#matthew fuller

[garadinervi]

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics. Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Verso, London, and New York, NY, 2021

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman's Investigative Aesthetics

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman's Investigative Aesthetics

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman's Investigative Aesthetics

[oo111111]

Excerpt from Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman's Investigative Aesthetics

[javatap]

[natascharink-blog]

Matthew Fuller The Web Stalker

The Web Stalker is a software application for reading and manipulating information on the World Wide Web.

It scans the hyperlinks on WWW-pages, displays their HTML code as the Web Stalker agent is analysing the pages, and maps the hyperlink structure in evocative graphics, allowing for a surprising look at the underside of the Web.

The Web Stalker, free to download from the I/O/D website, is a unique example of the re-visualisation of data-space at a deep level by artists. It proposes that a new, speculative engagement with software as a key locus of contemporary culture is both essential and fruitful.

[walkermargaret]

SD: It's interesting to think a little bit about what people choose to upload, because it's not easy to upload something. It takes a good deal of time to scan a book. I mean obviously some things are uploaded which are, have always been, digital. (I wrote something about this recently about the scan and the export - the scan being something that comes out of a labour in relationship to an object, to the book, and the export is something where the whole life of the text has sort of been digital from production to circulation and reception). I happen to think of Aaaaarg in the realm of the scan and the bootleg. When someone actually scans something they're potentially spending hours because they're doing the work on the book they're doing something with software, they're uploading. MF: Aaaarg hasn't introduced file quality thresholds either. SD: No, definitely not. Where would that go? MF: You could say with PDFs they have to be searchable texts? SD: I'm sure a lot of people would prefer that. Even I would prefer it a lot of the time. But again there is the idiosyncratic nature of what appears, and there is also the idiosyncratic nature of the technical quality and sometimes it's clear that the person that uploads something just has no real experience of scanning anything. It's kind of an inevitable outcome. There are movie sharing sites that are really good about quality control both in the metadata and what gets up; but I think that if you follow that to the end, then basically you arrive at the exported version being the Platonic text, the impossible, perfect, clear, searchable, small - totally eliminating any trace of what is interesting, the hand of reading and scanning, and this is what you see with a lot of the texts on Aaaaarg. You see the hand of the person who's read that book in the past, you see the hand of the person who scanned it. Literally, their hand is in the scan. This attention to the labour of both reading and redistributing, it's important to still have that. MF: You could also find that in different ways for instance with a pdf, a pdf that was bought directly as an ebook that's digitally watermarked will have traces of the purchaser coded in there. So then there's also this work of stripping out that data which will become a new kind of labour. So it doesn't have this kind of humanistic refrain, the actual hand, the touch of the labour. This is perhaps more interesting, the work of the code that strips it out, so it's also kind of recognising that code as part of the milieu.

"In the Paradise Of Too Many Books: An Interview With Sean Dockray"