Introductory Preface and Postface, or Open Bracketing of the W/Hole
[This is my introductory postface or preface to my forthcoming WVU book; it's a fairly good explanation of my essay-work I think. Offered with permission.]
The process used to produce this book has been one of continuous negotiation over pieces, which are broken remnants of a text that might go on indefinitely, if I did. I would say this about the individual sections -
1 that each begins, for me, from ground zero, both in the sense of catastrophe, and without regard to presuppositions; in other words, each sketches out a terrain which, phenomenologically, is close to the scratching-out of inscription against the flesh and abjection of the body.
As an introduction to this season’s theme for Upgrade! New York, Clay Shirky discussed the concepts of forking and failure in the open source process, and its value to the context of activism and the creative process.
This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it—to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.
Originally written in April 2007. Minor edits: March 2010.
Preface
In the past 50 years the digital user-interface has become a major field of cultural production, since the innovations of Douglas Engelbart in the sixties (mouse/keyboard/video-screen) through the personal computer revolution in the eighties to the rise of the World Wide Web in the nineties and the wider trends for social web applications since the turn of the century. Producers of hardware and software systems have been attempting to develop interfaces that will direct the users to produce the interaction desired by the system they represent.
Recipes for an Encounter functions as a literary extension to the 2008 group exhibition "Kits for an Encounter" at Vancouver's Western Front, which consisted of work that actively engages the viewer by providing the necessary components for instigating or troubling the notion of an encounter. This collection of texts, diagrams, and illustrations provides further "how-to" instruction for relational projects in the manner of a recipe book.
As an introduction to our Upgrade New York year theme we are excited to announce this month’s speaker, Clay Shirky. Clay will discuss the concepts of fork and failure in the open source process and will open them to discussion in the context of activism and the creative process.
