[syndicate] Subject: Re: From:

[Florian Cramer]

Am Donnerstag, 06. Februar 2003 um 23:05:20 Uhr (+0100) schrieb Fr. M.:
> 
> It has come to my attention that some posts are collated on the Nettime 
> mailing list under the monicker of "Unstable Digest", well yes I admit that 
> i've been aware of this because Netochka objected to it a while ago but 
> then again I am not subscribed to nettime and have stopped looking at the 
> archives years ago too.

Hi, Florian here, the main culprit of the "Unstable Digest".

> Still I have several objections to make which are not aimed at 
> discontinuing this service that Florian, Beatrice and Alan are providing to 
> the Nettime community 

Yes, but it's not necessarily limited to Nettime. Also be aware that
"unstable digest" is by no means an official Nettime project. I am no
Nettime moderator, and the digests rely on moderator's benevolence just
as anything else that gets posted to that list.


> Of course, in this particular edition there is a post by me, in response to 
> August Highland cross posting twice a day here as you might remember. I 
> chose this example because I specially want to point out that I am not 
> opposing redistribution of mail even in this case where no permission is 
> asked to the original sender of the message. 

A difficult point, indeed. Our policy is to regard public mailing lists
with public archives as public resources open to public redistribution.
If people whose postings we include object, we of course honor that.

> This could lead us into a probably more tiring than tired debate about 
> private vs. public and I expect the Unstablists to have thought long and 
> hard about those issues in relation to their digestion and regurgitation 
> over Nettime.

The initial idea was to create a weekly digest of artistic posting that
got rejected by Nettime moderators (including material by Sondheim, mez,
and others that hardly made it from nettime-bold to nettime-l), as an
alternative to a moderation fork. This also explains why the "To:"
headers got stripped. They now get stripped because most of what
we include are crosspostings to a whole bunch of lists (typically:
syndicate, _arc.hive_, wryting,  o-o).

But Fred, I see your point. I use a self-built Perl script to create the
digests from single archived txt files, and now changed it so that the
"To:" header gets included.

Why are headers stripped anyway? Well, every E-Mail contains much more
headers then you normally see in your E-Mail client, and they would
bloat any E-Mail digest. (If you look up syndicate postings in the web
archive, most headers are stripped as well.)
 
> As I believe they have thought long and hard about the way their production 
> (for it is theirs and only theirs ultimately) is formatted. For this is my 
> main theoretical gripe about UD and frankly when I noticed this it gave me 
> an irresistible _physical pain in the thorax: the posts chosen for whatever 
> reason they were chosen by our determined and relentless readers have been 
> stripped off the "To:" header. 

Ok, Fred, please take my apologies. This will be fixed.  - I am still
not sure though whether this could create trouble with outside replies to the
mailing lists the postings were taken from.
 
> One is that the Unstable Digest is a piece of artwork in itself, a collage 
> which like all collages is not the mere sum of its parts but subsumes them. 

Only to a minor degree. I see myself as a reader/critic, not as an
artist. Of course, one could bring up all kinds of arguments against
such a presentation format [which was largely lifted from the Nettime
announcer], perhaps the most important one being that it locks art that
is meant to be disruptive in its original context into a ghetto. On the
other hand, I tend to like the way the digested postings create a new
context/whole through their combination.

> digests that make  their way to Nettime; it is a digest of posts that were 
> not  sent "To:" Nettime but elsewhere, a digest of posts that  would (I 
> suspect that policy over there has not changed a  lot) have been rejected 
> if sent directly, or cross-posted to,  the list. 

Exactly. Although you can't rule that this digest itself will get
rejected by Nettime at some point.

> decision which would encourage unthoughtful misuse of mailing lists as 
> springboard for abusive promotion instead of communities. 

Promotion of what/whom?

> "To:" making it entirely his own. A dangerous decision because it indeed 
> validates the degrading practice of cross posting, a practice that many of 
> the specialists of the genre we are adressing here have adopted, 
> shamelessly trampling over the context that we are trying to build here, by 
> assuming that all the oulets they use is ultimately the same: a certain 
> number of subscribers, an audience that adds up numerically.

I see your point, but still like certain monomaniac cross-postings &
find them "valid" (whatever that means) as artistic expression. Jodi's
postings are fine examples, and they're the most socially/politically
incorrect you can imagine. 

Plus, I think it is the right of every reader/spectator/critic to put
art into arbitary contexts. Duchamp probably would not like the fact
the Great Glass is in a museum in Philadelphia next to some second-rate
painting, Guy Debord might not like that his writings have been put
into the Pleiade edition etc.pp.  (There's no way artists can or should
dictate the way their art is being perceived/contextualized except
through totalitarian copyright regimes.)

I am a person with a high appreciation of the "codework" of jodi, mez,
Sondheim, Gustin, Meskens and others, so I see the unstable digest as a
way to support this art, and not make it an exclusive and boring thing
by occasionally including interesting spam mail, offbeat replies etc. as
well. If you don't like to be put into this context - which, as with
your reply to August Highland, would be a shame -, we can fix this. 

-F

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