A genealogy of Blast, a “system of editorial circulation” published 1991–95.
From page to screen, a conversation on the unrecorded history of online publishing.
On July 29, as part of its Sender, Carrier, Receiver program, Triple Canopy presented a briefing on the activities of the International Necronautical Society's Berlin Inspectorate at Program. In this unofficial recording, Provan and Yamamoto-Masson dispute the INS's claim that Berlin is the World Capital of Death, and discuss attempts by its members—chief among them writer Tom McCarthy, artist Anthony Auerbach, and philosopher Simon Critchley—to surreptitiously recruit agents and take over major cultural landmarks. Click here to read the draft copy of their internal report, and here to listen to a file of covert INS recordings intercepted by Triple Canopy and prepared for the occasion.
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In this month's issue of Wired, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff argue that the Internet is finally undergoing the economic rite of consolidation that railroads, telephony, and the electrical grid reached in the interwar period. The delivery of content via the Internet, Anderson notes, is gravitating toward the “walled garden,” app-driven economy created by Apple; the greater “generative Web”—the free-as-in-speech self-publishing sandbox we identify with Web 2.0—will persist at the periphery, but will consist mainly of the long tail (or wide orbit?) of Internet content production. Basically, the argument—seemingly valid, despite the misleading graph employed as evidence—is that the Internet may not be as disruptive as the fever around it promised: new technological systems will be oriented around delivering traditional media in a more personalized, mobile manner. This supposition has been hotly contested by the community of philosophically-minded engineers whose ideals of absolute transparency have reigned for much of the Internet’s 18-year life.
Triple Canopy is in many ways a product of the wheat-paste ethos of the past decade on the Web, in which anyone with nine dollars to buy a domain name and decent programming skills could create a site that would occupy more or less the same space as those of CBS News and the New York Times (and certain major military contractors). Our original mission statement, however, recalcitrantly claimed that Triple Canopy worked “with and against the Internet”: We risked the conceit of adopting tropes of print magazines that ran up against the undifferentiated “stream” of the Web; we published in issues (discrete assemblages of content); we used the visual metaphor of the page, complete with bounding rectangles—a somewhat arbitrary (though, we thought, comical in its showy marriage of conservatism and innovation) constraint cribbed from the codex.
“What the Web has lacked in its determination to turn itself into a full-fledged media format,” Wolff writes, “is anybody who knew anything about media. Likewise, on the media side, there wasn’t anybody who knew anything about technology.” The challenge of producing “content” of actual value on the Web or on Internet-based applications—the articulation of ideas in a form particular to that expression and its reception—still has everything to do with inhabiting both of those seemingly divergent worlds, and with determining which pre-Internet metaphors remain viable and which are needless constraints. (We’re currently working on a redesign of Triple Canopy’s site that will shed the page-boundary paradigm completely.) Web 2.0 has been a kind of golden age: progressive browser improvements have empowered a generation of graphic designers to bring their work—the centuries-old practice of 2-D information representation—to the screen in a meaningful way. Likewise, Wolff argues, traditional media marketers may finally be able to practice their own trade of monetizing media consumption via the app market. Triple Canopy remains a hybrid, between the promise of the Web (look out for our soon-to-be-open-sourced publishing platform!) and the contemporary tendency to utilize the Internet to deliver conventional media experiences: reading text, watching video, looking at images. We like to think that our new design will go some way toward addressing Wired’s complaint that the Web lacks any “sublime integration of content and systems, of experience and functionality.” If only Steve Jobs had not already “perfectly fill[ed] that void.” —ADAM FLORIN
Two articles in the September issue of Artforum feature Triple Canopy contributors, collaborators, and/or agonists. In “The Long Take,” artist Lucy Raven, whose photographic animation China Town is currently being exhibited as part of MoMA P.S.1’s Greater New York 2010, talks with filmmaker Thom Anderson, whose works include Los Angeles Plays Itself and Red Hollywood. The discussion focuses on films that jettison the “stock-in-trade didactics of documentary or metanarrative” in favor of “audiovisual experiences that toy with the forms of time and media themselves”; Raven describes the composition of her visual essay "Daybreak,"
which appeared in issue 7, as an illustration of this approach.
