It is extremely tempting to be able to speak of the embodiment of a collection of information; we as humans desire to be able to anthropomorphize the things we see around us, in order that we might more naturally relate to their experience.
When we detect a pattern with a sustained form, we identify it as an object. In general, physical objects are considered to be solid bodies, although, as we know, the material that makes up true biological bodies is in constant flux: it is the pattern of that material that we insist on as the body. So if the truest bodies are mere patterns, why can't we think of all mere patterns as bodies?
In some sense we can, of course, but it turns out not to be very helpful in the naive sense. We instantiate ideals in bodies so that we may categorize and recognize their influence on the surrounding environment. When we speak of the body of a rock, we think of its resistance to incoming forces. When we speak of the body of a tree, we think of its ability to push up the soil, shade the forest floor, and house birds. When we speak of bodies, we think of affecting the environment.
Thus to think of the individual torrent swarm as the embodiment of a buried seed of data is a bit naive and myopic: this swarm alone merely instantiates that data: it does not enable its activation within its environment. This requires more: take for example the case of the movie file. Its embodiment requires first off the software that will allow for its playback, and in turn the hardware that can run that software and reproduce a physical instance of the file. Finally, we see that the system as a whole requires human desire to activate the programmatic framework, and here we follow the chain back to the earth as a whole.
This is frustrating. It is hard to ferret out the affective capability of the torrent, indeed of any idea, without tracing the support structure and instantiation back to all of society. Perhaps the most meaningful embodiment statement is therefore the noocortex concept: that we are all an embodiment of the global brain.
To narrow the situation any further we must restrict ourselves to mere instantiation of a set of data, much as we might think of language embodying an idea, a similarly frustrating proposition. But this is a retreat from our original desire to empower the data.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Michael Wheeler - God's Machines
discusses the concept of "bodily machines".
We consider bodies to be machines in the universe-as-machine Cartesian sense, but with epistemological norms of proper functioning (our heart 'fails', etc.). The body, as seen from the mind, is then a mere "bodily machine" that is that which supports the mind and enacts intentional behavior within the environment, attributed to the mind as an agent in question.
discusses the concept of "bodily machines".
We consider bodies to be machines in the universe-as-machine Cartesian sense, but with epistemological norms of proper functioning (our heart 'fails', etc.). The body, as seen from the mind, is then a mere "bodily machine" that is that which supports the mind and enacts intentional behavior within the environment, attributed to the mind as an agent in question.
Monday, November 16, 2009
http://library.mit.edu/item/001550749
Paradoxes of interactivity / Uwe Seifert etc
Does the Body Disappear? A Comment on Computer Generated Spaces / Sybille Kramer
-- No! It is defined now by its unchanging in time. The fact that it changes is still a challenge to its individuation. We have simply become willing to draw these changes into its definition, to accept it as current and past (and future) entity. We recognize the necessity and inevitability of change, and delimit our entities accordingly.
Where the Action is: Distributed Agency between Humans, Machines, and Programs / Werner Rammert
He defines levels of agency (69):
"when the parts of a technical system [...] can behave not only in one pre-fixed way, but more flexibly, when the interaction with other parts or the interaction with the environment changes the behaviour, and when some parts actively search for new information to select their behaviour and even more to change their pre-given frame of action, then and only then does it make sense to use the vocabulary of agency and interaction in the world of objects." (69)
"If one were to count the activities of people, only five percent could be classified as actions with reflected intentions. (Kaufmann 2008) [...] Giddens distinguishes three levels of an action: a first one where a difference of state is produced, a second one where a difference of options is possible, and a third one where actors can give an explanation for their action if asked. (Giddens 1984)" (75)
"the unit of technical agency is constantly changing and growing towards a highly combinatory and relatively autonomous technological system." (80)
"When a human action such as flying an Airbus or searching for a certain piece of information in hundreds of libraries, millions of books, and trillions of files can only be executed with the assistance and intervention of hunderds of other agencies, then it is urgent to develop a concept of agency that acknowledges all these agencies, though they are heterogeneous in substance" (82)
Time, Magma, Continuity: Some Remarks on In-Formation and the Fabrication of "Poiesis" / Christoph Lischka
--> Process philosophy, A. N. Whitehead
"The emergence of forms (in-formation) is the ultimate character of time. The 'before' and 'after', the irreversibility of poietic time, is 'given through the scansion of creation and destruction.' Poeitic time forces a self-deployment of new forms in ensidic space and time as receptacles of the first stratum, where they become organized through subjective - both social-historical and individual - construction." (166-7)
"Every form - in order to be - has to be identical to itself, it has to persist for a while'" -- describes the ensidic mandate...
"Fabrication of poiesis, then, means keeping open the surging forth of physis: alliosis. It works out to be simply waiting for the right moment, the kairos - with gelassenheit. / If you want -- an ethics of in-formation." (171)
Paradoxes of interactivity / Uwe Seifert etc
Does the Body Disappear? A Comment on Computer Generated Spaces / Sybille Kramer
if the transition from orality to literacy in medial respects can be described as a spatialisation, then the transition from literacy to telematics lies in a temporalisation. [...] information which is accessible and processable via computers does not remain in the shape of 'documents' but takes on that of 'cyber bodies'. It is then organized like a 'life stream'. Approaches to a non-Cartesian conception of the body become visible here: a body is taken as an entity in flow which is not defined anymore by its position in space, but by its changing in time. (32-3)
-- No! It is defined now by its unchanging in time. The fact that it changes is still a challenge to its individuation. We have simply become willing to draw these changes into its definition, to accept it as current and past (and future) entity. We recognize the necessity and inevitability of change, and delimit our entities accordingly.
