The Rhizome Archive | Rhizome Digest: Highlights from the New Media Art Field

The Rhizome Digest merged into the Rhizome News in November 2008. These pages serve as an archive for 6-years worth of discussions and happenings from when the Digest was simply a plain-text, weekly email.

Subject: RHIZOME DIGEST: 4.30.03
From: digest@rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 16:44:47 -0400
Reply-to: digest@rhizome.org
Sender: owner-digest@rhizome.org

RHIZOME DIGEST: April 30, 2004

Content:

+announcement+
1. Rachel Greene: Fwd: [ The Thing ] Online Art Auction Starts Sunday, April
25th!
2. Cinque Hicks: Afrofusionist Art and Other Unsolemn Concoctions
3. Marisa S. Olson: POP_Remix AT Camerawork

+opportunity+
4. Clemente Padim: Reload Call
5. john j.a. jannone: [employment] Hunter College IT/Web Associate position

+feature+
6. Ryan Griffis: The Social Construction of Blogspace

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1.

Date: 4.24.04
From: Rachel Greene (rachel AT rhizome.org)
Subject: Fwd: [ The Thing ] ONLINE ART AUCTION STARTS SUNDAY, APRIL 25th!

Begin forwarded message:

From: THE THING <auction AT thing.net>
Date: April 23, 2004 5:48:42 PM EDT
To: events AT bbs.thing.net
Subject: [ The Thing ] ONLINE ART AUCTION STARTS SUNDAY, APRIL 25th!
Reply-To: events AT thing.net

THE THING ONLINE ART AUCTION 2004

Bidding begins on April 25 2004 at: http://auction.thing.net.

Contact: Gisela Ehrenfried
212.937.0444
auction AT thing.net

The THE THING presents its fourth annual online art auction with
participating
artists Mariko Mori, John Miller, Daniel Pflumm, Beat Streuli, Miltos
Manetas,
Janine Gordon, Julia Scher, Ellen Harvey, Noritsohi Hirakawa, Joy Garnett,
Peter Fend, among others. All funds raised will go to supporting THE
THING'S
commitment to the arts and social activism.

At its core, THE THING is a social network, made up of individuals from
diverse
backgrounds with a wide range of expert knowledge. From this social hub,
THE
THING has built an exceptional array of programs and initiatives, in both
technological and cultural networks. During its first five years,
<bbs.thing.net> became widely recognized as one of the founding and leading
online centers for new media culture. Its activities include hosting
artists' projects and mailing lists as well as publishing cultural
criticism. THE THING's multimedia lab has regularly hosted a variety of
artists, including Vuk Cosic, Sebatian Luetgert, Nick Crowe, Prema Murty,
Daniel Pflumm, Heath Bunnting, Beat Streuli and Mariko Mori. THE THING has
also organized many events and symposia on such topics as the state of new
media arts, the preservation of online privacy, artistic innovations in
robotics, and the possibilities of community empowerment through wireless
technologies.

If you have any further questions about the auction or THE THING, please
contact us at the number or email above.

----------------

THE THING receives funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lower
Manhattan Cultural Council. To view our activities please visit:
http://bbs.thing.net

THE THING is a 501(c)(3) organization.
All donations are tax-deductible to the extent of the law.

----------------

THE THING /// 601 W 26th St 4th floor NY 10001 212.937.0444

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2.

Date: 4.27.04
From: Cinque Hicks (cinque AT cinquehicks.com)
Subject: Afrofusionist Art and Other Unsolemn Concoctions

For your perusal:

Electric Skin: Black Art and Techno-Culture News from the Front Lines is
now online.

http://www.electricskin.com

Electric Skin culls contemporary visual art news from around the Internet.
The site focuses on news of progressive, black visual art, including film
and digital art in the US, Canada, Africa and the UK. Electric Skin's
focus is non-exclusive and frequently includes news on technology,
nonvisual arts, and news on artists of all cultures.

Now featuring a conversation between DJ Spooky and Chris Ofili, plus a
review of Ellen Gallagher, and lots more.

