Think about resistance. Or protest. Or the idea of an avant-garde. Do you imagine an organization, a movement, or individual people’s conscience and attitude? Do you think about a programme or about responsibility? Do you have a pertinent insight into the object of protest, on the basis of distinct politico-cultural mechanisms, which are to be opposed or their products to be annihilated? Does your insight inspire a clear opposing strategy and consequent actions? Is yours a belief system to the same extent as the one you oppose? Do you think society operates in such distinct programmatic and pertinent ideas and actions and if so will these fulfil your needs for a society, world, politics in harmony with your social preferences? — with disregard as to how such world would label.

I am not inquiring after a specific world view or emancipatory programme. If worlds are programmatic, every programme will build its very specific class. Once an order is established, would you see it as an order, or a limited but temporary set of rules which allows change only within given parameters? Until the next protest begins, by the next resistance movement.

All’s well that connects well. The family that plays together stays together. 99% of our use of communication media serves to enhance existing contacts. That’s why I started the fire in the quarry in the first place.

If someone could explain me the difference between informatization and informationalization s/he’d be welcome to let me know. Until today I by default use the latter but SpellWeb/Google puts me in the wrong at a 10.500/1.240 score. Meanwhile an excerpt from the soon to be published in print by Open#8 (available in a Dutch and English separate edition, get your copy) and soon to be posted here in its entirety The post-monumental image deals with what I see as the two major operations at work in today’s communication media and commercial/cultural production: mediatization and informatization.

(translation by Pierre Bouvier, courtesy Open Cahier) [bracketed parts in red do not appear in the original text]

In mediatization traditional ideas about collectivity and identity [the mass, the people, collective identity, cultural integration, the institution, the nation] invite an incessant mobilization of as large an audience as possible [the mass market, industrial production, commodification, consumption]. In informatization the fragmentation of collectivity and identity into infinite sub-interests [individual preferences, iEverything, ...] leads to new forms of interest promotion and social interaction. The difference between mediatization and informatization is not one separating different technological media. It is not a conflict between old and new media, or between analogue and digital production processes. [both mediatization and informatization can be located in their real everyday mechanisms and effects as well as in their fantastic rhetorical exaggerations in (popular) media]

mediatization

We can observe the result of the mediatization process most clearly in the popular press and on television. The mass media seem to constitute a last social ‘institution’ that can be understood in traditional terms. However, they do not exhibit the principle of solidarity based on an ideological canon that characterized traditional organizations and movements: we do not become members in them. Therefore we would do better to consider the popular media as an aggregate rather than as a directional force, as a medium, a vehicle that holds disparate elements in a loosely relational context.

But the most significant aspect of mediatization is the endless expansion of the public realm, for the preservation of the media’s own industry. What is private is dramatized and what is public is individualized. Both in entertainment and in ‘more serious’ genres, television is the quintessential mass medium, with ‘content’ for and by a mass audience. On what is still the most popular medium, mediatization brings everything to our attention, without distinction as to the person, without distinction as to the quality of the content, without distinction as to the value of the exhibited knowledge, and without a response from the viewer, who on the other hand is increasingly thematized and presented as part of the offerings, in the dramatic banality of his or her everyday existence.

informatization

Informatization is a substantially different project, although, due to technological and commercial developments, parallels can be drawn with mediatization. Informatization outstrips mediatization in terms of technology and logistics at almost every level. The best model for studying informatization is of course the Internet. It provides an unlimited supply of content and offers the consumer superior selection and navigation possibilities. ‘Network culture’ if we define it as the culture that could only emerge with the advent of the Internet is characterized by the free exchange of digitized content among individual interested parties, independent of institutional intermediaries. The Net forms a platform in which every individual interest can be assured of a response and in which, thanks to the idealism of the first and second generation of Internet pioneers, an unparalleled amount and quality of cultural property is made available, free of charge. (...)

