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)
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