Less Mess with the Real: "Other no less grandiose plans exist which may eventually be realized. We could build a dam from Newfoundland to Labrador and thus block the cold current which frezzes a vast region of the U.S.A. We could dam the Straits of Gibraltar and exploit the enormous zones of fertile land at the bottom of the Mediterranean. We could divert the warm Kuro-Siwa current ito the cold sea of Okhotsk. We could create in the Sahara Desert a freshwater lake which would influence the whole climate of Africa. We could deflect southwards the great Siberian rivers and use their waters to irrigate the deserts of Central Asia. This and many other plans have been worked out." (From Life in the Twenty-First Century, edited by M. Vassiliev and S. Gouschev, 1959.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laryngitis which stops me from speaking as my voice rises to a whisper with uneasy pitch then begins to die out, body following suit, shaking to no language known on earth. So I could Net you, but would that Net me? As long as my hands work, I can @shout, @scream, outmurmur any of ye. And with the dusk of the vocal, the body concentrating on the _e_ in that and every other word, _yours for the asking,_ as I wrote to my friend, "say," in Disorders of the Real, I worry the metonymy of it all, displacing language itself onto cold trembling: Shall I speak to thee, counsel thee, enumerate my ways? For it would a hard counsel be, sputtered from body convulsed with memory of sound and sight, marginal fragments assembled, as I once wrote, still with aye my life elsewhere and anon: I am composed of scars, molded and cut into the semblance of the human; aye, and so are we all, and if they spoke, with what palsy, larynx doing its long sad dance til death? .. ________________________________________________________________________ home You're already home! look la daraine There's sadness in the forest if you've reached this part. You forget how to speak - you're desperate to speak. The brook runs close by, green- gold carp fluxed within it, shimmers of lozenge-suns against marbled leaf-shadows. A perfect radio plays a perfect tune. This is before the noise or this is the noise. The tune is lightning everywhere radiation everywhere, but subtle. The aventure is in the listening here, hands fluttering above the keyboard. You don't need to see to read, anymore. You say, "my name is Alan." You say, "i'm all alone here." You say, "this is my space." You say, "i span it from one end to the other, across the margins, across the lines themselves" laugh Alan laughs like crazy! You say, "I can jump but I don't remember how." jump I don't understand that. You say, "I don't understand what I don't understand." You say, "This is my space." look Kyoto an intense clearing, city-basin, distant humans, everywhere visible... You see snow, Luminous Sign, and the City of Wind here. "I am all alone here. My name is Hokusai. You say, "I am all alone here. My name is Hokusai." look me Hokusai Major Japanese Neurotic Ukioyi Artist! laugh Hokusai laughs infectiously and everyone desires to join in! sing Hokusai sings charmingly about life beneath the ceramic tiles of the old country jump Hokusai Hokusai makes Hokusai very very nervous! write I don't understand that. read I don't understand that. You say, "ah, I no longer know how to do these things..." cry Hokusai cries, half in sadness and mourning, half in pure exhaustion. cry Hokusai Hokusai cries to Hokusai that Hokusai needs quiet and private consolation. You say, "ah..." You say, "ah, alone as such..." @join Alan You join Alan (asleep). la daraine There's sadness in the forest if you've reached this part. Alan (asleep) is here. That's easy for you to say! kiss Alan Hokusai kisses Alan (asleep) ever so sweetly, like the Cedars of Lebanon if they could kiss! hug Alan Hokusai hugs Alan (asleep) with a warmth rarely felt in cyberspace, with true emotion. You say, "ah..." You say, "I am no longer alone..." ________________________________________________________________________ GEARS I continue to look at Life in the Twenty-First Century, edited by M. Vas- siliev and S. Gouschev, published in the Soviet Union in 1959, and thus I continue to be astounded by the assumed equivalence of science with engin- eering, enormous projects, high-frequency rays providing power just about everywhere, and little or no thought about issues of ecology or damage to biological tissues. So-called "pure" science or mathematics is non-exist- ent in the work. But beyond this, I concern myself with the mid-twentieth century, my birth-time, thinking further of development here in northern Nova Scotia, where the industrial base has gone basically bankrupt, and where there has been a return therefore to a less factory-oriented way of life, but a life that on the other hand is highly _engineered_ - consider the telephone, television, radio, and now Internet, all these advanced areas of communi- cation across this and every other landscape, including New York, also with a lost or somewhat bankrupt blue-collar economic foundation. Of course it is a truism that there is not a _ladder_ or fixed evolution of economic/technological development. And it is equally a truism that stages upon industry's way may be skipped, ignored, or proven ceilings bouncing things in an entirely different direction. So on can have for example a farming community and a CMC community intersecting, without intervening mechanisms, and without any intervening mechanisms in the area at all. (And of course even this rides on the assumption that there _are_ stages and intervening mechanisms in the first place.) But further, having read a great deal of Sovietica from time to time, it seems that the fundamental paradigm applied, diamat, dialectical materi- alism, was always extended into the domain of computers, only or largely in regard to engineering and computation itself, no consideration being given to the opening of qualitatively