It's festival season in Manchester, yet we've too much else to do. I'm "on tour" with work in Bristol, Cambridge and London over the next couple of weeks, so my Manchester International Festival fun has been reduced to Kraftwerk and Steve Reich, and the Procession. Annoyed to have missed the opening of the exhibition tonight - I always bump into old friends at these things - but hope to get to see it later in the week. Whether I find time (or inclination) to catch the Banksy show in Bristol is another matter. There does seem to be an awful lot going on at the moment - and on the one hand I'm a little gutted that I didn't bag tickets for Halle/Elbow and It Felt Like A Kiss, on the other, realise I'd have probably needed to take a fortnight off. After all, last night was also Manchester's Social Media Cafe - relocated to the sauna-like conditions of the BBC bar. The presentations always seem to mould themselves, so there seemed to be good audiences for all three. I enjoyed hearing about social objects and how they are like the periodic table from local web developer @hereinthehive, and hilarity followed through the crowdsourced little movie put together by Maria Ruban, The Joy of Ceefax, and a game of Ceefax Bingo to match. All good, slightly off-kilter fun; and that's the thing, there's a need for some creative, imaginative spaces in the city...
...which possibly explains why I'm feeling a little gloomily seasonal myself. After a couple of fantastic weeks, I've either reached entertainment burn-out, or just a necessary correction - my biorhythms are clearly a little off, as the last couple of days just been feeling a bit gloomy, and tiny little things have annoyed me out of proportion to their importance. It may just be a natural clearing of the airways after all the stimulation, or perhaps I'm just feeling the distance between the mundane and the sublime, both of which are amply to be found in my life at the moment. I get paid for the former, and pay for the latter - which might be better than the other way round, but still leaves one feeling a little like Leonard Bast. Suffering a little bit of ennui, I think, and though there's good ennui and bad ennui, I'm thinking this is the latter, more "what's the point?" than "I don't know what to do next." Perhaps being in other cities may help me get over this, though I kind of think I could probably do with some solitude, rather than stimuli at the moment. There'll be no let up, though, as I'll be back professional Manchestering for the Fall on the 18th July.
Partly I think its again down to the way that there's so much excitement about "all this digital stuff" but the one area I care about, literature, is hardly thinking about it. Notwithstanding the last posting about flarf and conceptual writing, I think the art form stays as it is; books, stories, poems - these are what writers care about, and everything else is a distraction - no different for me, than for John Donne or George Orwell then. If the key element of the Manchester festival this year has seen art break from its normal environments, and alter somewhat the relationship between performer and audience, then its a truly difficult thing for literature to achieve whilst still remaining primarily literature. I've some ideas about how we could do things differently (more in presentation of work than in the work itself), but not even sure where this would fit...more food for thought.
Showing posts with label #smc_mcr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #smc_mcr. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
Ideas, we've had a few
On the one hand you could say we live in an age where the "big ideas" are no more, or, at best, are antediluvian (the rise of fundamentalist religion, for instance); but on the other, there's a culture of ideas being thrown around which can only be a good thing. This week alone there's been a number of conferences, in the North West, and elsewhere; and this afternoon, I was reminded of the ongoing intellectual freight of the country, when I was asked to be an observer at a PhD Viva at MMU. I was at a consultation for Manchester's Cornerhouse on Monday; and one of Cornerhouse's aspiration's is to build on its almost accidental role as a "creative hub." It's long been the unofficial capital of Manchester's literary community, as well as housing art gallery, bookshop and cinema. It's interest to surmise whether it is our art galleries and other cultural venues that are returning to a previous role as "salon". Perhaps the rise of the Universities since the 1960s has isolated cultural thought in the ivory towers - and now ideas are beginning to break out again.
