Meaning without Borders: likn and Distributed Knowledge

This paper serves as a narrative companion to likn, an artware application about the nature of knowledge, ideas and language. According to the advocates and engineers of the “knowledge representation” project known as the Semantic Web, electronic ontologies are “a rationalization of actual data-sharing practice”; but where do artists and intellectuals fit into this data-oriented model of discourse? likn critiques the Semantic Web from a postmodern perspective. This account describes how postmodern theory was scrutinized, interpreted and ultimately expressed as “features” in likn.