The Database Narrative Archive symposium, held last May in Montréal, is culminating in an innovative journal of media and text that will be published on the Scalar platform, a multimedia authoring/publishing platform.
We are distributing far and wide to academics and non-academics who are interested in, well, database, narratives and archives – however these meet and overlap in electronic space.
Just a brief summary of the Database|Narrative|Archive Symposium in Montreal. I spent last weekend with about 120 others discussing and exploring a range of projects that were mostly non-fiction, interactive and cinema driven. The scale of the conference was perfect – small enough to weave good conversation, large enough for a range of points of view. Organizers Matt Soar and Monika Kin Gagnon had the participants make 5 min “lightening talks.” This meant everyone could (and most did) listen to everyone else’s presentation. This created cohesiveness and plenty of opportunity for follow-up discussions. I presented about my The Father Divine Project, a database documentary and archive built on Scalar. See below for my lightening talk and others as a Korsakow interactive video.
There were some very beautiful, innovative and smart examples of “database narratives” and all very different. Underlying my admiration for much of the work are lingering jealousies of the funding structures that we no longer have in the U.S. – but that’s another story. Besides the interesting content -content that demands multilinear presentation- these projects introduce and teach database thinking in their forms. Although this was not discussed much (too obvious?), the database narrative as a form is an orientation to the human world as a complex adaptive system rather than as a site of large and small “conflicts” centered around individual will and desire. For that reason alone, many of these projects would be great to integrate into learning centers – public, architectural spaces. They are ambient reflections of the world as database.
But… As Adrian pointed out in the plenary session and in a blog response, there is a troubling gap between the the kind of attention these projects demand and the dwindling attention spans of our networked life worlds. Each participant probably has a laptop and smart phone full of more attention demanding media than our lives have time for. Not to mention the simultaneous flows of information coming at us at any given moment. This is a very different media ecology than the one that gave birth to the novel, the feature film and other weekend rituals that were considered escapes from work and boredom. What is the new ecology?
“Blogs are premised on the personal, polyvocalism, authenticity, trust and porousness….Technically they are premised on granularity, addressability, small world networks and dense connectors ”
One special feature of DNA – for me- was that it brought together some videobloggers: Adrian, Jenn, Jay and Ryan and myself. In our group discussions we kept returning to the blog and video blog as models or starting points for new projects – especially given the wide interest in tablet apps. But “video blog” is an ugly description. That is one big problem with even raising it in a conference like this. But the presentation and contextualization of video, audio, image and text – whether it is in a blog post,an epub, mobile app, kiosk, wall or website – is going to be most successful in short (3-10 min.) chunks that are network aware and are connected to other chunks. Chunks can integrate into longer, deeper and wider serialized forms, but we need the smaller narrative units to weave into our own lives.
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Here is my talk embedded in a Korsakow movie with all talks.
Lin remixes networked and print reading/writing practices into something dense, beautiful, puzzling and ultimately relaxing. The book is about its own construction, and the nature of a hybrid identity as “book”, as immigrant, as a networked digital being . Search results, personal lists, metadata, receipts and low-rez images are indexical to the authoring process rather than illustrations of some simulated world. A narrative essay (sebaldian), with multiple entrances and exits and no specific information to absorb, designed to contain flows of semiotic debris that wash up everyday. Lin calls his poetry/fiction/essays “ambient.” And his books do, like much ambient music, set you on a leisurely stroll through semiotic space.
“I believe a novel should not preserve things, it should blank them out very very slowly around all those beautiful, corrosive things that are not happening in the world and that usually involve figures of state and violent incursions in countries far from our own and the loss of our loved ones.”
The novelistic arts – novels, movies, some documentaries – attempt to represent the complex flows of events, people and things inside dense cohesive structures. The novelist or screenwriter builds a structure so that its world can sit solidly in the reader’s mind. This is essential for immersion. And immersion is necessary to conjure the stresses of life and then to offer a catharsis – an end to the stress – and the ability to go on about ones’ business. Catharsis has always been a hot commodity.
But living with continuous networked flows of text and image, there is never catharsis – no end- to the piling on of information. Why pick up that novel or that netflix DVD and go through the motions of pretending to care about a watered-down and well-intentioned (accessible) version of reality when we’ve just spent the day sorting through various scales of virtual and local “crises” and flights from crises: news headlines, electric bill, tweets, emails, calls, anecdotes, comments, deadlines, lists, searches. How do you represent that reality?
Sometimes a fiction universe is so good (thick) that it does seem worthy of the semiotic complexity we experience everyday. But catharsis? I have been watching The Wire and find that it and much of the good long-form television beats the novel in doing what a novel should do – giving access to the complex flows of contemporary experience. In The Wire, although plot heavy, the cathartic moments are never fully satisfying, the characters are always frustrated with each other and themselves. The problems never go away completely. I often “watch” the episodes while performing tasks on the computer, or doing light reading. Divided attention. I listen to characters and turn to the interesting parts. Scroll back to cover what I missed. There are, of course, peaks of dramatic action that take over my attention, but mostly the flow of story is background ambience. In a way, I am not looking for a subject, but for a reflective surface that can bring my own mind into play. ADD? Maybe, but also an indication of how our brains are remixing new realities.