En-joy.

ch

Cinqué Hicks, aka MAZE the Low Res
http://www.cinquehicks.com
==================================
Electric Skin: Black Art and Techno-Culture News from the Front Lines
http://www.electricskin.com

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3.

Date: 4.30.04
From: Marisa S. Olson (marisa AT sfcamerawork.org)
Subject: POP_Remix AT Camerawork

Hello. I'm writing to announce the opening of POP_Remix, at SF Camerawork. A
description of the show is below. If you are in town, please stop by our
opening, on Tuesday, May 11. It is going to be a TON of fun--with work made
from Starsky & Hutch, Super Mario games, and Marilyn Monroe films, among
other pop sources, this is probably the most fun I've ever had curating a
show!

We are also having a number of fun events, including a hacking demonstration
by Cory Arcangel & Alex Galloway (5/10 in Mountain View, co-sponsored with
Zero1 & Leonardo ISAST) and a screening of "Enjoy!" and "Value-Added Cinema"
(5/18, in the downstairs theatre). Check here for more details:
http://www.sfcamerawork.org/events.html

POP_Remix
May 11-June 12, Opening Reception May 11, 5-8pm
SF Camerawork-1246 Folsom-SF, CA 94103 USA

Cory Arcangel / BEIGE, Matthew Biederman, Anthony Discenza, Radical Software
Group (RSG) featuring Alex Galloway, Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Paul Pfeiffer

{{This exhibition is accompanied by an issue of Camerawork: A Journal of
Photographic Arts, featuring essays by Lev Manovich, Philip Sherburne, José
Luis de Vicente, and others.}}

The Pop art era of Warhol and Lichtenstein may have officially come to pass,
but the movement has not ended. In today's moving image culture, the context
of Pop art is ripe for reconsideration-a "remixing" if you will? The
creative strategy of appropriation has only grown, in function and in
source-material, since the Television experiments and video art of the
1960s. Just as Pop artists of that era lifted logos and vernacular imagery,
the work in POP_Remix takes as its marrow appropriated segments of popular
films, TV programs, and video games. The deconstructed and remixed results
serve as meditations on mainstream image-making and its cultural import.

Anthony Discenza is concerned with the engorgement of our lives by the
images of "mediated culture." His work thus attempts to realize the decay of
the images that work to "decay" our selves. This effort appears to us in the
form of often painterly, abstract, or kaleidoscopic video (de)constructions.
Here he presents portraits of three "Hosts," the yield of layering footage
of seven major network news anchors.

Paul Pfeiffer explores the visual histories of the film, TV, and
digital/video eras, Pfeiffer's projects often take up issues in (and
parallels among) religion, sports, colonialism, racism, masculinity, and
power. In his photographic series, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pfeiffer
has "erased" iconic images of Marilyn Monroe from film stills, leaving only
a hazy vacant landscape.

Through techniques of parody, pastiche, and laborious dissection, Jennifer &
Kevin McCoy explore the enculturating impacts of genre and narrative
structure. For Every Shot, Every Episode, the McCoys created a database of
every shot in every episode of "Starsky and Hutch." Viewers can choose to
play disks categorizing the indexed data. In How I Learned, the McCoys
similarly catalogued episodes from the show "Kung-Fu," rhetorically asking
'if all you ever knew about the world you learned from this show, what would
you know?'

Matthew Biederman is also engaged in deconstructing TV clips. In his
AleatoryTV, a computer scans a channel of live TV for specific words via
speech recognition algorithms. The words form a sentence, pre-selected by
the artist. As the agent "hears" the words on TV, it samples the audio and
visual content that accompanies it, placing the clip in a loop that is
continuously played back on a large television. New utterances of the word
replace old ones and the process begins anew each day.

In 2x2 Alex Galloway, founder of the Radical Software Group (RSG) "degrades"
video clips from popular films and TV programs into linear animations two
pixels tall by two pixels wide. The flickering clips are played on GameBoys.
Galloway's Prepared PlayStation 2 uses unmodified versions of the
PlayStation game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 to exploit "bugs and glitches in
the code to create dirty, jolting game loops." Both projects point to an
internal collapse of the system within which they signify.

