[-empyre-] authors and authority :.

[Jean-baptiste Labrune]

Dear John (and Penny, Lorna and *.Empyre),

Thanks for your time in explaining your desire and early production in  
the context of the Making Sense event to happen in few days. I have no  
doubt your production with Penny and other participants will be very  
creative and rich.

As you mention it, the open nature of a Mailing-List like Empyre,  
allowed me to rant on an extended scale :) and not only in the time  
allocated to me if I would have asked a question during this event  
(especially on controversial topics such as the organisation of the  
event itself, and not only on the topic of the day).

When Penny talks about Mallarmé and the making of his patrimonial  
artefacts (the book) as maybe a precursor of Memex or the Web or when  
you quote the text as practice, I imagine that you both refer to  
semiotic systems where an audience, a reader or other externalities to  
the author are involved in the Sensemaking process. There is therefore  
a difference of nature between the creators (authors) and the space of  
reception of the artefact, artwork, discourse.

In the same way, there is difference let say of chatting in Empyre (or  
NetBehaviour, IDC, Nettime, ...) and publishing under the name of a  
famous brand such as Pompidou, Tate, Cambridge, Brown, you name it, is  
in the authoritative surrounding of this production. Making Sense (and  
society!) , as many other events use the rhetoric of openess an  
experimentaton, (and it looks like you have a great line up for an  
extraordinary event! ), however I was just pointing out how social  
authority is so manifest in the publicitation of the event. From big  
names (Nancy, Stiegler, etc) to big brands, it looks to me that it was  
important for the organisers to make this event legitimate, using  
people or places authority. If we want new political atmospheres, are  
we ready to abandon what constitutes current political space,  
especially authority and control of curation of experimental  
endeavours ?

Everybody can launch a discussion on Empyre or any other lists, so as  
everyone can create a webpage to express an opinion, even create a  
project, curate a topic. On the contrary, everybody can not be on the  
organising committee of a Pompidou-related event, it is a closed club,  
usually not constituted solely on merit or research/artistic  
excellency but usually following a discretionary process, involving a  
lot of branding, authority and social networking.  The context (or  
situation) I was talking about is precisely the one of the curation of  
a public event that proposes to discuss and experiment on Sense Making  
in the context of politics and society. I believe that openness (like  
open-source in the IT world) has its limits, usually sketched by the  
power of people and their need to sustain their own narrative. In this  
sense this is more the republic than democracy - and in the kalipolis,  
artists where out if they didn't want to abide by political imperatives.

In adressing the social constitution of this experimental event, I am  
not only playing the role of the party pooper/troll/etc of a party  
where I was not invited to participate from the organisation point-of- 
view, but I am also, I think, raising out how huge claims lead to the  
dilution of arguments or experiments.
After a second look at the flyer and homepage of the event, and after  
re-reading all the emails on Empyre, it is obvious to me that the  
actual experimental collaboration that was pulled up by Lorna and  
colleagues is pretty impressive and I have no doubt that it will be a  
kick-ass event (and yes, very experimental compared to traditional  
formats such as 20min pres adn 2 min question), and I see here a  
tension with what is claimed (as in territory) on the webpage  
announcing the event http://www.makingsensesociety.org/
I also want to underline how much a challenge it is to organise an  
international line-up of speakers/experimenters in my dear french  
capital where french is still the only intellectual currency :)))

With that said, I wish you bon courage for the organisation and look  
forward to reading the post-hoc accounts of Making Sense !

Cheers,
Jb

--

Le 14 oct. 10 à 00:13, John Cayley a écrit :

