The Merzweb: Kurt Schwitters And The Inverted Web

dave@TANDOT.co.uk Presented at Futuresonic 09 / SMC_MCR, May 2009

A brief introduction

• Painter • Sound poet • Performer • Writer • Information designer • Sculptor • Typographer • Landlord

• Passed through • He was an early cubism, futurism to practitioner with found increasingly abstract objects and collage work • Increasingly interested • Rejected by the Dada with surfaces and posse for being too relationships, rather bourgeois than politics or agendas

Merz is the middle syllable from „commerzbank‟. This is all that‟s left of it – a blurry mono photo. Merz became a term describing • Painting • Poetry • Performance • The artistic process itself

1923, Schwitters extends his collage technique to physical space He starts building columns of associated merz

1923, Schwitters builds the KdeE, the “Cathedral of Erotic Misery”, a third of his pillars, in a room at the end of his house. This marks the beginning of his serious „Merzbau‟ and their transition from a subject to the environment itself.

By 1933, „grottoes‟ and alcoves have formed with new construction over the makeshift frameworks he laid down earlier. The whole wall, ceilings, floors have become a continuous 3d collage of Merz.

• Allies destroy the Merzbau in a bombing raid • Flees to Norway and starts work on another in Oslo • Finally settles, forgotten as an artist, in Little Langdale, the Lake District, building his final Merzbarn.

That was just some context.

• In subtle grey! • It‟s built into my phone in silicon! • It‟s been in wide use for 5 years! • Ain‟t like no Beta I‟ve ever seen.

• Beta is a state of mind, a process • Anything online cannot be finished. There is no completed state. • A book can be completed. But like Merz, a website, the web itself, can only continually shift in response to it‟s own evolution. • We no longer need to say this.

He placed hair, nail parings and his own urine … throughout the project. Rendered impersonal, these … proceed along a circuit beginning from the … artist‟s body, through various containers and objects … into the crevices of the architectural armature. In effect, Merzbau obviates the traditional distinctions between interior and exterior.

Merz architecture and structures have parallels in „web 2.0‟

A typical site, around 2000, featuring a few sections and content types • Blog • Videos • Gallery • “Links”

The site architect decides to open up a little, and solicit interaction from the public. “Intense Debate” provide and off-the- shelf comment system. We have comments, managed and possibly hosted, at a third party site

The site manager realises the videos are better handled through YouTube. While they‟re there, they see flickr does a better job of image hosting. del.icio.us also does a better job of organising links. It‟s cheaper and easier to manage.

An interesting side effect happens; other people contribute content without visiting the site. • Links appear through the del.icio.us inbox • similar tagged images appear through flickr

Once moved to the external sites, the content starts to live beyond the site. It appears in other contexts in different places. It is hyperspatial, existing where it is requested to exist, based only on the relationships viewer have assigned it.

But the content hosts also layer their own redistributions channels, in the form of social relationships and comments.

The original site is just a shell; it is defined by it‟s content, which is ever changing, overlaying old content, obscuring it. The site is never fixed, there is no longer a definitive version of it. It is fluid, blurring what is hosted externally and what constitutes the site itself.

Despite the flux of the site itself, it creates an expansive network of new possibilities and relationships. By rejecting a fixed, defined identity, it brings its own process of creation, definition, and redefinition to the fore. The site itself is immaterial; if it disappears, it leaves the relations and it‟s imprint on the medium and connections of the internet.

• A site is just a structure for pulling in content • In Schwitter‟s language, it‟s a „grotto‟ united by theme (or folksonomic terms) • The bulk of websites are exact electronic analogues of Schwitter‟s Merzbau (tumblr, Vox, Facebook, MySpace, et al)

Merzbau… Facebook… • Schwitters invited friends • all participation is equally to contribute valid there; zombie quot;something from that killing, wedding arena of your life that is announcements, partners dearest to breaking up, poking you, art, kitsch, whatever you likequot;. • “art, kitsch, whatever you like”

• Creating personal grottoes of activity • Organising actions into groups • No fixed version, ever • Constant flux and change • All content is „found‟ elsewhere

4 people die on camera A performance of Ursonate

• Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith. Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919

• Open cultures, software, frameworks • Everything can suggest new relationships, new connections • The production of the process of production • Boundaries are eliminated; the outside exists on the inside and vice versa

• Traditional structures are better inverted • Everything is related • RSS Twitter searches are dynamic grottoes • “Unfinished out of principle” • Schwitters made a physical process of web 2.0 over 70 years ago

dave@tandot.co.uk http://tandot.co.uk/ http://twitter.com/davemee For discussion and tagging purposes use #merzweb Enjoy Futuresonic!

http://tandot.co.uk	84
http://leftclickblog.blogspot.com	21
http://www.slideshare.net	3
http://selectedintake.blogspot.com	2
http://leftclickblog.blogspot.com.ar	2
http://wildfire.gigya.com	1

The Merzweb: Kurt Schwitters And The Inverted Web

by Dave Mee on May 18, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

6 Embeds 113

Statistics

The Merzweb: Kurt Schwitters And The Inverted Web — Presentation Transcript