On Thu, 5 Mar, 2015 at 2:52 PM, Randall Packer <[email protected]>
wrote:
@Ruth & @Rob, some additional ruminations on the connection between
Net practice, the Happenings & the 1960s in general:
With the Internet & social media, like the Happenings, there are
opportunities for collective participation, distributed processes,
real-time systems of performance, information sharing, and viewer
interaction.
An obvious objection to this is that social media sites are private
spaces like shopping malls rather than public spaces like parks or town
squares. An obvious response to that objection is so what, and anyway
have any of you ever actually read the park bylaws. ;-)
Claiming privatised (network) space for the public that is (supposedly
economically) exploited to give it its value, and doing so under the
banner of art, is a political strategy (for those of us who like
political strategies) that has the potential to wrong-foot affective
capital's enclosures.
It will also be fun.
So with the knowledge that we're dancing until the police unplug the
sound system, let's reframe participation in social media along the
model of Happenings, and reclaim the TAZ nature of the early net(s).
Let's make a net we want to be citizens of, for a while.
Whereas process and documentation was essential to the shift away and
dissolution of the object in Fluxus and later forms of performance &
conceptual art, etc., the modern day database, content management
system,
We all live in databases now. LambdaMOO is still there, but there's
far, far, far more of us living in Facebook and Amazon. We can make new
databases and networks, or detourne existing ones. There are always
possibilities. We just have to believe that there are.
and social media offer new ways to fully integrate the artistic
process into a dynamically-shared, distributed network.
Integrating art production into a *peer-to-peer* network would have a
very different moral character from integrating it into Facebook. But
we can mock up the latter on the former.
- Rob.
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