User:Cristinac/moremorenotes

Internationale Situationniste. Wizards of OS4 Online Catalogue

" From 1958 to 1969, the journal "Internationale Situationniste" appeared in succession to the pre-situationist leaflet "Potlatch". This periodical was a détournement by itself in that it camouflaged as an academic journal, complete with theoretical essays, definitions of Situationist concepts and fake-official conference reports of Situationist activities. With its printed permission for free reproduction, translation and alteration of its content, the "Internationale Situationniste" appears to have been the first "Open Content" publication of the world. "

Softness: Interrogability; general intellect; art methodologies in software. Matthew Fuller

Whilst interrogability has obvious implications for the question of open source, I would like to contribute to that discussion by other means. On October 10th 1990 the Artists’ Museum in Lodz, Poland a self-organised group with years of significant work before during and after the emergence of Solidarnosc 41 , and whose activity in the eighties was significantly intensified by that movement, set up an event The Copy Shop by the Hamburg-based artist and member of NOMADS group, Wolfgang Hainke. According to Ryszard Wasko of the Artists’ Museum, “What happened then surpassed all our expectations. There were crowds of people coming to the shop for five days and nights. Soldiers, accountants, clerks came, all of them bringing books, documents,certificates, encyclopedias, souvenirs, et cetera – just to take advantage of the opportunity to make copies free” 42

The photocopier, like the computer, is a manifestation of technical performance and economic bandwidth but these beige pieces of fixed capital are only animated by the use values, atomic particles of the general intellect, that surge up to its glass, continue through it and in doing so refound it. It is important to remember the significance of the breakthrough that technologies for copying made before they were also – as computers linked to networks -technologies for distribution. But to look at this work now is also to understand how machines act as circuits for the amplification and establishment of desire, memory, knowledge, the itchy need to stay still or avoid a loss, to keep up, or to get a job done quick in order to get on with the next cycle of brain-breaking stupidity.

INDETERMINANCY A term proposed by the composer John Cage. The capacity for chance, luck, the user, for background or subconscious dynamics to effect and generate a work.

INTERROGABILITY A quality which allows for properties and dynamics to involve a sensual, critical and synthetic reflection upon themselves, for instance, software that questions what it is to be software, and which draws other elements, such as a user, into the composition of that reflexivity.

RETICULAR Networked, or ‘of networks’.