manifesto

This research will attempt to define a new cultural and socio-economic movement we will tentatively call ‘Platformism.’ We will define Platformism as a contemporary overarching meta-narrative driven by the networked communities and economies made possible by software apps which can be considered at once discrete platforms, and forming part of broader ecosystems affecting almost every sphere of human experience. By delineating and mapping Platformism as an evolving system of complex and disputed territories, our purpose is to explore how creative practices including writing and literature can function in, through and against the platform.Beginning with the 2020 Covid emergency travel and movement restrictions, there has been a dramatic acceleration of the already significant mass-migration toward digital platforms. Networked platforms have multiplied in form and function, and (according to the hyperbole of some companies offering these services) cater to almost every aspect of human being. Many of these platforms have been proposed as alternatives to traditional spaces for social and professional activities. Individuals, groups and communities have experienced a kind of ‘forced experiment’ during this period as they adopted services made possible by online and networked technologies, through computer and mobile telephony, often for the first time.Contemporary writers and other creative practitioners are no exception to this digital mass-migration. Not surprisingly, many artists have embraced Platformism; its promise of new feelings through innovative software; its claims of ‘exposure’ through access to massive user-bases; its non-stop attention/affirmation cycles through ubiquitous always-on technologies. We will argue against accepting the platform as a neutral, arbitrary and isolated substrate passively awaiting inscription by the user/artist. From this perspective, an understanding of Platformism can be useful for observing and developing art and literature in, through, and against the platform.We will present a speculative Platformist ‘manifesto’, algorithmically generated through the statistical analysis of a large number of ‘terms of service’ documents taken from existing software and hardware platforms. This Platformist Manifesto resignifies the legal agreements of social media sites (such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) with hardware platforms (such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Playstation, and Nintendo) into a general declaration which can reveal underlying intentions, motives and beliefs.This generative manifesto will also reveal the metanarratives of Platformism, allowing the reader to form a mental mindscape. These topographies may suggest the limits of the Platform, or at least offer pathways to navigate its boundaries. Our purpose in mapping this territory is to cultivate opportunities for commoning our struggles and priorities, to forge artistic and social positions within these topographies. To return writing to the edge.

In 2015 a colleague and I set up a Tumblr and Twitter account called Crap Futures. The tagline was a quote from Ray Bradbury: ‘People ask me to predict the Future, when all I want to do is prevent it.’ At the time it felt slightly pessimistic — not to mention unscholarly, as we were using the blog to work out ideas from our research. Then came the double surprise of the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election, and by 2020 ‘crap futures’ felt downright tame, almost conventional wisdom. At the same time we felt it was important not to fall into the trap of doomscrolling, apocalyptic paralysis, and the aesthetics of collapse. Instead we should start building the future we want — a point we made in our manifesto — and hold onto a glimmer of hope.The flourishing of manifestos of all types showed 2020 to be a period of both action and reflection. More precisely it was a year of reflection (spring) followed by action (summer) followed by hope (autumn) followed by reaction and acceleration into near collapse (winter). The manifesto is the ur-genre of the avant-garde, reflecting (and often encouraging) crisis and upheaval in politics, society and the arts. The genre’s high period, what Mary Ann Caws calls the ‘manifesto moment’, was a century ago during a similarly tumultuous decade — 1909 to 1919 — the decade following the first manifesto of Italian Futurism; there have been several waves since. Most studies of the manifesto, however, were written before 2008, so they (largely) miss the latest wave — the digital manifesto — and the unprecedented changes that accompanied this newly invigorated form between 2008-2020. I wrote about some of these issues in The Manifesto Handbook, which came out in February. In March, Breanne Fahs’ extensive anthology Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution was published. Through social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as niche and alternative platforms, the manifesto has reclaimed its function as a primary marker of history in the making. But whether analogue or digital, the manifesto has always served extremely diverse aims and movements.In this paper I will survey some of the dozens of manifestos that have appeared online in the past year and attempt to draw some conclusions and place them in a wider context of online culture. As I note in my book, manifestos are always at the bleeding edge of culture and politics. The threats they contain are potent because they are sincere: there is always enough instability, enough wildness about the manifesto to give it real menace — the possibility, near or distant, of real danger, real action, actual revolution. What kinds of manifestos will we need going forward into the 2020s — a decade that (let’s face it) is not off to an easy start, and that urgently requires our active engagement as scholars and citizens? What kinds of manifestos do we deserve, and what kind will we get?

"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)

TheCoevas Strumentist di Parole is an group of authors or, as they define themselves, a literary band which created an interactive novel called TheCoevasIo interattivo (TheCoevas I interactive). The novel which was published in 2011 on the blog of the authors is accompanied by a medium-length documentary and is also published in form of printed book. Another characteristic of the novel is the variety of the online versions: iWork Apple, Powerpoint and pdf. As they explain in the interview, the project as a whole is conceived as an experiment of different ways of expressions and the work of writing is similar to the musical composition of a band. The very freedom of creativity is granted to the readers who can choose various audio-visual effects and narrative paths following their emotional and individual choices according to the demands of extemporaneity.

Schools as well as universities have subjected writing to the dogma of access to knowledge and to the imperative of communication for too long.

They have restricted it to the role of an instrument which goes along with cognitive capitalism (Yann Moulier Boutang), by industrial production of knowledge, thereby steadily removing its artistic, aesthetic and political dimensions (Luc Dall’Armellina).

In today’s situation, for most pupils and students, writing is nothing but a compulsory step, a skill among others, a technique one has to manipulate for it is required in order to do well at school, whatever the subject.

Concrete Poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms. Assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed, concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent. Qualified space: space-time structure instead of mere linear-temporistical development. Hence the importance of ideogram concept, either in its general sense of spatial or visual syntax, or in its special sense (Fenollosa/ Pound) of method of composition based on direct-analogical, not logical-discursive juxtaposition of elements. "ll faut que notre intelligence s’habitue à comprendre synthético-idéographiquement au lieu de analytico -discursivement" (Apollinaire). Elsenstein: ideogram and montage.

(English translation by the authors)

Brief introduction to net.art written by two prominent net.art artists. The text is written as a list with a set of instructions on how to make net.art.