Re: <nettime> Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

[Benjamin Geer <benjamin.geer@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:03:29 -0500, Jon Ippolito <ji@guggenheim.org> wrote:

> You're right, American consumer culture is largely self-referential.
> But that doesn't mean that all non-consumer repurposing of that
> culture is stuck in the same groove. Remixes like John Oswald's take
> on Michael Jackson, Pat O'Neill's Humphrey Bogart, and Brian
> Provinciano's Grand Theft Auto break the expectations--not to mention
> the law--of mainstream culture's vicious circle.

I haven't seen them, so forgive me for hazarding some guesses that
might be wide of the mark.  Doesn't the very presence of Michael
Jackson or Humphrey Bogart serve to anchor the work in what the viewer
sees as their world?  And doesn't this reinforce the viewer's belief
that "my world" can only be the world that the culture industry has
created for me, and that its utterly alienated system of references is
something so important that every piece of art has to either emanate
from it or be a comment on it, as if it were a holy text and all
artists were its theologians?  Wouldn't it be much more liberating to
treat that system as the minuscule, putrid bit of rubbish that it
really is, and therefore ignore it completely, in favour of the much
larger and infinitely more human world outside?

> Want to netcast your video expose on the MGM-Credit Lyonnais scandal
> or your documentary on Iraqi casualties? Stand in line--you'll need
> Hollywood's digital watermark (and hence blessing) before you can get
> it through Internet2's routers.

Wouldn't one of Internet2's main selling points for the consumer be
the ability to send videos of your new baby to your friends in
seconds?  How would it be feasible to ban the documentary but not the
millions of baby videos?

Ben


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