Joanna Berzowska founded XS Labs in 2002 at Concordia, where they focus on “the development and design of electronic textiles, responsive clothing, wearable technologies, reactive materials, and squishy interfaces.” Previous to XS Labs, Berzowska studied and worked at the MIT Media Lab, and she co-founded International Fashion Machines with Maggie Orth. She holds a BA in Pure Mathematics and a BFA in Design Arts.

The kind of work that Berzowska engages in is profoundly interdisciplinary and crosses distinctions that we might automatically put up between design, industry, art, and theory. Her work has been shown at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the V&A in London, and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, among others. Her lab at Concordia is located on the 10^th floor of the EV and is part of the textiles cluster.

I met Joanna Berzowska for a coffee in St. Henri on December 10 to discuss wearable technology, her experience working at the MIT Media Lab, the agency of things, and what she believes is important for building an interdisciplinary space.

First of all, why do you call XS Labs a “lab”? Instead of say a “studio”? With International Fashion Machines, for example, I notice they call themselves a “company” — why “lab”?

I think part of the reason I originally called it a lab was just out of habit, because I was at the MIT Lab, and “lab” implies a kind of research culture… I’m thinking about it right now, because I guess I’ve never thought about it in depth… So part two of my answer is that it was a very direct, easy way of referencing research culture. Part three is a very strong emphasis at the time — when I was hired by Concordia fourteen years ago — to re-brand the institution as a research institution as opposed to a teaching institution. So when I was hired, I was basically told, your teaching doesn’t matter, your service doesn’t matter, all that matters is your research and how much money you raise. I think it was a turning point for the university, it was like the institution swung one way, because very strongly it was trying to position itself as a viable research institution at the time. Since then, the pendulum has really swung the other way. Now I think with the new president, Alan Shepard, he’s trying to find a comfortable middle that supports research as well as entrepreneurship, but at the same time recognizes that Concordia will never be a pure research institution and that’s what Alan always says — we can’t compete with McGill, we can’t compete with Ivy League–type schools, Concordia is unique. But when I was hired, the push was really, for a year or two, it’s all about research. So that’s part three of my answer, which is political in a sense. Going back to part two, it was important that “lab” reference research culture in a direct way, especially being in the Fine Arts, where, at that time, all the funding bodies and all of the potential sources of research income did not recognize what we now call “research-creation” as a viable way of working.

What’s interesting is I originally called it “XS Labs,” and even within that there’s an embedded critique. “XS” official stands for “Extra Soft” and it’s about soft circuits, it’s about soft electronics, but of course when you read it, it also sounds like “excess,” so there’s an embedded critique of a kind of contrast between a lot of research in Humanities, which is inherently critical of how we apply technology or how society embraces new changes, and then research in let’s say the sciences or Engineering, which don’t question it as much, but really just pursues innovation. The reason I chose the word “XS” was to have this critique. A lot of what I’m doing is in Engineering, science-type research, and we’re just going to put as much electronics as we can into all of these textiles and wearables, but, being in the Fine Arts, I’m also aware that we have to do so in a very deliberative, interrogative way, and question it at each step of the way. So that’s very much the tradition of XS Labs. And also, since XS Labs started, it’s XS Labs, colon, and what comes after the colon has evolved. So now I do refer to it as a design research studio. I’ve examined every couple of years the kind of work that we do, and these days I call it a design research studio, but the name is still XS Labs, so I guess I just want it all [laughs].

You’ve worked with the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group. This semester we’ve read a bit of Stewart Brand and have talked about California ideology and its very utopian take on technology. I read in an interview with you [with Jake Moore] where you were talking about researchers such as [Steve] Mann or [Hiroshi] Ishii who work with wearable technology in a way where it’s an exoskeleton or a kind of protective layer. And I was wondering if “Extra Soft” is a response to this kind of ethos that came out of working with the Media Lab and this situation where technology is celebrated as utopic and where wearable technology is something protective.

Yeah. So at the Media Lab there was definitely a strong gender divide actually, between how wearables were tackled by male researchers — and also, maybe coincidentally, the female researchers had more of a background in design or the arts. These are all stereotypes, which unfortunately were instantiated in my experience. So, women who I worked with, like Elise Co, Maggie Orth, who was my business partner for a while, Amanda Parkers, who came later, who’s now very active in the space, and then the dudes that I worked with, who were Brad Rhodes, Thad Starner, who ended up working for Google Glass, and Steve Mann, who’s a prof now at U of T [University of Toronto] — the women had more of a design and art background. I’m not saying it’s necessarily because of gender that they were more in touch with embodied sorts of questions, perhaps it was because of their past training, but maybe the past training was tied to gender. There was in fact one woman who was a really hardcore engineer, she still is, and she worked with Ros Picard [Rosalind W. Picard], who’s also a woman and also a hardcore engineer, so maybe the background training is more relevant in terms of the women that I worked with who were more interested in what we now refer to as embodied interaction, and considering the body as crucial — they were interested in textiles and the surface of the skin and what I now call beyond-the-wrist interaction —

Beyond the wrist…?

Whereas the dudes were really interested in things that you can manipulate with your hands and head-mounted displays, I was more interested in what happens on the rest of the body. And in many ways what happens on the rest of the body can be considered as dirty or sexual or smelly or provocative, so that doesn’t fit as easily into an Engineering research model, where you don’t have a specific problem to solve. And of course there are many problems, like how do you track baby kicks during a pregnancy, or whatever [laughs]. But, I certainly was more interested in the textiles, the rest of the body, how can we embed computation in textiles rather than attach devices to our bodies. And one corollary of that is also an interest in simpler kinds of computation. So, you know, the more cyborg approach to wearable computing basically strives to develop a computer as powerful as possible that is wearable and portable and now we have them [points to phone recording conversation] — these phones are kind of that, right? So, keep in mind this was twenty years ago, and the idea was, how can we take our computer with us all over the place? And now we do it with our phones, it’s funny. But back then, it was basically, you had to put the hard drive in the backpack, you have to take it all in pieces, have a huge antenna for your satellite GPS, etc. That’s wearable computing very literally, where you wear the same kind of computer that you have on your desk, whereas with my electronic textiles and the soft computation, it wasn’t a computer as you know it from your desk, but computation, how can you have wearable computing that is about simple kinds of interactions or simple kinds of functionality that are more interested perhaps in well-being or pleasure or just everyday experience or communication rather than just taking your computer from your office. That’s where the Extra Soft comes from, and there’s so many references, because also there’s hard science versus soft science.

It also sometimes seems like a lot of wearable technology aims to be “corrective” somehow, but you’re not really trying to “correct” the body. You’re trying to do something different.

“Extend” is usually what I say, whatever that means. Or not bring about some huge productivity gain or something but instead allow us to experience the world in a slightly different way.

To go back to the lab for a minute, is XS Labs one lab space or is it a series of lab spaces now in the EV?

Going back to the lab I realized there was something else that I wanted to say, so I’m glad you brought it up again. Another reason why I called it a “lab” is also that I wanted another way of working with my students. Traditionally in the Fine Arts when you work with grad students, they work on their own individual projects and you maybe advise them, you provide critique, whereas in the sciences and Engineering, they’re research assistants and you pay them for their time and they work not on your project but on a group project. I remember when I first came I was always using the plural “we” even though I only had maybe one research assistant, and people were very surprised, they were like, why aren’t you saying “I” or “my work,” and it’s because I was coming from a research lab culture, where every research paper that’s published has multiple authors, and you don’t work alone, ever, so that was another reason why I wanted to call it a “lab” and to train the students that I hired to not think of it as a job but to think of it as a collective inquiry that everybody will be credited for and everybody will benefit from. There were a lot of issues that we came up against of course where there was confusion between what would be their own individual practice and what is the research lab practice, so I tried to have very specific guidelines around how we credit, what people can take credit for, and how everybody had to credit everybody else’s work, and that’s a whole other kind of discussion.

In terms of physical space, we’ve always had one space that’s shifted over the last fifteen years, that’s smaller or larger, that was like our headquarters. Then through Hexagram and other facilities we needed to use or have access to other spaces either through the more technical work we needed to do, like the weaving, or, at one point, I was collaborating with a prof in Materials Science on Nitinol, so we had all of these other spaces where work was done, mostly leveraging specific facilities and expertise. With Materials Science we needed specific furnaces to shape the Nitinol and quench it. We’ve got different kinds of looms or laser cutters. Or, collaborating with École Polytechnique, we’ve had some of our students there developing new fibres. But we’ve always had this little central headquarters. [Nitinol, “also known as muscle wire, is a shape memory alloy (SMA) of nickel and titanium that has the ability to indefinitely remember its geometry”; it is used, for example, in XS Lab’s Skorpions dress.]

When you yourself go into the lab, do you have any daily rituals that you find yourself performing there?

I’ll just say that I was Chair of the department for three years and now I’m on sabbatical and I’m pregnant, so what I do now does not reflect historically. Maybe I’ll just talk about the previous ten years, when there was a strong routine and a strong practice. I always had my days organized — certain days I devoted to teaching and office hours — certain days to service — meaning all the committee work, etc., and all of the research assistants who worked with me, some of them were grad students, some of them were undergrads, some of them were affiliates, there was really a wide range of different ways that I worked with students and research assistants. We had one weekly meeting, where everybody was expected to attend. So that was a sort of ritual where we’d touch base and I would give goals and guidance to everybody for the week. I also had somewhat of a hierarchical structure, where students who had been there longer would be responsible for training some of the younger students, and by younger I don’t mean age, but the newer ones. A lot of the culture in a research lab isn’t about hiring skilled personnel, it’s about training HQP [Highly Qualified Personnel], that’s what we write in the grant proposals [laughs]. So I hire students with potential who don’t necessarily have the skills that I want them to have, and part of what we do is train them. I would pay them to take workshops or classes, but I would also really expect them to teach one another and I would hire very complementary kinds of personalities who could teach each other, and the work is intrinsically interdisciplinary, which is where I think you’re going with this anyway. So that kind of collaboration was really crucial to the success of the work.

I’m very interested in research-creation. Would you say there’s any divide in your work between the research and the creation? Do you have a space more for inspiration and a separate theoretical component, or is that tied together for you?

It’s really tied together because the creation is about questioning technology and doing things with technology that were not possible in the past. So for me, creation is not about what colour is it — let’s talk about garments since we make a lot of those — it was never really about, what does the garment look like — it is, what would it mean to have a garment that moved on your body and moved in an uncomfortable way? What would it mean to have a garment that needs energy but doesn’t have batteries and needs to harness energy from the environment or from somebody else’s body. So for me that’s the creative aspect, and then being able to formulate that into a research question that leads to a successful research grant proposal. And then, working with a team that is very creative, so that the potential answers to these questions that we suggest can be described as beautiful or evocative or playful. And they do get invited to be shown in galleries and museums, which I guess is sort of the institutional stamp of approval for the creation side. I’m not an artist. I’ve never had a solo show as an artist. I really think of myself much more as a researcher. But a big part of my dissemination happens in museums and galleries.

So you wouldn’t consider yourself an artist, but you show in galleries? And your inspiration is not so much connected to the fashion, but connected to questions about technology?

Yes. Like how can we really break down what a garment is. Or what a textile is. And how can we use all of these emerging materials that are being used in aerospace or the automobile industries or whatever, but use them in garments. What kinds of new functionalities would they enable? New forms of expression. New ways of connecting with one another. But also, how would they help us understand the world in a different way? Question the world. The project Caption Electric and Battery Boy is really about questioning our dependence on energy and batteries and portables. The major point there was to create garments that are sort of ridiculous and uncomfortable. And the thematic that runs through it is one of fear and paranoia and fear of natural disasters and protection, so it’s deeply linked. And then in order for me to be able to raise the money that I’ve raised that’s more from the sciences and Engineering, there’s always a very strong scientific or engineering innovation in the project. And I would feel like a fraud if there weren’t.

Do you think with working on very highly funded projects, with industry and with big labels, do you see that as in any way compromising your vision? Or extending it? Do you find that working with big industries provides a positive constraint or something where you have to really compromise your creative work?

It’s a different kind of vision. I don’t see them as contradictory. The obstacle to work in my experience has just been the really kind of overwhelming bureaucratic aspect of administering large research grants at the university, where I ended up just spending so much of my money doing paper work and filing reports and filing expense reports in a thoroughly inefficient way… Industry can’t afford to have the same kind of level of inefficiency that we have in academia… They would go out of business. So that’s super refreshing. Of course then we have a board of directors that we have to answer to. We have to show a business model that would be profitable with an X amount of years. Whether that business model involves being acquired by Google or having sales or whatever, I mean that’s another questions, it’s the VC [Venture Capital] world.

That’s interesting, because usually we see the academy as the place where we can sort of nurture our bigger ideas and industry as a place where we have to compromise. But that’s not your experience?

