from:
Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities
by Stephen Marche
The problem lay at the feet of literary institutions and their inherent fearfulness. In the popular imagination, writers and professors are liberals, hedonists, bohemians. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are, in fact, profoundly, deeply, organically conservative. The birth of print saw the emergence of many of the same Luddite tendencies recognizable today. The great German scholar Trithemius’s “In Praise of Scribes” has become the clichéd example of early scribal resistance to print, but his arguments were not ridiculous: printed books were much less beautiful than handmade ones; copying out a text allowed the scribes to identify and stop the reproduction of errors. The process of writing out a text produced a spiritually powerful condition. “In Praise of Scribes” tells the story of one scribe who had to be disinterred after years of scribal work; his colleagues find the three fingers of his writing hand “incorruptible.” Nonetheless “In Praise of Scribes” was printed, not copied. Trithemius went along with the changing world even as he claimed to despise it.
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
