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MEMORY LANE
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· · · · · · A E C F O R U M - "M E M E S I S" · · · · ·
· · · · · · · (http://www.aec.at/meme/symp/) · · · · · ·
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Hi Geert -
I just got back from Linz and Jutta told me that this mesge did
not get through so here it is again .... bob
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Dear Memesis -
Having (finally) read the demolitions of the MEMESIS text by
Herbert, Richard and Tom, I sat down and reread the text
itself. You are right -- it really is full of problems. On the
other hand its hyperbolic style has provoked attack -- which
was presumably its intention. But the MEMESIS text, for all its
brevity, flaws and assumptions, has a central theme which I,
unlike Richard, find very interesting: the relationship of
man/machine -- between the creator and createe so to speak.
The various sections of the text provide discussion points and
not necessarily rigid positions. I think the problems pointed
out by Richard might have been avoided had the different
sections been formulated as questions rather than statements.
I also think that this would have closer to the intention of the
author(s).
My general problem with the text is somewhat different, less
to do with "assertions" than with assumptions. These
assumptions are rather difficult to identify since they
probably belong to that invisible and unconscious realm
referred to here as "Memesis". For instance statements like:
"Complex tools and technologies are an integral part of our
evolutionary fitness" or "Human evolution is fundamentally
intertwined with technological development ...... genes that are
not able to cope with this reality will not survive ....", appear
to take for granted an evolutionary hierarchy of humanity --
those with telephones, modems and computers and those
without. Presumably the memes/genes that survive into the
new millennium will be those of the electronically endowed.
That is: members of the electronic master-race.
But there is not really much support for the assumption that
because industrial culture has created this technology, it
somehow OWNS it. In fact the technology has been
fundamentally instrumental in destroying industrial culture --
it can even be argued that the development of this technology
was for that very purpose -- along with military applications
of course. Since the mid-70s the great industrial centers of
Europe and North America have become wasteland -- like the
"Rust-Belt" of the U.S. north-east mentioned by Tom. De-
industrialisation is the name of the game regardless of the
euphemisms being coined to disguise it, and "Industrial Man" is
an endangered species. Nowadays "workers" can only be found
in Museums of Industry -- played by students during summer
holidays. A situation that doesn't provide much comfort for
those of us with industrial "memes" (whatever they might be)
in the evolutionary rat-race into the next millennium.
There is also something very "Modern" (in Richard's sense)
about the way the idea of evolution is being used in the
MEMESIS text. Evolution is being treated as a one-way street ...
always better, always improving. But the principle of
evolution is not about "progress" but about adaptation. This
means that a species may be perfectly specialised for a
specific environment but is utterly helpless should the
environment change ... even if the change is brought about
partly by its own efficiency. Similar but less specialised
groups of the same species are likely to be more able to adapt
to the changes and, in a sense, "inherit" the territory created
by their more "developed" cousins. In the future the world may
become a very uncomfortable place for societies of high
consumers.
About halfway through Tom's text we encounter a reference to
endangered cultures and languages and the paragraph following
concerns itself with strategies for survival for artists. He
blandly assumes that artists (and art) are a natural part of the
cultural framework and need only to arm themselves with new
techniques to survive in the new millennium. Once again I have
problems with the assumptions. If a whole culture -- the
culture of the industrial worker -- can disappear in less than
20 years what certainty can we have that the middle-class
culture, upon which art and artists depend, will survive into
the next millennium. What strategies can help when the
cultural environment for art (as we know it) may no longer be
there? And furthermore, Tom's strategies seem to me to be
very much like technical simulations of traditional art forms
-- hardly a very adventurous response to the challenges of the
new electronic age. Bunching together like threatened Bison on
the net may be comforting but its probably not going to help
much.
I posted a short text here at the beginning of this forum called
"Media Culture" (originally published in "Zeitgleich"). It was a
probably a bit too "poetic" for Richard and too "metaphysical"
for Herbert but I tried to identify the traumatic effect
recording devices have had on industrial culture. I see from
Herbert's text that he identifies a problem with the location of
these "cognitive behavioural patterns" in the individual -- as a
part of the human subject -- being passed, as it were, from
generation to generation like genetic code. In this sense the
"meme" notion does get into metaphoric trouble. But if the
recording technologies are viewed as a kind of collective
memory device -- like a moebius loop in which the culture
stabilises in something like an _oscillating present_ -- then
it may be that the biology metaphor can be de-fused.
Re:SQUID Clips
The leap from snap shots, family videos and grandma's voice on
cassette to total VR replays of her experience of dying is
probably going to take some time ... but we are ready for it!
(Which reminds me ... there is a film (Brainstorm??), made
around 1980, about a woman who invents such a recording
device and records her own death by heart attack.)
But what is interesting -- or disturbing -- is the way
recording technologies confuse and smudge the line between
past and present ... the way they externalise memory, make it
public and accessible. This is the territory of the "meme" --
the public space of collective memory, not some mystical
voice from the machine or the rewiring of the neurons but the
omnipresence of recorded images and sounds. The rearguard
action of asserting that this is all old hat and that portrait
painters and novelists have always done this sort of thing and
that "what the new information technologies have done is
make the process much easier ..." as Richard has written in
respect to sampling, simply won't do!
The monitor, whether TV or Computer (probably soon to be the
same), is the place at which media reality occurs, whether it
be home videos, WWW pages or TV. A confusion of material
meets on the screen, personal documentation, old films, the
news and it is collaged into a personal selection -- no
producer, creator, artist can determine the way in which his or
her material is experienced. Whether you call it surfing or
sampling it is the recipient who determines the shape of the
information, data, propaganda or art (as you prefer) that comes
out of the box at the end of the cable. This has serious
consequences for everyone -- but especially for artists.
Control is, in this sense, a thing of the past. Do we regret it?
bob
Robert Adrian
http://www.t0.or.at/~radrian/
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