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"d tect" <datatect@gmail.com>

new nature or narrative for a narrative of nature
July 27, 2008 6:49:27 AM CDT (CA)
janet.murray@lcc.gatech.edu
pocock@zkm.de

hello prof. murray

i enjoyed the context you were involved in - contextual media - as i was building a usergenerated hypernarrative work for the documenta (which requires some restoration to allow
login where the timing and tagging (very early) of remote user content to the rhizome of
'broken stories' (life itself it seems) currently at:
http://www.aporee.org/equator
i made this early msql and php1.0 work in uganda africa, live uploads out of africa, and 30%
user uploads from all over
my public lecture introduced by catherine david at documenta ( a first for hypermedia in a
major art context) is at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2634011385918088859 . it
was streamed live in 1997. the text concerning new narratives, database cinema and digital
aesthetics is at http://www.philip.battlix.com/datatecture/Otherlands01.html
in 2001 i built wth students at Hochschule Pforzheim design school what eventually was
business modelled into youtube by the company's first uploaded in 2005, jawed karem. he
describes our use of flash, python and php, and how he had to wait for that in 2005. we
basically put those techs together for a user-generated mashup 3 years earlier, as a narrative
art work at:
http://unmovie.zkm.de
a work for which i wrote a short text - the subject line of this mail - about a. v. humbot, who had
his own metamappings and pasigraphy, etc. this work was feature in the net_condition show
and went on to moma paris and many stops. it uses self-organizing mapping, user session
innovations and rich media in 1999. it's up at
http://www.humbot.org
and the earliest work i did, a sort of precursor to the blog, video blog actually, in 1995, i did in
the circumstances of the canadian remote wilderness. this cyberroadmovie is at:
http://roundearth.zkm.de/arcticcircle
my bio at:

http://datatecture.blogspot.com
i am currently running an artist lab at zkm for some years and have been prof in pforzheim.
however the waning interest in truly translocal media and the incredible lack
of differentiation between databanks and databases, read-only-memory and interaction, esp.
high profile writers like manovich and so much new media and narrative forms that are in my
view not sustainable and are digital updates for drive-ins, what i call drive-in digital media, is
holding back the greening of the media art landscape, and this due to a general
misunderstanding that computers know language, and computer languages, ie python, php,
bash, etc. know scripting, and are not really technical in an industrial age manner. such meta
structure for video and sound and behavior et al are only time consuming and require study
and thought, something that the consumer paradigm that pervades even advanced media
education avoids in favor of short circuit purely local works rather than those designed for a
translocal system allowing local access to be plugged in...
there is little knowledge of what i have been researching in the main academic circle, primary
because that is a circle and not like new media an open network.
i wish you well and again i remember in 1997 or thereabouts enjoying things you wrote or were
connected too, i.e. sociomedia. i own that book and contextual media. why have things
really seemed to run off the rails that these two textbooks attempted to lay out for young
minds?
cheers philip pocock
-datatecture :: data x dwelling