Some work by Andre Avelas, (not documented on his site yet so info is sparse but hopefully more will follow soon), Earphones is ether a installation or performance (I’m guessing performance) employing 1000 in ear headphones, 960 of which are used as speakers and 40 as microphones, creating feedback loops of audio.

As far as I can tell the idea of technology or media shaping us, I guess it’s an aspect of the technological determinism vs. social constructivism debate, dates back to Marshall McLuhan and primarily his publication The Gutenberg Galaxy (image above left of the cover of the first publication and right a handwritten page by McLuhan).

The premise of the book is simple, media shapes the way we think (see diagram below). Pre-dating the invention of the printing press (the Gutenberg Press from the title was the first system which employed movable type) cultures information was primary based on collective memory, that is oral histories handed down, apprenticeship etc. The press was invented, rapidly spread throughout the world and within a few hundred years oral histories had transformed into libraries. As a result we no longer remembered just sounds but also the symbols of language, less emphasis was placed on personal memory and more on the archival of information as a whole in print (which also becomes the means of distributing the information), this is the true dawn of the information age. Next comes the media age with the telegram, telephone, radio, cinema, television etc. Now the means of storing information (and distributing / diffusing it) multiples (multi-media which later becomes multimedia). For the first time we start to discuss the idea of media, print media, broadcast media, mass media. We start to think in images (as well as sounds and the symbols of language) as they dominant the 20th century.

There are a few things that interest me here. Firstly we do not abandon old methods of remembering but instead we incorporate them into new methods – old methods in a sense become reinvigorated, enhanced. Bruce Sterling has a great phrase in Shaping Things which I keep returning to that sums this health progression up:

Tomorrow composts today.

Secondly (and most obviously) what’s next? We have covered pretty much the spectrum of what we now (retrospectively) call media – sound, language, image. Its not a case of covering the senses, if it were the complexities of smellovision would by now have been solved :). It’s almost fully recognised now that we have moved beyond the information / digital age, the information-superhighway has proved to be the most complex and interesting aspect of this extending the possibilities of multi and digital media so the ‘next’ is the network, not as an entity in itself (yet) but with regard to the associations it creates between information and the medias that are currently used to store it and formerly to distribute / diffuse it. Now connections serve to distribute / diffuse medias based on how connected they are. We begin to think in associative ways, we remember something through other things. In the future perhaps the network itself will replace a term such as media allowing the information itself to take shape based on how its connected (with everything) and how its connected to.

This is the sort of thing that would annoy me quite a lot if it was about my work. I was wandering through someone’s weblog to discover an interesting work which seems to relate nicely to the idea of networked things and is quite similar to some works I’ve discussed here before so obviously I want to post something about it but I notice the artist attributed to the work is a name that looks vaguely familiar (and the style of work as well) but not quite. What looks like a work by David Rokeby is in fact a work by David Rockeby, is this an artist taking the style of another more famous artist with a similar sounding name, perhaps it’s a post-modernist intervention which I’ve stumbled accross?

So I click back from here (where I see the post) to presumably it’s origins (where it was reblogged from, which has now been corrected 20/12/07), to discover that indeed the artists name is David Rockeby, but what’s this a typo under the image of the work? So I click further back to an older post on the same weblog apparently a talk given by this (I think) newly discovered artist only to find a picture of the artist with the spelling Rokeby – it is David Rokeby after all that!

We all make typo’s, I’ve probably made one or two in this post alone but what’s frustrating to see is not that someone makes the typo but that it then gets perpetuated through the network as a result of syndication / reblogging etc. These are superb tools / medium’s but work equally well to spread truth or deception. What starts out as an interest in a new work (incidentally it’s called Cloud but that seems less important now) turns out to be a sort of research into the details of who made the work, why this typo has been so consistently wrong and how the ease of technology (copy and paste etc.) might have contributed to this disinformation. It’s no wonder that artists such as 0100101110101101.org can create mythical artists and their works in exactly this way and so convincingly.

The publication, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks by Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, came through Nettime in October. I saved it as a draft and then completely forgot about it until I saw Rhizome posted it through their news list / widget a few weeks ago. Not sure if there is a slight conflict of interest there but regardless it looks well worth a look:

The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems…the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.

Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive.

In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.

For more information, including the table of contents, visit the books webpage.

I mentioned Jeremy Deller a few weeks ago within the context of drawing (Mark Lombardi: Global Networks). Deller won the turner prize in 2004, the same year Langlands & Bell were nominated and presented works such as The House of Osama bin Laden (above, top left and bottom left) and Frozen Sky (above right). They seem particularly fitting to look at within the context of network research as their work centres on the exploration of:

the complex web of relationships linking people and architecture and the coded systems of circulation and exchange which surround us.

but their works Air Routes of Europe (Night) (above), Air Routes of Britain (Night) (below left) and www. (below right) also fit appropriately with the drawing / graphing theme which has developed into the recent post on Drawing with GPS.