In “Drama Queen,” David Velasco describes artist Ann Liv Young as “pop avec Sade.” His appreciation includes an account of Sherry tries on Cinderalla, Young's performance at 177 Livingston in June. “Everything about the situation is theater,” he writes. “It is unplanned, but not unanticipated. That it is in any way convincing (as reality, not theater) has to do with the fact that [Triple Canopy deputy editor Sam] Frank has not been scripted but rather has been compelled in the moment (better: inspired) to intervene”—when “Sherry” interrogates a woman in the front row about how she would feel if the audience were to hang someone onstage. “As the evening’s presenter and an ostensible authority figure in the space, Frank rehearses a position overdetermined by prior Sherry performances, and thus the action consummates rather than interrupts the work (or, to be accurate, the former is the consequence of the latter). Frank becomes, in effect, an accomplice to the performance, engaging with the fiction on its own terms. Young plays along, always staying in character (even if it’s a ‘broken’ character).” And so it goes:
SHERRY: This is art. This is performance art, have you ever heard of that?
FRANK: Do you believe in performance art?
SHERRY: Of course I do! Why else would I be doing this? You think that I think that I can make all of these people hang her from a rope?
FRANK: No, I don’t—
SHERRY: That is it! It’s twisted. It’s twisted! ... You guys can all go home. Fuck off. Fuck off. And you can keep your fifteen hundred fucking dollars, you asshole.
The Berlin-based biannual magazine 032c recently launched an online archive, where you'll find one of the most extensive extant treatments of Aspen, the great magazine in a box published between 1965 and 1971. (The current issue of Triple Canopy includes three projects directly inspired by Aspen, as detailed in the note from the editors.) Emily King writes that Aspen evolved from the fifteenth annual International Design Conference Aspen; its first issue included papers from a session called “Configurations of the New World,” which aimed to determine how design could fundamentally alter, and improve, the lives of ordinary Americans. Six years later, the magazine "was finally killed off by a much more prosaic concern: that of postage. On August 20th, 1971 the US Postmaster General rejected [publisher Phyllis] Johnson’s appeal against the denial of mail privileges for the magazine. Upholding a ruling that Aspen was not sufficiently 'periodical,' the postal service withdrew the lower rates available to more conventional publications. The Postmaster took particular exception to the fact that 'each issue of Aspen is complete unto itself and bears no relation to the prior or subsequent issues' and that 'each issue of Aspen could be considered to be an independent work, capable of standing alone.'” Thankfully, those independent works can now be viewed at UbuWeb.
The Internet is taking a beating these days. Nicholas Carr believes, and in his recent book, The Shallows, cites plenty of research to buoy his assertion that, the Internet is reconfiguring our brains, making us worse thinkers. Yes, the Web puts vast amounts of information at your fingertips, but its functionality has made it possible to do what scholars and scientists and just about everyone who’s ever studied anything have always wanted to do: cross-reference everything. So we flit about, moving from one article to another as quickly as we can click on hyperlinks—the mere presence of which greatly reduces reading comprehension. Carr argues that our brains are actually being rewired as a result. (The blog Three Percent
has been taking up these ideas recently in a series of posts derived from the first Future of Reading conference, where participants seemed split between “claiming that reading is just migrating to a new place and form, to claiming that technology can help improve close reading, to a belief that the belief in a constant decline in readership has been around since Gutenberg Day One and nothing has really changed.”)
In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks wrote, “The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian.” This is a long-standing claim, and is on one level true: Internet access offers (near) universal freedom to create and disseminate information, and to consume it on the other end. But on another level, this assertion is complete bullshit: We all know that the Internet has its own hierarchy, that the virtual equivalent of the crazy homeless man ranting about UFOs shouldn’t be—and, generally, is not—taken seriously.
Consider design. Books, for several hundred years, have not changed much at all. The paper is nicer. The covers last longer. And the evolution of printing technology has allowed for prettier pictures. But the format has remained static since the letterpress days: One reads from left to right, top to bottom, turning the pages to make progress. The Internet, on the other hand, is almost infinitely malleable—but you need a good blacksmith. Which has led to a hierarchy: the nicer, the more professional looking a site is, the more respected it is. Which sort of negates the egalitarianism.
But where do these two notions intersect? If there is a hierarchy, and if we now know why and how our brains are being rewired, can’t the blacksmiths behind the curtain counteract this effect? There is no single answer, of course, and much trial and error (along with a fair amount of hand wringing) will occur before designers—and information aggregators—find workable solutions. Despite Brooks’ pat assessment of Internet egalitarianism, there is an element of democratization at work, which allows individual concerns—preventing the dumbing down of the populace, for instance—to be articulated and amplified to the point where they might effect change (in this case, to the structure and function of the medium). On the Internet, there is no Tyranny of the Majority. —TOM ROBERGE