Where the Action is: Distributed Agency between Humans, Machines, and Programs / Werner Rammert
What are agents? From a technological view, agents are particular computer programs. They are written with the intention that software agents can execute actions like human agents. This means that actions are delegated to them. The agents divide and delegate the action among other agents. [...] the main characteristics are presented as relative 'autonomy', a particular 'reactivity' to the environment, 'pro-activeness', and 'sociability' (67-8)
He defines levels of agency (69):
- Passive -- Instruments completely moved from outside (hammer)
- Semi-active -- Apparatus with one aspect of self-acting (record player)
- Re-active -- Systems with feedback loops (adaptive heating)
- Pro-active -- Systems with self-activating programs (car stabilisation)
- Co-operative -- Distributed and self-coordinating systems (mobile robots, smart home)
"when the parts of a technical system [...] can behave not only in one pre-fixed way, but more flexibly, when the interaction with other parts or the interaction with the environment changes the behaviour, and when some parts actively search for new information to select their behaviour and even more to change their pre-given frame of action, then and only then does it make sense to use the vocabulary of agency and interaction in the world of objects." (69)
"If one were to count the activities of people, only five percent could be classified as actions with reflected intentions. (Kaufmann 2008) [...] Giddens distinguishes three levels of an action: a first one where a difference of state is produced, a second one where a difference of options is possible, and a third one where actors can give an explanation for their action if asked. (Giddens 1984)" (75)
"the unit of technical agency is constantly changing and growing towards a highly combinatory and relatively autonomous technological system." (80)
"When a human action such as flying an Airbus or searching for a certain piece of information in hundreds of libraries, millions of books, and trillions of files can only be executed with the assistance and intervention of hunderds of other agencies, then it is urgent to develop a concept of agency that acknowledges all these agencies, though they are heterogeneous in substance" (82)
Time, Magma, Continuity: Some Remarks on In-Formation and the Fabrication of "Poiesis" / Christoph Lischka
--> Process philosophy, A. N. Whitehead
"The emergence of forms (in-formation) is the ultimate character of time. The 'before' and 'after', the irreversibility of poietic time, is 'given through the scansion of creation and destruction.' Poeitic time forces a self-deployment of new forms in ensidic space and time as receptacles of the first stratum, where they become organized through subjective - both social-historical and individual - construction." (166-7)
"Every form - in order to be - has to be identical to itself, it has to persist for a while'" -- describes the ensidic mandate...
"Fabrication of poiesis, then, means keeping open the surging forth of physis: alliosis. It works out to be simply waiting for the right moment, the kairos - with gelassenheit. / If you want -- an ethics of in-formation." (171)
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Notes 2
http://danube.mica.edu/library/texts/EssList.cfm?Writer1=Lischka%2C%20Gerhard%20Johann
Everyone a Mediator / Gerhard Johann Lischka
ISBN 026273138X
"The white cube is the vessel with whiuch to isolate whatever kind of image worlds from negative concomitant information and thus to show the exhibited artworks off to the best possible effect. However large or small these white islands in the chaos of information and redundancy may be, they present what is 'new,' they develop a great intensity and a vortex that momentarily clusters recipients prepared to deal with image-language into a discussion group. As a kind of cult space, it succeeds, extends and rivals temples, churches and mosques. / The Black Box on the other hand is the representative of the New Media, technological development and a trend towards binding mediatization to us as an increasingly refined form of multimedia, with the effect that we become the controller and emissary of data, images, texts and sounds as a result of advancing miniturization. The Black Box can be so large that it engulfs us as an auditorium and it can be so small that we can swallow it. It bursts conventional experiences of space and in cyberspace is the beginning of a new age of reception, of total involvement in the media, of mental immersion in fictious worlds." (170-1)
-- But the black box is now the whole world, and the white box is an architecture of extremely unbalanced participation. The white box in cyberspace, perhaps, is the way of encapsulating the spectacle, of focusing the 'new' vortex of intensity into the universal black box.
-- What does the torrent have against other p2p delivery mechanisms? It is actually rather more mortal than the standard always-on mentality: peers must exist to keep it alive.
-- It therefore acts as a source of concurrency.
-- The need to keep the torrent alive generates a sense of urgency, and shapes activity at all levels of communication. (The permanence does not come from the torrent itself, or from its structural emanations, but from the intensity it draws from the swarm)
http://library.mit.edu/item/001103727
Technomanifestos : visions from the information revolutionaries / Adam Brate.
"The circle of 'we' begins with ourselves and extends outward to societies, animals, computers, and the environment. We can apply the principles of feedback to understand why we must protect fellow humans, animals, and the environment in order to protect ourselves, [...]. The more conscious we are of this feedback loop between ourselves and the world at large, the more effectively we can sustain democracies, protect natural resources, understand one another, and strive towards ideals of fairness and equality." (30)
Gutenberg Galaxy: "This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the 'noosphere' or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. [...] unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence [...]. Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time." (200)
-- why this is not inevitable? memory... digital librarians hold power, in that the libraries are no longer mere stores of spectacle but the very production points of tools.
-- speed of communication belies an undercurrent of attempted permanence.
"Distributed computing, P2P, could fulfill the promise of cybernetics: ubiquitous interactivity. Its proponents imagine that it would be irrepressible, [... with peers] simultaneously autonomous and part of the great body of information. [...] There would be no unobtrusive way to control information if it can be passed from individual to individual. The concept of publication, crucial to the premise of copyright, would require a transformation. It may necessitate alternative payment (and credit) models" (334)
-- Indeed this describes succinctly the transformations that have taken place.
http://library.mit.edu/item/000101763
Autopoiesis and cognition / Humberto R. Maturana & Varela
"The nervous system always functions in the present, and it can only be understood as a system functioning in the present. The present is the time interval necessary for an interaction to take place; past, future and time exist only for the observer. Although many nerve cells may change continuously, their mode of operation and their past history can explain to the observer how their present mode of operation was reached, but not how it is realized now, or what their present participation in the determination of behavior is." (18)
"Notions such as embodiment of representation express the correspondence that the observer sees between relations, or sets of relations, and different states of activity of the nervous system, and, as such, lie in his cognitive domain. They describe the functional organization of the nervous system in the cognitive domain of the observer, and point to the ability of the nervous system to treat some of its own states as independent entities with which it can interact, but they do not characterize the nature of the functional subordination of the nervous system to its own states. This subordination is that of a functionally closed, state determined, ultrastable system, modulated by interactions." (25) -- Cf. Ashby 1960?
