The Search Drive a Hack-Ography : Cognitive Activism by Warren Neidich

Can a video ever be turned into a book? The answer is quite emphatically no. Is it about stabilizing images for contemplation? With the modern technology of fast forward, reverse and pause the Vimeo.com platform is in ways superior to print technology as a means with which to observe a work. Do the two forms present different experiences of the artwork, which sit side-by-side informing and deforming each other when compared? The conditions of book design and web design and their eventual production is an historical narrative which not only recounts diverse ontologies and evolutionary processes, based on different contingencies specific to their practices, but also links to different theories of the body. How a book is held, its material essences, its capacity as an ergonomic force that politicizes a body as a place of change not stasis is quite a different set of relations than the body to a screen constituted as it is as a soporific, hypnotic and bodiless relations. The book is a valuable anachronistic form in this world accelerating into the future of endless and fluid production. When the internet collapses as it will eventually at the hands of hackers and internet daemons, if science fiction correctly portends the future, then some resilient book found by accident by some raging mongrel might play some role in a post-Apocalyptic Mad Max Fantasy assuming reading is still possible..