[-empyre-] An "other" view of writing, performance

[Green Jo-Anne]

Hi Patrick,

The other voices are not those of the authors; they're (hopefully)  
those of the "readers."

The open history is meant to allow both unknown artists/authors to  
add their voices, and for the original authors to revise their texts  
over time.

The present book is not the future book ... unless no one  
participates in updating and revising it. One of the most striking  
features of Wikipedia is how quickly history is revised as real-time  
events impact various texts -- a Tsunami wipes out three villages in  
Indonesia; the Indonesia page on Wikipedia is immediately and forever  
changed. Ted Kennedy dies; within moments, his Wikipedia page  
reflects his passing; tenses are changed; date of death is filled in.

Networked can be this kind of book.

Some parts of your essay will not change, because they are fixed in  
time. Sections that refer to a more recent past may change to reflect  
insights you've gained from critical distance.

The print version is a big maybe. I don't see any reason to print the  
texts as they are. On the other hand, if people take the time to  
argue with and add to the original texts, the possibility of printing  
a version 2.0 and, later, a version 3.0 would be worthwhile.

One last point. Some of these texts are inaccessible to many in our  
own community. It's not that they're illiterate, it's that the  
language is rather dense. One can admonish readers for not being  
intellectually sophisticated, or one can learn to communicate with a  
wider demographic. My personal preference is for the latter.

Warm Regards,
Jo


On Oct 5, 2009, at 9:59 AM, Lichty, Patrick wrote:

> I have been quiet in the conversation (and on many of the lists in  
> the last year or two) in order to listen more and talk less.
>
> It's very strange; some of the points that have been offered in the  
> last week seem to be larger and smaller ones.
>
> In regards to the idea of "other" histories, I am a classical Libra  
> personality on this.  The Networked book does create a salient  
> metaphor by framing discourse within a medium and setting its  
> processes upon it.  In so doing, the project acts as a multi-tiered  
> probe into technoculture, and sets up an alternate methodoilogy  
> that suits the authors quite well.  In regards to other voices; I  
> might say that most of us are "regulars" to the New Media scene,  
> and therein lies the conundrum, but unless someone wants to run  
> with that, I will probably say that the 'otherness' of our  
> discourse in the book is with approach and methodology.
>
> I also agree with Johannes that there are differing expectations  
> amongst the creators of the project.  Johannes rightly states that  
> in the age where information is rising at an exponential rate, how  
> does one validate the necessity for reflection on any text or  
> another, or to digest the Networked Book and reply to it in the  
> space of a month?  This is parallel to what I am getting at in my  
> essay, that in an age of information overload, artists and writers  
> are forced to read index tags and use trending algorithms or that  
> texts must be legible at the seventh-grade level, given the average  
> literacy in the US (but I am being polemic).
>
> What I am also interested in regarding some of the ideas regarding  
> performance and media.  We can go back to the death of the author  
> (barthes) and the text as performance, and the performance of  
> completion in reading (Foucault), but I might be more interested in  
> a performance of situation of discourse or habitus.  The Networked  
> Book responds to a culture, and tries to reflect upon it in a  
> McLuhanesque marriage of medium and message.  Perhaps the  
> performative elements are the call to response, as well as the  
> presentation of the propositional form of the book.
>
> Lastly, regarding history, I had a great talk witht he people at  
> the Long Now Foundation regarding the Rosetta project, which is an  
> archive of 15,000 texts of different languages etched into a metal  
> disc.  We live in a time where languages are being lost by the  
> month, and as more media is being archived digitally (an inherently  
> media ecologically unsustainable practice), I agree with the Long  
> Now that we will enter a "Digital Dark Age", in which digital  
> archives will either degrade, crash, or simply not migrate over  
> decades. Therefore, i am very grateful, and appreciative that the  
> book will be published after a year, as atoms trump bits every time.
>
> In regards to this, another family member (a tenured historian) was  
> talking to me this weekend about her difficulty in writing a  
> history of artists that were not dead yet, and that their context  
> keeps changing over time.  The traditional baseline for historians  
> versus theorists is that one writes about those who are dead/long  
> inactive, and the other not. While I replied that one merely has to  
> localize their discourse (set a very tight context), her problem  
> compared to the discussion here seems as if we are trying to write  
> histories concurrent with the events, which is problematic to say  
> the least.  It is the greates exercise in control - desiring to  
> control one's own historical context before the other historians  
> get to you. But them one can look to computational culture and  
> Engelbart's idea of the "bootstrap", or pulling together a project  
> from the grass roots... I see what we are doing here as an  
> important experiment to which any proclamations, or declamations  
> about its rel
>  ative worth will only be borne out in time.
>
> To refer to Johannes, who has time?  Well, while I think there were  
> expectations for the book to be a viral sensation, I am much more  
> concerned with it being an importane experiment and good solid book  
> on the subject, a tome that will sit on the shelf with proper  
> gravitas, in a period early enough in the history of new media that  
> it will demand attention.
>
> In my opinion, all one can do is to present a proposition that  
> others will see, and hopefully that will resonate with others.   
> Throw a log on the fire, and hope it burns.
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Jo-Anne Green
Co-Director
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.
917.548.7780 or 617.522.3856
Turbulence: http://turbulence.org
Networked_Performance: http://turbulence.org/blog
Networked_Music_Review: http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review
Networked: http://networkedbook.org
New American Radio: http://somewhere.org
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