It’s different ideas. But what’s really exciting is there’s different kinds of industry. And right now with the start-up culture around new technology, it’s all about innovation and wonder and discovery that, sure, you have to have a business model, but that can be viewed as a benefit rather than an impediment… I’ve also worked on projects with creative studios. So industry doesn’t necessarily mean military or medical devices. Industry can also mean Cirque du Soleil. Or working with PixMob, which is a great company, some of my ex students started it. So industry, sure, has to have a business model, and if it’s not profitable, it will go out of business, but it doesn’t mean you don’t innovate or you don’t do exciting work. And sometimes innovation is actually stifled in academia because of all the bureaucracy and paper work. I’m being provocative of course. Because all of the assumptions you’re bringing to that question are true, but there’s also that other side.

You said you don’t see yourself as an artist. What do you think the differences are between art and design?

Everybody is going to give you a different answer. But my answer these days is that art is about one individual and design is about multiple individuals. And of course people will argue with that and I will change my mind eventually, but that’s how I think about it these days. So for me, design fits a lot better into this research model where we have multiple authors for each project. It’s almost like thinking of the research work as a theatre performance, or a play, or an orchestra, where you have a conductor, but then everybody gets credited for their own role. Whereas I find a lot of the art research-creation, it’s still about the one person who takes credit for everything even though they might have a team of people working with them. But also for me design is perhaps a little bit more concerned with the tools, the materials, the processes, rather than like the final moment of showing the piece.

So in design there’s more of a process?

No, it’s not that there is more process, but the process is almost more important than the final piece, for me, okay. Whereas the way that I think of art is that the final artefact is given more importance, culturally. In design research, the process, the materials, the steps you took, are maybe just as important or even more important. And especially when you look at that whole movement of speculative design. Or critical design coming out of the UK, with people like Dunne & Raby. In fact, there isn’t really a final outcome, but it’s all about these trajectories and interrogations and asking “what if?” and showing these speculative processes. Or experimenting with materials. But not necessarily building up to the one artefact that will go into a permanent collection somewhere.

But say with industry you would need to eventually produce an artefact—

—Yeah, you need a product—

—Or else they would be like, “where’s your product”—

Well not necessarily, because also patents are a very viable outcome of industry work. So I’m writing a lot of patents right now with OmSignal. And those aren’t artefacts. That’s IP [intellectual property] that has a high monetary value.

In your work, for example in your Skorpions dress, you describe the dress as parasitic and the wearer as a host, so a lot of agency is given to the actual items that you create. Do you see what you do as somehow aligned with biotech? These garments are almost coming “alive”?

To me, a lot of interaction design I find problematic around the idea that the human is always in control or needs to always be in control versus the idea of giving up control a little bit. And maybe that’s also just a personal philosophy as well. With being a mother. Raising two kids in this very unusual sort of circumstance where I’m not their biological mother but I’m their full-time mother and yet I don’t have the same kind of control… So I think for me, my personal life experience has also influenced the way that I think about interaction design… It’s less about biotech and more about control.

It sounds a little like actor-network theory. We read this also in communication with Stewart Brand. And the fact that objects or technology can dictate the way things go, not necessarily just the human.

One of my favourite quotes from Sherry Turkle is that computers aren’t just a projective medium, but also a constructive medium [See Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster), 1984]. You control or project your desires on them, but they also shape what your desires are.

So it’s a collaboration in a way between the human and the technology? And this is maybe freeing?

Well, the reason I can do these things is that I’m not in an Engineering faculty where each project has to be about solving a specific problem that is then quantifiably successful or unsuccessful. I can produce these projects that exist in this much more qualitative research space, whatever that means. I don’t have to have tables and graphs for each project that I make…. I don’t need to do those kinds of quantitative studies for my research, which allows me to explore these questions that are more — sometimes I say they’re poetic — I don’t have a very rigid theoretical structure for how I talk about these things. But it’s definitely great to have a freedom not to need a quantifiable result at the end of each project.

Is there anything about your lab that you would like to change or that you find problematic? Say, in terms of space?

When we were in that corner space on the 10^th floor, that was too small. At one point if you can imagine I had about twelve people working in there with all kinds of sewing machines and electronic stations, so that was nuts. The thing that makes a space successful is to allow everybody to feel ownership over a portion of the space. You need everybody to feel like some small portion of it is their own. To develop a level of trust where people can leave things without worrying about them being either stolen physically or the ideas stolen, so actually working on a culture of collaboration and trust is really important. Definitely in my particular discipline where we need machines there’s always going to be the need to go to other spaces to use different kinds of specialized machines or facilities. But the space itself — it’s more about the culture you create in the space, about exchange, about giving, and the way that I fostered that from the very beginning is by having a lot of parties and 5à7s. It’s all about building trust.

All images taken from the XS Labs catalogue.

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The point is to build environments that are “not complicated but rich.” At the TML, we live with our designs, within our responsive environment.

Interview with Navid Navab
Associate Director in Responsive Media, Topological Media Lab
Research-Associate, Matralab
Multidisciplinary Composer

The Topological Media Lab (TML) is a large, open space with polished concrete floors and a long wall of windows punctuated by various hanging plants and black-out curtains. The room is canopied by a maze of light bulbs, microphones and wires that dangle from the tall ceiling, all of which goes unnoticed if your eyes are preoccupied with the other strange and wonderful objects that inhabit the lab – on one low coffee table, a deer skull sits nonchalantly next to a Rubik’s cube and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.

The first time I attempt to locate the TML, I find myself wandering through the shiny halls on EV 7, pondering the chaotic numbering systems of the future. Lucky for me, Navid Navab – multidisciplinary artist, “media alchemist,” thinker/maker – embraces chaos (and knows these halls well). Navab, who is also Associate Director in Responsive Media at the TML, kindly fetches and leads me to room 7.725, the space where he works, researches and creates. We speak at length about the design and philosophy of the lab, as well as the various projects that have been explored there, and are eventually joined by Michael Montanaro, co-director of TML and chair of Contemporary Dance at Concordia. The conversation is both delightful and at times mystifying. I begin to jot down terms like “gesture bending” and “subjectivation,” planning to Google them later…

The dance/new media projects that have emerged out of TML are what first piqued my interest in the lab. The “Shadows and Light” sequence in TML’s Einstein’s Dreams (2013) presents a space in which performers interact with media as they move through the space, “dragging” pools of light with their bodies as they dance. Another example is performer/creator Teoma Naccarato, whose past research with TML has contributed to her practice, which integrates contemporary dance with interactive video, as well as audio and biosensor technologies to navigate material and virtual scenarios.

Einstein’s Dreams (2013), a TML Collaborative Project

Several weeks after speaking with Navid and Michael, I decided to ask a few more questions, via email. Navid’s writing style is almost identical to his mode of speaking; he meanders deftly and with charm between topics as diverse as teamwork, dance improvisation, operating theatres for surgeons, grant-writing and Felix Guattari. Because of this, I’ve provided a glossary of terms at the end of the interview to help readers navigate.

Here’s what Navid had to say:

HB: What is the Topological Media Lab?

NN: The TML (Topological Media Lab) was established in 2001 as a trans-disciplinary atelier-laboratory for collaborative research-creation. In 2005, TML moved to Concordia University’s Hexagram research network. Following the departure of the founding director Sha Xin Wei in 2013, the TML was restructured to sustain as an autonomous laboratory for the critical study of media art and sciences at Concordia University.

As articulated on our website, TML’s projects serve as case studies in the construction of fresh modes of knowledge, bringing together practices of speculative inquiry, scientific investigation and artistic research-creation. Currently, TML’s technical research areas include: responsive environments, active media, computational-materials, and gesture bending. Its application areas lie in movement arts, speculative architecture, and experimental philosophy.

The TML is both an atelier and a laboratory for research in improvisatory gesture from both humane and non-anthropocentric perspectives. Our atelier research investigates the process of subjectivation, agency and materiality from phenomenological, social and computational perspectives. It approaches this by suspending assumptions about what we think are egos, humans, machines, objects, and subjects. Instead, we consider the transformations of things, and see how these things emerge through play and process. This method is informed by a continuous (rather than tokenized object/grammar-based) approach to material change, hence the “topological” aspect. Topology is concerned with the non-metric (non-numerical) properties of space and the continuous, dynamic relationships through which space is constituted.

HB: How did you originally become affiliated with TML?

NN: I first become affiliated with the TML in 2008 as a curious student — occasionally dropping in, apprenticing with inspiring thinker-makers — and shortly after as a core artist-researcher and co-author of projects. I was given sufficient autonomy to freely innovate my own voice and in a few years I was initiating and leading multiple research streams of my own. Each research stream would investigate a particular question or phenomenon that interested me, which I would explore through organized discussions, intensive material-computational research-creation, and eventually through live experiments, workshops, engineered software environments, published works of art, and peer reviewed publications. The studio-lab supported these diverse activities both intellectually and logistically, thus enabling my pursuit of passionate and radically fresh art-research without having to constantly defend these investigations in institutional language (e.g. of disciplines, granting agencies) or in terms of the market.

Over the years my activities have enriched and shaped the environment of TML, leading to my role as Director in Responsive Media, in collaboration with the lab’s current co-director Michael Montanaro.

HB: How many other people are involved regularly at TML?

NN: TML welcomes curious passersby to drop in and engage with its ecology of practice. TML’s long-term research-experiments are driven by a small group of 6 or 7 actively present members: directors, administrators, core artist-researchers, and research-assistants. We are also in constant exchange and collaboration with our international partners at top institutions and centres around the world. Additionally, TML hosts a continually shifting and returning array of newbies, apprentices, students, artists in residence, visiting scholars, international partners, artists and hackers.

HB: What are the practices that happen at TML on a daily basis? How does knowledge emerge out of the TML and what is the material form of that knowledge?

NN: Practical domains for art research at TML are:

theory: imagine, make, explore, articulate and evaluate concepts rigorously
art: ethical-aesthetic gesture and creative ways of being with others
technique: (for) collective innovation, improvisation, and play

The TML stores group knowledge, an apparatus structured by ongoing experiments, from which members take what they need in order to make experiments, and to which they contribute pieces that others can use in the future. The apparatus is made up of various components such as physical things, material samples, software, documentation, videos, reports and procedures.

The TML is not a production facility for individual art projects.

It is a place for building sketches and experiments with larger ambition for impact, and which requires the collective talent, expertise, and energy of a small team. The TML is a nexus for art-research (neither art production nor technology development) with a family of themes with philosophical or critical value such as:

– ethico-aesthetic play
– distributed agency
– materiality
– gesture and movement
– phenomenology of performance
– critical studies of media arts and sciences

These themes are elastic and have evolved over the years around the joint interests of an affiliate community of artists, researchers and philosophers who engage with the lab. These themes also take material form, as works of art, performances, engineered instruments or systems, essays, peer-reviewed papers and documentary videos.

Besides making stuff and overseeing research experiments, we also situate TML’s activity within the contemporaneous global context, and locate funding for our affiliate researchers so that individual members can pursue their work with more autonomy and freedom. In exchange, we expect work of world class quality (not student class project work) which should aspire not merely to tech art venues (such as Ars Electronica), but also to real world, socially embedded situations.

HB: How does the material space of TML affect the products and processes that occur within the lab? 

NN: Some of TML’s experiments use active lighting and acoustic conditioning systems to change the apparent physical qualities of interior or exterior space. The point of this work is to build environments that are, to quote Xin Wei Sha, “not complicated but rich.” The TML space was designed from the ground up by the founding members, Sha Xin Wei and Harry Smoke, to handle demanding and diverse sets of events and technological structures. The configuration of the space is itself continually shaped under ongoing research. At the TML, we live with our designs, within our responsive environment. Our research-creations are thus always put into unscripted play and place. This approach results in responsive designs that at once address everyday functions, inform ambient aesthetics and enable virtuosic improvisations, all within one holistic, responsive environment — the TML itself.

Our designs and concepts are not invented in a “black box” and they are not made with black-boxed technologies; they are co-articulated through TML’s ongoing dynamic and spatial apparatus that is never turned “off”: a responsive environment full of rich contingent activity.

Therefore, the space at TML is itself a live apparatus for enacting knowledge in a collective fashion. Projects conducted in the atelier draw on and also contribute to ongoing research in the computational and natural sciences, seeking to understand the dynamic interplays of social, psychical and material space.

(Consider Navab’s delightful description of the “ecology” of the Topological Media Lab in the imagined scenario below)

…a visiting person’s shy manner of walking into TML gently perturbs our responsive ecology—very much the same way a lost traveler’s careful steps in an autumnal forest perturb the surrounding life, resulting in fields of distributed activity. A few researchers and artists are busy making stuff and a group of people at the far corner of the lab are participating in a seminar. Through the responsive environment, the inhabitants of TML are gently made aware of a different-presence in the lab and yet this awareness—this ambient behavioural resonance—does not cost their full foci of attention. One research assistant walks to the new comer to welcome them into the space….

HB: What is the difference between the Topological Media Lab and the other space where you are affiliated, the MatraLab?

