Archive for October, 2008
The theorist George Landow, writing on Hypertext, urges us to forget the usual conceptual elements which hold language together and, instead, use new substitutes ‘such as multilinearity, nodes, links, or networks.’ Elements of syntax - and, when, so, or - are now converted to a range of physical manoeuvres: mouse up, mouse over, mouse down etc. A click now links us to our mediated world.’ In this new world, the internet is often described as a virtual landscape without a horizon but, with the average lifespan of a website measured in months rather than years, in practice it has surprisingly many broken links/dead-ends. Although the web links us to snapshots of ‘history’ in unlimited supply, it has no memory - just a post saying ‘this page is no longer on this server…’
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Dans la première partie de cet article nous avons montré comment l’évolution culturelle des mentalités n’a permis d’accueillir les idées avant-gardistes d’Aby Warburg, que 70 ans après leur conception. S’il se retrouvait vivant aujourd’hui, après un bond à travers le temps, l’espace et la technologie, à quoi ressemblerait son projet ? read the rest of this article
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Warburg 2.0
“Warburg was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration that connected civilizations from the beginning.”
Mathias Bruhn – Aby Warburg (1866-1929): The Survival of an Idea
In Part 1 of this article published in Le CENTQUATREVUE we saw the cultural worldview ripening to welcome back Warburg’s avant-garde ideas 70 years after their conception. If he was alive today, taking a quantum leap through time and space and technology, what would his project be?
Warburg wanted to break down disciplinary boundaries, allowing meaning and ideas to flow freely across academic and ethnic cultures, across geography and history, and particularly, across value systems. His procedural technique required the meticulous collection, storage and tagging of randomly accessed archives of various sources and media. He tried, with relatively limited success, to keep snapshots of the relationships themselves that he found between cultural elements.
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