[Air-l] Bring me my Bow.

Sat Jan 26 13:24:19 PST 2002

>was Re: my email archives

>>One day no doubt the world will mourn the >loss of my juvenilia. <cubitt>

>I doubt the world will mourn, Sean, the loss >of your ‘juvenilia’, as long as it did not 
>and does not impact the rights of others.

Turn yourself in Cubitt and stop babbling.
You are distracting, but then this is your
ideological function in the field of new 
media and digital culture, the purpose of 
my intervention in AoIR.

1. The Primary producer has a right to the fruits of his or her labour. We cite sources in scholarship for a range of reasons that I am sure scholars of AoIR would like to list.

2 Yes, erasure is an art of power. However the
trace of erasure leaves an impression that has permanance. My research has teased out instances far more remarkable than any you 
may presently have in mind. So, shut up
and let things unfold.

3. Contemporary Culture is a wee bit less
ephemeral than you might like it to be, matey. There are memories, there are histories and as I am sure you will dimly recall, there is foresight.

I shall introduce myself to the scholars of
AoIR. Shut up and sit at the back.

Lachlan Brown

>Hey Lachlan

>Yes but

1. there  are engines for the storage of our missives that we wot but
little of (I'm constantly ego-surfed by students checking my credentials
who then ingratiate themselves by quoting 'publ,ications' I never knew I
had, a common enough thing, and) as Cap'n Beefheart once said I'd like to
give my music away for free, it didn't cost anything where I got it from.
The internet is a self-archiving entity by nature, so why privatise memory
when it can be socialised?

2. the privilege of the personal archive reduces to one thing only: the
right to erase. Exercise of this right reveals only a hankering for a
pre-modern Enlightenment privacy. Unless of coursxe you are an Enron
executive, member of the unelected government of the USA, recovering
alcoholic in charge of genocide against the Palestinians or otherwise
disgraced person, in which case you have forfeited the right to be treated
with the usual ethical obligations reserved for mammals

3. The contemporary culture is intensely ephemeral. Those dull Derrideans
who wrte endless preambles to the foreward before the preface believe they
are writing in the sprit and style of the events they understand to be
a-foundational. Perhaps we shd on principle delete everything in the intray
on the principle that because it is in the intray it is obviously
out-of-date (incidentally a phrase which first appeared in popular
journalism circa 1896 . . . )

Now keep out of trouble, and delete this message

s

Sean Cubitt
Screen and Media Studies
Akoranga Whakaata P=FCrongo
The University of Waikato
Private Bag 3105
Hamilton
New Zealand
T (direct) +64 (0)7 856 2889 extension 8604
T/F (department) +64 (0)7 838 4543
seanc at waikato.ac.nz
http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/

Digital Aesthetics
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita
The Dundee Seminars
http://www.imaging.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/index.html

was Re: my email archives

> I'm not quite sure what you mean by "archiving." <warschauer>

>anyone else archived all their incoming and outgoing emails, <hunsinger>

>How do we keep it secure (both in the 
sense of "private" and in the sense of "safe")? How do we think about it, if at all, right now? 
That is, I suspect we all have this sense of the "stuff" that we have 
on our disks and hard drives, but how does that intersect and 
interplay with how we feel about the box of letters we keep in the 
closet? Will we encrypt stuff, or keep it open? Will we erase some? <jones>

>One day no doubt the world will mourn the loss of my juvenilia. <cubitt>

I doubt the world will mourn, Sean, the loss of your ‘juvenilia’, as long as it did not 
and does not impact the rights of others.

Forgive me for crashing in, but a little 
bird told me I should take time out of my 
intervention in Nettime (I think I have pitched things about right over there), to
check to see what AoIR was doing under the
duress of contemporary cultural ‘events’ and
the impact of ‘emergency’ legislation.

 I sense unease.

This ‘e-mail archive’ thread reads a little 
like an annual general meeting of the ‘Intellect and Imagination Temperance Society’ and I would remind 
you four of your duties and responsibilities not merely as scholars, but 
as members of an international intellectual community. 

After seven or eight years in which questions of archival, catalogue, 
identity, access and availability of information and knowledge,
gender, ethnicity, uneven distributions of information, uneven 
accumulations of knowledge, new relations of distribution of 
media and communications and new relations of 
mediation in a tremendous cultural contest that 
cast new perspectives on the nature of governance, 
institution, scholarship, democracy, not to mention an economy 
led like a pig with a ring in its nose by the mere ‘idea of Internet’, 
you’d think we’d have got a little further along 
in an understanding of technology in contemporary 
culture.

What, one wonders, have you all been doing?

Yes, I kept all of my files and email communications 
1993-present. Saved, time-locked, stored, periodically. 
I thought this was a simple matter of research scholarship, 
quite in line with the Social Sciences Methods and 
Approaches course I took at Goldsmiths College as 
a requirement in undertaking PhD work. Given the 
intense contests already apparent in 1993-94 – 
perhaps rather more apparent then than they are now 
-- around the meanings and governance of the technology, 
I would have been remiss in my scholarship to not do so. 

>>>It was easy to imagine a scenario in which, say, The National Security 
State employed archives to influence government, 
commerce and public opinion to help render compliance to the agenda 
of the National Security State, alternatively imagine a situation in which 
commercial or alternative interests employed these archives to the same 
end. Or rather, easy to anticipate the nature of a contest between these 
interests (it’s called “the pretzel debate” apparently’) and you, pretty much,
have something closely resembling contemporary culture
>>>

Lachlan

Lachlan Brown
Thirdnet Ltd

Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths College
University of London
Toronto: M.(416) 826 6937
         VM: (416) 822 1123
         lachlan at london.com

http://third.net 

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