<nettime> violence as authorship

[calin@euronet.nl (calin dan)]

Violence as authorship. Why is interactivity the first commandment in the
religion of new media could be understood as both obvious and unclear.
Obvious is the fact that interactivity - @ the present level of
sophistication - is mainly a business of violent intrusion in otherwise
linear concepts. And it seems that violence - sublimated though - is now an
important ingredient of mass culture. Unclear remains how much is
interactivity rewarding the idea of authorship, and connected 2 that how
significant a need creativity represents 4 the user.
What lasts in the end of this trip is just a vague landscape where
collective creativity, violence and control over the territory of fiction
compete with the dominance of single authorship. If the responsive machines
are supposed to infuse a horizontal (non-hierarchic) view on crucial
matters, then uniqueness should become obsolete, as an entrenched form of
defending identity and economics.

Content in Istanbul. Istanbul has been a place of intense data traffic 4
millennia. In the old city, a feeling of irrepressible amounts (time,
events, merchandise) is overwhelming the stress of constant noise and
agressivity. The quotation aesthetics of the oriental bazaar was intensely
speculated in the visual arts of the late 80s/beginning 90s. It was then
understood that the fall of some ideological barriers allows incredible
cultural connections @ the level of basic signals (packaging, fashion,
printed matter, entertainment), all valued by the new possibility of global
perception.
Multi media production of the late 90s should pay attention to the
procedures of this ancient and still available cultural nomadism. Notions
like authorship, ownership, cultural/moral/legal property, appropriation,
synthesis, eclecticism, multi sensorialism, conceptualism, market values,
aesthetic autonomy, are checked upon in the bazaar consistently and without
interruption, no matter the political stress.
When huge amounts of exciting data lie around, I guess that the most
reasonable way of being creative is to work on the display. No big distance
in that between the newmedia oriented artists and the intelligent promeneur
in places where Russians, Kalmuks, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Americans,
Weuropeans are buying and selling the most useful and the most absurd
products that can sit on the two sides of the imagination.
But controlling the display means also owning the merchandise; a critical
option for the newmedia artist is to have the abilities - mental, social,
financial- to step into the position of a wholesale shopper.

Calin Dan
ONLY REPLY ADRESS: calin@euronet.nl

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