new media technologies

We Descend: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor first appeared in electronic form in 1997, published by Eastgate Systems on a floppy disk as a Storyspace Reader for Macintosh computers; as of 2018, the work is available on the internet, encoded in HTML5 and CSS3, the latest in a series of at least a dozen necessary "upgrades" to its software instantiation. Throughout this period, techology for presenting archival material has continued to transform at an increasing rate. At the same time, previously unknown writings have come to light; new methods of processing writings have been developed; and certain assumptions guiding the preparation of previous volumes have had to be updated as well. This paper will focus on some of the most pressing issues facing the primary "minder of gaps" in such an enterprise, the Curator, of which Bill Bly is only the most recent. Perhaps the largest gap to be bridged in our comprehension of such an enterprise is that between the impression of tidiness and order that any "finished" instantiation — with its neatly labeled apparati, finding aids, annotations, and commentary — presents to the reader, in contrast to the extensive dithering, fussing, and floundering actually required to herd together a collection of writings that have been gathered and transmitted over a span of many generations. Once brought together, these texts must be arranged, sequenced, and linked to one another in an organization that facilitates their being read, understood (each by itself and as a member of a group), pondered, and then easily located again after being laid aside. The immaterial "space" defined by this "placement" of such "objects" in relation to each other — as if they were furniture and other appurtenances arranged in a room — is useless until its design can be mentally grasped by the reader, and some person must perform this essentially hospitalic function, that of welcoming the reader into the space inhabited by the writings of the Archives. In doing so, this hôtelier (the Curator, whether named or not), leaves a trace that itself can be "read". In We Descend, all such persons are regarded as of equal importance to the original Authors whose work the reader has come here to encounter. The first Curator was Egderus himself, a scribe who discovered a cache of ancient texts, to which he added writings by his contemporaries as well as his own recorded thoughts and memories, thereby creating the first "holdings" that form the kernel of the Archives now bearing his name. This process of amalgamation was recapitulated some generations later by an unknown Scholar who rediscovered the long-forgotten holdings of Egderus and passed it along, bridging the gap between Egderus and Bill Bly, whose mission has been to render the Archives into hypertext form.

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/614/Welco…

A double is haunting the world--the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world--for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Source: amazon.com

In his artist essay "Steps Into Performance (And Out)," Vito Acconci writes: "...if I specialize in a medium, then I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another - so, then instead of turning toward 'ground' I would shift my attention and turn to 'instrument,' I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on whatever ground was available." Is it true that the artist is the visionary medium or instrument best positioned to transform the cultural landscape and that the tools we use, the theories that justify it all, and the outcomes that all too often play into the preconceived agendas and methods of the academic research community as well as the corporate R&D divisions should have very little to do with the way an artist or collaborative network of artists bring their creative compositions into society? Artists working with new media technologies are developing hybridized art practices that are meant to play out their performances-to-be on whatever compositional playing field they happen to be on at any given time. That playing field would be the ground of the moment, not one they would have to dig themselves out of continuously, but one that they would act on as a digital persona circulating in the networked space of flows. "I had a marvelous art-making machine," artist/writer Eleanor Antin once said, "my personas. I never knew where it would go." Many interdisciplinary media artists are following Antin's lead. Consider DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid. Are you familiar with his constructed persona? His art-making machine? "Creating this identity," says DJ Spooky aka Paul Miller, "allowed me to spin narratives on several fronts at the same time and produce persona as shareware." There is no sure-fire way of constructing the "right" set of digital personas so that you can spin your narratives, remix your realities, and build your own one-person "art-making machine." What does it take to locate your own visionary track? Is the visionary inseparable from the technological? One of the early visionary media artists, Nam June Paik, was circumspect in his view of what he called the cybernated life. In his artist notes entitled "Cybernated Art," Paik wrote: "Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated." Does producing "persona as shareware" in digital cultures open up the possibility of creating an "art-making machine" that leads to visionary experience? How does this relate to what Allan Kaprow referred to as the blurring of art and life, research and performance, writing and envisioning? In his book Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead writes: "Creativity is the principle of novelty." One of the cruel ironies of being a living, breathing postproduction artist-medium in an age of super-late turbocharged capitalism is that the environment that produces innovation is also the environment that kills creativity. 

Is envisioning the visionary still even possible?

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)