NN: TML and Matralab occasionally collaborate on projects, share talent and often support each other in large-scale initiatives. Despite their partnerships and similarities, the two labs are however completely independent of one another, each with their very particular and unique vision, process and agenda. Matralab is a research space of inter-x art directed by Sandeep Bhagwati, “dedicated to using interdisciplinary art practice to bridge the gap between emerging art forms and their aesthetic reflection.” Matralab’s core activities revolve around experimental musical events, and comprovisational environments to name a few. Matralab’s research is leading to the establishment of a practical and theoretical framework for the creation and evaluation of interdisciplinary, intercultural, intermedial and interactive art.

HB: How important is dance/movement to the work done at TML? I know you work with dancers regularly – can you talk briefly about what it’s like to collaborate with dancers?

NN: One of TML’s strategic goals is to transpose insights from movement and performance into the design of durable, everyday situations, and experimental environments. We leverage our pre-verbal intuition of physical materials and embodied knowledge to explore the ways in which bodily relations are felt and understood. For example, we do experiments that explore when movements can be regarded as volitional rather than accidental, and when movements—perhaps among multiple bodies and things—can be regarded as a single gesture. The emphasis is often on continuous, unanticipated movement that may be improvised freely by those within the conditioned space.

Our ongoing GestureBending* experiments explore how everyday gestures can become charged with symbolic intensity and used for improvised-play.

Close collaborations with dancers and performers are extremely unique and precious opportunities for rigorous co-creation, refinement, and embodied evaluation of gestural media and responsive environments.

What is evaluated is the media/matter/environment’s potential for play—in its ability for allowing boundlessly open sets of a priori gestures and experiences by the participants to acquire expressive, playful and poetic force. If successful, participants’ gestures not only lead to unexpected meaning and instrumentality but to narratives about and recognizing daily life and the material world as a platform for play and for refined practice.  Such a design approach allows for any potential movement at all by the participants to turn into a potentially co-expressive art-event. This removes the burden of modeling the human experience through mimetic performativity and instead allows for such notions as gestural meaning, intentionality, expressivity, noise, musicality, and even performer, performed and spectator to freely arise from the context established in the moment of performance.

So in a sense—to maximize improvised co-expressivity and synergetic play— it is helpful for performers to unlearn presumptions about what it means to interact with responsive media and instead maneuver embodied intuition, to improvise gestures as they already always have in continuous media like fabric, flesh, water, air, and mud. When designing performative media (an installation, instrument, or a responsive scenography), even when rigorously staging theatrical events with virtuosic performers, who are welcome to incorporate or invent their own very unique sets of  gestural vocabularies, we maintain the position to never model or presume, at least in our design metaphors, what constitutes a gesture or a body. We condition performative events that potentialize improvised play, always working with a priori non-anthropocentric movement and contingent activity. Therefore solo dancers, groups of passersby, and even non-humans objects and subjects are all treated (computationally and conceptually) as fields of stuff and process. Within this continuously responsive field—fusing humans, non-humans, media, matter, and energy— solo dancers as well as other (non)human performers can improvise nuanced gestural expressions, co-constituting and enacting one another in the ever-changing field that forms them!

At TML’s recent GestureBending workshops, resulting from my ongoing collaboration with expert dancers, participants discovered that their everyday movement can create intricate sonic textures and developed their own unique vocabulary of sound generation to sculpt musical events via intuitive movement and embodied engagement with computationally enchanted materials. Leveraging the GestureBending apparatus, renowned TML performance works such as Practices of Everyday Life | Cooking symbolically charge everyday actions and objects in ways that combine the composer’s design with the performer’s contingent nuance.

What we are suggesting is a holistic shift from representational technologies to performative media, from nouns to verbs, from objects to fields of matter-in-process, from a priori concepts to processes that enact concepts. To adapt Mcluhan, instead of encoding and decoding a presumed message we are enchanting the medium!

I chose to close my interview with a question about dance because I am fascinated by the potential that interactions with new media hold for dance and the moving body, and I know that TML is also intrigued by these collaborations. When Navid explained GestureBending to me in person, he flung his left arm out into space and asked me to imagine a sound that followed from the movement of his body, unexpected, off in the distance, as if resulting from his thrown arm. A performer improvising amidst a soundscape such as this would be affected by the sounds their own body was “producing,” thus enlivening their own improvisational impulses. With GestureBending, sound (or light, or some other vibrant force) is shaped by the dancer (controlled by their movements) and likewise the dancer’s movements are shaped by the elements that interact/play with their body. The space of the Topological Media Lab, with its hung lights, mics and sensors, and its smooth, clear floor, perfect for movement through space, is an ideal space for this type of improvised “duet,” a fact which underscores the importance of built space to the forms of knowledge that can emerge out of the lab.

Glossary of Terms:

Topology: A mathematics term for the study of open sets in which a given set is a “topological space.” Topology is developed out of geometry and set theory and is interested in the the deformation, stretching, transformation and bending of space and dimensions through a concept of connectedness. For example, “a circle is topologically equivalent to an ellipse (into which it can be deformed by stretching).” 

Subjectivation: A philosophical term/concept invented by Michel Foucault and explored further by Deleuze and Guattari which “refers to the construction of the individual subject.” Also corresponds to Althusser’s concept of interpellation and is sometimes called “subjectification.”

Gesture Bending (Navab’s definition): A generic term coined by Navab, which refers to the poetic transformation and enrichment of gestures through instrumental augmentation or technical mediation of movement. The goal is to continuously enact persuasive conditions for the transformation of networks of meaning production in the embodiment of movement. Pervasive Gesture Bending can potentialize improvised-play, leading to emergence of conditions that could invite performers to synergistically improvise with a hybrid expressive force.

Speculative Architecture: This book review may help to define this complex term.

Black Box Systems: A device, system or object which is defined by its inputs and outputs without consideration or knowledge of its inner workings. This term is most often used in science, computing and engineering, and can be applied to many objects, like a transistor, an algorithm or even the human brain.

Comprovisational: Navab’s term for compositional techniques used to explore blends between fixed composition and free improvisation with interactive performance systems.

Ethico-Aesthetic Play: Navab uses this term to adapt Guattari’s concept of the coming into formation of subjectivity (or Subjectivation, above), through an engagement in art, dance, performance and improvisation. In Xin Wei’s words, “to conduct philosophical speculation by articulating matter in poetic motion, whose aesthetic meaning and symbolic power are felt as much as perceived.” 

Find out more about the Topological Media Lab on their website.

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By Sabah Haider

In this interview for the graduate seminar HUMA 888: Mess and Method [Fall 2015, “What is a Media Lab?” edition], Sabah Haider, PhD Student at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University interviews Dr. Erica Lehrer, Director of CEREV and Associate Professor, History and Sociology and Anthropology (joint-appointment), and Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Memory and Ethnography & Museology, at Concordia University. In this interview, Haider seeks to gain insight from Lehrer on how interdisciplinary research engages with technology and the fast evolving Digital Humanities.

EL: First of all, I should begin by saying that CEREV is in the process of separating itself from our lab space, which itself is being renamed the Centre for Curating and Public Scholarship. I didn’t want my own preoccupations with difficult, contested histories and cultural issues to dominate a lab space that could be accessible to many more users who share my concerns with using exhibition or curatorial work as a form of public scholarship. So in the future CEREV will be one of a number of units and groups of people using the CCPS lab platform. It was also a question of stability. There is no lab work without lab funding supporting lab staff, and the model we had was too narrow to be financially sustainable.

SH: The Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence (CEREV) is a media lab that fosters the intersection of many disciplines/disciplinary approaches to produce broader understandings and to challenge existing understandings around ideas of the exhibition of trauma and violence. On the CEREV it states the centre was established “to create a community of researchers and curators and produce new knowledge around issues of culture and identity in the aftermath of violence.” In relation to the practical side of this — how can you describe or explain how knowledge is produced at CEREV?

EL: Different kinds of knowledge are produced at different nodes in the network of sites and people that make up CEREV. We have an incubator room with computers, and more importantly a round table, where postdocs and students (and sometimes me) meet and talk; we have our exhibition lab, where curatorial experiments and public presentations take place; periodically we have large-scale public exhibitions at various local or international sites; we meet in homes or cafes or my office for more casual mentoring chats; and then we have our website and Facebook page. These are all parts of “the lab,” and the spatial aspect is centrally important to what kind of knowledge is produced, and who participates in its production. I would say that knowledge is produced individually in reading, looking, and thinking; it is produced socially in interdisciplinary, multi-level, and inter-subjective dialogue, negotiation, constructive mutual challenging (sometimes uncomfortable), and in shared experience among differently positioned people; it is produced in a process of making, building, and experimenting with various media; and (for those who only come into contact with things we produce) I hope knowledge is produced in inspiration and the generation of new ways of thinking and seeing. For me the key to “lab-ness” is the special process of collaborative creation – we all help each other to think through and envision a product even if it ultimately is put out into the world under a sole author. I’ve always liked (and used) Gina Hiatt’s manifesto, “We Need Humanities Labs.”[1]

SH: How does CEREV engage with digital technologies to stimulate this? Since the lab’s creation in 2010, has there been an increasing interest in also exploring relevant digital forms and practices, in parallel with the growth or expansion of the digital humanities (DH), particularly as the DH has spawned a seemingly infinite number of digital tools that facilitate new types of exploration?

EL: Playing with new technologies can generate ideas, and that’s why we have our indispensible Director of Technology, Lex Milton, who crucially has a background in educational technologies. He’s an excellent muse, who can listen to logo-centric humanities scholars and help them think about how they might expand and “curate” their projects in productive ways by imagining what technology can do. But I’m not so compelled by projects that use technology as a starting point – or perhaps I mean humanists are not best-positioned to start from everything that “can be done” and then try to figure out how to use XYZ bells and whistles in their own work. Rather I think we do best when we have a particular problem we want to solve – like getting multiple voices or perspectives visible/audible around an object, or getting people who are far away from each other into dialogue, or creating options for accessing and exploring massive archives of information in a single space, or moving people emotionally – and then thinking about what might help us do that. This is when dialogues between humanists (or social scientists) and people with technical and creative skills are most productive. We dream aloud, we share our challenges, and they suggest possible solutions using the technologies that exist. And we humanists push the tech people by asking them “do you think you could make it do XYZ?” It’s a really exciting dialogue, and the final products are always something neither party could have envisioned on their own. We stretch each other.

SH: What are some of the emergent media forms that the lab has incorporated/is incorporating? How can you describe the materiality of the CEREV space? (i.e. mobile, virtual, etc.) What kinds of material forms (i.e. forms of output) does the knowledge produced at CEREV take? What types of ethnographic experimentation has/does CEREV facilitated/facilitate?

EL: I alluded to the various materialities linked to the CEREV lab above. We do have a couple of dedicated physical spaces, and the exhibition lab in particular has a lot of technical tools – projectors, mobile screens (some of them touchscreens), iPads, surround sound capability, etc. – as well as analog ones like pedestals and screens and curtains. And then lots of recording equipment for still image, video, and sound. We facilitate whatever kinds of technology-enhanced fieldwork people want to do, which includes documentation as well as bringing various pre-produced media to field sites, or to co-produce media with various research interlocutors. The forms of output range from ideas to lectures, blog posts, scholarly publications, videos, and exhibitions.

SH: Most of the work of CEREV affiliates appears focused on themes of meaning, affiliation, curation and exhibition. Trauma and suffering, as you have identified, encompasses victims, perpetrators and bystanders or observers. Has/does research at CEREV explored/explore all three of these perspectives/positions — or relationships between them?

EL: I would say yes, we’ve created work looking at these positions and their interrelations. PhD student Florencia Marchetti has been creating field-research-based videos made at a site of a former detention and torture centre in Argentina, which she then uses to seed discussions among the people who today live nearby – some of them were bystanders at the time the centre was operational and they are bystanders to memory today. Students re-curated the video testimony of a Montreal Holocaust survivor to explore victim narratives and their forms and uses. And my own work has dealt with how to raise difficult questions that implicate audiences in their own collective “perpetrator-hood” regarding historical violence and its contemporary legacies or ongoing prejudices. These are just a few projects but they cover all the positions you mention.

SH: What does it mean to have this kind of space as an interdisciplinary scholar — a ethnographer/historian/anthropologist?

EL: It’s mostly challenging. It makes one realize how comfortable text is – both in terms of the limitations of creating it and its relatively limited reception. When you have to deal with capturing and transmitting so many more dimensions of experience, and when such a large public audience can respond (and challenge) what you create, one is confronted with the limitations of one’s own view.

SH: Has anyone outside of your research community (i.e. from the wider “at large” community taken interest in your space, and if so why and how?

