I have always found it difficult to clearly articulate what this project is. To my way of thinking, there is a proper reluctance to focus sharply on its boundaries. Certain phrases come to mind when I consider the question “What is it?” for my own purposes: an open portfolio, a collection of works-in-progress, a loosely-bound fascicle of digital artifacts, a kind of diary, a mediature, which is to say, a form of literature admitting all digital media among its chapters, paragaphs, figures, and various expressions.

Many aspects of this project have evolved over the years, but there has been a steadfastness to its first conception: that it is a series of filecasts — a broadcasting of digital artifacts — and so it carries on as such. There are recursions; some filecasts are playlists of other filecasts. There are discernible threads connecting certain filecasts, while excluding others. There are versions, revisions, reduxes and rejections (reconsidered, and thus deleted, filecasts), and complete reworkings; and there are filecasts that use previous filecasts as source material.

And so,

The project ( nula.cc ) is the brainchild of intermedia artist Lloyd Dunn, a founding member of the Tape-beatles, and editor and publisher of the zines Photostatic and Retrofuturism during the 1980s and 90s. It comprises hours of sound works, hundreds of photographs and videos, numerous texts, which often reflect the artist‘s frequent travels, presented here for the delectation of anyone who finds themselves interested.

Retrospective

Now that ( nula.cc ), which first went live in 2009, has officially spanned a Gregorian decade, let me spend a moment looking back.

It started as an itch in my brain, sometime in the mid-00s, a dissatisfaction with how the wwweb was being used; mainly: how most creators of its “sites” were making use of it. Grounded as it was in text, the wwweb by all rights should give birth to a new form of literature. Files are digital artifacts, “written” on electric media. If we accept a certain equivalence, what does that imply? I decided to create a problem space within which to conceptualize, and populate it with my own works. That is how ( nula.cc ) started.

The medium of text, let us understand, began several thousand years ago as an aid to arithmetic, and was used mainly for the recording of numbers of sacks of wheat, for example, or camels, or amphoræ of oil. Its usefulness thus demonstrated as an aid to our biological memories, it later took on sacred and magical roles, fixing ritual in immutable forms so it could be perfectly repeated, thus pleasing the gods; and, along with that, stories, poems and songs were also written down. Text could enthrall, it could sing and teach, and it could preserve history.

In the digital age, text was, for the first time in thousands of years, asked to do something entirely new. It was asked to do work. The instructions in a program file (electrically written words) can be “run” so that some new result, often impossible to create by physical means, can be displayed on a glowing sheet of glass; or flood out of loudspeakers; or a moving image can be thrust forth on a cone of light. Each of these experiences are fundamentally different manifestations of the same thing: computers interpret the instructions given them and some attached speaker or screen gives us the chance to perceive the results.

So the web site ( nula.cc ) is my response to this problem space, an exploration of some idea of what a “digital artifact” is. The project continues to grow and change, by grace of your attention and responses to it. My enthusiasm is yet unflagging and I am grateful for all who have paused here to read, look and listen.

1 January, 2020, Prague