[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]

[warkk]

Thanks Shu Lea,
    i was at a thesis defense just yesterday and i was thinking about this.
The defender's name is Pehr Englen, and i expect he'll write about this
soon. The topic was the Situationist International considered as a network,
and as an argument between different forms of network. Which got me
thinking about Jacqueline de Jonge's journal, The Situationist Times, which
one can read as a publication for artists and (partly) by artists that was
a resource-book for thinking and acting in networks. It was multi-lingual,
but had more of a visual than a written language. There were issues devoted
to specific topologies, such as rings or spirals. I think this side of the
Situationist International that ended up in The Situationist Times was very
interested in what distributed networks of autonomous groupings would be
like as a form of artistic communication. One has to wrest it out of the
hands of art history, which is more interested in either individual artists
or movements that have names and leaders. This was an avant-garde that had
neither of those qualities.

This connected for me to a project i have never quite managed to get done,
which would be a more personal account of the listserv culture of the
nineties. I was on nettime more than empyre but i see them as part of a
network of networks that includes undercurrents, spectre, rhizome and
several others. How do you write about something in the form of linear
prose that didn't have that form at all? It is hard enough with just two
correspondents. When i was editing my correspondence with Kathy Acker this
drove me crazy. In actuality there were always several threads going and we
answered each other on those threads. But in book form all that has to
collapse into one sequence. I printed the whole thing out and moved the
documents around on the floor. The order ended up being a compromise.
Imagine doing that for dozens of threads among hundreds of parties.... Not
that i would want to actually transform those listserv debates literally
into print form, but even just notionally to transform the dynamics of
those networks into one prose narrative seems to defeat the form of the
thing itself.

So that might be a place to start thinking about speculative *and* tangible
networks, or ones that are both at once.

On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 4:25 AM, Shu Lea Cheang <shulea at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> Dear all
>
> thanks to Fran llich's latest posting (as promised) which coming at the
> tail end of week3 serves well to lead us into week 4. I believe there
> would  be some follow up for Fran's tremendous endeavours, Fran, please
> stay with us for this week 4.
>
> This week we focus on proposals for speculative, tangible networks -  the
> unrealized, to be realized, the anticipated, to be anticipated, the trashed
> and the in progress, deep sleep conjuration, deep water dive in, deep root
> expounding.... we open up this week to welcome all your proposal
> contributions.
>
> I am honored to welcome the following three heavy-weight thinkers,
> writers, hackers, weavers+++  whose work i admired much to join us this
> week.
>
> Francesca da Rimini (Adelaide, Australia) is an artist, writer, filmmaker
> and researcher. She was awarded an Australia Council New Media Fellowship
> in 1999, and her work has been widely published and exhibited. She is a
> founding member of the cyberfeminist art collective VNS Matrix,
> intercontinental group identity_runners (with Diane Ludin and Agnese
> Trocchi, and In Her Interior (with Virginia Barratt). Recent collaborations
> include performance/installation *lips becoming beaks, hexing the alien*
> and *The Darkening*. She periodically adds to her labyrinth at LambdaMOO
> to continue hexing capitalism from within the beast.
>
> Denis Roio aka Jaromil (Amsterdam, NL) is a purpose driven software
> artisan and well known ethical hacker. CTO and co-founder of the Dyne.org
> think &do tank, a non-profit foundation with more than 15 years of
> expertise in social and technical innovation. Leading digital culture
> institution popular among digital natives and millenials. Jaromil shares
> understandable insights and visions on Internet of Things, Blockchain
> Technologies, Cyber Security, Data Ownership and Software Freedom. Expert
> speaker about Open Source, Lean and Agile methodologies
>
> McKenzie Wark from New Castle, Australia, currentl living and working in
> New York City. known for his writings on media theory
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_studies>, critical theory
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory>, new media
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media>, and the Situationist
> International <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International>.
> His best known works are *A Hacker Manifesto
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto>* and *Gamer Theory
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gamer_Theory&action=edit&redlink=1>*.
> He is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_School> in New York City. To cite
> a few of his books -
>
> ·  *The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of
> the Situationist International* (Verso, 2011)
>
> ·  *Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class* (Polity, 2012)
>
> ·  *Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation* (with
> Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker) (University of Chicago Press,
> 2013)
>
> ·  *The Spectacle of Disintegration* (Verso, 2013)
>
> ·  *Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene* (Verso, 2015)
>
> ·  *General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century*
> (Verso, 2017)
>
>
> On a sunny day in June.. let the words begin....
>
>
> over
>
> sl
>
>
>
>


-- 

McKenzie Wark
*Professor of Media and Culture*
EUGENE LANG COLLEGE
65 w11th st, NEW YORK, NY 10011

warkk at newschool.edu
<http://www.newschool.edu/marketing-communication/email-signature.html#>
T 212 229 5100 2241 / M 646 3697266 / @mckenziewark / room #456
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