The Process (collective)
Encyclopedia
Skinny Puppy
Skinny Puppy is a Canadian industrial musical group, formed in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1982. The group is widely considered to be the founders of the electro-industrial genre....
album The Process, though the direct interrelation ends there. Some of the early contributors included Nivek Ogre
Nivek Ogre
Nivek Ogre is a Canadian musician, performance artist and actor best known as a founding member of the industrial band Skinny Puppy. Since that band featured another Kevin and was produced by another Ogilvie Nivek Ogre (born Kevin Graham Ogilvie December 5, 1962) is a Canadian musician,...
, Genesis P-Orridge, William Morrison
William Morrison (director)
William Morrison , is a Canadian born Juno Award-nominated music video director, documentary film director, and musician...
, and Loki der Quaeler
Loki der Quaeler
Loki der Quaeler is a research mathematician and musician; born Matthew Demsey in December, 1970, his name was legally changed in the early 1990s...
. Members are known as Processians or Processors
The Process logo — formed by the overlapping of 4 P's — the name, along with some philosophies, other symbols and texts were taken from The Process Church of the Final Judgement (Process Church); ideas that were initially introduced to the early members of The Process collective by Genesis.
Aside from the facet of their structure aimed at supporting a micronation
Micronation
Micronations, sometimes also referred to as model countries and new country projects, are entities that claim to be independent nations or states but which are not recognized by world governments or major international organizations...
status, the general organizational structure of the NSK
Neue Slowenische Kunst
Neue Slowenische Kunst , aka NSK, is a controversial political art collective that announced itself in Slovenia in 1984, when Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. NSK's name, being German, is compatible with a theme in NSK works: the complicated relationship Slovenes have had with Germans...
played a contributing role in the aim of the original, largely unrealized, structure of The Process.
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", Loki Der Quaeler (personal reflection 2007).Information about The Process was initially communicated across Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
by its founding members, who encouraged people to upload their various media files for collaboration via anonymous FTP. "We worked out a doctrine and put something up and from all of that, something was woken. Something rose up and came back to meet the call," Ogre (Paradigm Magazine, 1998). Later, a mailing list was also created, but without direct participation by Ogre or Genesis.
The Process 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. This effort has largely gone undocumented by contemporary media theorists and internet sociologists despite the fact that many of their assertions played out in the course of the experiment.
Several gatherings of participants took place in 1997 and 1998 at primarily East Coast locations. During the last years of the decade, community activity dwindled and the website was eventually retired. Creative spin offs and independent projects were launched around roughly the same time frame drawing many participants in new directions and away from the collective. In this same period, a number of original members of the Process Church contacted some of the early contributors of the collective and the Process Church members were subsequently provided with their own web space on the Process server from March 1997 until May 2001.
Controversy
Genesis brought with him to The Process philosophy and documents that had similarities to Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY)Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth
Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth or TOPY was a fellowship founded in 1981 by members of Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93, and a number of other individuals...
a collective that he had previously co-founded in the early 1980s. He was accused by Temple ov Psychick Youth North America (TOPYNA) of plagiarizing and re-branding a TOPY document for use in The Process. Genesis also founded congruently with The Process an organization with an acronym similar to the one used by TOPY called Thee Outer Process International (TOPI).
Since 2000
In 2000, Genesis premiered a short film entitled The Process is the Product. It was prepared from multimedia material created by Process Media Labs during the early years of The Process.The Technics
The Process ftp was initially located at the address ftp.netcom.com directory pub/puppy. The group was then afforded its own server space and listproc at USCUniversity of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, by Robert Engen, with 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
NeXTstation
NeXTstation was a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured and sold by NeXT from 1990 until 1993. It ran the NeXTSTEP operating system. The NeXTstation was released as a more affordable alternative to the NeXTcube at about US $4,995 or about half the price...
which sat in a closet in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, B.C; the location and internet connection were provided by Blacky
Jean-Yves Thériault
For the Champion Kickboxer, see Jean-Yves Thériault Jean-Yves Thériault played bass guitar for the Canadian thrash/progressive metal band Voivod. He co-founded the band and appeared on the first six albums – War and Pain, Rrröööaaarrr, Killing Technology, Dimension Hatross, Nothingface, and Angel...
. Since 2000, the server has been on anonymous hardware in a colocation center
Colocation
Colocation is the act of placing multiple entities within a single location.Colocation is often used in the data sourcing industry to mean off-site data storage, usually in a data center. This is very important for businesses since the loss of data can be crucial for companies of any size...
.