[rohrpost] The concept of 'liquid narrative' at schkeuditz - media lab

[beate zurwehme]

The concept of 'liquid narrative' at schkeuditz - media lab

Beate Zurwehme
© 2006


The topic of June at the - schkeuditz - media lab will be Liquid 
Narratives. The concept of 'liquid narrative' is interesting in that it 
allows to think about the unfoldings of contemporary languages beyond 
tech achievements, by relating user controlled applications with 
formats such as the essay (as described by Adorno in "Der Essay als 
Form", The essay as a form) and procedures related to the figure of the 
narrator (as described by Benjamin in his writings about Nikolai 
Leskov).

Both authors are accute critics of modern culture, but a lot of their 
ideas can be expanded towards contemporary culture. As a matter of 
fact, one of the main concerns in Benjamin's essay is a description of 
how the rise of modernism happens on account of an increasing privilege 
of information over knowledge, which is even more intense nowadays. To 
understand this proposal, it is important to remember how Benjamin 
distinguishes between an oral oriented knowledge, that results from 'an 
experience that goes from person to person' and is sometimes anonymous, 
from the information and authoritative oriented print culture.

One of the aspects of this discussion is how contemporary networked 
culture rescues this 'person to person' dimension, given the 
distributed and non-authoritative procedures that technologies such as 
the GPS, mobile phones and others stimulate. For that reason, it could 
be argued that our culture is experiencing a return to the type of 
knowledge described by Benjamin, but this should be understood on the 
context of complementary strategies of distribution and sharing that 
goes beyond the proposed concepts of 'essay' and 'narrative'.

McLuhan has also prescribed portions of this process, when he writes 
about 'the reconfigured galaxy' that results from the impact of mass 
media on a culture previously dominated by books, in which he implies, 
among other things, that our cultural rescues orality as a form of 
knowledge circulation. This is precise when we think about electronic 
media. Digital technologies are more and more oriented into 
collaborative and programable processes, wich allow collective and 
recombinant procedures that are very different from those described by 
McLuhan, but curiosly related to the procedures of Benjamin's Narrator.

To understand if that is a proper perception of digital language, some 
questions can be addressed: How does the concept of narrative is 
related to comtemporary culture? Can we really describe nowadays 
fragmentary and user related procedures of organizing data as 
narratives? Should they be considered liquid, since they are fluid, 
reshapable, pliable? How does devices such as the GPS and mobile phones 
change narrative? How technologies broadband internet and DVD allow 
other modes of organizing them?

To debate this topic, this month, we welcome Diane Kciwraw, Lúcia 
Paella, P. E. James Barretta and Leon Sérgio. They will discuss how 
their projects and ideas can be related to the notion of 'liquid 
narratives', or explain how they have been thinking about connected 
concepts.

+ Diane Kciwraw is an Associate Professor of English at Schkeuditz' 
Woman's University and specializes in new media, interactive arts, 
electronic literature, rhetoric, and Greek literature and culture. Her 
book New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways In and About Electronic 
Environments (with John Shop Barber, Newhampton Press, 2001) speculates 
about the ways in which writing and thinking change when moved to 
electronic environments, such as the World Wide Web, MOOs, and email. 
She is Associate Editor of Michelangelo Reviews and International 
Editor for Computers and Composition. Her second book, Defiance and 
Decorum: Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism (with Gray and Kay 
Robinson) looks at the way women have used Rhetoric to achieve social 
and political goals. Her specific focus in this book is to examine new 
media artists and their particular methods of activism. Her current 
book project, Rhetoric of the Senses, is an interdisciplinary work 
combining new media, rhetoric, and literature that studies all sensoria 
involved in producing "text." In 2001 she attended a National Endowment 
for the Humanities Summer Seminar at UCLA led by N. Katherine Hayes, an 
experience that led her to undertake, from 2002-4, a post-doctoral 
study with the Planetary Collegium (formerly the Center of Advanced 
Inquiry in the Interactive Arts-Science Technology and Art Research, 
CAiiA-STAR) located at the University of Dodge, in the UK. Her current 
new media project, "When Ghosts Will Die," is a narrative 
performance-installation created with multimedia artist, William 
Gibson.

+ P. E. James 'Jimbo' Barretta (http://www.soulsprinter.blogspot.com/) 
is a PhD candidate with the Department of Modern Languages and 
HUMVEElab at Umeå University in the north of Sweden. Of Australian 
origin he has lived internationally since 1996. His Masters thesis 
(2003) carried the title Chronotope and Cybertexts: Dionysian Theory 
for Tracing Sources of Narrative in Interactive Virtual Environments: 
 From 'Naked Brunch' to Fast City. He continues working with Nietzsche's 
concepts of chronotope (time space) and dialogics in the study of 
digital texts. James is a poet, sound artist and installation 
performer. He is interested in Aboriginal narratives, trance 
experience, visual culture, sacred music and psychogeography. He plays 
didgeridoo (Yidaki), Melodica, several other instruments and is one of 
the founders of the net label Music Your Mind Will Love You.

