what are you rebelling against?
paper delivered to the 2nd National Artists Books Forum, Artspace Mackay, February 2005
Many of you will know that the title of this paper is a line from the Marlon Brando film, The Wild One.
You must know the scene – Brando’s famous retort to the question, What are you rebelling against, Johnny?", is ‘What have
you got?’.
Now, while revisiting this paper five years later, I am thinking "What are you revelling against?" might have made a better, more apt and more playful title.
Artists are often very adept at calling into question the very nature of art itself and this is a very important kind of rebellion because often we reinvent or, better still, take up the task of constructing something different or something new. It’s not rebellion for the sake of it but myriad critical practices through which culture and art are being renegotiated. It’s a question put to everyone in this room – not only those who refuse to see any connection across media and tell me ‘the computer is just a tool’ – refusal is rebellion – but also to those who are railing against the book because it’s not the latest technology.
So when I ask, ‘What are you rebelling against?’, I am really calling on the rebellions of those practices often referred to as trangressive.
However, in keeping with my introduction of the idea of revelling, perhaps I should also note the celebratory, reckless and festive nature of those rebellions.
So, I am asking about the sorts of institutions, practices and discourses that frame artists’ books and new media works. Of the things new media artists and books artists seem to share is resistance to each other. Some new media artists proclaim things like the ‘end of books’ while some book artists refute the semiotic value and imperative of media and indeed technology. That’s a fissure that really interests me given my own view that there is a commonality to be found across different kinds of practices over time. It interests me all the more because my pathway to artists’ books starts from my interest in new media writing and hypermedia. It’s from having worked with new technologies and in new media that I got myself to a point of saying ‘I see both a connection and a dislocation’.
In the early days of hypertext and web browsers, let’s say the early 90s until the late 90s, when linking[1] and some image and animation were really its defining moments, many hypertext writers and theorists were railing against the book with particular reference to the novel. There was an intense focus on this. So they were railing against a literary form not the book per se. However, they weren’t saying the ‘novel was dead’, as in that famous essay by Robert Coover in the New York Times[2], they were saying that the book was dead that the book was a knowledge structure and indeed a literary form that required some interrogation and scrutiny. What those artists brought to bear was a focus on the book as technology and as media. I have a specific interest in text in these contexts – and agree with the contention that language is a technology – but as many theorists have demonstrated it’s not so easy to tease out the text or even the technology from everything else. There’s always a bit of drift in the sorts of territories we need to cross. I read a very compelling essay by McKenzie Wark some years ago where he described William Blake as a ‘media artist’.[3]
Primarily I will focus on new media work and examine how these practices have much to contribute to book practices and discussions about books, how they might actually provide us with an opportunity to think a little differently about books and artists’ books.
I have participated in and read many discussions about both new media arts and artists’ books that grind to a halt as soon as someone asks how we define these things. We grapple with ideas about THE book and, to my mind, there’s really no such thing as THE book. That’s an ideal that seems to occupy emotional, semiotic and mental space – are all books are measured against this ideal? Or is the ideal an end in itself? Likewise, in the world of new media, there is great anxiety about the multiplicity of practice that falls within this categorisation. Among other things, the word, NEW, presents a problem but I won’t delve into that in great detail. So really we have these media or technology based practices that don’t hold and we can see something of the quandary of taxonomy or typology. I guess there’s a relation to past and future in this – to me THE book connotes an historic ideal from which we have gravitated away and the NEW is something that we have to keep searching for and asserting. Both ideals have a kind of remoteness about them.
For the moment, as Johanna Drucker proposes, instead of considering what a book is, let’s consider how a book does. And she so eloquently highlights ideas about performativity as the means for examining this.[4] Rather than labouring over the definition of artists’ books, attention turns to tendencies and processes and we might start to consider an array of methodologies in this.
Most artists I know are focused on ‘process’ and their processes are usually multifaceted and interdisciplinary. This question about methodology or process has come up a few times in some recent discussions – enough times to give me pause for thought. What seems to happen is that some notion of pure craft or design is posited as the appropriate means of considering books. I am not sure how far you can go with that line of argument because it seems rather hermetic. I am trying to think about the way these things are always culturally inscribed. I am trying to think of and through ways where we can talk about one or two things without disregarding everything else and make some meaningful connections across practices. In loosening up a little we might be able to take or make new shapes. There’s no endgame.
