So then…
Via Mario Carpo’s text, we were discussing the notion of primacy of (architectural) text, superceded or forever conjoined by image.. in particular Alberti’s ‘dictum’, that despite his championing of drawing as an architectural process, and showing much enthusiasm for the visual, he wished for his architectural treatise never to be illustrated..
1. So is that the moment when text gains the authority, the upper hand forever more? Works of scholarship, i.e. those of words, whether or not they are accompanied by frivolous or useful images, receive the prestigious status that defined the architect as a belletrist, a “man of letters”?
2. Coming back to blogs as a paradigm:
If we define that the interactive or exchange potential of blogs is the crux of their critical faculty – for without that potential for exchange and interconnection, they are simply isolated, individuated assemblages – fragments of ideas and broken, rhizomatic or synaptic trajectories..
2.1 .. Let us consider for a moment the nature of those trajectories, in terms of media. I was thinking about blogs, and their discourse, as the re-emergence of text as the critical media through which ideas are transmitted. Because there are such sites which act as galleries and image banks, but the critical capacity emerges only when these are selected/curated/elaborated and critically, verbally discussed. But content does not have to be purely alphabetical; even if the code ends up as a form of text, it is increasingly easier (and less reliant on text interfaces) to incorporate media such as video and image into an exchange of ideas.
Fittingly the field of communications technology points the way towards where this might lead, in terms of discourse. Small programs which perform increasingly sophisticated functions are now a highly commodified notion; I’m thinking directly of [iPhone] apps. For the most part, consumers share, purchase or download “apps” or applications to use them as their name suggests; applying them to perform a certain function. Looking at the increasing – and increasing in the sense of amoebic, rhizomatic, synaptic – community of developers, and companies who produce products, applications, soft and hardwares both for and with their ‘base’ of developers, we can identify a new method of production, that is to say one of “Open Source”.
(Perhaps not so new: there was a interesting-lite article in The Sunday Times Magazine about the Grateful Dead’s reciprocal relationship with their fanbase, the Deadheads, in helping to proliferate their product by allowing taped recordings at live shows, and in boosting creativity by encouraging independent merchandise. The article cited the Dead’s anti-accumulation philosophy as the loose origins of [the business models of] companies like Apple and other digital developers, who capitalise (and in this case I can use that word) on the “community” of their consumers. I would provide a link, but as you know, the Sunday Times is made by – or at least produced/distributed by bastards. So.)
2.2 So what is exciting about that whole thing, is that what is being exchanged, pushed forward, (even) in a commercial sense, is half-baked. Programs that are “buggy”, hardwares that don’t wait for endless testing in a hermetic environment, products that are not so much user-defined as user-refined.. I’m particularly excited by the exchange of softwares, incomplete programs and applications, which are worked on by developer communities. It seems to me that what is being exchanged here is raw, live, like DNA or creative matter, sort of like stem-cell tissue! If the exchange of semi-formed commodities is commercially accepted and viable – and not simply as a gimmick towards “customisation” but genuinely to engage mass creativity – to me this heralds a new method of production and points to a new kind of status, in a way…
Now, any phenomena at all can have an effect on someone’s mind, and this can take seed in a highly individuated way, and produce something cool; of course we don’t HAVE to have the exchange of half-baked cookies for that to happen. But what if – for example in academia – it’s less “cool” to have a static theory printed in a book, what if the real currency is in producing an idea, format or framework that can be endlessly extrapolated, mutated and improved?
.. Is this the total dissolution of authorship?
As you can see, feeling pretty half-baked myself this morning…
andsothenwhat 