"The living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them." (48)
-- so perhaps the embodiment of these ideas is coincident with the whole of society -- we need to draw the line of organization somewhere: resources from earth is not a helpful abstraction
-- desires to experience the spectacle are drawn into the life of the organism.
"The new, then, is a necessary result of the historical organization of the observer that makes of every attained state the starting point for the specification of the next one, which thus cannot be a strict repetition of any previous state; creativity is the cultural expression of this unavoidable feature." (51)
"Any cohesive social institution is an autopoietic system - because it survives, because its method of survival answers the autopoietic criteria, and because it may well change its entire appearance and its apparent purpose in the process." (70 - Stafford Beer)
-- indeed the transliteration of the spectacular process into cyberspace has _reversed_ its appearance
-- it is purpose is transformed from force of change to force of stability
--- earlier, need was to cause upheaval in the form of major destabilizing events
--- as destabilizing events and chaotic concurrances become the norm, the need is now for a source of shared experience from which to transcend McLuhan's terror
"Although a given machine can be realized by many different structures, for it to constitute a concrete entity in a given space its actual components must be defined in that space, and have the properties which allow them to generate the relations which define it." (77)
"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (78-79)
-- This must apply to the torrent swarm.
http://library.mit.edu/item/001487341
Body, language, and mind
"We humans are live creatures. We are acting when we think, perhaps falling in and out of step with the environment, but never are our thoughts outside of it. Via our bodily senses the environment enters into the very shape of our thought, sculpting our most abstract reasoning from our embodied interactions with the world." (49: We are live creatures / Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer)
"according to the ideal of the computer as a general purpose machine, the computer itself [...] imposes absolutely no constraints on how the machine will operate and this is why it offers the obvious and sufficient explanation of what is going on when the program is 'running'" (63: Bringing the body back to life / Alan Costall)
"Both senses of embodiment [...] involve a process by which something not recognized as a body presents itself as a being one: in the first case, a mind is being situated in the world; in the second case an idea is being reified into an object publically accessible to all." (91-2: From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning / Göran Sonesson)
"theoretical culture presupposes the existence of external memory, that is, devices permitting the conservation and communication of knowledge independently of face-to-face interaction between human beings." (115: Merlin Donald via Sonesson)
"it is not enough for two persons to know about a picture for it to exist: there must be some kind of organism-independent artefact on which it is inscribed. The picture must be divorced from the bodies (and minds) of those making use of it." (Sonesson 116) ~ reification
Posner (1989) -- transitory vs. enduring artefacts: "The transitory artefacts [...] also have a material aspect, just as the lasting ones; they only have the particularity of developing in time, which is why they cannot be accumulated without first being converted." (117)
"Body image is a (sometimes conscious) system of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs pertaining to one's own body. / Body Schema is a system of processes that constantly regulate posture and movement: sensory-motor processes that function without reflective awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring." (273: Phenomenological and experimental contributions to understanding embodied experience / Shaun Gallagher)
The body and the arts / edited by Corinne Saunders, et al.
Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses / Ulrika Maude
"What happens when we stare intensely at something? Instead of clear and distinct perception, blurring and confusion; instead of fulfilment, the eyes lose their sight, veiled in tears; instead of stability and fixation at the far end of the gaze, we find a chaos of shifting, jerking forms as the object of focus violently tears itself away from the hold of the gaze." (David Michael Levin, 122)
"Literature and the visual arts, however, often seem to exploit, even celebrate this dissociation of knowledge and vision by aestheticizing perception, and foregrounding the division between objective knowledge and sensual experience." (Ulrika Maude 122)
"in the modern world, wonder may reside less in a search for transcendental, otherworldly phenomena, than in material, commonplace experiences such as seeing or hearing, augmented now through various technological advances." (119)
Body, Space, Time / Antony Gormley
"the smallest shelter necessary for a man to inhabit: Room for the Great Australian Desert. It is in the central Australian outback at a place not unlike the site of the first atomic bomb tests. Its coordinates are undisclosed. It's very important to me that this is a work for the imagination, not for going to visit. However, it exists in space and time. It's important to me that there is no other construction between it and a completely flat 360° horizon. There are no eye-holes in this architecture. There are four apertures: one at the mouth, two at the ears, and one in the anal-genital region." (Gormley 216)
re Allotment: "I think you have to slow down when entering this space. At first it feels like a ghost town, but you can begin to intuit relationships. Relationships between these seemingly intert masses become important [...] The intimations of family relations are confounded by the avenues and the cross-streets, which impose grid systems on to the articulation of the whole. The way the living body of the viewer and these voided personal spaces of the individual relate is critical." (217-8)
"art might not pertain to what is contained in the institution or within the unique object, but within the dynamic between the living and its surrogate body. What for me was unexpected was the way in which these things became invisible, and how it was an open question as to who was the outsider [...]" (223)
"rather than describing the space around or internal to the body, I [...] activate the space of the room by a continuous line [...]. The body in question here is entirely the body of the viewer and people take up their own positions within the space. [...] in a way, this is the returning of the emancipation of art from its duties of representation to the viewer as a free, experiencing individual in space." (235)
Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodemism / Patricia Waugh
"The recipe for life conveyed by the report of the human genome consortium was soon transferred to and made available on a cd-rom: the biological body seemed to have achieved its final disembodiment as fully digitalized 'information'. [...] The idea that the human body can be coded in a decipherable sequence of four letters is based on the epistemological assumption that computer language, like molecular 'language' or codes, can be an unambiguous and direct inscription of the living, breathing body. The quality of incarnation is conferred on the concept of inscription in an Elision that entirely facilitates the evacuation of embodiment as affect and viscosity." (Waugh 136-7)
Everyone a Mediator / Gerhard Johann Lischka
ISBN 026273138X
"The white cube is the vessel with whiuch to isolate whatever kind of image worlds from negative concomitant information and thus to show the exhibited artworks off to the best possible effect. However large or small these white islands in the chaos of information and redundancy may be, they present what is 'new,' they develop a great intensity and a vortex that momentarily clusters recipients prepared to deal with image-language into a discussion group. As a kind of cult space, it succeeds, extends and rivals temples, churches and mosques. / The Black Box on the other hand is the representative of the New Media, technological development and a trend towards binding mediatization to us as an increasingly refined form of multimedia, with the effect that we become the controller and emissary of data, images, texts and sounds as a result of advancing miniturization. The Black Box can be so large that it engulfs us as an auditorium and it can be so small that we can swallow it. It bursts conventional experiences of space and in cyberspace is the beginning of a new age of reception, of total involvement in the media, of mental immersion in fictious worlds." (170-1)
-- But the black box is now the whole world, and the white box is an architecture of extremely unbalanced participation. The white box in cyberspace, perhaps, is the way of encapsulating the spectacle, of focusing the 'new' vortex of intensity into the universal black box.