> Dear -empyre-
>
> I was ready to write with some thoughts on my collaboration with  
> Penny Florence when my reading of Jean-Bapiste Labrune's recent  
> responses rendered me acutely aware of the context of this practice,  
> and of the context of aesthetic practice generally. I've become so  
> paralyzingly aware of context that, for example, I originally wrote  
> 'Penny' and 'Jean-Bapiste' (as if you and I know both of these  
> people well) and went back and added surnames, since I don't know J- 
> B and many of us may not know Penny, at least not as a collaborator.  
> I have just playfully (I hope) evoked the indeterminate play of  
> address that is prevalent in all critical discussion but radically  
> so in digitally mediated fora. The link here is institutions. J-B  
> asks us to be aware and wary of the institutions within which we  
> work, especially while pretending an autonomy for this practice. I  
> agree absolutely that we are always within and necessarily complicit  
> with _many_ institutions as we work and that the value systems of  
> these institutions - only occasionally aesthetic - often manifest  
> agonistic and contradictory relations. A contemporary problematic -  
> the institution of a contemporary problematic - arises from  
> networked and programmable media's ability to generate potential,  
> emergent, virtual (in the strong, contra-digital sense of this word)  
> institutions with close-to-immediacy. I'm here. I'm in -empyre-. How  
> did I get here? And do I belong? Scaled-up somewhat, these remarks  
> apply to the institutional complicities which J-B interrogates.
>
> As it happens, and perhaps in opposition to the practices of what  
> are now suddenly and shockingly predominant institutions - Facebook,  
> Google Accounts - -empyre- is exemplary. I have been introduced. You  
> already know that next week I will play a collaborative role in a  
> presentation to the 'Making Sense' colloquium in Paris-out-of- 
> Cambridge. Terrifying. I have, through Penny, been introduced to an  
> institution that I do not yet know well. As Penny set out in her  
> recent post, our work entered into productive correspondence during  
> and after the organization and realization of a series of events at  
> the Tate Modern that placed digitally mediated literary poetics in  
> dialogue with art. My other qualifications for this engagement?  
> Until 2007, I practiced and theorized irregularly and relatively  
> independently as a poetic writer in and of programmable media.  
> Pretending the role of a writer of this description means that I  
> attempt to produce literary work for which computation is a vital  
> aspect of the literary artistic medium. In 2007 I accepted a  
> position in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. Although  
> Brown's program is rightly recognized as strongly innovative,  
> institutionally it is also a part of the "creative" "writing"  
> program(me) that has pullulated in the US academy (cf. Eli Batuman  
> in a recent LRB). Context indeed. That's how it's happened; here (at  
> last) is how I see it working:
>
> Penny's outline has been posted. Here is a summarized retelling from  
> the viewpoint of my current practical engagement (in the midst of my  
> attempt actually to make something that is new to me - and I do mean  
> that I am doing this in this extended, shifting present). Penny  
> responded to certain formalizations of iterative, literal  
> translation that I have represented as process in coded, time-based  
> pieces of literary art. She refers specifically to the series that I  
> call _translation_, and has already provided a link to my lamentably  
> 'ancient' website. In this series, nodal, natural language texts are  
> sited within a dynamic system driven by relationships between  
> protosemantic elements (those _on the way_ to 'making sense' -  
> although 'sense' for me is a difficult word) at the level of the  
> letter. The texts perform transliteral morphs from one to another,  
> often across languages. At stake, I believe, is an aesthetic and  
> critical wager that (even) these directed protosemantic processes  
> have some significance- and affect-generating bearing on the texts  
> with which they engage and also that such time-based processes  
> themselves can and should be read as _the text_ in a broader and  
> ultimately more comprehensive understanding of text and textual  
> practice. The process is the text.
>
> Penny was as interested in the virtual critical address of such text- 
> as-process towards (found or composed or conventionally translated)  
> 'host' and 'guest' texts (these terms are from Lydia Liu's  
> _Translingual Practice_) in systems where these categories of text  
> are implicitly or explicitly paired. Do the generated liminal,  
> transitional states of the system have a critical or aesthetic  
> purchase on our readings? My investment has already been made clear.  
> Yes they do, I wager, poethically (Joan Retallack's formulation).  
> But Penny sees a way to go further. Taking up her long-standing  
> readings of Mallarmé, she paired a sonnet, 'Le Pitre chatié' with  
> some verses extracted from the 'Prose pour Des Esseintes' and  
> challenged us to find a way to put these texts into a dynamic  
> relationship based on underlying translations, ultimately by both of  
> us, into English. Penny is also interested in allowing the  
> protosemantic, transliteral processes back into the work as, I would  
> suggest, subprocesses of those that will drive an initial iteration  
> of 'Mirroring Tears: Visages' but I may not get that far in the  
> coding before our presentation next week and I also worry about the  
> incorporation of the audio correlates that Penny has identified.
>
> It all sounds reasonable now but it took a while before this made  
> sense - practical sense, sense as practice - to me. In my other  
> work, currently, I am explicitly engaged with reading (_The Readers  
> Project_ another collaboration between Daniel C. Howe and myself) -  
> with what reading is, and with how all the endlessly various dynamic  
> visualizations and representations of reading that digital media  
> make possible - how these may reveal or conceal, enhance or destroy  
> what reading has been for us. Now, I am tending to see many of the  
> digital poetic pieces that I have made as 'readers,' but as readers  
> that read critically and that also, arguably, write - with and  
> against me, with and against us.
>
> What one may see or read, when 'Mirroring Tears: Visages' is  
> presented, will be two poetic texts, in French, each with "wind- 
> eyes" "torn" in their "tissued facade" (quoting phrases my my own  
> translation of 'Le Pitre chatié'). Inside these windows, words and  
> phrases mined from all the English translations made for both texts  
> by Penny or I will be shown, according to an algorithm the details  
> of which I am still working out. These "tears" in the texts will  
> read and translate the two texts one into and out of the other,  
> with, virtually, a critical, human translator's address - an address  
> that will be mediated by a technological encoded representation of  
> 'reading' - reading that relates to human reading but is  
> programmatic: exhaustively describable in terms of digital symbolic  
> manipulations. Penny asked: can digital poetics perform a critical  
> address to these texts? We hope to present one of many possible  
> answers.
>
> And all I really wanted to say is that I have already learned and  
> will have learned so much from this collaboration. And I anticipate  
> that much of what I will have learned will derive from its context.  
> I will have been making sense, although I may still have been  
> struggling with the object implied by the practice that this rubric  
> continuously suggests. On the other hand I'm sure, more or less,  
> that we will have been making.
>
> Yours,
> John (Cayley)
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

--

Jean-Baptiste Labrune
MIT Media Lab
20 Ames St E14-464C
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

http://web.media.mit.edu/~labrune/




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