<nettime> Glossary for zkp5

[Faith Wilding <74447.2452@CompuServe.Com>]

Dear nettimers: These are Glossary items for the zkp5 book contributed by
Peter Lunenfeld. I hope they will inspire you to send in your Glossary
contributions. If each nettimer would send in one item we would have a
lovely glossolalia....So, please... THANKS

Send them to Faith Wilding:>fwild@andrew.cmu.edu<

The Alexandrine Dream: The desire to collect the whole of human cultural
production under one roof. This impulse runs directly from the classical
Library at Alexandria to hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson's forever unfinished
project Xanadu. 

Camera rasa: In the discourse of virtuality, the imagination confronts a
camera rasa -- a blank room, the erased slate of the tabula rasa extruded
into three dimensions -- and renders into it all manners of wonders. 

Commodity Camaraderie: The primary cohesive force binding electronic
artists, less a shared sense of artistic destiny than the common use of
similar tools. See also TechnoVolksgeist. 

Digital Dialectic: A critical discourse about electronic culture which
grounds the insights of theory in the constraints of production. 

Demo or Die: The demonstration, or "demo," is the defining moment of the
digital artist's practice at the turn of the millennium. The failure to
demo leads to the end of financial and/or critical support, hence, "Demo
or Die." 

The Edenic Fallacy: Too many of those artists who employ vastly expensive
technologies offer a never ending idyllicization of nature in the service
of a feel-good eco-aesthetic. The call for a return to nature is a
puzzling embarrassment: Why use million dollar systems dependent on the
latest hardware and software to create simplistic critiques of machine
culture? 

The Electronic Corpse: One of the default settings of net.art. The digital
era's take on the Surrealists's Exquisite Corpse, the Electronic Corpse
ships images over the net and around the globe, in the hopes of creating a
truly collaborative art form. The usual result is rasterbated murk. 

Future/present: In an era of technological hyper-obsolescence, the present
is no longer sufficient, we have need of a future/present, a
phenomenological equivalent to the future perfect tense. 

Hardscape: The built structures that house or hold the visual screens that
constitute hybrid architecture's imagescapes. See hybrid architecture and
imagescapes. 

Hybrid architecture: Architectural systems that combine the hardscapes
with mutable imagescapes. See hardscapes and imagascapes. 

Hyperaesthetics: A dynamic aesthetics applied to dynamic arts.
Hyperaesthetics requires theorization in real time. 

Imagescapes: The mutable visual technologies embedded within and/or
covering the built hardscapes of conventional architecture. 

Nano-thoughts: Ideas, metaphors, and images processed down to their
smallest units, and then repeated ad nauseam throughout digital databases. 

Neologorrhea: The compulsive, almost hysterical need to neologize, to
create new words to describe and confront new situations. Neologorrhea is
pandemic within the technoculture. 

Nostalgia for the future: The condition that allows us the mental space to
confront the ever redoubling speed of digital technologies which render
them obsolete memories in the blink of an eye. 

Permanent Present: The situation of being unable to imagine a future more
interesting, viable or beautiful than the moment in which we live now. 

TechnoVolksgeist: As digital artists and other groups heavily invested in
the creative use of technology extend their commodity camaraderie from
software to platform to network, they transform the idea of a
geographically specific Bohemia into a broader concept of the user group
as proto-social formation. 

Vapor theory: Critical discussions about technology untethered to the
constraints of production.  Vapor theory often mutates into
techno-mysticism, and can lead even exceptionally able thinkers into a
hype-driven discourse that dates instantly. See Digital Dialectic. 

(Peter Lunenfeld)

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