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

[Anna Munster]

Interesting points about print. archiving and revision to text coming up here from Patrick and Jo. One point I'd like to raise on this is that the wikipedia comparison may not be the best one to Networked and that has to do with the technical architecture being deployed. Wikipedia has the advantage of being a wiki which means that it also allows for an archiving of its own textual history. While its true that events change its most recent text, it's also the case that one can return to older histories/archives of the entry at hand. In fact this is something I spend a lot of time pointing out to my students as one of its most salient features and I get them to spend time with which and what version of information they are using.

I can't see this kind of feature on Networked up front. That means the process of changing its text is not a publicly archived one and hence the changes and differences are not available as part of its history to the public accessing it. The changes, then, are for the authors more than anything....
Just something I thought I'd raise in terms of what/why one chooses to design with when writing in a networked context
cheers
Anna

A/Prof. Anna Munster
Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
School of Art History and Art Education
College of Fine Arts
UNSW
P.O. Box 259
Paddington
NSW 2021
612 9385 0741 (tel)
612 9385 0615(fax)
a.munster at unsw.edu.au
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Green Jo-Anne [jo at turbulence.org]
Sent: Tuesday, 6 October 2009 10:28 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] An "other" view of writing, performance

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.
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto: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
Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade_boston