http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh en-us http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/media/thumbs/thoughtmesh_logo_beta@m.jpg http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh 144 27 ThoughtMesh Recently Added
A report on the CRASSH workshop "Subversion, Conversion, Development: Public Interests in Technologies," Cambridge, 24-26 April 2008.From the workshop's abstract:As part of the "New forms of knowledge for the 21st Century" research agenda at Cambridge University, the workshop will explore why designers and developers of new technologies should be interested in producing objects that users can modify, redeploy or redevelop. This exploration demands an examination of presuppositions that underpin the knowledge practices associated with the various productions of information communication technologies (ICT). A central question is that of diversity: diversity of use, of purpose, and of value(s). Does diversity matter, in the production and use of ICT, and if so, why?]]> Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:36:59 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/87.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/87.php
A response to the Open Objects Initiative and the Cross-Cultural Partnership, both presented at the conference Subversion, Conversion, Development organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 2008.]]> Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:48:37 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/10.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/10.php
This essay is an expanded version of a presentation at the 2007 DOCAM Summit, Daniel P. Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Montreal, 26 September 2007.]]> Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:44:34 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/199.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/199.php
Still Water co-director Jon Ippolito takes a look at emblematic cases of the transition from subversion through conversion to development in connections between art and industry in the last fifty years. This talk was first presented at the conference Subversion, Conversion, Development at the University of Cambridge, organized by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), 25 April 2008.LEFT: Duct tape holding together the Apollo 17 moon buggy.]]> Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:38:19 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/200.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/200.php
A brief discussion on why moral and aesthetic values should not be considered as either at tension or independent of one another, but are instead additive qualities.  Support for this argument is given using examples from Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf.]]> Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:32:08 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/198.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/198.php
This is a response to the conference Subversion, Conversion, Development: Public Interests in Technologies took place at CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts , Social Sciences, and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge, 24-26 April 2008. The organizers included James Leach, Lee Wilson, Robin Boast, and Anna Malinowska.]]> Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:34:40 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/193.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/193.php
Essay for NPF]]> Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:31:09 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/190.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/190.php
In 1977, Steve McCaffery wrote in an early forum on what would soon come to be known as language poetry that "The main thrust of this work is hence political, rather than aesthetic." This paper seeks to understand the stakes of the tendency that emerged in experimental poetry during the 1970s —towards a coupling of theory and practice, as a politicization of aesthetics—by comparison of the political poetics theorized therein with the poetic politics of the Situationist International. Specifically, we will use McCaffery's account to explore the then emergent conception of the poem as a textual environment through which a reader moves freely by constructing temporary and contextually specific meanings from its parts (sounds, words, lines, sentences) as analogous to the SI's dream of a permanent revolution in the cityscape (as context providing the contents of daily experience). Against the backdrop of the failures of 1968 and political despair attending the Vietnam War, in the context of "minimal employment and low cost of living that was the late 1970s" in San Francisco, we will take this comparison as an occasion for thinking through the collective and utopian nature of that project. Beginning with McCaffery's account as a signal (but partial) instance of the effort to wed Marxist political praxis with post-structuralist textual agency, we will argue that this fusion of critique and aesthetic practice—via the development of conceptual and aesthetic technologies that shifted poetics from writerly concerns with textual production to readerly concerns with contextual production—made possible an imaginative instantiation of the political desires which the SI momentarily organized, at a moment when possibilities for their materialization were coming to seem everywhere foreclosed. In doing so we will argue as well that from a properly Debordian perspective no aesthetic tendency can answer the cry trapped in the thesis "All that was once directly lived has passed away into mere representation." Consequently, we will insist on the necessity for a rigorous differentiation of the considerable and very real aesthetic gains the tendency in question made from the political ambitions that motivated them in any critical accounting adequate to that moment and the lessons it affords utopian thinking today.]]> Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:31:38 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/189.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/189.php
Most of the little that has been written about Ron Silliman's The Chinese Notebook foregrounds its connection to Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical texts—particularly Wittgenstein's use of the numbered proposition and the interrogative voice. This is the format in which Silliman explores his major theme: the question of linguistic reference. 29. Mallard, drake—if the words change, does the bird remain? Next to Silliman's meditations on reference, we also have his far less circumspect treatment of the materialities of communication, in particular the relation between speech and writing and the influence of writing instruments on the composition process. In probing the question of reference, Silliman adopts the calmly detached voice of Wittgenstein's project. But in sections where he ponders the materiality of writing and its putative other, speech, the tone is apt to turn sardonic ("8. This is not speech. I wrote it") and even scornful ("22. The page intended to score speech. What an elaborate fiction that seems!"). In a format predicated on the neutralization of tone, Silliman's lapses into voice stand out. Silliman's resolute distrust of reference and speech crystallizes in The Chinese Notebook and comes to stand as a forceful articulation of emerging Langpo poetic doctrine, but it extends even further suggesting strong connections between the poetics of the seventies and soon to emerge disciplinary formations in media and performance studies. For example, Silliman's thoughts about the impact of certain writing instruments on what gets written anticipate Friedrich Kittler's groundbreaking work in Media Studies. At the same time, his dismissal of intermediality (the way poets might imagine textuality in terms of performance, or view the page by way of analogy to painting) as "fiction" seeks to uphold category distinctions that have since vanished. This paper examines the many tensions in Silliman's text as key reference points in the ongoing discussion of vanguard poetry and its position within contemporary media ecologies. ]]> Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:06:39 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/191.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/191.php
My introduction to Bernadette Mayer, reading with Clark Coolidge at the Colby College Art Museum on 14 June 2008, as part of the National Poetry Foundation Poetry of the 1970s Conference: an ABC of Mayer's literary biography. ]]> Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:05:13 PDT http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/183.php http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/183.php