TOWARD ELECTRACY -- a conversation : Ulmer

One can become agglutinated.

Or: better yet: one must become agglutinated.

It's really the only way to survive.

As a writer.
An artist.
A theory conductor.
You become stuck and then --- possibly --

unstuck, but --

in becoming unstuck, you find that you still have parts of the adhesive still attached to you, to your body, to your body of work --

and that's when you find all sorts of other things, other bodies of work, easily sticking to you.

Little fragments that never want to leave.

Ticklers.


	Like those little yellow stickies that we all seem to use (I have virtual stickies too). I'm interested in how an expanded concept of writing enables us to perform a kind of stickie practice.


	And how this stickie practice creates mystory potential. By "mystory potential" I mean to say the potential energy that exists within a collective body of work. Mystory is yourstory is ourstory is network potential. Therein lay the value.


	Metaphorically speaking, stickie practice has been around for a long time: examples abound, whether it be cubist collage stickies, situationist detournement stickies, or the recent surf-sample-manipulate stickies that pervade the Internet.


	On the net, those of us creating site-specific work for distributed audiences that we might have never had access to were it not for hypertext transfer protocol, are redoubling our efforts not only to shape the design of things to come, but to build mindshare in the attention-economy.


	Building mindshare via mystory development is a challenge, one that requires endless work, endless distribution, endless web presence (presence-in-absence). Keeping your mindshare, building your web presence-in-absence, maintaining your distributed audience's attention -- this is what the net industry likes to call "stickiness." Stick around and you'll see what I mean.


	Greg Ulmer's "stickiness" has been generating attention in the digital art world for quite some time now. » "Applied Grammatology" » "Mystory" » "Heuretics" » "emerAgency" » "post(e) pedagogy" » "hyperrhetoric" these are just some of the terms we have begun appropriating for our own uses.


	His serial form of composition, a hyperrhetorical process that strings us along as we tap into the mysterious resonance emitting from his tenor lines, has re-introduced to artists the necessity of designing their own life-experiences so that they may write themselves into the future. It's as if Ulmer's glue has dribbled onto our borders and now we find ourselves attached to an ongoing ungoing theory of "hypermedia grammatology" that, for the time being, makes us an adherent to his heuretic practice.


	In other words, many artists the world over, myself included, have found that Ulmer's theoretical practice, a WYSIWYG mystory that reconfigures the author into a pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress, can easily be adhered to.


	All it takes is a can-do attitude and an open-mindedness to the critical arts. As Vilem Flusser reminds us in his short essay "About the Word Design": In German, an artist is of course one who is 'able to do something,' the German word for art, Kunst, being the noun from können, 'to be able' or 'can', but there again for the word 'artificial', gekunstelt,comes from the same root (as does the English 'cunning'). Or, feeling entitled: Toward a cunning theory of art. No can do?


	Start taking notes, sticking them all together. See how these notes take shape, how they contribute to theoretically inclined life-design. I once had a To Do list that was totally influenced by Ulmer's glue, it read: All of this was handwritten on a new-improved yellow stickie, bigger than the original stickies, with blue line making it easy to stay on track.


	Or: multi-tracks. Multi-track theory conduction as narratologically-minded hyperrhetoric. It's so easy to surf-sample-manipulate the concept-characters in Ulmer's theory-plays. To remix them into newly constructed "scenes of writing." Writing as a circuitous mystory. The tele-theorist as network conductor.


	In the following interview, Talan Memmott, whose own brand of new media writing clearly puts into practice what we can only call an "applied grammatology," spurs on an important dialogue we will all want to stick around and see. There's really nothing like watching Ulmer use his heuretic skills to conduct himself in public. Mark Amerika

TO DO:
invent new theory
turn new theory into a conceptual art "character" and give this character a diacritical name
create pseudo-autobiographical fiction around the concept-character
create other theoretically-charged concept-characters and give them diacritical names too
have these concept-characters participate in the pseudo-autobiographical fiction so that they form a network discouse wherein they invent their own behaviors consequently saying what they mean and meaning what they say
while conducting this "theory-play" take notes on the developing forms of hyperrhetoric that emerge from the ensuing discourse and feed them back into later "scenes of writing"
turn these "scenes of writing" into post(e)-pedagogical performance
reconfigure this post(e)-pedagogical performance into new forms of Internet Art