[-empyre-] authors and authority :.

[Lorna Collins]

Dear Jean-Baptise, dear all,

JB, I want to make a very brief comment on your message, about my
experience of organising this event. We -- I suppose you could say
that we have formed a royal we, which in this instance refers to the
committee of people who have organised the second colloquium at
Cambridge. This is not intentionally separated or hierarchical royal
We. We have not wanted to close ourselves to a small group, on the
contrary we are constitutively open, but in order to organise this
event we have had to communicate between a small amount of (eight)
people in order to make it happen. These people were not 'chosen' but
volunteered at a meeting, and we formed a natural committee. One of
the purposes of the second colloquium is to set up the next event in
this series. We will open the floor to see who wants to be involved in
organising an event like this. How can we organise an event without
forming a smaller grouping of people, and asigning different tasks to
different people? And JB, how can we organise this event in a way that
challenges the authority of the institutions? We have found ourselves
continually challenged by the institutions and we try to new find ways
of communicating with those in authority. This is not a deconstructive
or destructive intention -- we need to communicate with the
institutions, in a language that can open and redistribute their
hierarchy. We do not want to incite an aggressive revolution, but,
rather, we try to explain to the institutions how their system and
authority can be challenged and an alternative suggested, in this way,
and we discuss how to make things make sense and then change. 'In this
way' -- what is this what? What is the alternative? How do we make
things make sense and then change? These are the very questions that
we will be discussing and experimenting with at the colloquium.

At the first colloquium in Cambridge, on the day we found that we
could use artistic performance to open and invigorate the protocol and
system that governed the institution that housed us; this opened the
day to all who participated. Our creativity and collaboration made a
new kind of sense, which we went on to publish (forthcoming, with
Peter Lang, Making Sense 1). Most of all this was not about the names
or their authority, it was the way that art can open an interface for
difference, it doesn't matter who or where you are, the process of
creating an artwork, and the process of encountering an artwork
creates a free space.

I realise that I can't say something like that without receiving a
hoard of critical questions from the large group of people who
subscribe to Empyre, which is quite scary. But I genuinely believe
that the 'we' of Making Sense, which is laid open to all of Empyre
during this debate, is creating something really important.

JB you ask: "are we ready to abandon what constitutes current
political space, especially authority and control of curation of
experimental endeavours ?" I would say that this is one of the
questions we are challenging with Making Sense. Clearly you have a lot
of ideas about this, so I'd like to ask you what you would do, or how
you would contribute to answering your own question?

All the best,

Lorna

2010/10/14 Jean-baptiste Labrune <labrune at media.mit.edu>:
> 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/
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Lorna Collins
PhD Candidate: "Making Sense; art practice as a social act"
Jesus College
Cambridge
CB5 8BL
http://web.me.com/lornacollins/
http://www.makingsensesociety.org./