On Tue, 3 Mar, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Patrick Lichty <[email protected]> wrote:
I think something that is quite salient is Sterling’s ahistoricity
of the Net, even multigenerationally.
The Cultural Smog Of The Internet is that postmodern simultaneity
people used to talk about but as a paralysing weight rather than an
inspiring force. New developments are always already overwhelmed by the
entire history of cultural production being available for comparison on
the Web. We're not competing with our peers or a fading previous
generation, we're competing immediately with the best of every
generation here and now.
That's unique to the internet - compare Netflix "binge watching" to
network rotation or archive.org to the telegraph. It's a quantitative
difference that makes a qualitative shift. People need to move beyond
seeking models of historical authenticity to appropriate positively or
negatively and start pointing leaf blowers into the smog.
Secondly, I emphasize the ahistoricity of networked culture, lest we
forget the Telematic Age, McLuhan’s discourses before that, and
even telegraphy. In addition, in the late 90’s I remember papers
on emergent taxonomies of concurrent channels of communication,
emergent net.discourses, pervasive computing, the erosion of history
in the net archive (actually, a friend used to be a migrator between
systems, and there were many interesting stories about corporate
migrations).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable.
The old whispering black boxes with blinking lights sitting in nests of
cables on stages or in darkened basements made the presence of
computing and of network nodes visible and conceivable. This leads to
the paradox that the visionaries of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s felt and
considered the presence of computing and of networks more concretely
than we can now that they're so pervasive that if we point in a random
direction they're just there.
That said I read a telegraphy manual from the early Victorian era that
in one small section described how network operators used the system
for chat, for games and even to play music. And there was the genre of
telegraph literature:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/11/telegraph_literature_from_19th_century_was_surprisingly_modern.single.html
I agree with the clickbait description another article applies to one
of those novels: "“Wired Love”: A tale of catfishing, OK Cupid, and
sexting … from 1880"
And to come back to the title of this discussion, there's essays in
Peter Ludlow's 2001 "Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias"
about how the net is and isn't a place and how it relates to government
and citizenship.
But people didn't walk around trailing telegraph wires in the 1880s,
and the basis for communication, commerce and identity on the net
hadn't been remade in the image of the cypherpunks yet in 2001.
So, in many ways, I feel like half of a paragraph in the conference
manifesto has been talked about periodically for the past fifty
years. There are new elements, though. I feel that social media and
the rise of infopower like the Arab Spring and ISIS, big data, stacks
and Baynesian algorithms typify our time.
Yes there's definitely a new aesthetic. ;-)
In 2006, I wrote that the pixel would become a cultural choice as of
1998, when Close (the king of the Cartesian) went to Nash Editions
and apparently didn’t like the process, and inkjet printers of the
day began to stop using stochastic dithering to simulate continuous
tone. People like Jon Cates and Cory Arcangel surely have borne this
out.
Cates' use of old Mac-style monochrome dithering for its formal
qualities and historical associations is thrilling.
My point is that, as in a recent Rhizome panel, one speaker said
that there wasn’t much Internet art before 2000,
This replaces my previous favourite Rhizomism, about being surprised
that net art wasn't just an East Coast thing. :-)
[...]
In net terms, I know I’m venerable, even in my early 50’s, but as
Oliver Grau has so aptly framed the naming of the Media Art History
conferences as a play on the “re-“, or ritornello, I think even
now, we need to keep in mind that the digital spans at least 200
years, and that networked technologies span over a hundred, Computer
art was investigated by FLUXUS artists, Knowlton, Vanderbeek, et al
in the mi/late 60’s and Internet culture emeged about 35 years ago.
We’re not that new, although some aspects of our culture are.
A historical view is vitally important (doomed to repeat etc.). But the
volume on computing in society has been turned to 11 over the last two
decades. If there's an attitude to networked technology that telegraph
operators, hackers, early adopters and 90s multimedia artists share (or
combine to), it must surely be more widespread now that the technology
is?
- Rob.
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