-- What does the torrent have against other p2p delivery mechanisms? It is actually rather more mortal than the standard always-on mentality: peers must exist to keep it alive.
-- It therefore acts as a source of concurrency.
-- The need to keep the torrent alive generates a sense of urgency, and shapes activity at all levels of communication. (The permanence does not come from the torrent itself, or from its structural emanations, but from the intensity it draws from the swarm)
http://library.mit.edu/item/001103727
Technomanifestos : visions from the information revolutionaries / Adam Brate.
"The circle of 'we' begins with ourselves and extends outward to societies, animals, computers, and the environment. We can apply the principles of feedback to understand why we must protect fellow humans, animals, and the environment in order to protect ourselves, [...]. The more conscious we are of this feedback loop between ourselves and the world at large, the more effectively we can sustain democracies, protect natural resources, understand one another, and strive towards ideals of fairness and equality." (30)
Gutenberg Galaxy: "This externalization of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the 'noosphere' or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in an infantile piece of science fiction. [...] unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed coexistence [...]. Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time." (200)
-- why this is not inevitable? memory... digital librarians hold power, in that the libraries are no longer mere stores of spectacle but the very production points of tools.
-- speed of communication belies an undercurrent of attempted permanence.
"Distributed computing, P2P, could fulfill the promise of cybernetics: ubiquitous interactivity. Its proponents imagine that it would be irrepressible, [... with peers] simultaneously autonomous and part of the great body of information. [...] There would be no unobtrusive way to control information if it can be passed from individual to individual. The concept of publication, crucial to the premise of copyright, would require a transformation. It may necessitate alternative payment (and credit) models" (334)
-- Indeed this describes succinctly the transformations that have taken place.
http://library.mit.edu/item/000101763
Autopoiesis and cognition / Humberto R. Maturana & Varela
"The nervous system always functions in the present, and it can only be understood as a system functioning in the present. The present is the time interval necessary for an interaction to take place; past, future and time exist only for the observer. Although many nerve cells may change continuously, their mode of operation and their past history can explain to the observer how their present mode of operation was reached, but not how it is realized now, or what their present participation in the determination of behavior is." (18)
"Notions such as embodiment of representation express the correspondence that the observer sees between relations, or sets of relations, and different states of activity of the nervous system, and, as such, lie in his cognitive domain. They describe the functional organization of the nervous system in the cognitive domain of the observer, and point to the ability of the nervous system to treat some of its own states as independent entities with which it can interact, but they do not characterize the nature of the functional subordination of the nervous system to its own states. This subordination is that of a functionally closed, state determined, ultrastable system, modulated by interactions." (25) -- Cf. Ashby 1960?
"The living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them." (48)
-- so perhaps the embodiment of these ideas is coincident with the whole of society -- we need to draw the line of organization somewhere: resources from earth is not a helpful abstraction
-- desires to experience the spectacle are drawn into the life of the organism.
"The new, then, is a necessary result of the historical organization of the observer that makes of every attained state the starting point for the specification of the next one, which thus cannot be a strict repetition of any previous state; creativity is the cultural expression of this unavoidable feature." (51)
"Any cohesive social institution is an autopoietic system - because it survives, because its method of survival answers the autopoietic criteria, and because it may well change its entire appearance and its apparent purpose in the process." (70 - Stafford Beer)
-- indeed the transliteration of the spectacular process into cyberspace has _reversed_ its appearance
-- it is purpose is transformed from force of change to force of stability
--- earlier, need was to cause upheaval in the form of major destabilizing events
--- as destabilizing events and chaotic concurrances become the norm, the need is now for a source of shared experience from which to transcend McLuhan's terror
"Although a given machine can be realized by many different structures, for it to constitute a concrete entity in a given space its actual components must be defined in that space, and have the properties which allow them to generate the relations which define it." (77)
"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network." (78-79)
-- This must apply to the torrent swarm.
