+++
title = "'Metadata Punk'"
glassblowers = ["mckenziewark.md"]
+++

> Monoskop and UbuWeb are tactics for intervening in three kinds of practices, those of the art-world, of publishing and of scholarship. They respond to the current institutional, technical and political-economic constraints of all three. As it says in the *Communist Manifesto*, the forces for social change are those that ask the property question. While *détournement* was a sufficient answer to that question in the era of the culture industries, they try to formulate, in their modest way, a suitable tactic for answering the property question in the era of the vulture industries.

> This takes the form of moving from data to metadata, expressed in the form of the move from writing to publishing, from art-making to curating, from research to archiving. Another way of thinking this, suggested by Hiroki Azuma would be the move from narrative to database. The object of critical attention acquires a third dimension, a kind of informational depth. The objects before us are not just a text or an image but databases of potential texts and images, with metadata attached.

— McKenzie Wark, "Metadata Punk", *Public Library*, edited by Tomislav Medak and Mars Marcell, 111–20. Zagreb: What, How and for Whom/WHW & Multimedia Institute, 2015.