The Immediated Now on Networked: A Networked Book

Networked: A Networked Book on Networked Art is now live.

Produced by Turbulence.org and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Networked includes a chapter that I wrote entitled The Immediated Now. Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality.

In this chapter, I suggest that network culture is not limited to digital technology or to the Internet but rather is a broad sociocultural shift. Much more than under postmodernism, which was still transitional, in network culture both art and everyday life take mediation as a given. The result is that life becomes performance. We live in a culture of exposure, seeking affirmation from the net. My chapter explores the resulting poetics of the real from YouTube to the art gallery. To be clear, the new poetics of reality is different from established models of realism, replacing earlier codes with immediacy, self-exposure, performance, and remix.

One distinctive feature of this book is that it is open for comments, revisions, and translations and you may submit a chapter for consideration by the editors. I hope my readers not only read the entire book, but contribute. Many thanks to Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington of Turbulence.org for putting up this project. It’s been in the works for a while and is sorely needed. 

I’m excited that the research that I did for this chapter is now taking on another form as it feeds my book on Network Culture. I’ve been writing 1,000 words a day and its moving at a good clip. I hope you enjoy the chapter as a preview, and if you haven’t read the introduction yet, you can do so here.   

Finally, I’ll also confess to another role in the project, which is that the CommentPress system, developed at the Institute for the Future of the Book came in part out of a discussion that members of the Institute and I had after one of my courses three years back. That said, WordPress isn’t the best system for this. I’m dying for it to be ported to Drupal.

 

Networked: A Networked Book on Networked Art is now live.

Produced by Turbulence.org and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Networked includes a chapter that I wrote entitled The Immediated Now. Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality.

In this chapter, I suggest that network culture is not limited to digital technology or to the Internet but rather is a broad sociocultural shift. Much more than under postmodernism, which was still transitional, in network culture both art and everyday life take mediation as a given. The result is that life becomes performance. We live in a culture of exposure, seeking affirmation from the net. My chapter explores the resulting poetics of the real from YouTube to the art gallery. To be clear, the new poetics of reality is different from established models of realism, replacing earlier codes with immediacy, self-exposure, performance, and remix.

One distinctive feature of this book is that it is open for comments, revisions, and translations and you may submit a chapter for consideration by the editors. I hope my readers not only read the entire book, but contribute. Many thanks to Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington of Turbulence.org for putting up this project. It’s been in the works for a while and is sorely needed. 

I’m excited that the research that I did for this chapter is now taking on another form as it feeds my book on Network Culture. I’ve been writing 1,000 words a day and its moving at a good clip. I hope you enjoy the chapter as a preview, and if you haven’t read the introduction yet, you can do so here.   

Finally, I’ll also confess to another role in the project, which is that the CommentPress system, developed at the Institute for the Future of the Book came in part out of a discussion that members of the Institute and I had after one of my courses three years back. That said, WordPress isn’t the best system for this. I’m dying for it to be ported to Drupal.