A couple of weeks ago I was invited to take part in a panel discussion on London based, arts radio station, Resonance FM. It was for The Thread, a lively show that aims to use speech and discussion as a tool for research, opening up new and unexpected angles through the unravelling of conversation.

The Thread's host, London Consortium researcher Seph Rodney, and I were lucky enough to share the discussion with Dr. Lane DeNicola, a lecturer and researcher in Digital Anthropology from University College London. We talked about encoding and decoding, about the politics of ownership and the implications for information technologies. We talked about inscriptions in stone, and the links we saw between the open-source software movement and genome sequencing.

Here is an edited transcript of the show, but I encourage you to visit The Thread's website, where you will shortly find a full audio recording of the conversation. The website also contains information about upcoming shows, as well as a rich archive of past conversations.

Inside Code: Encoding and decoding appear in contemporary context as a fundamental feature of technology, in our use of language and in our social interactions, from html to language coding and literary symbolism. How, and through what means, do people encode and decode?

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

Seph Rodney: I wanted to start off the conversation by asking both my guests how it is that we get the kind of literacy that we have to decode writing. It seems to me that it’s everywhere, that we take it for granted. It seems that there’s a kind of decoding that happens in reading, isn’t there?

Lane DeNicola: Yes. I would say that one of the more interesting aspects of that are the material consequences. Whereas literacy before was largely a matter of human knowledge, understanding of a language, all the actual practices involved was a surface to mark on and an instrument to do the marking, whereas today, a great deal of the cultural content that is in circulation commonly involves technologies that are considerably more complex than a simple writing instrument. Things that individuals don’t really comprehend in the same way.

Seph: What are the technologies that are more complex? What’s coming to my mind is computer code.

Lane: Exactly. Apple’s Garage Band might be one example, these tools that many of us encounter as final products on YouTube. One of the things on the new program at UCL we have tried to give a broad exposure to is exactly how much communicating people are doing through these new forms, and how they take the place in some instances of more traditional modes of communication.

Seph: You’re calling it communication, and one of the things that occurred to me after talking to Daniel, and exchanging a few emails, was that he calls writing, at least, a system of exchange. I was thinking, wouldn’t that in other contexts be called communication, and maybe ten years ago we would have called it transmission? But why is it exchange for you?

Daniel Rourke: I just have a problem with the notion of communication because of this idea of passing on something which is mutual. I think to use the word exchange for me takes it down a notch almost, that I am passing something on, but I am not necessarily passing on what I intend to pass on. To take it back to the idea of a writing system, the history of writing wasn’t necessarily marks on a page. The technologies that emerged from say Babylonia of a little cone of clay that had markings on the outside, they said just as much about the body and about symbolic notions as they did about what it was the marks were meaning to say. So that’s why I use exchange I think. It opens up the meaning a bit.

Seph: Yeah. It doesn’t presume that there is a person transmitting and a person that’s receiving, necessarily? And it also says something about, what I thought was really fascinating, that there is so much more in the object than just the markings on a page. About how the materials tell us something about that particular age, that particular moment in history.

Lane: Yeah. Even in a contemporary context it may have been the case that the early days of the web were all about hypertext, but the great deal of what you call ‘exchange’ that is happening today, how are you going to qualify a group of people playing World of Warcraft simultaneously in this shared virtual space – calling that communication is a little bit limiting. In fact it is experienced much more as a joint space, or an exchange of things, more than simple information. It can be thought of as an exchange of experience, or of virtual artefacts for example.

Seph: That can happen certainly in simulated game play, but it also happens in the decoding of texts. Objects that come to us from antiquity. There is all this material to be decoded that’s wrapped up in the artefacts. It is also, how much we decode and what we decode has something to do with our moment in time.

Daniel: I think it might be worth picking an example out of the air, when we are talking about this.

Seph: OK

Daniel: I’ve become fascinated by the archive of Henry Folger, he was a collector who became obsessed with collecting everything about Shakespeare he could get his hands on. This was in the 1920s and 30s I think. At the time there was a lot of need for every library around the world to have the object, whereas today we can digitise it and distribute it, back then if you didn’t have access to the thing itself, then you didn’t have the thing at all. Henry Folger became known for collecting the same Folio, tens and tens of times. In fact he became a laughing stock because he had tens and tens of the same ‘Last Folio’ of Shakespeare. People of course asked him, why did he need to have these things? Surely it was better to distribute them, but actually after his death, having all of these Folios in the same place, when people came to study them they found that they gained more information by comparing the Folios that were apparently the same. Comparing the marks that differed across Folios; one printing press had made an error here; how this piece of paper had been re-used, and therefore turned over, to print on the other side. And by decoding across the many Folios that Folger had collected they managed to piece together information about Shakespeare’s works that you could never have gained if all the Folios had been in 40 research libraries around the world. They had to be together, they had to be next to each other.

Seph: And the fact that there were differences, even though ostensibly there was just repetition, there were differences amongst the repetitions? It brings to mind immediately the Rosetta Stone, an ancient traffic sign that says the same thing in one language and the same thing in another language. A repetition, but clearly a key difference.

Daniel: The thing about the Rosetta Stone is that there was already knowledge of one system, and then they could transfer it, but I suppose it becomes interesting, especially in things like digital anthropology, where similar comparisons need to be made. You sent around this link about an old satellite system that they had managed to get more information from, by comparing and contrasting data, than it was originally intended for?

Lane: Exactly. There’s almost a sub-genre of information technology today that I think you could call information archaeology. We’ve had several decades with computers and rapid changes in the kind of technology involved, and as a result we are losing the ability to access nearly as much data as we are collecting in some fields. The idea of people being able to retain older media, in the case you mentioned, there was only one two-inch tape drive left in the world that was capable of reading the media involved. So the project had garnered some kind of innovation research funding and they had done a proof of concept just to show that yes, we can use this one device successfully to retrieve the data from, what I believe was a 1960’s Nimbus Satellite. It has strange consequences in fields outside of paleography.