In order to avoid thinking of informatization as a primarily technological condition, we must concentrate on the characteristics in which it sets out its objectives, those that distinguish it from mediatization. Informatization is geared not to the masses but to the individual. The network offers its infinite possibilities for the individual to identify him or herself in terms of his or her interests and then to search for the desired information, or to be addressed according to his or her individual knowledge and interests. Unless he or she deliberately presents him or herself as a member of a specific interest group, the network user cannot be addressed as such by other users of the network.

Informatization is also the lasting storage of ‘content’ data on ideas, people, and issues in the form of image, text and sound to be kept ready and delivered to any address, on demand and as desired. This requires no editorial intermediary; it suffices that the data I am looking for is stored at that moment in the network and earmarked in such a way as to be delivered at my request.

The information network can also mediate, however. In response to my request, data can be added to my ‘content’ by another network user. All transactions in the information network unfold thanks to an unlimited storage of data in endless configurations and thanks to selective access to these data. While it is often said that the network operates according to a process of ‘dis-intermediation’, the reality is that what is taking place is ‘pan-intermediation’.

The Internet has not been promoted in the way which it is described above. Only in its very early days we used to attribute such and even more idealistic possibilities to it. Some of its early believers have turned sour over the past decade. While there is all the reason to judge that mass media have taken over the network, to some extent it’s all on a wo/man’s mind. It is where you want to look in order to decide where you want to go and fight with these media. You do not want to battle the juggernauts (heheh... early jargon) but you can fight for diversity, alternative organisation, protest, explicit content and what have you... the entire heritage of a counter-cultural tradition, which was never aimed to install rule.

Its quality to ‘route around censorship’ is about the most optimistic qualification you can pick up these days in Internet critique. Be it already an amazing property, we need to say more and do more to maintain and improve net culture, to ‘take it to the street’ and oppose commodification, mediatization, digital consumerism. Heheh you’re telling me! Route around pessimism!

Yesterday’s paper or artist’s estate? I wondered below. Of course some weblogs after an expiry date will be the former while other personal publications aspire to be the latter — NQP being one of them. I personally deem all of NQP to be one hypertext, being constructed over years, never to be finished but always to be regarded in its non-linear entirety. Rather ‘without end’ than ‘under construction’ — ‘construction’ in and by itself suggesting a fin des travaux at some point.

In our time period storage is de facto — in spite of large scale meta tagging initiatives — a culturally chaotic server condition, benefiting from unlimited capacity (Google, on 14 February 2005, 16:21 CET, scans 8,058,044,651 ‘web pages’) and deep but (again) rather unrefined searching possibilities. Quality issues therefor taken aside, the demarcation of the storage horizon (quality selection coming after the disclosure of what was stored), on the basis of which we stipulate where and when and how safe, as well as how accessible a ‘content#146; is to be preserved, is largely taken on the basis of a ‘news’ to ‘reflection’ ratio. Importantly, we always store and display cultural production answering to ideologies of contextualization, visibility, politico-cultural preferences. ‘News’ and ‘reflection’ are extremely relative notions.

With no need to waste, or pre-emptively destroy evidence (burn the books) in anticipation of future investigation; with infinite tagging possibilities; a body of even ephemeral fragmento presto publications, contextually relevant bits, packet size content contained, can be kept readily available for new constructive activity anytime. The basic condition of network server stored information is that it is fragmented right until search parameters determine its actual assembly. Search designs information, content, we form such ‘designs’ into knowledge — or entertainment, leisure, debris.

A stored old news bit might find a limited audience, yet can be decisively important for someone with a very specific interest. We will have to accept to cater to an audience-of-one, at one point, in some future. Before we stored the paper object, along came the micro-photo, the digital medium, the networked server base. Capacity is no problem anymore. Durability, sustainability is, however, even more so: accessibility, due to technological and ideological preferences and privileges. Our generations therefor should keep what can be kept, all of it.

Future generations will use different disclosure algorithms to answer to and in the pursuit of different memory constructions than we do, or can imagine. They need material, raw data, not our petty selections. Data want to be free.

