Scripting the Other
Open call for wrong works: Scripting the Other SCRIPTING THE OTHER is a pavilion (online exhibition) in the third edition of The Wrong - New Digital Art Biennale (Nov 1, 2017 - Jan 31, 2018). We're calling for works that explore the notions of the Other and Otherness in online, performative scripting and writing. The work should preferably have some live, dynamic function - e.g. through (ambivalent) interaction with user/audience, communicating, streaming, mashing textual-visual sources and feeds, live coding, stream-of-consciousness-or-data writing or scripting. The idea is to use internet as an instrument of the Other, and antitheses to the echochamber of the self, and set up an interface towards it, as if communicating with or observing an undefined, unknown or uknowable entity, operating system, or AI. The exhibition examines text and text-visuals in meeting with an inordinant 'Here Comes Everything', the role and protocol of author, reader - entangled and undermined. If possible, the exhibition will take form as an embodiment of the Other with the works selected being incorporated within it. Works for the exhibition should be made for web browsers. Deadline: 15. September 2017 Contact: m...@noemata.net Scripting the Other is part of the project Other Writing initiated by Noemata and funded by Arts Council Norway. Noemata is a production site for digital and netbased art affiliated with PNEK (production network for electronic art Norway). Notes 'Live coding' meaning programmable live and that the writing process is made visible and part of the execution, or put in another way, that it includes a visible operational meta-level where the text is coded/generated. 'Ambivalent interaction': To challenge and undermine ideas about communication, meaningfulness, identity, noise/signal, writer, reader, and the like, in relation to text. For example, the audience/browser should ask questions about what this text _is_ - is it communication? do I write? who's writing? do I read? both? - and at least to conclude that the text has its proper life and symbolically approaches the Other (the opposite to self and identity). Ambivalent interaction is a metaphor for the way we operate on the internet - how internet opens up for a game of identity, partly necessitated in the face of an overwhelming and frenzied 'other', something which in turn has created a feverish market for simulacra, representation and imitation - think of social media acting as a 'big data' simulacrum, and 'selfies' acting as a kind of mockery mirror. In reality, this kind of identity has an equivalent vast, dark side, 'other', as a reaction, since our default state on the internet is both anonymous and transparent (two antitheses of identity). 'The Other' as a writing process, and the category 'Scripting the Other' as an aggregate term for text or text-visuals not immediately categorizable: "The concept that the Self requires the existence of the Other ... Lacan associated the Other with the symbolic order and language. Levinas connected it with the scriptural and traditional God, in The Infinite Other. ... Ethically, for Levinas, the "Other" is superior or prior to the self; the mere presence of the Other makes demands before one can respond ... Levinas talks of the Other in terms of 'insomnia' and 'wakefulness'. It is an ecstasy, or exteriority toward the Other that forever remains beyond any attempt at full capture, this otherness is interminable (or infinite)... it has not been negated or controlled. ... The "Other", as a general term in philosophy, can also be used to mean the unconscious, silence, insanity, the other of language (i.e., what it refers to and what is unsaid), etc." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other SCRIPTING THE OTHER will explore through such a hybrid reading-writing process an integration to a wider operational identity, perhaps with a reference to analytical psychology and its individuation process if we look at the unconscious as 'the Other' and internet again as the unconscious through big data which we are interacting ambivalently with. If we associate 'the Other' with the symbolic order and language, and assume that the unconscious has a language, we can treat the internet with its endless stream of data as a stream-of-(un)consciousness and 'Other' in the meeting with the browser, identity and traditional reader and writer. A "nihilogue" (e-lit term introduced by Espen Aarseth, 1997) - a text which has neither origin or impact (author or audience), for everyone and for no one, in the sense that it is automatic or unconscious, and corresponds approaching the 'the Other', an existence evading control, and in a stream which is continuously and increasingly diverging; can be compared with a 'default state network' in the brain, whirring constantly, a dream without a dreamer. The reader/audience might interact with the script, either in plain text or commands, and the script will process the input and respond in different manner similar to the role as 'other'/unknown/internet; that the input for instance can be filtered through social networking, search, databases, algorithms, providing 'resonant' answers, i.e. the answer is a kind of reverberation of the situation where the context plays part and changes (as is often the case on the internet - everything is context, everything is protocol). The scripting might serve as communication between transmitter and receiver, where the aspect of 'Other' is put in the background and intervens more sporadically. These modes can be compared with the Other as 'insomnia', 'wakefulness', 'ecstasy', 'presence'. The scripting might have a relatively pure and transparent interface, a writing surface, in the meeting between the transmitter and computer/internet/recipient, where these different roles avoid defining. As mentioned the writing surface can provide a sort of resonance space between identity and 'other', as the scripting uses the input to process textual mass from the net, and thereby intervening in the writing process which might reveal an associative-resonant meaning. The scripting can itself start this process and the user act as a resonant search machine for it. Links https://www.facebook.com/groups/thewrong3/ https://www.facebook.com/thewrongbiennale/ http://noemata.net/ https://www.facebook.com/noemata.net/
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