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The Internet on paper

Image: http://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/images/e/e6/Screenshot_from_2014-10-31_16-21-52.png
Caption: From industrial heartland to the Internet age (screencapture). Promotional video published by The Mundanum, 2014
    
In 1934, documentalist Paul Otlet wrote: "Humanity is at a turning point in its history. The mass of  available  information is formidable. New instruments are necessary for simplifying and condensing it, or the intellect will never know how to overcome the difficulties which overwhelm it, nor realise the progress that it glimpses and to which it aspires". Otlet considered radio, cinema, micro-fiche, phonograph and television all worthy substitutes for the book as information carrier. He envisaged them interconnected into a 'radiated library', an intellectual multi-media machine that would support the publication, consultation and creation of knowledge.
Since 1993, the remains of Otlet's extensive collection of documents are being cared for by The Mundaneum archive center in Mons. Located in a former mining region in the south of Belgium, Mons is also right next to Google's largest datacenter in Europe. Due to the recent rebranding of Otlet as 'founding father of the  Internet', and 'visionary inventor of Google on paper', the Mundaneum has called international attention to his oeuvre. In return, the Internet giant thankfully accepted the gift of posthumous roots, and adopted The Mundaneum.
'The Internet on paper' traces various narrations of media in and around the work of Paul Otlet. It is a contribution in the context of Mondothèque, a platform for experiments by artists, archivists and activists concerned about the way knowledge is produced and distributed today.
http://mondotheque.be


context: http://bek.no/projects/458-the-extensions-of-many-seminars-on-media-aesthetics?locale=en

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the legacy of Paul Otlet.


  Not surprising since Mons is conveniently located next to Google's largest datacenter in Europe.


For the internet giant, discovering posthumous roots in a francophone corner of Europe is convenient too.



This presentation explores the 

As  the responsible archive institute caring for Otlet's extensive card  catalog, personal papers and various archives started to put emphasis on  the possibility of Otlet foreseeing the interent, an internet on paper  or even a Google on paper. For the internet giant, the creation of a  postumous father of information technology was convenient and moreover,  creating francophone roots in a corner of Europe. 



traces many amalgamates of media and history, geography 



The extensions of many
exploring the ambiguity of the notion of media from an aesthetic and technological perspective


Since Google adopted the remains of the Mundaneum in mons, equasions between the oeuvre of the obstinate documentalist Paul Otlet and The Internet have proliferated, creating a postumous father of information technology and moreover, creating francophone roots in a corner of francophone Europe. 

The internet on paper, 
internet giant constructing a European, eand even better, francophone pre-history.
Retro-construction of lineage
Weaving through materialisations of these ideas and 
the First Concept of the World Wide Web ... Google in Paperform

“Humanity is at a turning point in its history. The mass of  available information is formidable. New instruments are necessary for simplifying  and condensing it or the intellect will never know how to overcome the difficulties which overwhelm it, nor realise the progress that it glimpses and to which it aspires,” (Paul Otlet, Traité de Documentation, 1934, p.430).

from document to medium

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"Media-theoretical discussions on aesthetics in recent years gave way to miscellaneous contributions such as those on post-digital aesthetics (Cramer 2013), post-media (Post-Media Lab 2013), 'anti-media' (Cramer 2013), 'evil media' (Fuller and Goffey 2012), or 'no media' (Dworkin 2013). They share one common denominator: the persisting effort for a new theorisation of media and mediality. The humanities' modernist understanding of media as a means of artistic expression (painting, sculpture, photography..) got complicated by importing elements from mathematical theory of communication, and particularly the interpretation of information channel as medium. This semantic ambiguity was embraced notably in the 1960s in the circuits of conceptual and computer art and from the 1990s on in the domain of new media art, which, despite the former postmodern turn, implied a new artistic genre in terms of the exploration of and work with the latest technology as its means of expression. New media artists in turn refuted the criticism of their modernist nostalgia claiming that the relevance of their work resides in artistic research of media as contemporary information, communication channels.

The issue of medium-specifity had been raised in aesthetics on several notable occasions: in connection with dismantling Horace's maxim 'ut pictura poesis' (Lessing 1766), arguing for the primacy of material 'faktura' over stylistic 'manera' in the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s (Markov 1914), or formulating the imperative for the arts to submit to the purity of their respective media (Greenberg 1940). However, the introduction of information theory (Shannon 1948) and the unavoidable inclusion of digital (communication) media in the arts thrown the artistic medium into a paradoxical situation between its agency, on the one hand, as the formal/ materiological determinant of a work of art, and on the other, as a sole transmission channel of mimesis."

Four seminars are planned, each is to feature two invited, 45-60-minute, talks by an international scholar and a researcher working in Norway, followed by discussion. Other invited speakers include Ina Blom, Florian Cramer, Knut Ove Eliassen, Olga Goriunova, Aud Sissel Hoel, and Eivind Røssaak. The events will be hosted by Hordaland kunstsenter ( http://www.kunstsenter.no ). The working language is English.