Let’s pick up on this again.

Note to self: add dates of publication to document heads, to show up in searches: e.g. NQPaOFU 93, 3-31 January 2005. Definitely for a publication which abolished dates, but in its source, for mining.

DONE.

Now back to the BIG question: how to guarantee above link’s functionality on, say 2 August 2053, 17:45 CET? And how to provide relevant context for a publication which’ context is so much the informatic everyday A.D. its publishing years. In other words: are old weblogs like yesterday’s papers or valuable literary heritage? Both and — so how and where to store and display the different categories?

We are looking for context and performance in the long term, for personal publications which would otherwise cease to exist with their author’s death. Unless some party can guarantee a publication’s archiving, any of those out there will disappear just like how they emerged: from one day to the next. Even with unlimited storage space I believe in collecting context beyond what individual search filtering can do to limit returns on searches (call it the museum versus the library option). We will have to put together specialized libraries of mutually relevant publications. It would all the more be helpful to start such archiving ASAP, as to allow for included publications to start linking within the archive to be certain that their links will be sustained. Actually such a collection or conservancy is a server where publication’s move when (or before) for one reason or another they are discontinued.

Apart from the sake of sustained accessibility of a publication I see a clear Early Information Age research interest. Therefor a conservancy would wisely also collect other electronic documents of its authors, like Perry’s DevonThink encyclopaedia for example. And other “public” digital content which was kept over a career, maybe selected analogue material?

A link to a Google search for the object the link is relevant to sometimes might be the best choice in terms of reference sustainability. Sure it does not pinpoint relevant information on the matter, but some of that information won’t be here to stay around as long as Google will. And your own publication? If the information is concise one better pull a quote into the referring text. Footnote it. If the linked to information could be subject to relevant change better link to a monitoring service, like Google’s. Which brings to mind an idea for monitoring rather than search services. Some kind of intermediate location where your link would go for updated reference from selected sources.

Like a link to Paul, where he raves about DevonThink, instead of being a link to Alamut’s archive, would have to take one to anything Paul ever wrote about DevonThink, even when it will only be writen in the years after I posted the link. My link would have to go to ‘Alamut on DevonThink’. Hm. Well, this is already possible with Google. I will do this more from now on. Even review some of my recent links to send them to a monitoring engine like Google. Now when would Google do in-document searches, which would prevent you from doing page searches yourself? Then there's no anchoring routine, let alone standard. Which brings back another long topic: personal publishing conservancy.

NQP on Google

A ‘radius loci’ search since 1998 has always pointed exclusively to my sites. This might change when Siemen’s Digital Graffito (read their Unsichtbare Haftnotizen professional press information, in German) is in place. Merging location and information, sandwiching real estate and screen estate from a server feed finds its conclusive channel in mobile telephony, developing into the next GPS integrated portable media. The slow and the dynamic, the stable and the ever changing meet in site specificity. History is in the information that transcends site specificity and even historicity in a sense. Or was that spirituality? We are dérive driven.

Taken a bit further your next social software will be close to Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net fantasies of 1988. Flickr geotagged simply means that when you visit a site where one of your special interest group’s members went before you, s/he will be pushed to you to show her entire photo album in site specific detail. Since there’s no sensible use for such a publication, it is experimented in art circles. Siemens did prototyping with the Linz University and Ars Electronica. On the other hand, geotags will also guide you to the nearest public toilet. And might even fulfil another long time exclusive NQP wish for emptied out public space: all commercial and informational signage comes off the street and into the telematic net (NQP issue 3, May 29 1998)

All infra going server based, any updatable information will be fed in situ. For me interesting opportunities might show in the combination of what Paul Perry (who forwarded me the Siemens link) on 10 February in Alamut referred to as a ‘third momentous leap’ (after pc and web): a software (DevonThink) which allows anyone to build ‘their own Diderot’ plus my radius loci fancy... the Hermit meets the Whore. I personally have not a doubt that the third big leap after pc and web, in the same order of singularity, is telematic mobility and the site specificity of networked information. I’ll get back to you after I have really started using my copy of DT. It is a performative piece of software with next versions porting to CD/DVD and the web — getting our encyclopaedias and documented lives out of the can, into the phone and even under the pavement, who knows.

