dear all -
so excitng to read Curt and also Mchael, on unmoderated movement and anarchc postngs and wrtngs, and sorry my keyboard is breakng down slowly, some vowels are mssng, and wonder
wh th er art h/rstory wll distngush the anachsts from the archvsts and the police,
and alan sondhem is movng, to a new town, whout panc one hopes, w sh ng h m well.
best wshes
Johannes
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From: Curt Cloninger [[log in to unmask]]
I'm with michael on this. The thrill of the unmoderated rhetorical negotiations on rhizome at that time was more important to me (at that time) than the "art" being discussed. Lots of things were put into play and enacted. A kind of anarchic/indifferent post-structuralism was being performed (much to the consternation of some academic post-structuralists who attempted [ironically] to police it, and failed). It was a level playing field (boxing ring? wrestling mat?) into which a (then) non-academic 20-something from the rural US south could throw his rhetorical hat. One remained standing in the ring not via formal, peer-reviewed consensus, or via a past publishing record, or even via logic; but via sheer ingenious ascii-constrained rhetorical acumen, audacity, humility, absurdity, obliqueness, HUMOR, persistence, or whatever else you could muster/rig. For about a year, my own personal constraint was to only "dialogue" using urls or embedded media. Those were some of my favorite "conversations."
Many of the richest flows to me were those hovering right on the threshold of signal/noise. To archive the living vibe of such flows is tricky -- because archivists tend to want to filter out "noise." So such ambivalent flows left a kinf of trace that resists (or simply eludes) its own archiving. such flows are "memorialized" in the lives of those who performatively negotiated them (filtered them, opposed them, moderated them, lurked through them, collaborated with them, initiated them).
"
They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book, I think,
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.
"
On Oct 8, 2013, at 4:45 AM, Michael Szpakowski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Personally I have derived more pleasure, instruction and that-thing-that-I-engage-with-art-to-get from Alan Sondheim's work on lists than I have from a great deal of art presented in more "legitimate" contexts. It's not only the work, which is beautifully made, hugely smart and unfashionably vulnerable and human, but the creative urgency that drives it that is so affecting. This goes to the heart of things - to even dream that this work might present a 'problem' is itself, for me, a huge problem. Are lists somehow finite? Can folk not choose to ignore work they don't care for? Have people heard of filters and folders? Perhaps its the by-passing of the curator that makes a curatorial list jittery.
> On a related note, I came to Rhizome in, I think, 2000 when it was packed with all sorts of nn & other related "spamming", "trolling" , "flaming" and all sorts of non conventional art world and non academic frivolity too and can never recall finding it it other than exhilarating . It's the multiplicity of absolutely democratic ( at least from the POV of the mechanics of posting) voices that is special - a wonderful polyphony. I miss it; I don't think it's passébut that its demise, or more hopefully, eclipse, is connected with the ongoing corporatisation of what were once wide open spaces. Furtherfield and Netbehaviour are to be congratulated on resisting this. The beautiful, shiny, dead eyed corpse that is Rhizome today is a testament to the worst of it ( it remains, of course, a useful resource). This is not just a historical matter to be observed and commented upon but an ethical one too.
> michael
>
> ________________________________
> From: Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]>
> I consider Alan Sondheim's work an example of list-dependent practice.
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