different or potential spaces. D/G or Irigarayan flows translate through diamat into dams, barriers, and hydro projects, _literally._ The body was a function/ary or node; the body was _mechanism._ So a materialist cybernetics dominated - a science of control of heavy industry, within which the body was liminal. Its liminality functioned, of course, within official history, language, culture, industrialization, and five-year plans. I'd place the model for all of this somewhere in the vicinity of Watt's governor, not, for exam- ple, the superimpositions or Bell's theorem of quantum mechanics. The situation was different in the United States, as a result of... _en- tertainment,_ which stressed the admixture of all values, the experience of the immigrant, and the collusion of flows with the subaltern body, as is evidenced for example in I Love Lucy or the Marx Brothers. Who played with all of them? I did. The _machine,_ for example hot-rod, might rule outside, but language formed its own inchoate subversions - _not_ a re- constitution elsewhere, but the problematizing of reconstitution. So you see, from this, CMC is not such a large step after all, and such is in evidence here in Nova Scotia as well as across the entire planet - and what is clear here in these neighborhoods also becomes clear in New York's - a postmodernity of historiography or devolution of _the stages of life's way._ (I only want to mention, in passing, the _low-rider,_ which, through all institutions and capital investment, has remained an interesting and fragmentary subversion of modernity and mechanism, while remaining _with- in_ the mechanical itself. Think of drag plates, hydraulics, etched glass and chandeliers in this regard... There is a saurian quality at work here which play with diamat within the deconstructive terms of the Other. But this takes us far, into other fields.) The GEARS have disappeared, _qualitative,_ not only in terms of nanotech, but also in relation to future mechanisms of pure or impure thought, of which the Internet and its horizon of seamless virtual reality is only ... a stage... _________________________________________________________________________ - ii GEAR, PLANETARY, because this is a century like no other, a movement towards the organic, the demechanization of the world - Lucy Lippard's dematerialization app- lied across the boundaries of culture productions, into the sphere of everyday life. Miniaturization is no longer nanotechnological in its main thrust (already a change from a year ago!) - instead, the field concerns itself with an _omnipresent sentient environment,_ interpenetrating the given, however that may be defined. In fact, the changeover is occurring so rapidly that it is impossible to chart even short-term socio-cultural effects. Think of this - it is not even certain where the _physical_ environment per se will be located - neural interfacing, for example, might lead to a domain of information, just as cyberspace's virtuality is problematic in relation to older lived environments (in spite of novels, etc.). In this regard, a new topology/topography comes into existence, a self-sustaining world of geomatics, i.e. with geomatics foundations, paralleling those created through MOO programming language. In spite of _symptoms,_ there is no precedent for this; no wonder S/M has become so popular, carrying attributes of worlds to one another across a simultaneous insistence on the body _and_ its simulacra. (So many models: cyborgian, prosthetics, robotics, remote-sensing, viral, artifical life and intelligence...) ___________________________________________________________________________ - Watch Out! It's not difficult to disrupt communications; it's difficult to cut them off completely, dependent on protocol, bombing of nodes or bombing tech- nology. The node's the thing; there is always the node and always some- thing outside the techology - inscribe the perimeter, and there is another zone, unprotected flank. Totality can never be won at any price; control depends on the depth and width of the potential well - how deep, how wide your moat, in other words. Miniaturization plays a critical role; security is always in relation to a system of classification, including a _sieve_ which of course can't touch the molecular within any 'reasonable' amount of time. Bombs and other devices need not leave trails; the very crudeness of the Atlanta bombing points, in my mind, to something connected to regional 'white power' groups. There is always a price to be paid for the _safeness_ of the world, from the technology necessary to maintain the wealthy past their 'natural' (warning: deconstruct!) lifespans, to airport security measure that could, in fact, connect with the millimeter, requiring hours per passenger, the very air she or he has breathed. These measures descend accordingly, free- fall, to other areas of contemporary life - playground safety, for exam- ple, or the entire rhetoric associated with protecting our 'loved ones,' particularly the younger or female (GOD forbid if you are both!) among them. Protect them O Lord against the horror of rock, the onslaught of drugs, the impurity of the races, and man-man love, not to mention other varieties too numerous to mention! In a 1950s film I once possessed, the homosexual was portrayed as a slowly lumbering heavy-set male who looked like he just stepped out of the Polit- buro. The intersection of ideologies was obvious; young boys were _his_ prey, one for all and all for one, a totality of young boys, boy-mass to be sure. Lesbians weren't accorded _anything,_ since they didn't fit into the structure at all; beyond the pale, they were the locus of male desire. So danger lurks everywhere, but it must be named, totalized, classified, sieved, _found out,_ and it is danger that fuels and structures the right, which defines it. Danger and the right live hand in mouth; one feeds and devours the other. The right defines 'little ones,' the