It should be uncontroversial that a decade or longer of media innovation and art making require the literary or esthetic term collective apply to a more encompassing and better-thought-out conceptual construct than a group.
This is so even if it's a cluster of the like-minded or, even, a kibbutz of substantial, like-minded collaborators or practitioners with shared processes. The term collective applies, more specifically, to such groups who, additionally, aim for nonhierarchical, collegial micro- and macro-views of their action as a group and as individuals. A common outcome for and distinctive feature of art collectives is that product authorship is either unassigned, that is, it is rendered anonymous, or signed under the name of the group.
Blurred identity is a singular esthetic legacy of the term collective, one that we receive largely by way of our understanding of how the materials of medieval plays and music were assembled, edited, and emended by lines of long-obscured and frequently anonymous sorts, many working out of guilds and in disciplined work areas of the similarly unnamed.
Production through retrieval and the add-on ethos are other features of medieval collectivism. It's not unironic in the least that internet data assembly enables our return to those kinds of collective production and ethos -- I'm using collective as a trope descriptive of communal agitation in the Durkheimian metaphorical sense of group unconscious. The work we produce right now is parallel along incalculable dimensions to the industry of the guildmeisters and servants of previous times. And if most of the work present day is still authored, squinting forward we can imagine that the mushrooming of art production (including poetry) over a relatively short time will totalize authorship into line items within extraneous data fields (with a few exceptions, of course). The important data are part of the Collective, capital c.
Ok, my point is not at all directed to any of my earlier enablers and colleagues, per se. They as members of any group of two or more are free to designate themselves a collective, small c, if they have the urge. But none of us now, group or singleton, is making products from media all alone. Chances are what you (or we or I) do is matched or surpassed by others out of your reach.
Disparate data assembly and grandiose and novel media mining are commonplace for artists and writers because new and improved procedures and products are in the air. A ten-year-old can program your phone to display box scores and blast Baroque chamber pieces while you I.M. your florist. Multiplicities are coming on. What can you do to them? Instrumental composer Nico Muhly surfs YouTube to cap off music he's modeling after Bach and Purcell: "There's a way to search for interesting things on YouTube, and then there's a way to search for uninteresting things. You put in search terms like 'My daughter's yard,' 'My friend's restaurant.'" In this respect Muhly differs from poet Sharon Mesmer, say, only in his formal application and modulation of searches.
Music atmospheres by Muhly and a good deal of contemporary music and poetry, for sure, come off more and more as products of the Durkheim Collective. With regards to poetry, there's a terrific initiative identified as Zeitgeist Spam, authored by "johnbr," a marker of a well-mannered semi-anonymity, apropos of the work. Johnbr lifts other poets' artifacts on the net and elsewhere and recrafts them. On July 25 johnbr composed a "transformation View of 'Girl Singing'" along with these notes about procedure:
I took the nouns in Alan Baker's "Girl Singing" in order, matched each with a proper name beginning with the same letter as the noun (e.g. life/Philip Lamantia) found in the index to the SPD Fall 08 catalog (exceptions: the 2nd "girl", which I matched not only to (the wrong, i.e. the not-SPD) Emily Galvin, but also to Gérard Genette), through "game", at which point (bored with the choices in SPD – same letters, over and over …), I switched to the index of The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought (ed. Lawrence D Kritzman); googled the resultant noun-and-name sets, took what I wanted. This is now known as the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation, after the title of its first manifestation, though the HTADL/SCACIEO transformation is slightly modified here, as I allowed myself the luxury of extracting texts from the "digital objects" linked to, not just the Google results screen.
It's a lone guy's toe-dip into the "zeitgeist," as he (or she?) puts it, scooping up "the luxury of extracting texts" by others. It's a new view in fact and a transformation through ad-libbed procedure practiced by one anonymous sort in the blazingly omnipresent Collective.
Today Jack followes this up with my invitation re: the 1000 Views project. If interested, please check it out, and if still interested, get back to me at the email address he provides.
Thanks, Jack!
PS ... "as he (or she?)" ... Close enough!
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