[-empyre-] about turbulence

Mon Oct 12 05:35:35 EST 2009

I agree with Timothy on how Turbulence is constantly pushing in new
directions. I think the Networked book project exposes the wall that
individuals in academia and more "rigorous" researchers face in the current
stage of web 2.0, which is how to be sensitive to the rate at which ideas
are exchanged, while also keeping an in-depth understanding of things.

As Kazys points out with his own experience with Blue Monday, there is a
certain reservation to change the text as the original authors would hope.
This may be due to the apparent tendency to still treat the text as the
product of a sole author.  Patrick Lichty cites Barthes' and Foucault's
respective theories on authorship in his contribution to the networked book.
I admittedly have written about this on my own a while back
(http://remixtheory.net/?p=309), and at the moment find that the
possibilities that were foreseen by Barthes and Foucault may still be in a
theoretical stage--at least in more conservative spaces.

I think that online resources like Wikipedia demonstrate that authorship can
function as a collective effort.  Perhaps the issue is how contributors
would gain proper recognition in particular institutions; the other might be
of contributing the "proper" thing.  The biggest challenge may be for
researchers who are closer to academia than networked culture to be willing
to write contradictive ideas.  If networked culture demonstrates anything is
that one can only learn through the willingness to view writing as truly
experimental and a collective effort. The networked book makes this
limitations of pre-internet writing obvious.  I'm very curious about the
outcome.

The very best,

Eduardo Navas

On 10/11/09 9:12 AM, "Timothy Conway Murray" <tcm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:

>> Hi, Helen,
> 
> Thanks ever so much for agreeing to position "Turbulence" at the center of
> this month's discussion, as well as for your fascinating (and passionate)
> account of its history.  I think it's very important to insist not only on
> the initial novelty of the project, but also on its longevity and
> elasticity.  While the initial impetus of Turbulence was to give a
> networked place to New American Radio's work on sound (which remains to be
> pioneering and exemplary in the US), you also took the risk of expanding
> its parameters to address the needs of the emergent new media arts
> community, which was experimenting with interactive formats on the net.
> And, now, you've again stretched those limits by providing an interactive
> and collaborative format for critical writing about these same procedures.
> 
> Interestingly, I can attest to the difficulties of these latter aims since
> I worked collaboratively with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker to produce
> CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA at Cornell (providing a skeletal library framework for
> what later developed into the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, which
> is now partnering with Turbulence on an archival initiative).  Many of our
> -empyre- readers are participating artists in this project, which produced
> four volumes of conceptually based net.art--Digital Dirt (produced solely
> by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in Montreal) and three volumes produced by
> the three of us at Cornell, Tech Flesh: The Promise and Perils of the
> Human Genome Project; Wired Ruins: Digital Terror and Ethnic Paranoia;
> NetNoise, the volume most in keeping with Turbulence's history).   What we
> never managed to accomplish in this collaboration was the development of a
> sustained project of interwoven writing on our net.art pieces in CTHEORY
> MULTIMEDIA that would be published in the pages of CTHEORY, and ideally,
> inform and dialogue with later net.art pieces in CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA.
> 
> I think that we all should take the lead from Turbulence's willingness to
> use to interactive resources of web to expand the dimensions of writing
> into a multimedia sphere--indeed, this seems to have marked the ethos of
> the Turbulence commissions throughout.  As a result, we're now engaged in
> a fascinating discussion of the fractal depth of writing
> itself--something, by the way, that I think hearkens up back to the
> complex legacies of early modern printing and illustrated books.
> 
> Thanks so much for your contributions and for your engagement in this
> important discussion on -empyre-.
> 
> Tim
> 
> 
> In answer to Greg and Anna's requests for information about the name
>> "turbulence"
>> 
>> It was New York City 1995.    A few of us -- myself and several
>> friends who agreed to help me  -- were sitting around tossing out
>> names for the two websites we were in the process of
>> creating, the one for the New American Radio series (1986-1998) -- a
>> weekly series of  half-hour artist-created works (we called it "radio
>> art")   produced for the public radio system --    the other for a new
>> series  of artistic works for  the "new frontier" - the Web.
>> 
>> The one was a waning project:   Public Radio, committed to becoming a
>> news network and bottom-line business, was no longer interested in
>> giving artistic work airtime.  It's audience, although very faithful,
>> was simply not large enough.
>> 
>> The other was the beginning of something new -- something I  hoped
>> might be an alternative to the top-down governance of the public radio
>> system, where artistic voices might be heard.
>> 
>> We  gave New American Radio a location in this new world at
>> "somewhere.org" .   The other -- a first of its kind, it turns out --
>> was to be turbulent -- trials, errors, experiments in
>> a new medium free from the top-down governance of broadcast systems.
>> Fortunately turbulence.org was an available name.
>> 
>> A parenthetical note:  I was personally insulted, laughed at, suffered
>> some really painful stuff at the hands of people in the public system,
>> so there was a strong element of turbulence in me as I turned the
>> organization -- its name is New Radio and Performing Arts, by the way
>> --  away from it and toward a more hopeful future.
>> 
>> 
>> The question: what does it mean now?  Turbulence is not a fist-shaking
>> site, but  in relation to the art world, it is still a disturbance in
>> the system of how art work is made, exhibited and collected.
>> 
>> I hope this answers your questions.
>> 
>> --Helen
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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