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.
No comments:
Post a Comment