Trudy Lane's List: online curating

• Western epistemology is linear or teleological, logical, and atomistic. Our classification does not adequately represent other cultures with holistic, circular, and inclusive worldviews. These issues are discussed through Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and deconstructed using theory discussed by Hope Olson. With the advent of the Internet, and the multiple possibilities of hyperlinks that are like a rhizome, hierarchical classification no longer needs to be an issue. Each item (web page) is a node of the rhizome and has the potential to be linked to infinite numbers of other nodes. All nodes are equal in value and extend shoots to other nodes. Borges' The Library of Babel represents the rhizome through a honeycomb of infinite hexagons.
• "The Library of Babel" anticipates the rhizomatic structure of the Internet.
• Eco helps the reader question memory and truth
• our system of classification is not inherent in nature, rather it is of the lineage of logic and teleology.
• These are metanarratives (Lyotard 1984), tangible beliefs, systems of knowledge that a societal body holds to be true. Olson traces the presumptions in modern day classification back to fourth century BCE in Greece during the development of logic (1999b)
• Western epistemology to be integral parts of our beliefs in logic, science, and rationalism.
• base all conclusions on empiricism— taking facts available from what we can see, taste, touch, smell, or hear, and synthesizing the items together to induce a conceptual "truth."
• Olson discusses Derrida's term, "différance," a combination of the words "differ" and "defer." The difference between binaries can never be pinpointed and is "perpetually deferred" (Olson, p. 182). Binaries are exclusive: "concepts forming a binary opposition are mutually defining—each being what the other is not. Such mutual definition involves exclusions, categorizations, and classifications. A given concept excludes what it is not"
• Logic is based in binaries and mutually exclusive concepts
• The new way of organizing information may be through a rhizomatic structure, an idea introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987).
• Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress
• In hyperspace, a discrete object may
• have multiple accessions, or just one
• the classifier (or cataloguer) determines the degree of sameness or difference
• arbitrary product of a societal mind
• the Western ideal of teleology
• The separation of time is a representation of a worldview that can reduce everything to base units.
• the hyperlink and the semantic web, many concepts/classifications can be put on the same level, without hierarchy, like a rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) introduce the concept of the rhizome (Figure 1),contrasting the rhizome with the structure of a tree.
• "center," or "totality," and even "universality."
• "is an act of power, usurpation. By assuming, one sets oneself above Others, in arrogance
• suggesting the use of local (as opposed to universal) critical knowledges
• such as cyclical worldview (instead of our teleological worldview
• Borges and the Rhizome
• "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries"
• "The library is a labyrinth, containing not one Truth but all truths, many of them hoaxes, fallacies, frauds or imperfect facsimiles (books that differ by only a single letter or punctuation mark)"
• In the rhizome, the Internet, and the Library of Babel, there is no center and no binary, but an infinite number of interlocking nodes, linked through similarity through the Semantic Web
• The library is a circular structure—as one node crosses to another, and that one to yet another, and eventually the connection will come back to the original node. Circular structures, and decentralized organization are the complete opposite of Western classification schemes

• The Internet and the Rhizome

    

  Metanarratives of logic embodied in Western classification schemes can be deconstructed through an alternative: the rhizome structure. Sassón (2000) discusses the rhizome in her dissertation: "It does not necessarily link similar traits: on the contrary, the rhizome is able to make connections with diverse modes of coding. As a consequence, a rhizomatic structure does away with vertical hierarchies, so that no supreme force rules or imposes its traits upon subservient subjects" (p. 56). This can be seen in the digital world, especially in the hyperlink:

    

  Everything in hypertext depends upon linkage, upon connectivity between and among the various elements in the system. Linkage, in hypertext, plays a role corresponding to that of sequence in conventional text. A hypertext link is the electronic representation of a perceived relationship between two pieces of material, which become nodes once the relationship has been instantiated electronically. That is, the link simulates the connections in the mind of the author or reader (Slatin, 1990, p. 877).
• The challenge of the Semantic Web, therefore, is to provide a language that expresses both data and rules for reasoning about the data that allows rules from any existing knowledge-representation system to be exported onto the Web. (¶ 14)
• to laud the Semantic Web as the road of progress or a next evolution of knowledge organization is to fall under the spell of teleological discourse
• Borges' "The Library of Babel" represents this as a honeycomb of infinite hexagons with multiple links.

