In her essay, Feeds ans Streams: RSS Poetics, Kate Armstrong asks: “How might an RSS feed produce new art and digital literature?” The highly fluid flexible flux-able customizable nature of RSS changes the way we read, write, access and understand text. So much so that our notion of what a reader/writer is has changed. In 1984 Michel de Certeau wrote, in The Practice of Everyday Life, of “The ordinary practitioners of the city” as writers “of an urban “text” they write without being about to read.”
The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. [de Certeau]
Armstrong argues: “The automatic delivery of text fragments can generate new patterns of reading that come to be interspersed with regular life.” These new patters shift the ontology of the reader. Reader/writer, publisher/consumer - all roles are rolled into one.
Armstrong: In a digital RSS poetics, the work isn’t interactive, it is simply active. It is not about the decisions of the reader who changes the outcome of the pieces, it is about the reader him/herself: it is about this reader’s world. It is the reader’s experience, history, perception, inclination, passions, biases, and the array of other sources chosen by the reader in a continual, ongoing array of potential decisions that come to shape a person’s stream – both incoming and outgoing in terms of what they read and what they produce. Because as fast as the information comes in, it can go out. The individual is the ultimate but still networked node, who reads and publishes, pulls and pushes, consumes and produces in an ever more integrated cycle. It is not the decisions made by the reader in the piece but those made by the reader in the world. It is another way, a new way, for the digital model to meet the physical, for the subset to dissolve into the superset, for art to meet and greet life.
Kate Armstrong / Feeds ans Streams: RSS Poetics
other islands in this text-fed stream