Seph: This obsolescence of objects is strange because it seems like, if the object is the height of technology at the moment, when it becomes obsolete the chances of us being able to decode what was encoded using that technology seemingly nosedive. But paper, stone, these most simple materials – it seems like those things we can continue to decode for ages.

Lane: There are questions here that are quite political in nature, but there are also questions that historians have about how something is going to work, when this proportion of our exchange, our communication and mutual experience, is happening in these forms that require opaque technologies in order to decode them.

Seph: When you say opaque, you mean?

Lane: Something that the average person couldn’t cobble together a simple instance of. Most digital technology, for example. Although there are counter-trends, like the open source software movement.

Seph: Where you create a platform, essentially, that allows anyone who uses it to add to it.

Lane: Exactly. They’ve kind of formalised it at this point. In the early days of open source it was very much about sustaining open exchange of things like source code. They realised fairly quickly that they needed something a little bit stronger, and that was where organisations like Creative Commons came into play. This is an organisation that provides a specific set of licences that legally preserve the right of users of a piece of code to re-mix it, re-modify and re-distribute it, as they wish. Some people refer to it semi-jokingly as a ‘copy-left’, whether it’s a piece of source code, or a piece or data like music and so on, essentially making it available for public re-mixing, whilst ensuring that attribution of the original author is ensured. It’s all built on this paradigm that exchange needs to happen and needs to be retained as a right for everyone.

Seph: Right. In essence exchange needs to be broadened out, so that the technology can actually stay viable.

Lane: Yes. Exactly.

Seph: I guess to suggest that for technologies to continue, to not become so obsolete that there is only one piece of equipment in the world that can decode, they need to have a lot of participants.

Daniel: And with open-source, the hierarchy also gets taken out to a degree. You don’t have the guy on the pulpit who can read the Bible and the people down in the church who are listening. With open-source it’s the people down in the church, basically, who control the code. As much as it lives, it evolves and is successfully passed on, rather than being decided by some authority. I don’t mean to build a figure-head here, but a lot of code is owned by corporations...

Lane: We won’t name any names.

Daniel: No.

Seph: Would we get in trouble for that? Of course this is the thing that has gotten Microsoft in a bit of trouble, right, with the EU? They made moves, allegedly, with their software that locks out certain people and locks in certain add-ons and software that must be used with Windows. It seems to be an effort at control, right? I’m not sure how this connects to literacy, but if you are controlling or trying to control how much your information disseminates you are making the opposite move from what we have been talking about.

Daniel: I think there is a comparison to be made. I’m thinking in terms of the difference between the French language and the English language. Every year the French authorities come together to decide what new words will be accepted into the French language, whereas English has always been allowed to bloom and blossom. Of course there’s benefits to both of those, like Microsoft controlling its source code means that when people buy a PC it’s going to work, because all the software or hardware has been designed by the same company. Anyone who has had to go into a lecture theatre and wait 20 minutes whilst the person at the front figures out how things plug in and why it’s not working. That’s one of the problems with open-source. So there’s benefits to both: to open-source because we can all partake in the code, but we have to forego some kind of standardisation.

Seph: It’s interesting that in writing, and I don’t know if this is true further afield from writing like computer code, that there’s this impetus to limit who has a certain kind of literacy or who has the power to decode and encode. It seems for writing that there doesn’t seem to be those kinds of limitations?

Lane: We haven’t brought up the term encryption; there are certainly situations where an individual wants to preserve a text, but only maintain a limited kind of access.

Seph: One of the complaints people make about ‘high-theory’, especially in literary studies, is that the language is so coded that the average person, if there is such a thing, has a hard time making heads or tails of it. There a gate is being set up where you say, well you have to know this much to come through.

Daniel: I think maybe looking at the system involved is important. With theory, do you want to argue that it’s a closed system? That universities foreground their own existence by perpetrating this coded language that we all exchange with each other, where we get funding opportunities and hold conferences.

Seph: I’m not sure I would go as far as to say it’s closed, it’s restricted.

Daniel: But it does open out at certain points. I do think it’s important for people in academia to see their work in its practical means, but whether that has anything to do with the authority of the page or the authority of speech, I am not sure.

Lane: This is making me recall some of the anthropological work that I have read on magical writing. Michael Taussig, for example, authored a book on the magic of the state. There is a whole genre on writing, writing practice and its association, in a number of cultures for millennia, with magic and magical power. It’s commonly acknowledged enough that it’s almost a joke that there’s a similar paradigm in the minds of a lot of programmers. That is, they have an esoteric, a kind of arcane knowledge, and that the literacy involved is sometimes associated with a specific language, but just as often with abstract programming principles. The exclusivity of that kind of writing is something that can bind them as a community. I have seen that many times first hand, but then there have been revealing things written on that too, mirroring tiny Melanesian communities that practice this kind of magical writing.

Seph: What does magical writing look like?

Lane: The term refers to a number of different phenomenon. There’s a colleague of mine in the states that wrote about a very small community that kept track of its dead by writing their names in a book. There were repercussions to not having a particular ancestor’s name written in the book, it had consequences that were woven into the culture. There was a specific person who was allotted the responsibility of writing the names in the book. You don’t even need to look that far afield. European traditions exist, for example, where spell casting abilities get traced in one form or another to the inscription of sigils.

Seph: Sigils?

Lane: Iconographic runes for example, proto-lettering. But it’s the whole process of representation that people see as a magical human capacity. This idea of transforming thought into a material form.