John Ashbery: I would not put a statement in a poem. I feel that poetry must reflect on already existing statements.
Kenneth Koch: Why?
John Ashbery: Poetry does not have subject matter, because it is the subject.
- Selected Prose by John Ashbery
Tan Lin proposes that the craft of writing “be replaced with handicrafts and utensils of writing. Thus recipes, tickets, text messages, itineraries, legal briefs and disclaimers would consitute various surface entrances.” A collaged “novel” cannot provide great catharsis . But it can, if shaped properly, make us see our life’s material ephemera (shopping lists and earthquake data) as worthy of reflection, speculation and discussion. Not the events themselves, but the intermingling of the various reports and records of those events.
Back to conversing with the network. This site began as a video blog way back when and has since morphed into academic musings on digital forms with some more reflective journal entries. My main interest and art practice is still video–or “cinema” in general–but things have changed.
from Landmasses and Railways by Bertrand Fleuret
The World through My Eyes by Daido Moriyama
My iPhone and iPad, for example, have turned me on to conceptual, street and landscape photography, photo blogs and photobooks and writers who use the essay and fiction to access and harness the world database, rather than project onto it narratives from their heads. This is what the video blogging community was all about: sharing and discovering worlds captured in fragments.
Anyone who records a bit of life data, and shares that data instantly with a network – all with a few movements of the thumb and forefinger- is practicing a new form of conceptual art. The fragment – blog post, photo, tweet – does not pretend to be a whole in the way a letter, a book or a painting is a whole. A fragment of life data implies a larger context, is open for further development, conversation, remix, comments, exhibition or publication. It is part of a stream that connects to other streams.
At this point, the Conceptual artist of the 2010s should be addressing questions like, “What are the most innovative ways to continually release yourself into the field of distribution? Do you place more value on inward bound links or those that go out? How is your link strategy tied to your fictionally generated narrative mythology? What does it mean to create a value-added network and how does this relate to both your public persona/presence and your right to privacy and freedom of speech?” – Mark Amerika, aka Professor VJ
These new mobile tools make creating, consuming and remixing life data extremely easy. So what is the value added work of the artist/writer in this environment?
from "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris" by Georges Perec
In 1974, George Perec spent three days sitting around Place Saint Sulpice in Paris watching the “tens, hundreds of simultaneous actions, micro-events” in the world around him. In his notebook he made observations of everything he saw: the make of cars, the people, what they were wearing, what the birds were doing. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a work of literature that is neither narrative nor poem. It is a database–a long and incomplete list–of the “insignificant” details Perec attempted to put down on paper, including is own momentary frustrations with an impossible project. Perec’s notion of the “infraordinary” is no longer stuck in the realm of experimental literary arts. The wired among us have become similar ethnographers of the everyday, publishing streams of micro-events as they are experienced.
But what is the result of all this swirling life data? And why at this moment does there feel like a shift in attention from linear stories to databases of micro-events? Is it really all about the hive mind or is there still space for the singular visions of artists? How do we negotiate the tensions between inherited narrative models of the world and the new database models our networked technologies increasingly impose. What can be learned from the history of spatial, networked and mobile writing? How do ideas of narrative change as the author moves from inside the room to out on the street?
Anyway, these questions are the new subject of this blog.
This year I have been doing a lot of listening to the now all-inclusive field of “digital media art.” I regularly read the blog HTMLGIANT for insight into how fiction and poetry writers are adapting to the changes digital culture brings to literary form. In a recent conversation between Blake Butler and Matthew Simmons about David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Blake had this to say:
“… while I enjoyed Shields’s book, and could see it bringing benefits to those who haven’t thought so much about escaping the undoubtedly dead scene of traditional narrative lit, I’d much rather have seen the book act less as a manual or a ‘manifesto’ and more as the kind of amorphous, transfixing objects that he calls for. This is more a syllabus, less an art….All that said, a syllabus can be a great thing. I wish there’d been more feelers that escaped the book, transcended it, rather than a kind of diatribe. ” -Blake Butler
I was also (sadly) underwhelmed by Reality Manifesto. It traces only part of the history of constructing art from contingent reality. Shields hardly mentions the de-mythologizing influences of cinema and networked culture on narrative form. Hasn’t blogging and video blogging done it’s share of breaking down our sense of reality into bite-sized, multimodal fragments? What really surprised me was Shields’ dismissal of fiction-making as a still vital and powerful art. Just ask BP about the power of fiction. It is not the fabrications of fiction vs. contingent reality that is the issue. It is how artists arrive at the structures of their creations that is changing.