EL: Yes, people from various communities, like the Black community in Little Burgundy, or members of the Armenian, Palestinian, and Jewish communities, as well as AIDS activists are just some of the groups that have seen in the lab a space to gather to create and debate representations of history and culture relevant to their own groups. You can read a bit more about the projects we’ve done in the lab, and my own trajectory, at: http://cerev.cohds.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Abell-interview-with-EL.pdf

// END

[1] Hiatt, Gina, “We Need Humanities Labs”, Site URL: <https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/26/we-need-humanities-labs>

FOR A FULL PDF OF THE INTERVIEW CLICK BELOW

HUMA 888 Interview_CEREV_Erica Lehrer_by Sabah Haider

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BFC – BigFriedChicken’s Cook and Sort machine

How does the BFC Vanilla edition sort cooked chicken, feathers, and eggs into specific chests?

An industrial cooking and sorting machine. This device is the soul of the BFC and automates the process of collecting, cooking, sorting and finally storing cooked chicken, feathers, eggs and any anomalies (ie: dirt blocks, uncooked chicken, etc) into containers (chests).

To begin the process, the chicken brood is enclosed over hoppers (in our case, 3), these hoppers are placed so that they output towards the next hopper in line, with the final hopper output dropping down into a dispenser.

The dispenser will not shoot out eggs unless it is powered. 

The mechanism that powers the dispenser is a circuit designed to launch eggs once they enter the dispenser through the hopper chain.  The circuit uses a comparator in the “compare signal strength” mode in order to compare the state of the dispenser with the feedback signal to detect incoming eggs and to power the dispenser to fire them. 

In “compare signal strength”, the comparator is off but

will compare its rear input to its two side inputs,

and so it is important that the comparator is properly configured so that its rear input faces the dispenser’s rear (figure 1).  

Figure 1. The comparator rear output is connected to the rear of a dispenser

Figure 2. The arrows show the circulation of power. The comparator will try and compare values on either side of it but cannot compare the repeater on the side because its power follows a linear tract. The X shows that the connection is not established and therefore ignored.

When there are objects in the dispenser, the comparator will compare that amount to its side inputs, these being red stone wire and a repeater. The comparator does not compare the signal to the repeater because the repeater’s output does not face the comparator (figure 2).  

The comparator compares the value in the dispenser to the red stone circuit to its left.  A repeater, its input towards the comparator, controls the rate at which the signal passes through the red stone circuit to ensure that the comparator’s signal does not instantaneously turn on the red stone wiring. This ensures that the comparator’s signal will be stronger than the red stone circuit.

Ex: if the dispenser has one egg, the comparator has a value of 1. It checks it’s side inputs and the red stone circuit will have a value of 0.  1 is bigger than 0, and therefore the Comparator turns on. 

In the second example, I explain one of the reasons for using a repeater directly after the comparator. Although not necessary, the repeater ensures that the red stone does not instantaneously power on when the comparator does.

Ex 2: the dispenser has one egg, the comparator has a value of 1. It checks it’s side input and server lag or a malfunctions, and because the system does not have a repeater to delay the signal, its value also appear as 1. 1 is not greater than 1 and therefore, no power. Without power, the dispenser does not do anything.

When the comparator turn on, a signal passes through the repeater, which delays it by a fraction of a second, and circulates both left and right on the red stone circuitry. On the left, the signal powers the red stone adjacent to the comparator and powers the red stone to 1. As we have seen, when the comparator and the red stone next to it have the same value, the system turns off.

Simultaneously, the right side powers a repeater, that powers a block which in turn powers the dispenser which shoots out the object (egg). By shooting out the object, the dispenser value decreases and as a result the comparator turns off.

There is no danger of overflow of eggs into the dispenser because the hoppers only ever allow one item to transfer at a time. This ensure that this system constantly turns on and then off for each egg.

Figure 3. Chicks on top of a slab and a dispenser dispensing lava.

The dispenser shoots the eggs into an enclosure to produce chicks and from them, cooked chicken. The eggs are launched into an enclosed chamber over a hopper with a half slab, some hatch as chicks. The chicks are therefore elevated above the regular block level and only have a half slab area to circulate. Since chicks are only half a block high, they can move freely. A full block above the hopper, contains lava produced by a dispenser (figure 3). This dispenser is powered by toggling a button – while ON it produces the lava, and OFF it retracts the lava. Since a fully matured chicken is a block in size, once the chicks grow up, they surpass their half slab of livable circulation and the lava cooks them. In most cases the dropped item, cooked chicken and feathers, will fall through the half slab and into the hopper underneath it which is positioned with its output towards a chest. In some cases, the dropped item will burn.

A row of hoppers aligned with their outputs towards the next in line, lies beneath the chest (figure 4). The hopper pulls the items out of the chest and down the conveyer belt. The last hopper at the end of the belt has its output leading down into another hopper that leads down and into a chest. This chest, at the end of the line, will collect any surplus items that are not configured in the regular sorting system.

Figure 4. The conveyor belt hoppers each have their output leading towards the next hopper. This ensures that items move fluidly.

Figure 5. Conveyor belt hoppers, sorting hoppers, and chest. Note that the red torch is ON, at the bottom, to indicate that the hopper is locked and will not pass down items.

Beneath this conveyor belt of hoppers are three evenly spaced red stone sorting circuits designed to store specific items into their respective chests. The system works by taking advantage of a hoppers ability to lock when powered and to draw similar items within its inventory and use it to power red stone. In this way, when items travel through the conveyer belt, specific items (in our case feathers, chickens and eggs), will fall down into a lower hopper when they match (figure 5). 

Hoppers work by shifting items in it towards its out put. In the assembly line, the items are pushed left, but, if there is a hopper underneath a hopper, items will fall down. When a hopper is empty, any items may travel through it, such is the case for the last chest on the conveyer belt. This chest collects any material our three configured hoppers will not collect. These configured hopper’s slots have been filled with 21 sticks and one chicken/feather/egg which is located in the first slot.

When a hopper’s slots are filled, it will try and collect additional material first through the first slot. For the sorting machine to function properly, one chicken (or desired item to be sorted) must be at the beginning of the slot line so that the hopper will constantly look for it. This hopper is specifically designed to allow only one item to travel through it (and into the next hopper below it which deposes it into a chest) at a time. This ensures that the sorting machine will never collect any sticks, but always the primary slot item.

Figure 6.

Just in case,

ex: 1 chicken, 6 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks (figure 6)

One chicken from the conveyer belt falls down into this hopper: 1 new chicken + old chicken = one chicken falls down into the lower hopper and into the chest before the hopper locks again (I will explain that process shortly). We still have 1 chicken, 6 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks and therefore the sorting machine will continue looking for chickens and not sticks.

Alright, so we now understand that the cooker function with a “compare signal strength” comparator coupled with repeaters to launch eggs into an enclosure that will hatch chicks that will cook when they mature into chickens. The cooked chicken then falls into a hopper located under the enclosure, into a chest, and then is sucked into the hopper conveyer belt which will then sort them into four categories: chicken, feathers, eggs and everything else. But how does the sorter work? Where does it obtain its power and ability to transfer only one item at a time down from the sorting hopper into the lower hopper and into the chest? Why don’t all the items in the sorting hopper (1 chicken, 6 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks) not fall down also? The answer, a comparator and repeater process again.

Figure 7. The comparator is on “Measure block state” mode. Out put towards the red stone wire. It is difficult to see, but sparks are coming out of the first block to show that it is powered. The second block of red stone wiring is not sparking.

Instead of using a “Compare signal strength” (CSS) comparator as we did with the cooking section of the BFC, the sorting area utilities a “measure block state”(MBS) comparator and its output facing two blocks of red stone wire (our circuit material). Unlike the CSS, the MBS “will treat certain blocks behind it as power sources and output a signal strength proportional to the block’s state.” This allows the user to control how many items fall into the lower hopper, and ensures that the sorting hopper does not empty itself out into the lower hopper. But how?

Alright, so the hopper is locked using a red stone torch set ON. The comparator has only enough power to power ONE of the red stone wires (figure 7). When one cooked chicken falls down into the sorting hopper, the additional power of one chicken will power the second red stone wire block, which will activate the repeater that will turn off the RED STONE TORCH long enough to allow one item to fall down into the unlocked hopper before locking again. The repeater ensures that only one item falls down at a time so that the sorting hopper does not empty itself out.

How does the comparator generate energy? Why does it only power one block when we have 1 chicken, 6 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks, 5 sticks, but two blocks when there are two chickens?

It is not readily obvious how this works, but a member of the Minecraft Wiki community shared this mathematical formula to explain how to calculate signal strength from any given item.

signal strength = truncate(1 + ((sum of all slots’ fullnesses) / number of slots in container) * 14)

1 + ((sum of all slots’ fullness)/number of slots in container) x 14 = amount of red stone blocks that will be powered.

To begin, we must calculate the amount of items in our hopper and divide each by their full amount. In our case, the items we are using all stack up to a maximum of 64.

1/64 + 6/64 + 5/64 + 5/64 + 5/64 = 22/64

22/64 = 0.34375

0.34375 divided by amount of slots in a hopper (5) = 0.06875

0.06875 x 14 = 0.9625

0.9625 + 1 = 1.9625

Truncate this number and we get 1

therefore, this formula powers 1 red stone block.

It is important that the non-truncated number is 1.9625 because with an additional chicken, the truncate is 2.

22/64 + 1/64 = 23/64

= 0.359375

= 0.071875

= 1.00625

= 2.0624

truncate 2

With the second block powered, the repeater turns off the torch long enough for one chicken to fall down into the chest and return the power to 1. The sorting machine absolutely needs two blocks powered for items to fall.

Why not use other items such as signs that stack up to 16?

Using signs or other items that stack up to 16 actually impede the machines functionality:

ex: 1/64 (our chicken) + 2/16 + 1/16 +1/16 + 1/16

1/64 + 5/16

0.015625 + 0.3125

= 0.328125

= 0.065625

= 0.91875

=1.91875

= Truncate = 1.

BUT, if you add an additional chicken:

2/64 + 0.3125

= 0.34375

=0.06875

=0.9625

= 1.9625

truncate = 1

Not enough power.

Therefore, using items that stake up to 16 will decrease the amount of cooked chicken gained as this system would need 3 or more chickens before having enough power to let one pass. The other system ensures that the user has the most cooked chicken gain.

Why not add more signs? Adding just one additional sign will power two blocks and thus render the sorting machine useless as everything would empty out of the hoppers (as the constant power will allow the repeater to keep turning off the red stone torch and letting more items down into the chest). Using this energy, the system is able to collect cooked chicken and other material and place it into specific chests.

Have fun with your BFC

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Redstone_Comparator

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How do deviations from the norm provide an important foundation for radical invention and improvisation in contemporary poetry? Acclaimed poet and scholar Charles Bernstein makes a strong case for the importance of the exception.

Bernstein’s talk explores how the process of swerving away from expected trajectories is necessary for radical improvisation and the invention of new poetic forms. With special reference to Wittgenstein’s use of “queer” in Philosophical Investigations, he makes a strong case for the value of aesthetic positionality as part of the overall program of ’pataphysical disciplines such as Midrashic Antinomianism and Bent Studies.

Introduction by Darren Wershler

Recorded by Michael Nardone
Concordia University, Montreal
25 October 2012

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Plucking Fluxes: Media Archaeology to the Metal
Matthew Kirschenbaum

This talk adopts a media archaeological framework for considering the floppy disks (the ubiquitous remnant of the first great home computer age) and their virtual simulacra, the disk image. The conceit of an “image” confers a complex epistemological status, bearing the inheritance of centuries of Western philosophical thought about the nature of mimesis and representation, with concomitant implications for archival notions of evidence, authenticity, and integrity. We will therefore descend to the ferro-magnetic surface of this unique class of media objects to examine their import and legacy from both a technical and theoretical standpoint.

Introduction by Darren Wershler

Recorded by Michael Nardone
Concordia University, 20 March 2013

Link to Matthew Kirschenbaum’s site:
mkirschenbaum.wordpress.com

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Lisa Gitelman and Craig Dworkin in dialogue

Moderated by Darren Wershler

Concordia University, 20 January 2013
Recorded and transcribed by Michael Nardone

Darren Wershler:
Thank you. Welcome to the Concordia Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture’s panel on the materiality of paper in print.

Gerald Graff has remarked that given that intellectual history consists entirely of a series of conversations and arguments, it’s all too seldom that we stage events where scholars actually talk to one another in person. So it’s especially exciting to be able to bring to you today a discussion between two people whose work is so vital and influential. Intellectual conversation has almost always been asynchronous. We discuss and debate the matters that concern us with people separated from us by time and space. Historically, the medium enabling that discussion has been paper. So, it’s particularly appropriate that the materiality of paper, including the various formats and genres of blankness, is what’s under discussion here today.

China Mieville’s The City in the City is a detective novel that takes place in two distinct cities that occupy the same physical space, but whose inhabitants have been rendered incapable of acknowledging each other through the function of competing ideologies. Hanging over everything is the nagging feeling that the ideas and opinions being expressed nearby could profoundly effect what we do and how we do it if we could only access them.

