All Sources Are Broken
https://www.neme.org/projects/respublika/performances/all-sources-are-broken
All Sources Are Broken is an internet-based-project developed by Labor Neunzehn (Alessandro Massobrio & Valentina Besegher). ASAB is both an artistic experiment and a collaborative re-archival practice, which presents itself as an open access web content management system (WCMS) for the investigation of the hypertext space of post-digital books. It encourages creative re-reading practices, parallel narratives and unconventional learning strategies. An online space for creativity, collective action and re-contextualisation. The project aims at exposing the offline/online cycle of data and ideas, exploring how both are being shaped by migrations between the material and the digital world, ultimately creating output originating from that cycle.
By means of a participative process of data collection, ASAB aims at offering a response to the question about where the networking function of hyperlinks is situated in offline texts ASAB also encourages possible strategies for re-reading books in the post-digital era. This INPUT, which requires an attentive analysis of texts and citations, can be then utilized in order to produce an OUTPUT for deconstructing the cycle. The hope is to build a narrative similar to the one used in experimental cinema; storytelling that begins with the deconstruction of the text, in order to gradually allow – after some initial embarrassment and disorientation – for new organizations of discourse to emerge. We have in view the development of a back-end desktop publishing tool for the creation of print layout: a javascript based, interactive area that grants logged-in users the ability of reorganizing books’ citations and multimedia sources, to elaborate and print out physical objects. Instead of employing a re-archival approach that prioritizes the encyclopedic, the project focuses on parallel subjects and narrative patterns.
ASAP stems from a participatory dimension that becomes clear in the re-archival and deconstructive processes enabled in the project. This, however, is not taken as a means for “pure” emancipation. On the contrary, as an artistic practice, ASAB deals with a critique of democracy for how it has developed, and continues to develop, through the World Wide Web Infrastructure. If information architecture, which constitutes the structures in which hypertext operates, were compared to city planning, Labor Neunzehn suggests that the latest development of the Internet recalls the experience of the shopping mall. Just like in a shopping centre, the information architecture can work to create paths and barriers intended to direct user choices. Or, alternatively, it can design strategies that sustain discovery and sharing activities – as ASAB does – facilitating dissemination and contiguity with original context as key tenets. We want to stress (and play with) the deferred space between offline and online, its delay and decay. Working at the intersection of intertextuality, audio-visual collage, sampling, cutup media and deconstructed narratives, ASAB progressively takes the form of self-published works, installations, video and lecture performances, in order to show the different levels of the discourse that brought us here, until All Sources Are Broken.
Sponsors
The Respublika! project was made possible thanks to funding by the Cultural Services of the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture and the kind support from Medochemie, Sheila Pinkel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Uppsala University, CCMC, and H4C.