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First of all, and that was my original motivation for inviting you to contribute, I admire very much that in your moving across let's say art, design and programming, your practice somehow manages to avoid professional(?) bias of each of those fields and instead opens up for something new/different. This is very rare despite all the talk about interdisciplinarity in the arts... art usually always ends up looking like 'art', design like 'design', software like 'software'. Of course you immediately think about all kinds of struggles and insecurities you might have experiencing, still it is something that demands being constantly rearticulated. 

One of the conceptual inspirations for the seminar was an observation Florian made some time ago, when he said that in the arts we tend to confuse two different notions of media - that of communication channels and that of forms of expression (I am only roughly summarizing for now, more in the quote below). Later on he said that what had sparked the realisation was his conversation with a student from Fine arts whom he suggested that she might want to switch to Networked media program. To this she responded, "ah, but I am not interested in those media battles that we have already resolved long time ago." Here's a longer quote from the introduction to a collection of his writings titled 'Anti-Media' (can send you the full e-book):  

"The very notion of ‘medium’, however, is loaded with too much ide- alist legacy to lend itself for onto-technological materialism. There are two almost unrelated notions of ‘media’ that clash in art theory today: the notion of medium as a means of artistic expression, such as painting or sculpture, that has existed in English literature since the eighteenth century and continues to structure the study disciplines of most art academies in the world; and the notion of medium as a carrier of infor- mation that has its roots in nineteenth-century physics. The latter is closely related, as Raymond Williams notes, to the concept of the ether and even older physical concepts such as ‘phlogiston’ and ‘caloric’. 6 (In words like ‘Ethernet’ or the synonymous use of ‘ether’ and ‘radio waves’, this legacy remains alive today.) The evasive concept of ether has been abandoned in modern physics. Likewise, ‘medium’ is hard to define. What, for example, is the medium in radio? The radio waves, or the air carrying them, or its molecules? This choice of definitions is still rather manageable because each of them re- lies on a narrow understanding of ‘medium’ as something in between a sender and a receiver. But when radio as a whole is called a ‘medium’, as is common even in media theory, then this differentiation is void. ‘Medium’ then also encompasses the sender, the receiver and even the editorial staff of a radio station. Aside from radios, TV sets and record players are also called ‘media’, although technically they are receivers; and electronic de- vices connected to the Internet are called ‘media’ although they are send- ers and receivers at once – let alone that the contents received and played back by them, such as music or video, are called ‘media’, too. The tumorous expansion of ‘media’ from something in between senders and receivers to something that includes them all perfectly exemplifies what is called a metonymic shift of meaning in literary studies: when a word, instead of referring to only one particular object, also refers to things that are close to this object (such as ‘paper’ referring not just to the material but to a newspaper, or to an academic essay). In McLuhan’s definition of media as ‘the extension of man’, ‘media’ even grows into a synonym of any technology. The knife of Chuang Tzu’s cook would be, no doubt, a medium according to this definition; a Taoist might perhaps consider cook, knife and oxen one medium to the way (Tao) pursued in the cutting. With their metonymies, terminological fogginess and mix-up of technology and editorial institution, ‘medium’ and ‘media’ become latently paranoid figures of thought – all the more when media theory glorifies them as a speaking subject that fills the void of the philosophically abandoned human subject. It’s tempting to conversely abandon the notion of ‘media’ because of its pomp and fuzziness, but doing so, one would just swing to the opposite extreme. We can’t rid ourselves of the word ‘media’ simply because of its wide use and great impact on contemporary culture and politics; an impact that has become even greater than that of ‘art’. (For the same pragmatic reason, Henry Flynt’s philosophical debunking of ‘art’ doesn’t solve the problem either.) " (pp 12-14)

I thought it would be interesting if you can perhaps talk about the kinds of practices you are engaging with and particularly about the role/ambiguity between communicativeness/instrumentality of delivering a message and 'opening up' fields of possibilities; as well as the language embedded in it (issues such as the prototype, self-documentation, free software, etc.). We will get to editing the publication only some months later, so the talk can be a starting point for a text to be written later on.

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The other speaker on the 18th is Ina Blom who has background in history of visual art and will most probably talk about how the introduction of portable video cameras in the 60s brought about new ways of doing autobiography ("production of selfhood"), while at the same time artists began transforming 'autobiography' of the video itself. Her primary subject is social memory.  

Otlet's vs Google's quest for catalogising world's knowledge is also a story of very different attempts to transform memory. the first was still continuing the librarian legacy (bibliographic organisation of meaningful material), while the other is a project of information science (i.e. algorithmic organisation of numerical data). A crucial difference is of course in on what media they rely on - paper vs computers. I think the adaptation of Otlet's system for computers (which you mentioned is part of the initiative) reveals a great deal about how these two domains differ and yet how one is intertwined with the other. Like with books on one's bookshelf and their electronic versions inside the computer. So in any case, if you would like to talk about your ongoing work on mondotheque, that is very interesting and we have then questions for follow-up discussion as well?