NTNTNT. Jason Brown, Zoe Crosher, editors
Valencia, CA: California Institute of the Arts. 2003
Natalie Bookchin brought net artists and activists to Los Angeles for ntntnt. The threads and fragments from original conversations were woven together with techno-utopian ruins and associatively cross-indexed with fragments from the distant age of “Browser Wars,” creating stuttering, paper-based constellation. The resulting book is not so much a document as an artifact — a puzzled, puzzling, mnemonic object marked by passage of a particular time.
Clocking in at 396 pages, with nearly 200 fragments, and more than 50 illustrations. The 6 indexical divisions and 37 topical sections were inspired by the published form of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, another textual ruin attempting to memorialize the recent past.
A: Origins | Retrofuture | Melancholy | Utopia | Nostalgia
B: Artist-Activist | Action-Prank | Weapon-Tool | Revolution-Terror
C: Amateur Conspiracy | Collective Consciousness | Occult Networks | Sacrificial Science | Base Organs
D: Shit Dominion | Corporate Machine | Filthy Lucre | Soft Control
E: net.art | machine.language | art.system | after.net
F: Writing | Theft | Mapping | Reading | Decay