vernacular

The “vernacular” comes from the Latin verna meaning “home-born slave.” In its common understanding, it refers to the native speech, and has long been associated with “populism.” Many assumptions about digital discourse in the United States are framed by the pragmatics pop forms, driving even political and intellectual discourse into what behavioral scientists call “system 1 cognition”: short-term, unreflective, reactive, and, ultimately, manipulable thinking. This paper, drawing on critical writing developed by Justin Katko and Sandy Baldwin, will discuss choice architecture and strategies of détournement in electronic literature. Against the heavy presence of tagging in social media spaces and graphic design in public spaces, this presentation will analyze Typomatic by Serge Bouchardon, et. al, as a form of digital writing that subverts the reductive tendencies of instrumental signification in favor of ambiguity and excess at the level of the word. Even as I draft this proposal, I find myself wanting to describe the it as a work, for it is a concept, an installation, executed by artists and given a title: Typomatic. But the genius of the work reveals the tension between interface and its output. The Typomatic, is not a body of texts, rather it is a platform on which others are allowed to play. While it might not be the immediate thought of those who play with the machine, it is worth considering the relationship between the tools and the model of social interaction they enable. On the one hand, it is “populist” and “democratic”. Everyone is invited to play along, entering their own word, seeking out its relation. But as each player generates their little text, the role of author migrates into her hands, and her audience, whoever she chooses to share these riddles with (and sharing seems rather inevitable), invites the reader to consider “why?’ Why this word? Why this pairing? What do they mean by this? The interplay between author and readers is held together by the text. In this feedback loop, editing, revision, and virtuosity become emergent priorities, as microcommunities of literary entanglement mobilize acts of discretion to improve writerly engagement with linguistic complexity. The tie that binds the reader and writer through the tool is the appreciation for indeterminacy, eccentricity, cleverness, divergence, and surprise. Contrast this to social media, in which togetherness is achieved through consistent repetition of tags, explicit repetition of content through retweeting, and affirmation through favoriting (in the case of Twitter) or through liking, sharing, and commenting (on Facebook), and, more importantly, the structural consolidation of consensus through the metrics of visibility that elevate the already visible (branding), and one can see rather plainly how communication platforms reproduce different models of the public: In the case of so-called social media, reproducing official messaging under the appearance of everyday speech, or in the case of subversive works like Typomatic, reproducing the pleasures of sociality and fecund individuation in the play of the text, while cultivating the sustained, reflective, and, ultimately, liberatory engagement associated with “system 2 cognition.”

An extended and illustrated version of a talk at the Decade of Web Design Conference in Amsterdam, January 2005

When I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from what was on the web in the mid 90's.

I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution, but in order to stress that -- although I consider myself to be an early adopter -- I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to be different.

So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?

To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.

I made my first web-based art work in 1995. It’s still online, it still works. The internet has changed a lot since then, but the DIY aesthetics and practices of that era have by no means disappeared. In today’s highly commercialised web of proprietary applications, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers, it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects. Drawing upon Olia Lialina’s essay “A Vernacular Web” (2010), this paper makes correlations between the early ‘amateur’ web and today’s maker and open source movements. Examples of the persistence of Web 1.0 are presented, from the massive Ubu Web site which its founder boasts, ‘is still hand-coded in html 1.0 in bbedit, from templates made in 1996,’ to the tiny anti-social network TILDE.CLUB, where small experimental websites are hosted on one ‘totally standard unix computer.’ In addition to the slow writing of the web through hand coding, the practice of appropriating existing source code is discussed in relation to Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge (2008), which has been remixed dozens of times. And, drawing upon Lori Emerson’s book Reading Writing Interfaces (2014), it is argued that experimental web-based works such as Daniel Eatock’s The One Mile Scroll (2008), which transforms virtual space into an actual, physical distance, force slow reading by challenge conventions of web design.

Drawing examples from the free-swinging, rootin'-tootin' 18th century and from the present day, this talk will explore imitation as the sincerest form of innovation. By finding vigorous vernacular forms and investing them with the scope and goals of classical literature, or by projecting wildly onto idealized "foreign" forms, writer/designers have --- at moments of social transition --- pushed, pulled and parodied their cultures toward needed change . . . often laughing all the way. The gesture is that of the cuckoo --- laying one's eggs in another's nest. While offering a historical and theoretical account of this strategy, the presentation will also practice what it preaches --- by performing, live, the latest chapter in an ongoing pastiche fiction. Hang on to your hats!