Join us for an ethnographic report from deep inside the virtual public sphere. Gabriella Coleman (NYU, McGill) researches transnational digital social movements from Anonymous to the Debian Project. Her scholarship has focused on the formation of ethical and aesthetic identity within these movements, and how they are transforming the wider cultural understanding of law, property, and freedom. She has published widely, and has interpreted digital activism for the popular media, including Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, the New York Times, and many other venues. Her book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, is forthcoming on Princeton University Press. Hosted by Building Better Speech & Globe.

About Art, Media, and Technology (AMT): In our dynamic world, art reflects conditional reality, and design contributes to further development of global societies. At Parsons The New School for Design, rigorous practice and critical scholarship prepares students to become leading agents of commentary and change.

An identity is a mutable object. It’s negotiated between people, organizations, and institutions, formalized in documentation, actions, and possessions. In this workshop Heath Bunting (UK) shows how you create your own legal identity. As Bunting demonstrates, identities can be constructed over time by developing relationships to place a given “person” within a web of shopping cards, cell phones, bills, government correspondence, and other “personal” data. Identity Bureau challenges the idea of personhood by showing how materially produced an identity is.

Heath Bunting explores the porosity of borders. Often performing as an interventionist or prankster and finding form within everyday acts of resistance, Bunting’s work reaches its public through systems of documentation and distribution including photography, print publishing and the web. Dismantling the divisions separating art and everyday life, Bunting prioritises information and action. His work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communication technologies and social systems.

Buntings’ work straddles various modes of action, documentation and visualisation. Bunting is best known for his involvement in the formation of the net.art movement in the 1990s and as a founder of irational.org. His practice may be viewed in parallel with the tendencies of historical movements such as Conceptual Art or the Situationist International. Dismantling the divisions separating art and everyday life, Bunting prioritises information and action. His work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communication technologies and social systems. He explores the porosity of borders, both in the physical space and online. Often performing as an interventionist or prankster and finding form within everyday acts of resistance, Bunting’s work reaches its public through systems of documentation and distribution including photography, print publishing and the web.

Bunting’s works have been commissioned and exhibited at a range of venues, including The InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo; Apex Art, New York; The New Museum, New York; Tate, London; Documenta X, Kassel; The Banff Centre, Canada; Lovebytes Festival, Sheffield; Art Teleporticia, Moscow; The Arts Council England; Proboscis, London; The Watershed, Bristol; and DA2 London.
Some of his well-known works are: readme.html (1997), which relates to the issue on the Internet of visibility versus invisibility. BorderXing Guide (Tate commission, 2002) in which he comments on the way in which governments and associated bureaucracies restrict movement between borders. The Status Project (2004–2008) examines how the construction of our ‘official identity’ as a collection of data influences how we can navigate the social space, the Internet and private or governmental databases. And Map of Terrorism (Tate commission, 2008), in which he plots on a map the information required when making an online purchase in relation to new legislation defined in the UK government’s 2006 Terrorism Act.

This workshop is organised by NIMk and SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain.

With most demonstrations and street protests it’s hard to know exactly who hurled the first bottle. Amidst a sea of people engaged in a collaborative state of mind, the sense of anonymity generated can be very empowering. In the ever-congealing, international abyss of the iPhone (the networks, the users and the apparatus itself) anonymity in this perceived collective is curbed by a registered phone number and GPS coordinate tracking. Social networking-enthused developers have been finding more and more ways to implement existing social network platforms to enhance the usage and appeal of their applications.

The iPhone applications which engage in content and experience sharing, which no doubt offer a number of benefits, require new or pre-existing usernames, email addresses or often involve third-party requests for sharing through pre-registered accounts on social network platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. One of the key features of the application TinyRiot, which provides a cathartic soundtrack while its users shake out ‘tiny’ bouts of frustration, is that it does not require users to sign in or register to share.

As users record, title and approve videos, they are auto-uploaded to a shared YouTube account which acts as a sub-platform where users can share and watch each other’s videos in real time. In turn, videos appear embedded on the application’s homepage which also shows the GPS coordinates via a modified GoogleMap API, with lightning bolt icons showing where TinyRiots have occurred around the world.

