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signs: from
text to context 1
This site is a
part of the signs: from text to context project. The main
goal of the project is to discuss the issue of authorship on the
Internet, from the point of view of the
credibility of texts as well as from the
point of view of the author as the
producer of digital textual
knowledge. The project is also
concerned with the point of view of
the receptor, who has in the World
Wide Web, an infinity of textual
relationships presented from billions
of sites placed in the net, but who is
yet unable to screen or even to check
the credibility of the text, except
through comparison to the printed
book or through access to sites of
institutes or research foundations,
specialized journals that keep safe
and protected domains with available
texts that allow the reader a
minimum sense of credibility. On the
net, more often than not, the authors, readers
and editions can be sheer
pastings, altered reproductions,
iterations, copies or even
preposterous adulterations of the
texts. The project intends, through
some practical examples, to show
how the limits of authorship become
ruptured, and not only in the more
trivial sense of the rights of the
"master" against the "slave"
(commercial copyright), but also in
the sense that there is no longer a
theoretical or even analytical
regulation that is capable to support
this overwhelming wave that takes
over our lives as digital readers.
In order to support this theoretical
proposition and to try to ponder a
little about it while inserted in the
digital universe, I developed a Web
site to discuss this theme and to
attempt a conceptual appropriation
that started from these theoretical
conceptions. The site presents a
listing of access to various texts by
various thinkers, all of them
important from the theoretical point
of view and who had some impact or
representativity in the universe of
knowledge production. All the used
text databases are from authors
whose copyrights have already been
extinguished, whereas the names of
the authors I use to "sign" the texts
come from a very current list, as
fortunately there is no law that
forbids the use of people�s names for
your own projects. Or would I not be
allowed to baptize someone as Gilles
Deleuze just because there has been
someone with this name before?
Besides, all the texts to be accessed
by the Web surfer have already been
published on the Internet, in random
addresses that the common net users
create everyday. In some classical
cases, we have more time to
understand the process of
comprehension of text in a practical
way.
1 The original in Portuguese
"assina: do texto ao contexto" presents a duplicity of ideas, as
"assina" is a conjugation of the verb to sign, but is also
phonetically equal to "a sina", the destiny.
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What is now
presented, from the
prospect of having anyone publishing
and, as possible, reading what is
published, is an increase in the use of
texts with no reference and also with
no possibility of assembling a line of
their "origin". The users start to
quote, when possible, the reference
of the Internet site, but it is common
knowledge that this site can be
removed, modified, altered, diverted
and moved.
Basically, from these questions, this
project aims at investigating, chasing
the tracks of the authors that use the
texts, through Internet searches,
tracking the uses that the readers
made of these agglutinated, forged,
iterated and ruptured texts, what
acceptance these texts had. How did
the users quote? How did they
understand it? How did they perceive
the content of the writings? It also
attempts to observe if in the
quotations used from these
automatically generated texts
(corrupted and hybrid) some reader
noted whether the fact that they are
signed by someone "known" might
have changed the "context" of his/her
own text, or if he/she made use of it
only because the signature is
reported as being by the "author X"?
The project developed a collection
from texts "quoted" on the Internet by
authors who produced some type of
work on the fictional texts generated
by the program. The textual works,
academic or even literary, present the
information that the quoted texts are
part of a "project" that was developed
with the intention of questioning the
"authorship" on the Internet as well as
the credibility that the texts
published there can be granted. The
official warning that is part of all the
project pages is as follows: This site
is part of the artistic-academic
experimental project sign: from text
to context. The texts here presented
are copyright-cleared and have no
link to any type of official disclosure
of the authors quoted in the texts and
works. The users that wish to quote,
copy, alter or even publish under
their own names the texts here
presented are totally free to do so,
based on the purpose of the law.
Official project
site:
www.pucsp.br/~cicero/assina/
Sites that are
part of this project:
http://personales.ciudad.com.ar/gillesdeleuze
C�cero In�cio da Silva
editor
Professor of Communication and Multimedia and Technology and Digital Media from Pontificia
Universidade Catolica de Sao Paulo.
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