In NES Home Movies: 8bit Landscape Studies Cory Arcangel spins a tale about
his youth, traced by those images he grew up staring at, thus revealing his
identity to be, in a sense "photosensitive." They work effects a reverse of
the trajectory of the image's "evolution" from still to film to video to
video game by reverse-engineering his 8-bit videos into panoramic
photographs.His relayering of self-composed Detroit-style rock or old school
raver tunes over remixed clips of Mario and his environs, in Video Ravings,
brings new meaning to the work it mimes. In defiance to the
commercially-driven "evolution" of machine culture, and in recognition of
the formal origin of these remixes, Arcangel saves the new videos on game
cartridges and runs them on original Nintendos.

In each of these works we can begin to chart the cultural shift from
accessing screen-based photographic images in the forms of cinematic
projections, to television screens, to hand-held screens. With each shift
there have come physical and cultural shifts, among them a change in the
allowed modes of representation and access of these images. In each case,
the machinery of a work of art dictates the conditions of its production,
distribution, and-arguably-its interpretation. These issues are at the heart
of Pop art, alongside questions about authorship, the status of the
multiple, and interrogations of commodity fetishism.

Overall, the exhibition serves as a meditation on mainstream image-making
and its cultural import. Each project is at once accessible-even fun!-by
virtue of its relationship to pop culture, while simultaneously revealing
the deeper cumulative effects of our relationship to its content.
Ultimately, we are invited to consider the impacts these popular lens-based
genres have had upon the ways in which we choose to look at the world.
-Marisa S. Olson, Curator

SF Camerawork encourages emerging and mid-career artists to explore new
directions in photography and related media by fostering creative forms of
expression that push existing boundaries. This year marks our 30th
Anniversary.

We would like to extend special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the
Arts, Zero: One, Leonardo ISAST, the Hotel Tax Fund of San Francisco Grants
for the Arts, Hosfelt Gallery, Lucasey Mounting Systems, Steven
Blumenkrantz, Jona Frank, Anthony Laurino, and Thomas Meyer.

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4.

Date: 4.25.04
From: Clemente Padín (7w1k4nc9 AT adinet.com.uy)
Subject: Reload call

F5 - Reload
yto.cl (isabel aranda) 2004

español - english

CONVOCATORIA

yto.cl (isabel aranda) - artista visual - digital - e Ismael Frigerio
director del Centro de Artes Visuales de Santiago CAVS. , le invitan a
participar en la Convocatoria Internacional de Arte Correo F5 Reload, que se
expondrá en el CAVS, Santiago de Chile.

F5 Reload. Actualiza tu arte. Nuevos medios en el arte. Tecnología,
comunicación y vanguardia.
F5 Reload es la tecla del computador que se usa para actualizar los archivos
que se están visualizando. Haz tu propio "reload". Enviar una obra que
integre los nuevos medios en el arte. Puede ser en la técnica o en el tema.
También se reciben textos teóricos. ¿Qué entiende usted por "nuevos medios"?

Tamaño: A4 o libre

Técnica: Libre.

Las obras serán expuestas en el C.A.V.S (Centro de Artes Visuales de
Santiago).

Sin Jurado. Sin retorno de la obra.

Deadline: 31 de Julio de 2004

Todas las obras serán publicadas en el sitio web: www.escaner.cl/artepostal
(excepto las que sobrepasen los 300 kb.)

No olvidar escribir dirección e-mail para informar y enviar certificados de
participación. Si no tiene dirección e-mail por favor infórmenos.

Enviar obras a:

Isabel Aranda yto.cl Proyecto F5

Casilla 140 - Santiago 11. Santiago de Chile.

