Kurt Schwitters and the inverted web: The #Merzweb

dave@TANDOT.co.ukPresented at Futuresonic 09 /

SMC_MCR, May 2009

KURT SCHWITTERS?A brief introduction

A bourgeois artist born in Hanover, 1887

• Painter• Sound poet• Performer• Writer• Information designer• Sculptor• Typographer• Landlord

German art in the early 20th Century

• Passed through cubism, futurism to increasingly abstract work

• Rejected by the Dada posse for being too bourgeois

• He was an early practitioner with found objects and collage

• Increasingly interested with surfaces and relationships, rather than politics or agendas

I AM AN ARTISTAND I PAINTWITH NAILS!

THE BIRTH OF MERZ

The first merz collageMerz is the middle syllable from ‘commerzbank’.

This is all that’s left of it – a blurry mono photo.

Merz became a term describing• Painting• Poetry• Performance• The artistic process itself

Schwitters’ Merz Columns1923, Schwitters extends his collage technique to physical space

He starts building columns of associated merz

The Merzbau (1923)1923, Schwitters builds the KdeE, the “Cathedral of Erotic Misery”, a third of his pillars, in a room at the end of his house.

This marks the beginning of his serious ‘Merzbau’ and their transition from a subject to the environment itself.

More Merz! (1933)By 1933, ‘grottoes’ and alcoves have formed with new construction over the makeshift frameworks he laid down earlier.

The whole wall, ceilings, floors have become a continuous 3d collage of Merz.

More Merzbau had to be built

• Allies destroy the Merzbau in a bombing raid

• Flees to Norway and starts work on another in Oslo

• Finally settles, forgotten as an artist, in Little Langdale, the Lake District, building his final Merzbarn.

THE MERZWEB.That was just some context.

When did you last see any of these?

…and did you notice this?

• In subtle grey!• It’s built into my

phone in silicon!• It’s been in wide

use for 5 years!• Ain’t like no Beta

I’ve ever seen.

Our cultural understand has shifted

• Beta is a state of mind, a process• Anything online cannot be finished.

There is no completed state.• A book can be completed. But like Merz,

a website, the web itself, can only continually shift in response to it’s own evolution.

• We no longer need to say this.

Breakdown of boundaries

He placed hair, nail parings and his own urine … throughout the project. Rendered impersonal, these … proceed along a circuit beginning from the … artist’s body, through various containers and objects … into the crevices of the architectural armature. In effect, Merzbau obviates the traditional distinctions between interior and exterior.

THE MERZWEB: HOW WE GOT HERE

Merz architecture and structures have parallels in ‘web 2.0’

‘Web 1.0’ siteA typical site, around 2000, featuring a few sections and content types

• Blog• Videos• Gallery• “Links”

We get interactive!The site architect decides to open up a little, and solicit interaction from the public.

“Intense Debate” provide and off-the-shelf comment system.

We have comments, managed and possibly hosted, at a third party site

We go fully ‘web 2.0’The site manager realises the videos are better handled through YouTube.

While they’re there, they see flickr does a better job of image hosting.

del.icio.us also does a better job of organising links.

It’s cheaper and easier to manage.

RelationsAn interesting side effect happens; other people contribute content without visiting the site.

• Links appear through the del.icio.us inbox• similar tagged images appear through flickr

The content lives!Once moved to the external sites, the content starts to live beyond the site.It appears in other contexts in different places.It is hyperspatial, existing where it is requested to exist, based only on the relationships viewer have assigned it.

Layers on layersBut the content hosts also layer their own redistributions channels, in the form of social relationships and comments.

The site is just a shell for a processThe original site is just a shell; it is defined by it’s content, which is ever changing, overlaying old content, obscuring it.

The site is never fixed, there is no longer a definitive version of it.

It is fluid, blurring what is hosted externally and what constitutes the site itself.

The content is beyond the edgesDespite the flux of the site itself, it creates an expansive network of new possibilities and relationships.

By rejecting a fixed, defined identity, it brings its own process of creation, definition, and redefinition to the fore.

The site itself is immaterial; if it disappears, it leaves the relations and it’s imprint on the medium and connections of the internet.

The Inverted Web

• A site is just a structure for pulling in content

• In Schwitter’s language, it’s a ‘grotto’ united by theme (or folksonomic terms)

• The bulk of websites are exact electronic analogues of Schwitter’s Merzbau (tumblr, Vox, Facebook, MySpace, et al)

Relationships, not items, matter

Merzbau…• Schwitters invited

friends to contribute "something from that arena of your life that is dearest to you, art, kitsch, whatever you like".

Facebook…• all participation is

equally valid there; zombie killing, wedding announcements, partners breaking up, poking

• “art, kitsch, whatever you like”

FriendFeed as Merzbau

• Creating personal grottoes of activity• Organising actions into groups• No fixed version, ever • Constant flux and change• All content is ‘found’ elsewhere

Merz makes no value judgement4 people die on camera

A performance of Ursonate

THE MODERN WEB IS A REALIZATION OF GLOBAL MERZ

A cathedral for the future

• Together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity, and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919

I AM ANINFORMATIONARTIST AND

I PAINT WITH RSS!

We live in an online Merzbau

• Open cultures, software, frameworks• Everything can suggest new

relationships, new connections• The production of the process of

production• Boundaries are eliminated; the

outside exists on the inside and vice versa

Dream machines? Computer Lib?

• Traditional structures are better inverted

• Everything is related• RSS Twitter searches are dynamic

grottoes• “Unfinished out of principle”• Schwitters made a physical process

of web 2.0 over 70 years ago

Thanks for your time

dave@tandot.co.ukhttp://tandot.co.uk/

http://twitter.com/davemee

For discussion and tagging purposes use #merzweb

Enjoy Futuresonic!