I first began to think about the potential for a conversation between Lisa Gitelman and Craig Dworkin when I realized that although there current research object, the blank – blank books, blank paper – was the same, that they viewed it in a kind of parallax: Gitelman from the perspective of media history and material media theory, and Dworkin through the lens of contemporary conceptual poetics. Each perspective has something to offer the other, as well as its own blindnesses. But the subtle and not so subtle regulatory mechanisms of the academy often prevent us from even realizing that somewhere nearby, perhaps even on the same floor of our building, another conversation about the objects, institutions, and discourses that matter to us, may well be occurring.

I’d like to believe that it shouldn’t require moments of profound disruption in the dominant circuits of communication to make us realize such possibilities, though, both the anti-SOPA website blackouts on Wednesday and yesterday’s revelation of the draconian end-user license agreement terms for Apple’s iBook’s author application have made me think a lot harder about the materiality of blankness this week than usual. It is in that spirit that I’d like to introduce our speakers for today.

Lisa Gitelman is a leading scholar in the field of media history and an associate professor of English and Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Though much of her research concerns American print culture and techniques of inscription, Gitelman’s work also makes a major contribution to digital media studies. It insists on the importance of method, tracing the patterns that render digital media meaningful within and against the contexts of older forms. All media, she has famously observed, were once new media. She has elaborated on this concept from Scripts, Grooves, and Writings Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era through to New Media: 1740 – 1915, her edited collection with Jeffrey Pingrey, to her most recent book Always Already New: Media History and the Data of Culture. Her current projects include a monograph, Paper Knowledge, and an edited collection, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron. For the past three weeks, Lisa has been the Beaverbrook Media at McGill Visiting Scholar. We’d like to thank Media at McGill for helping us to make today’s event possible.

Craig Dworkin is a founding figure in contemporary conceptual writing, the editor of the Eclipse digital archive, and a professor of English at the University of Utah. Since his first monograph, Reading the Illegible, Dworkin has been an incisive theorist of the limit cases of contemporary poetry and poetics, which is not entirely surprising because several of Dworkin’s other books, such as Parse, constitute the limit cases of contemporary poetics. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Parse is the result of taking Edwin A. Abbott’s 1874 text How to Parse and attempt to apply the principles of scholarship to English grammar and analyzing it according to Abbott’s own system. It is among the most unnerving books that I have ever encountered, which is saying something. Dworkin’s edited collections include the brick-sized Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, with Kenneth Goldsmith, The Sound of Poetry / the Poetry of Sound, with Marjorie Perloff, and Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci.

How we’re going to structure this is we’ll begin with each of our speakers talking for about 15 minutes, then we’ll proceed to about another half hour of conversation between them, and then on to general questions. So, we’ll begin with Lisa Gitelman.

Lisa Gitelman:
Thank you, Darren. Thank you, Marcie. Thanks, too, to Craig, and also again to Media at McGill. It’s been great to be here in Montreal.

Maybe just one more second of background before I launch into my allotted 15 minutes. Darren read chapters by Craig and I that each have to do with blank books, and we’ve read each other’s chapters, and we’re not going to present the full chapters obviously, but that’s some of the background that we have under our belts, if you like.

Blank books. This is a blank slide. I have a couple of slides, nothing too fancy.

I remember reading a story, a piece in the New Yorker, a long time ago. It was a piece back when celphones had just started to appear in everybody’s hands. It was about a woman or a man, I can’t remember, and she’s hung up on by her boss or her partner or something, and you hear this delicious, rich multi-part click and then you hear a dial tone. The author was making the point, oh, look at these Hollywood sound editors, how behind the times they are, or how behind the times they think their audiences are, because we know, we New Yorker readers know, that celphone circuits don’t have dial tones. And yet, there it was.

Dial tones seems to be dying out the more we use cell phones, and yet it’s interesting to think where they come from in the first place. The author of this goes on to describe that dial tones were invented or became sort of ubiquitous only really when automated switching technology was applied to telephone circuits in the 50s or 60s. The dial tone was in a way, a replacement, if you like, for the operator. It used to be that you picked up a phone and a voice said, “Number please.” The dial tone was a way to say, “Okay, you can go ahead and dial your call,” without saying you can go ahead and dial your call.

So, why am I telling you this? It was that New Yorker piece that made me think about blanks. The dial tone is a blank. It’s an empty sound or it’s the sound of empty, into which you launch your call, your voice. Not quite signal, not quite noise, the dial tone represents an open channel. But more than that, I hope you’ll agree, that the dial tone also represents an absent telephone operator. It effaces labor. It disavows gendered labor as it alters your experience of communicating by telephone, helping you to forget – and you always do forget – that communicating with a friend on a telephone is always also, also always, communicating with your non-friend, the telephone company.

There’s a lot there, in blanks. Blanks are full of missing things, you might say. And it was after reading about the dial tone that I got so interested in pursuing blanks, and thought, hey, you better get back to a field of media history where you know something instead of talking about telephones, and that’s 19th century printing and books. So, I found this list of blank books– let me put it up there – in an 1894 dictionary of printing and bookmaking. I’m not going to read it, which is why I put it up there. But a few thoughts just as you look it over. It’s a list that points variously to the work place, market place, school and home, while it belies the assumption, one rampant in popular discourse today, that books are for reading. Books are for lots of things. Books like these were for writing, for filling in, or filling up.

Fillability, in some cases, seems to suggest a moral economy: mind you diary, mind your fern and moss album. But in many others, it suggests a cash economy with which North Americans in the 19th century had grown so familiar. Filling up evidently helped to locate goods, to map transactions, and transfer value, while it also helped individuals to locate themselves and others within or against the site’s practices and institutions that helped them to structure daily life. So, think of roll books, or workman’s time books, little instruments of power, if you like, locating as they do the schooled and the laboring. While hotel registers, rent receipts and visiting books point toward the varied mobility of subjects that stay over, reside or stop by. Letter copying books helped businessmen keep copies of what they also sent away. This was long before Xerox. While cotton weight and log tally books offer space to record one moment and always again the same moment in the life cycle of a bulk commodity. Some things are obscure. I have no idea what a “flap memorandum” is, or a “two-thirds book.”

The general picture, though, is one of motion, a confusion of mobilities really whereby goods, value and people circulate. They move through space and across borders from and to, they get caught and kept, they pause and pass, moving faster or slower. They also move in time because recorded in increments, and thus amid intervals.

Yet, for all of its motion, I think the same list suggests stasis or inertia. Things – cards, fern fronds – but more typically, records of things stopped forever, as they filled the waiting blankness of books like these. Each of the books listed formed a class or category of blank because each catered to the repetition of certain kinds of writing. If writing is preservative, these books were preserving preservation. Their design, manufacture and adoption worked to conserve patterns of expression. A blank blotter would have conserved inked inscriptions of any kind no matter what was written or drawn, but most blank books would have worked however modestly to mold, to direct, and delimit expression. Order and invoice books, for instance, like ledgers and daybooks, would have had entries that accreted according to the formulae of accountancy if you like. Habits and formulae can change, of course, and be changed, but inertia is one of their defining characteristics.

Entries made in exercise books, composition books, reporter’s notebooks would have been far less constrained, less formulaic, yet they, too, were, loosely speaking, micro-genres:repetitive expressions and in some sense shaped according to the norms and obligations that attend the specific callings and settings in which they were habitually deployed. So the blank books were – it’s a bad expression, but – meta-micro-genres, one might say. They establish the parameters or the rules for entries to be made individually in pencil or ink. Rules, like habits, were broken, of course, as notebooks became scrapbooks or as ledgers became the illustrated chronicles of indigenous tribes. But rules there were. That’s what makes one class of these books distinguishable from another.

Now to speak of “rules” for filling them in is likely to exaggerate the constraints hinted or proposed by different blank books, but it also appeals to their manufacture and design. Many blanks books, not all of them were ruled, their pages lined in expectation of particular uses, like blank forms generally, the pages of many blank books had ink on them. The ink was, paradoxically, what made most blanks blank. So, you see, I’ve ended up at the same place that I started with the dial tone, a kind of paradox: the fulsome blankness of the technologically blank, blanks made under the sign of bureaucratic labor, power, knowledge. You fill in these blanks. Your voice, your handwriting. But look at it another way and somebody, the company, has already filled you in, designing its blanks ever so painstakingly with you, it’s willing subject, foremost in mind. There are other kinds of blanks and Craig is going to talk about blanks that don’t work this way, but lots of blanks do.

I found, for me, a compelling set of examples, a specimen book called Harpel’s Typograph. There’s the book, and I just want to say a few things about it. First off, it’s not a blank book in the same way that a notebook or a ledger is blank. It’s a specimen book because it compiles a set of specimens of what was called “job printing” in the 19th century. This is a sort of commercial printing on contract, the kind of printing that provided you with letterhead, receipts, tickets, cards, handbills, posters, programs, that sort of thing. Normal specimen books, and there was a whole different genre of specimen books, offered typefaces, fonts, and printers equipment to the trade. These can have a certain poetry, usually accidental. I just have a couple quick copies, really bad scans from Google [to show]. But Harpel’s Typograph prints instead hundreds of blanks and other assorted jobs related to everyday uses of print, and my last slides are just four different pages from Harpel to give you an idea.

The Typograph is a really weird book. Its codex form serves to countermand the habitual ephemerality of job printing that it seeks to illustrate. Books are for keeps, but job printing, if it survives today, is usually relegated to collections of ephemera. Like the paradox of blankness that’s made of ink, the Typograph preserves an ephemerality it thereby refutes. It works as a sort of time capsule, too, for its age. The product of an over-wrought, unreasoned aesthetic against which modernism would soon recoil. Harpel and his contemporaries apparently loved those curlicues, the clashing display fonts, and other technical gimcracks and ornaments. No clean lines here in the petite bureaucracy of the 19th century tradesman.

Just a couple quick points about the Typograph so we can get to our discussion. First, printing like this consumed about a third of the printing trade in the 19th century, yet exists entirely outside the normal – I really want to say – the Romantic realms of authoring and reading. It doesn’t make any sense to think about the blank deposit slip on the right or the tomato label below it as authored, published or read in the manner, say, randomly, of Great Expectations. They are designed, printed and used, not authored, published or read. I’m making this distinction in shorthand to remind us just how co-opted or how distracted we’ve become about print media in general. About media in general and print media maybe in particular, by a set of constructs much beloved, bequeathed to us from Romanticism. I’m thinking of the Book, capital B, the Author, capital A, the literary, capitalize it if you like.

Whole bodies of law exist to protect authors. We classify discourse according to the author’s name. Whole departments at university exist to pursue the literary, but who has ever heard about or cared about job printing? So, a second quick point, another question: I think we need to pause and ask what these so-called specimens of Harpel’s are really specimens of. That’s not a label and that’s not a deposit slip despite my calling them that, because Harpel has printed them or printed that ink on to sheets to be bound as a book instead of slips of paper or gummed labels. They are specimens of ink shaped by specimens of labor. I’m thinking again of the dial tone. Harpel’s individual specimens rest on top of or are pressed on to the paper below the way butterflies may be pinned gently to a board. You need to remember to forget or forget to remember about the paper to call it a label or a deposit slip. These specimens are neither, I think, material texts nor intellectual work. They are something somewhere in between that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Finally, I think that printed blanks point toward a set of provocative and tensile connections across media forms. For one thing, they are print artifacts that incite manuscript, as Peter Stallybrass has said. For another, the script that they incite can be prompted by oral communication, and I am thinking ahead to bureaucrats, say, who under the sway of scientific management filled out memo blanks that had been printed with the headings “Verbal Orders Don’t Go.” And if blanks helped to demonstrate as well as to insure a continued interdependence of the oral, the written and the printed, then they also begged questions of the digital. I’m sure that you can help me push this forward, [Craig,] but I’m thinking that blanks are increasingly encountered online, for one, where they are often designed to look like 19th century job printing on paper even though there is a whole sort of data architecture behind them there.

Going further still, Alan Liu has suggested that you can think of every online text object as a filled-in blank of sorts because of the way that metadata necessarily directs and delimits and encodes the appearance and behavior of text on screen. Metadata makes the blank and then data get poured in. Relatedly, you type into Google’s blank search box, but really now, hasn’t Google filled you into its plans already?

By these lights, an account of 19th century job printing and its blanks offers part of an extended history of information in one context, and surely there are many contexts, for the supposed distinction between form and content, between medium and message, upon which contemporary experiences of information and technology so intuitively rely.

Thank you.

Wershler:
Craig.

