OPEN REFLECTIONS

Category: Art

  • New Visions for the Book II: Remix

    Part 2 – Lev Manovich Lev Manovich is a professor of Visual Arts, at the University of California, San Diego, specialized in new media, software and digital culture. Manovich directs the The Software Studies Initiative where he practices cultural analytics. Similar to Navas, he has theorized and applied the concept of remix frequently in his…

  • New Visions for the Book II: Remix

    Part 1 – Eduardo Navas In the first part of New Visions for the Book, I described how the concept of the book is being used as a strategic power tool to argue for a certain knowledge system. I tried to show how within this discourse certain essentialist notions—such as authorship, stability, and authority—still hold…

  • The Struggle to Define a Position: What will be the Future of Electronic Literature?

    Last week I attended a fascinating roundtable at Kingston University London which focused mainly on the position of electronic literature within the literary and artistic field and within academia more in specific. The roundtable, entitled From the page to the screen to augmented reality: new modes of language-driven mediated research, had as one of its…

  • Do not ask me to remain the same

    Definitions are intrinsically time-bound. Imagine the fundamental question of ‘What is a book’. To ask this question at this moment in time means we have to take into account the present transformation or remediation of the book. Definitions concerning the nature of the book need to bare in mind its past as well as its…

  • Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

    Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

    As Ihle shows in her film, since the unification in 1990 of North and South Yemen, the country has been politically unstable. Poetry fulfills a very important function in the barren rural landscape, where illiteracy reigns and where television and radio (let alone the Internet) have not yet gained (much to any) ground. This is…

  • Society of the Query – Part 2: Gugerli, Fuller, Manovich, Ludovico, Bruno and Van ’t Hof

    Part 1 of my notes on the Society of the Query conference can be found here. David Gugerli a historian specialized in the philosophy of science gave a lecture on the history of databases and of data management as a signifying practice. In a Deleuzian fashion, he states, knowledge operates in distributed networks. The world…

  • Strange Manuscripts

    Where I discussed the concept of post literacy (described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’) before (after which John Connell wrote a nice reply on his blog, followed by some insightful comments), I have grown more…

  • Cave Bunny

    As already hyped over the Net, Nick Cave (the multitalented Australian singer, screenwriter, actor, writer and what have you) is releasing his second book The Death of Bunny Munro. Surrounding the presentation of his new book, Cave, assisted by publisher Canongate, is launching a huge marketing campaign using all digital/new media marketing possibilities to promote…

  • (Interim) Wallace prophecy

    “There existed today, the three sham-Stans sang, an untapped national market for myth. Linearity was a cul de sac. Novelty was old news. The national I was now about flux & eternal return. Difference in sameness. “Creativity” — see for instant Nar’s recombinant own — Now lay in the manipulation of received themes. & soon,…

  • Post Literacy

    The concept or theory of post literacy (which I learned about via James Bridle from booktwo.org) is described by Wikipedia as a stage ‘wherein multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read written words, is no longer necessary’. However, literacy encompasses much more than just the ability to read (and…

  • Patronage

    Kevin Kelly reports on his blog about an experimental book publishing model. In this model you first sell a required amount of (hard cover) books (in this specific case 200), enough to cover for the costs of the print run, after which the book is made available online for free as a downloadable PDF. Actually…

  • The Concept of Bible

    Some small stuff from around the world or the web or the world that is the web that deserves some attention here in this and future posts to be. First of all the oldest bible (ok maybe no small stuff), the Codex Sinaiticus, has been digitized and has concurrently been made accessible online. As the…