Aside from location, what makes each video unique is how the iPhone’s audio and visual functions are exploited. With shaking as the guiding praxis, the application’s major functions benefit from two facets of the iPhone’s design — namely the relative positions of the camera and flash as well as the microphone and speaker. With the speaker only a few centimetres away, a howling, reverberating feedback is triggered as the internal microphone begins recording audio.

At the same time, as users shake their iPhones while taking video footage, the pulse of the camera flash is synced and since the lens is a few millimetres to the side, nanoseconds of blinding flashes and visual feedback appear on the user’s screen-cum-viewfinder. Aesthetically, what would be a normal video takes on a disorienting effect that is equal parts entertaining and blinding. The accompanying soundtrack draws on a number of pre-loaded samples and as users shake, a randomized assortment of heavy metal sounds emit.

A simplified, 8-beat format of guitar and drums was chosen for simplicity as the developers saw a similarity in the way teenagers once picked up their instruments and regardless of skill, started playing loud. TinyRiot is to apps what teenagers were to rock - just playing loud and shaking it all out. In doing so, the gesture-based method of sampling and remixing takes another step towards becoming its own platform. Seeing potential in the format, TinyRiot’s main developers Sembo Kensuke of media-art unit Exonemo and Taeji Sawai, who has worked extensively on music-enabling technologies with The Boredoms, teamed up with Atari Teenage Riot frontman Alec Empire and recently released Atari Tiny Riot as an application.

Users are able to play with loaded samples of the artists’ beats and rhythmic arrangements. Banner lyrics such as “Anonymous Teenage Riot” blare through the cacophony and align with a spirit the developers’ and the band champion. In terms of participation it’s in the tradition of mass movements and as a collaboration, the anonymous user videos are uploaded on the TinyRiot page where fans watching each others’ ‘riots’ has an infectious property. With uploading remaining anonymous, the application creates an international, anonymous collective.

As social networking itself no longer wrestles, but rather develops and intensifies its own imperative of increasingly constant and closer connectivity, the parameters of sharing and privacy have manifested themselves in the form of contentious issues for users. Users of TinyRiot find themselves no longer, or less, restrained by the (inadvertently) associated pressures or assumed embarrassment from the “friend” connections maintained on the social networks in which they participate. TinyRiot users can sidestep electing usernames or avatars, however, once a video is uploaded to the mutual YouTube account, the application’s developers have included a prompt for inclined users to further share their videos on existing social platforms.

The model of sharing anonymously or recording video publicly has re-emerged in recent years as an issue entwined with both privacy and ethics. Both have been highlighted in the media-wide coverage of Wikileaks and its submission policy and procedures, as well as in recent legislation in some states of the United States where it has become illegal to record video of law enforcement. Indeed, these issues will remain a nuisance as social networking developers move forward on an increasingly user-generated content and information-dominated superhighway.” — Vicente Gutierrez, Neural.

This paper looks at the impact of social media platforms on collective action. In particular, it focuses on spheres of activism where personal risk (bodily or otherwise) is the condition of participation. For this analysis, I discuss interviews conducted with Egyptian activists around the events of Tahrir Square. Issues of copresence, witness, and visibility are central to my discussion. This talk is based on a research paper developed with my coauthor Dr. Mike Ananny.

Coleman’s book Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation will be published by the MIT Press in November.

Hello Avatar! Or, {llSay(0, “Hello, Avatar!”); is a tiny piece of user-friendly code that allows us to program our virtual selves. Hello Avatar examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the “x-reality” that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency — our new power to customize our networked life. By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities — in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject — all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.

Dr. Beth Coleman’s work focuses on the role of human agency in the context of media and data engagement. She is currently a Harvard University Faculty Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a visiting professor at the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam. From 2005-2011, Coleman has been an assistant professor of comparative media studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is the primary investigator of the Pervasive Media/City as Platform research and design lab. She received her B.A. in literature from Yale University and her Ph.D in comparative literature from New York University.

Commissioned by Alpha-ville for the 2011 festival this interactive installation plays with and proposes alternative landscapes in the technological ether surrounding our everyday movements. Personal identity is increasingly becoming a broadcasted commodity, as a result of this, our constructed personae enmesh and define us. CELL realises our virtual reflections, making digital projections into literal ones. This installation creates luminous clones, exposing these parallel realities as it replicates the body movement of visitors. As the visitor moves through the installation space, personal data mined from internet profiles is randomly tagged onto the alternate, technologically refracted form of the body, revealing the second self while simultaneously allowing us escape from it.

