The lesson of Wikipedia is one of contested histories. Under the surface of each content page exists a world of contention, negotiation, politics, intervening identities. The edit history pages are a catalogue, a genealogy of vacillation, and in this sense remain inherently ambivalent. The content pages "pop out" from this body of contention, digested, calcified (at any given moment), framed, ready for consumption and proliferation. This emergence is inherently violent (like any birth); it stems from utility and yet contains within itself all of the marks of power-domination:
The relationship of domination is no more a "relationship" than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in ritual, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it. Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.
- Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
Notes from Desk Crit with Gregory Thorpe (10/12/2007):
- remapping wikipedia: the landmark as the "content page" of the urban landscape - i.e. an act of control/ repression/ reframing/ consensus/ etc. - packaging of culture and the urban space - it is an architecture of controlled history.
- the alternative to this, what does it mean to have an architecture of contested history?
- in this effort, I necessarily take a position of ambivalence
- in that case, how do i reinsert myself (back) into the system/process?
- here is the critical issue of authorship in the open-source/ ambivalent mode of cultural production..., in fact this defines what art IS/has become.
- sine wave video editing as a tentative example
- re-define existing landmarks or create new ones - or both?
- using processing to diagram patterns of landmark use, both in physical and virtual terms
- indexing landmarks - news feeds, placeblogger, overlaying different perspectives as a generative process
- hyperlocal vs. hyperglobal data feeds
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2 comments:
The contested history idea in relationship to the 'linkability' of a built fabric- urban- is a great way to deal with what I would say the most important aspect of contested history is: specifically, the awareness produced in a population, over time, while they contest history- that history itself is a point of view, not a truth. Some may disagree with this, but I base my statement on a general agreement I have with certain statements Foucault makes in the NGH essay quoted above, as well as an interview where he acknowledges that he did, indeed, write history as if it were fiction. He says something to the effect that- answering his critics- "I never said I was writing anything except fiction." This answer- provocative- was intended IMHO to point out to them very clearly that any history is going to be assembled as an elaborate construct, and as such its only value would be in the rigor and depth of thinking that went into it, and then the ways that depth of thought carried through to an audience.
Ultimately this begs the question, how can an urban/landscape/architectural condition provoke a consciousness in an audience, and how legible should we assume that landscape will remain over time? As well, of course, the additional technology components that might make it more and more possible to 'TAG' a physical system with a set of virtual labels/tags/nomenclatures/histories, such that the fabric of the world itself carries the contested histories in both immediate and virtual ways.
Again, the key user interface question that comes up for me is not how legible immediately any given tag is- or how true- but how the discourse that emerges around a protocol and practice of tagging can yield a kind of thinking or collective awareness/intelligence.
Ultimately this demands a definition of intelligence, which act of definition is the responsibility of the designer.
In my humble opinion, I must say that your first paragraph was quite lucid and forceful. I think this is a good step for you. In regards to your questions, rhetorical no doubt-I found them a little difficult to navigate through. But of course I would imagine that these are still early times in the formulation of these particular ideas.
With that said, I'm curious about Keller's statement and the issue of legibility. But what of it? (now rereading Keller's writing at the end, perhaps this is what he means?) That is to say, are you interested in mapping/diagramming the contest OR CREATING a contest/conflict? Is my point taken? By setting up a dynamic mapping, with feedback loops amongst a multitude of folding variables, you are INVITING conflict. Perhaps this is a philosophical perspective but a conflict cannot be defined, retold historically shall we say if it can't be mapped (that mapping of course can be oral, written, etc) I suppose what I'm trying to say and I feel as if I'm having some difficulty articulating it, is it not right to assume that a system will always be in conflict? And well, maybe we should start by defining "conflict"? That is to say, perhaps we should examine "conflict" not as a point of stasis that must be resolved at all costs, but rather as a kind of byproduct or secondary or tertiary step in the evolutionary process of ANY system. How does the role of equilibrium play into this particular system? I'm not sure if this helps.
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