Cornerhouse's "The Art of With" debate the week after next, has another contribution, this time from Tom Fleming, called "Embracing the Desire Lines." Things still aren't "open source", of course, but curated, invited, but I'm imagining that the new Cornerhouse - as a hub for ideas as well as art and film - may well need to think on how it might expand on this. Something like n+1's event/pamphlet series would come to mind. Their pamphlet on "A practical avant garde" is one of the most stimulating things I've read over the last few years - and, key to this, I think, brings the "ideas" culture beyond the big think pieces of Charles Leadbetter, Richard Florida, Malcolm Gladwell and others, and into more specific frameworks. It's why the Social Media Cafe in Manchester exists, as well, of course, to not be too prescriptive or "top down." Open source ideas have to come from the left field; from the audience; and - key to that - the participants need to be able to "curate" the ideas, not merely respond.
And I'm always keen to see art find its own place - I should get to Lancaster next week to see my first Litfest event, the launch of their exciting new Flax edition, "The Crowd Without."
Cornerhouse's "The Art of With" debate the week after next, has another contribution, this time from Tom Fleming, called "Embracing the Desire Lines." Things still aren't "open source", of course, but curated, invited, but I'm imagining that the new Cornerhouse - as a hub for ideas as well as art and film - may well need to think on how it might expand on this. Something like n+1's event/pamphlet series would come to mind. Their pamphlet on "A practical avant garde" is one of the most stimulating things I've read over the last few years - and, key to this, I think, brings the "ideas" culture beyond the big think pieces of Charles Leadbetter, Richard Florida, Malcolm Gladwell and others, and into more specific frameworks. It's why the Social Media Cafe in Manchester exists, as well, of course, to not be too prescriptive or "top down." Open source ideas have to come from the left field; from the audience; and - key to that - the participants need to be able to "curate" the ideas, not merely respond.
And I'm always keen to see art find its own place - I should get to Lancaster next week to see my first Litfest event, the launch of their exciting new Flax edition, "The Crowd Without."
Friday, May 15, 2009
Nothing is New
At the Manchester Social Media Cafe, after Thursday's Futuresonic, Dave Mee gave a fascinating thinkpiece on the "Merzweb" - basically an idea that German artist Kurt Schwitters, a fellow traveller to the Dadaists, was in many ways acting out in his work much of what we now see in the web and social media. It runs parallel with the presentation I gave a little while ago that much of our social media present and future is prefigured in avant garde literature.
For Schwitters art was all around us, was collaborative and participative, was mutable, never finished, but also locative. His "Merzbau" was a living organism - a house usually - a space becoming filled. If you think of the web as this structure, as this holder, then what people do with this space is very like Schwitters Merzbau. The mutability seems vital as well. One of the things that I imagine will come out of Charles Leadbetter's "Art of With" article for the Cornerhouse is a reappraisal of the value=permanence equation. The idea had took hold earlier in the day, at the Futuresonic debate, that perhaps our online presence, our blogs our facebook pages, our drunk photos when we were 16, that these should degrade over time. Of course the commmercialisation of 20th century art (or rather it becoming a value-holder, to be traded like gold or platinum - and this includes not just one-off visual arts masterpieces, but copyright in literature, film and music)is based on a belief in permanence that the Pharoahs would relate to. Perhaps, in many ways, the last vestige of our Abrahamic-based faith can be seen in that desire for permanence. Yet Shelley's Ozymandias, "look on these works, you Mighty, and despair", never seems more prescient.
The art of decay, of things being unfinished, or changing is challenged by a commercial artist like Damian Hirst, or rather by the business model around his success. Hirst's fascination with decay means that like the Merzbau, his sharks should, after a certain time, putrify, to be nothing more than cultural memory; yet the value invested in them is a late 20th century alchemy, turning these impermanent artworks into gold, not realising that there value is only in the beholder.