Keiichi Matsuda is a designer and film-maker. He began working with video during his Masters of architecture at the Bartlett school (UCL) as a critical tool to understand, construct and represent space. Keiichi’s research examines the implication of emerging technologies for human perception and the built environment, focusing on the integration of media into everyday life.

James Alliban London, UK. He is primarily concerned with building interactive toys and immersive environments which allow for new forms of creative expression. These projects include installations, mobile art apps and online tools that explore the experiential nature of technology using a variety of computer vision and image processing techniques.

The rapid development of digital technologies has radically transformed ways of keeping in touch with home cultures and diasporic networks. Moreover, the notion of migration has undergone significant shifts, coming to signify imaginaries on the move which are not necessarily linked to geographical displacement. The aim of this conference is to address the relationship between migration and digital technologies across national contexts and ethnic belonging. Migrancy embeds many of the local and global paradoxes that also pertain to digital media with their compression of space and time. However, the link between the two fields is still under-theorized and in need of more situated and comparative analysis. Drawing from approaches from the humanities and social sciences (media theory, communication studies, learning sciences, gender studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, migration and transnational studies, among others), the primary aim of this conference is to explore how the study of digitalization and migration challenges existing notions of diaspora, identity, nation, family, learning, literacy, social networks, youth, body, gender and ethnicity, asking for new approaches and a rethinking of traditional social and cultural categories.

The conference will consider the following questions, among others: How has the development of new digital technologies changed the experience of migration? Conversely, how has the reality of migration impacted on the use, development and distribution of new media technologies? How does the use of media differ among different migrant generations? How does media literacy impact on issues of integration and socialization in a hosting country? What are the differences in media access, diffusion and use among different migrant communities across the world? How are race, gender, age, class, ethnicity and other markers of identity recodified online? How are transnational relationships and resources arrayed in networks? How do ideas and practices move across these networks? How is the notion of home or community, which is no longer locatable with a “here” and “there” reconceptualised through digital diasporas? How do these developments impact on the spaces for learning and education, which are no longer limited to place-based classrooms and curricula? How can learning processes and networks be conceptualised when these networks expand larger geographical distances, and multiple communities are crossed? What resources of identity do migrants draw on and how are these resources hybridized in practice, and related to their learning and socialization processes? In short, how are digital crossroads created, distributed and experienced in the context of migration, diaspora and transnationalism?

Keynote speakers:
Shakuntala Banaji
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Kirsten Drotner
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Radhika Gajjala
Bowling Green State University, USA
Eva Lam
University of Northwestern, USA
Lisa Nakamura
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Liesbet van Zoonen
Loughborough University, UK and Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands

The conference will explore three inter-related strands of the relationships between media and migration:

Identity and diaspora (Strand 1)
- identity and performativity
- gender, race, ethnicity, religion and online communities
- digital borders, digital diasporas
- imagined communities, transnationalism and mobility
- digital divides (generational, access, skills, user-generated content)
- cultural industry, participatory culture and social media

Migrant networks (Strand 2)
- mediated spatialities
- relations between online and offline worlds
- affinity networks and intimacy
- media literacy and migration
- comparative perspectives on digital media practices

Learning in a globalized world (Strand 3)
- informal learning in the digital space
- network approaches to learning
- immigrant learning
- globalization and learning
- learning & identity
- socialization in transnational families

Please send 300-word abstracts for papers or 500-word panel proposals for 3 to 4 presentations by 10 January 2012. Submission should be made online via http://www.digitalcrossroads.nl. See further submission instructions on the website.

Notification of acceptance will be given by 20 February, 2012.

For more information or questions please send an e-mail to info [at] digitalcrossroads.nl.

The conference comes at the end of a five-year High Potential project, entitled “Wired Up: Digital media as innovative socialization practices for migrant youth”, carried out by the Faculty of Humanities (project leader Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi) and the Faculty of Social Sciences (project leader Prof. Dr. Mariette de Haan) at Utrecht University in collaboration with Vanderbilt University, USA (Dr. Kevin Leander, Peabody College for Education). The project was funded by the Executive Board of Utrecht University to stimulate interdisciplinary research. See http://www.uu.nl/wiredup.