Sólo animaciones digitales por e-mail: ytoaranda AT lycos.es ó
ytoaranda AT hotmail.com

(o si usted tiene problemas para pagar el correo)

Nota:

(2001) Moscas en la sopa: Por favor bajar CD :
http://www.escaner.cl/artepostal/uniacc2001 (7MB)

F5 - Reload
Isabel Aranda (yto.cl) 2004

CALL

Isabel Aranda * yto.cl * (visual - digital artist) and Ismael Frigerio
director of the Center of Visual Arts of Santiago CAVS. invite you to
participate in the International call of Mail Art : F5 Reload that will be
exposed in the CAVS, Santiago de Chile.

F5 Reload. Reload your art. New means in the art. Technology, communication
and vanguard.

F5 Reload is the key of the computer that is used to reload the files that
are visualizing. Make your own "reload". Send a work that integrates the new
means in the art. It can be in the technique or in the topic. Theoretical
texts are also received. What do you understand for "new means?"

Size: A4 or free.

Technique: Free.

Deadline: July 31 2004

The works will be exposed in the C.A.V.S (Center of Visual Arts of
Santiago).

No Jury. No return of the work.

All the works will be published in the web site : www.escaner.cl/artepostal
(except those that surpass the 300 kb.)

Not forget send e-mail address please! I want inform and send
participation certificates through e-mail. If you don't have address e-mail
you please inform me.

To send works to:

Isabel Aranda yto.cl F5 Reload

Casilla 140 - Santiago 11. Santiago de Chile.

Only Digital animations through e-mail: ytoaranda AT lycos.es or
ytoaranda AT hotmail.com
(or if you have problems to pay the postal mail)

Note:

(2001) Flies on the soup: Please download CD :
http://www.escaner.cl/artepostal/uniacc2001 (7MB)

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Rhizome is now offering organizational subscriptions, memberships
purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions allow
participants of an institution to access Rhizome's services without
having to purchase individual memberships. (Rhizome is also offering
subsidized memberships to qualifying institutions in poor or excluded
communities.) Please visit http://rhizome.org/info/org.php for more
information or contact Jessica Ivins at Jessica AT Rhizome.org.

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5.

Date: 4.27.04
From: john j.a. jannone (john AT ballibay.com)
Subject: [employment] Hunter College IT/Web Associate position

HUNTER COLLEGE
of The City University of New York
Department of Film and Media Studies

INFORMATION SYSTEMS ASSOCIATE
for
WEB ADMINISTRATION AND DIGITAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

JOB DESCRIPTION

The Information Systems Associate in the Department of Film and Media
Studies is expected to be an authority on computer based media
systems (primarily Macintosh), including: web server administration,
web authoring, hardware and software networking, server and client
side web programming, basic graphic design hardware and software and
basic digital video and audio software and hardware.

Duties expected of the Film and Media Information Systems Associate include:

1. Serve as Web Administrator in charge of maintaining all
departmental web servers and the departmental web site.

2. Run regular technical training workshops (software and hardware)
for undergraduate and graduate students.

3. Manage staffing, oversight, and scheduling in digital media labs.

4. Installing, troubleshooting and day-to-day maintenance of computer
equipment and related peripherals, software management, and system
scheduling.

5. As the technical expert in digital media systems, the Associate
must consult with the department faculty and participate in the
planning, designing and equipping of the new digital media facilities
as well as develop long range resource upgrade strategies.

6. The Associate will be expected to work collaboratively with
faculty and staff to devise and support the successful implementation
of technology in the classroom, including managing the allocation of
server space.

7. The Associate will conduct research in areas of computer based
media production tools, peripherals and software and will make timely
recommendations to faculty and staff.

8. The Associate will identify, train and supervise College Lab
Assistants and student assistants appointed to the areas and
facilities, which utilize computers and digital technology systems.

9. Cross platform, basic graphics, web design and programming, and
basic digital video editing expertise is required and a working
knowledge of digital video production equipment and digital/video
interface is expected.