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• What would it mean if communication were exact?  That, in spite   of the real, material, spaces of message, channel, format, filters,   modulations, mediation, and plain old error, it might be possible   to exclude all noise and see through to some pure space of connection   and transmission. Despite my curiosity, I suspect the result would   be disappointingly dull, or simply redundant. The search for perfect   communication is as pointless as trying to find an audio space not   infected with electromagnetic waves, or a gallery space where only   one work is apprehended at a time. Our communications spaces are   always already determined by the varieties of noise that constitute   their surfaces. In scientific and informatic models there are laws   that repeatedly demonstrate the futility of any attempt to maintain   purity as a static form. Key to these demonstrations is the role   of entropy. Entropy is both a force and a probability measure. This   essay examines shifting roles and definitions of entropy in two   recent digital installations. What I suggest is that an understanding   of the operations and implications of entropy helps us to unpack   operations of noise and materiality in these works. The installations   discussed here use the tools of distributed media at the same time   as they locate themselves within the physical spaces of the art   gallery. Furthermore, a focus on entropy and its role in digital   installation acknowledges that both information theory and aesthetics   are themselves impure and inexact.

• Pool’s problem with Web 2.0 is that it does not encourage quality.
• It is not enough to <tag> or have contextual bots to do the automatic tagging for us.
• The problem deep down the Long Tail is not of getting 600 reviews but organizing one or two good ones to start with.
• ‘User generated content’ is nothing more than priceless noise: trash for the readers, gold for the shareholders. I recently had a debate with a Web 2.0 start-up owner who admitted for him user content would become irrelevant the moment he’d sell his company. We are working for his profit. He saw himself as a ‘multi-preneur’ (so-called entrepreneur who walks away from the job way too early, letting others deal with the ‘creative’ mess). What will happen with the content and the community after the deal was done, he couldn’t tell. I would say: he couldn’t care less. Profiles, recommendations, ratings, they are all data that contribute to the value of the company.
• It’s time to get a better understanding how to redistribute wealth and income in this ‘free’ and ‘open’ world. The uncritical praise of social networks, placed in opposition to the print and broadcast media, is merely replicating 1990s schemes and leaves no space for the critique of techno-libertarism. Soon the Web 2.0 boom will be over. Merely celebrating citizen content takes us away from the hard task to design the building blocks of a new digital utopianism that does provide fair living wages from cultural workers—and their reviewers.

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• The time had come to look for elements that compose a network theory outside of post-modern cultural studies (which marvelled at place-less space) and ethnographic social sciences (which recalled place-based space).
• The time had come to look for elements that compose a network theory outside of post-modern cultural studies (which marvelled at place-less space) and ethnographic social sciences (which recalled place-based space). The study of network culture is currently dominated by a science-centric ‘unified network theory’ (Albert-László Barabási). What network theory needs – to paraphrase Lev Manovich – is a ‘language of new networks’ that includes both aesthetic and political elements.

• Patrick Lichty: Henry Giroux’s ideas on radical pedagogy influenced me a great deal in terms of electronic communication in education. Although Giroux has not addressed new media per se, his thoughts on radical pedagogy as agent of social change have had an influence in terms of activist writings and media tactics. In this day and age when our rights to free speech are being imposed upon so badly, one must engage in media tactics in order to get a full range of ideas across.
• Another crucial theoretical influence is the Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser. He distinguishes discourse from dialogue. In my reading of Flusser-- discourse is a unilateral transmission of information, building on prior dialogues. Conversely, dialogue is a multilateral exchange of ideas. Under this model, dialogue should generate more information and knowledge; it is a seed generator and feedback machine. The idea is that through the much more distributed/less hierarchical exchange of information there is the possibility for greater generation of ideas. Perhaps this is the principle that inspired the move from lecturer to facilitator in much of academia.
• Hakim Bey’s idea of the ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’
• Online you can insert your contribution immediately into a peer-reviewed distributed debate.
• The challenge in distributed learning is not technological but has everything to do with the implementation into social systems
• From the angle of knowledge creation, social networks as generators of information and ideas have a lot of merit if there are models in which the veracity of the information can be maintained. The question regarding the gatekeepers of knowledge then comes up vis-à-vis authority and legitimacy and regulation of information.

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• The selection and placement of the projects on view will be determined   by visitors' choices rather than by a predetermined curatorial agenda;   Web sites that receive more attention will rise toward the screens nearer   the skylight, while those sites that languish will sink back to the rotunda   floor.

