You have landed, dear visitor, on The Island of Dr. Thoreau: A Laboratory for Experiments in Cultural Vivisection! Please feel free to look around as much as you like. I have nothing to hide—quite literally! You see, this little isle, two hours due southwest of ____________, is a wild, desolate place, previously uninhabited by humans (as far as I can tell) and almost entirely undeveloped (but not for long).
I am your host, Dr. Thoreau, and I have many plans for this empty bit of real estate. As the name of the Island implies, it will be home to a laboratory, or really, a number of labs, galleries, and workshops, all devoted to promoting experimental work in what I call cultural vivisection: a form of criticism for the digital age, in which cultural artifacts are operated upon as if they were living organisms.
This website is to serve as a conduit for an organization, currently in formation, which is dedicated to promoting new, primarily digital work in the humanities and the arts, with a focus on critical writing about culture. Here, “writing” is meant in an extraordinarily broad sense: while conventional writing/publishing practices remain central to cultural movements and discourses, reading and writing are not the same as they used to be; the “logocentrism” of civilized culture’s past is still in effect, but the root word, logos, has taken on some new baggage; social and technological shifts have blurred some popularly-presumed boundaries between words and other kinds of signs. As much as the Doctor loves reading and writing about culture, he must insist that it is no longer viable to think of writing about culture as being separate from participating in culture (really, it never was viable to think this way, but it seems to have been easier to uphold the fantasy in times when analog media roamed the earth (a caveat: Dr. Thoreau does not actually consider analog media to be extinct, but the dinosaur analogy seems apt)).
In short: Your humble host is here to provide an open space for expanded forms of writing, conceived by a union of Surrealism and the sci-fi section of the video store, and attuned to the demands of digital cultural production: the networked, the interactive, the databased, the cloud-based, the hypertextual, the hyperlinked, the hypermediated, and the nonlinear. Here's to the Twittering Machine!
While the Island is under construction, please refer to the MadBlog for demonstrations, definitions, and distractions. If you would like to remain up to date as to our progress, kindly subscribe to the MadBlog. And if you are generally curious, confused, overjoyed, or incensed by any of this, please contact me.