In his Poetics of Cinema 2, in a chapter called Structure and Construction, Raul Ruiz writes:
“Structure relates to the creation of the work, taken as a singular entity; while construction concerns the film in relation to the many circumstances that interact with it, throughout its making; during the many processes that will allow it to surface. That is, its relation with that which is near and far.” -Raul Ruiz
It is this “near and far”, the othernesss that intrudes on “the plan,” that is so hard to pin down in an artist’s statement or teach in the classroom, much less welcome inside the creative process. So much of our training in making things is industrial: pre-production, production, post-production; outline, draft, final draft. And yet, our lives have become more and more influenced by Black Swans.
I get great pleasure in contemplating the structures of art – videos, paintings, novels, poems, movies. So when I embark on my own art project, if structure isn’t clear, I start doubting my choices and the project stumbles. But then sometimes, something happens. I let go of my own plans and start listening for the works’s own desired shape. I start constructing. Good structure is grown inside the contingent circumstances of the work’s construction. It is a dynamic of mind, body and materials.
If we give up worrying about structure and all that that it implies – mediums, genres, markets, audiences – and instead look to practices of construction, we might find that digital art wants to be something very different than most models of (popular and high) art in the industrial age.
For example, we know digital art wants speed. It wants to be free or cheap. It wants to be social so that it gets attention. It wants novelty so that it acts like an eddy in the rush of information. It may even want to alter our senses with “mutant percepts and affects” (Guattari), or at least do something that a steady diet of information bits cannot do.
If we abandon knowable forms in favor of hybrid monsters, where do we look for models? Avant-garde and modernist practices, barthesian fragmentation and delluezian rhizomes – where to start? The history is there and will be (re)taught in schools and universities as economies (once again) shed 19th century models of mind and reality. But let’s not mistake storytelling for structure as we create new digital forms.
I’ll leave you with the constructions of Michael Robinson. He has taken remix art to a different level by building improbable and beautiful enigmas of sound, text and image. His cinema is made of the shells of past structures and re-purposed into hybrid monsters. But instead of being diatribes against the mythic past, they weave stories from an inhuman future. Dark and good. Enjoy.
It’s a black and white, high contrast afternoon. I have a half hour at a local cafe before I go pick up the kids from school. I want to write something and dignify the place of the writing with images. I am capturing photos with my iphone. With the same phone, same finger, I compose a blog post as an email that will be sent to me for later revision.
The cafe I am sitting in, The Palio, is in the Ladd’s Addition. The Ladd’s Addition is one of the oldest residential districts in Portland. It is built in the shape of a wagon-wheel with wide, diagonal, elm-lined streets that converge on a central traffic circle. Where I am now.
The circle is quiet with more bikes and pedestrians than cars. Massive rose bushes in the park have little nooks for lovers to sit and talk. The only shops on the circle are a cafe, a bike repair shop and a salon. All of this makes for a certain kind of quiet, steady attention.
I remember boredom. The feeling that there was no place to put your attention. But then albums and movies and books and TV started filling that empty space. Now the internet. The irony is that the commercial success of these arts grew out of a need to fill chunks of dead time – “leisure time” – and cure its inevitable boredom with novel forms of attention. Conversation pieces.
Now “art” sits next to other information categories in an rss reader. Personal databases of curated forms of attention are carried around next to our bodies. We are walking museums.
I’m not sure artists and writers are facing a publishing crisis. Publishers have a publishing crisis. Artists have a deeper more complex problem. How to create the kind of attention that is not the same kind of attention that we see all around us at the workplace, the gym, the cafe, the home?
There is always live performance or the unique object in space that can break up our plugged-in-screen habits. The live venue, like the ecology of this residential circle, will always capture attention.
But what to make of the virtual forms of attention – the books, the movies, the music, the interactive games? How do these fit into our lives when we are already filled with more forms of attention than our lives have time for?
Here is a book that has consumed a good portion of my attention:
Paris Stories by Laird Hunt. I found it at Powells last year for a bargain $7 (it was listed on Amazon for $50-100) and it has been close-by ever since. I cannot tell you what it is about, except that it is the observations of an American writer in Paris. I can only say that its syntax and the way prose flows vertically on the page awakens a certain partially dormant part of my brain. It makes me pay attention in ways that are both familiar – I have also been alone in a foreign, barely decipherable, city – and completely novel. It is of the Gertrude Stein family of literary arts, but still something entirely its own.
I just finished this trimmed down novella and plan to read it again very soon.
It was quite an easy read. It flowed sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter, effortlessly. A love story with a tragic ending. In fact, the novel begins like this:
Then it takes off on its story of the lovers. Other characters emerge and disappear. The reader isn’t sure of some things, like why certain details and not others? It is elliptical but has a graspable shape. The plot is neatly pruned. That is the problem. The reader must look to the pruning, the negative space, for the story to resonate on deeper levels. That is why I need to read it again.
Both of these works have an emptiness at their center. They ask you to sit down at some quiet center of your being and observe with rapt attention.
But now I have to place my attention on the time and my kids.
