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5 October 2002
8:30, 11:00, at the Asnois grape harvest today.
4 October 2002
Been advancing to about 5,300wrds—3,500 in the main text, including some copy and paste, 1,800 in its footnotes, primarily c+p—on the obscenity text for De Witte Raaf. If I can keep one third of that blurb I shouldn't complain. Changed its working title from Het avontuur obsceniteit to Een vormeloze tijd, or maybe Een onversterkte tijd. You can't discuss 'obscenity' outside a proper time period and culture to also situate it outside abstraction. Some introductory quotes in the moerstaal. Don't be surprized to see 180° turns in the final essay.
(...) als we de ogen voor de professionele obsceniteit zouden sluiten, dan valt ons als fundamentele ontregeling van een maatschappelijk bestel nog slechts de perverse alledaagse randcriminaliteit van de amateur toe, de kleine ontladingen van die heimelijke liefhebber van de burgerlijke onvrede: het gemorrel in alle maatschappelijke strata aan de marges van de regelgeving, de dagelijkse ontering van openbare voorzieningen en privé-bezit, een dubbelzinnig verlangen naar popularisering van het openbare leven en de cultuur, een tot in alle kieren van de sociaal-culturele voorzieningen kruipende hebberigheid en de laffe mea culpa van een voorheen intellectuele voorhoede, die geen antwoord heeft op de complicaties van de stagnerende economische en sociale ontwikkeling en geen nieuwe vragen durft te stellen uit angst om voor de eigen gemeente van zijn historische voetstuk te sodemieteren.
left: still from 35mm footage found in the campus garden of the
National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, 7 February 2000
right: Elephant Savant by horlogier Milot, of Varzy, late 19C fair shooting gallery
target box in which the elephant is situated behind two doors that open
when the bull's-eye on its door is hit
a crank on the outside animated the scene but I have no idea
what this Wise Elephant would do
3 October 2002
copy-cut-cast
The possibility to take apart a text and use parts of it reminds us of the wooden and lead cut-cast type and its gorgeous circus act poster publications: composition and construction on the one hand, image on the other, at the end user traditional typography melts down into one material/informational pictorial plane. The electronic word which shortly visits your hard disk over the network can be copy-cut out of its context, paste-cut into another one, where it immediately will be reformatted to fit in, like it was born and raised right there. Form is no object here, but context and subtext are still hard to get.
If you desire to not only copy and re-use a word, but track its previous use and annotations and not only also link to these but process their data and test them for possible new outcomes—if with whatever 'word' you take you want to lift an entire subtext from the medium which delivers that word—now that's another story and involves long search engine detours and whatnot. Very unfriendly. Others call it research. If I lift a bit (text, image, sound) from someone's text I want overview to stick to every copy-cut and preferably haul a long trail of links and histories with it!
With networked hypermedia we're still bookkeeping!
this here sender address trails here
remember NQP is delivered from a petikulla landscape's golden October
2 October 2002
type tagged
I got a bit carried away with the retro-political charm of black tags and bold type. The blots stretch in any x-y size and rearrange interestingly when you change the window size, while also they behave differently in different browsers... I was too tired to splatter a whole document with'm and see what happens. These typographic elements are images, not text, meaning they cannot be read electronically, hence not copied and pasted. You would have to type'm all over if they contained any information at all that you'd want taken to another format. Or would OCR get the text out of them? I haven't done any OCR since maybe 10 years. No long texts made up like that for NQP however. Some 'design conscious' sites do pour all their text into images.
To a certain extent typOCRacy is over with the arrival of the electronic word. Typography has become image for good, a non reversible development since photosetting and off-set printing. 'Text' is something altogether different from what is or can be type set. Text may come to the screen, typography certainly does not. What typography graces our screens, are images from books. Leaving the age of mechanics for an age of information, where there is no more (linear) graphein, also the typos changes. To equalize text with typography, or typography with print (or to solely argue text and type and print in each others proximity) is already not getting right where writing, type setting and printing began with. The only excellent but never translated philosophical essay on these matters is by Vilém Flusser, Die Schrift, subtitled Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, from 1987.
text als figur... jan tschichold... placeholders for typography in the scanner window
Die Typographie soll hier weniger als eine Technik zur Herstellung von Drucksachen oder als eine Methode zur Verteilung alphanumerischer Informationen verstanden werden, vielmehr als eine neue Art des Schreibens und Denkens. Die Aspekte des Druckens sind zwar von grosser Wichtigkeit für das Verständniss der gegenwärtigen Informationsrevolution (man kann die elektromagnetische Information als Weiterentwicklung der Technik und Distributionsmethode des Buchdrucks ansehen), hier aber geht es um eine sehr radikale Frage, nämlich: ob mit der Erfindung des Buchdrucks der Schreibende sich nicht erst bewusst wird, was er eigentlich tut, wenn er Lettern zu Reihen ordnet (...)