Conference chair: Sandra Ponzanesi
Conference coordinator: Fadi Hirzalla

Organization Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi: conference chair
Dr. Fadi Hirzalla: conference coordinator
Prof. Dr. Mariette de Haan: scientific committee
Dr. Kevin Leander: scientific committee
Dr. Fleur Prinsen: conference committee
Dr. Lisa Schwartz: conference committe
Koen Leurs, MA: conference committee
Asli Ünlosoy, MSC: conference committee

Anonymous: Shared Identity in the Era of Global Networks attempts to give an overview of the movement of the Internet-activists ‘Anonymous’ through a comparative and aesthetic investigation in the form of a series of video-grids including videos that were made by the activists in the course of their protests activities.

‘Anonymous’ is applying the medium ‘web video’ in order to announce its activities taking place on the Internet and in real space, as well as call for others to participate. Thus, the videos should be seen as an important interface between the Internet and the so-called real world.

Due to their specific aesthetics, the videos have constituted a kind of ‘corporate identity’ related to ‘Anonymous’. Their film language, their aesthetic appearance and their style were therefore constitutive of the entire movement.

As explicitly leaderless group with a political orientation, centered around human rights like free speech and free access for information, ‘Anonymous’ makes use of the network structures and the social network, its services and platforms like Twitter, IRC, 4chan, youtube, etc. by using these forms of communication to organize upcoming peaceful protests. Although the members act anonymously, some user groups such as 4chan, the Chaos Computer Club and The Pirate Bay are associated with ‘Anonymous’.

In 2008 ‘Anonymous’ became generally known with the ‘Project Chantology’, an extensive protest against the Church of Scientology. That campaign already revealed the specific culture of protest that ‘Anonymous’ is using to this day: Internet-organized real-world demonstrations combined with Internet activism as DDoS attacks, video messages and video documentation of the protests, with the call to join them. Since then, a series of so-called ‘anon-operations’ followed: e.g. ‘Operation Payback,’ which was directed against the opponents of Wikileaks, or ‘Operation Didgeridie’ and ‘Operation Tunisia’. In the course of both operations, ‘Anonymous’ accused the governments of Australia and Tunisia of violating the right to freedom of expression.

Since 2010 state agencies reinforced their investigations against ‘Anonymous’ and began arresting alleged members of the movement. Currently ‘Anonymous’ participates in the campaign ‘Operation Wall Street’ or ‘#occupywallstreet’, that has been taking place since the 17th September 2011 in the form of an occupation of Wall Street following the example of peaceful demonstrators of ‘the Arabic spring’ or those who occupied public squares in Spain.

The usage or the performance of a shared identity began on image-boards like 4chan where users posted pictures and comments using the multiple-user-name ‘anonymous’. Shared identities can be designed in the form of a ‘character’ (avatar or fictional character) or in a more abstract way with the aim to identify common goals and philosophical or political ideas. A shared identity is formed by the users while building internal rules and recurrent or recognizable concepts and signs such as linguistic or pictorial patterns that are used in a heraldic form (using simple design tools in an interpretive way) not only in order to be a part of the corporate identity for a self-chosen period but also in order to shape it.

‘Anonymous’ uses YouTube as a publishing platform. Frequent copies and remixes of the videos as part of the shared identity ‘Anonymous’ as well as of the common usage of YouTube can also be understood as an emphatic process of transformation from the specific languages of videos (what is an artistic and aesthetic activity) into a political statement. The videos on YouTube are arranged through a simple recognition effect based on theirs formal language, although, at the same time, these forms of identification become dynamic because of the the permanent modifications, adaptations and rearrangements made by the users. The specific ‘Anonymous-style’, its common practice of appropriation, citation, modification and rearrangements of video-sequences, sounds and texts, finds its ‘natural environment’ on YouTube while spreading out on the Internet in a viral and dynamic way.

To provide the complexity of the iconography of the web video - film language, the exhibition has put together a series of multi-channel-video-installation-grids.

In the merging and contrasting of different videos that were posted by ‘Anonymous’ on YouTube, the exhibition visitors are encouraged to consider the specific means of representation and self-presentation of a new form of protest culture and ‘artificial identity’, as well as to perceive the various references to past political and other cultural figures.

