Petroglifs

We are developing a conceptual installation designed to illustrate the 2013 EMERGE Conference theme: “the Future of Truth.”

We are writers of fiction and nonfiction, who increasingly explore the DMZ between those two narrative forms.

“You are a creator of prose-based conceptual art, which is frequently mistaken for science fiction.”

Imaginative literary text as source code for conceptual art.

Word + image.

The medium is the massage.

Petroglif as network node.

Stone tablets encoded with image + word + code that interoperates with its context—present, future, or possible past—to participate in available networks and conduct a multi-party dialogue (or dialectic) about truth.

We have some pretty good baking dough already kneaded regarding the issues of how network culture impacts the traditional linear narrative foundations of “truth.”

Petroglifs as software comments inside the operating system of incipient forms of socially constructing narratives.

Stone tablets that are nothing but etched rock, but manage to be interactive.

Truth is the communal narrative constructed using available languages and communications media, weaving together “facts” observed and imagined, to conform to the structures of symbolic logic and mythic story.

Petroglifs are stone tablets that can go viral.

A petroglif could be an actual virus, or other biological material, that conveys its message(s) in the language of English speakers and in the language of proteins.

A petroglif could be returned to the desert as atemporal land art.  It could also be posted on the Internet. 

Petroglifs could be created by one person, or two, or by an entire conference.  In any configuration, they recognize that the notion of the solitary author is one deemed suspect by the network.

Petroglifs should draw their content from the dissonant infochorus of the network, and feed right back into the source, or relay it on.

A petroglif is a stone tablet that can be retweeted.

A petroglif is an object in the desert, location unknown, that you can “Like.”

A petroglif is an aphorism without an author that also functions as source code for a new narrative.

A petroglif is an image without an author that also functions as an input code for the semiotic GPS map of the network.

A petroglif is a truth.