(Vilém Flusser: Der Schrift; Hat Schreiben Zukunft?)
roughly reconstructed in Arial Black Photoshop 5.5: Piet Zwart's personal mark, double (Dutch 'zwart' is black), original around 1920s
Remarkable in contemporary typography and lay-out: over the past decade its images largely have attempted to visualize the freedom of information. This freedom—its malleability, which is achieved in its readiness for pixel stretching and for copy and paste manipulation, in its wild distribution, AND in its infinite form receptivity—is exactly which withstands the type setting, or typos graphein data fix. Remember that typography already in the mechanical age mimicked its stamping machines and way before that, mimicking the writing hand, picturing it, imaging it, in reproduction and distribution. Rather than a textual skill, a language halting signifying skill, typography was image making from its earliest beginnings, a pictorial art like the rest of them.
The typographical questions for an information age are, akin Flusser's 'Hat Schreiben Zukunft', or 'is there a future for writing?': what do we want or expect 'text' to be? And: do we want or need or how much sense does it make, to picture that text, and of course 'how to' if positive, for its ultimate usability and enjoyment? Can we imagine the text to be freed from the typographical fix? What can typography, as a trail tracking and marking skill, contribute to the way we weave texts together today and tomorrow? Rather than word and line and paragraph fixing, could it be link forging, subtext and context scanning?
#20021001 1 October 2002
re:homename
datainformationpreferenceidiosyncracy
Informatic license inthisEarly Information Age context would be the ultimate unlimited right to publish my personal information, with as sole object to articulate, process and evaluate it in the immediate context of your personal information. Informatic license is the absolute disposal of one's individual data, both one's interest profile as one's gathered knowledge and expertise, or individual miscellaneous preferences, with the only aim to increase its volume and quality. Omnia Mea In Media as the original information habit. Re:organize in your name.
Let's gather data. Let's process data. Let's share information. These three equally simple as modest propositions for a coming community's knowledge distribution only partly meet practice. Download and upload symmetry has proven a traditional dream of information freedom. Possibility space has largely been sealed off with industrial labels. All things e-galitarian are embedded in e-vasive privacy slogans.
issue
30 September 2002
more anti war
Dutch and international anti-war events are (next to coming week-end's NY and SF and other US rallies) scheduled for October 29, like the ANSWER's march on Washington and a Rotterdam national demonstration. Dutch activism platforms are indymedia.nl and wereldcrisis.nl. In London 28 September some 400k rallied against Blair and his support to invade Iraq. If no resistance now: when?
28 September 2002
get reorganized, also in your name
At its most brutal, home is no more than one's name.
(John Berger)
October 6-7 schedules protest across the US, against war on Iraq. I hope to find out about any international events, e.g. in Paris or Amsterdam, which I could join on those dates. NOIN has a fair cause, which allows no scepticism. Spread its links. Like the not in our name base where to find more concern, at nion.us If no resistance now: when?
If politics, just no party lines.
my 2 cents: a banner in Dutch you can use with its link to the belofte van verzet
the Dutch translation of the 'pledge of resistance'
27 September 2002
warning
Mimeograph machines have been largely replaced by more sophisticated technology, but many are still being used. They are becoming obsolete, however, because they are no longer being made. Parts will eventually be unavailable.
(mystery quote)
26 September 2002
wysiwyg
placeholder
Welcome back to NQP. We had our credit challenged fora couple of24 hours, due to serious service hick-ups at ANWB and VISA and my own lack of administrative spine. Straighten up. One's total dependence from creditability was once more painfully proven, as much as lack of access to be a capital frustration. But idie.net seemed unhurt so some of you might have followed me there. Respect. Above image has been removed there and is archived here for future reference.
wein
What else is new? Funny thing, nothing ever happens if you're not publishing. Hey? Omnia Mea in Media Porto. Meanwhile, I welcome back your links. And go see issue 58 for its truffle link and bottling blurb, if you missed its delicatessen just before we got blacked out.
nqpaofu.com 2002 jouke kleerebezem Notes Quotes Provocations and Other Fair Use *1998