We’ve inherited this bifurcation in our thinking about artists’ books – book as object and book as idea – and that’s a taxonomic reductionism that’s not particularly useful because to me there’s a default to a kind of Cartesian, essentialist or dualistic regime of the material (the craft, the feminine, the object) and immaterial (the art, the masculine, the idea). Generally and historically, these splittings are gendered and hierarchised – much of contemporary feminist thought, for example, has been directed towards unpacking that and it grieves me to see that people continue to articulate various craft practices as epitomising some kind of idealised feminine/domestic trope. It may not be so explicit but if you look at some of the histories, curatorial rationales and exhibitions you’ll see there’s some intonation of that in the way these practices are recounted and presented. I have difficulty in reconciling a fundamentally European history or ideal or tradition with national, Indigenous and local histories. For the moment, pluralism, multiplicity, difference works for me as a method or way of thinking both critically and historically, even though some art historians have thrown their hands up in the air about it. This to me is legitimate methodology because it is process-based and is legitimate for criticism, for practice and for history. Pluralism gives us – diversity, layers, striation, network, architecture, fragmentation, fold and all those other postmodern, postcolonial and feminist tropes that have infiltrated and transformed our knowledge structures. It’s a little more open-ended. There is no endgame or synthesis – we are doing things with and through design, craft, technology and the like while considering how design, craft or technology does.
At some point you have to be able to construct something – new spaces for thinking, perhaps new shapes. How can any of us say ‘book’, or even ‘artists’ book’, and expect to be able to isolate that from everything, the whole circuit of meaning, that makes a book what we think it is or experience it to be? So this idea of performativity as Drucker proposes is quite useful. We participate in this exchange – we produce books, we are also produced by them. We act on them, they act on us. And that’s what N. Katherine Hayles says:
the book is an artifact whose physical properties and historical usages structure our interactions with it in ways obvious and subtle. In addition to defining the page as a unit of reading, and binding pages sequentially to indicate an order of reading, are less obvious conventions such [as] the opacity of paper, a physical property that defines the page as having two sides whose relationship is linear and sequential rather than interpenetrating and simultaneous. To change the physical form of the artifact is not merely to change the act of reading … but profoundly to transform the metaphoric network structuring the relation of word to world.[5]
So, we can see that artists’ books, because so many artists really impose on the physical properties of the book, produce this altered experience of reading and when we come to books, we really do come to acts of reading even when those books are image intensive or unable to be read or inquire into ‘objectness’. Reading is our habit and it’s our expectation even when the artist makes no overture to inscription as such.[6] I guess I am also interested in the delineation – in our making of books and our dematerialisation of them, at what point does representation kick in? I have seen a lot of artists’ books and, without getting too involved in ideas about simulacra[7] and the like, a great many of them[8] seem like representations of books. It’s a blurry place but I wonder how we might negotiate that because it has bearing on the way digital technologies might be herding us to new ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing. How do we understand these notions of interpretation and representation in this specific instance?
Darren Tofts says of new media work rather than being new of necessity, hypermedia's contribution to and advancement of the cultural apparatus of representation lies in its re-constitution of the historical practices it re-combines.[9] In referring to the ‘recombinant logic’ of hypermedia and cyberculture, he alludes to the persistence of seemingly unnamed and experimental artistic practices, those don't or haven't quite ‘fit in’. Tofts asserts that certain ‘inflections, attitudes and energies’ persist into the present and persist into the virtual realm. Tofts investigates and creates ways in which old and new media interrelate. He asks, ‘in what ways do hypermedia practices have to be reconciled with those media, such as the book, cinema, television, animation etc, which have contributed to its recombinant logic?’[10]
There are parallels to Lev Manovich’s research[11]. In The Language of New Media, he investigates continuities and discontinuities between new forms and the old ones. He sought to show how many principles of new media already existed in older media arts such as cinema. He also sought to foreground the avant-garde potential of new media, its promise to create new cultural forms and to re-define existing ones. The sorts of questions that Manovich posits include: What are the ways in which new media relies on older cultural languages and what are the ways in which it breaks with them? What is unique about how new media create the illusion of reality, represent space and time, and organise human experience? How do techniques of old media such as the rectangular frame, mobile camera and montage operate in new media? We might see similar references to the book – the page, the border, the column, design and so on.