Even in the internet's short life span there is a tension between decay and permanence. Seeing a website from 10 or 15 years ago now, particularly if its an amateur design, can be a jolt to the system. Yet the data on our Facebook page risks being around forever? We can only hope that some of these pages and websites disappear into nothing more than memory. Google has short-fused this process, at least for a time, for all data is now equal. It is the equivalent of the peat-bog find where it is not the mighty emperor who history now puzzles over, but the Tollund man. For art there is a challenge, but one that it shouldn't shirk. Our culture depends upon some kind of artistic inheritance, the "shoulders of giants", rather than letting "a million flowers bloom." I wonder if that is the tension that "The art of with" is now looking at...the tension between the forgotten sheath of letters from a literate woman in Victorian England, and the production of "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre". The internets million flowers are containers, more often; it is a container itself. Those YouTube videos with several million hits are unlikely to feature in any retrospective except out of chance. Earlier in the week I'd been to the Videogame Nation launch at URBIS. I've hardly ever been a gameplayer, so this 30 year old history was a museum piece of artefacts. "I like the shiny things" I said more than once, finding none of the nostalgic reverance that a game player would have found, but liking the styles, mannerisms and sounds of this commercial subculture. Every loft could probably furnish an exhibit for the exhibition; every car boot.
For me, what interested me about Mee's talk about Schwitters was its reminders that art hasn't always been about the single object; that in many ways this was a 20th century construction based upon two things:- the electronic recording (whether photo, film or record), and the legal (copyright) framework that necessarily sustained that. I could now, if I wanted, put my entire works on the web, to let it be found, or not found as is the case. As permanent as a thing can be (at least until the water needed for the cooling systems for the vast server farms runs out). I think there's another side to this though. The artist as entity. Its the challenge that I don't think is addressed by those calling for a more participative culture. In our short lives, artistic progress can take time, from gaining a facility, to finding the voice, to having something to say, to managing to say it. The "transmission mechanisms" for art are actually probably very good models that are being replicated across social media, rather than the other way round. "Open source" would be no new concept to the impressionists, the surrealists, the imagists, the PRB. Once an idea has been circulated, or the culmination of that idea has been made, then it is free to be disseminated. Wasn't Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment and those other salons of the day a meeting place similar to Tuesday nights? The cafes as Myspace or Twitter? Indeed you could argue that the transmission mechanisms then, letters sent back to friends in America or Britain ("You must come to Paris") were slower than email but as equally able to catch-fire.
The artist as an entity, as someone who wants to do this with their life, is actually the bigger challenge to the hierarchies of contemporary culture than anything else. History sees its more interesting work come from more interesting places, yet "old media" whether its the publishing industry or the BBC, is as dominated by Oxbridge as any other time. Those - like the Old Boys network - are "transmission mechanisms" across time; informal rather than formal networks, and therefore more powerful over time and space.
I think we can go back to the artist as entity, the idea of a "body of work", that can progress, that can change, that can grow, that can decay. Whereas celebrity culture spits people out for their 15 minutes, our gatekeepers are keener on having a fixed list of writers, composers, painters etc. Shouldn't those bright poets who made their mark in the early 70s be at least forgotten for a little while, at the very least so they could be rediscovered later? I kept being reminded of the great American chronicler, Walt Whitman, and his single work, his "Leaves of Grass," appearing in a range of different issues, orders, with poems changed, added, subtracted. This is a website for the 19th century, a written Merzbau, if you like. Whitman, saw America as a vast whole, but that to approach it you had to try different entry points, not start at an entry point in New York, and spread out like the settlers, but come from a thousand different points in the American landscape.
The artistic life lived sees change as inevitable, the works altering, both in themselves and in their context, or their intercontextual value. It is this, rather than the putting a price and value on a particular artwork, that is the more interesting. It is possible that the web will be like 20th century art, with a whirlwind of creativity passing through a different centre, leaving another -ism (another dot com boom) in its wake. Yet old websites, or ones with decaying audiences, are like empty properties after the boom has passed and the gold has run out; an artist goes on, repapers over the old canvases, changes, looks again, sees, in many ways, the bigger picture.
