4. • 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
5.
6.
7. 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
8. 1923, Schwitters extends his collage
technique to physical space
He starts building columns of
associated merz
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. • 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.
14. • 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.
15. • 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.
16. 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.
18. A typical site, around 2000,
featuring a few sections and content
types
• Blog
• Videos
• Gallery
• “Links”
19. 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
20. 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.
21. 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
22. 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.
23. But the content hosts also layer their
own redistributions channels, in the
form of social relationships and
comments.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. • 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)
27. Merzbau… Facebook…
• Schwitters invited friends • all participation is equally
to contribute valid there; zombie killing,
quot;something from that wedding announcements,
arena of your life that is partners breaking up,
dearest to you, art, kitsch, poking
whatever you likequot;.
• “art, kitsch, whatever you
like”
28. • Creating personal grottoes of activity
• Organising actions into groups
• No fixed version, ever
• Constant flux and change
• All content is „found‟ elsewhere
29. 4 people die on camera A performance of Ursonate
30.
31. • 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
32.
33. • 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
34. • 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
35. dave@tandot.co.uk
http://tandot.co.uk/
http://twitter.com/davemee
For discussion and tagging purposes use #merzweb
Enjoy Futuresonic!
Editor's Notes
Thefloorplan indicates where his ongoing work is taking over.
This is not a sculpture in the traditional sense – an object that is experienced as a subject. The visitor becomes a subject of the production, passing through it and for some, becoming a part of it. The boundaries are ever shifing, rebuilding and being reimagined based on their own ongoing metamorphosis.
Even less likely, now Geocities is going down.
At the surface level, and the level of how these things connect to other things, there’s no difference.The web is bound together by the URL.
Maybe some would argue for the separation of paint from architectural layers, these days.