But this is not all, he says. The computerisation of culture not only leads to the emergence of new forms; it redefines existing ones such as photography and cinema. Manovich therefore also investigate the effects of the computer revolution on visual culture at large. How does the shift to computer-based media redefine the nature of static and moving images? What is the effect of computerisation on the visual languages used by our culture? What are the new aesthetic possibilities that become available to us? Even though there are a lot of them, these kinds of questions are very pertinent to the discussion we’re having here. So this isn’t something that just happens in the new media – this new media has an impact on the way we consider ‘older’ or established media. I hope that in placing or contextualising new media within a larger historical perspective, it’s possible to be more circumspect and less panicked about the way media changes. As Manovich argues, we can begin to see the long trajectories, which lead to new media in its present state, and we can also extrapolate these trajectories into the future.
We live in this very peculiar to and fro epoch. Even so, when I look at hypertext, I see some resonance with artists’ books, often more so than with novels or other literature. I see, in some of those works, shared ‘ inflections, attitudes and energies’. I think this is more useful than making outlandish claims about the novelty of new media and hypertext or the demise of old media and forms because these days the new becomes old very quickly and, after 500 years, books have proven their resilience. So we have a web of ideas and histories that have bearing on the way in which hypertext developed. One of the things we need to be mindful of is that superficial comparisons are easy, very easy – just like linear accounts of history are easy. Technology itself isn’t an explanation – whether that technology is a book, a printing press or a computer – and so we need to dig a little deeper.
Like so much printed ephemera, new media works disappear across technological generations. So while I am keen to establish this consonance in the ethos of these works across print and digital realms, I am also interested in exploring this, in the way that Hayles does, in a way that accounts for media specificity and materiality and makes the point very clearly that they are not the same things. It takes me to the point of inquiring into our embodied awareness of books or computers as technologies or media so as to deal with issues of form and content. Hayles defines materiality in the following way:
The physical attributes constituting any artifact are potentially infinite; in a digital computer, for example, they include the polymers used to fabricate the case, the rare earth elements used to make the phosphors in the CRT screen, the palladium used for the power cord prongs, and so forth. From this infinite array a technotext will select a few to foreground and work into its thematic concerns. Materiality thus emerges from interactions between physical properties and a work’s artistic strategies. For this reason, materiality cannot be specified in advance, as if it preexisted the specificity of the work. An emergent property, materiality depends on how the work mobilises its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops … In the broadest sense, materiality emerges from the dynamic interplay between the richness of a physically robust world and human intelligence as it crafts this physicality to create meaning.[12]
Books and computers do have both material and semiotic significance. In taking this route and adopting this idea of materiality, I haven’t actually stopped to account for virtuality as Hayles, herself, so rigourously does[13]. They imbue their own aesthetic possibilities and in the transitional and recombinant print-digital era, we can expect to see work that is highly reminiscent of the printed page yet makes some overtures to the digital environment and that’s the point that Manovich and Tofts make. It’s important to think in webs.
I’m not here to say books are dead, nor am I here to say that books are the penultimate experience of human literacy, nor am I here to say that artist books and hypertexts are the same thing. They are most certainly and evidently not the same thing even though they can share a certain ethos, some tendencies, some energies and some starting points and can sometimes do the same things. Their differences are wrought through the specificity of their media and materiality. I think these moments of sameness are as important as the moments of difference.
Because my interest is in text, I respond to those works where some idea of writing and text is at play. It’s more likely to be the case that we can see some connections across page and screen when we look at text. In the works that interest me what is at play is what David Bolter calls an engagement with ‘topographic space’ whereby words are experienced as more than verbal description – they are experienced as both visual and verbal phenomenon and in ways that involve both seeing and reading. I hope we will see the betweenness, the slippages across media, across pages and screens, across the physical and virtual realms and across technologies where we can see more clearly the pluralities and multiplicities that shape our literacies. The three artists I am looking at are all Australian new media artists: Teri Hoskin, Jenny Weight and Suzanne Treister.
