SDS SERVER
SDS SERVER
My project is called “Rich Text” and it will present 12 poems, photographs, illustrations, essays, interviews and fictions that examine the open interface of the rich text editor. The rich text editor (RTE) is a software tool and protocol that allows artists and authors, its “users”, to press publish on media rich text with style and links in HTML (hyperlinks). While today’s platform users “expect smooth and seamless online experiences” Rich Text will imagine in the nonlinear hypertext outside of moderated mainstream timelines - “by their preserving analogue features that make them immune from algorithms and corporate data sharks” (Stuck on the Platform).
Rich Text goes against the doom scroll and directly addresses the collective user-discontent and disappointment lingering from the promising early web - where users login and blog untold stories of paperless free-press publishing for the people and save the trees from logging. In the book “Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet” by Avery Dame-Griff, the early web queer publishers imagined futures for themselves in “work created in HTML offered far more flexibility. If they wished, creators could write, erase, and rewrite their work.” These inherent qualities of the autonomous web are limited by platforms, where templates and moderation might make platforms more legible or “user-friendly,” but what affordances are lost to proprietary and black box software (or obfuscated, made invisible, eligible) to make something more “usable” and for which users? Will trans hackers continue in a legacy of autonomous publishing “through obfuscations and illusion, manipulating existing infrastructure”? (Two Revolutions). How can this Rich Text be clearly "read" by machines but less clearly “read” by its more human readers, and how can the relationship between code and its interpretation by man and machine become a site for trans imagination? Exploring what affordances, or written code, make it possible, or inversely impossible, to imagine ourselves and how to better use the machine to dream.
Rich Text will invite work that transcends an algorithmic censorship that preferences a particular profitable palatability, including slutty fan-fictions, gay gossip and other seductions that find creative and criminal imaginations of the same tools that otherwise force our hands. I’m thinking about backpage black-hat parasitic advertising, creepy craigslist missed connections and anonymous conspiracies found in the deepest-web forums and forests. Rich Text doesn’t publish “content” or measure value within the commodified attention-economy but succeeds a rich history of DIY alternative publishing: a powerful medium for the dissemination of main-character marginal matters, unseemly stimulations, sensibilities and sexualities, kinky desires, guilty pleasures, aggressive ambitions, and the absolutely absurd! Vengeful revolutionary ideas that can’t be found on Instagram and voicing experiences, queer questionings, against the majority “normal”, and open our eyes - again. To explore our complicity as users of high and low tech by building an archive that explores freedom to fail and reject today's smoother interface standards and fine unexpected pleasures and counterintuitive forms of resistance.
10 Writers/Coders/Hackers/Artists will be selected for the publication that will be open-source and available at richtext.de.pub. Each participate will be paid $500CAD for their contribution. Which comes to around 275 british pounds or 350 american dollars.
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