Seph: And that dovetails with your research Daniel?

Daniel: I’d like to think so. I’m thinking of Walter Benjamin and his short essay on Mimesis. He tries to go back and pick apart what reading was. That before we were reading letters we were reading the world, in a sense. When you sacrificed an animal you would ‘read’ the entrails and you could say whether it was going to be a good season. That’s the kind of magic capacity, to see patterns in the world, that at that point we would have thought had been coded by God or nature for us to find and pick apart. It’s only a small leap from that to saying, nature has given us the entrails to read, well what if I make this mark and I say this mark represents the rain or something. Then you’ve got the step towards the rune or the hieroglyph.

Seph: It’s a huge step that we make when we do that, when we take a mark and say this represents the animal, what do you think that allows us to do?

Daniel: What it forces us to do is to separate the world from ourselves, or ourselves from the world, to some extent. Perhaps when reading the entrails we don’t distinguish as much as we do when we read a mark on a page what meaning is and what world is, seeing them inherent in the same moment. To write something on a page and say it represents love or my name, suddenly our symbolic notions are pushed one step further, we are distinguishing ourselves from nature, from the world around us, from the language that we speak.

Seph: It sounds like the bad part of that is that we become more abstracted, that we begin the process of abstracting ourselves from ourselves. Saying, I can be represented by this stick figure, or this name in a ledger somewhere, or even represented by a statistic. But there’s got to be a good part as well.

Lane: In the field that I come from they often refer to writing as the original technology, and discuss Western civilisation as predicated in large part on writing and the written word. There’s a whole, in part false, but compelling dichotomy between cultures that privilege writing in some form and cultures that are primarily verbal, where stories are passed down verbally from one generation to the next. There are these clear advantages, depending on your stance. The ability to have texts preserved in a way that limits the latitude of the re-interpretations over time has very important consequences. Like you say, that disconnection that is happening, so that a given sequence of thoughts of articulations are taken away from their author, and persist in time and are looked at and forced into being interpreted in a new kind of way. That is the trade-off.

Seph: So encoding things and reading that code allows us to gain distance from things. It allows us to move away from them symbolically, and move away from them in time, and still in some ways preserve them. Daniel, in one of our emails to each other you had raised this question as to whether at any level of reality coding/decoding stopped working as a paradigm. Do you think there is a point where decoding/encoding doesn’t work anymore?

Daniel: To ask that question I have to contemporise myself, I have to locate myself in the present day. We’ve been talking about this separation, where the symbol starts to determine how we look at the world, the main paradigm of today perhaps would be the computer, or science, both of which have become very much combined in the science of genetics. In the news recently was the story of the entrepreneurial scientist Craig Venter, who announced to the world that they had created synthetic life from code on a computer. We could have spent the entire hour talking about the moral implications of this, and the political implications of him presenting this knowledge in the way he did, but underlying it is the very simple notion that life is able to be decoded. That to its very fundamental constituents we can pick it apart. Now, I’m not going state my opinion – whether I am a materialist, do I see something more ‘important’ in the world – I don’t know. But there are a lot of implications for free-will, especially people of religious inclination have been up in arms about this announcement. Embedded with it is the idea, from Craig Venter, that the world could be completely picked apart to its constituents, that we could rebuild things from the ground up.

Seph: The way we want to. Absolutely. Not talking about the moral implications, but it seems that one of the things we are risking in synthesising things, life, in this very commercialised, dead on the table sort of way, is we are risking despair.

Daniel: They tried to inject some kind of symbolic value back into this by encoding some words from James Joyce within the DNA of the organism.

Seph: Giving it a literary credibility?

Daniel: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s supposed to show that all scientists have got a literary heart deep within them.

Seph: A humanist side.

Daniel: A headline grabber.

Lane: I read an article on a geneticist in the states who procured some relatively cheap gene sequencing equipment off eBay.

Seph: Really? That’s an amazing sentence. Relatively inexpensive and off eBay!

Lane: Still in the thousands of US dollars, but comparatively pretty cheap. And, he had done this because he had previously been working for, I think, a large pharmaceutical company and he had access to the most advanced equipment, but as a result of him leaving the company he didn’t have access to it anymore and he was interested in a project of his own devising. He has a daughter who has a particular genetic malady and he wanted to sequence her genome with the idea that it could provide basic information for later therapy, potentially. So he, in effect, was initiated this do-it-yourself DNA community – if you could call it a community at this point. But in a sense, it’s like open-sourcing gene sequencing. It really muddles that whole question of, on the one hand, a trepidation built into the whole process of manipulating our own genes, but that’s a separate layer from the question of the commercialisation of the process. And the copyrighting of the ‘human text’, so the speak. I think primarily you’re talking about the pharmaceuticals industry as the leading industrial sector that has an interest in patenting specific sequences from a genome, for things like targeted drugs. An emerging and exploded new direction for the pharmaceuticals industry. Essentially, you’re talking about the copyrighting of a text.

Daniel: And the ability perhaps to put that online, to upload it to your website and let everybody see it.

Seph: To do what you will with it. The question that comes to my mind is well, then if you do create a kind of, let’s call it a ‘community’, like that, is it the kind of community – one of these I am more comfortable with – that’s like Wikipedia or is it a community like the comments page on YouTube. Do you know what I mean?

Lane: That you get the dregs along with it?

Seph: Yeah. Or an informed, scholarly position.

Daniel: I think in the long run it’s probably much more important that this information is shared around the right parties, but that’s where the question of morals comes up again. We are worried now about terrorists getting hold of radioactive material, and making a ‘dirty bomb’. It’s possible that if you can buy a genetic sequencing kit of eBay that in the next ten to twenty years people will be able to organise and design bacteria or viruses that could specifically attack certain ethnicities. These are some of the possibilities that the decoding of the genome allows us to do in the future.