Craig Dworkin:
Alright, thank you to Darren and to Marcie and to all of you for coming, and to Lisa, as well. I want to talk about one particular example of a blank book just to try and set the stage for the more abstract discussions we will have, and that’s a book that appears in the opening scene of Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée. It’s set amid the bustle of the Café des Poètes, where Orpheus is shown a copy of the journal containing the poems of his new rival, the enfant terrible Jacques Cégeste. And Orpheus glances at the cover — it has this very thin border, elegant Didot typeface mimicking the familiar designs of Les Éditions de Minuit — and he flips quickly through and objects that it is entirely blank. His companion, this older writer, explains it’s titled Nudisme. And Orpheus tosses the book back with a snicker and says, “That’s absurd [Mais c’est ridicule].” In part, this is just a dismissal that is typical of the response of an establishment put upon by avant-garde pranksters, unwilling to assimilate the gestures, ces gestes, of radical reduction. But he also in some ways gets the joke, right? — the jest, say, of its absurd pretensions — and “ces gestes,” as the literary records also denotes, are “ridiculous prentensions.” Nudisme does indeed follow the structural logic of a gag. It’s structured like the cheap one-liner of a New Yorker cartoon, moving unexpectedly and with this false naïveté between the verbal code of its title and the visual code of the pages in the interior. So, only at a glance, certainly, the whole thing would seem like a hoax, but the specifics — and this is part of what I want to argue here — the specifics are telling. It’s instructive to pause a little longer than Orpheus does before he tosses the issue aside. The difference between the sophistication of getting the joke and then the greater sophistication of refusing to get the joke depends on how closely one tries to actually read a work that seems to ask only that it not be read at all.

To begin with, as Lisa points out, blank books typically are not blank. They have ink on them. Here the interior pages are entirely blank. It is the review’s title that frames an interpretation of the blank sheets that follow. That is the joke itself. Since several different titles might have given rise to the same punchline, I want to reflect a little on what the journal was not called. It was not called Silence, for instance. Indeed at exactly the moment that Cocteau is filming Orphée, John Cage delivers his famous “Lecture on Nothing” at the Artists Club in New York where he declares “I have nothing to say and I am saying it, because what we require is silence but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” Orpheus’s companion, not coincidentally, is respected for maintaining decades of principled poetic silence because he has nothing to say. Je n’apportais rien de neuf, he explains, underscoring this contrast with Cégeste, the author of Nudisme, who has nothing to say, and in Nudisme is, in fact, saying it — which for Cage defined not just silence but actually “poetry” itself. “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry,” he continues in his famous lecture.

While it would have suited the same intellectual moment voiced by Cage, the title Silence would have come maybe too close to the very first book, very famously published, by Minuit: Jean Laurier’s Silence of the Sea. The review is not titled with the Sartrean “neant”; Being and Nothingness had been published in 1943, which, again, might have brought the satirical mise-en-scène of the Café des Poètes too close to Cocteau’s actual target: Sartre’s real-life haunt in the Café de Flore. He did not choose “rien,” which would have signaled a Dadaist nihilism or maybe a rarefied fin-de-siècle aestheticism. It is not entitled “manque,” this “lack,” this term that Lacan would develop as a working term in just a few years’ time. It is not a mystical Buddhist “vacuité,” or any number of related words: “vide,” “absence,” “lacune.” Any of these titles presumably would have elicited the same exasperated response from Orpheus, but their differences inflect the very impatient dismissal that he gives the book and point beyond it. “Nudism,” that is, already wittily anticipates Orpheus’s very response. To denounce the publication as a hoax while seated among the true believers in the Café des Poètes is, in essence, to proclaim that the emperor has no clothes: this nakedness that the book itself has already openly confessed. So, the collection presents itself, just as Orpheus accuses it, as being the naked truth, but it also presents itself, to borrow Jacques Derrida’s phrase, as truth as nakedness. Orpheus unclothes a nakedness, but one that has already announced its intention of disclosure even before the book is opened — a simultaneously unapparent and exhibited nakedness, as Derrida puts it.

By doing so, Nudisme literalizes the metaphoric. It not only discovers its pages, but it takes off the metaphoric bedsheets to show the actual sheets of paper. It also enacts or dumbly presents the way that truth itself gets figured. This is Derrida’s demonstration that the figure of nakedness is not just any metaphor, but the very metaphor of metaphoricity itself — what is already a metaphor of metaphor, a metaphor to render metaphoricity. So, in staging this joke, Nudisme offers up the very figuration that its pages would seem to refuse, even as it eschews verse, the genre that traditionally turns most conspicuously on figural language. The book figures the figure of metaphoric unveiling.

At the same time, this title, Nudisme, triggers mechanisms of social and moral reflex in the best avant-garde tradition of trying to piss off the bourgeois. It’s a title that performs a quick double punch; first it elicits the shock of the prudish bourgeois reader by announcing a salacious subject and then it denies the prurient and equally bourgeois expectation of some kind of titillating material within. I want to note that it’s a title that does not advertise what would would merely be a classically sanctioned nudity or general nakedness, but the specific nudity of counter-cultural nudism. By 1950 this word “nudism” carried connotations of lubriciousness from which some at the time were tempting to distance the word naturisme (“naturist”). You can track the frequency of these words over print media at the time. “Naturist” is gaining ground relative to “nudist” precisely at the moment of Orpheus. The French Naturist Association had been founded in 1948. The attendant lifestyle magazine, La vie au soleil, began publication the following year. And they were promoting this term “naturism” to emphasize connotations of communal living, holistic health, vegetarianism, and environmentalism in contrast to the pornographic, the exhibitionist, associations that “nudism” carried.

In so doing, they were etching those associations all the more starkly so that this punning rebus that Orpheus acknowledges works at the level of abstraction between the sign systems of word and image, but any particular sign occurring in that system: silence, nothingness, absence, et cetera — any particular — is always historicizable. That’s the point I want to make.

Then, further, I want to claim that in contrast to these other plausible titles, that Nudisme implies an unveiling more than a negation. I think that we might think about what has been made naked in, or what’s made naked by Cégeste’s publication. Part of the work’s frisson is the remove at which it pitches the rhetoric of clothing, which is to say, a rhetoric of rhetoricity itself. To conceive of dematerialized ideas clothed by somehow a more tangible language elides the degree to which our sense of language is itself usually dematerialized in relation to the physical materiality of print, of ink on paper, that would make language manifest. Print clothes clothing; it clothes a clothing.

Given the title, Orpheus might have expected a plain spoken or unartificed poetry, something in the style of an unornamented genus humile or genus tenue, but Cégeste has stripped away not just a kind of rhetoric, some particular mode, but any visible language at all. So, in this work is laid bare, is mise à nu, the page itself: the physical facture of a noise-making, weighty, extended object; the substrate of print; what was the typical technological support for poetry at mid-century. Which is to say that in the 50s, it was a space that was indifferently ready to take the imprint of any kind of text treating any kind of topic. It is the fate of lyric in the 20th century: from the most intimate confessional bodily detail to the most banal everyday experience, treating those sort of texts with any kind of form, any kind of politics, any poetic style, from the most excessive or the most reductive avant-garde hoax to the most retrograde alexandrines. If Nudisme is provocative (though not quite in the way licentious readers hope), it’s also — with a similar disappointment and with its entirely unprinted pages — quite promiscuous: “obscene,” in Jean Baudrillard’s sense of the term: “explicit,” or, as they used to say, “easy,” explicitus in the classical Latin.

Nudisme, in the film, must have about 40 blank pages, and that material has a very obvious but not incidental trace. Pages are thin enough, they are supple enough, to pass through a press without damaging the type. They are pliant enough to be sewn, and they’ve also been trimmed to accommodate what would be a standard lyric verse with sufficiently luxurious and aestheticized margins. The book in the film, that is, takes the textual form of self-satisfied individualism. It’s light enough to be carried under the arm, to be taken en plein air. It’s light enough to be handed easily back and forth without moving more than the arms or upsetting a glass of wine. It can be tossed lightly aside. It can be slipped discreetly into a stack of paperbacks, all of which the actors in Orpheus demonstrate. So, it’s portable. It is scaled to the reader. It’s a format that permits a precise kind of communication. The revue is small enough that it can be carried in public without being an ostentacious burden, but at the same time it’s just large enough to require a certain care, a certain spread: it needs the support of the elbows or the support of other books when reading. Even though it’s suited to a single, private reader to the space of the outdoor café table, when opened in public, it announces it is being read. The review, then, is the perfect object for the space in which it is distributed and consumed and where it plays this defining role in the social network of the café. It connects discrete generations of writers. It distinguishes between insiders and outsiders, like Orpheus. It reinforces the homogenous community of fashionable young habitués, and it recalls the economic patronage of a princess who funds it, who is not from there and can’t pass among them. And above all it advertises the success of the café celebrity mascot, Cégeste. And I want to suggest that this is one of the primary lessons of media themselves: that we’re mislead when we think of media as objects rather than as social events, and that the closer one looks at the materiality of a work, at the brute fact of its physical composition, that that is a point at which the social context is brought all the more sharply into focus.

Thank you, all.

Wershler:
Thanks to both of you. It strikes me, sitting her and listening, that part of what we’ve been hearing about from two different perspectives is a kind of theory of the missing mass of textuality. I have in mind Latour’s argument about the dividing up into the world of the aesthetic and the scientific. When you think about the bulk of things that have been printed and written are neither literary texts nor scientific texts. There are business texts of various kinds. There are files and memos and folders, thing that John Guillory talks about in “The Memo and Modernity.” Lisa has talked about this in terms of reinserting the importance of genre, the genre of the blank book. As a starting point, I’m wondering, when you think about each other’s respective approaches to the genre of the blank, what is it that you see that is of immediate use or immediate value in a way that you would not have described or you would not have thought about?

Dworkin:
I can do that.

Lisa’s a real scholar. Part of what I take away is that you get the facts right, which is what Ezra Pound said historians do. Those facts that are useful to me are things like remembering what we think of as “literature” constituted, in terms of labor and resources, a really small amount of what was printed. What is useful to me is remembering these things that we know but we forget: that one can separate literature from printing, that one separates genre from format. If I ask you to picture a novel in your head, you’re going to picture a codex, you’ll picture a book. You’re not going to picture this genre, “the novel”, spread through newspaper periodicals or something like that. Those are the points that put me in my place.

Gitelman:
It’s easy to get facts wrong, and I am sure there are wrong facts in what I’ve been trying to do, but what I find so productive in your piece is the reminder, which is so important, that media cannot be seen in isolation, that looking at media is forever a kind of comparative and contrastive endeavor, comparative across media, comparative across time. Once we start thinking about media not as objects but as attached to contexts, as having meanings where meanings equal uses, they are dynamic. They change productively all the time so that you’re always trying to look at a moving target and by going at it with such care and eloquence into this one example, you’re able to show just how multi-faceted the sets of conditions are that might at any one moment articulate a particular blank.

Dworkin:
One point that we overlap on, that I need to think more about, that I think is worth thinking more about, is when I start looking at a book like Nudism, which is a prop. Someone [Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin] has made a copy, what purports to be a facsimile, but it’s not. It makes me very angry! It’s much too small. It’s not printed in the same way…. I started thinking initially of this with whatever cultural reflex makes me think that blankness is some property that adheres in an object. That is, I could hold up pages and then I could say, “Is it blank?” and you can say “yes” or “no.” But, in fact, blankness is really something that is more like an ideology that often involves or depends on not being blank. As I was working on this project, someone would say, ‘oh, I know this novel of blank pages.’ I’d be very excited and then I’d go and find it and the pages weren’t blank at all: they had headers or page numbers. Something like that—

Gitelman:
Foiled again.

Dworkin:
But that is also what makes them blank. Blankness is not a property that I go to look for; I have to remind myself that it is something more.

And once you move away from the aesthetic object or the aesthetic expression, a lot of what is sort of framing the blank as a blank are those corporate, institutional structures that make Google’s search box so empty and inviting, but that also similarly make these 19th century forms empty and blank. I love that sort of Derridean play you have with clothes and clothing here that you just brought to mind again. In my sort of primitive way I think of that as a kind of toggle between on the one hand the bibliographer’s distinction between text (material) and literary work, that the work is the ideal and the text is that thing you can touch, but more so, maybe a little bit more subtly as a distinction, as a sort of insoluble contrast between something that is on and as paper. On paper as paper. You can never quite peal them off the back of one another. It’s like two sides of a sheet of paper.

Wershler:
You can definitely hear a class politics being played out here too. The first thing that occurred to me was how many people in this audience are enthusiastic consumers of moleskin notebooks. I have a little stack of them upstairs. When I am at a talk like this I am usually busily scribbling away into my extraordinarily expensive little notebook, but the way you articulate it is quite different. Craig’s reading of Cocteau’s Orphée and the blank book Nudisme is an avant-garde slap in the face to the bourgeois, but this is the same bourgeois whose existence is in large part constructed by a series of blank books, which they’re busily filling in: ledgers, memorandums, logbooks and other kinds of records that make the middle class possible in the first place. Can you talk a little more about the role of class, and the role of blanks in structuring class?

Gitelman:
In framing these little remarks I thought I was going to have to allude to some outside, and I reached for Great Expectations, to the 19th century bourgeois narrative of the Victorian age, because I think that’s the same sort of world as these blanks. So, the work that Craig is doing about the later avant-garde is really different and explicitly a reaction against that world. If there is a through-line though, and I think there has to be, I’m not a pro at theories of the avant-garde, it’s Romanticism. It’s still the Author, capital A, that provides a kind of through-line. That said, the blanks don’t have authors, and technically they don’t have readers. They, like the book that Craig describes, are works that ask not to be read, or assume they won’t be read.