http://library.mit.edu/item/001487341
Body, language, and mind
"We humans are live creatures. We are acting when we think, perhaps falling in and out of step with the environment, but never are our thoughts outside of it. Via our bodily senses the environment enters into the very shape of our thought, sculpting our most abstract reasoning from our embodied interactions with the world." (49: We are live creatures / Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer)
"according to the ideal of the computer as a general purpose machine, the computer itself [...] imposes absolutely no constraints on how the machine will operate and this is why it offers the obvious and sufficient explanation of what is going on when the program is 'running'" (63: Bringing the body back to life / Alan Costall)
"Both senses of embodiment [...] involve a process by which something not recognized as a body presents itself as a being one: in the first case, a mind is being situated in the world; in the second case an idea is being reified into an object publically accessible to all." (91-2: From the meaning of embodiment to the embodiment of meaning / Göran Sonesson)
"theoretical culture presupposes the existence of external memory, that is, devices permitting the conservation and communication of knowledge independently of face-to-face interaction between human beings." (115: Merlin Donald via Sonesson)
"it is not enough for two persons to know about a picture for it to exist: there must be some kind of organism-independent artefact on which it is inscribed. The picture must be divorced from the bodies (and minds) of those making use of it." (Sonesson 116) ~ reification
Posner (1989) -- transitory vs. enduring artefacts: "The transitory artefacts [...] also have a material aspect, just as the lasting ones; they only have the particularity of developing in time, which is why they cannot be accumulated without first being converted." (117)
"Body image is a (sometimes conscious) system of perceptions, attitudes and beliefs pertaining to one's own body. / Body Schema is a system of processes that constantly regulate posture and movement: sensory-motor processes that function without reflective awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring." (273: Phenomenological and experimental contributions to understanding embodied experience / Shaun Gallagher)
The body and the arts / edited by Corinne Saunders, et al.
Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses / Ulrika Maude
"What happens when we stare intensely at something? Instead of clear and distinct perception, blurring and confusion; instead of fulfilment, the eyes lose their sight, veiled in tears; instead of stability and fixation at the far end of the gaze, we find a chaos of shifting, jerking forms as the object of focus violently tears itself away from the hold of the gaze." (David Michael Levin, 122)
"Literature and the visual arts, however, often seem to exploit, even celebrate this dissociation of knowledge and vision by aestheticizing perception, and foregrounding the division between objective knowledge and sensual experience." (Ulrika Maude 122)
"in the modern world, wonder may reside less in a search for transcendental, otherworldly phenomena, than in material, commonplace experiences such as seeing or hearing, augmented now through various technological advances." (119)
Body, Space, Time / Antony Gormley
"the smallest shelter necessary for a man to inhabit: Room for the Great Australian Desert. It is in the central Australian outback at a place not unlike the site of the first atomic bomb tests. Its coordinates are undisclosed. It's very important to me that this is a work for the imagination, not for going to visit. However, it exists in space and time. It's important to me that there is no other construction between it and a completely flat 360° horizon. There are no eye-holes in this architecture. There are four apertures: one at the mouth, two at the ears, and one in the anal-genital region." (Gormley 216)
re Allotment: "I think you have to slow down when entering this space. At first it feels like a ghost town, but you can begin to intuit relationships. Relationships between these seemingly intert masses become important [...] The intimations of family relations are confounded by the avenues and the cross-streets, which impose grid systems on to the articulation of the whole. The way the living body of the viewer and these voided personal spaces of the individual relate is critical." (217-8)
"art might not pertain to what is contained in the institution or within the unique object, but within the dynamic between the living and its surrogate body. What for me was unexpected was the way in which these things became invisible, and how it was an open question as to who was the outsider [...]" (223)
"rather than describing the space around or internal to the body, I [...] activate the space of the room by a continuous line [...]. The body in question here is entirely the body of the viewer and people take up their own positions within the space. [...] in a way, this is the returning of the emancipation of art from its duties of representation to the viewer as a free, experiencing individual in space." (235)
Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodemism / Patricia Waugh
"The recipe for life conveyed by the report of the human genome consortium was soon transferred to and made available on a cd-rom: the biological body seemed to have achieved its final disembodiment as fully digitalized 'information'. [...] The idea that the human body can be coded in a decipherable sequence of four letters is based on the epistemological assumption that computer language, like molecular 'language' or codes, can be an unambiguous and direct inscription of the living, breathing body. The quality of incarnation is conferred on the concept of inscription in an Elision that entirely facilitates the evacuation of embodiment as affect and viscosity." (Waugh 136-7)
Friday, November 13, 2009
Notes
http://library.mit.edu/item/001248162
The Public Domain
Stallman's GNU manifesto: Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives, and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
etc.
Truth, technology, and the visual/virtual world
http://library.mit.edu/item/001487972
Jaron Lanier: preface...
A dictionary, by itself, isn't meaningful, no matter how complete it might be. It's just a web of abstract connections between abstract connections. Words about words mean nothing. At some point the web has to be attached to something that words alone can't capture. There's a living tradition of use behind every language, and we don't yet know how to describe such a thing as a living tradition using either the tools of the dictionary or of science. (xi)
We think of the idea of a miracle as something a magician might want to do, but could not actually do. At the core, a miracle reflects a distinction we make between the natural and the supernatural. The strange thing is that in order to function morally, we might need to perceive just such distinctions in the world in a practical, every day sense. In order to treat people as if they are special in a way a computer is not, I grant people a miraculous status. (xviii)
I experience experience. I cannot prove it to you. I could just as easily be a robot making the claim. The experience thing is the odd duck in all of our - well - experience. It's precisely the one thing that isn't reduced at all if it's an illusion. (xviii)
-- Really, it is the odd duck in the *discussion*, and this is of the essence. It is the only thing we attribute to faith.