10. The Associate should have working familiarity with maintenance
of computer networks and servers.

Send a letter describing qualifications, experience and research
agenda with resume and names of three references to:

Dr. Jay Roman
Chair, Film and Media
Hunter College, CUNY
695 Park Ave.
New York, NY 10021

Review of application will begin immediately. The search will remain
until the position is filled.
CUNY is an AA/EO employer M/F/D/V

--
john j.a. jannone
http://www.john.ballibay.com
assistant professor, brooklyn college, cuny
director, program in performance and interactive media arts
http://www.interactivearts.org

718 951 4203 (office)
718 951 4418 (fax)

office: 376 Gershwin Hall
office hours Spring 2004: Tuesdays 1-4, by appointment.

campus mailing address:
304 Whitehead Hall, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11210-2889

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For $65 annually, Rhizome members can put their sites on a Linux
server, with a whopping 350MB disk storage space, 1GB data transfer per
month, catch-all email forwarding, daily web traffic stats, 1 FTP
account, and the capability to host your own domain name (or use
http://rhizome.net/your_account_name). Details at:
http://rhizome.org/services/1.php

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6.

Date: 4.30.04
From: Ryan Griffis (grifray AT yahoo.com)
Subject: The Social Construction of Blogspace

Ryan Griffis
The Social Construction of Blogspace

"In these high tech times, the question isn't why publish, rather it's why
not?"

Interestingly, the statement above was made by zine publisher Edward Dean in
1989 in response to the question of why zine producers publish, but the
axiomatic belief that technology practically demands, rather than enables,
people to publish bears a striking resemblance to the stated motivations of
many bloggers.1 Similar to this understanding of zines, blogs are also
generally identified by their technology and form. As historians and
theorists of both zines and blogs point out, any attempt at defining them
according to content proves futile. Zines are often described to be
non-commercial, cheaply produced periodicals on any number of topics, from
popular to subcultural, which are created and distributed by individuals. A
commonly accepted definition for blogs, short for weblogs, is frequently
updated websites consisting of chronologically ordered and archived posts
published by individuals or small groups using an informal and personal
writing style.2

"Blogs have made the creation and publication of content as simple as
browsing the Web. Blogging tools have removed virtually all the technical
barriers that previously prohibited publication by the masses."3
The utopian ideals of participatory democracy found in the discourse
surrounding both blogs and zines seem rooted in notions of access to
communication technologies. Alternative forms of communication and
distribution, allowed by increased contact with inexpensive and relatively
easy to use technologies, are believed to "reactivate the memory of everyday
life and reconstitute the narrative of daily practices and anonymous
itineraries hidden in the thick folds of the social fabric."4 At the moment,
blogs, unseating the deflated hype of the Internet in general, are often
cited as the communicative form that best brings what de Certeau calls the
"memory of everyday life" into the mediated space we call "public". It is
this rhetorical function, and potential, of the "everyday" that seems to be
implicit in how blogging is framed by its proponents as progressive.

What seems to come through in the rhetoric and aesthetic of blogs is the
power given to the local, the specific, the individual. In this sense, one
could say that de Certeau's notions of a public sphere, one infused with
informal networks of narrative and "how to" knowledge, meets the rational
ideals of a Habermasian public based on consensus building through logical
dialogue. But, I would argue, when one looks at the conversations both
within and about blogs, the pragmatics of consensus break down into "mere
opinions" as fast as ever.

The publicness exhibited in blogs is one constructed of individuated spaces,
where the movement of personalities can be identified and tracked. While
there may be a strong communal ethic, blogs are sites of contact for
externalized egos, and are definitely to be distinguished from other forms
of communicative networks currently being organized, like Wikis, where the
content and structure of a website are modified by members of a community in
the process of communicating. Linguistic researchers have noted that "I" is
the most common form of identification used, and the overwhelming number of
active (not to say the most widely read) blogs are sites of personal
storytelling, ranting and journaling.5 As one prominent blogger puts it, "a
weblog used technology to bring the psychological you outside."6

The situation of mediated contact, or interface, between the individual and
the "public," places the blogger in a position of an intermediary or
mediator. For de Certeau, the transmission of communication through a
network involves three levels: intermediaries, original sources, and the
practices of circulation and transmission. Bloggers map quite well onto de
Certeau's loose schema as mediators - those "who decode and recode fragments
of knowledge, link them, transform them by generalization." These
individuals are further defined as "linking agents" and "amateur mediators"
who "distinguish themselves by the very particular interest and razor sharp
attention that they bring to the slightest issues of life." Bloggers are
valued, not for their objectivity and disinterestedness, but for their overt
perspective and personality in how they filter through the haystack of media
to find the needle that pricks interest.