The ‘Anonymous - videos’ make use of an arsenal of characters and methods, which can be critically considered. Nevertheless, the exhibition wants to convey the productive tension built by the friction of the different propagandistic funds, brand strategies and artistic methods that ‘Anonymous’ uses in order to constitute a collective or shared identity via a dynamic aesthetic and to provoke grassroots protests.

A collaboration between Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art and City University London, The Politics of Visibility: Mediating the Global, Local and the In-between is a one-day conference that brings artists and academics together to examine the relationship between art, media, transnationalism and power.

Today, this relationship is marked by porosity, captured in myriad corrosions of borders, distinctions and forms. And in this space where art, media and transnationalism overlap comes a politics of representation in which dualisms – between the West and the Rest, cause and effect, remembering and forgetting – have proven bankrupt. It is a space in which hiding can be a strategy for being seen. This conference, then, sets out to explore what new dynamics emerge when art can no longer be considered outside the media; when transnationalism can no longer be thought of as apart from art.

The work of the renowned Chinese video artist Yang Fudong (showing at the Parasol Unit until 6 November 2011) is the conference’s conceptual pretext, and will be explored in a keynote by Professor Chris Berry (Goldsmiths). Other speakers will include:

• Philip Crang (Royal Holloway)
• Marianne Franklin (Goldsmiths)
• Anthony Gardner (Courtauld Institute of Art/University of Melbourne)
• Rachel Garfield (University of Kent)
• Janet Harbord (Queen Mary)
• Alan Ingram (University College London)
• Isaac Julien (Turner Prize nominee)
• Shani Orgad (London School of Economics)
• Juliet Steyn (City University London)

This panel will un­der­take a close scrutiny of La Plis­sure du Texte, tak­ing into ac­count both its cre­ation in 1983 and its re-cre­ation in 2010, dis­cussing the work in its role as a land­mark of New Media Art His­tory as well as an art work which has shown the ca­pa­bil­ity of re­gen­er­at­ing it­self as an en­tirely novel man­i­fes­ta­tion based upon the con­cepts of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, tex­tual mo­bil­ity, emer­gent semi­o­sis, mul­ti­ple iden­tity, and par­tic­i­pa­tory poe­sis.

Roy As­cott’s ground­break­ing new media art work La Plis­sure du Texte (“The Pleat­ing of the Text”) was cre­ated in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris dur­ing that same year. The title of the pro­ject, “La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy Tale,” al­ludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a fa­mous dis­course on au­thor­ship, se­man­tic lay­er­ing, and the cre­ative role of the reader as the writer of the text.

In 2010, La Plis­sure du Texte re-in­car­nated as a three di­men­sional, in­ter­ac­tive ar­chi­tec­ture cre­ated in the meta­verse and was pro­jected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea dur­ing the INDAF new media art fes­ti­val held at To­mor­row City, Songdo, In­cheon, through­out Sep­tem­ber 2010. Fol­low­ing As­cott’s orig­i­nal premise of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, the fairy tale is now being told by a text dri­ven ar­chi­tec­ture within which a pop­u­la­tion of ro­botic avatars tells the tale through end­lessly gen­er­ated con­ver­sa­tions which are har­vested from the On­line Guten­berg Pro­ject. Ad­di­tion­ally, vis­i­tors to the ex­hibit in the phys­i­cal realm may also con­tribute to the gen­er­ated text flow through SMS mes­sages or via Twit­ter. Thus all pleated text - the gen­er­ated, the con­tributed, and the stored - is si­mul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble as a mas­sive, ever evolv­ing lit­er­ary con­glom­er­a­tion.

This panel will un­der­take a close scrutiny of La Plis­sure du Texte, tak­ing into ac­count both its cre­ation in 1983 and its re-cre­ation in 2010, dis­cussing the work in its role as a land­mark of New Media Art His­tory as well as an art work which has shown the ca­pa­bil­ity of re­gen­er­at­ing it­self as an en­tirely novel man­i­fes­ta­tion based upon the con­cepts of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, tex­tual mo­bil­ity, emer­gent semi­o­sis, mul­ti­ple iden­tity, and par­tic­i­pa­tory poe­sis.

