cultural artifacts

"Once you get into the flow of things, you're always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that's what I'm going to talk about." -- Rhythm Science The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science -- the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, "the changing same." Taking the Dj's mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn't stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist's consciousness and the outside world. Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona ("spooky" from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for "coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity." For example: "Start with the inspiration of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes...What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density." Or, for an online "remix" of two works by Marcel Duchamp: "I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material -- with him rhyming!" Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson ("all minds quote"), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. "The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce," he writes. Miller's textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book's motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld's claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are "theoretical fetish objects...'zines for grown-ups." (Source: Google Books)

More than ever, our cultural institutions are in process. A precarious state that necessitates an ouroboros of approach: we compose even as we are composed. Composing with technology only yields up further process as our predominant cultural artifact. How must we determine its literary value? We must learn to unmake. We must interrogate process through the lens of process. By examining how our cultural artifacts are composed, we may further reveal their stakes. The following presents a beginning survey and comparative analysis of how different writers have composed with/through/among technology to produce cultural artifacts. This study is by no means exhaustive; however, even among few volunteers, there already are interesting trends and divergences.

As writers we are cultural producers. Often with a split mind, we reflect on the result of our labor even as it is born. In this connected world of manifold process, it is difficult to divorce ourselves completely: especially, if our writing follows the trend of content that comments on its form. Don't we, as practitioners of writing that takes advantage of emerging technology, have a stake in suggesting what it can be? What it can do? Submissions and suggestions were graciously provided through the community and personal correspondence. Why isn't reflective commentary by writers on writing a more visible resource? Hopefully, even as a small overview, this paper will serve as a community repository of such commentary.

There were expected and unexpected findings. I expected to find evidence of "split-mind composition". The process of composing Digital Literature demands not only a consideration of language as content, or data, but also the formation/composition of that data to a concrete degree. I expected that the technologies selected as writing mediums would have their own meanings and literary potentials that could be read through the way they produce a text. Part of the body of the text produced is the current of what the technology brings to it. To a lesser extent, I expected varying degrees of hacktivist aesthetic: writers co-opting technical platforms to reflect culture back at itself. I did not expect the undertones of writer/machine struggle to be as prevalent. Findings show gradients of tension between writer and machine control of the system. In some ways, the writer is one embodiment of manifold process, synapse firing, always executing. They are one process set to "interrupt" the system. Yet, "writers write what writing wants. And in that writing the very form of the writer is rewritten" (Johnston).

Source: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/community-repository…