"Nur kommt wohl kaum jemand nach Oslo, dem ich es einmal zeigen kann. Ich arbeite eben, und habe etwas, das ich der Nachwelt überliefern kann. Später kann man einmal das Haus auseinandersägen und dorthin transportieren, wo es jemand sehen kann. Ich habe es so gebaut, dass es sich ohne grosse Mühe in transportable Teile zerlegen lässt. Außerdem arbeite ich einzelne Plastiken und einzlene Bilder..."
Zitiert nach Gerhard Schaub: Kurt Schwitters und die ‘andere’ Schweiz. Unveröffentlichte Briefe aus dem Exil. Berlin 1998. S. 31/ 32 - www.kurt-schwitters.org
dv, 1989 - collage & watercolours - 9,9x14,4 cm -12.553,00 euro (or dollars)
will be varnished at the Inauguration of the Cathedral Scroll
Introduction to Cathedral Building Theory
NKdeE-users: If you want you can join me in writing this introduction in the public NKdeE wiki here. Mail me to get a password for editing or log in, you'll find a link to the wiki with the password. Below is the outline, liable to sudden change.
Both the outline and the text itself is of a nAârty nature.
Links in the outline are in this lay-out:
"...the purpose of this website is to build the Cathedral Game. The Cathedral itself is absent. The purpose of the Cathedral Game is to build or find the Cathedral. The Cathedral wants to be found, but because it is absent it tries to help you (and me) build the game, for instance by creating (or having me create) satellite processes that have a potential of leading towards the Cathedral..."
...that may sound absurd or even crazy, but in fact the only thing weird about it is that i'm using recursive definitions in the language-logic of the sentences above. Ordinary language, and indeed, the whole of nature, is, from a human point of view, (ontologically) full of recursive definitions, this website is being built on a recursively defined idea...
... i didn't wake up one sunny morning with all this weirdness in my head all of a sudden. It happened gradually, rolling downhill like a snowball, until it got so bad that nowadays i mostly wake up thinking 'my god what have i gotten myself into'. I started out last year with a simple attempt to make some web content management stuff to efficiently publish my poems and a few months later i end up with this kind of thing, giving my poor brain all kinds of headaches...
...For instance: I started out including this introduction in my general artistic way of working because it seemed a very artistically interesting way of doing it, but i realise now i will have to allow for some external methods, just to make myself clear and avoid having to complain to everybody that they don't understand what i'm talking about. Being the great genius, or poet maudit, that is misunderstood by his contemporaries might be an ambition for some, i'm just a fairly plain poet from Kessel-lo explaining himself very inadequately about a fairly interesting idea that might turn out to be too big to handle on my own...
But let's get practical & a bit technical first, before i drift of again.You will need some technical info to understand what it is i'm talking about...
[1. About the NKdeE Publishing Framework ]
... the NKdeE is also based on an XSD schema. An xsd schema file is the eXtended language Schema Definition file underlying an xml file that has the schema attributed to it. If you don't know zilch about xml try this url to get you started [link to low-level xml intro]. This means that all the content of the website would go into several xml-files in order to make it easily updatable through a central administration page were i would be spending most of my time whistling away and making art on the fly...
So eventually, as was first intented, the whole of this website will be published by the nkdee java webapplication transforming the nkdee.xml file validated by this xsd schema partly by xml-transformations using xslt stylesheets, partly by Flash movies having the parsed xml data as contents and making representations/soft apps based on those dynamic data.
Basically such an application works like this:
This, a publishing framework based on xml-transformations through java, is all very common practice nowadays in commercial publishing to the internet and elsewhere, and i would be building just another version of existing frameworks doing that (Cocoon,...) if it weren't for the fact that i try to make a framework that would be more suitable for artists and that i'm building it in a very experimental fashion as well.
I'm trying to make that because i need it myself, i want a tool i can work with and i didn't find anything suitable on todays market, probably because i have such a chaotic way of working. As it happens, i'm also a professional web programmer, not that i'm very brilliant in my daytime job, but i am able to get some things up and running in that line of work. In the end i started thinking this could be of use for others too, so if i was going to built anything i could better do it in a methodical way...
