Distance Makes the Art Grow Further: Distributed Authorship and Telematic Textuality in La Plissure du Texte
Symposium:
Session Title:
- La Plissure du Texte
Presentation Title:
- Distance Makes the Art Grow Further: Distributed Authorship and Telematic Textuality in La Plissure du Texte
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: La Plissure du Texte
Roland Barthes’ canonical statement contains an understanding of textuality that lies at the center of this chapter and indeed informed the project it sets out to describe. The term telematics has its origins in the 1978 report to the French president by Alain Minc and Simon Nora concerning the convergence of telecommunications and computers, particularly in business and administration. Distributed authorship is the term I coined to describe the remote interactive authoring process for the project La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale, which is the principal subject of this text. My purpose here is to explore the genealogy of the project, how the concept of mindat-a-distance developed in my thinking, and how the overarching appeal of the telematic medium replaced the plastic arts to which I had been committed as an exhibiting artist for more than two decades. The project arose in response to an invitation in 1982 from Frank Popper to participate in his exhibition Electra: Electricity and Electronics in the Art of the XXth Century at the Musèe Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the fall of 1983.
Popper had written previously on my work, and I was confident that his invitation offered a perfect opportunity to create a large-scale telematic event that would incorporate ideas and attitudes I had formed over the previous twenty or more years. La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale (LPDT) sought to set in motion a process by which an open-ended, nonlinear narrative might be constructed from an authoring “mind” whose distributed nodes were interacting asynchronically over great distances—on a planetary scale, in fact. As I examine it in retrospect, I see how a complexity of ideas can create a context for a work whose apparent simplicity masks a generative process that can bifurcate into many modes of expression and creation. It is the bifurcations of ideas speci.c to the context of LPDT—their branching and converging pathways—that I shall initially address in this chapter. The content itself is transparent, insofar as the text in its unfolding is its own witness.
