| An info-face hypertext work
A project by the Sarai Media Lab: Additional Research: Acknowledgements: Designed and Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, India (www.sarai.net) |
| To navigate through the network of No_des: No_des is an HTML based audio and visual work. * You enter the network of No_des through its interface. |
The Network of No_des: Media practices in South Asian streets have a history of using the edit, copy and record/paste function to celebrate a culture of shared usage, gifting, reproduction and low cost distribution mechanisms for high value information goods. Backstreet CD burners and basement hard drives combine to produce a thriving network of unofficial info trade. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people from South Asia (those teeming brown billions that are taking over the planet and swiping all the software) are so dangerously clever. They pay less to go to school, they run away from school, and end up learning more than those who pay more to go to school. We call this the ecological and economical utilisation of knowledge resources. Some people call this piracy. The exhilarations and anxieties that mark this phenomenon are poles that orient us to the compass of affect that frames the map of information in our time. You are either in the hemisphere of joy or in the latitudes of anxiety, when you come face to face with the glut of information. The user/producer’s sudden joy of coming upon a stash of images or texts, ripe for interpretation, ready for sharing, is offset by the anxiety in the guardians of a knowledge system that their data hoards are being ‘liberated’ by hacks that erode the high walls of the citadel of decryption. The Network of No_des uses driftwood from web searches, messages in data bottles, re-mixed fragments of Hindi and Bengali film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s ongoing exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an array of associational possibilities. We are weaving threads that connect basements in Delhi to depots for migrants in Ellis Island, theology to pornography, lost and found notices to the drying up of a sea, Goethe to (desi) Spiderman, food to forgery and death sentences to internet matrimonials. The paths that you take as you travel between the nodes in the Network of No_des bring you surprises, confirmations and detours and makes you come face to face with the fact of yourself as a forager in the undergrowth of the information economy. Next time you hear someone being accused of forgery, remember that they were probably foragers who had somehow lost an ‘a’ during a rough day out in the data forest. This work considers remixing, which is just another word for foraging in an electronic mode. Remixing, repurposing and re-editing are facts of life, as simple, as pleasurable and as necessary for the reproduction of knowledge and culture as foraging, feeding and fornication are for the reproduction and survival of our humanity. To forage is human. Everyone forages - we store a fragment of a story, hum a cadence in a song, scratch a text into a notebook and put all that that through the blender in our mind. One thing leads to another, a story fills a space in a song, a piece of code gathers patches. And in time a re-purposed remixed media work is released into the peer-to-peer network called conversation. This conversation, the one that you enter into when you plug in and press ‘play’ on this ‘info-face’, emerges from a fluid info-sphere made up of the most mundane of media materials – newspaper cuttings, video grabs from late night cable tv, downloads, scraps of paper, floating bits of history, besides original research material. Each bit of material adds incrementally to the ‘facticity’ of the work, not because everything you read here is true in some indexical sense, but because the elements emerge from and fall back into the acts of electronic and data foraging that we do each day. Reality haunts this work like the ghost of a dead pirate sitting on a piece of lost treasure. The info-face of this work is nested within the matrices of the everyday life of the media in our city. What is an info-face? It is the form that weaves its way into the making of a work such as this one. An info-face is what we are calling an interface made entirely out of pieces of previously extant information, treated to constitute (together) a completely new informational entity, which while it uses various informational bits contained within it as sources, links and annotations also makes sense as a re purposed whole. The fragment of information then does two things: it points to what it contains within itself, and it also acts as a lever into the design of the way the different pieces of information dovetail into each other. In the case of this work, the info-face is both the rough index of the entire contents of the work, as well as the surface that you first encounter, and the architecture that holds all the fragments together within one frame. We would like to thank the authors of the films, texts, reports, websites and other messages that we have re-purposed in this work for their conscious and unconscious acts of generosity towards our enterprise. As a colony of conscientious parasites (like the ones that inhabit your gut and keep you healthy by helping you digest your food) we welcome all further re-purposing of what we have produced so as to keep the epidemic alive. Come, be infected, and spread our contagion. Share what you know and enjoy! |
Nodes (No_des):
Any structure that is composed of concentrated masses of materials which act as junction points for the branching out of extensible parts of the overall system may be described as nodal. The concentrations or junctions being the nodes. A nodal structure is a rhizomic structure, it sets down roots (that branch out laterally) as it travels. Here, nodes may also be likened to the intersection points of fractal systems, the precise locations where new fractal iterations arises out of an existing pattern. A work that is internally composed of memes is inherently nodal. Each meme is a junction point or a node for the lateral branching out of the vector of an idea. In a work that is made up of interconnected nodes, the final structure that emerges is that of a web, in which every vector eventually passes through each node, at least once on its orbit through the structure of the work. In such a structure it becomes impossible to suppress or kill an idea, once it is set in motion, because its vectors will make it travel quickly through the nodes to other locations within the system, setting off chains of echoes and resonances at each node that trace a path back to the kernel of the idea. These echoes and resonances are rescensions, and each node is ultimately a direct rescension of at least one other node in the system and an indirect rescension of each junction within a whole cluster of other nodes Nodes, when written, perhaps erroneously, as 'no-des' gives rise to an intriguing hybrid English/Eastern-Hindi neologism, a companion to the old words - 'des', and 'par-des'. 'Des' (in some eastern dialects of Hindi, spoken by many migrants to Delhi) is simply homeland or native place; 'par-des' suggests exile, and an alien land. 'No-des' is that site or way of being, in 'des' or in 'par-des', where territory and anxieties about belonging, don't go hand in hand. Nodes in a digital domain are No-des..." A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons, |