Teri Hoskin – meme_shift
http://ensemble.va.com.au/meme_shift
Teri Hoskin is the coordinator of the electronic Writing Research ensemble and has curated some extraordinary projects through and with the ensemble. One of those is the book, ensemble logic, which was published in 2000 and includes a cdrom version of the ensemble site at that time. Having coordinated and curated several online projects and collaborations with writers, Teri edited and designed a book of this work so as to reinterpret those writings – or as she said, ‘to consider how writing for online environments translates in-to, back-to, the book’. I was always curious as to why Teri said that because these works didn’t start as books. She’s clearly pointing to something else – most likely to the way our reading started as print. In many instances, we read print before we read handwriting and handwriting as in cursive script is largely unintelligible to us until we are several years through our schooling. In so doing she was seeking to investigate the relationships and crossings between literacy and electracy or electronic literacy.
The first thing that strikes me about meme_shift as I click through it is it’s minimal beauty – only when you move through it a little, you get a sense of it’s complexity and its contours. There are quite intriguing things about it as she negotiates an increasingly fraught terrain of language, inscription, translation. It’s often that case that we engage these kinds of works – historically referred to as hypertexts – as literary works. Teri inquires into the process of ‘practicing design as writing’ and that’s a perplexing project but you do get this sense that her approach is spatial (but I don’t want to say cartographic because it’s more dimensional than a map). The pages have depth, the work has depth and it’s very much writing across multiple planes of the visual and textual. As Hayles says, the content of the pages interpenetrates. We have to work a little at this – sometimes things don’t quite fit on a page and we have to retain our mental maps of where we have been. Or we have to scroll the content around to see everything.
Often what we see in these earlier works are artists trying to come to terms with the functionality of new software – I am not saying that’s what Teri is doing there are an array of aesthetic choices that need to be made and negotiated when we work with software. Things like rollovers and pop-ups were really quite significant in scattering the pathways from the printed page into this digital environment.
Bear in mind that a meme is kind of like ‘cultural DNA’ – it’s a unit of cultural memory, something we pass on across generations and sometimes across cultures. So there’s a sense of ‘passing on’ and ‘inheritance’ – these are such culturally loaded ideas because both of these words have connotations of death and what’s left behind, they evoke tradition and enculturation. That’s the subject of this work and the memes Teri evokes are text, writing and reading and technology – she explores our embodied experiences of language. She’s not saying anything is dead but rather exploring a transition or transformation in a quite intimate, quiet and personal way. There’s a recurring motif of a cicada and that’s such a poignant symbol of joyous rebirth – shedding its skin and singing its song.
There’s obviously something of the page in the design of this work – we can see the text, the image, the page. But it’s on a computer screen and there’s a different kind of relationship to the reader[14]. Teri also has an interest in Japanese culture having spent time living there and this work is an exploration of that – a translation of cultural experience or passing on of memes. As Teri said, meme_shift is
to do with an obsession with all things Japanese, as a site of ultimate Other. For me, the me now, the me then: country girl on her first journey elsewhere. She felt her way around the place via literature, manga, confusion and getting lost, over and over. The sources are historical, literary, philosophical, social and personal. And this environment, playing with what it might do for the way we read a text, the way one can write. I'm still (always) working on and with this. Perhaps a pattern will emerge.[15]
We can often get annoyed or impatient with net.art because we don’t know where we’re going, how big it is, how long it will take, whether we will experience an entire work and how much work we have to do – non-linearity doesn’t promise an end. Sometimes our electronic literacy doesn’t quite engage. I guess uncertainty is an important part of this kind of work.
This page is the core navigation for meme_shift. One of the things we encounter in these works are instructions – the visual space often includes instructions[16] on how to navigate and how to get around a work and there are examples of that in this work. A real concern for the reader finding their way is integral to the work. This is actually my favourite page in this work even though lots of people say rollovers and the like are old hat or done. It’s an silly thing to say – a sort of meaningless red herring or technological determinism that reduces all art and all criticism to a kind of fashion that’s already been done. Critical languages need to be able to circumvent this because, in pursuing this line of thinking, we end up saying that only work using the latest technology is the most important and most effective and the only real art. It’s anti-pluralism.