Seph: Who gets access to the encoding scheme then, seems like a really important question?

Lane: Not just from the commercial angle. Usually the way the discussion of copyrighted texts begins is with the interest in motivating creative work. So the major content providers, whether it’s television production studios or what have you, their argument is if you don’t have incentives for people to produce creative work then you’re not going to have the same calibre of work being done. This is tantamount to an argument for some kind of mechanism being in place to preserve texts as property, in a kind of abstract way. That’s more at the commercial level, but there are other parallel concerns as well.

Seph: In other words, incentives like, the author gets some sort of payment or remuneration at some point for her work or efforts. Isn’t this the issue with Craig Venter. He was working with the major operation, a government funded project, that began looking to decode the genome, and then he broke off from it, saying that they were doing it too slow, that they he knew a faster way to do it. He got funding, and because he is obviously a very clever man, made it commercially viable.

Daniel: He didn’t quite beat them though. I think it was very close.

Seph: His model is, you need to make it commercially viable to get investors. For it to work you essentially need to make a profit. To go back to what we were talking about at the beginning, one of the things that earlier technologies in some ways avoid is precisely that paradigm of commercialism. Presumably when they made marks in rocks or on papyrus they weren’t doing it because that was their wage earning job?

Daniel: There is a huge hierarchy in text-technologies. I mean, every Egyptian Pharaoh had a scribe. The workers that built the pyramids wouldn’t have been able to read the hieroglyphs necessarily. So there have always been hierarchies within textual technologies. We think of text now as the freest system of communication that there is, but in pre-literate societies where education wasn’t available to everybody the text was just a mass of squiggles on a page that only the priest had access to. In that very move, the church could claim authority over the text, because only they could read it out. I don’t know if we should be mapping that directly onto Craig Venter and his commercial enterprise, but there has always been an attempt to gain control of information technologies from their outset. Always.

Seph: It seems that one of the things we have been saying is that that effort to gain control over technology, and to limit who gains access to literacy in that technology, is not necessarily a bad thing?

Lane: Right. I am kind of compelled to mention, as we are here, that copyright as it’s known began in London. Book publishing, and the right to reproduce a text, was granted by the crown and the whole idea that a text, in the abstract, could be property – rather than the copies of a text. The idea that that abstract entity could be property began here, when the major book publishers in London were beginning to suffer a drop in their profits because other printing presses were beginning to open up. The printing press was proliferating and as a result people were able to produce things much cheaper. They realised that this was going to cause them a problem, that the authors who they were compensating were not going to enjoy any of the money from their works. When copyright came around, I think around the early to mid 1800s, it was about preserving the creative incentives for the authors. There was a limit put on the amount of time the copyright could be enjoyed by the publishers. I believe it was originally 20 years, but that’s gone out of the window since then. Certainly in the States it has been extended, especially in the case of Walt Disney, to beyond 95 years.

Seph: Property – and by that we mean private property – is in itself not a thing, but a relation, a community. It is only private property because I recognise your right to have that pen next to you, to own it.

Lane: Right.

Daniel: I think the Walt Disney example is an important one. Not only do they extend the ownership of their icon Mickey Mouse every 20 years, or so, but isn’t it also the case that all the Disney films were borrowed off someone? Taking the stories of others and using them themselves. But as soon as any outsider wanted to use the image of Mickey Mouse in an art object, or in anyway, they slammed down on them as hard as they could. So there are different degrees of ownership, and community, depending on how important you see your own ownership as being.

Seph: It’s funny that in talking about encoding that we’ve gone from the text, to genetics, to moral implications, to commercialism and ownership. I suppose ownership is a good place to get to because of the political implications of encoding; of what it is to have the ability to encode something and then again decode it, to make it make sense, to share it; to allow it to proliferate. Maybe one of the great strengths about writing is that it is not under control. It really is everywhere, and in everything. Is that going too far?

Daniel: I wouldn’t want to claim that writing is any different from say a digital code. Not everybody can code in PERL for instance, but everybody can now get a YouTube video and convert it, using a program into another format, and add some titles on the bottom saying “this is my daughter, 1995” and then send that to someone else. I don’t understand the history of these marks on the page, why the letter ‘e’ is the shape it is, or what in Chinese, for example, is the history of this ideographic symbol. I don’t understand that, but I have the power to use it for my own means, to make it express. I think that is the same in all of these technologies, when they get to the public the public will use them at different levels of encoding, in a sense.

Seph: And that seems to somehow ensure that the technology will continue.

Daniel: Yes.

Lane: Yes.

This transcript is shared under a Creative Commons License

by Daniel Rourke

In Part One of this article I wrote about the instability of the art-object. How its meaning moves, and inevitably cracks. In this follow-up I ponder text, the book, page and computer screen. Are they as stable as they appear? And how can we set them in motion?

Part Two

"There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about... writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and... I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it."

David Foster Wallace, PBS Interview, 1997

17^th Century print technology was rubbish. Type could be badly set, ink could be over-applied, misapplied or just plain missed. Paper quality varied enormously according to local resources, the luck of the seasons or even the miserly want of the print maker out to fill his pockets. There are probably thousands of lost masterpieces that failed to make it through history simply because of the wandering daydreams of the printer's apprentice. But from error, from edit and mis-identification have come some of the clearest truths of the early print age. Truths bound not in the perfect grain or resolute words of the page, but in the abundance of poor materials, spelling mistakes and smudge. In research libraries across the globe experts live for the discovery of copy errors, comparing each rare edition side-by-side with its sisters and cousins in the vain hope that some random mutation has made it intact across the centuries.