It is experimental both in its concepts, the hypothesis i want to advance, as in the way i go about making the thing, the artistic development process. The hypothesis came into being because i started correlating some ideas i knew from ontological, philosophical works by people like Gilles Deleuze, good old Heraclitus, Leibniz and Whitehead on the one hand, the practice of me writing poems somewhere in mid-air, and my daily practice of web-programming on the other hand. The working method is just a systematisation of what my natural artistic flow looks like, but now, sometimes to my utter shame, brought live on a website and infused by the practice of website development habits.
[2. The hypothesis, the development method and its conceptual frame]
[2.1. The hypothesis ]
Hypothesis (it will be extrapolated into it's falsifiable parts further on):[to be revised & expanded]
a/ through an approach i call Data Folding, in opposition to the common object-oriented approach that i refer to with Data Cutting, a more flexible publishing framework can be made, better suitable for artistic purposes.
b/ furthermore, the concept of Data Folding could serve as a valuable addition to common programming practices and
c/ it could validate a sound and positive critique of current transcoding phenomena in our culture.
[2.2. Develepment method: process nAârt]
Again here only the expostion of the method as an argument. The method i follow in building up my testcase of this hypothesis is roughly the following (i'm indicating here what's done already and try to summarize some events on the way):
first i make a draft of the nkdee schema, building on proven schema design techniques as incorporated in Altova's XMLSpy software, providing as much as i can for all possible media in a way that i can think of in abstracto (done)
next i start making a horrible mess of things in what could be considered as a very artistic way of doing things. i start building a website doing several things at a time and wanting to be several things at a time. It's what i consider to be a traditional artists studio, but this time occupied by a frantic net-artist wanting to conquer the artistic scene with the ultimate gesamtkunstwerk. I did enjoy that part thouroughly, although it would be ill advised for any artist wanting to be succesfull in her art to go about her work in such a chaotic fashion. For me, it comes natural, without the aid of computers to correct me, i think i'd get nowhere with anything. So i can assure you, there was no theater involved, i really felt that way.
Here things also started to go wrong a bit, because in this phase i received more interest than i had expected, was invited to enter in competitions, i got mixed up in applying for commission because i started having hopes of making a living as an artist instead of doing the routine of daily commercial programming, etc. All that attention got me in a kind of hypernervous state, wanting to do too much too quickly, while i really didn't have any time at all. Although this was and is exhausting, it also functioned quite well as a stimulant to trigger some connections i probably wouldn't have made otherwise. Luckily i also made some afwul mistakes in communicating about the project: the interest in the project was gone before i realised what had happened, everybody probably just turned away from what was apparently another crank making loud noises about some silly idea. And that, of course. is true, partly.
gradually all the things like poetry, beta versions, sketches of planned modules of the framework, painting activities, start falling into recognisable patterns (for me) of familiar (to me) processes. I know how they work, i can analyse their requirements. This is where we are now.
so now, along with analysis i can start and try to incorporate the artistic processes at work within the xsd schema, expanding its functionality and abstracting the processes to controllable programmed routines. Here the initial difference between the representation of the processes on the website and the actual processes within the website as such start fading, and that's rather significant, i will get back to that as well as to this:I realise at this point that if i should succeed in defining this kind of content creation within the xsd/java web-app set-up, i would end up with a workable prototype of a framework incorporating such strategies as data folding (there's another one but that's just theory at the moment) and perhaps i might even end up with software incorporating basic artistic processes in its subroutines. I just might have found something new here, so not completely free from a hardly modest call to artistic history, i come up with a name for the method, referring to some earlier instances of irony on the heavy jargon in the IT business and artistic circles alike, i call it 'process nAârt' ( as in technoôlogy, artificial intelliîgence, semAântics...just a small hesitation and then your voice singing high, almost slamming through the roof on a repeated vowel in any overused term that's very importaânt these days. Try it, it's fun, and nAârt, like life, should be fun.
the next fase would be to invite other artists to testrun an implementation of the prototype and through feedback collaborately extend and refine the framework into a distributable system, especially in the direction of hiding the more private matters of how artistic processes really take place. I have no reputation to defend as an artist, no one else would very much appreciate to see her internal affairs in public that way, i guess.