I know what the limitations are with these technologies, as technologies rather than as artworks, but I like to suspend my logical mind for long enough to get a sense of enacting changes on the screen through my interactions with it and moving through the work, taking different pathways and making aesthetic choices as a reader. There’s something to be gained through improvisation. There’s no point being sceptical because not all new media works make outrageous claims. I know that these changes are just limited pre-programmed possibilities and that there is no feedback loop between me as a user and the work. In other words, the work will pretty much always be the same, it won’t learn anything from my interactions with it but I do respond to it. I get a sense of tactility from this work – that I am touching the letters and that makes them quiver, lose focus and blur. The words and letters shake off the stillness of print and move – as if they are about to flee. To me that’s just breathtaking because we don’t often have that experience of the text artwork. Even tho concrete poetry can look like it dances around a page, we don’t often have the experience of being able to touch its concreteness or affect its presence in this way even though some artists’ books have ways and means of being interactive or changeable.
One of the other aspects of this work is the way she uses different parts of the browser window or text – like the status bar and the page titles. There’s a reference there to marginalia, that there are all kinds of spaces for writing.
I don’t want to become too bogged down in comparisons to print traditions because it’s important to appreciate that this work can only be produced in this kind of environment. Its materiality is computer or screen-based and not print-based. Texts are hidden and revealed – ‘alt’ tags for hyperlinks and images. Pages or screens take shape as their content is downloaded. The eye doesn’t get it all at once like on a printed page – the page itself is often revealed at the speed of downloading. Artists have used this for quite dramatic affect and there’s something in watching the technology assemble each page especially where there’s a lot of image or sound.
Jenny Weight – concatenation
http://www.idaspoetics.com.au/generative/generative.html
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~jenny/
Concatenation is a shockwave work by Jenny Weight that is described as online generative poetry. As we click on the interface, words and phrases are assembled from a seeming electronic alphabet soup. This work does evoke something of the game, Scrabble.
One of the things worth pointing out here in relation to most new media works is that they are usually wholly produced by the writer or at least ‘artistically directed’ by the writer. It’s not often that a writer can do that and direct the way their work will appear in the world beyond words on paper that a publisher or other agent then prepares for publication. It’s the writer who conceptualises the work as a visual or new media work. So they are actually making these works and these digital objects as artists do and this is a very process based engagement across media and text.
By all accounts, Jenny is a very switched on programmer and to her the code she writes is of equal textual value as what we see as the writing or poetry or the image or the interface. The programming comes to about 160 A4 pages for this work – so we have that sense of multiple texts through which a work is written. To my mind, virtual space is a textual space – it is written through the languages of code. Writing in this space is multiplied. Concatenation is one of three that explores a ‘nexus between language and violence contextualised by contemporary world events’. The principle behind the work is the application of William Burroughs’ cut-up concept to the computer. She says, ‘I t's not as random as a cutup; there are heaps of rules determining what gets generated.’ She also refers to OuliPo or the Workshop of Potential Literature, which is a loosely knit group of authors and mathematicians interested in exploring the use of formal constraint as an aid to creativity in literature.
Jenny says, ‘I'm not so much interested in the surreal aspect of the cutup principle, but in the performative aspect.’ And there you have that reference to the reader as performing a work or a work being performed. There that sense of ‘doing something with words’ and of ‘making things with words’. It’s a good example of a working process from the print or analogue environment that’s being tested, tried, toyed with and reinvented in a digital environment and the insistence of particular energies and inflections. What also interests me about this is that Cut and Paste are standard functions in most software – there’s an inbuilt sense of editing or collaging that wasn’t really available to us with the typewriter and other analogue inscription technologies. But as we read the work, we do play it and perform it. I think that’s quite evocative because it gives writing a kind of musicality or instrumentality that wasn’t there before.
Suzanne Treister – … No other Symptoms. Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky
CD ROM publication: 'No Other Symptoms – Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky'
Accompanied by a 124 page full colour hardback book.
Published by Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, UK.