Since the invention of writing, and its evolutionary successor the printing-press, text has commanded an authority that far exceeds any other medium. By reducing the flowing staccato rhythms of speech to typographically identical indelible marks we managed, over the course of little more than 2000 years, to standardise the reading consciousness. But in our rush to commodify the textual experience we lost touch with the very material that allowed illiteracy to become the exception, rather than the rule. We forgot that it is the very fallibility of text and book that make them such powerful thinking technologies.

Today text appears so stable that we almost don't notice it. We bathe in it, from moment to moment, on the spines of our books, the packaging of our breakfast cereals, the labels sewn fast into our clothes. We live it without a thought. In fact, we live it because it is thought, composing such a steady proportion of our lived experience that we fail to notice its constricting power over our imaginations. Of course we all speak, but even speech in the literate society has become stultified by the restrictions of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Rarely does the speech of our leaders, of the world's most powerful politicians, exhibit anything more organic than a choice of when to pause for effect; when to express a comma, a colon or hyphen – each a technology of writing, rather than of free-thinking. Text is all-powerful, omnipotent and invisible. It infects how we think, speak and perceive the flow of time around us. Yet even as a way to break free from the constraints of text rises into view we baulk in pedantry and hark on about tradition. The unyielding space of the printed page has become the primary metaphor for those who fear where reading is heading: the Internet. But to truly understand the Internet's liberating power one must first look towards a great thinker who never read or wrote a word in his life.

Socrates decreed that writing would be the death of thought, becoming a crux to memory. He warned that text was 'inflexible', unable to answer back and that, as a consequence, writing would mark the end of a truly virtuous society in which public debate enhanced the thinking subject. His warnings obviously went unheeded, for were it not for the scribblings of his greatest pupil, Plato, his ideas would never have survived the long journey to your computer screen. Was Socrates short-sighted? Perhaps. But in our current time, of digital divides and books encoded in binary, Socrates' words seem remarkably prescient. Current debate surrounding the omnipotence of the Internet bears a striking resemblance to Socrates' concerns about writing. Just as Socrates proclaimed the authority of the spoken word, so today we hold stead-fast onto the shrivelled husk of a textuality that allows each of us to float aimlessly through literate culture.

In the decades proceeding Henry Clay Folger's death in 1930 his library became the prime resource for scholars of (arguably) the world's most famous playwright. Folger collected manuscripts. In particular he liked rare editions of Shakespeare's works, and he liked them so much he wanted to have them all. The First Folio is the earliest known print-run of Shakespeare's works, collated and published only seven years after his death. Folger's collection of nearly 40 First Folios became the laughing stock of the bibliophilic elite. Surely one copy of the Folio was enough for any research library, let alone a single collector such as Folger?

Folger's library enabled experts to consider First Folios side-by-side for the first time, garnering crucial information from the mistakes and mis-prints that were allowed to creep into the famous Folios by their 17^th Century printers. There were three different issues of the Folio, printed and bound by a handful of printers and their apprentices. From Folio to Folio edits are common, a missing Troilus and Cressida in one Folio leaves room for Timon, whereas in other, less 'complete' versions neither play make their way into print. Hidden within some ill-fated Folios can be found a crossed out ending to Romeo and Juliet on the reverse side of a print of Troilus that is missing its prologue. No Folio is the same as any other, meaning that the closest thing left to a 'perfect' collection of Shakespeare's works is the entire run of 400 Folios that still survive to this day, each noted for their individuality; each ready to expose their hidden mistakes to the careful eye of the scholar.

At the level of print, text has never been stable. And a good thing too, for if it were priceless knowledge about Shakespeare's plays would have been lost. The problem with the book and page today is that they have become frozen stiff, losing their dynamism as they spin off the production line. The value of Folger's Folios is not to be found in the meter of the language, or the subjects there imparted, but in the scratches, scuffs and tears scattered throughout like forgotten memories. Is it possible to inject some of this substance back into the mass-produced paperback? To allow authorship, once again, to become a collaboration between writer, page and the medium of transmission?

The internet is the obvious answer, but it is of course not that simple. For as long as we cling to the rigid structures of the printed page the internet will only act as a poor copy of the medium we so cherish. Academics, educators and politicians are quick to speak of the liberating potential of digital technology, but few of them make concessions for the web without first issuing a decree about the standards of reading to which we have become accustomed. In the last century perhaps the most important works of literature to have emerged were those that challenged the rigid flow of the printed narrative, asking us to question the inner realities we write and talk about. I am talking of works like Joyce's Ulysses, or Burroughs Naked Lunch, works that broke the book, even as they infected its forms with their liberating approaches to language and thought.

Like the new breed of art-objects I mentioned in Part One of this article, text is now moving towards a revolution in its status as 'thing'. In order to think beyond text, one must first begin to understand its distinctive character as both subject and object. A good place to start is with the art-object, the best examples of which encapsulate ideas that far transcend the lowly substance of the materials they are composed of. To ponder Duchamp's Mechanical Bride is to move beyond the foil and dust sandwiched between glass panes. Simply put, art-objects are objects that we mistake for subjects – and long may it be this way. This capacity to treat the material as a vehicle for a subject has long been missing from text and the book. When we reach out with our minds, beyond the divides of eye, page and text, we often forget the object-ness of the book, preferring instead to wallow in subjects that we consider the linguistic meaning of the text alone imparts to us.