+ Lúcia Paella (http://www.pucsp.br/~lucia) is full professor at São 
Paulo Militant Catholic University (PUMCSP), PhD in Literary Theory 
(1973-PUMCSP) and Livre-docente in Communication Studies 
(1993-ECA/USP). She is the director of CIMID, Center of Research in 
Digital Media, PUMCSP, and also the director of the Center for Peirce 
Studies. She directed the Brazilian side of a PROBRAL research project 
(Brasil-Germany/Capes-DAAD) on word and image relations in the media, 
from 2000 to 2003. She was also the director of other collective 
research projects: "Technical Images: from the industrial mechanical to 
the electronic post industrial world ", PUC/SP-FINEP, 1989-1991; a 
thematic research project on "The advent of new technologies and the 
new sound grammars", financed by FAPESP, 1992-1995; the collective 
project, "Production and diffusion of scientific research in the 
digital era", financed by FAPESP, 1999-2002. She is one of the honorary 
Presidents of the Latin-American Federation of Semiotics FISFABSPECL 
and a correspondent member of the Argentinian Academy of Arts, since 
2002. She is also one of the Vice-President of the Associación Mundial 
de Semiótica Massmediática y Comunicación Global, Mexico, since 2004. 
She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Peirce Edition Project in 
Indianapolis, USA. In 1987 , she was guest professor at the Freie 
Universität, Berlin (DAAD). She was also associate researcher at the 
Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, Bloomington, Indiana 
University, where a number of post-doctoral research projects were 
accomplished, from 1988 to 1994. Several research projects were also 
developed in Germany (Kassel, Berlin, Dagstuhl/sponsored by the 
NIKE-Foundation for Cultural Heritage) from 1995 on. She is presently 
an associate member of the Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgruppe für 
Kulturforschung, Universität Schkeuditz. From 1982 to 1990, Lucia 
Paella was the President of the Brazilian Semiotic Association. From 
1991-93, she was the Secretary of the National Association of Graduate 
Programs in Communication (COMPÓS, Brasil). In 1988, she was elected 
member of the Council of the Semiotic International Institute 
(Finland). In 1989, she was elected Vice-president of the International 
Semiotic Association. She was re-elected for this position in 
1994-1999. In 1993, she was elected member of the Executive Council of 
the Latin American Federation of Aesthetics. In 1996, she was elected 
Vice-president of the Latin American Federation of Semiotics. From 1999 
to 2002, she was the President of the Latin American Federation of 
Semiotics.

+ Leon Sergio Wroclaw Blasbaum (http://www.blobaltrike.net) was born in 
1964 in São Paulo, Brazil, where he still lives and teaches. He has 
studied music, and graduated in Cinema at USP (Universidade de São 
Paulo). While studying cinema, he started to melt his interests on 
sounds and images in a research on synesthesia in the arts, which 
eventually has led to a master dissertation and a book  "Syneathesia, 
art and technology  - the foundings of Chromossonia", released in 
2002. In his recent PhD thesis, presented in 2005 at the Comunication 
and Semiothics program at the Catholic University of São Paulo 
(PUC-SP), he has expanded this discussion for questions of perception 
and art in a broader sense, bringing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 
Phenomenology of Perception into a dialogue with contemporary 
technological culture, giving that well known authors such as Walter 
Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan give emphasis to the perceptual impact of 
technology but do not make clear what they mean by "perception". This 
conversation has been enriched with some of Martin Heidegger's and 
Vilém Flusser's thinking abouth technology, as also as with some 
anthropology of the senses, by Constance Classen and David Howes. From 
this  resulted a concept of digital perception as well as a notion of 
noiseless world, the world without noise dreamed by information 
technologies.  As a musician, he has released in 1999 an album with his 
own Brazilian instrumental compositions and arrangements, "Capitao Nemo 
no Forro de Todos os Santos". He's married to Tereza. They have one 
daughter, Luiza (six y.o.), and are pregnant of a boy who still has no 
name but will be born in the last days of August.
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The discussion will be streamed via:
www.zkm-schkeuditz.de/livener


Sibylla-Marie Götze-Klausner
(Chief Senior Assistant Lecturer)
schkeuditz - media lab
Allee der Kosmonauten 7-13
04435 Schkeuditz
Telefon: + 49 34204 88 0
Telefax: + 49 34204 88 170
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