Reading Victoria Vesna’s essay “Database Aesthetics:Of Containers, Chronofiles, Time Capsules, Xanadu, Alexandria and the World Brain” was like surveying a slice of my own (non-linear) history of encountered concepts.
I have read “As We May Think” and explored Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. Tim Berners-Lee is a name I have known since 1996 (though I saw my first web page in 1994). I remember exploring Vera Frenkel’s ‘Transit Bar’ (or was it ‘Body Missing’ or both?) website(s) in 1997 while taking a web design course at OCAD (taught by Steev Morgan) – ah, the days when tiled backgrounds were cool. I hadn’t known about R. Buckminster Fuller’s Chronofiles, but have appreciated his work since reading ‘Education Automation’ (book version of a lecture given in 1962) years ago (the BFI used to make the text of this freely available, but it is no longer there – I have a PDF version if anyone would like it). I’ve seen some intriguing new media projects come out of ITP and the IDMI while I was living in NYC.
The part of Vesna’s essay that stood out as particularly relevant, philosophically, to documentary media , was the following from p. 12:
“Documentation of an artist’s life is an investment in the future of the personae that will continue to survive in the form of information. Collecting, storing, and archiving is very much connected to time, to our anxiety over the loss of time and the speed with which time travels. We preserve the all-important self in this age of relentless movement by creating a memory bank that testifies our existence, our unique contribution, and promises to perhaps be brought back to life by someone in the future who can unpack the data and place it in a space of cultural importance.”
At the age of twelve I began writing in a diary and was already concerned about such things. Anyway, I probably have too much to say about these things (and I haven’t even got to writing about the other readings), but this combined with some of Graham Runciman’s reflections on the same essay made me think of having read Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” (http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm) followed by Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (http://www.continental-philosophy.org/2007/05/29/e-texts-foucault-what-is-an-author/) many years ago…
I wish could have spent more time reading, writing and reflecting on the readings, assignments and prof-posed questions, not to mention revisiting Second Life, before this morning’s class, but I spent most of the weekend struggling against a nasty migraine, which made reading and looking at screens rather difficult. This being day three of pain and nausea, it should be on its way out.
1 response so far ↓
gruncima // May 27, 2008 at 5:15 pm
I always felt the claims about the “death of the author” to be at once self-evident and overstated by Barthes. The reader always determines the meaning of a text, but the raw material (i.e. words on a page) remain intact. Some readings are will always be more likely, more common, and more justifiable than others. I always took it to about just a fine shift in balance of approach.
New Media offers a totally different take on the “readerly” / “writerly” distinction, in that the actual material can change, more than interpretations around it. I think the distinction becomes more literal. It’s nice to see new debates around authorship opening up!
Hope you’re feeling better.