Or imagine geotagish SMS that hikes on your phone and keeps feeding you alternatives to your geospecific actions. You go right, it tells you to go left instead. You go forward, it tells you to return. You go to your girlfriend’s home, it tells you to go to one of the other addresses in your database. Geo Sims are here and you will likely be one of them.

Periods live in people. The 1960s, 1970s, 1980s are prominent in me. Less so the 1990s. I am working with my 2000s. The 1950s I wasn’t taking in. All periods have a different effect on how I feel, how I think, what I experience in their mix as past, present and future. The 1960-1980s are different in me in the 2000s than they were in the 1990s. Disclaimer: periods do not come in bundles of ten years, or decades. Generally they take longer than that. If only for the reason that is discussed here: we carry them along for prolongation. And make them more diverse than any social memory will ever understand. Someone’s 1960s will never be over.

I could, some of my preferences and ideals could, if one would wish to do so, be identified by the time periods that I have lived. A soixantehuitard. Old hippie. Babyboomer. Such labels do not account for the 1990s-from-the-1970s special effect. Or for 1996-as-1967 illusion. Or any 2005 deja vu.

For T.S. Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, the present changes the past, while of course the past filters the present and future. Both at an individual level as well as in a wider cultural sense. I am no home cultural industry however. One man bandwidth is all I am capable of. I produce a lot of self for my own consumption, some of myself for the ones near to me, some spin off for a small and less again for a wider audience. One contributes very little over a lifetime. An individual talent is to encapsulate one’s time, catch the drift, transcend the self and bring love, peace and understanding to one’s world. Very 1960ish to some of you, I’m sure. But your 1960s might only have started in 1998.

Who would want to overcome time? Overcoming time as in the sense of finding peace in eternity is no futility. Outside you and me getting older no time ever passes. If there exists no such a thing as time immunity we have to strive for time incarnation. Incorporating eternity is such articulation’s ultimate aim.

Hence my interest in my contemporary. Co-incidence binds us. For ever.

10 February 2005 we have our plums and pears distilled. Gathered in 2004, stored in containers where they were mashed and occasionally stirred and finally seal locked to ferment, today we take our juices to nearby Grenois. The ambulant still has arrived from La Pouge and is only to stay another couple of days in our vicinity. It is the temporary center of the universe for all slow fruit loving neighbours. Our pears are almost rejected by the distiller, a big man who lives on paté, bread and white wine if we are to believe his sidetable. We did not add sugar nor yeast and have not squeezed the fruits enough. Yet he will give it a try. He produces a very light amber colored eau de vie with a distinct pear smell. Poured into large glass containers at home these will have to stay open, their opening covered with a piece of cloth, for another three months to lose the alembic scent and gain their final quality.

The Moulin du Merle always again strikes us as one particular place. I never before have had such a long term interest in a place, neither a house nor studio, city nor village. Six years ago we did not leave the Netherlands for France but for this house, for its grounds, for its site. We did not leave a canal side center of Amsterdam warehouse for an ancient water-mill-turned-19thC-villa in the rolling hills of the Nièvre department, we did not leave the city for the countryside... we took off to experience this house’s magic. For old souls to meet.

‘The arts are a special mode of being where we are allowed to try lives and perspectives on and put them aside at will, where we can make our attempts as remote and formal as the retinal image or as close and intimate as performance sculpture created for groupings of two or three people. And any gradient between these poles...’

— Ken Friedman, Perspective: Brief Notes on an Exhibition, 1975

Allow me? Having tried on NQP, or ‘graphing the bio’, equal to ‘living the graph’, for almost seven years now, I have no intention to put it aside. The other life — the supported and supporting life — I tried on for almost six years and neither I intend to give that up. They enhance one another. More fires to follow. The other life can even be intensified, precisely situated, dug out in French soil. Le sentier NQP à la croisière du sentier MdM.

