why a website..?
This site is both a workspace and the Project in process. Its fragments and images are the rags ‘n refuse that Benjamin talks about and collected in his analog envelopes. But why use a website and more specifically a Blog?
Clearly one reason is to embrace but also explore the rhetoric of ‘open source’ and networked, distributed content. By putting my fragments of work and drafts of ‘chapters’ on the Networks and allowing comments, subscriptions and embedding, I am exploring the wisdom of crowds – the vision of group writing being ’smarter’ than any one monkey with a typewriter.
But by building this Project in a Blog rather than on a wiki, by allowing commenting within structures I have determined, I retain a form of authorship – a vision maybe – and build the windows through which the Olympic Arcades can be seen.
A second reason for working through this site/space is that by doing so I am admitting my own position within the network relations under analysis. I am not outside the Net, the Net discourse nor its power relations. Even if I was not developing the Project online I would still be part of those relations but by deliberately working in space built through XML, HTTP and TCPIP I am foregrounding my relationship to those protocols 1.
A third reason for developing this ‘practice-based PhD’ here (wherever that is) is so I can explore and even discover what that ‘practice’ is as I collect fragments and images. The mindmaps that form some of the fragments, the screengrabs filed in multiple miscellaneous categories 2 and the audio and Kodachrome explorations are fragments not just of content or reportage but of practice. By allowing them to be ‘filed’ as they are found means they can exist as practice as well as text and so allow me to unpick my own practice, the practice part of Birkbeck’s brief and the wider issue of networked media practice.