[here comes the horrid horizontal RULE, needing to get down, down]
[upper part has been revised already]
In any net content, but most explicit and visible in commercial content, there's a strict division between the data and the representation, the business logic and the representational logic. Data that are processed on a commercial website are methodically mapped to instances of representation. Cut up the data into managed objects, make them relate to nicely sliced up objects of representation. That's perhaps why i get so eaily bored by any Net art project involving data mapping (no offense intended): us commercial guys do it all the time. Now you can mess up the data all you want, and mess up the objects of representation in any organically looking way you want, you're still going to be left with data objects mapping through programmed algorhytms to objects of representation. Sure you can hide the mapping process, play on the human senses, take the viewer's focus away from the mapping process and make her believe the machine is actually doing something like singing a song, composing an original image or even writing a genuine line of pure poetry. Again, we from the commercial planet, have learned our lesson well: a web app hiding it's database, pretending to be the helpfull store manager (with some of the company's #DAEEFE color dilligently placed as a characteristic twinkle in her eye) will sell more products. So we tend to engineer towards more diversity, more complex mapping including AI generic algorythms.
And it seems business information architects and a lot of net artists alike are chasing the same rabbit, trying to convince the audience the machine is a respectful, artisticly inclined citizen, addressing not the wallet, but the human social appetite for beauty.
The NKdeE schema is unusual in the sense that its full of recursive definitions. Usually xml-schema designers, like database designers, avoid recursive definitions because it complicates things a lot, and you don't really need it to get object-oriented software up and running. Mostly recursion will only be found at some lower level of the schema, dealing with such annoying things as having a word of normal text within bold text within italic text having one or two words in plain bold.
In the NKdeE schema recursion occurs in every level, including the root, but there, of course, i am faced with the limits of the XML language, that being conceived as a language of hierarchy (tree structure) needs a unique top node. But i think i may have sufficiently solved that problem with a neat ontological patch, namely by making the root element 'nkdee' a sequence of zero to unbounded number of 'nkdeed'-elements plus 1 and 1 only empty element of 'absence' . I hope to prove later that that impenetrable core of absence will enable programmatic implementation of top-level recursion, although it's more likely to be just another metaphor, a basic language process, often and imho mistakenly, taken to be of high poetic value...
public boolean hasabsence() {
return hasDomChild(Element, null, "absence");
}
//...
public void addabsence(SchemaString value) {
appendDomChild(Element, null, "absence", value.toString());
}
public void addabsence(String value) throws Exception {
addabsence(new SchemaString(value)); }
... 3 java methods of the com.nkdee class as generated by Altova's XMLSpy...
... the concept of data folding is inspired by Gilles Deleuze last major publication 'Le Pli'. I can't go into details here yet because it's a very complex book and i need to go through it again first because else i might make some very silly mistakes. Perhaps this whole website is based on a silly mistake, it might very well be, heck, it had better be because i hate being right, but that's the whole point of science and Art isn't it: try to make something, put forward an hypothesis and present it in a falsifiable way, give it an audience and see if it works by presenting it in a way people can understand what the heck you're making all that fuzz about. In that way i'm constantly working and writing on the edge of my ignorance, another idea i got from Deleuze, so it's most likely my big balloon will go down with loud but harmless sissing noise anytime now...
...data folding, as opposed to the current practice of cutting up information into managable objects, is an approach to reaching the goal of a more 'human', process-oriented way of dealing with information. In stead of cutting up information, it tries to capture the flow of information and 'fold' it unto a predefined scheme. These schemes have controllable levels of effectiveness, based on their being able to validate information flows being processed. Information that is valid to the scheme, could then be used further in the system built on it...
... As i said, this will mostlikely turn out to be just a crazy idea, but then that wouldn't matter very much, the art is in the making, there is no way, there's only the walking that needs to get done: Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar, Luigi Nono spotted this piece of graffiti, probably inspired by poet Antonio Machado, on a monastery wall in Toledo, Spain, and made it his adagio. Besides, i can always adapt the main hypothesis or throw it away altogether if it gets falsified beyond repair, the main point being to find a way to get more process-oriented thought into programming practice, because i feel that we need that very much and urgently...
