The Process (collective)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Process is an art and philosophy collective formed in the early 1990s. The idea was initially birthed at the same time as, and with a subset of the same people from, the studio work for the Skinny Puppy album The Process, though the direct interrelation ends there. Some of the early contributors included Nivek Ogre, Genesis P-Orridge, William Morrison, and Loki der Quaeler.
The Process logo — formed by the overlapping of 4 P's — and the germ of the founding idea was taken from The Process Church of the Final Judgement; the introduction to which was delivered by Genesis.
Aside from the facet of their structure aimed at supporting a micronation status, the general organizational structure of the NSK played a contributing role in the aim of the original, largely unrealized, structure of The Process.
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[edit] The 1990s
One of the initial ideas pursued by the collective was concerned with the idea of geographically distributed collaboration. The notion which often came up in early conversations was one of «well, there's this newly available medium: the internet; it really seems like it could be used to better facilitate musicians, graphic artists, and philosophers collaborating on works». Originally through Usenet and other forum-precursor memes, people interested in the notion were encouraged to upload their various media files for collaboration via anonymous FTP. This idea would have been much better served by using a revision control system, than by the usually version-destructive method resulting from allowing users to FTP.
The experience provided one of the earliest international collaboration efforts by artists and philosophers who were largely unknown to each other prior to their usage of the internet.
During the last years of the decade, community interest (or at least activity) dwindled on its asymptotic approach to zero. In this same period, a number of original members of the Process Church, contacted some of the early contributors; in addition to facilitate new communications, and in light of the state of the community effort, some of the original members were provided with their own web space on the Process server.
[edit] Since 2000
There are currently efforts to create a next generation release of The Process, dealing with privacy and nation-state issues, as well as a parallel effort to create a multimedia archive of both Process and Process Church related documents.
[edit] The Technics
The Process was afforded its own server space and listproc at USC, by Robert Engen, and had the address process.usc.edu. Starting in 1995, internet efforts not involving the listproc were based from its own domain: process.org.
The original process.org server was a NeXTStation which sat in a closet in Vancouver, B.C. Since 2000, the server has been on anonymous hardware in a colocation center.