Scattered throughout this article you will find examples of books which attempt to transcend their 'book-ness' by breaching the gaps between art and text. Some of these works would not have been produced in a pre-internet society. It is not that the internet is a form that text should aspire to, but perhaps that in living and thinking through a net-based society writers/artists have become able to consider the book-object in new and innovative ways. As soon as we could write down our speech, to inscribe it in stone or bind it onto the page, were became capable of speaking and thinking from the outside, like Gods looking down on their creation. Social networks, digital archives, computer screens, user generated interfaces, blogs, RSS feeds and tweets have, in similar fashion, allowed us to spin text out of order, to wrap thought around itself and let it bloom in fractal musings. New technologies have shown us that society is not rigid, that audio and video can be dismantled, distributed and dispersed on the winds of the world wide web. Books are about to start speaking back to us in ways that would have made Socrates and Shakespeare giddy to perceive.

We should encourage books to crack wide open, and let the internet wash between their pages. We should rejoice as the forms of text and print come crashing down around us. Let's rebuild our textual culture from the thinking subject up.

by Daniel Rourke

Part One

by Daniel Rourke

"The spacetime of the lightcones and the fermions and scalar are connected to the chocolate grinder. The chocolate grinder receives octonionic structure from the water wheel."

- Tony Smith, Valdosta Museum Website

In 1927 Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass was broken in transit. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Duchamp's title for the piece, depicts a mechanical Bride in its upper section and nine abstract Bachelors in its lower. Duchamp took oil, lead, varnish and dust and sandwiched them between panes of glass. The Bachelors encounter their Bride in the presence of a large, gorgeous, chocolate grinder whose drums revolve in motions which seem to reach up, across the divide, to touch the ethereal Bride in her domain.

In 1936 Duchamp 'fixed' the broken Bride by repairing, rather than replacing, the shattered panes of glass. He claimed to like it better that way.

Today progenies of Duchamp invest time, thought and often a great many dollars in their own artworks. The successful ones amongst them package those artworks up in foam, plaster and cellophane to be moved, shipped and re-exhibited in multiple gallery spaces again and again. Without dwelling on the commodification of the artwork I want to build my own scheme for understanding these movements. I want to rest a little and draw the lines of desire that artworks traverse; the paths they take that human intent had nothing to do with; the archives they carry within themselves. For every map there are points we must plot, spaces and places in real space and time that require isolation and signification. We grab a GPS device and codify the crossroads where St. Martin's Place meets Trafalgar Square, marking carefully the precise angle via which Madonna on the Rocks will be fed through the clamouring crowds into the The National Gallery's mouth. Artworks live in motion, just as readily as they live in the gallery. In the dark recess of transit they sketch a hidden, secret life away from the viewing eye, becoming not 'art', but 'object' – traversing the gap between these concepts as they travel.

The Bride now rests out her Autumn years in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, waiting for gravity to release her chocolate grinder once again from its sandwich of (un)shattered glass.

Through Plato's writing we know that Socrates maintained a deep mistrust of the art as object, distinguishing three realms through which art must move before it was realised. In Book X of The Republic Socrates develops the metaphor of the three beds. The ideal bed, made by God, the carpenter's bed, a mere imitation of God's idea, and the artist's bed, again made in imitation, but this time of the carpenter's creation. The art-object is twice removed from 'truth'. It is a model of a model; a mimetically charged, displaced falsehood. Like a black-hole emitting virtual particles in space, the realm we long to peer upon is always hidden, allowing only those particles escaping from the object to catch our gaze.

Ever since Socrates we've aimed to stretch, like Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, across an invisible divide into the realm of the absolute. Like Duchamp's Bachelors, ever removed from their beloved Bride, it is the network, the movement of the Earthly chocolate-grinder, that throttles our attention. We believe in an 'other' place, attempting to represent it in our paintings, our sculptures, novels and poems but we will never reach it - transfixed as we are on the material realm around us. Should we instead forget the Bride, and concentrate on the cracks beneath-which the chocolate-grinder forever whirls? Forget the 'ideal' bed and ponder on the imperfections the carpenter ensures in his work, as the hammer and nails meet in a blur?

* I will not talk here of the other exhibits in Altermodern – and elsewhere – that took me on similar discursive journeys. I will instead lend you a series of hyper-links, a network of possibilities, for you to travel.

A new breed of artist believes so. They make art that realises a network of possibilities, rather than a final imperfect solution. Artist's such as Walead Beshty, whose Installation of FedEx Sculptures echoes, in its shattered cubes, the 1927 incident when Duchamp's Bride was disfigured.

Beshty's FedEx Sculptures are a series of shatter-proof glass cubes broken in transit. What makes these boxes different from mere badly wrapped art-objects is the intent behind their destruction. The boxes are shipped by FedEx, rather than professional art-object shippers, from Beshty's studio to each new gallery. Their constant destruction sketches their character as meaningful objects. Each crack a palimpsest of movement, of random intent gathered in transit - between exhibitions. The boxes were exhibited as part of Tate Britain's Triennial, Altermodern, * earlier this year, where I had the opportunity to see them. Peering through the cracked panes, into the voids contained within each cube, I felt like a cartographer tracing lines made by movement and time to the source of an endless ocean.

Like the shattered panes of Duchamp's masterpiece, or the unique voids contained within Walead Beshty's FedEx Sculptures, time and movement have oft been deceived by our perceptions of art. For every artwork, whether considered whole or disfigured, is riddled with tell-tale cracks.

Throughout his second voyage to the Pacific (1772-75) Captain James Cook was accompanied by William Hodges, an ambitious artist whose landscape paintings would serve as a living archive of the expedition. Hodges was amongst the first people from Europe to see the Rapanui monuments of Easter Island, to sail The Cape of Good Hope or shake hands with the Maori of New Zealand. Hodges’ keen memory for light and atmosphere were responsible for much of the romanticism an enthused Europe would languish on Captain Cook’s expeditions.

