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Word Circuits

 

Forepaper by Heiko Idensen
for Messenger Morphs the Media 99

 

Could Poetry be made by all?

Hypertextual Discourses-Technics: annotation, crosscultural linking, collaborative textnetworks

Extended Version: ... From hypertext utopias to cooperative net-projects

HYPER-Media-Culture

Although the apparative preconditions for the networking of various media are becoming ever more complex, artistic(non-affirmative) methods of using such networked systems are only slowly beginning to evolve. The artistic paradises ofhyper-media, in contrast to the analogue media (writing, film, radio, TV), are no longer metaphorical representational machines:they refer to nothing, but are simply waiting for our input, actions and reactions. www revolution? Although the radical mediatransition from gramophone, film, typewriter (thus Friedrich Kittler's suggestive title) to CD, video and computers has radicallychanged the personal, cultural and political parameters of information processes - the foundations of literary culture (authorship,copyright, work- and product character of the media documents exchanged ...) are only now beginning to tremble with the rapidspread of digital media: The techniques and practises of non-linear forms of living, thinking, and production are now becomingstandard operations with, through, over, under and around the new media ...
EU: Cultural Competence Conference (Linz 3.-5.10.98)

forming rhizomes

writing and reading in the network represents a nomadic action of roaming around in media networks: hypertextual arrangementsof various information units that circulate between various information systems because of a permanent up- and downloading.Switching between different media streams in social networks ... Single particles of text, image, and sound can be interrupted,broken, altered - while at the same time they are being held together, able to continuously referring to each other. Therelations between text/author/reader no longer function from point to point, from word to word, from image to image ... in alinear reference (significant/ significant unit), instead they function in a rhizomatic way via crossings, overlappings, chains ofdifferent media streams along which knots of meaning form - different screen layers are overlapping. The users may createunprecedented interconnections ...

hotspots

Below the empty surfaces of the up-to-date information-design - of the 'softmodern, of the Infotainment - the antiquated typedcharacters flashes up again ... Now as hyper-words, which have lost their innocence - they do no longer absorb the reader intothe text, but repels him rather into the wide fields of digital communication. Readers and writers are now connected withthe same machines and tools likewise - they write and read simultaneously at one distributed and dismembered texture, that isspread over the whole word ...

kollaboration

a very important cultural technic for the development of network-culture is to act against totalitarism, mono-culture (controlled bymonopolistic multi-national softeware-giants with inclination to controll even the content of the net by universalcontent-providers in cooperation with censorship and protectionistic controlling by governments) and to envent new collborativediscourse-technics: open special interest-groups in the tradition of news-groups, mailing-lists, accumulations and kollaborativeprocessing of data-bases, social text-filtering, collective authoring ...
collaborative working space: network-culture (texts in german)

machines of desire

The wishing machines aren't stuck in our heads, are not figments of the imagination, but exist in the technical and socialmachines themselves. (Deleuze/Guattari)
Deleu ze/Guattari-Mailing List

on-screen-thinking

Visualizations and dramatizations of data presentations, simulation techniques, desktop publishing, desktop video ... make the screen as a virtual surface the favourite place of cultural exchange processes: on screen thinking in networks. Digital hypermediaare freely shapeable interfaces: processors, by which objects of thinking may be produced, connected and distributed in differentways of presentation (text, image, sound, animation). Everything is deeply intertwingled! (Ted Nelson)

on-screen-writing

Screen objects are both media representations of ideas and, at the same time, executable operations that occur on virtual screens:screens will open other screens where there are again screens that open ... . Object orie ted hyper mediaenvironments meet this spaceing of ´writing' with different means by offering actions - in addition to to linear funcitions ofediting - that allow a functional interplay of the most diverse media objects on the screeen. collaborative online writing: tree fictions

poetic of links?

The poetics of a link lies in the bare insinuation in no way, nor in a metaphoric or implicit reference - but carries out itself in areal jump, an actual linking - a poetics of the transportation. Network-work-writing-projects puts a crucial question of artistic useof media: like can aesthetic operations - removed from the aesthetic strategies of single authors - as concrete program - enter intocommon work-processes ? How can collective texts be generated and how do they circulate? Could some kind of' telematicpoetry ' be made by all?
Proto- Anthology of Hypermedia Poetry

poetics of transport?

'Poetics of the transportation ' could do the old concept of the metaphor available now as a network-stream maybe, that througharrival and departure, import and export, input and output is to be organized in dynamic knowledge structures (memes?). Newforms of conceptualisation and social communication originate - a kind of active semiosis, within the writing and readingcontinuously discovers new contexts, follows tracks , draws commentaries ...

public exchance

Posting, download, reply, annotate. . . these processes of structuring, recombination and contextualisation of texts no longerhappens in the head of a single authors but already in a public writing-area: new discourse-technologies arise from thisdistributed collaborative exchance of ideas - text-processing in the truest sense of the word.
nettime mailinglist: socia text-filtering, net dicsourse

Text, collective

The utopian vision of a collective TEXTUALITY: as already found in socially turbulent situations (French revolution, operativewriter collectives in the Russian revolution ...) and in communal text-net-works. But neither the encyclopaedia, nor literarycircles (Nouveau Romanciers, Tel-Quel) really eliminate the bourgeois author-subject, even when this belongs to the centraldemands of the respective literary program! Perhaps this is really (operatively) a question of the technology of writing (recordingand distribution): Copyright, the mythos of the closed work, conventional authorship ... disappears in the moments ofgeneration/structuring and distribution of networked hypertext. That which applies theoretically and conceptuallyto written literature - in the system of literature as an inter-textual network - applies also to the net-work-text-tours at everymoment of generation/structuring and distribution: The difference between writing and reading in the network is approaching nil.

text-networks

The classic separations between production and reception (e.g. between author, text, and reader or of code, sender, and receiver)will be abolished in favour of a text-network-conception: ´In active processes of intertextualgenerating of texts from texts, images from images, media from and within other media ..., reading and writing will overlap.The making of references substitutes the conventional receiving and sending of media documents.
WWW Collaboration Projects

kontakt: home, email

Hypertext-Archiv Heiko Idensen: http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/~idensen/
Projekts & Links Heiko Idensen: http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/ami/
The Imaginary Library (text only german) http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/ami/pool
idensen@rz.uni-hildesheim.de

  

 

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