Antoinette LaFarge
25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds
25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds
1. The eternal form of the absolute is god. The protean form of the absolute is art. 2. The network, our new home, is a swamp to which divine revelry provides the entry. What is the art of networlds? 3. The template for networlds can be found in the experiential underworld rather than the utopian visionary; in the id rather than the ego; in the trickster rather than the hero-genius. 4. In networlds, control of self and others, coping, mastery, clarity, craft and sacrifice are superseded by generosity, abandoning the facade of self, hacking the code, gratuitous elements, crudity and frivolity. 5. Pseudonymous role play offers a place to begin. We do not just imagine and create new worlds, we enact and inhabit, extend and break them. Creation needs no creator but requires inhabitants. 6. The art is to create structures from which the unforeseen will emerge and within which uncertainty will flourish. 7. The art of creating government supersedes the art of creating object. 8. In networlds, no single person creates more than a fraction of the whole. 9. Networlds are where we go so that we may be characters in other stories that continue. 10. Pseudo-beings are a different form of life. They do not die (except temporarily); they are shed, like skins. They are at once more resilient and more transient. 11. Networlds are episodic, lurching unpredictably between the familiar and the novel. 12. Networlds are never finished. There is no catharsis. Thought manifests as action, and thought is continuous. 13. Networlds resist disruption but are sensitive to existence. They evolve or die. 14. In networlds, vitality is centered in the system rather than in its members, in the pattern of incarnations rather than in the incarnations themselves. 15. Immersed and reoriented in networlds, one no longer needs to make a distinction between you and me and them. It is a polyphony of shared voices and overlapping actions. 16. The art is a form of conversation, language as performance, time as medium. 17. Networlds revive the beauty of the particular. Their art is in their microstructure. 18. The logic of networlds is nonlinear, a continuity of non sequiturs, interruptions, noise, lag, and displacement, and a tangle of multiple causality. They are micro-intelligible and macro-incoherent. 19. Networlds have no goal. Possible ends are buried in an avalanche of means. The intention is in the whole, but the whole is built without intention. 20. Networlds are wasteful, overflowing with redundancies, repetitions, duplications, feedback loops, ripple effects, and rolling variations. They encourage an art of copies sustained by modularity. 21. Networlds release us from the necessity to generalize based on a sample of one. 22. Networlds allow us not to have to know who, what, where, when, or how. 23. Networlds are an activity in which the imaginal displaces the physical. 24. Networlds resist ownership but require stewardship. 25. Networlds graft the arts of improvisation to the activities of mind. Antoinette LaFarge Irvine |
