Design Documents - Q&A 2

Matthew Fuller: I think we've had throughout the day a number of different kinds of documents, different kinds of vocabularies, different kinds of methods that are generated in order to draw together projects varying in scale, varying in style, varying in approach; different kinds of grammars and relationships between objects that are deployed; different kinds of political relationships and the construction of actors with those schemes and methods. So does anyone have any conclusions or suggestions they would like to make?

Question one [Femke Snelting]: I've been thinking about language throughout this day but as well previous to this occasion, and today came up the trouble of owning words; who can define "hacker", who can't. The desire for a common vocabulary and the problem of buzzwords. To me, the disappearance of vocabulary, somehow it gets tossed around so much that you cannot own it anymore. And even people feeling hurt about someone saying you do not own that word anymore. We agree that the debate about vocabulary or words is interesting, for me that is where interdisciplinary work becomes interesting because it is about redefining, but what I was wondering is, as language is always owned is there something like a pidgin or creole, a shared language, is there some Esperanto of sharing we should develop, does it exist, or what would be the place to think about that?

McKenzie Wark: [Audio drop out]... is there a reason that we now need these processes that are not markets? Because markets do certain things well and don't do certain other things. They are not bureaucracies. Bureaucracies do certain things well and don't do other things. Here we seem to be defining a third set of practices that are much more qualitative and complex but at the same time needs to compete against markets and against bureaucracies of ways of doing things. But I think you are right language and another use of language becomes very central, but I think it is closer to a popular sense of what poetry is, rather than administered language or a corporate language.

Matthew Fuller: If there are no further questions I think it is possible to reflect on the transcripts as they emerge, and Todd [Matsumoto] will be working on that extremely fast over the next few days, so you will be able to provide feedback on them, and if there are no further comments I would like to say thank you very much coming.