... for this website to work as a piece of Art, all of this explaining needs to be superfluous. It should be self-evident from the moment you start browsing these files. In order to accomplish that, i need to get some things working, the data folding way. I'm a long way from that, so i'll need plenty of time.That's why i'm constantly nagging away at everybody for support. Any kind of support will give me more time to work here instead of having to make product catalogues for my customers all the time. It's a fun job too, but it isn't what i really want to do, and business is going bad these days, anyway.
In the meantime i do need some kind of audience for what i'm doing, because i like making things and showing them to people because the things i make tend to be better or more beautiful then the person making them...
...the actual Cathedral of erotic Misery is the absent core of this website, an active process that is conceived as being a center because this website and the processes it reflects holds the Cathedral at focal point. In the end, the Cathedral is the core only because i, as Central Authoring Process, want it to be the core. I do this because i consider any focal point (or Point of View) to be of equal potential, but i like Schwitter's work a lot and i like the idea of a Cathedral too. Anyway, very unlike me, Schwitters was a genius so his title pretty much sums up the essence of art, don't it?
Eventually, you could compare this strategy to mankind, or the individual person, looking at itself as the center of the universe. We all know we aren't, but we do it anyway, because else there isn't much left to say or do...
...I can't tell you what that game will look like or how to play it because the game is defining itself in the building process...
...this website is very 'literary', because i still think of myself as a a writer mostly, but for me publishing literature or art or what's left of it the 'old way' through established publishing channels is not a very relevant thing to be doing these days (although i might consider doing just that some ugly day, only to promote these files): i do have the highest respect for people doing that, but it's not something for me. I would welcome some small scale low-cost edition in print for some poems, ...
...perhaps that sounds rather presumptuous to some people, i don't really care to be honest...
...to read or 'understand' poetry is to create the reality of absence, information refusing to be informative, thought without presence, irrecuperable resistence. I wouldn't know about real intelligence & human language capabilities & all that, but i do believe that machines, given the right software, can do this bit too: create the reality of absence, i mean, contradicting its own purpose in a way, so you could write software that interprets machine-readable data in a manner that creates some kind of poetry, not necessarily in spoken or printed language. That will not turn machines miraculously into artificially intelligent thingies suddenly, with a humane sense of poetry and/or religion, it's all about finding a practical approach to getting process thought translated to programmable algorythms so that we can use machines more efficiently...
... Building such software might become an escape route from the catastrophical in contemporary human-machine interactions.
It can most certainly function as a valid critique of current transcoding phenomena in our culture (TransWhat? transcoding, the projection of dominant computer inspired concepts into our everyday lives, put simply it's that awkward feeling in your belly you get because we are forever being forced into non-existent higher levels of object organisation in order to (re)gain control, an utterly senseless race, the true objective should be a change of state in some major processes, rather than a false trancendence into further distortion)...
...Postmodernisme has lead to a situation where all too often any speculation on these subjects is immediately conceived of as useless or even detrimental to our search for solutions in urgent matters such as keeping earth alive the next 50 years. I'm a poet so you could have guessed i would be telling you that research on the process of generating meaning is the key to solving some of those problems. Of course i have a host of very impressive people backing me up on this claim, but i'm a rather stupid guy myself so i'll just be making some of my modest art most of the time, playing between gigantic toes as those kolosses of human creativity tred steadfast to a brighter future...
...people interested in very radical experiments with new media will be dissapointed, perhaps, because my work is very traditional in a way. The only thing 'newish' about it is perhaps ( i wouldn't know, i don't get out much any more) is that i take current website-making-conventions & commercial 'best practices' as a workable basis to make art from ,or at least i pretend they are because, well, they aren't very much, are they? That's a reason for my modest development efforts, anyway ...
...on the other hand, literature as software or vica versa is a quite radical statement , i suppose. the whole of this website being conceived as a software process with my writing/painting/general messing about & your using the website as inputs & the Cathedral as output. Well, poets do have a tendency to get megalomaniac in every move they make, it's something we need in order to create logic into something that doesn't exist. i'm no exception, so if it gets too bad, too embarrising, just look the other way, listen to the art floating around the wreck of our Titanic, see the sounds of our mournings cristallyze in midair, feel our sweet poison creep up your vains & ...
