Hyperglyphics

Since we’ve been playing around with Twitter in my Writing for the Web class, and since I’ve been thinking about the poetics/rhetorics of streaming torrents of words, ideas half-formed, the cumulative piling-on of new ideas and meanings in remixes and retweets, I want to think more about what our microblogging, status-updating, twitterpating will produce in terms of rhetorical art.

So I’ve been thinking about what Richard Lanham’s account in The Economics of Attention of Christo’s Running Fence installation from 1976. As a work of art that existed in its original form for only two weeks, it seems very much like the ephemera that fizzes into being and then just as rapidly dissipates online - all those Tweets, all those blog posts, all those discussions and chats: they may be archived somewhere, but for all intents and purposes, they might as well have disappeared entirely for as much as most of us care. We see, we read, we move on to the next link, the next click of the mouse. The RSS feeds us new rivers of information to scan, to hold in our minds for a moment, only to move on to the next in a seemingly endless stream of bits and pieces of data, lore, scoop, and score. Likewise, Running Fence existed for a couple of weeks, stretching through almost 25 miles of Sonoma and Marin counties in California, and then was gone. Of course it still is archived. The sketches, the plans, the photos of the finished product are meticulously documented and archived and will be featured in an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition. But the fence itself is now only a memory, captured and stored in our digital tools.

But what is really interesting to Lanham, and to me, is the fact that this was a participatory work of art. While the concept and inspiration may have been Christo’s, the work itself would never have become manifest were it not for the collaboration and effort of many, many people in the counties in which the fence was built. Lanham writes:

This work of art, as [Christo] said repeatedly, was composed of the human behavior that was required to create it, not only the building of the fence but also the hearings, lawsuits, rulings, reports, meetings, and pleadings that were necessitated by the project. To create the fence he needed a myriad of permissions and to obtain those permissions he needed to persuade a myriad of people to grant them. The fence was created as an attention structure that dramatized how persuasion works in human society. It was not only a thing of beauty that did not last forever, it was, as well, a model of how persuasion works in human society, which is to say a model of rhetoric, which should last, if not forever, at least as long as such things can last. He persuaded people of what? What rhetoric has always persuaded people of: to share a beautiful attention structure. To cherish eloquence. (57-8)

I think we are beginning to see how artists and innovators in new media are bringing us into positions to share those “beautiful attention structure[s].” I think there will be those who figure out how to use the Web to tap into the same kinds of social cooperation that Christo did in the years he spent developing Running Fence and bringing it into its unlikely existence. I think they’ll create the same kinds of “participative drama[s]” (Lanham 59) and we’ll all gasp in wonder and awe for a moment. Or a couple of weeks. And we’ll take our pictures and we’ll move on.