:
title: Net.art: Shedding the Utopian Moment?
dvr: Rachel Schreiber
date: 2001
uri: http://www.yorku.ca/kartz/archives/2054/Schreiber_NetArt.pdf
while i respect Schreiber's txt + her approach to recontextualizing 
Rosler's Video Art txt in relation to net.art, the above excerpts form 
another example of oddly cast technopositivitst shades. the gap between 
commercially oriented corporate sites + artist built systems may or may 
not be closeable to varying degrees of success, but the existence of 
online systems (let alone HTML) does not inherently produce closure.for 
me, the problematic technopositivitsm suggested here results from 
positioning newer media as more able to {champion the causes|realize 
the goals} of the older new media effectively b/c of it's more recent 
status + technological superiority.
Schreiber's txt offers much more than these minor points i am making 
suggest + should be read in it's entirety b/c of it's 
[inclusion/analysis] of various artists, projects + perspectives that 
are particularly germane to the conversation this month.
i'm not arguing for any mythical purisms of art theorypraxis alignment 
([fantastically/fanatically] pomo or otherwise altho i am a deeply 
interested in  + excited by various new media myths + technosocial 
fantasies while attempting to apply self-reflexive forms of critique + 
analysis to these discourses). i am only attempting in this reply to 
offer tenative + incomplete answers to your question. i could go on 
forever in my own personal upward spirals towards various utopic 
states, but instead i will end + press send while remembering recursive 
digital ghosts haunt new + old media moments alike...
[talk/type] soon
// jonCates
edu: http://www.artic.edu/~jcates
collab: http://www.criticalartware.net
projs: http://www.systemsapproach.net/
blog: http://newmedianowandthen.blogspot.com/