For Schwitters art was all around us, was collaborative and participative, was mutable, never finished, but also locative. His "Merzbau" was a living organism - a house usually - a space becoming filled. If you think of the web as this structure, as this holder, then what people do with this space is very like Schwitters Merzbau. The mutability seems vital as well. One of the things that I imagine will come out of Charles Leadbetter's "Art of With" article for the Cornerhouse is a reappraisal of the value=permanence equation. The idea had took hold earlier in the day, at the Futuresonic debate, that perhaps our online presence, our blogs our facebook pages, our drunk photos when we were 16, that these should degrade over time. Of course the commmercialisation of 20th century art (or rather it becoming a value-holder, to be traded like gold or platinum - and this includes not just one-off visual arts masterpieces, but copyright in literature, film and music)is based on a belief in permanence that the Pharoahs would relate to. Perhaps, in many ways, the last vestige of our Abrahamic-based faith can be seen in that desire for permanence. Yet Shelley's Ozymandias, "look on these works, you Mighty, and despair", never seems more prescient.
The art of decay, of things being unfinished, or changing is challenged by a commercial artist like Damian Hirst, or rather by the business model around his success. Hirst's fascination with decay means that like the Merzbau, his sharks should, after a certain time, putrify, to be nothing more than cultural memory; yet the value invested in them is a late 20th century alchemy, turning these impermanent artworks into gold, not realising that there value is only in the beholder.
Even in the internet's short life span there is a tension between decay and permanence. Seeing a website from 10 or 15 years ago now, particularly if its an amateur design, can be a jolt to the system. Yet the data on our Facebook page risks being around forever? We can only hope that some of these pages and websites disappear into nothing more than memory. Google has short-fused this process, at least for a time, for all data is now equal. It is the equivalent of the peat-bog find where it is not the mighty emperor who history now puzzles over, but the Tollund man. For art there is a challenge, but one that it shouldn't shirk. Our culture depends upon some kind of artistic inheritance, the "shoulders of giants", rather than letting "a million flowers bloom." I wonder if that is the tension that "The art of with" is now looking at...the tension between the forgotten sheath of letters from a literate woman in Victorian England, and the production of "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre". The internets million flowers are containers, more often; it is a container itself. Those YouTube videos with several million hits are unlikely to feature in any retrospective except out of chance. Earlier in the week I'd been to the Videogame Nation launch at URBIS. I've hardly ever been a gameplayer, so this 30 year old history was a museum piece of artefacts. "I like the shiny things" I said more than once, finding none of the nostalgic reverance that a game player would have found, but liking the styles, mannerisms and sounds of this commercial subculture. Every loft could probably furnish an exhibit for the exhibition; every car boot.
For me, what interested me about Mee's talk about Schwitters was its reminders that art hasn't always been about the single object; that in many ways this was a 20th century construction based upon two things:- the electronic recording (whether photo, film or record), and the legal (copyright) framework that necessarily sustained that. I could now, if I wanted, put my entire works on the web, to let it be found, or not found as is the case. As permanent as a thing can be (at least until the water needed for the cooling systems for the vast server farms runs out). I think there's another side to this though. The artist as entity. Its the challenge that I don't think is addressed by those calling for a more participative culture. In our short lives, artistic progress can take time, from gaining a facility, to finding the voice, to having something to say, to managing to say it. The "transmission mechanisms" for art are actually probably very good models that are being replicated across social media, rather than the other way round. "Open source" would be no new concept to the impressionists, the surrealists, the imagists, the PRB. Once an idea has been circulated, or the culmination of that idea has been made, then it is free to be disseminated. Wasn't Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment and those other salons of the day a meeting place similar to Tuesday nights? The cafes as Myspace or Twitter? Indeed you could argue that the transmission mechanisms then, letters sent back to friends in America or Britain ("You must come to Paris") were slower than email but as equally able to catch-fire.