• There are three aspects that have to be taken into   account if you want to build a free cooperation. The   first is that all rules in this cooperation can be questioned   by everybody, there are no holy rules that people cannot   question or reject or bargain and negotiate about -   which is not the case in most of the cooperations and   organizational forms that we know.
    And the second aspect that has to be guaranteed for   free cooperation is that people can question and change   these rules by using this primary material force of   refusing to cooperate, by restricting their cooperation,   by holding back what they do for these cooperations,   making conditions under which they are willing to cooperate,   or leaving cooperations. They must be guaranteed the   right to use these measures to influence the rules and   that everybody in the cooperation can do this.
    And the third aspect - which is important because otherwise   it would be just a blackmailing of the less powerful   ones by the more powerful ones - is that the price of   not cooperating, the price that it costs if you restrict   your cooperation or if the cooperation splits up, should   be …not exactly equal …but similar for all   participants in this cooperation, and it should be affordable.   That means, it can be done, it's not impossible, it's   not a question of sheer existence to cooperate in this   way.
• First, you   have to dismantle the instruments of domination, you   have to abandon the idea of using them for better things.
• you have to find alternative ways of cooperation   and negotiation, alternative rules of the social
• politics of relationships
• develop new social abilities
• develop forms of getting   independent and forms of articulation, critical articulation,   of reclaiming public space
• if the people working there disagree on the future   course of this enterprise, and doesn't it introduce   an element of instability into the whole system
• That rules out the possibility that there   are people who have such a special knowledge that nothing   can be done without them, for example
• So it also has   to imply processes of distributing knowledge and abilities
• The main question with regard to implementing free   cooperation in today's world, of course, is the question   of property
• capitalizes on the activities, the work, the thinking   of people of the past, of a very large number of people   and their lives

• So I think there is a lot of   ideas going around in the world today that are related   to concepts like free cooperation and can be brought   into an interesting discussion with it. This discussion   is essential, because this kind of dialogue between   different ideas, different people, different groups   is necessary to build coalitions, and this is what we   need today.

   

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• The challenge is how to develop such a position without falling prone to the delusions of the ‘new’, something that accompanied ‘new media culture’ all too often in its formative years.
• With this book Kluitenberg insists upon a cultural reading of media and technology, and argues that in order to reach the desired critical position it is necessary to understand the much larger histories of the linkages of culture and technology
• Delusive Spaces is divided into four main sections, ‘Archaeology’ tracing alternative histories of technology; ‘Politics’, questioning the politics of media and information; ‘Anthropology’ asking how to live in a digitally networked world; and ‘Art’ exploring the relevance of artistic strategies in a society dominated by global machines.

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• "The conceptual basis of this work  is centered within theoretical discourses of database and knowledge engineering.  Where as domains of cultural art production centered as advocacy and critique  are obsolete and in that the exposition of theory has clearly situated art  as code, a new conceptual terrain for art is necessary. A terrain in which  art as information system is understood in its fullest capacity."
• described  software for emerging knowledge through conversational interaction in a process  called DoWhatDo, a software design that relied on relational procedures involving  a network of expert system based machines. The terminology of Entailment Mesh  referred to a mechanism of conversation for emerging a learning procedure through  an ever-refining conversational method.
• RG: I'm particularly interested in collaborative models employed and occupied  by artists, which has inspired a series of interviews with various practitioners.
• On occasion I have gone so far as to describe myself as an  artist who designs collaboration models.
• my interest in information  mapping, autopoieses, social networks, and emergent behavior is pretty central  to everything

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• TS: Earlier we spoke about Martin Buber's influence on your work and how you mobilize his ideas of dialogical space.

    

  JH: I use the term dialogue", borrowed from Buber -- which I define as an energized exchange between the self and the other. A bi-directional exchange, not just verbal but a full exchange of human energies. This is what dialogue is about.
   Starting from this concept -- talking about distributed exchanges. Martin Buber's essay "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace" deeply struck me as it promotes dialogue as the pathway to a more democratic, caring, just, and sustainable world. He proposes that societal changes are made on a granular human to human level and not on a world political scale. Otherwise, he claims, we are just playing around with social systems. My personal idea of an energized encounter is a full-spectrum dialogue between the self and the other. It requires a shifting into a space modeled by quantum physics, Taoism, and Tibetan Buddhism: the universe as a field of energies. When two people meet and they walk away with more energy than they had prior to this encounter then something has happened. When we engage with the other and an excess energy remains after we part-- that is inspiration. My teaching is a facilitation of open frameworks, of platforms in which these inspirations can grow. I am of course also sympathetic with Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone."
• Fortunately, I let go of the idea that I am the only source of knowledge and energy, which is a great feeling.
• This merely describes the
   excess of energy that arises when two or three people are in focused engagement. Interaction between self and the other is fundamental -- it is a fact of everyday life. I start all my courses with the task for students to pair up and connect with each for two full hours in a focused and concentrated way. I see this as an anchor with the topic being absolutely open, it is an encounter with a stranger. It is simply two human beings engaging with each other.
• I found that dropping a reliance on those terms and boxes is necessary to crack situations open.

