[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> other than pocock's boycotts

[Philip.Pocock@t-online.de (philip pocock)]

the term i use 'embargo' in my open letter to manovich, you humorously 
equate with boycott.
" the term Boycott comes from Colonel Boycott, a person so horrible to 
work for that his workers refused to harvest his fields."
http://www.dcrtv.net/mb0206b.html

it's not however what i intend to say exactly. an online embargo 
distinguishes itself from a RL embargo. i intend by embargo, no 
censoring or 'boycotting' but simply a concept-clarifying open forum 
that exposes for the online record, the misappropriation of terms, their 
muddling by manovich, for motivations only he knows.

the best boycott is an open forum. thanks for taking part. i hope you'll 
take time to continue.

my hope is that with it, the underlying paradigm of media influencing 
the polit-media stars, ie B&B, is not to be given a cosmetically-termed 
database facelift as soft cinema does.

if one of the teams working in the field with proper understanding of 
datadase tech and media art gets lucky and makes a break through without 
making new media systems backward-compatible to inappropriate paradigms 
for database media as soft cinema does, there is movement, horizon and 
hope.

the affect and effect of manovich's promotion of so-called 'database 
cinema' asks both those who are and are not familiar with database 
technology to set back their system clock to pre-OOP database sytems - 
focus instead on contemporary misnomers like soft cinema, rather that 
imagining any quiet revolution that new media database coding might 
cause in thev tired media-prop cultural production loop. as labyrinthian 
as manovich might inscribe his closed circle. Chewing gum for the 
eyeballs, is how buckie fuller would perhaps describe soft cinema.

what soft cinema ignores, consciously or not, is that (Open Database 
Management Systems) blurs lines between consumption (classic media-prop) 
and the emerging of user participation, co-production of knowledge (and 
media art). Soft cinema gives any ground new media may open back to the 
classic control of tv news, using databases of the soft cinema sort for 
decades (without manovich's mondrianesque, eye-candy effect). manovich 
flavors his GUI's consumers with what they already are feeding on with a 
growing scepticism.

a brief timeline on database tech:
- 1950s Database technology evolved as a solution to manage access to 
shared data.
- 1961, BASE-BALL provided access to data via natural language 
processing.
- 1962, multi-valued DBMS (Database Management System) began with the 
Generalized Information Retrieval and Listing System (GIRLS).
- 1970, Relational, SQL (Structured Query Language) and Beyond from  
Codd's seminal work.
- 1993, the Object Data Management Group (ODMG) created the first 
standard for object databases, based on OOP (Object-Oriented 
Programming).
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Ken_North/db_hall.htm

Is it not peculiar that ML would have the brashness to title his book 
keying on the subject of databases 'Language of New Media'. Certainly it 
is not useful to media artists and students searching and experimenting 
with current database tools.

Am Sunday den, 16. February 2003, um 16:38, schrieb Heiko Recktenwald:

> Hi Pocock, btw ;-)
>
> On Sat, 15 Feb 2003, McKenzie Wark wrote:
>
>> Mr Pocock confuses two relatively separate things, but it seems to me
>> he makes an excellent point under each heading anyway.
>>
>> 1. why not boycott the media product of the United States and its 
>> allies
>> at this point in time? One might argue that the arts community is 
>> mostly
>
> Boycott or not, many pieces of so called american art are better than 
> Bush
> etc (maybe even Bush is better than Bush, I really like some aspects of
> the person/family). But whatever happens, we will no longer view those
> american things with the same eyes. A lot of things will no longer be
> neutral, trash or whatever, pop, they will look really ugly.
>
> What seemed to be history, "the ugly american", has reappeared in much
> more terrible dimensions.It will last years for Hollywood etc to cure 
> this
> esthetic desease. Like Napalm and Dow Chemicals 30 years........
>
> I dont know if Blair is so important, who believes in BBC (well, Pit),
> but "american civilisation" will never be the same.
>
> Maybe we should work in this direction more, the old Europe etc showing
> american uglyness, even innocent one, this is most ugly.
>
>
> H.
>
> http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs106/ -- the messy mp4 playlist name game 
> page.
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philip pocock
gabelsbergerstr. 1 d-76135 karlsruhe germany
mobile/sms +49 1707 369 870
tel +49 721 845 715  fax +49 721 830 2714

the more we share, the more we have. - l.nimoy

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