Components

MemeMo­r­ial

“A MEmo­r­ial con­sists of two parts:
a periph­eral (pro­posal for an elec­tronic device to be placed at the site of an exist­ing mon­u­ment asso­ci­ated with an abject sac­ri­fice)
and a tes­ti­mo­nial (a Web site rep­re­sent­ing a medi­a­tion on the abject sac­ri­fice).”
(Elec. Mon­u­ments p.57)

 
 
→ updat­ing (dig­i­tal rhetoric): MemeMo­r­ial for par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture in net­work media ecology

 
Tes­ti­mo­nial Com­pose an assem­blage—“expe­ri­enced expression”—for medi­ated con­sul­ta­tion & to cir­cu­late within the network.

• “The MEmo­r­ial shows us not our fate, but our sit­u­a­tion. The Inter­net is a liv­ing mon­u­ment.
  The Emer­A­gency offers a prac­tice for a vir­tual civic sphere that does for the imag­i­na­tion what sta­tis­tics does for the intel­lect.” (p.176)
• Goal: “to do for the com­mu­nity as a whole what lit­er­acy did for the indi­vid­u­als within the com­mu­nity. Could a com­mu­nity go to school col­lec­tively? The Inter­net is the place of this scene of instruc­tion, and the Emer­A­gency pro­vides the ped­a­gogy” (xxvi)

“Abject Genre” (p.48)

“The genre of a MEmo­r­ial includes the fol­low­ing elements”:
• “Select an exist­ing mon­u­ment, memo­r­ial, cel­e­bra­tion to which to attach the periph­eral”
  — present “a sim­u­la­tion of the peripheral”

• “Select an orga­ni­za­tion, agency, or other admin­is­tra­tive unit that has some respon­si­bil­ity for pol­icy for­ma­tion in rela­tion to the dis­as­ter, to be the nom­i­nal recip­i­ent of the consultation”
• “Place an (elec­tronic) device at the site, designed to link sym­bol­i­cally the estab­lished sac­ri­fice with the unac­knowl­edged sac­ri­fice” → Pro­posed (incl. sketch / visual plan)
• include “links to Web rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the rel­e­vant sites and organizations”

» “Elec­trate Commemoration”

• Dis­as­ter
  • Event (sin­gu­lar, his­toric, specific)
    • include infor­ma­tion from research — source (at least one)
    • use par­tic­u­lar details as “iconic” → “emblem­atic” (of sit­u­a­tion com­plex­ity: sac­ri­fice, blindness/blindspot, value)
  • on-going prob­lem (con­sul­ta­tion for future/decision)
    • pub­lic pol­icy (at least one exam­ple, from research — source)
    • ref­er­ences to cur­rent rep­re­sen­ta­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, resources, etc.

     

• Con­cetto (Emblem) com­pos­ite image
  • (sim­ple for­mula for emblem/impresa): Motto + Image* (com­pos­ite) + Epigram
  • Sources for any/all these aspects are your pop­cy­cle, draw­ing upon details from any dimen­sion, plus the problem/disaster.
    *Emblem as con­cetto: “event (dis­as­ter) folded into indi­vid­ual” — in other words, prob­lem + me.
  “We use the emblem to write a dis­as­ter that we can­not think (or feel).” (138)
  — also see concetto/impresa dis­cus­sion (pages 106–08)

  Cre­ate by “begin­ning with the map­ping of the event, locat­ing a repeat­ing pat­tern across the dis­courses, and iso­lat­ing the sig­ni­fiers found in this pat­tern. A MEmo­r­ial emblem may then be com­posed of these sig­ni­fiers in order to dis­cover the meta­physics and moral­ity they evoke.” (124)

   

• Periph­eral Pro­posal (illustrated)
  • pro­posal (hypo­thet­i­cal; see Ulmer’s exam­ples) — includ­ing spe­cific mean­ing­ful geo­graphic location

  • with net­work interface/device — illustrate/simulate (visual, vir­tual) on project page

   

  “a pro­posal for a periph­eral to be attached as an aster­isk (dis­as­terisk) to an exist­ing mon­u­ment.” (151)

  Ulmer’s exam­ples: “The rule of a MEmo­r­ial is that my periph­eral for abused chil­dren must be attached to an extant memo­r­ial for acknowl­edged sac­ri­fice, so that the jux­ta­po­si­tion estab­lishes the pub­lic and col­lec­tive nature of the abject sac­ri­fice.” (175)

  “The Upsilon Alarm periph­eral is linked to the Florida Rush­more holo­graphic pro­jec­tions.” (176)

» Assem­blage Tes­ti­mo­nial
(frag­ments: het­ero­ge­neous, mul­ti­modal; sam­pled from var­i­ous databases)

“The MEmo­r­ial does not define (ana­lyze) the dis­as­ter but dis­cov­ers its mood. […] Through attune­ment the dis­as­ter mat­ters to me.” (154)

• “Medi­ated Witness”

 

*** “The MEmo­r­ial becomes a tes­ti­mo­nial when the egent designs it as an image, fig­ure, para­ble, emblem, using some fea­ture of the news event as an objec­tive cor­rel­a­tive for the witness’s state of mind, mood, attune­ment to the world.
Using aes­thetic means, basic devices of lit­er­ary lan­guage and art design, the egent gen­er­al­izes the event into an image of what the world is like, how things stand with the wit­ness” (65)

 

• Frag­ments (mate­r­ial selected from entire Popycle)

   
  » Method: The “assem­blage tes­ti­mony” dig­i­tal com­po­si­tion will include het­ero­ge­neous ele­ments, using cul­tural & expe­ri­en­tial mate­ri­als from entire par­a­digm: nar­ra­tives (2 min.), “schol­arly dis­course” (2 sources), auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and mul­ti­me­dia (e.g. found & orig­i­nal con­tent, such as videos & digitally-manipulated images).

   

  “In the tes­ti­mo­nial, the maker gives evi­dence, tes­ti­fies to the eth­i­cal expe­ri­ence, the feel­ing of duty that abuses me (if it does). My iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the dis­as­ter out­side me as a frac­tal mea­sure of the dis­as­ter within makes writable the cat­e­gory of jus­tice, and is the point of depar­ture for an elec­trate post­na­tional iden­tity.” (140)

 
 

• Ora­cle func­tion (for net­work consulting)

  “The ora­cle func­tions as a con­sul­ta­tion in both the empir­i­cal and eso­teric senses (learn con­sult­ing by con­sult­ing). The chal­lenge of the inter­face design is to com­pose an ora­cle that relates indi­vid­ual quo­tid­ian prob­lems with col­lec­tive pol­icy dilem­mas.” (258)