One of the strongest ideological imperatives within zine culture remains its
steadfast opposition to commercial culture. This reactionary aspect, while
often part of the literary content of the medium, became a very deliberate
aesthetic practice. In the 1980s, producers of punk zines made sincere
claims that such publications were:
"authentic, and get to the heart of the matter. They exist outside of
commodification; they are real. They come straight from the source."7

This sense of expressionist immediacy is most certainly found in discussions
about blogging. Descriptions of blogs as the "pirate radio stations of the
Web" that are ³first on the scene² are common among enthusiasts and
theorists alike. One of the traits common to de Certeau's intermediaries is
a wariness of official language and administrative tone. For de Certeau,
this caution stems in part from a conscious and unconscious attempt to avoid
the formation of dependent relationships based on authority. Aversion to
institutional forms of speech is not something found just in personal
journal style blogging, but even in those run by academics and researchers.
Even the process of peer approval is handled in a pedestrian manner,
blogrolls, and other forms of interlinking among sites with similar
interests, are often as much signs of "solidarity" ("shout outs") with
similarly minded writers as bibliographic citations. It has even been noted
that within blog networks, those sites with a high rate of "solidarity
links" occupied more central locations (read: more widely read/referenced)
than did sites with more informational links, which tended to exist on the
periphery.8

"The idea of communication immediately calls up that of the network, with
all the ambiguity attached to that word. Does it mean networks materialized
through an infrastructure allowing for the circulations of goods,
furnishings or persons? Or networks plotting the implantation of a belief or
of an ideology?"9

So what about the other two aspects of networked communication offered by de
Certeau, the original media sources and the practices of circulation? It has
been said that the "only aspect of mail art that one can state with any
degree of certainty is that it is entirely dependent upon the international
postal system for its existence."10 While the dependent relationship between
blogs and the Internet is as self-evident as that between mail art and the
postal system, stating this is pretty meaningless in and of itself. My
Interest is how these relationships are perceived, and how that perception
shapes action.

As some have observed, the potential of networks is often discussed as if
they "suddenly appear out of nowhere," despite their historical and
ideological inheritence.11 And we certainly must be critical of all claims
of immediacy and authenticity, not just because such claims depend on
repeatable conventions.
One of the ways that blogs as communicative tools are usually separated from
more static websites, like the "personal home page", is that they exhibit a
degree of "self-organization." Steven Johnson has explained that static
websites lack the ability for self-organization because they are
inhospitable to feedback.12 But weblogs - where feedback is part of the
structure - are positioned as an "emergent" form of organizing. "Emergence,"
an explanation of order and regulation derived from self-organization and
practice, rather than a top-down model imposed by authority, is often cited
by those asserting the democratic potential of blogs.13

The power of "emergence" as a concept seems to come from its use of
analogies to the natural world. Ant colonies and neural networks provide
compelling examples of self-organization and order that seem to bypass
ideological conflicts and make the democratization of knowledge not just
desirable, but biologically determined. The problem to be solved is
self-evident; it is the observable fact that representative forms of
governance and media are incapable of managing "the scale, complexity and
speed of the issues of the world today."14 New forms of communication, like
blogs, are said to be able to generate a more natural form of direct
democracy.