Paper Ab­stracts

Dis­tance Makes the Art Grow Fur­ther: Dis­trib­uted Au­thor­ship and Telem­atic Tex­tu­al­ity in La Plis­sure du Texte
by Prof. Roy As­cott

Roland Barthes’ canon­i­cal state­ment con­tains an un­der­stand­ing of tex­tu­al­ity that lies at the cen­ter of this chap­ter and in­deed in­formed the pro­ject it sets out to de­scribe. The term telem­at­ics has its ori­gins in the 1978 re­port to the French pres­i­dent by Alain Minc and Simon Nora con­cern­ing the con­vergence of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and com­put­ers, par­tic­u­larly in busi­ness and ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship is the term I coined to de­scribe the re­mote in­ter­ac­tive au­thor­ing process for the pro­ject La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy­tale, which is the prin­ci­pal sub­ject of this text. My pur­pose here is to ex­plore the ge­neal­ogy of the pro­ject, how the con­cept of mind­at-a-distance de­vel­oped in my think­ing, and how the over­ar­ch­ing ap­peal of the telem­atic medium re­placed the plas­tic arts to which I had been com­mitted as an ex­hibit­ing artist for more than two decades.

The pro­ject arose in re­sponse to an in­vi­ta­tion in 1982 from Frank Pop­per to par­tic­i­pate in his ex­hi­bi­tion Elec­tra: Elec­tric­ity and Elec­tron­ics in the Art of the XXth Cen­tury at the Musèe Art Mod­erne de la Ville de Paris in the fall of 1983. Pop­per had writ­ten pre­vi­ously on my work, and I was con­fi­dent that his in­vi­ta­tion of­fered a per­fect op­por­tu­nity to cre­ate a large-scale telem­atic event that would in­cor­po­rate ideas and at­ti­tudes I had formed over the pre­vi­ous twenty or more years.

La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy­tale (LPDT) sought to set in mo­tion a process by which an open-ended, non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive might be con­structed from an au­thor­ing “mind” whose dis­trib­uted nodes were in­ter­act­ing asyn­chronically over great dis­tances—on a plan­e­tary scale, in fact. As I ex­am­ine it in ret­ro­spect, I see how a com­plex­ity of ideas can cre­ate a con­text for a work whose ap­par­ent sim­plic­ity masks a gen­er­a­tive process that can bi­fur­cate into many modes of ex­pres­sion and cre­ation. It is the bi­fur­ca­tions of ideas speci.c to the con­text of LPDT—their branch­ing and con­verg­ing path­ways—that I shall ini­tially ad­dress in this chap­ter. The con­tent it­self is trans­par­ent, in­sofar as the text in its un­fold­ing is its own wit­ness.

Read­ing La Plis­sure du Texte “back­wards”
by Prof. Jan Baetens

In the his­tory of new media art and dig­i­tal writ­ing, Roy As­cott’s La Plis­sure du Texte (Elec­tra, Musée d’Art Mod­erne, Paris, 1983), a work using telem­at­ics to cre­ate in real-time a world-wide, col­lec­tive nar­ra­tive (more specif­i­cally, a col­lab­o­ra­tive, multi-player fairy tale), has proven a wa­ter­shed mo­ment (Plis­sure, n.d.). Basic con­cepts and is­sues of au­thor­ship, text, in­ven­tion, and lin­ear­ity, among oth­ers, have been dra­mat­i­cally re­de­fined as well as im­ple­mented in a con­crete prac­tice (as much a process in it­self as a model for fur­ther de­vel­op­ment) of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, text as “work” (in­stead of “prod­uct”), users’ par­tic­i­pa­tion, and mul­ti­me­dia con­nec­tiv­ity, that it is no longer pos­si­ble to study the art and tech­nol­ogy field with­out tak­ing into ac­count this major achieve­ment.

