From: "Marisa S. Olson" Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 Subject: "digital poetry" & network conditions an extension of the {"digital poetry" vs. net art} thread: Lewis (et al), Though I, too, called for "net art" to be specific to the net, I think that we may be over-glamorizing and under estimating certain network conditions. Lewis, in your critique of [digital poetry] you say, "it operates with a totalitarian economy...it's closed, no-one can walk inside it really, no one can move anything in it..." This point implies that a linguistic act (poetry) can escape closed systemiticity, which seems impossible to me. (along the same lines, when you say "one can't translate Finnegan's Wake into cinema because it's a linguistic experience," I want to insist on remembering the difference between "linguistic" and "written.) But *more* important to me, in your critique, is the assumption that the very dynamics of reading must be somehow different on the internet; that an art work or artist is not living up to its/her mandate if it does not illustrate this difference. (ie you refer to "the ones that are just animation.") I see a sort of slippage, here, in that we have all been insisting on the way in which a text (visual, verbal, written, aural, etc) is changed/completed/authored by the reader in her interpretation or performative enunciation of the text. (you described your own net work, saying, "the work itself ends up being authored mostly by the user and the machine-though I would urge us to think about how "language" might be used in place of "machine," both as a catch-all for analog and digital work, and because I think you mean more the system than the machine-the machine cannot drive itself, can it? It needs a language and instructions written in that languageŠ) If we are to insist on this, however, we cannot say that the act of reading is "actionless" in one medium or platform over another. This needs to refer to reading at large, though we'd be remiss not to notice the different reading conditions (in this case, network conditions) at play, effecting the construction, dissemination, accessibility, physical and intellectual labor of reading, and interpretation of the work. But this just recalls the age old story|discourse distinctionŠ This concern carries over to my understanding of your statement, "i want a new art form, a new form of digital poetry that's less cinematic..." Are you saying that you want something read more actively than a "passive" cinematic text? (this was a common critique of Heavy Industries' Flash movies) I am well-aware of important readings of cinema's cultural context, in relation to leisure/class, passivity, spectacle, and (easy)identification; however, I would again underscore my point that there is an action happening in these readings. Let's think about how a cinematic narrative is read, in relation to a written one. (and while I understand the coding of the word narrative, I think that my comments here could also refer to "non-narrative" texts that are read spatially, as in poetry-of course, what's not read spatially?!) We read words/images in a specific order, whether or not that order is traditionally "linear," or more what I call "curvilinear" (in the sense that the order may change, but all of the pieces/words/signifiers are still linked in a distinct way); this reading-order is a product of our (linguistic) enculturation, of course, but we must first agree that some process is in place. No matter what this process is, the text is subject to secondary (and tertiary, etc) revisions, as we retroactively make sense of the pieces, in relation to each other, new information, etc. So, when mez says: .u .do.NT. "u" is qualified by "do.NT." This much is obvious. What it should also make obvious is that I, as a reader, am performing an action. Bracketing "death of the author" arguments, this action is roughly the same whether I perform it in response to an e-mail, Flash site, piece of paper, metal engraving, or filmŠ. I would, however, be interested in hearing more on how/why you think that a work becomes "damaged" when it is translated into another media. Are you referring more to an artist's intent or the aesthetic value of the work? marisa _________________ Marisa S. Olson Associate Director SF Camerawork 415. 863. 1001