In his introductory essay to TCR 2-50, Artifice And Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies, guest-editor Andrew Klobucar outlines the major themes covered in the issue. An annotated version of the “In this issue…” section of his essay functions as a reading tour through Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams:
Klobucar: Kate Armstrong tells us more about the cultural significance of RSS feeds in the issue. The Vancouver artist and writer is one of Canada’s most important theorists and practitioners in the field of new media and technology studies.
Carpenter: Kate Armstrong is also the curator of Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams. When she first approached me about making a new digital artwork out of the texts of TCR 2-50 the only criteria was that the project explore the formal and functional properties of RSS. That sounded great to me but when I try explaining the project to some people, they hear the acronym RSS and their eyes glaze over. For all those people who I have explained this project poorly to, please read this excerpt of Armstrong’s essay - it explains everything AND why it is interesting: What the heck is RSS?
Klobucar: Scholars like Laura Marks show how art forms as seemingly disparate as Islamic writing and new media share an interesting cultural “lineage” via their common deference to the “line” as a visual measure of infinity. In her essay, “Taking a Line for a Walk,”? the spatial design of Islamic script in history presents an alternative, more abstract concept of reasoning closer in structure to digital writing than to prior, more verbally-centred western traditions of representation.
Carpenter: Laura U. Marks uses examples from Islamic art to “show that an immanent Infinite is imaginable in contemporary society,” and suggests a number of ways in which “contemporary works of computer-based art may point toward this infinity.” My favourite example of the performivity of the vector appears in this excerpt: the giant On/Off of mortality
Klobucar: Some of the recent developments in the visual structure and appearance of writing on screen derive, as we see in Jim Andrews’s piece, from new networking technologies. The “network,” for Andrews, functions not just as a structure of information exchange with multiple nodes of input and output, it suggests an actual paradigm of cognition as a continuous, process-driven social activity. The writings and artworks he reviews in his article share a creative interest in exploring these key aspects of the Web as important aesthetic qualities.
Carpenter: Interestingly, in the Client-Server excerpt of of Andrews’ essay, in a discussion of peer-to-peer communication, an intertextual relationship emerges between Andrews’ essay TCR contributer Kevin Magee’s poem, To Write as Speech, in particular in the matrix/chora excerpt.
Klobucar: The network as a model of both cultural creation and organisation retains a growing influence outside the Web, as is evident in both Sandra Seekins’s research into biotech art and Sharla Sava’s review of recent work by this issue’s featured artist, Antonia Hirsch. Hirsch’s inventive reconstructions of cartographic information exemplify the visually abstract nature of modern knowledge, discovering in it a wealth of creative patterns and image relations – many of them as politically informative as they are aesthetically pleasing.
Carpenter: A section of Seekins’ essay that deals with the metaphors and media of biotechnologies led to me to quote a sequence of pre-genetic-technology references made in literature and philosophy to “metaphors” of bodies as “composites of replaceable parts” in this excerpt: Metaphors of Biotechnology. Usage of language, metaphor and meaning come up again in Sharla Sava’s essay, A Language of Cartography
Klobucar: A more critical approach to current artistic interests in networks and digital media appears in Gordon Winiemko’s account of New Media installation art, where he shows how a clearly fetishised response to information networks can result in a too naive appreciation of abstract processes over creative agency and willful design.
Carpenter: In the beyond the binary either/or section of his essay Some Thoughts About “New Media” in Quotes, TCR 2-50 contributor Gordon Winiemko writes:
The artists who make careers out of tackling important issues are ones who often have to resort to a defencive mantra like “all art is political.” If that’s the case, then why do they (why do we) persist in making work nominally pre-classified as “political art”? Perhaps, such a tendency merely mimics common tactics within post-industrial capital, where the best way to make a living seems increasingly dependent upon defining some particular niche market.
Carpenter: TCR 2-50 contributer Sandra Seekins picks up on this issue of art production in a capital, commodity, consumer continuum in her essay: Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art. In a section called Brief Encounters with Biotech Art she writes:
Contemporary art practice is being transformed (as art has always been) by technological imperatives, and art has a contribution to make in terms of raising the level of public awareness about the technical, economic, political, and social discourses surrounding biotechnologies. […] In advanced biological science there is, on the one hand, the ideal that scientific inquiry benefits the public good, and, on the other, that a free market drives innovation. Art is equally caught between goals of personal expression, social relevance, and commercial value.
Carpenter: In the Co-opting the Lab section of her essay, Seekins writes extensively on “artists who make careers out of tackling important issues” in biotech art. For many of the artists Seekins mentions, “all art is political” indeed.
Klobucar: Given the arguments presented throughout this issue, the reader will no doubt agree that new information technologies, along with the variety of formats they inspire, have indeed prompted a “crisis” in writing, in the sense that such developments must invoke a formative and not merely utilitarian effect on knowledge and how it is communicated.
Carpenter: In Kevin Magee’s poem, To Write as Speech, he argues:
But others brought in
others brought in from the margins
In the matrix/chora excerpt Magee asks:
“(It is only language, typing, that sticks in your throat?”
And in
Darren Wershler-Henry’s Technologies of Dictation we might find an obliques anser: Typewriting and the Toronto Research Group describes Toronto Research Group’s composition process as they (Nichol and McCaffery) portray it in one of their own texts, the fumetto (photo-comic) “Nary-A-Tiff”: at the scene of production, the two men are busy literally putting words in each others’ mouths as they paste word balloons down onto the photographs. Outside of such fleeting moments of elementary school-style craft production, though, typewritten dictation is rarely simple, and it is never innocent.
Klobucar: Perhaps this complex cybernetic intermingling of machine and mind appears clearest in Darren Wershler-Henry’s contribution, an inspired exploration of the typewriter as a device uniquely representative of the historical and epistemological convergence of the dicté and typist into a single dictation apparatus. Wershler-Henry’s typewriter as authoring machine invokes an especially dynamic image of all media technology, one forever fraught with the tension of being part language document, part language system – part artifice, part intelligence.
Andrew Klobucar / Artifice And Intelligence: New Writing, New Technologies
other islands in this text-fed stream
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This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Andrew Klobucar, Darren Wershler-Henry, EXCERPTS, Gordon Winiemko, Jim Andrews, Kate Armstrong, Kevin Magee, Laura U. Marks, PERFORMANCE, READING, Sandra Seekins, Sharla Sava. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
The text seems runny today.