ISBN: 190103366X
http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/
No other Symptoms. Time Travelling with Rosalind Brodsky is an interactive work produced in Director for cdrom. The book and cdrom set was published by Black Dog Publishing in the UK in 1999. This is an expensive, high quality and very sexy production – full colour, hardcover. Each media offer different perspectives and different experiences of time and space. The premise for the work is quite elaborate and narrative driven. But it’s an artwork not a story and was included in the Sydney Biennale in 2002. But it is a story that sometimes feels like an elaborate game. We slip into the baroque world of Brodsky and the traditions of Jewish culture and intellectualism particularly psychoanalysis via what one critic described as a Dr Who aesthetic. There’s a kind of cyber-Judaism in this work that mixes it up in both warming and confronting ways – family traditions of hearth and faith and those more gruesome political histories such as the Holocaust which has defined Jewish lives since. This work is much more complex than I’ve presented here but I do encourage you to explore the work on the Rosalind Brodsky website.
One of the things worth noting about this work is that a book is a central part of the narrative. Once we get into Brodsky’s realm and start touring her Bavarian castle, we encounter her private world including her diary as well as case notes of her sessions with the renowned psychoanalysts – Freud, Klein, Lacan, Kristeva and Jung. Brodsky was actually delusional. So this book (closed on the desk above) becomes one of the key means by which we get to know Brodsky and her life’s journey and as she time travels for her clinical sessions.
While it’s significant that this work is published with a book, it’s the diary that interests me in this context of artists’ book practice. Is the diary a book or is it a representation of a book or a simulation of a book? We’ll accept quite readily, without question, that this paper and cardboard object is a book. But what of the book within the book? The book within the electronic artwork?[17]
We know what Jean Baudrillard has written about the simulacra and this perplexity of reality and representation. We can see quite clearly, I hope, through this particular example that there are some issues to be resolved in how the new technologies have caused us to rethink some of those things we thought to be true. To my mind some of the conceptual works that we have seen today are akin to representations or simulations of books rather than books in and of themselves. What are the limits of this blurring of the book? I won’t go as far as to draft up a checklist and say ‘if an object meets x number of criteria then it is a book’. It’ll leave that for the taxonomists and typologists. However, there are ideas about books in this trio of works and books are evoked in various ways and through various tropes. I’ve just wanted to identify some moments that might lead us to other ways of thinking about books while retaining a sense that there are blatant differences between computer and print technologies and texts.
Coda
Over the last 10 or so years there have been quite a number of studies about the book, reading, writing and the like. I have a raft of books where those kinds of works had a chapter at the end called something like ‘Hypertext and Future Words’ as in Simon Morley’s Writing on the Wall or ‘Endpaper Pages’ as in Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. We become acutely aware that there is great uncertainty about the future and that technology is the cause of that uncertainty because of this transformation in our textual and technological realms.[18] But when have these arenas really been static? In asking ‘what are you rebelling against’, I really want you to consider your own technophobia and your own technophilia. Says Darren Tofts:
Technofear in the age of cybernetics is like a densely inscribed palimpsest, for critical attentions to its motivations ... reveals the legible traces of ancient technophobias that were bound up with the introduction of writing and alphabetic literacy.[19]
Books and language are technologies, so we shouldn’t let our technological determinism about one kind of technology blind us to the possibilities of others – this is the double-edged sword of technophilia and technophobia. There’s nothing to gain in refuting possibility or projecting a digitopian future just as there’s nothing to gain in negating or glorifying artisan traditions. We live the future now and future words are already being read, spoken, transmitted, emailed and written. Our future words and worlds include our history – and we live in a digital world that is both shaped by web-authoring, templates, webpages, fonts, desktops, web publishing and the like but also reshaping our understanding of these printed forms. The languages and metaphors of old and new media are intrinsically intertwined.
One of the things I finally want to say is kind of a plea to the collecting institutions like libraries and other collectors of artists’ books (and similar works) because I hope in what I and others have said there’s enough reason for those organisations to start looking at collecting and preserving electronic artist publications. It perhaps seems like I am grasping at straws. I’ve admitted that these works are not artists’ books but it’s necessary to try to find ways and means of dealing with this work in a way that doesn’t lump it all together as new media and through which we can make some meaningful connections across artforms and artistic practices. I don’t believe this kind of work will be around forever. It’s already been characterised as first generation cybertext – it’s very much of this peculiar to and fro, in-between epoch. I pretty much believe that books will be around forever or, at least, for generations to come.