Dworkin:
I can’t say anything more interesting than that except the Cocteau example, or another example: the poet Aram Saroyan published a ream of typing paper as one of his books in the late 60s. Or to think of the kind of artworks that Tom Friedman has put forward as blank pieces of paper. These all occur in either what are explicitly aristocratic [venues], or our version of aristocratic: art world dealings. As I said, the review Nudisme is funded by a princess and clearly it is a leisure class that can hang out at the poets’ café. The ream of typing paper is published by an Upper East Side heiress. That, I think, on the one hand is not incidental; but I think it works two ways. On the one hand these blank books of the avant-garde are the endpoint of the kind of aestheticism that followed and reacted against Romanticism. There were versions of Mallarmé: that once you say a poem doesn’t need to have a subject, it doesn’t need to have meaning, maybe it doesn’t need language at all. That’s the ultimate refined poem. But it’s also for people who don’t want to read a poem. It’s a joke you get right away when you’re watching the film. You don’t need to be filled in on the fine points of the avant-garde to get the joke. You say, ‘yeah, I wouldn’t want to read one either.’ I think that’s the other story there.

Wershler:
As long as we’re talking about reading, it’s probably worth talking about methodologies and reading strategies because in some ways, again, you are looking at the same object but you are doing very different things. Craig is doing a kind of microscopic close reading, reading the base material of the text itself—

Dworkin:
Wood pulp.

Wershler:
Right, reading the pulp, reading the ink on the page. And Lisa is providing a larger social and cultural context and an intellectual history of the forms. Ironically, you’re both housed at least partially in English departments—

Gitelman:
How is that so ironic?

Wershler:
In part because of the move away from interpretation and close reading, which I think is increasingly important to talk about. So could you talk a bit about method and how that sort of positions you inside the academy and why you do what you do?

Gitelman:
Yeah, I would love to and I am sure there are people in this room who can speak to this more eloquently than I, too. I am extremely heartened by things like this dialogue but also by work like Craig’s because I do see the two disciplines that I straddle and sometimes uncomfortably inhabit the gap, English and Media Studies, sometimes having a productive interface, more and more so. Maybe the quickest way is to name my three favorite books that are right in the middle there. I think of Andrew Piper’s Dreaming in Books and Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery or Mark McGurl’s The Program Era. These are all books that are coming out of literary studies that I find myself running after my colleagues in media studies and saying “You have to read this one.”

Dworkin:
I’m not a good person to answer this because I don’t feel like I have a very good feel of what goes on in English studies. I know that it doesn’t look like most of what I do. I’m lucky to have a job and so I try not to draw too much attention to what I do. I try to keep my colleagues from reading anything that I publish…. I’ll be fired once this goes online!

Wershler:
Concordia is kind of an amazing place this way because there is a sort of will toward interdisciplinary collaboration here, an interest in working across departments and across methodologies that I find incredibly attractive. The kinds of conversations that go on with people down the street at McGill too are very much part and parcel of that because it doesn’t exist everywhere. In my experience, interdisciplinarity is often someone saying to you, well, I can do your discipline but you can’t do mine. When I look at work like this and think about what it offers not just for students but for those of us in the thick of it, I’m incredibly heartened and, at the same time, bemused about how to forge more connections. We don’t always go to the same conferences, we don’t read the same journals, so what else can one do to foster more conversation?

Gitelman:
One thing that struck me, Darren, is this question about close reading, about whether we need to do more than just close read is a red herring, because I don’t think anyone’s just been a close reader. There have been imitations of that, albeit. I think that one thing we learn either from the bibliographical tradition in Literary Studies, as unfashionable as that may be, or from the profoundly Canadian tradition of media studies, is that content and context is a false dichotomy. Medium and message, you can’t get them apart. That’s the whole lesson of bibliography and the whole lesson of media studies. Even though there are people who specialize in the hermeneutic and people who specialize in the media-historical, as I do, it’s an invidious project to try and get them apart, and that’s why we’re here, that’s what’s interesting.

Wershler:
That was one thing I found amusing about the German materialities of communication theories, even at the sort of height of their polemical position against interpretation, they’re doing an awful lot of close reading. Kittler is embedding entire texts in his book and then commenting on them scrupulously. A decade later, Gombrecht turns around and says well, this was a rhetorical position at a very specific institutional time and place, and, you know, close reading isn’t so bad. It’s another tool that we need in the box. So, for sure, I think that that’s part of it, but I wonder a bit about surrounding ongoing institutional pressures around these questions.

Dworkin:
The problem with close reading is that it’s rarely close enough.

Gitelman:
What do you mean?

Dworkin:
Well, that people are not reading at the level of the alphabetic letter. They are still reading at the level of semantics; they are not reading how is this paper sized? [gestures to sheet of paper]: what are the chemicals here? I want really close molecular readings, or a look at the distribution of ink over a surface. I would like readings to be much much closer. I think in some ways, in the long run, my guess is that your question won’t matter (in the sense it can’t be too long before English departments go the way of Classics departments).

Wershler:
That was McLuhan’s argument.

Dworkin:
They are going to be like the Latin departments in universities. This is not to say that interesting stuff won’t go on, but there will be one or two — a couple old people talking about English literature and how to read it—

Gitelman:
Now I’m going to get fired when they put this up here!

Dworkin:
And media programs, communications, however that evolves, are going to become the English departments of the 21st century.

Wershler:
In October, we had a conference here that was put on by the TAG group, the technoculture and gaming group about video games studies as part of the Entretien Jacques Cartier, and we brought Nick Montfort up and I was talking to him about his platform studies model after the conference and he said well, the ironic thing is that we just stole all that stuff from the history of the book people anyway. There’s a very long and careful history in medieval studies and the study of Anglo-Saxon texts that is meticulous about its materiality. Maybe we need more of that in contemporary studies. I spend a lot of time talking to students about things they don’t really want to talk about like colophons and where books were printed, paper stock, all of that stuff.

Dworkin:
I got interested in what I do thinking that I was going to be a medievalist and taking my paleography and codicology pro-seminar in sourcing bits of 13th century Italian manuscripts where you look very closely at the paper and see what kind of seeds are embedded there, or what kind of sheep led to this bit of substrate…. that kind of thing.

Gitelman:
Right. I guess I started in documentary editing, which is kind of related to textual studies, in an archive sort of holding up sheets of paper to see the pinhole in the corner to decide whether something had just been pinned to that other sheet, and if so which one had been in front to figure out the chains of correspondence in an archive. That was part of the material sensibility, I guess.

Wershler:
Maybe one more question and then we’ll open things up to the audience. You’ve both suggested quite strongly that thinking about the materiality of print can be very helpful when we’re thinking about digital materiality as well. You’ve both done a lot of work with digital media studies in a variety of contexts, so could you talk more about that? Particularly Lew’s notion of the data pour, the idea that a blank has been constructed in a certain kind of way long before you arrive there to elicit certain kinds of information and what that does to our notions about the control of our texts and how certain kinds of blank space elicit responses from us.

Gitelman:
I’m not sure I have anything more to say about that, certainly nothing profound. I guess there’s a really interesting set of conversations going on now, happily, that conversation about whether online experience, text, whatever is virtual or immaterial or not seems to be extinguished. We’ve established the materiality of digital texts in some very productive ways. There’s a kind of corresponding productive discussion going on that I’m not completely up on about the status of code, how we should explain to one another how digital texts operate. I think that that is an ongoing project of great interest.

Dworkin:
Yeah, I was going to say exactly the same thing. This is why I think thinking of something like blankness as an ideology rather than a thing: as one of those things that we all know and then immediately forget and need to be reminded of. It is important, and I’d want to pitch it back toward bodies: that’s one of the problems when digital media was figured as “immaterial”l it’s not true when you got tendinitis. It was not true when your neck cramps. Remembering that one reads at all at a point where our bodies impinge on materials in the world — and that it’s individual, specific, irreducibly individual bodies with particular material points — is important for political reasons. So remembering that this is not a blank screen [gestures to projection screen]. We all know that, and then we immediately forget it. You’re looking at PVC. You’re looking at certain kinds of pearled and spin-coated plastics but we forget. We think it’s blank. That dynamic is the important one to keep in play.

Gitelman:
And just maybe I’ll express that in a kind of narrower way in terms of the language of literary genre. I think it’s incredibly hard to keep remembering but we constantly keep remembering it, that genre isn’t something that lies there on the page. Or that novel that’s in a codex and in a newspaper and on a screen. The novel genre is in us. It’s behind the eyeball there. That’s where it’s coming from. Genres are functional in that way. They are uses we make.

Werhsler:
Great. Thank you very much. I’d like to open things up to questions from the floor. We have two microphones, one on either side. I’ll ask you to use the microphones to address the speakers please.

Speaker:
Just as John Cage suggested that music depends as much on the silence between the notes played, and those who are involved in erotica maintain that the power lies on the removal of clothes rather than on nudity, I will suggest that when referring to blankness and to printed materials, we must include the exclusions, the people and the thing that are normally excluded. First of all, let us remember that until very recently most people were illiterate to begin with. They didn’t bother using all these various books that have been alluded to. They couldn’t read or write. Similarly, we have the fact that they didn’t appear on voter’s lists. Women’s work at home wasn’t recorded anywhere by the economists. The list goes on and on and on about what has or has not been included. Similarly, we have to ask ourselves a second line of questions and that is in terms of publishing. What gets published? What doesn’t get published? Why does it get published? Who does the selection of texts for schools and universities, et cetera. So, it seems to me that you’ve been concentrating, with all due respect, on what has been included, as opposed to what is excluded, and I think you’ve presented an incomplete picture.

Dworkin:
I take the points, and agree, though maybe this is going to come back to – it’s not going to help save English studies – but it comes back to my relation with English studies. Frankly, by talking about Aram Saroyan’s ream of paper as a book of poetry, I think of what I’m doing as including things that are not included. It’s not in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. It’s not taught in high schools. Part of recovering an avant-garde is exactly the kind of act you’re doing. It would be well outside of my job to recover the economic counting of domestic labor. I’m all for it, but I’m not an economist. Within the proper realm, I think I’m doing exactly what you’re calling for.

Speaker:
With all due respect and drawing on my own experience of teaching history, if I can generalize, that somehow a partial revolution or a failed revolution is worse than no revolution. The fact that you have the odd isolated individual – and I don’t mean that in a demeaning sense – doesn’t really change the foundations of much of what goes on. Now what you can do with an individual, I don’t know. But surely, we just can’t take complete solace in the idea that somebody is being a trailblazer or somebody is taking the contrary view. I think we have to look certainly if we are talking about institutional frameworks, we have to look at a wider perspective than the odd heroes who are attempting to do something different.

Dworkin:
My book is not published yet, but when it comes out we’ll see if the revolution follows.

Gitelman:
I kind of take the point, too. I guess I would, at least in my English department clothes, second what Craig is saying that my work is so deflationary in a certain sense because so counter literary, but that it’s in a particular institutional academic circle, for what it’s worth. But I did include that example of the telephone operator’s effacement to gesture toward precisely this question of what’s missing. I think certainly a lot of what’s missing in the blanks that I’ve been studying in these printed blanks has to do with labor, how it does go missing.

Wershler:
That labor really is sort of endless. The point of taking things into account and saying that they’ve been missing is to simply get to the point where you realize that there are other things that are missing and that you have to start that process again. I’m sort of hopeful about this in the sense that there are some signs going up that there are things that are missing, that sort of missing mass in the middle that I started by pointing to. So, I see signs to be optimistic here.

Marcie Frank:
I wanted to ask about ideology, actually, and about what the relationship is between the claim that we have to see blankness as ideology, which Craig has said, and the idea of blankness that Lisa evoked in the dial tone where it’s more than one thing that’s going on. So, I’m wondering if it’s always a question of there being more than one thing and whether that is ideology or not. I guess that if it’s being disappeared in some ways, if our inclination not to recognize that there is more than one thing is being enforced in some way, that would seem to me to be a question of ideology, but the formal existence of more than one thing doesn’t necessarily seem to me to be ideological in the first instance.

Dworkin:
Part of what I want to suggest with that term goes exactly to your point. It strikes me that it’s an “ideology” as distributed, unconnected, multiple reinforcements of something. It wasn’t just the one time when someone told you something was blank. It is also all of those metaphoric associations, other cultural institutions, the kind of constructions that Lisa gets to in other parts of her paper. So, the multiplicity is a kind of key towards that for me.

Wershler:
In terms of the kinds of blank books that Lisa is talking about, it reminds me of trying to use the Google search box that you were also referring to. When you start typing something into Google, Google will helpfully give you a whole list of things that you may or may not be asking about. But I think the sorts of blank books that you were talking about imply that as well. There are certain kinds of things that are appropriate to write into a ledger or certain kinds of things that are appropriate to write into a journal. Even blanks on paper elicit certain kinds of responses. That strikes me as ideology at work.