Putting the stakes of As­cott’s in­volve­ment with col­lab­o­ra­tive world-mak­ing even higher, the re­cent up­grade and recon­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of this sem­i­nal work in the meta­verse of Sec­ond Life, LPDT2, proves that the cre­ative po­ten­tial of La Plis­sure du Text is still in­tact, to say the least (LPDT2, 2010). Yet by cre­at­ing a dis­tance be­tween the “old” and the “new”, i.e. by mak­ing the (once) “new” now (sup­pos­edly) “old”, LPDT2 gives also the op­por­tu­nity to come back on an as­pect that may have been over­looked in the eu­phoric re­cep­tion of the truly utopian first ver­sion of the work, namely the ques­tion of its “read­ing”. So strong has been the em­pha­sis on the shift to­wards the new par­a­digm of par­tic­i­pa­tion and con­nec­tiv­ity, that the very ques­tion of the work’s read­ing did no longer seem rel­e­vant. Read­ing in­stead of “doing”, “per­form­ing”, “cocre­at­ing” La Plis­sure du texte seemed an ex­am­ple of McLuhan’s “rear-view mir­ror” ap­proach of the fu­ture: (1967: 74-75). The ne­glect of read­ing, how­ever, is not fully mo­ti­vated here. First be­cause read­ing is much more than just de­cod­ing the words of a text, it has also to do with the var­i­ous stances and at­ti­tudes one takes to­wards a work (in this sense, read­ing has to do with global cog­ni­tive and cul­tural is­sues of “per­cep­tion”). Sec­ond be­cause As­cott’s key in­no­va­tion has not been made from scratch. La Plis­sure du texte is in­debted to all kind of tex­tual an­ces­tors (texts, mod­els, au­thors). The rev­o­lu­tion it brings about is not a tab­ula rasa, yet one new (big) leap in the his­tory of art as con­nec­tiv­ity, and it is plau­si­ble to argue that the re­la­tion­ship with this cul­tural and lit­er­ary con­text, and hence the read­ing of it, is part of the work it­self, so that par­tic­i­pa­tion can only be com­plete if one takes also into ac­count the work’s back­ground.

LPDT2
by Elif Ayiter, co-au­thored with Max Moswitzer and Selavy Oh

LPDT2 is the meta­verse in­car­na­tion of Roy As­cott’s ground­break­ing new media art work La Plis­sure du Texte (“The Pleat­ing of the Text”), cre­ated in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris dur­ing that same year.

The title of the pro­ject, “La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy Tale,” al­ludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a fa­mous dis­course on au­thor­ship, se­man­tic lay­er­ing, and the cre­ative role of the reader as the writer of the text. As was also the case in its first in­car­na­tion “dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship”, a term coined by As­cott has been the pri­mary sub­ject of in­ves­ti­ga­tion of LPDT2.

Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by a num­ber of human sto­ry­tellers po­si­tioned around the globe; in the three di­men­sion­ally em­bod­ied meta­verse the sto­ry­tellers show novel and un­ex­pected at­trib­utes: An emer­gent tex­tual ar­chi­tec­ture/ge­og­ra­phy, as well as a pop­u­la­tion of au­tonomous “robot” avatars which dwell in­side this bizarre, lit­er­ary land­scape are pleat­ing the text by act­ing as com­mu­ni­ca­tion nodes be­tween the nar­ra­tors of this new ver­sion of the tale: The pri­mary per­sis­tent dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship is now ac­com­plished by many writ­ers through­out the ages:

A text gen­er­a­tor telling a non-lin­ear, multi-faceted, often times po­etic, story har­vested from the fa­mous on­line Guten­berg Pro­ject is now dis­trib­ut­ing its out­put amongst ar­chi­tec­ture and its in­hab­i­tants, gen­er­at­ing di­a­logues and it­er­a­tions tak­ing their tra­jec­to­ries from mas­ter­works of clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture. The pleat­ing re­sem­bles mu­si­cal sam­pling, the con­nec­tion be­tween the sen­tences fades, text be­comes noise, from which the au­di­ence gen­er­ates mean­ing.

The struc­ture on the sim­u­la­tor adds yet an­other layer of pleat­ing by vi­su­ally mix­ing the dif­fer­ent sources of text, while yet an­other layer of tex­tual input will be pro­vided through a con­tri­bu­tion by i-DAT.​org from the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth, UK, by means of which Real Life vis­i­tors will be able to con­tact the LPDT2 by send­ing SMS mes­sages. Thus all pleated text - the gen­er­ated, the con­tributed, and the stored - is si­mul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble as a mas­sive, ever evolv­ing lit­er­ary con­glom­er­a­tion.

