switching Web Cams connected The Turing Galaxy collaborative film textual surfaces Collaborative Systems feedback reading: screen feedback options readable/writable/feedable feeding public exchance going inter-textual links poetics of transport? hotspots poetic of links? interfacing
Avital Ronell's "The Telephone Book" is more radical in the use of media discourse techniques. The layout and organisation of the book are adapted from the structure of a telephone book. The medium telephone works as an active/living metaphor in the background of the "telephone switchboard" in which the discourses (Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech) run together. All the material is organised in the sense of telecommunication: white and yellow pages, long distance calls, return calls (Derrida with friend), local calls ... the discourse partners "pick up", hang up, let ring - word-play, multi-linguality, the use of texts and graphic drawings, broken up layouts ... provide cross references between literary and medial, between technological and political, historical and philosophical discourses ...
"The Telephone Book is going to resist you. Because it operates with the logic and theme of the switchboard, it sets the destabilization of the receiver in motion. Your mission [...] is to learn how to read with your ears. In addition to listening for the telephone, you are being asked to tune your ears to noise frequencies, to anticoding, to random noise - in a word, you are expected to stay open to the interruptions and interferences that will occupy these lines. [...] At first you may find the way the book runs to be disturbing, but we have had to break up its typographical logic. Like an electrical impulse, it is flooded with signals. To break through the hermetic sovereignty of the book, we have simulated silence and false connections, suspending the soothing rhythm of paragraphs and conventional divisions. At indicated times, schizophrenia lights up, jamming the switchboard, fracturing a latent semantics with multiple calls. [...] You will become sensitive to the switching on and off of interjected voices, various calls [...] When you hang up, it does ot vanish but waits i the backgroud.
(Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book. Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, Nebraska, 1989)