Net-rét [Net.Field] at Sziget Festival, 3 August 2002
The theme of the day: Art & Media - internet lectures. Invited institutions were: Hungarian National Gallery, Centrális Gallery, Film.hu, Hungarian University of Applied Arts, Korridor TV, Artpool Art Research Center and the Information Society- and Trend Research Centre.
[in a knowledge-friendly environment]
THE KNOWLEDGE-FRIENDLY CHANCE
György Galántai's internet lecture on the Net.Field at Sziget Festival (3 August 2002), the theme of the day was Art & Media.
(Draft)
Artpool – founded in 1979 – experienced the special variants of artistic communication by its projects organized on the postal network (mail art) and by researching the possibilities of thought-exchange in communication-art . The result is their archives and the different artwork collections. In 1992 the Artpool Art Research Center had opened its door. As a new project the aim is to build up an interactive (knowledge-friendly) “Univers/ity” from the formerly collected materials in connection with the net outside. Since 1995 the the Artpool has been using the internet by two ways: as a user as well as a content supplier.
Socrates (469-399 BC) a friend of knowledge, once said of knowledge: “I know nothing, except that I know nothing”. Some two thousand years later Tamás Paulinyi cited a man by the name of W. H. Lung, who maintained that “It's not that the mind is in the space of the body, but that the body is in the space of the mind. This is like examining a radio and concluding that the broadcast is not in the radio but rather that the radio is in the broadcast.” […] The universe could have a consciousness per se and consciousness could have its universe. To continue with the master of paradox, Zeno (c. 490-430 BC): in the Arrow Paradox he states that in any one (durationless) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not. […] If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible. A great many conceptual artistic experiments at the end of the 20th century adopted these early propositions.
[...] “space, once seen as absolute, and time, once seen as clearly elapsing, are nothing more than relationships between observers, which is to say, subjects.” (Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future?) [...] “Today we have access to deeper insights into brain function and telematic technologies that would permit us to turn a stupid society into a creative one, specifically on the basis of a circuitry that does justice to the interaction among brain functions. In such a social structure, there would be no more broadcast centers. Rather each point of intersection in the web would both send and receive. In this way, decisions would be reached all over the web and, as in the brain, would be integrated into a comprehensive decision, a consensus. (Flusser: Into the Universe of Technical Images). Society will be a mosaic of intentions that will be continually composed into new, joint intentions. “Poetry as a self-assembling system”, as Miklós Erdély would say.
In a knowledge-friendly environment
* associative chains set free the operation of brain functions
* network structure * in every sense
* doubts are functional and not critical
* sameness and otherness (as the two abilities of the mind) work together
* accidentally changing knowledge reckons with the duality of the imagined and the actual world
* the “knowledge-friendly” book, as a physical reality, will become a medium and with its virtual adaptations transform the reader; thus, a “unified way of reading” will come into being.
* the “transition from the old ways of reading to the new involves a leap from historical, evaluative, political consciousness into a consciousness that is cybernetic and playful, that confers meaning. This will be the consciousness that reads in the future. [...]” (Flusser: Does Writing Have a Future?)