Full quote from NQPaOFU 35: read write live bio graphy

Today the graphy is almost identical (and synchronous) to the bio. We rewrite our lives (in text and image) as stories, as companions, as primers, right in the middle of the action of living them. We allow for no production process (editing, designing, reproducing, distributing) to delay our utterances, trusting our voice to sound in some new veracious way through the web, instantly. We write, edit and montage and lay-out and publish in one uninterrupted process, in near real time. We monitor, and log. We report, and make up. We put into words, and fool with them. We mix private and public and share secrecy in overlapping correspondence, weblog, discussion lists or metalogs. We link to our interests, building context along text. We invite other utterances to invade ours. We produce volume, all the while testing how to interpret the new volume genre of bio-graphy in the making. Writing being just about life size.

Are we up for a long and deep exploration of the publicized personal, to arrive at some point at, or to construct at a certain moment from lives lived individually, a new view on what are the sustainable needs of people in communication and information exchange—living public lives, sharing the risks of communication and production and the hazards of physical presence, the way the world, or powerful parts of it, does today? Six years after I coined it, the 'information habit' is still a dream. (See also Vital Information; information reputation for the arts)

Change being ‘the essence of information’, we experienced lots since some six, seven years. Even when change seems ongoing it comes with accelerations, breaks, singularities, at which you say to yourself, why didn’t I do, see, know this before. You just simply did not, could not, wished not. You didn’t allow yourself to try it on.

The other day in Magny Cours I saw this huge St. Raphaël wall, two waiters and the signature. I have to return there with my camera. Oh and call that mayor again because she did not reply to my message on her answering machine.

Tour de force back and forth to NL via Paris in a couple of well filled days, including one narrow escape on the way up and a seriously limited view on the way back, between Reims and Troyes and around Migé last night. I do some of Paris with A.B., am introduced to Philippe Mairesse, have lunch with Johannes Schaub who guides me to CL later. Andrea also introduces me to Odile Decq, who invites us to her recently realized restaurant Little Italy at 23 Rue Poncelet; next morning drop A. off at CdGaulle at one early hour, drive on to NL Zeeland to visit Kees Brandenburg and his family at home in Middelburg, have dinner with Maria-Rosa and Marinus Boezem later that day, take 16 Allocations English edition copies along and get Marinus’ catalogue raisonné as a present, sleep at Jan and Henk’s in The Hague, meet at Stroom the next morning and miss my meeting with Paul because all other dates in Maastricht have been cancelled so I return home immediately.

Most interesting find: the museum in Clamecy, the Musée Romain Rolland, owns the largest collection of work and work related objects from the estate of French designer Charles Loupot, who owned a house in nearby Chevroches. Apart from the above logo other local designs include the cock on the Chevroches church and murals in the Notre-Dame-de-Tête-Ronde chapel in Menou. Best known is his work for St. Raphaël, which inspired a Font Bureau script by Laurie Rosenwald, with Cyrus Highsmith. I find my 1978 Musée de l’Affiche catalogue and scan above car design.

A couple of days later Loupot searches find that the opening of the Salle Loupot in the museum has been pushed to April. I drive by Chevroches after having taken R., who had a first hour off, to school. Following the mairie/église sign I get to a small square from which a steep path leads up hill: the sentier Charles Loupot, probably to where he used to live. The cock is hard to discern from the ground. I walk up hoping for a better view on the clock tower, and down the path. Returning home I phone the mairie of Menou and ask if I can visit the chapel to see the CL murals. I have to call Ms. Dominique Roger, the mayor, Friday night, not before 7 pm., to possibly arrange for a visit this Sunday.

A quick visit to the greenhouse at Surgy, to get horse dung for the vegetable garden, takes me past a route buissonière sign at the Pousseaux exit onto N151. Loupot comes alive. I will prepare something good in street media for 2012, at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death.