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

Sun Jun 24 04:50:46 AEST 2018

Shu Lea,
   thanks tor the link to http://compostingthenet.net which i was just
playing with for a bit. I had once tried to get a more prosaic set of tools
developed for working with nettime.org as a collaboration with Warren Sack.
(We picked that one as its archive is public and has been for years).
Nobody would fund it so that didn't happen. I don't know how much one would
need tools for doing digital humanities style work on listserv culture, or
if one just needs to think about it and do it the old human humanities way.

Its remarkable how the networks of the nineties get left out of various
histories, from art history to media history. I was at a rather good event
on cybernetics organized by millennial artists, librarians, coders. Of the
three hundred people there, nobody knew what nettime was, or any of the
other similar networks i polled the audience about. They had only heard of
rhizome because its now a program at New Museum. I see a lot of people
re-inventing the wheel. I had to sit through a panel discussion recently at
which one panelist declared that "there is no critical writing about tech."

So the question then becomes one of the temporal aspect of networks, how
they might pass themselves along through time without losing too much of
their form. One can see what's going to happen if one reads the books on
the Situationist International, which is all things to all people, but is
never a network in the literature, let alone a series of conflicts and
mediations about what a network is or could be. I tried to remedy that a
bit in The Beach Beneath the Street, but there's a lot to be done to create
a network approach to the history of networks.

On Sat, Jun 23, 2018 at 1:05 PM, Shu Lea Cheang <shulea at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> hi, warkk
>
> I think we should bring in Rachel Baker to help us digging into the
> Situationists!! and we can start listing some keywords: distributed,
> autonomous.... (with all empyrians' help!)
>
> so, indeed about the threads...just as we witnessed here last 3 weeks, the
> multiple threads, the threads that got picked up or sunk into oblivion......
>
> and about listserve culture...you should really work on the book. I am
> very interested in it.
>
> i have this web work, composting the net (2013).
>
> real time accessing listserve, retrieve the postings randomly, scramble
> the words, make compost out of it for the fresh sprouts to grow..
>
> http://compostingthenet.net
>
> use menu pull down to take a listserve, when one start composting process,
> press mouse to stop the tumbling and read.
>
> the composted ones - nettime, spectre, empyre, idc, aha, (skor is out, and
> it seems rohpost also not available any more)
>
> Annet Decker once commissioned me to compost SKOR of NL, which gave me the
> archive access . unfortunately SKOR got shut down and the site is no longer
> available. this was casualty of NL's last media art budget cut...
>
> over
>
> sl
>
> On 23/06/18 17:01, warkk wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
>
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forumempyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.auhttp://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>

-- 

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20180623/9e6d5658/attachment.html>