Some of Hodges’ more unusual paintings were recently x-rayed in the lead up to an exhibition of his work at London’s National Maritime Museum. As well as revealing a wealth of archival information about the artist’s processes, x-ray images of his View in Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay exposed something far more spectacular. There, beneath the painted surface of the luminous rainforest canopy were two giant, white formations stretching up and out of a black swathe of ocean. Hodges, for reasons we will never fully understand, had chosen to paint over the first ever visual record of the Antarctic. The icebergs, having hidden for over 300 years under layers of oil paint, were freed by the roving, radiographic eye of the x-ray machine. The canvas usurped by its own regolithic layer; the history of the event ebbing over an invisible event-horizon like separated virtual particles.

Understanding that the archive is not contained solely in the document does not come naturally. To fully sketch the mimesis of art-objects we must devise better ways to peer beneath their surface. As I write this I am aware of what I am trying to say, and what I am actually saying. There is a gap between, a significant chasm that this text will never bridge. The art-object carries with it a history of its making, a memory of its movement. The art-object is vast in its potential to be seen and re-seen. Whether by accident, or intent, there are always cracks on the surface of an art-object. Some of these cracks may only be breached with new technologies – such as the x-rays that pulled across the void William Hodges' lost vision of the Antarctic. Some of these cracks are allowed to creep onwards by artists who long for their art-objects to develop lives of their own.

In this article I have concentrated on the movement inherent in art-objects. Scupltures and paintings are traditional fodder for this kind of exploration. But what of the text? How is the modern writer, aware of the networks of intent that spiral from her art-writing, best to shatter her work into life? How can we make the text move and encourage it to crack? And how will we read its movements upon its return?

This is a question I currently ponder. A question I hope to explore in Part Two of this article (to be published on Monday, 2nd of November).

by Daniel Rourke

The Early Days of Blogging - Presented at the 2009 HyperText conference, this paper is an extensively cited and well-researched narrative of the blogosphere's formative period. It delves deep into the involvement of Jorn Barger, Dave Winer, and other A-list luminaries.

A collaborartion between Joshua Kaye (composer) and Holly Pester (poet and text artist)

Presidents Birds and Even

At the conception of this project Kaye and Pester created a system of exchange and translation, developing shared concerns for chance operations, periphery speech sounds and the thrill of live performance. By trading sound, text and image material, they allowed the piece to workshop itself out of their (re)interpretation and (mis)translation. Kaye and Pester have engendered not only a musical score, but a hypertextual network of graphic notation, sound poetics and a prolific collaborative partnership.

The piece works as a triptych, with each instant both setting Pester’s text and also conceptually representing each visual poem. The piece is also interspersed with rhythmic interludes.

Baritone – Alex Garziglia

Percussion 1 – Catherine Ring

Percussion 2 – Louise Morgan

I am looking for writings on mimesis in regards new, digital, hypertext and hypermedial technologies and cultures. I am following the redefinition of mimesis. From Plato's disregard of oral culture, through his mimesis of Socrates' dialogues in writing. Following Plato, Aristotle's theory was always a written mimesis, thus the order and processes of representation and mimicry were fundamentally written.

In essence, I am interested in how the artefacts of oral culture differed in their mimesis to written culture, and thus, how our modern move from a written to a digital/hypertextual culture will similarly impact on mimetic embodiment.

(I am also concerned with the terms 'digital' and 'hypertextual' - perhaps they are too narrow. Oral, written cultures and then XXXXX? The terms 'Cybertext' and 'Ergodic' do not seem to cover the ground wide enough.)

I have been reading Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Gunter Gebauer's and Christoph Wulf's Mimesis: Culture--Art--Society. I am looking for writings on digital, hypertextual mimesis, and how it differs, how it has altered, the theoretical embodiment of representation in thought, artefacts, language and culture.

Your help, ideas and advice are much appreciated, as always

This slice in hyperspace follows on from these past posts: How things 'become': The infinity of definitionThe Archaeology of 'The Book'hypertext/?="The Metaphor is the Message" (Part I) ...and is a direct response to this post by Robokku: Temporal Hypertext Time is important in the definition of any model, hypertextual or otherwise. At the moment I am interested in how new technologies allow us new ways to see, to realise the world around us. This constant re-definition of our realities can actually add temporality to mediums which previously had none.

Modern technology has allowed art historians to 'look' at paintings with new, multidimensional, eyes. Shine certain wavelengths of light onto a Picasso painting and it becomes possible to read marks under the surface of the paint. What's more, apply several different wavelengths of light to the same painting and multiple layers, painted by the artist at various different times, become visible.

In a sense, once an available technology has re-examined the painting its process is more obvious: the non-temporal becomes temporal. Each layer is like a snap-shot of the artist's process, their vision, even their 'mistakes'. The laser/x-ray imposes a kind of hyper[textu]ality upon the painting which previously was unavailable (but not absent - only hidden). Of course this causes the art historian to weep with joy, but it also causes an exponential explosion of interpretation from that moment onwards. Any further examination of the painting now occurs in hyper-reference. The painting can never be seen as merely 2-dimensional again.

The example I have given can be extended to countless other mediums and medias. Film has its cutting room floor / multiple editions. Ancient manuscripts have their palimpsestic layers, just as the painting does. In fact palimpsest is THE word to use here, as it applies to all medias.

Examine the outside of an old brick building and very often you will find the outline of a window that was bricked in, a foundation that no longer leads to an out-house, or a patch of brickwork that had to be fixed. Even the photograph has had its dimensionality extended. These are remnants of temporality, just like the layers under the painting: the word is a palimpsest, and I've grown used to using it often.

Now here's the bit which leads back to my original post. and acts as in answer to Robokku's questions...

