April 4th, 2015 § § permalink
Het project krijgt vandaag, op 4 april 2015, een nieuwe start!
Met dank aan AM Heath and the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell & Arbeiderspers voor het gebruik van George Orwell’s 1984 voor datamining & datamatching.
“{KMI, weer op plaats van lezen} Het is overal zwaarbewolkt en ook plaatselijk nevelig. Op de meeste plaatsen valt er lichte regen of motregen. Wat lichte smeltende sneeuw in de Hoge Ardennen. De klokken slagen {tijd van schrijven} één uur éénentwintig. {meest voorkomende meisjesnaam plaats van lezen} Emma {meest voorkomende familienaam plaats van lezen} Peeters, {haal weg wat niet tot algoritmisch perspectief behoort} haast zich door {adres thuis, beschrijving in Street View} de donkere gang van {beschrijving door Mechanical Turk} een saai blokjesflatgebouw, ze beweegt zich niet snel genoeg voort om te kunnen zeggen dat ze zich verplaatst met een auto of fiets, en haar hartslag is te laag voor een jogger.”
June 20th, 2014 § § permalink
On Thursday 19th June I received this short message that filled me with joy.
From now on, all actions on the text of 1984 will be executed ‘with the permission of AM Heath and the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell’ and this until June 2016, for sure.
Sonia Brownell Orwell was the last wife of George Orwell. She married him three months before his death. It is said that she ‘was the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the “girl from the fiction department” who brings love and warmth to the middle-aged hero, Winston Smith.’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Orwell). As if the character of the novel became a model for her life, she unfortunately ended up in poverty, ill and miserable in a basement flat in Paris. For more details: https://suite.io/paul-john-ramos/28f32p6
April 5th, 2014 § § permalink
This is how far this project goes for now. Twelve hours have past since the first commit.
And I prefer to freeze the concept instead of freezing the spirits by inducing my colleagues, friends and myself into a risky business of working with illegal material.
Luckily there is someone like Cory Doctorow, who rewrote 1984 for youngsters. He managed to get Little Brother published under a Creative Commons Non-commercial Share Alike, ready to remix.
So today I start a new project with a new repository: 1984:revisited.
But not without making a statement first. » Read the rest of this entry «
April 4th, 2014 § § permalink
30 years after the setting of George Orwell’s 1984, the novel is frequently referenced in articles on privacy, data protection and the surveillance society. Search for ‘Big Brother’ in this database f.ex.: http://etraces.constantvzw.org.
The novel was written in 1948, speculating on a totalitarian society that would not allow for any possible resistance.
Do these references to 1984 make sense? And to what extent? That is the question for which this project is a thinking tool. Today there is not one government, not one system. The surveillance society is a fragmented one, Big Brother has such a friendly face we do not organise a big protest after the heroic act of Snowdon, and the human minds seem far too messy to be able to control them. But then there are a lot of similarities too.
This revisiting journal is launched on gitorious today, on 4th April 2014, exactly thirty years after the main character Winston started his journal in Orwell’s novel. The methods for revisiting are inspired by the ideas living at Constant and Variable in Brussels, the experiments with video and archives of Michael Murtaugh, Stéphanie Villayphiou’s Blind Carbon Copy, discussions with members of Algolit and the belief that Kenneth Goldsmith might be right when he states in ‘Uncreative Writing’ that the literary digital revolution is only about to start.
