Even if new media hasn’t yet managed to definitively change the rules, it has put them into contention. Here’s one, presented as a rhetorical question: Why do we bother to finish things?

The importance of process is something that’s come up again and again over the past two years at the Institute. Process, that is, rather than the finished work. Can a blog be finished? They could, of course, but that’s not interesting: what’s fascinating about a blog is its emulation of conversation, its back-and-forth nature. Even the unit of conversation – a post on a blog, say – may never really be finished: the author can go back and change it, so that the post you viewed at 6 o’clock is not the post you viewed at 4 o’clock. This is deeply frustrating to new readers of blogs; but in time, it becomes normal.

*****

The Fluxus Movement. The visual arts in the 20th century present a way of looking at the problem of finishing things. Most people know that Marcel Duchamp gave up art for chess; not everyone realizes that when he was giving up art, he was giving up working on one specific piece, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Duchamp actually made two things by this name: the first was a large painting on glass which stands today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp gave up working on the glass in 1923, though he kept working on the second Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a "book" published in 1934: a green box that contained facsimiles of his working notes for his large glass.

Duchamp’s ideas found fruit in the Fluxus movement in New York from the early 1960s. Fluxus resisted the idea of art as commodity in preference to the idea of art as process or experience.

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece is perhaps the most well known Fluxus work and perhaps exemplary: A performer sits still while the audience is invited to cut pieces of cloth from her (or his) clothes. While there was an emphasis on music and performance – a number of the members studied composition with John Cage – Fluxus cut across media: there were Fluxus films, boxes, and dinners.

There was a particularly rigorous Fluxus publishing program; Dick Higgins helmed the Something Else Press, which published seminal volumes of concrete poetry and artists’ books, while George Maciunas, the leader of Fluxus inasmuch as it had one, worked as a graphic designer, cranking out manifestos, charts of art movements, newsletters, and ideas for future projects.

Particular ideas for future projects: John Hendricks’s Fluxus Codex, an attempt to catalogue the work of the movement, lists far more proposed projects than completed ones. Owen Smith, in Fluxus: The History of an Attitude, describes a particularly interesting idea, an unending book:

This concept developed out of Maciunas’ discussions with George Brecht and what Maciunas refers to in several letters as a "Soviet Encyclopedia." Sometime in the fall of 1962, Brecht wrote to Maciunas about the general plans for the "complete works" series and about his own ideas for projects. In this letter Brecht mentions that he was "interested in assembling an ‘endless’ book, which consists mainly of a set of cards which are added to from time to time . . . [and] has extensions outside itself so that its beginning and end are indeterminate." Although the date on this letter is not certain, it was sent after Newsletter No. 4 and prior to the middle of December when Maciunas responded to it.} This idea for a expandable box is later mentioned by Maciunas as being related to "that of Soviet encyclopedia – which means not a static box or encyclopedia but a constantly renewable – dynamic box."

Maciunas and Brecht never got around to making their Soviet encyclopedia, but it’s an idea that might resonate more now than it did in 1962. What they were imagining is something that’s strikingly akin to a blog. Blogs do start somewhere, but most readers of blogs don’t start from the beginning: they plunge it at random and keep reading as the blog grows and grows.

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Something out of nothing. One Fluxus-related project that did see publication was An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, a book credited to Daniel Spoerri, a Romanian-born artist. The basis of the book is admirably simple: Spoerri decided to make a list of everything that was on his rather messy kitchen table one morning in 1961. He made a map of all the objects on his not-quite rectangular table, numbered them, and, with the help of his friend Robert Filliou, set about describing (or "anecdoting") them. From this simple procedure springs the magic of the book: while most of the objects are extremely mundane (burnt matches, wine stoppers, an egg cup), telling how even the most simple object came to be on the table requires bringing in most of Spoerri’s friends and much of his life.

Having finished this first version of the book (in French), Spoerri’s friend Emmett Williams translated it into English. A fourth friend, Dieter Roth, translated the book into German, kept Williams’s notes and added his own, some as footnotes of footnotes, generally not very clarifying, but full of somewhat related stories and wordplay.

Spoerri’s book was becoming their book as well. Somewhere along the line, Spoerri added his own notes. As subsequent editions have been printed, more and more notes accrete; in the English version of 1995, some of them are now eight levels deep. A German translation has been made since then, and a new French edition is in the works, which will be the twelfth edition of the book. The text has grown bigger and bigger like a snowball rolling downhill. In addition to footnotes, the book has also gained several introductions, sketches of the objects by Roland Topor, a few explanatory appendices, and an annotated index of the hundreds of people mentioned in the book.

Part of the genius of Spoerri’s book is that it’s so simple. Anyone could do it: most of us have tables, and a good number of those tables are messy enough that we could anecdote them, and most of us have friends that we could cajole into anecdoting our anecdotes.

The book is essentially making something out of nothing: Spoerri self-deprecatingly refers to the book as a sort of "human garbage can", collecting histories that would be discarded.

But the value of the Topography isn’t rooted in the objects themselves, it’s in the relations they engender: between people and objects, between objects and memory, between people and other people, and between people and themselves across time. In Emmett Williams’s notes on Spoerri’s eggshells, we see not just eggshells but the relationship between the two friends. A network of relationships is created through commenting.

George LeGrady seized on the hypertextual nature of the book and produced, in 1993, his own Anecdoted Archive of the Cold War. (He also reproduced a tiny piece of the book online, which gives something of a feel for its structure.) But what’s most interesting to me isn’t how this book is internally hypertextual: plenty of printed books are hypertextual if you look at them through the right lens. What’s interesting is how its internal structure is mirrored by the external structure of its history as a book, differing editions across time and language. The notes are helpfully dated; this matters when you, the reader, approach the text with thirty-odd years of notes to sort through, notes which can’t help being a very slow, public conversation. There’s more than a hint of Wikipedia in the process that underlies the book, which seems to form a private encyclopedia of the lives of the authors.

And what’s ultimately interesting about the Topography is that it’s unfinished. My particular copy will remain an autobiography rather than a biography, trapped in a particular moment in time: though it registers the death of Robert Filliou, those of Dieter Roth and Roland Topor haven’t yet happened. Publishing has frozen the text, creating something that’s temporarily finished.

*****

We’re moving towards an era in which publishing – the inevitable finishing stroke in most of the examples above – might not be quite so inevitable. Publishing might be more of an ongoing process than an event: projects like the Topography, which exists as a succession of differing editions, might become the norm. When you’re publishing a book online, the boundaries of publishing become porous: there’s nothing to stop you from making changes for as long as you can.

*****

The National Book Development Board and IP Philippines invite you to celebrate World Book and Copyright Day on April 23, at the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati. It’s a whole-day event with prominent writers like National Artist Virgilio Almario and award-winning fictionists Butch Dalisay and Susan Lara talking about their creative processes and their works.

In the afternoon, there will be an extensive discussion on copyright by experts in the field to enlighten copyright owners (like writers, illustrators and publishers) and copyright users (schools, media, libraries). For advocates of copyleft (more in a future column), Philippine Commons, in collaboration with Arellano University Law School and Vibal Foundation, Inc., presents the Philippine Open Education Forum: Are We Ready and Where Are We? on April 23, 2008, Wednesday from 8:30am to 5:00pm to be held at Arellano University School of Law, Pasay City.

The forum will discuss the concept of open education, how it can be applied in the Philippines, and the efforts by government and private organizations in promoting it. Educators, proponents of open source educational materials and publishers are invited to attend. The seminar is free. For more details, email Atty. Bern Guerrero at guerrero@mydestiny.net.