Electronic Beats Spring 2012 [antikvár]

Dear Readers, Some people claim our minds are geared towards understanding the world in narrative form. Storytelling is everywhere. In this issue of Electronic Beats Magazine, we explore not only the extent to which the medium is the mes- sage, but also how new mediums have created new messages. Is the core of our commu- nication still people exchanging thoughts and ideas in conversa- tion? Have new forms of digital literacy revolutionized not just how we communicate but what we commu- nicate? For many of the artists, curators and visionaries featured in this issue, die answer is a resounding: "It's hard to say We're proud to present their perspectives on musical and literaiy narrative, without con- sensus, and in all of their seemingly infinite shades of grey. Best wishes, Max Dax Editor-in-Chief lated from French to English yet, but our readers embraced the fact that you ignored the conventions of release schedules, opting instead to lobby for a book you believe in. HUO: Glissant touches another important issue of our time: How do we archive and contextualize information? I have an archive of more than two thousand five hundred interviews, and Fve been working together with the Institute of the 21st Century and the University in Karlsruhe to find ways of making them accessible and browsable. For example, I have twenty hours of interviews with the pioneering architect and influential writer Cedric Price. We're currently tagging all key words and names that appear in these conversations, something I ve been working on together with Armin Linke. When we re finished with that, we 11 be able to browse the interviews, digitally speaking, in a completely new way, and the reader will be able to recombine the interview content very intuitively Ultimately, we'll end up of with a map of tags that invisibly connects all of the interviews with each other. I like the idea that protagonists who have died can—via the tagging system— still contribute to discussions we lead today MD: In this issue, we feature an interview with Chris Dercon, director of London's Tate Modern, and a conversation between hacker-ethicist Steven Levy and the British poet and blogger Rick Holland. In both pieces, new rules of narration in the digital age are central topics of discussion. In your recommendation, you emphasize the importance of documenting these developments because the Internet does indeed massively change one of life's most basic activities: the way we read. HUO: The English artist Ed Fornieles makes art out of Facebook archives, showing that online profiles and networks often are situations where the individual tools to create and frame reality are not only refined but also habit- ual. As Fornieles told me: "This is whv character and narrative are the great frontier for me. Playing writh them opens up the potential to make art on a new scale." MD: You mentioned artists who continue to contribute discussions even after they've died. This is important, because in the past, magazines like ours used to ignore the thoughts and ideas of the old and wise. All printed matter seemed to focus on youth. I think balancing the two is kev when it comes to thinking about the maga- zine of the future. HUO: The art historian Erwin Panofsky said we often invent the future out of fragments from the past. We have to find new and intelligent ways to filter and sort through what we have to read and what not. EB 1/2012