[Nettime-bold] E is for Event

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

E is for Event
McKenzie Wark

Words fail the very event with which they tangle. It is in the nature of 
disaster to defy representation. The abstract grazes the concrete and 
vaporises on contact.

What we are witnessing, on our TV screens, our computer screens, is a weird 
global media event. Like all such events, it appeared as if it came out of 
nowhere. It took the media by surprise. The networks were reporting live on 
an event before they even knew what the envelope of the event was.

As I write, we still don't know. There is no reliable information as to how 
this event started, or how it will end. And still the networks keep pumping 
out the information. As with all such events, the desire for information far 
outstrips the ability to provide it. People cluster around screens and 
newsfeeds, anxious for details that are not forthcoming. Endless repetitions 
of the same video clips and endless speculation from supposed experts fill 
the yawning gap between fact and appearance. CNN just goes live without 
commentary. Images and sounds in search of a story.

The saturation of the media space and time spills over from broadcast media 
into personal communication. The phone lines jam as people try to contact 
loved ones. People use their internet communities to share words, mostly 
heartfelt but futile, as a way of working through the surplus of emotions 
that spills over from this weird global media event.

Weird global media event: It is an event because it is far outside the 
routine of newsmaking. In news, the story always precedes the facts, and the 
facts fit the story with the predictable tang of redundancy. It is a media 
event because it instantly connects any and every vector of communication 
together in a vast, irrational stew. Everything from financial data to 
erotic emails twist toward the unfolding shape of the event. It is a global 
media event because the vectors that snap into place create their own world. 
(We are that world). Events of this kind are no respecters of scale or 
boundaries. And it is a weird global media event because it is a pure 
singularity. It does not quite fit any template. It is its own precedent. It 
defies meaning. The truth of the event lies in what can't be said.

This is not an irony: I wrote about weird global media events in Virtual 
Geography: Living With Global Media Events (Indiana University Press, 1994). 
The examples in that book were Tiananmen square, the fall of the Berlin 
Wall, the Gulf War and the 'Black Monday' stock market crash. I thought when 
I wrote about these events that they would not be the last. I never expected 
to be touched by a weird global media event personally.

New York is my home town. Like everyone connected to this most global city, 
I spent the day trying to confirm that friends and family are safe. And they 
are. But there are many people whose friends and family are not safe. My 
proximity to loss makes me feel their genuine loss, in the very marrow of 
what I cannot say for them or about them. Words lose their glamour. But 
silence is not much of an option.

INDEX TO THIS FABULOUS WORLD
http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_15/faf_v15_n09/text/feature.html



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