1996 – (a) Poetry should be made by all! From hypertext utopias to cooperative net-projects - Heiko Idensen

Texto

From hypertext utopias to cooperative net-projects

By Heiko Idensen

The explosive expansion of the WWW changed the use of hypertext-programs and concepts: from artistic and academic experiments in the seventies to a new kind of network-hypermedia. But what happend to the utopias of hypertext by the way? - Did all readers become writers? - Are avantgarde techniques in literature and art now available for all users? - What about poetics/ethics within networks?

Visualizations and dramatizations of data presentations, simulation techniques, desktop publishing, desktop video, the hypertext revolution of the WWW ... make the screen as a virtual surface the favourite place of cultural exchange processes: on screen thinking - writing and reading on the net.

Connected

The post-modern technologies and sciences leave human beings behind as nomads hooked up to the network of telematic multimedial systems: culturally imprinted by the alphabetic book-culture, informed, seduced, and emotionally fed by audiovisual mass media, mentally stimulated, fascinated and inspired to speculations and visions by the new information technologies. The myths of the text society finite text, authorship, legitimization in the context of "great stories" (ideologies) collapse in the interfaces of the information media, in the circulation of endlessly interchangeable information particles: texts, pictures, sounds are floating through information channels ... networking as an art of cross connections, of being on the way, of being everywhere. ... nomadic interwoven cultural techniques arise ...

Everything can be connected to everything!

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 intertextual generating 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. Media Networks contrary to the linear-sequential writing of printed texts, electronic documents are divided in small, discrete units: the screen, the card of a hypertext system, one data record of a data base, the text, image or action window of an object oriented working surface, a message on the board of a mailbox ... have manifolds relations with each other. The network of such objects of ideas and mental images requires from the beginning a multiperspective way of organisation - a networked thinking which allows different approaches and connections.

One doesn't read texts anymore, one doesn't see pictures anymore, one doesn't listen to soundscapes anymore ... instead, one cuts together various media streams on-line (in real-time) - not only as chance mixtures - as, for example, in early multi-media happenings - but rather as integral constellations and configurations: Networking Hypertexts as "text's" late revenge on television and the audio-visual media-massage.

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 of hyper-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. Although the radical media transition from gramophone, film, typewriter (thus Friedrich Kittler's suggestive title) to CD, video and computers has radically changed 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 rapid spread of digital media: The techniques and practises of non-linear forms of living, thinking, and production are now becoming standard operations with, through, over, under and around the new media ... The place of knowledge and culture production thereby shifts to externalised networks of the most varied of media configurations. The "classical" (manipulated or to be mobilised) bourgeois or mass media produced public no longer exists - the question of media connections, of networking, sequencing and interrelating the "charges" (mixtures of texts, images, sounds, interactions) circulating in the network will become decisive for a tele-political culture - for the networked circulation of public images, texts and multi-media.

Hyper-Media-Utopias

Hyper-media offers places to jump from, information nodes, intensification, network addresses, fragments, that must be used, stolen, traversed, "fed". Taken on their own they mean nothing. Hypermedia documents cannot be simply "transmitted" or "received" - they contain activating moments, invitations to manipulate the syntax and structure of the media, to discover new worlds, micro- spaces and real-time-environments, extensions beyond the raster and resolution of the monitors: - multicultural and interdisciplinary exchange of texts, images, sounds as opposed to the one-dimensional set channels of the mass communication media - the development of a world wide network, a common electronic writing environment as the preliminary model for a hyper-media-culture - thinking as travelling through information networks - free access to networks, archives, data banks, media ... The poetry should be created by everyone!

Network-Utopias

Each utopia is a network. There are closed networks (religion, meditation, the aura of classical art, the book as a closed text, mass media...) and open ones (love affairs, social utopias, open artworks that allow participation, ecological cycles, the telephone system and naturally, digitalized telematic nets, open texts, interaction, hypertexts). Social networks can be found in artist groups and communities (Cobra, Fluxus, Situationists) as well as in the many initiatives of the counterculture since 1968 (from food co-operatives, communes, neighbourhood groups, neighbourly help, to media co-operatives and socio-cultural centres). Nonetheless, it would be false to think that the Net- Work-Concept as such has an utopian character - the "System" (totalitarian or technocratic state, the bourgeoisie, the family etc.) is after all, also a complex network of dispositions: transmission, storage, distribution, and control mechanisms. Only a very specific use of networks can be utopian: (Network "radio" for example is employed by fascism as the central distribution unit for propaganda, while in the revolutionary struggle of the Tuparamos, it was used as a mobile guerrilla communication system - central "fascist" grouping of transmissions versus rhizomatic, nomadic networks.)

Cartography

"What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to an kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways..."

(Deleuze/Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12)

tap in The encyclopaedia projected the classical tree of knowledge onto a map, in order to show connecting lines and crossing points between the various disciplines. These concepts will be further developed into methods to interrelate and process idea-objects on the surfaces of information processing environments. Experimental literary methods such as Cut-up, intertextual connections, interlockings, visualisations invade the realm of knowledge as discursive methods, speed up the general circulation and the confluence of information from various areas, create connective possibilities and interfaces to other areas of knowledge. Short circuits and interferences between discourses turn into productive fields, in which discoveries, inventions and innovations take place. Thought itself happens in the spaces between, in the transition zone from one area to another. The process of transport and transfer of hypermedia develops through tapping into the information particles circulating in the network.

Media Myth

Especially today, after the presumed failure of social utopias and projects, utopian potentials are increasingly pushing their way into technologies and media: ecological technologies, recreation and psychological technologies, body and aesthetic technologies... While the mechanical age sang an ode in a myriad of variations to the myth of the machine as the universal instrument of production, the post-modern age delivers the myth of the Universal Network: the telematic technologies promise a liberalization, multiplication, and enrichment of the methods of communication. Social systems as open networks in which the messages flow out star-like in all directions - the myth is no longer "The medium is the message", but "The medium is the network! The myth was first a narration, then a statement, now the network itself...

Subversive Use of Media

The dream of a critical theory of media: to tear the commodity character from the media, so that they can be put to a communicative, social use - from the capitalist application to the revolutionary subversive practise of miss-application, since the structure of media is "fundamentally egalitarian" (from a distribution to a "real communication tool"...). This is, however, not a technical problem but rather one of the networking of medial connections, social relationships, artistic forms of production, run of the mill daily practices...

Reference Systems

It is true that the telematic utopias resemble all too closely the promises of the free market, free elections, or media feed- back mechanisms such as reader submissions, listener telephone calls, questionnaires: "minimal effort on the part of voters/viewers" (Enzensberger 70, 161), whereby, however, the answers are already present in the questions. The telematic-cybernetic illusion: everyone can switch from the status of recipient to the status of transmitter, to become the active operator of their mental constructs! However, the model of social mass communication doesn't change at all if the users of telematic networks can only alternate from the status of recipient to the status of transmitter, without destroying the immanent implicit reference and code structures of media systems. Therefore, hypertext-systems that only allow for stripped-down, read-only versions of electronic documents are also completely unacceptable. This implies the complete disposability of all texts in the network for collaborative writing projects: Everyone can enter at any point, delete, enter text, interconnect ...

Enlaces

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19991108225104/http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/hypertxt.txt