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• Siegfried Zielinski: “Depth of Subject and Diversity of Method: An Introduction to Variantology” (Word)

     

  My endeavour is not to explain the history of the media as a consecutive retrospective, but to move from reflections about the deep time history of arts and sciences to speculative projections that occasionally might reach into the present and into the future. Our work on deep time relations between arts, sciences, and technologies does not seek to re-invent the concepts of the media or the arts. The aim is to open up both media and the arts via their interactions with scientific and technological processes.

• The Entailment Mesh research project is based upon a conversational and learning systems theory. In the late 1970's systems theorists Gordon Pask and Paul Pangaro at MIT developed the conceptual framework for a machine conversational and learning system called DoWhatDo. DoWhatDo is a method in which knowledge emerges from conversational interaction involving differing expertise. Using a relatively simple set of action/reaction algorithms that enable conversant associations through relational filtering and substitution processes we are able to generate multiple layers of knowledge distinct from the original expertise of participants. 

  Engines-Sex-Leather = Motorcycles 

  Their significant accomplishment is a recognition that learning evolves from conversational interaction in which the outcome is driven by the conversation itself and is something that cannot be entirely predicted. They also clearly establish the role of human subjectivity involved with inferencing as a central feature in the evolution of meaningful knowledge.
• Entailment Mesh is an art project. The conceptual basis of this work is centered within theoretical discourses of database and knowledge engineering. Where as domains of cultural art production centered as advocacy and critique are obsolete and in that the exposition of theory has clearly situated art as code, a new conceptual terrain for art is necessary. A terrain in which art as information system is understood in its fullest capacity. Entailment Mesh is a social software. It can be argued that the operatives of internal and external relations that comprise complex social organization as networks blurs all lines between structure and process. And such systems are evidenced by the presence of complex strata's of self-organizing interactions. Understanding the social nature of data relations provides a means of describing of a framework for machine knowledge discovery that is not Artificial Intelligence based. We believe that research models as prototypes can demonstrate this character and serve to redefine knowledge as the result of human-machine mediated processes of relativistic social interaction.

• Walker writes: 'What has changed is the development of a team-wide entrepreneurial ethos, based on a revised but undiminished commitment to the traditional roles of an art museum. It is a culture defined by ambition, a real level of respect for community, audience and artists/creative practitioners (which are not seen as being mutually exclusive), a willingness to take risks and a commitment to learn from those risks'.[2]
• Strategy is vital. It requires thought. And it requires commitment. All of that requires leadership. A fundamental aspect of leadership is the ability to communicate effectively and comfortably to staff and those interested in the enterprise. As Lynda Gratton and Sumantra Ghoshal of the London School of Economics once said, 'Conversations lie at the heart of managerial work. Managers talk. It is through talk that they teach and inspire, motivate and provide feedback, plan and take decisions. Conversations lie at the heart of how companies develop new ideas, share knowledge and experience, and enhance individual and collective learning.'[3]
• Leadership also involves passion, passion for the ideas and prospects. Passion energises other people. To suppose that anyone other than the leaders of the organisation would conduct the frank and open discussions which lie at the heart of strategic planning is to defeat the process. And since people only really commit to goals and strategies they have helped to develop, to imagine that someone other than those in the museum who are to implement the plan might write it is to condemn the plan to failure.

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• WonderWalker, a web site that  consists of a collaborative virtual collection of objects  constructed by the visiting public. (This site contains a  ‘map space’ of icons that provide links to web pages  chosen by the visiting public, who are the collectors.) Wonder  Walker proposes collecting as a social or public  practice online that breaks with the concept of  collecting as a private and elitist process.

• as Tom Stoppard put it so elegaically in his play Arcadia, "It is the best of all possible times to be alive, when everything we thought we knew is wrong." 
  
   I believe that net art and net artists, if they care, can change institutions before they are changed. The issue for institutions is to hope [some of] these artists do care, perhaps even give them a reason to do so.

• Related is this idea of the theory object as my colleague Tara McPherson has taught me — an object through which one can come to understand what the object is here for, how it works, how it can work differently. This is much like Rich Gold's Evocative Knowledge Objects. So, not only is the finished, designed object of interest, but so too is the process of its construction, which you must ruthlessly capture and document because every step of the process has something important to say that's part of the critical voice of the design — from the initial sketches, to choosing parts, to accidentally bricking an expensive component.