Once upon a time there was a species that was very good at inventing new technologies. [...] a terrible thing happened. The stopped having experience! They could see the future, so they lost the ability to be surprised. They could have anything and be anywhere instantly, but that meant they were never in any particular place, with any particular things. (xx)
w/Paul Miller
JL: people who like to identify with machines as a form of psychological comfort because machines don't have to die. [...] people who fetishize computers -- they'll be able to upload themselves so they don't have to die. (two:38)
PM: "with the Ise Shrine -- all these Buddhist monks, every 20 years, build this one wooden structure that's exactly like the same structure that was 20 years before and they burn it. So ever7y 20 years, the same building is constructed, [...]. It's a repetition; it's a stop-motion kind of repetition. [...] about the role of hip-hop and electronic music in general. I don't view it as identification with machines; it's more like saying the culture itself is an abstract machine: let's play. (two:38,39)
JL: "you can never really know everything, and the fact that there's meaning at all is really weird; why should we even be conscious? This whole world would be here without us. We could be robots moving around and it would be the same. [...] there's some kind of extra mystical element that's needed to make sense of the fact that things are meaningful instead of just happening, because everything could happen in a meaningless way -- including the atoms moving around in our brains -- I mean everything. [...] I view the world as being fundamentally mysterious and that there's this source of meaning that we don't have access to." (two:40)
- the major question, then, is whether the source of meaning/experience extends to those traditionally non-living entities such as computers, or whether it's a property that is accessed only through some kind of emergence within the structure of the brain. I would assert that it is fundamental to the universe, and that machines with different hardware can just as much have experience, though that experience must be shaped very differently from our own.
PM: "the idea is that it's an open-source system. And I think what's going on with digital media is that we're slowly becoming more comfortable with it." (two:44)
- Ron Eglash: African Fractals
PM:"sense of loss of time. I call it the prolonged present. When you hear repetitive music [...] people celebrate the idea of withdrawing from the standardized notion of time to celebrate being human." (two:48)
Joseph Beuys - Social Sculpture...
PM: "if we're human and we made it, it's an extension of us; it's not like it's post-human or after, it's not anti-human. It's something that's the extension of various needs and desires that we have." (two:63)
Giancarlo de carlo - Architecture of participation
http://library.mit.edu/item/000372125
"Whereas, in the pre-industrial city, work, leisure, traffic, education, entertainment, commerce, and contemplation went on everywhere, in the contemporary city (designed by urban planners), everything is in its place, or should be; and if it is not, the fact that it is not is considered (by urban planners) an error."
-- !! convergence vs. the need to compartmentalize !!
-- internet embodies/enables maximal convergence, wages war on spatial divergence in the physical city
-- labeling vs. zoning in the city
"'Clearness', in itself, is not a virtue and, more than that, it has no power to exorcise the inherent quality of what it expresses."
"why should it be the goal of an urban organization which is a highly intricate and complex system of relationships among individuals and among social classes?"
- to enable outsiders to participate seamlessly. Aiding in construction of the global oblivion
- instead of having to integrate with the urban organization, the outsider can rely on labeling to direct activity: zoning allows for the collapse of experience (of surprise) into a template, and destroys the sense of spatial existence by enforcing uniformity.
- in shifting the modernist desire to transcend spatial boundaries (everything everywhere) to the internet, we restore the instantiation of spatial distinctions. The globalization trend is a phase; perhaps it will be transcended with internet penetration, and rather than expect the world to conform to a single standard, we will move fluidly between a conforming digital space and the distinguished physical realm.
"There came, at a moment in recent history, the discovery that the specialization of physical space would complete the specialization of human activities. Since then, not only were men specialized within spheres, but the spheres themselves began to be unified internally."
"the Modern Movement lost contact with -- and even knowledge of -- the context in which it wanted to act. / The equation form-function [...] could have been much more fruitful if the second factor had not been limited to a bare representation of conventional behaviours, but instead, had been expanded to include the entire range of social behaviors, with all their contradictions and conflicts. But this sort of comprehension would have required the direct participation of the protagonists; whereas, according to the method pursued, the protagonists were inevitably unheeded and even strictly excluded."
-- not so with the internet; indeed the structure has from the very beginning been rooted in the peer and in a non-hierarchical organization. Each endpoint is expected to give.
"We have participation, in fact, only when everyone takes part equally in the management of the power structure, or when the power strucutre no longer exists because everyone is directly and equally involved in the process of decision-making."
"The disorder of participation is not an unstructured and change phenomenon. On the contrary, it is based on value systems and behaviour patterns much more complex and flexible than those on which order is based. Architecture has rarely produced complex events, because its commitment to order never allowed it to perceive the logic of disorder. Even when it seriously tried to deal with people, it was only to convert them to order."
Wisdom of crowds
http://library.mit.edu/item/001288527
"The idea of the wisdom of crowds also takes decentralization as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self-interested, independent people to work in a decentralized way on the dame problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with" (70)
-- reference to Jaron Lanier's concept of emergence -- or perhaps an explanation of its method of coming to be.
Machines as agency : artistic perspectives
http://library.mit.edu/item/001498091
Embodied Cognitive Science as a Paradigm for Music Research / Luder Schmidt:
--> Ziemke, Are Robots Embodied
"Agents as programs, i.e. as structures in a purely logical sense, do not interact witht heir environment and therefore do not exhibit any form of coupling. For structural coupling to arise the agent program must be implemented and running, i.e. it must be realized by some physical processes. The processes, however, need not be tied to any specific and readily identifiable material substrate."
"Not only the present structure is of importance for the way agent and environment interact, but that also the course of previous mutual influences may have contributed to the present form of coupling." (53)
"requirement of the presence of sensors and activators integrated into a material structure" (54)
Questions of Style. Subjects, Things and Shared Agency in Popular Articulations / Andrea Sick:
"Anthropomorphism is predicated on two principal concepts:
a. The machine is an apparatus that saves human effort by generating and transmitting power.
b. The machine functions as a model for explaining human capabilities."
Mechano-Poiia / Christoph Lischka
!! great essay.
http://library.mit.edu/item/000963899
Reading digital culture
Collective Intelligence / Pierre Levy (1997):
"The most socially useful goal will no doubt be to supply ourselves with the instruments for sharing our mental abilities in the construction of collective intellect or imagination. Internetworked data would then provide the technical infrastructure for the collective brain or hypercortex of living communities. The role of information technology and digital communications is not to "replace mankind" but to promote the construction of intelligent communities in which our social and cognitive potential can be mutually developed and enhanced. [...] Perhaps it will then be possible to move beyond the society of the spectacle and enter a post-media era in which communications technologies will serve to filter and help us navigate knowledge, and enable us to think collectively rather than simply haul masses of information around with us." (258)
-- and this is the culmination of De Carlo's architecture of participation.
