Re: <nettime> <foo>.net

[Martin Schitter <mash@gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at>]

On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Josephine Bosma wrote:

> [...] i love the dot. I use it a lot. I see no restriction in it
> whatsoever, no barrier or limits. Quite the opposite.
> 
> The dot represents what words cannot say what is different about
> working in this new environment, while being connected to the so
> called real world and its history. To me the dot is almost poetic
> in its release of energy [...]

sorry - i'm still one of the ':'-addicts - this canonical form of
(political:art)-expression - part of the local austrian culture(-history?)
(-> "peresepolis:zelten", "hunger:biafra", berlin:anmaeuerln"...) - and
it's '/'-neighbourhood like the "a/traverso"-theory+movement from italy.

this poetic form - the "Konstellation" (constellation) - has a long
tradition and it's development was strong related to other visual-media
(jap.  wood-engrafing, film-editing-technics...) but after it's exploding
application beetween the 60s and 80s it's hard to find anymore. 

to use the dot this way (that's how i read your: "net.art" and
"girl.friend") is IHMO not very usefull. well - in the example "net.time",
it maybe a nice way to emphasisze some difference of it's object to more
radical but outdated forms of controversion - but in most cases the ':'
and '/' leads to more tension and dialectic vision... 

to see the dot-notation as a construct of hierarchys seems much more
attractive to me. it doesn't hide the origin of most newer '.'-words and
opens a new field of tactical operation. thinking about this kind of
dot-usage, i see the necasserity to escape the simple pseudo-realism of
address- and directory-space - searching for some more abstract form like
in most newer class-naming-conventions. the most significant difference
beetwen this two dot-constructs you'll find the order of their elements. 
the class-form usualy looks somehow mirrored to the suspected
address-form. 

mash

PS: what to do with this strict "<CR>.<CR>"-usage described in RFC821 ;-)   


==========================================================================
     University of Graz - Computerlab at the Department for Humanities
   Forum Stadtpark Graz - Department for new media and electronic art
                             Martin Schitter
             (finger mash@gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at for PGP-key)
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