The artist as an entity, as someone who wants to do this with their life, is actually the bigger challenge to the hierarchies of contemporary culture than anything else. History sees its more interesting work come from more interesting places, yet "old media" whether its the publishing industry or the BBC, is as dominated by Oxbridge as any other time. Those - like the Old Boys network - are "transmission mechanisms" across time; informal rather than formal networks, and therefore more powerful over time and space.
I think we can go back to the artist as entity, the idea of a "body of work", that can progress, that can change, that can grow, that can decay. Whereas celebrity culture spits people out for their 15 minutes, our gatekeepers are keener on having a fixed list of writers, composers, painters etc. Shouldn't those bright poets who made their mark in the early 70s be at least forgotten for a little while, at the very least so they could be rediscovered later? I kept being reminded of the great American chronicler, Walt Whitman, and his single work, his "Leaves of Grass," appearing in a range of different issues, orders, with poems changed, added, subtracted. This is a website for the 19th century, a written Merzbau, if you like. Whitman, saw America as a vast whole, but that to approach it you had to try different entry points, not start at an entry point in New York, and spread out like the settlers, but come from a thousand different points in the American landscape.
The artistic life lived sees change as inevitable, the works altering, both in themselves and in their context, or their intercontextual value. It is this, rather than the putting a price and value on a particular artwork, that is the more interesting. It is possible that the web will be like 20th century art, with a whirlwind of creativity passing through a different centre, leaving another -ism (another dot com boom) in its wake. Yet old websites, or ones with decaying audiences, are like empty properties after the boom has passed and the gold has run out; an artist goes on, repapers over the old canvases, changes, looks again, sees, in many ways, the bigger picture.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Last night at the Social Media Cafe
I gave a small presentation last night at the Manchester Social Media Cafe, and really enjoyed it. My talk was a little more philosophical than others so was always likely to be a minority interest, but I sat with half a dozen interesting people in the "boudoir."
I could put all my notes here, but think its better to articulate the positions I took, without, necessarily having a conclusion or solution.
Position 1.
The internet is essentially a text-based medium and therefore remains beholden to the book.
Position 2.
That given this text-based bias, the internet looked to books for inspiration. If I say an "unreliable but reassuring source of information" am I talking about Wikipedia or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?
Position 3.
Our 18th century novelist wouldn't find the internet so strange. After all, what is Gulliver's Travels other than a platform game? Isn't Gulliver himself Jonathan Swift's avatar?
Position 4.
Modernism is the dominant literary form of the 20th century and is a form that denies the linearity of the Victorian novelist/poet - and therefore is a model for what writing should be on the internet.
Position 5.
Late 20th century fiction tried new forms because the writers were transgressive and felt that the existing forms were too patriarchal, heterocentric, class-based or empire-worshipping.
Position 6.
Writers need to be adaptive, and counter-intuitive, and not accept the norms of the day. In our use of Google or Youtube we are "peasant agriculturalists entering the cities of the future en masse looking for work/fulfilment/life/future and finding only the mass-factories of the industrialists."
All that in 40 minutes, and here is my reading list... vaguely touched on, but worth repeating, nonetheless.
F1. Fantastic Literature
Arabian Nights - trad.
Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift
News from Nowhere - William Morris
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain
Alice Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - S. T. Coleridge
Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
First Men in the Moon - H. G. Wells
The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
2. SF
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long - Brian Aldiss
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
How’s the nightlife on Cissalda? - Harlan Ellison
Other Days, Other Eyes - Bob Shaw
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Minority Report - Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Count Zero - William Gibson
The Jerry Cornelius Books - Micheal Moorcock
3. Modernism
An Imagist Anthology - Ezra Pound et al
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans - Gertrude Stein
Ulysses - James Joyce
6 characters in search of an author - Luigi Pirandello
4. Experimental & Transgressive Writing
Dream Songs - John Berryman
The Tennis Court Oath - John Ashbery
Dream of a Common Language - Adrienne Rich
Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Locos - Felipe Alfau
Cities of the Red Night Trilogy - William Burroughs
The Penguin Book of the Beats - Kerouac et al
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
OuLiPo Compendium - Harry Matthews et al
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Boy Wonder - James Robert Baker
5. Contemporary Writing
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Specimen Days - Micheal Cunningham
The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus
Contraflow on the Superhighway - Richard Price et al
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Solibo Magnificent - Patrick Chamoiseau
Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
A Crack Up at the Race Riots - Harmony Korine
Whatever - Michel Houellebecq
The Swank Bisexual Bar of Modernity - H.P. Tinker
6. Miscellaneous
The Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin
Pandora’s Handbag - Elizabeth Young
n+1 Symposium: For a Practical Avant Garde- Various
And the Band Played On - Randy Shilts
twitter: @adrianslatcher
I could put all my notes here, but think its better to articulate the positions I took, without, necessarily having a conclusion or solution.
Position 1.
The internet is essentially a text-based medium and therefore remains beholden to the book.
Position 2.
That given this text-based bias, the internet looked to books for inspiration. If I say an "unreliable but reassuring source of information" am I talking about Wikipedia or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?
Position 3.
Our 18th century novelist wouldn't find the internet so strange. After all, what is Gulliver's Travels other than a platform game? Isn't Gulliver himself Jonathan Swift's avatar?
Position 4.
Modernism is the dominant literary form of the 20th century and is a form that denies the linearity of the Victorian novelist/poet - and therefore is a model for what writing should be on the internet.
Position 5.
Late 20th century fiction tried new forms because the writers were transgressive and felt that the existing forms were too patriarchal, heterocentric, class-based or empire-worshipping.
Position 6.
Writers need to be adaptive, and counter-intuitive, and not accept the norms of the day. In our use of Google or Youtube we are "peasant agriculturalists entering the cities of the future en masse looking for work/fulfilment/life/future and finding only the mass-factories of the industrialists."
All that in 40 minutes, and here is my reading list... vaguely touched on, but worth repeating, nonetheless.
F1. Fantastic Literature
Arabian Nights - trad.
Gullivers Travels - Jonathan Swift
News from Nowhere - William Morris
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain
Alice Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - S. T. Coleridge
Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
First Men in the Moon - H. G. Wells
The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
2. SF
Super-Toys Last All Summer Long - Brian Aldiss
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
How’s the nightlife on Cissalda? - Harlan Ellison
Other Days, Other Eyes - Bob Shaw
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Minority Report - Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Count Zero - William Gibson
The Jerry Cornelius Books - Micheal Moorcock
3. Modernism
An Imagist Anthology - Ezra Pound et al
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
The Making of Americans - Gertrude Stein
Ulysses - James Joyce
6 characters in search of an author - Luigi Pirandello
4. Experimental & Transgressive Writing
Dream Songs - John Berryman
The Tennis Court Oath - John Ashbery
Dream of a Common Language - Adrienne Rich
Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing
The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
Locos - Felipe Alfau
Cities of the Red Night Trilogy - William Burroughs
The Penguin Book of the Beats - Kerouac et al
Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
OuLiPo Compendium - Harry Matthews et al
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
Boy Wonder - James Robert Baker
5. Contemporary Writing
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Specimen Days - Micheal Cunningham
The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus
Contraflow on the Superhighway - Richard Price et al
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Solibo Magnificent - Patrick Chamoiseau
Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald
Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
A Crack Up at the Race Riots - Harmony Korine
Whatever - Michel Houellebecq
The Swank Bisexual Bar of Modernity - H.P. Tinker
6. Miscellaneous
The Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin
Pandora’s Handbag - Elizabeth Young
n+1 Symposium: For a Practical Avant Garde- Various
And the Band Played On - Randy Shilts
twitter: @adrianslatcher
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