-- those filtration systems do not inherently store the information they intend to refer to as well as the human brain does, though they actually now have the potential to!
-- the torrent swarm must be thought of as the interface of this new post-media society with the old society of the spectacle; indeed it is mainly used to encapsulate and embody the spectacle within the post-media frame: it culminates the task of disgaging information from space...
http://library.mit.edu/item/001349220
Making things public : atmospheres of democracy / edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
14 Bruno Latour - From realpolitik to dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public
126 Michael Hagner - The Pantheon Of Brains
234 Ana Miljacki - ...Myth of Direct Knowledge
342 Andrea Mogoutov et al - Making Collaboration Networks Visible
614 Richard Powers - An Artificial Being:
"A novel, too, is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of synthetic invention." (618)
- what does it mean to be a being that is not embodied? or embodied non-functionally, as in a book?
[Armin Linke - Flower Auction 1998 [_]
874 Futurefarmers - Communiculture
876 Lorenza Mondada - BecomING Collective.
"Talk has not always been dealt with as collective action: The Western tradition has reduced it to words and its production to the sole speaker" (876)
"A transcript is a kind of inscription in which an audience is made to appear or disappear." (879)
"taking into account real time processes through which audiences interactively accomplish public talk with (or against) the speaker is a way of tackling the question of emergent patterns of collective action and collective formation." (882)
906 Xperiment! - What Is A Body / A Person? Topography of the Possible
"It seems that informed consent is an inadequate instrument for dealing with experimental situations that are characterized by uncertainty and doubts. Nevertheless we cannot stop acting." (906)
-- indeed! how can we demand consent from those close to death that we are made to keep alive? It is this way with information as well, these fledgling entities always on the verge of disappearance.
The Public Domain
Stallman's GNU manifesto: Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives, and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.
etc.
Truth, technology, and the visual/virtual world
http://library.mit.edu/item/001487972
Jaron Lanier: preface...
A dictionary, by itself, isn't meaningful, no matter how complete it might be. It's just a web of abstract connections between abstract connections. Words about words mean nothing. At some point the web has to be attached to something that words alone can't capture. There's a living tradition of use behind every language, and we don't yet know how to describe such a thing as a living tradition using either the tools of the dictionary or of science. (xi)
We think of the idea of a miracle as something a magician might want to do, but could not actually do. At the core, a miracle reflects a distinction we make between the natural and the supernatural. The strange thing is that in order to function morally, we might need to perceive just such distinctions in the world in a practical, every day sense. In order to treat people as if they are special in a way a computer is not, I grant people a miraculous status. (xviii)
I experience experience. I cannot prove it to you. I could just as easily be a robot making the claim. The experience thing is the odd duck in all of our - well - experience. It's precisely the one thing that isn't reduced at all if it's an illusion. (xviii)
-- Really, it is the odd duck in the *discussion*, and this is of the essence. It is the only thing we attribute to faith.
Once upon a time there was a species that was very good at inventing new technologies. [...] a terrible thing happened. The stopped having experience! They could see the future, so they lost the ability to be surprised. They could have anything and be anywhere instantly, but that meant they were never in any particular place, with any particular things. (xx)
w/Paul Miller
JL: people who like to identify with machines as a form of psychological comfort because machines don't have to die. [...] people who fetishize computers -- they'll be able to upload themselves so they don't have to die. (two:38)
PM: "with the Ise Shrine -- all these Buddhist monks, every 20 years, build this one wooden structure that's exactly like the same structure that was 20 years before and they burn it. So ever7y 20 years, the same building is constructed, [...]. It's a repetition; it's a stop-motion kind of repetition. [...] about the role of hip-hop and electronic music in general. I don't view it as identification with machines; it's more like saying the culture itself is an abstract machine: let's play. (two:38,39)
JL: "you can never really know everything, and the fact that there's meaning at all is really weird; why should we even be conscious? This whole world would be here without us. We could be robots moving around and it would be the same. [...] there's some kind of extra mystical element that's needed to make sense of the fact that things are meaningful instead of just happening, because everything could happen in a meaningless way -- including the atoms moving around in our brains -- I mean everything. [...] I view the world as being fundamentally mysterious and that there's this source of meaning that we don't have access to." (two:40)
- the major question, then, is whether the source of meaning/experience extends to those traditionally non-living entities such as computers, or whether it's a property that is accessed only through some kind of emergence within the structure of the brain. I would assert that it is fundamental to the universe, and that machines with different hardware can just as much have experience, though that experience must be shaped very differently from our own.
PM: "the idea is that it's an open-source system. And I think what's going on with digital media is that we're slowly becoming more comfortable with it." (two:44)
- Ron Eglash: African Fractals
PM:"sense of loss of time. I call it the prolonged present. When you hear repetitive music [...] people celebrate the idea of withdrawing from the standardized notion of time to celebrate being human." (two:48)
Joseph Beuys - Social Sculpture...
PM: "if we're human and we made it, it's an extension of us; it's not like it's post-human or after, it's not anti-human. It's something that's the extension of various needs and desires that we have." (two:63)
Giancarlo de carlo - Architecture of participation
http://library.mit.edu/item/000372125
"Whereas, in the pre-industrial city, work, leisure, traffic, education, entertainment, commerce, and contemplation went on everywhere, in the contemporary city (designed by urban planners), everything is in its place, or should be; and if it is not, the fact that it is not is considered (by urban planners) an error."
-- !! convergence vs. the need to compartmentalize !!
-- internet embodies/enables maximal convergence, wages war on spatial divergence in the physical city
-- labeling vs. zoning in the city
"'Clearness', in itself, is not a virtue and, more than that, it has no power to exorcise the inherent quality of what it expresses."
