A video interview about the installation "How It Is in Common Tongues" at the Remediating the Social exhibition with John Cayley and Daniel Howe. Interview conducted by Scott Rettberg 3 Nov. 2012 at Inspace, Edinburgh. Photography by Richard Ashrowan.
John Cayley reads John Cayley reads and discusses his poem PENTAMETERS TOWARD THE DISSOLUTION OF CERTAIN VECTORALIST RELATIONS (which examines the effect of Google on language and poetics) with discursive and conversational interrupts from Jhave.
Recorded on John's Providence, Rhode Island home as part of i2.literalart.net/ on 12 Feb 2012.
(Source: David (Jhave) Johnston's vimeo account.)
David (Jhave) Johnston: discursive and conversational interrupts.
A hypercube is a work of electronic fiction based on the structure of a cube. It comprises six pages, each of which links to four others. Letter to Linus uses the form of a hypercube to explore, through six points of view, the politics of electronic literature.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2)
The art of writing has always been threatened by low overhead. Until now. When you join our exclusive club, you'll enjoy the benefits of reduced competition.
My parents, before they died, bought me English as a graduation present. It's an outdated version. I hear it has fewer problems than the latest release, but I can't look up some of the newer words...
In decrepit basement rooms, gather daily to train, recite the alphabet backward and forward in seconds, write in complete darkness, memorize dictionaries.
You are even capable, some fear, of unlocking encrypted text; freely pirating newspapers, textbooks, bus schedules.
If. Dialects starved, would you still cook me dinner?
To foster literacy, the government is using helicopters to overfly target sectors, dropping poems warning of the evils of poverty. "Real friends don't need money," one optimistic slogan states.
With language rapidly gaining the status of a military technology, some form of regulation may be in order in order to lock...
Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms.
We see before us a turning in free culture. This turning, lies between the claims of the ordinary against those of the extraordinary, and suggests that we need to carefully examine our current situation. The ordinary highlights the fact that even in the beginnings of free culture there existed its middle and its end, that its past invaded its present, and even the most extreme attention to the present is invaded by a concern for the future. Whereas the extraordinary highlights the possibility of thinking that brings us out of this life-world and instead opens out and unfolds the way in which we might reveal a different world. This world could be said to be both within capitalism and between capitalisms. Here we might think about the transformation of the economic base from an industrial fordist form of capitalism, to an economy founded on the valorisation of information and code, a postfordist capitalism. Free culture, then, could be said to lie in the interstices, and in so doing could be a rare chance to help to point the way from the lived to the desired.
In this short paper I attempt to follow Heidegger (2000) in suggesting that the work of a philosophy of free culture is to awaken us and undo what we take to be the ordinary; looking beyond what I shall call the ontic to uncover the ontological (Heidegger 2000c: 28-35). In this respect we should look to free culture to allow us to think and act in an untimely manner, that is, to suggest alternative political imaginaries and ideas. For this then, I outline what I think are the ontological possibilities of free culture and defend them against being subsumed under more explicitly ontic struggles, such as copyright reform. That is not to say that the ontic can have no value whatsoever, indeed through its position within an easily graspable dimension of the political/technical the direct struggles over IPR, for example, could mitigate some of the worst effects of an expansion of capital or of an instrumental reason immanent to the ontology of a technological culture. However, to look to a more primordial level, the ontological, we might find in free culture alternative possibilities available where we might develop free relations with our technologies and hence new ways of being-in-the-world.
The project of ‘free culture’ is committed to the creation of a cultural space, rather like the ‘public domain’, seeking to complement/replace that of proprietary cultural commodities and privatized meaning. This has been given a new impetus with the birth of the Creative Commons. This organization has sought to introduce cultural producers across the world to the possibilities of sharing, co–operation and commons–based peer–production by creating a set of interwoven licenses for creators to append to their artwork, music and text. In this paper, we chart the connections between this movement and the early Free Software and Open Source movements and question whether underlying assumptions that are ignored or de–politicized are a threat to the very free culture that the project purports to save. We then move to suggest a new discursive project linked to notions of radical democracy.