Bios of the Par­tic­i­pants

Roy As­cott is a British artist and the­o­rist, who works with cy­ber­net­ics and telem­at­ics, born in Bath, Eng­land. From 1955-59 he stud­ied Fine Art at King’s Col­lege, Uni­ver­sity of Durham under Vic­tor Pas­more and Richard Hamil­ton. On grad­u­a­tion he was ap­pointed Stu­dio Demon­stra­tor (1959–61). He then moved to Lon­don, where he es­tab­lished the rad­i­cal Ground­course at Eal­ing Art Col­lege, which he sub­se­quently es­tab­lished at Ip­swich Civic Col­lege, in Suf­folk. He was a vis­it­ing lec­turer at other Lon­don art schools through­out the 1960s. Then he briefly was Pres­i­dent of On­tario Col­lege of Art and De­sign, Toronto, be­fore mov­ing to Cal­i­for­nia as Vice-Pres­i­dent and Dean of San Fran­cisco Art In­sti­tute, dur­ing the 1970s. He was Pro­fes­sor for Com­mu­ni­ca­tions The­ory at the Uni­ver­sity of Ap­plied Arts Vi­enna dur­ing the 1980s, and Pro­fes­sor of Tech­noetic Arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Wales, New­port in the 1990s. As­cott is also the found­ing pres­i­dent of the Plan­e­tary Col­legium, an ad­vanced re­search cen­ter which he set up in 2003 at the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth, UK, where he is Pro­fes­sor of Tech­noetic Arts.

In 1964 As­cott pub­lished “Be­hav­iourist Art and the Cy­ber­netic Vi­sion”. In 1968, he was elected As­so­ci­ate Mem­ber of the In­sti­tu­tion of Com­puter Sci­ence, Lon­don (pro­posed by Gor­don Pask). In 1972, he be­came a Fel­low of the Royal So­ci­ety of Arts. His first telem­atic art pro­ject was La Plis­sure du Texte (1983), an on­line work of “dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship” in­volv­ing artists around the world. The sec­ond was his “gesamt­daten­werk” As­pects of Gaia: Dig­i­tal Path­ways across the Whole Earth (1989),an in­stal­la­tion for the Ars Elec­tron­ica Fes­ti­val in Linz, dis­cussed by Matthew Wil­son Smith in The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cy­ber­space, New York: Rout­ledge, 2007.

Jan Baetens is pro­fes­sor of cul­tural stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of Leu­ven (KUL). His re­ser­ach top­ics range from French po­etry (which he also prac­tices as a pub­lished poet) and word and image it­er­ac­tions in so-called minor gen­res (graphic novel, photonovel, nov­el­li­sa­tion). He has writ­ten and edited var­i­ous books, among which re­cently: “Pour le ro­man-photo” (Brus­sels, Les Im­pres­sions Nou­velles, 2010), and “Con­strained Writ­ing”, a dou­ble spe­cial of Po­et­ics Today, co-geuste­dited with JJ Pou­cel (vol. 30-4, 2009 and 31-1, 2010).

Elif Ayiter is a de­signer and a re­searcher, teach­ing at Sa­banci Uni­ver­sity, Is­tan­bul. Her texts have been pub­lished at aca­d­e­mic jour­nals such as the Jour­nal of Con­scious­ness Stud­ies and Tech­noetic Arts. She has pre­sented cre­ative as well as re­search out­put at con­fer­ences in­clud­ing Sig­graph, Cre­ativ­ity and Cog­ni­tion, Com­pu­ta­tional Aes­thet­ics and Cy­ber­worlds. She is also the chief ed­i­tor of the jour­nal Meta­verse Cre­ativ­ity with In­tel­lect Jour­nals, UK and is cur­rently study­ing for a doc­toral de­gree at the Plan­e­tary Col­legium, CAiiA hub, at the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth with Roy As­cott.

“Identity is a construction and we as human beings made it into an entity that consists of something that can possess one or more natural persons and control one or more artificial persons”. Heath Bunting explains where his passion for systems and power structures comes from.

The world of an administrative content provider. About opening spaces, connecting layers and being mobile.

For those unfamiliar with Heath Bunting’s work, it is not immediately obvious what he intends by The System. Its pages, consisting of stark black-and-white spider diagrams, give the impression of an austere post-conceptual practice, but technocratic as this aesthetic may seem, it camouflages a more wayward disposition.’ — Colin Perry on the net artist’s new book “The System,” in Art Monthly, issue 334, March 2010.