"why should it be the goal of an urban organization which is a highly intricate and complex system of relationships among individuals and among social classes?"
- to enable outsiders to participate seamlessly. Aiding in construction of the global oblivion
- instead of having to integrate with the urban organization, the outsider can rely on labeling to direct activity: zoning allows for the collapse of experience (of surprise) into a template, and destroys the sense of spatial existence by enforcing uniformity.
- in shifting the modernist desire to transcend spatial boundaries (everything everywhere) to the internet, we restore the instantiation of spatial distinctions. The globalization trend is a phase; perhaps it will be transcended with internet penetration, and rather than expect the world to conform to a single standard, we will move fluidly between a conforming digital space and the distinguished physical realm.
"There came, at a moment in recent history, the discovery that the specialization of physical space would complete the specialization of human activities. Since then, not only were men specialized within spheres, but the spheres themselves began to be unified internally."
"the Modern Movement lost contact with -- and even knowledge of -- the context in which it wanted to act. / The equation form-function [...] could have been much more fruitful if the second factor had not been limited to a bare representation of conventional behaviours, but instead, had been expanded to include the entire range of social behaviors, with all their contradictions and conflicts. But this sort of comprehension would have required the direct participation of the protagonists; whereas, according to the method pursued, the protagonists were inevitably unheeded and even strictly excluded."
-- not so with the internet; indeed the structure has from the very beginning been rooted in the peer and in a non-hierarchical organization. Each endpoint is expected to give.
"We have participation, in fact, only when everyone takes part equally in the management of the power structure, or when the power strucutre no longer exists because everyone is directly and equally involved in the process of decision-making."
"The disorder of participation is not an unstructured and change phenomenon. On the contrary, it is based on value systems and behaviour patterns much more complex and flexible than those on which order is based. Architecture has rarely produced complex events, because its commitment to order never allowed it to perceive the logic of disorder. Even when it seriously tried to deal with people, it was only to convert them to order."
Wisdom of crowds
http://library.mit.edu/item/001288527
"The idea of the wisdom of crowds also takes decentralization as a given and a good, since it implies that if you set a crowd of self-interested, independent people to work in a decentralized way on the dame problem, instead of trying to direct their efforts from the top down, their collective solution is likely to be better than any other solution you could come up with" (70)
-- reference to Jaron Lanier's concept of emergence -- or perhaps an explanation of its method of coming to be.
Machines as agency : artistic perspectives
http://library.mit.edu/item/001498091
Embodied Cognitive Science as a Paradigm for Music Research / Luder Schmidt:
--> Ziemke, Are Robots Embodied
"Agents as programs, i.e. as structures in a purely logical sense, do not interact witht heir environment and therefore do not exhibit any form of coupling. For structural coupling to arise the agent program must be implemented and running, i.e. it must be realized by some physical processes. The processes, however, need not be tied to any specific and readily identifiable material substrate."
"Not only the present structure is of importance for the way agent and environment interact, but that also the course of previous mutual influences may have contributed to the present form of coupling." (53)
"requirement of the presence of sensors and activators integrated into a material structure" (54)
Questions of Style. Subjects, Things and Shared Agency in Popular Articulations / Andrea Sick:
"Anthropomorphism is predicated on two principal concepts:
a. The machine is an apparatus that saves human effort by generating and transmitting power.
b. The machine functions as a model for explaining human capabilities."
Mechano-Poiia / Christoph Lischka
!! great essay.
http://library.mit.edu/item/000963899
Reading digital culture
Collective Intelligence / Pierre Levy (1997):
"The most socially useful goal will no doubt be to supply ourselves with the instruments for sharing our mental abilities in the construction of collective intellect or imagination. Internetworked data would then provide the technical infrastructure for the collective brain or hypercortex of living communities. The role of information technology and digital communications is not to "replace mankind" but to promote the construction of intelligent communities in which our social and cognitive potential can be mutually developed and enhanced. [...] Perhaps it will then be possible to move beyond the society of the spectacle and enter a post-media era in which communications technologies will serve to filter and help us navigate knowledge, and enable us to think collectively rather than simply haul masses of information around with us." (258)
-- and this is the culmination of De Carlo's architecture of participation.
-- those filtration systems do not inherently store the information they intend to refer to as well as the human brain does, though they actually now have the potential to!
-- the torrent swarm must be thought of as the interface of this new post-media society with the old society of the spectacle; indeed it is mainly used to encapsulate and embody the spectacle within the post-media frame: it culminates the task of disgaging information from space...
http://library.mit.edu/item/001349220
Making things public : atmospheres of democracy / edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
14 Bruno Latour - From realpolitik to dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public
126 Michael Hagner - The Pantheon Of Brains
234 Ana Miljacki - ...Myth of Direct Knowledge
342 Andrea Mogoutov et al - Making Collaboration Networks Visible
614 Richard Powers - An Artificial Being:
"A novel, too, is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of synthetic invention." (618)
- what does it mean to be a being that is not embodied? or embodied non-functionally, as in a book?
[Armin Linke - Flower Auction 1998 [_]
874 Futurefarmers - Communiculture
876 Lorenza Mondada - BecomING Collective.
"Talk has not always been dealt with as collective action: The Western tradition has reduced it to words and its production to the sole speaker" (876)
"A transcript is a kind of inscription in which an audience is made to appear or disappear." (879)
"taking into account real time processes through which audiences interactively accomplish public talk with (or against) the speaker is a way of tackling the question of emergent patterns of collective action and collective formation." (882)
906 Xperiment! - What Is A Body / A Person? Topography of the Possible
"It seems that informed consent is an inadequate instrument for dealing with experimental situations that are characterized by uncertainty and doubts. Nevertheless we cannot stop acting." (906)
-- indeed! how can we demand consent from those close to death that we are made to keep alive? It is this way with information as well, these fledgling entities always on the verge of disappearance.
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