04   |   02.10

Internet as Collage

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Maintained By: Benjamin F. Walter

Co-Authored By: Jim Cocola, Benjamin F. Walter, Bobby Bokista, Ben Cummings, Travis Farmer

Last Modified By: Travis 02.10.04 :: 5:45pm

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EVENTS AND NOTES

Thursday 02.05

Jonathan Durham, UVA '97, will deliver a slide talk about his drawings and mixed media sculptures on at 5 pm in Campbell 153. His exhibit at the Fayerweather Gallery runs through Friday 02.06.

Friday 02.06

HipHop performer and speaker Djindji Brown will give a talk titled "From the Record Store, to the Studio, to the Streets Around the Globe!" at 3.30 pm in Wilson 301.

The Ix Memorial Sculptural Monuments, by advanced sculptors from the university, will be on display between 5 and 7 pm at the Frank Ix Building.

Djindji Brown will give a performance at Plan 9's Performance Space on the Corner, starting at 7.30 pm.

Monday 02.09

David Golumbia will give a talk on "The Nonstandard Web" between noon and 2 pm, as part of the Media Studies Lecture Series. This event will be held in the English Department Faculty Lounge on the 2nd Floor of Bryan Hall. Here is a short summary of his remarks:

Like the printed book before it, the World Wide Web emerges both as a mass medium created by global capital and one defined and shaped by vernacular cultures. The history of print shows the extent to which vernacular cultural practices are required by governing administrations to create mass media, despite the administrative desirability of standardized cultural practices and languages. Today there exists a profound tension on the web between a wide range of nonstandardized practices and a no less wide range of standardized ones. Modern ideology suggests that technological and communicative progress would be served by streamlining the web so as to take full advantage of its degree of standardization, and proposals for technological innovation on the web often follow this logic. Looking back at the history of print and analytically at the range of phenomena on the web, it is arguable that another option is to work to maximize the channels of nonstandard communication opened by the web. Keeping in mind the insights that critical views of the history of print culture make available, it is arguable that the web provides means of resistance to the cultural standardization toward which mass media seems inevitably to lead.

MAIN READINGS

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Random House, 1967.
  [Selections in the Materials Section of Jim Cocola's MDST 322 Collage and New Media, Spring 2004]

We'll also be looking closely at the Wikipedia and the Wiktionary, which rely on the Wiki as a means of generating knowledge. Such an approach has a number of crucial ramifications. Among the keywords we'll be discussing are Fair Use, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation (1999, 2003), GNU, Linus Torvalds, and Open Source. Feel free to add other keywords that appear relevant.

Also of note is Everything2, which is very similar to Wikipedia, but with different constraints and a more strict power structure.

Finally, be sure to take a look at Creative Commons, where one can apply for a hybrid copyleft-copyright license. Take a look at the myriad of license options, perusing both the human-readable texts and the legal codes for each variation.

SELECTED TEXTS

Amerika, Mark. How To Be an Internet Artist. Boulder: Alt-X, 2001.
  [In the Materials Section of Jim Cocola's MDST 322 Collage and New Media, Spring 2004]

Hocks, Mary E. and Michelle R. Kendrick, eds. Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age
  of New Media. Cambridge: MIT P, 2003.

Watson, Nessim. Why We Argue About Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net fan community. London. 1997.
  [In the Materials Section of Phil Gochenour's MDST 110 Information Technologies and Digital Media, Fall 2002]

Barlow, John Parry. Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.
  [In the Materials Section of Phil Gochenour's MDST 110 Information Technologies and Digital Media, Fall 2002]

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.
  [Introduction, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 in the Materials Section of Aniko Bodroghkozy's MDST 301 Theory and Criticism of Media, Fall 2002]

LINKS

• 
  Who is this young man?
• At Alt-X, the digerati and the literati have been meeting since 1993.
• The Banner Art Collective is a resource for internet collage artists witting and unwitting.
• Friendster is, among other things: a digitized cut-n-paste version of socialization, an electronic means of establishing friendships with (friends of) the friends of your (friend's) friends , and/or yet another means of virtual procrastination. Use at your own risk.
• The JavaMuseum is brought to you by the New MediaArtProjectNetwork.
• The Laboratorium, an exemplary weblog, is brought to you by James Grimmelman.
• Yoism appears to be the world's first open-source religion. Check out their homepage, yo.
• Is the internet a collage hypothetically or visually? Or both? See for yourself.

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