But I wonder about the use of concepts like "emergence" and deference to
what seems "natural." Critique of the political usage of "Nature" is, of
course, nothing new, which is partly why I'm suspicious when some
understanding of the behavior of ants is used to support beliefs about
democracy, especially when those beliefs include technology.
Weblogs depend on structure, and a fairly rigid and hierarchal one, to
function as defined, both in terms of the visual presentation of information
(chronological, vertical, etc.) and as it relates to the larger space of the
Internet. This spatial aspect of weblogs is beginning to be discussed in
terms of a political economy that includes the cultural and economic
exchange of value through links.15 The mechanisms of access are also
discussed, including search engines like Google that are considered as
integral to blogging as "the Otis elevator was to skyscrapers."16 But what
of the aesthetics of management utilized by blogs? The rigid, hierarchal
structure of blogs is what is said to allow for the aesthetics of immediacy
within the content. What does this understanding of content and form within
weblog discourse mean politically?
"The modern world has given us ways to experience the extension into space,
ways that are more accessible (maybe) than older routes of mediation...
Space has become obsolete."17

I certainly don't have any answers to my questions, just suggestions for
discussion. The issue of space, where contact between subjectivity and
social conventions occurs, is one that seems worth investigating. The
dichotomy of form and content seen in blogs can be seen to intersect with
how space is created and understood. If the form of distribution (blog tools
and the Internet) creates an experience of public space as a field with no
distance, then the content becomes a marker by which to recognize location.
Blogs become "virtually local" within the communities in which they
participate.18

If de Certeau's assertion that the local has consistently been an obstacle
to the historical development of communication still holds true (if it ever
did), what does the current situation represent? If there does seem to be a
kind of return to the local, it has a largely rhetorical function. The
battle between a homogenized, ideal public realm and a network of fragmented
subjectivities seems to find resolution in the naturalist metaphors of
self-organization, but there are no virtual Galapagos Islands from which to
observe these developments as they occur. We are certainly moving into a
paradigm of standardization in communication, and this movement involves
managing space as much as knowledge. It may be the motion of emergent
organization, but as always, the fuel used to power its mechanisms are the
desires and interests of its active agents. If there can be no communication
without standards and operations, the question is "Whose standards will we
practice?" Will we organize as a "plurality other than the masses consuming
and repeating imposed models,"19 or possibly "capitalize on the homogeneity
found in networks to resonate far and wide with little effort?"20 Or will we
emerge somewhere more familiar? At least I can be assured that if someone
comes up with any answers they'll be posted somewhere, on someone's blog. Or
even better... published in a zine.

1 in Mike Gunderloy's compilation for Pretzel Press called "Why Publish"
available at http://www.zinebook.com/resource/gunderpublish.html
2 See: Jill Walker's definition drafted for the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory,
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/blog_theorising/revised_definition.html
3 Eric Janssen, "Weblogs Will Save the World,"
http://www.webraw.com/theory/weblogworld_050903.shtml
4 from Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech and Other Political
Writings, University of Minnesota Press, 1997
5 Stephanie Nilsson, "The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain
Social Networks in Research Weblogs"
http://www.eng.umu.se/stephanie/web/LanguageBlogs.pdf
6 Joe Clark of JoeClark.org quoted in Nilsson
7 Fred Wright, "The History and Characteristics of Zines,
8 Nilsson
9 de Certeau
10 Stephen Perkins, "Mail Art and Networking Magazines (1970-1980),
Zinebook.com
11 Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, "The Limits of Networking," sent to
Nettime 3/15/04
12 Steven Johnson, Emergence, Scribner, 2001
13 Joichi Ito, "Emergent Democracy," v. 1.3, 2003
14 Ito
15 Jill Walker, "Links and Power: The Political Economy of Links on the
Web," 2002 http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/txt/linksandpower.html; Clay Shirky,
"Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality," 2003
16 Tim Dunlop, "If You Build It They Will Come," Evatt Foundation
http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/91.html
17 Sean Wolf Hill from "Why Pubish?
18 Gary Thompson, "Weblogs, Warblogs, the Public Sphere and Bubbles"
http://transformations.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue7/articles/text.htm#thompson
19 de Certeau
20 Galloway and Thacker

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