Many vest the book with immortality or permanence. On the other hand, virtuality is fleeting, impermanent. Disasters of the scale of the fire that destroyed the Alexandria Library don’t happen that often. But if Paul Virilio is right then an ‘information bomb’ of major cataclysmic proportions is inevitable and who knows if that will desiccate our cybercultures.[20] Books are here but these works, despite our attempts to ground them in the physical world on cdroms and in books, are facing disappearance either as data trash because we can’t find them and don’t know they are there or through technological attrition and obsolescence.
I’ve heard many an artist complain about not being able to access work produced a decade or more ago – a lot of them have already been lost. The software and the platforms simply don’t exist any more. Technology, or rather technologists, tell us that it’s only about the next thing and the happening thing. This is a mindset that means we are not only losing a part of our history but, more potently, a part of the connection between past and present, present and future. In a state that boasts two of the largest publicly accessible collections of artists’ books, I’d want to explore this more meaningfully if I could. There’s some flux in this collecting and exhibiting scenario – we have collections of moving image, we have screen collections, there are exhibitions of net.art – all of which include text-based work. I wonder if this really is a meaningful way of going about it. It’s difficult to assemble all this work under the one category because the field is not static. And this institutionalisation framework is increasingly a bone of contention of new media practitioners.
Just to illustrate something of this, let me tell you about Deena Larsen who is an American new media writer who produced work in hypercard many years ago – she goes as far as to collect old, working Mac Classics so that she can continue to show that work. Here’s an extract from a weblog written by a QUT student when Deena visited a couple of years ago:
Give a thought to Deena’s first major digital work, “Marble Springs” which can now only be viewed by a person who has access to a Mac Classic. (Forgive me; I didn’t even know that a Mac Classic ever existed). All those several years of work that has become almost inaccessible and would take many more years to re-program. Work that originated, no doubt, in the now naïve expectation that standards would never change so rapidly and extensively, if at all.
It gives rise to some serious thoughts. Will the countless millions of weblogging archives still be able to be read in ten, twenty or one hundred years time?[21]
Notes
1 When Alisha Banbury was speaking I couldn’t help but think there might be something similar about rubrics
in medieval manuscripts and a link. They both open on to bigger ideas
than contained on the page, connecting from the page to a mental or
spiritual space.
2 Robert Coover, ‘The End of Books’, New York Times, June 21, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html?
3 McKenzie Wark, ‘From Hypertext to Codework’, http://www.geocities.com/hypermedia_joyce/wark.html
4 Joanna Drucker, ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space’, http://www.philobiblon.com/drucker/
5 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Massachusetts: MIT Press. 2002. p 22-23
6 See Linda Carroli, ‘ Reading Technology: Curling up with a good information appliance’, 2002, http://home.pacific.net.au/~lcarroli/text/curlingup.htm
7 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. New York: Semiotext[e]. 1983.
8 including some of those that Alex Selenitch showed
9 Darren Tofts, Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology , Sydney: Interface. 1999. passim
10 Ibid. p 10
11 Lev Manovich’s website, from which much of this commentary is sourced, is at http://www.manovich.net
12 Hayles, op.cit. p 32-33
13 See Hayles, "The Condition of Virtuality", Ed. Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. p 69 ff
14 See N. Katherine Hayles discussion of proprioception,
"the sense that tells us where the boundaries of our bodies are", to
describe human relations with books and computers, or screen and print.
"The Condition of Virtuality", Ed. Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. p 88
15 Teri Hoskin, ‘pre_face’, http://ensemble.va.com.au/meme_shift
16 Alex Selenitch spoke about artists books that included or were comprised of instructions.
17 See Hayles discussion of the virtual book, ‘ The Condition of Virtuality’, Ed. Peter Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. p 80 ff
18 See Lisa Gye, ‘Te[XT][C]hnology: A Play (on words) in FIVE ACTS’, http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_18/faf_v18_n02/faftext/gye.html
19 Darren Tofts & McKeich, M., Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, North Ryde, N.S.W.: Interface, c1998, p. 40
20 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb,
21 Royby, Royby.com: today’s reality tomorrow, Feb, 14 2003, http://royby.com/royby_archives.php?id=A2003022