How does/can this palimpsestic awareness apply to the future of information/expression? The internet contains copies of its former self, hidden not so far from view. Wikipedia has its history section and google has its cache. The Internet Way Back Machine allows ghostly simulacra of webpages to be pulled out of the deep freeze. My 1998 homepage is alive, somewhere.

But is this layering of information the same as a palimpsest? I am not sure. Binding time together with human reality are the narratives that anthropomorphises it. Follow the xray-defined marks under the painting's surface and you can actually see the former brushstrokes of the artist, layer after layer, hour after hour: time is made real in the narrative story of the artist's action.

This kind of narrative arc does not really exist in internet archives. The user is taken out of the equation and all that is left is a username editing the entry on 'Defenestration' for the 12th,17th or 26th time. A ghost of personhood can be seen, but it is far inferior to the powerful force of just one single hidden Picasso brushstroke.

How can we infuse our new metaphors with these narrative dimensions?

I linked to a Seed magazine conversation in my Archaeology of the Book piece that NEEDS to be read (or watched) again and again. Please come back after the layers have realigned themselves and add some layers of your own to this (or Robokku's) post.

Readers: Do you think in hypertext?

The era of the linear tome is dead, information is a web - who'd have thought it - a net of knots in time and space, a palimpsest with infinite, self-referential layers.

I find that the model of hypertext has become the metaphor via which my thoughts, my research, finds form. I can't read one book at a time. Instead I skip between many, following an annotation in one, buying a bibiliographed reference, dipping into books by the same or similar authors in the bookstore, scribbling notes in one book about another. I make the world my internet; the library my world wide web.

Less I describe my journeys in hypertext, how about I carve them in hypertext, for you to explore?

Here's a hypertextual mind-map of some of my recent travels as reader. Click the to interact hypertextually**

I started this post because I am interested in the metaphors we use to model the world. As our understanding of the world evolves, so do our metaphors. As the metaphors shift, so our models are re-moulded in ever newer forms. The forms metaphors take say a lot about the culture they emerged from. The model, in many aspects, is not important: The metaphor is the message.

For example...

Over the millennia religions, philosophers, scientists and psychologists have cultivated countless metaphors for the soul; mind; consciousness. By looking at just a handful of the metaphors that were prevalent at different times in history, one begins to notice fascinating messages about the cultures that bore us:

If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950's I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand after a talk I had given at the University of Utah and asked a question I had been waiting for for a couple of years: "Isn't the human brain just like the world wide web?". The brain always seems to be one of the most advanced technologies that we humans currently have. - Rodney A. Brooks As new technologies/theories are invented, we tend to use them as metaphors to explain the world around us and within us. Consciousness isn't the only human attribute we blindly re-metaphorise.

In recent years the Gaia Hypothesis has become very successful at explaining climate change, ecology shifts or the ever-constant salinity of the oceans as the workings of Planet Earth's immune system. The model here posits Earth as an organism, inspired at a time in history when Biological, Darwinian science was reaching its peak. Newton's mechanistic universe was probably influenced by the technically cutting-edge clocks that ticked so perfectly on his office wall. Richard Dawkins' 'meme theory' of language, for instance, came from a strong understanding of genetics.

Our language itself is packed full of artefacts of metaphor. Phrases and words that have become so absolute in our understanding of the world that we forget they all came from technologies we invented. Think of the phrase "letting off some steam". Or "mapping the territory"? Or "what makes him tick? Or "photographic memory". Engines, maps, clocks and photos have become interwoven into our linguistic frameworks, used to describe anger, ideas, other people's inner-realms and inner-mindscapes.

There are countless other models that grow out of technological or ideological changes. So too do cultural movements, in turn, become inspired by the models of the world that exist at the time. So we had the Cubists working shortly after Einstein's Relativity was being devised, or Andy Warhol reacting to consumerist, mass-produced culture by creating art that was also mass-produced. At present, architects are pursuing design down an organic-pathway, originally laid out by fractal modelling, organic chemistry, and evolutionary theory. Twisting the metaphor of the organism - a concept that philosophers of Biology try to model with their own metaphors - in order to design and implement more 'natural' human environments.

And the metaphors never stop. Mind is now a quantum computer, mind is a neural network, mind is the internet, mind is a hypertext...

And so I come back to my original point, hypertext, or more specifically the application of hypertext as a metaphor for reading, thinking, researching.

Somewhere in the feedback between culture, science, technology and thought there is an idea called 'human' that persists. Trying to raise this idea to anything above a metaphor is difficult, until we come to recognise the ripples in time and space that our models of reality leave in their wake. Tracing those models back through history and off into the future we begin to draw the outline of ourselves and our limitations.

Is it possible to use and abuse a metaphor, like hypertext, to map that territory, to permanently inscribe those lines in the sand? Even as I attempt to form my ideas into words the metaphors keep coming. Can our evolving metaphors of reality, of its perception be plotted? On a map? A hypertextual mind-map? An interlinking system of symbols, signs, cultures, ideas and relationships that feed into each other, grow forward and away from each other, merge and link back to themselves with enough clicks on the metaphorical mouse-button?

What metaphors are the message? and can Space Collective, and internet entities like it, espouse new messages in their models?

UPDATE: Part Two of this piece can be found here: Palimpsests/Palimpsests/Palimpsests

** I created this mind-map with online tool mindmeister.com. It is far from a perfect, hypertextual representation of my thoughts as they relate to books. For one thing, the mind-map can only be manipulated into a tree structure, so that branches move outwards, but never come back to link with each other across branches.

Apart from this, the mind-map is merely a tool for you to explore, click on some of the links ( ) and generally interact with. Mind Meister allows for the possibility of collaborative mind-maps, could there be possibilities for Space Collective Projects etc? If you would like to expand my mind-map then let me know and I can add you in as a collaborator.

The metaphor is the message.