Dworkin:
Darren will help me with the guy’s name, but there was someone who when AOL unfortunately released the search data for thousands of its users, before they could pull it off the net, someone grabbed it and published one user’s searches. It’s called something like “I feel lonely when I type to you” or “I feel lonely when I type this.” What’s interesting is that most of things that were revealed were looking up things like addresses or phone numbers or things like that. But this person was having some kind of dialogue with the search box, which was not, obviously, returning the proper answers. They were somehow cathecting to that space as a space that was in dialogue with them. This may be where I am too drawn to the aberrant exceptions, exceptions to things, but it’s a glorious exception.

Omri Moses:
I feel strange asking this question on this microphone – talk about pragmatic interfaces – but I have a question that I guess goes to the heart of the some of differences you have disciplinarily and also maybe some point of connection between the methods of a cultural historian on the one hand, which wants social context to be built into the way you understand media and media aesthetics, that wants to think a little bit about the conditions of the possibility of the media in various ways. Craig, you were suggesting that media is not an object but a social event, which, in some sense, one can gloss that as being context specific, but I don’t think that’s the only thing that one would say about an event because an event is in some sense open ended. Media is not just a socially and pragmatically contextualized event but it’s also, as you suggested in your metaphor, Lisa, an open channel, that is something has quality and effect on the human interfaces, potentially ongoing and yet to be finalized. So, I guess I was just wondering a bit more about digital media, which is our new media, our media which has yet to be finalized. Of course, you’ve both reminded us that it’s not abstract or disembodied, that is it’s not merely ones and zeroes that can have an infinite permutation of possible meanings or pragmatic effects, but on the other hand it’s also something whose interface is incredibly various, stretches between sound and visual, and between potentially any number of sensory manifestations. So, is there something about media that is, in a sense, an open channel not just because it effaces something that is but also because it opens up to something that isn’t yet?

Gitelman:
Good question. I wrote this book that is called Always Already New trying to capture that problem of the new that is constantly arriving and receding at the same time. Again, I want to see the meanings of media, which obviously are dynamic and ongoing, as coextensive with the uses of media. Uses can be built in, right. They can exist as standards or values in design, but uses are always also after the fact. After the sign, outside if you like. That’s kind of rough word to use, I guess. So, that’s a great thing about digital media. They are so plural, so various, so varied. I think that media studies and literary studies need to be careful and discerning and to try and see what those emergent meanings are according to their habitual methodologies and domains. For me, I like to think of the literary, I was telling these guys, and this is sort of Foucault/John Guillory again, the literary as a principal of thrift in the proliferation of printed meaning. There is this moment at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century when print forms explode. The literary is a way to keep control of some of it. What are the principles of thrift appropriate to the proliferation of digital meanings? We don’t know yet, but we should be looking at them. That’s what I think we’re going to study if we study new media.

Dworkin:
In some way, at the moment, the thrift is built in for us in the sense that most of the reading and writing that is digitally done is not for humans at all. Two useful things for myself are trying to think if there are media and what they are, and two of the things that were very instructive came from the digital. One of them was this realization that there is never any medium. There is never one thing. There might be media. I’m not quite sure about that. But one way to think about media would be to think of them as nodes that distinguish activities of analysis or of interpretation. In some ways I could just keep it with analysis. Where one kind of analysis stops and another begins is where you can start to identify media. So, at the level of looking at the screen and typing, there is one thing. Behind that is the processor which is resolving it. I’m going to miss a bunch of steps here, right? But that’s one where that kind of analysis stops. You can start a new analysis to look at that processor. It’s going to get you to code. You’re going to have to start a new kind of analysis. It’s going to get you to the little bits of magnetized metal that are deposited and written over on a hard drive. That’s going to get you to another one. You go from there to the diode. At every point you have to change the type of analysis you do might be one way to think of media.

The other thing that helped me a lot was a debate in the “discogs” website by people who are really invested in the rules of this website for a sound artist named Jarrod Fowler, who releases — among other things — blank recordable media as rhythmic audio events. He is a musician whose CDs often contain no sound, and in fact nothing but a CDr given to you by him. Here is where the social comes in. If someone gives me a blank CD, I think about it one way if I am in the office supply store. I think about it another way if it is an avant-garde sound artist giving it to me. The discussion was someone snarkily saying that they just picked up a 100 CD spindle, and should they put that under the deluxe box set of Jared Fowler’s works or not? People got very mad, but that’s a really good question. It opens on, I think, to what you say.

Wershler:
I’ve always liked the definition that Lisa provides in the first chapter of Always Already New of media as the material technology plus the attendant protocols and social forms that we attach to that. Maybe that’s where the kind of opening that you are talking about, Omri, is coming from, because those social protocols are always changing. The sort of infamous examples of that are things like the invention of touch typing after the final Latham & Scholes typewriter or the invention of the word Hello as a kind of social protocol for answering the phone. That kind of perpetual openness means that there is always something more that could be said or something more that could be done.

Speaker:
This is really more of a question for Craig. I was thinking about when you started talking about the Cocteau film, when you were sort of contextualizing it with other forms of blankness in the post-war avant-garde. I haven’t read your work yet but I know that you’ve written about Vito Acconci, so I’m assuming you are pretty familiar with this stuff, but I was wondering how you would read the reception of monochromatic painting? By today’s standards that’s not blank in any way, but I’m thinking about your idea of the ideology of blankness and how those paintings were so controversial at the time they came out because they seemed to be promoting this kind of nothingness. Of course they are totally rich in tone. You got me excited about that question and I was wondering if you had considered that.

Dworkin:
I think it comes in two ways. There is a practical historical moment in which it’s Rauschenberg’s white paintings that are fundamental for Cage thinking about 4’33” which goes on to be fundamental for a range of people presenting clear film strip as film or blank pages as poetry. So, I think you can’t extricate the poetics of a blank page from monochromatic white paintings in that tradition. Then there’s a more interesting and complicated version of that inextricability that I’m not going to be able to pull off here but it goes something like this. One of the tensions in the history of the monochrome is why are they are painted and why they are simply not canvases that are hung up and I’m blanking on the great scholar who wrote Kant After Duchamp.

Wershler:
Thierry De Duve.

Dworkin:
Yes! Thank you. Thierry De Duve goes into this with the proper depth. What he argues is very interesting in that painting as a discipline, and avant-garde painting, imagined simply the stretched but unpainted canvas put forward as a painting, and no one ever did it. For all the avant-garde work that was done, no one ever just hung those up. They always primed it. They always put white paint on it. He argues that it was actually necessary for avant-garde painting to imagine but not realize this. The flip side of this is that avant-garde poetry realized the blank page before they theorized its power for poetry, but has to always forget that it was done. This is part of what I take to be the recovery work of this kind of project. It seems necessary for avant-garde poetry to forget that it actually was realized before anyone thought of the power that it could have as such.

Does that make any sense?

Speaker:
Yes, thank you. That was a great answer.

Will Straw:
I’m making this up as I go along, but partly bouncing off the discussion of the blank CDs, I guess I’m curious of the moral-ecological status of the blank. Blank books and blank CDs are not any heavier usually then ones filled. And they are both thrifty in their spare use of expression, but of course they’re wasteful in the very gesture of giving out blank CDs. I’m wondering if there are any reflections upon that?

Wershler:
One of the things, when we’re talking about the avant-garde literary side of this, I can talk about this as a former publisher of avant-garde poetry. That’s an economy of waste and excess and arbitrary value anyway. Nobody buys those books. So, you give them away. At the Coach House, there was always an open box at the front door of whatever had just come off the press and anyone coming and going would just take books when they arrived or when they left. What you end up with is this kind of circulation of things ranging from manuscripts to small press ephemera. So, in that sense, to sort of lovingly prepare a blank ream of paper and circulate it, it’s not that different a gesture. What do you think?

Gitelman:
From a completely different angle, part of describing entries as a micro-genre or micro-genres is to think about them as existing in a kind of economy of expression related to the extent of the material.

Dworkin:
Picking up on Darren’s point, Aram Saroyan’s blank ream of paper is interesting to think of because it enters into these dynamics of use and waste in really interesting ways. People who would not pay, I think it was, two or three dollars at the time…? How much would you pay for a blank music CD if it’s given to you by some artist? But if you go to the convenience store in the basement here, you’d buy one then. And in fact his publisher was so upset by this publication that she actually took them to the dump. Rather than say ‘this is great, I have a 5-years-supply of typing paper’, which she could have used; there’s this sort of wasteful expenditure of insisting on the uselessness that he gestures towards. He didn’t say you can’t use my book for typing.

Wershler:
It’s also worth thinking about digital blanks here, the proliferation of templates, the Microsoft template wizard. All of those blank forms that no one will ever use because they are designed for everyone and used by precisely no one. There is a kind of economy of waste that comes out there from trying to serve everyone.

Jonathan Sterne:
I don’t know if this is a question, but we’ll give it a try. I’m thinking about the condition of blankness in the different ways that it’s been talked about today. Two things strike me. One is it’s relationship to minimalism, which I feel like almost inhibits my ability to read the 19th century stuff historically because it isn’t minimalistic. It’s before that moment, whereas the empty search button for Google feels very much in that legacy. The other thing about the blank, whether we’re talking about the blank screen or the blank page or the blank on the internet, it seems that its blankness is generally invitational, and when it’s not invitational that’s a meaningful gesture of some kind or an avant-garde gesture. So, there is this way in which if you think of blankness rhetorically it lands somewhere in between what some people call invitational rhetoric now and epidictic rhetoric in the sense of attributing value, like this little square of the paper is where you put the number of pieces of lumber on your ledger as you go down. So, is there a question in there? I don’t know.

Gitelman:
I don’t know what to say about the minimalism, but the invitational quality you are pointing to, I guess I was trying to think about it in more sinister terms, as a sort of prior interpellation of the subject always there lurking. So I guess I’m less encouraged. But a different kind of online blank that fascinates me is all those blank pages in Google Books. What’s the ideology of those blank pages? It’s the ideology of the book, still, that we can take this thing whole and represent it here.

Dworkin:
I’m not going to be able to think through it now, but after listening to Lisa’s talk, thinking about the range of things that do and don’t take place during an invitation, say, or invitations that are misunderstood. I was delayed yesterday at the airport because I signed the customs form where the agent was supposed to sign it. First, I didn’t sign it at all, so I missed the invitation. It looked to me that I was supposed to sign it when I left the country. I didn’t know how I was supposed to know when I’ve left the country before I’ve actually entered the country. So I was confused by this temporal part. I thought I must have to sign this later. I didn’t sign it and then she was unhappy that I hadn’t signed it, and she said “Sign it!”, so I signed it but it wasn’t where my signature was supposed to go. Then we had this problem that I’d filled out a form and I wanted to do it again but I wasn’t supposed to just do it again. This is trivial, but there are all kinds of things that go under “invitation” where you establish it wasn’t a handshake, it was a hit.

Gitelman:
Well, the one way that not minimalism but what Craig calls the radical reduction creeps in to invitations is that because they are thought of ahead of time they never entail all of the possibilities. All of the mistakes that you could possibly make are not there. So, you get things like having to pick one gender, one religion, one race. That’s radical reduction sneaking into this realm that we see with such profusion of curlicues and the rest of it.

Dworkin:
The student number line on the release form that I had filled out to allow this recording to go public would be one instance.

Gitelman:
You didn’t put your ID number in there?

Dworkin:
I put yours!

Speaker:
Sam Weber in that book Theatricality as Medium talks about the hollowness of the stage as a condition for expressivity. I’m wondering about the blankness in relation to the term theatricality. I’m thinking of this because Jonathan’s point about minimalism. There’s a way in which minimalism is an extremely theatrical aesthetic, even though it denies theatricality. I’m wondering if that’s a way of connecting your curlicues on the one hand to the blank page of the avant-garde?

And also, generally, I’m wondering if you might say something about expressivity? Because we don’t associate blankness with expressivity, but I wonder in being directed to the plastic of the screen behind you, what does that do with the concept of expressivity? What then are we left with? That is, perhaps, a kind of Romantic concept, but I don’t think that’s gone.

Gitelman:
I just want to say that the idea of the performative is absolutely great to think about blanks and to think of those blanks as meeting places, stages upon which the subject meets his or her other subject.

Dworkin:
That’s too good a question for me. I have to do a lot of thinking, but that’s really helpful. Theatricality is what Michael Fried hated about minimalism to begin with, so I think you’re right on.

Gitelman:
That question of expression is good.

Wershler:
About the staging thing and the earlier question about minimalism made me think about the Suprematist square, the black square that’s lurking behind the white one that’s slightly off kilter. That blank space has been prepared in advance. So, there’s the sinister lurking behind the blank.

Any other questions?

Well, thank you all very much. I’d like to thank our two speakers today and everyone who has helped to make this possible: the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Michael Nardone who prepared the sound recording, Media at McGill, and all of you for showing up. Thank you.

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