from: heiko idensen date: January 1996 http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/hypertxt.txt 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-hyper- media. 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 audio- visual 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 ... Answers... Artistic telematic projects go beyond the conventional dialectic of transmission and reception; therefore they change the code, the message, the technological structure and the social contexts in which these things operate. The network as utopian potential, is therefore not the simple knotting together of that which circulates through existing telematic networks, but rather the network/the matrix/the tissue/the rhizome as a model, as texture, as form, program, activity, way of telling, way of living... Moments of immediate, unheralded connections, references, cross-references, new forms of a symbolic exchange, that is completely unfiltered by any social, languistic, bureaucratic, commercial norms - no transmitter and receiver, but rather, people who respond to each other... Rhizome - Network Through nomadic wandering in telematic networks, centrallized systems (like the branching model of trees and roots) are converted into de-centralized systems, "in which communication is established between neighbours, in which streams and channels have no previous existence (...)" (Deleuze/Guattari 92, 30). Writing in the network has nothing to do with literature in the classical sense - as in the system author- work-meaning-market, - but rather with surveying virgin land in the telematic domain, establishing landscapes of text, even to understand writing and reading as a nomadic act of wandering through text-networks! The additional dimensions of the hyper-textual tailoring of random text particles that circulate among various mailboxes through permanent up and downloading, liberate the mental effort of producing texts as a social network. These text particles can be interrupted, ripped apart, altered (and sent again) in any position - while being simultaneously held together in a variable network while constantly referring to each other. On-line-Writing Writing (as ecriture in the poetic sense, as activity, as doing, as generation...) takes place (already) always 'on- line': hooked up to the projection apparatus (of a writing system) the writing process constantly switches back and forth between transmission/reception, remembering/forgetting, continuation/termination ... The processes of structuring, revision, of setting in contexts (repetitions, recursions, the interlocking of phrases, casual events ...) that take place in the minds (or on the margin of the manuscript, between the lines of a proof copy ...) of individual authors, are already happening now in the public domain: distributed collective - collaborative de-sign, development-processing of text in the truest sense of the word. Perhaps in such a net-work of interterchange it is no longer important who has written something but rather where it has been written, to what it relates, how it is distributed in the networks, what replies it elicits ... Text, Collective The utopian vision of a collective TEXTUALITY: as already found in socially turbulent situations (French revolution, operative writer collectives in the Russian revolution ...) and in communal text-net-works. But neither the encyclopaedia, nor literary circles (Nouveau Romanciers, Tel-Quel) really eliminate the bourgeois author-subject, even when this belongs to the central demands of the respective literary program! Perhaps this is really (operatively) a question of the technology of writing (recording and distribution): There is neither room for a signature ("signature" is the file with a personal farewell greeting which can be added to a mail- message), nor the necessary consistency of information to provide conventional authorship. That which applies theoretically and conceptually to written literature - in the system of literature as an inter-textual network - applies also to the net-work-text-tours at every moment of generation/structuring and distribution: The difference between writing and reading in the network is approaching nil. Utopia Telematics Travel routes, departure and arrival points draw tracks, paths, and traffic routes, mark nodes, bases and cities in the landscapes of telematic networks. With each journey, each on- line adventure, the network of interconnections expands... If these communicative connections, communication acts, up and down-loads, acts of sending and receiving ... combine with object oriented hypertext programs, then the most disparate data forms, information carriers, cultural production forms mix on a communal surface: the utopian vision of a comprehensive telematic network, in which the forms of individual production change into social communication. Rhizome "The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing... " (Deleuze/Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12) European Diary A Network-Project addresses precisely this space in between power/powerlessness, centre/periphery, private/public - the personal form of the diary is written directly into the network: starting from the "Zagreb Diary", in which the Dutchman Wam Kat makes public via computer networks his personal impressions of the events of the war in the former Yugoslavia, personal entries, subjective stories and experiences are collected and compiled in networks throughout Europe - and thereby opposed to the always repetitive news agency reports of the official media and information structures. POETRONIC (Peter Glaser) has taken on the translations and co- ordination of this project which can be found on news-Servers in the directory T-Netz / Tagebuch or in local Mail-Boxes (e.g. //BIONIC (Bielefeld): germany /0521/68000): Those who wish to participate can send contributions to the Board /T- NETZ/TAGEBUCH. Word3-Voices "First, a quick word about the structure of World 3. We've tried to design the space to reflect one of the most remarkable attributes of hypertext. Namely, its ability to connect ideas, to draw analogies, to create intelligence. The decidedly non-linear Deus Ludens or "No Thought Is More Than One Connection From Any Other" weighs in with some heavy concepts (heck, we're talking Big Ideas here!) about the nature of cyberspace. Think of it as metahypertext. One Thought." W3 Voices: http://www.rezn8.com/world3/meme1/vioces.html C.R.E.W. Compact for Responsive Electronic Writing "Preamble We believe in Hypermedia and the World Wide Web ... Hyperdocuments are not simply Collections of Nodes and Links, but Articulations of Nodes and Links in Space ... ... the Space of Hypermedia is not the Space of the Book ... We feel "the need to use computer networks as a means for creating new forms of collective intelligence, of getting humans to interact with one another in novel ways" (De Landa) ... It's better to do it than to write about it. What is C.R.E.W.? Compact for Responsive Electronic Writing: a non-binding, strictly symbolic agreement among World Wide Web authors promising to open their documents to links proposed by others in the community. Why bother? Because presently the World Wide Web is more like a gigantic index than a true hypertext system. Hypertext requires the ability to create links as well as follow them. The CREW Preamble: http://raven.ubalt.edu/crew/Preamble.html WAXweb (http://bug.village.virginia.edu/) is the hypermedia version of David Blair's feature-length independent film, "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" (85:00, 1991). It combines one of the largest hypermedia narrative databases on the Internet with an authoring interface which allows users to collaboratively add to the story. Hi Pitched Voices (http://duke.cs.brown.edu:8888/viewer=sav/lang=English/obj=2430 ) A collaborative WWW-Hypertext work in the "Hypertext- Hotel" (at Brown University, where you find a lot of hypertext- projects). Some kind of MOO-inspired collaction of "voices", which inspire further wandering within their often meanderings. Imaginary Library * All texts (sorry, mostly in german language!), projects, bibliographies of the project PooL-Processing are part of the "Imaginary Library": http://www.uni- hildesheim.de/ami/pool/home.html (some kind of literary micro- model of a hypertext-docuverse like the WWW. "Literature is an ongoing system of interconnecting documents."(Ted Nelson) ** more links to cooperative hypertext projects: http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/ami/pool/AAO.html *** email Heiko Idensen:100762.2560@compuserve.com connect it! Find the places in the network that you can do something with. Copy the material, scan it, import it, work with it... Wunschmaschinen (Machines of Desire) The wishing machines aren't stuck in our heads, are not figments of the imagination, but exist in the technical and social machines themselves. (Gilles Deleuze; Felix Guattari) --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de