A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés.

Quite the opposite, so long as we grasp the fresh routes to knowledge, and connection, that technological change brings, says Nick Harkaway.

These are old, old fears in a new form. In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down. To an extent, he was right. We do indeed take on and regurgitate information, sometimes without sufficient analysis, and we do use notes as an aide memoire - though even now, when our brains have begun to assume the ability to Google information, studies show we can still memorise facts perfectly well if we know we will need to. But Socrates was also wrong: literacy isn't a catastrophe for knowledge, but a huge boon. It allows us to gain an understanding of the work of lifetimes in short order, preparing the way for research into topics we might

If bricolage is the major creative form of the twenty-fist century, then the archive is its standing reserves. Socrates famously worried about the stability of our memories as we moved from an oral to a written culture, and his concerns have been echoed in the move to digital archives. The pedigree of this technological Socratic shift is deep. When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll on December 6, 1877, he externalized and disembodied a piece of humanity. Jonathan Sterne writes that “media are forever setting free little parts of the human body, mind, and soul” (p. 289). By the time Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, the public was familiar and comfortable with the idea of preserved foods. As a cultural practice, “canned music” in John Philip Sousa’s phrase, was ripe for mass consumption. Envisioning a world without such “canned” media is difficult to do now. We preserve everything. The problem is not so much the authenticity of our entertainment and information, but how to parse the sheer expanse of it. Andreas Huyssen (2003) mused, “Could it be that the surfeit of memory in this media-saturated culture creates such an overload that the memory system itself is in constant danger of imploding, thus triggering fear of forgetting?” (p. 17).

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. This presentation was designed and delivered as part of Coventry University, Media and Communication Department’s ‘Open Media‘ lecture series. Please browse the Open-Media /stream and related tags (in left column) for more material

(Audio recording of talk coming very soon)

Many thanks to Janneke Adema for inviting me to present this talk and for all her hard work with the series and podcast.

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