...the NKdeE was initiated on september 27, 2004 at 0:50, its conception is documented here...
... Maurice Scève's presence in the blog part is another matter, i guess he's here to remind us what text and poetry is (or was, if you're in a pessimistic mood) all about. He'll get his own spot later, on the side, looking down...
... no i don't have high hopes for this site, when you see how many eggs dear mother nature needs to get one baby turtle safe & back into the sea, there isn't much reason to have high hopes for anything, is there. Besides there's just too much of a huge gap still between the audiences for traditional art and the net art scene, at least where i come from, for this site to be a 'success' (it needn't be, the process has started)...
...& then, websites are in many ways horrible media for any content: you'd have to produce a user-friendly miracle each three seconds in each file to get hold of the users attention span for longer than that if you're not selling anything...
... nothing's fixed (more and more so everyday, i might add) , so click around & do give some FEEDBACK (give votes, make comments, write mails...). I don't use the word interactive because once you're at a computer, things get per se interactive, so it doesn't mean anything. What i mean is that you're invited to participate in whatever you see or hear & i do need your feedback as a resource for further experiments....
... i do still strongly believe in 'authorship' as something essential to art: the authorial process can coexist with collaborative processes & i do applaud all those (net) art initiatives that invest in collaborative art, but it's not something i want to do. One of the reasons for making this website is trying to build some things that would enable other authors to use the net more freely and independently. Blogs are fine, but most authors i know want much more, like being able to easily make spatial montages (Manovich's term * ) like the PLAZA or like simply making a decent animation without having to learn Flash for two years. Some of their wishes will remain unanswered, & i will only be able to offer the tiniest of contributions, but some of my efforts might show some possibilities...
... in a way this is a bit of an inverted building process because it produces garbage instead of being made from it...
... on the other hand i think some authors are too darn lazy as well & i do think that if you want to make art work for you these days, you need to at least understand & master the basics of such diverse disciplines as drawing, writing, performance, working with sound and video, image processing, publishing to theinternet as well as have some notions of programming. The only alternative is admiring your artistic genius in front of a blank computer screen and waiting for it to be miraculously uploaded somehow. There are some who believe that may be possible some day, & yes i did enjoy watching the Matrix too, it is a nice fantasy...
...if you want to interact with my graphics & literary stuff seperately or in a more traditional way (sic), visit the REDUX version, although i'm sure you'll notice the difference is only a very thin layer of very recent conventions that we have all adopted very rapidly, more out of necessity than because we want things to be this way. As usual, what we really want is a whole different ball game, & i do hope that through sheer luck i can offer you some glimpses from time to time...
...This website is my humble piece of open source art-dev, it welcomes the idea that art can be made useful in conjunction with science and technology and that every result should be shared with all for free because we're all on the same survival trip, so support it if you can and you feel i'm doing something useful.
And if you like the art amidst the dev at all, please register: registered users will get more out of this site in the end, so why not register now? Besides: it's free, there are no commercial strings attached ...
...anyone wanting to read more on how my very slow mind deals with the theory and practice of cathedral-building visit the International About Blog: that's where i mutter myself through it, writing out loud, eyes wide shut...
All texts on this website are nAârt texts, meaning among other things that they are being published as they are written, instantly, continously: there is no editing or seperate correction stage whatsoever, any editing is integrated in the writing process. If a text stops changing after a while it's because i think it has reached a sufficiently stable state or because i lost interest in the subject. Text can start changing again at any time, even years later, like some of the poetry i'm rewriting atm.
Soap City, Episode 56 :
Spinbad turns on Clio to reveil some deep S on Turner as the whole of philosophy has gone to the Dogs,but A's having fun with some Topologoi nonetheless, while Bridget's corpse is still decaying, annie bursts out in a B-song because the audience audaciously keeps humming you can't draw feet now can you you can't draw feet now can you and Francis of course is once more nowhere in sight. Someone though keeps nagging about suture, the future of infinity oh do shut up & listen the Byrds are having a conversation, diego make a note of that will you The
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