family, 'the woman and her work,' the whole structure of civil society in fact. And danger accompanies the definition; everyone gets into the act - Clinton proposes a _national_ curfew for teenage Amerikkka and signs the CDA. The truth as usual is far more complex, just as more complex systems are more likely to fail. Ecological catastrophies and natural occurrences bond together; a 1972 flood from Hurricane Agnes that devasted my parents' home was partly the result of a stalled storm over New York State - erosion and forest elimination (both the result of agriculture) had opened the water- shed for surface runoff, which flowed down the Susquehanna to the first big flood plain available. Natural or not, it was of course a disaster, one which probably could not have been forestalled until after the fact (bigger dikes in the area have since been built, waiting for the next). _Naturally,_ then, the only thing to expect is the unexpected; disasters are with us and will always be with us, and as population increases and world resources decrease, the order of things becomes more chaotic. Noth- ing can be done about this, but the opposite - too much vigilence - lends itself to control elsewhere, as all systems go are also all systems leaky. Which is not to say that nothing should be done, but that perspective is necessary, as well as a certain vigilence about vigilence: Who is served by that curfew, for example, and _Who serves it?_ ___________________________________________________________________________ - Lag, Death, Mafias I write about this from time to time, just pulling in or out of lag, when the liminal takes over and the gap proves absolute, when nothing shows on the screen, and the controls no longer operate. This is the edge, the lip of the black hole within which everything is lost; this is the moment when it's still possible to withdraw from the _position,_ pull back, recuperate the skin itself. But I prefer to leap, send, transmit, communicate, and so the body teeters and begins its journey downward. In freefall nothing is accomplished; the fingers fly from the keyboard, no longer articulate their clean and proper dominions. They gasp at air which has lost the site of oxygenation. So words falter and thought, at thought's plateau, is neither responsive or responsible. It's here that the nation-state begins its slow decay, picking up speed, transforming into competing gangs, slogans stuck into the protocol-mater- ial of the sky. ________________________________________________________________________ - Listen, Little Man! 1. "But - it is in the very nature of philosophy never to make things easier but only more difficult." The flooding of things requires taking the lower boundaries of geodesic strategies. What falls, takes the form of the fallen. Mud sloughs from the sides of the stream, destroying the ideal as Parmenides would have it. The woman floods herself, so that her things are easier. The man grinds the path towards the nation-state. 2. "Rather, it is the authentic function of philosophy to challenge histo- rical being-there and hence, in the last analysis, being pure and simple." The challenge of philosophy washes away the _block_ of water represented by the tidal forces at the Bay of Fundy, the _block_ which announces it- self by pure presence, every half-day, occasioned all the greater by the parallel commitment of the light of the full moon. 3. "It restores to things, to the essents, their weight (being)." Which is the _task_ of philosophy, this restoration/recuperation, acknowledgment of the _task_ of objects as well. What is the remainder, if not the serra- tions of strata remaining, protruding, through the mud, forming the begin- ning of inscription? Rewritten with the punctuation of barnacles, the human continues writing presence, thrown from the cliff against the wash, as if something eternal were to be occasioned. 4. "How so?" The question is already answered with the full weight of the water which has always already retraced itself, inscriptions lost in the fluids leaked from the body, ocean, self, stance, barnacle closed against any remainder. 5. "Because the challenge is one of the essential prerequisites for the birth of all greatness, and in speaking of greatness we are referring primarily to the works and destinies of nations." We do not have a chiasm here, but almost, "of all greatness, and in speaking of greatness we" - the breathing of the great man against the tides, the woman weighing down on him, suffocation in the Bay of Fundy. As if _not_ "for the birth of all works and destinies of nations." 6. "We can speak of historical destiny only where an authentic knowledge of things dominates man's being-there." The universe is an _event,_ and destiny adds its task to history. Already, contamination has established its (viral) presence in Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics, tran- slated by Ralph Manheim, and it is Fundy's _inertness,_ pro-Fundity, that can re-trace _that_ path, which is the history of an entire century, and _that_ word, which is its destiny. (Man has never _been-there;_ Man has never been born.) 7. "And it is philosophy that opens up the paths and perspectives of such knowledge." And _one_ is a philosopher, the tide only to be noted by the presence of my eyes doubled by the _overlook_ near the Walton Lighthouse, on the way to Truro, Nova Scotia, a _rendering_ after the abandonment of the _massif_ once again to the anonymous perspective of the barnacles. ________________________________________________________________________ Violence If you believe in something _long_ and _hard_ enough, your head explodes. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Internal Diaspora When I was in Montreal, I read a magazine called Exile, I worked on writ- ing and video interpenetrating anglophone Toronto, francophone Quebec, bodies, flows, surfaces - the tapes were shown in both regions. My teeth chattered from the differance. Here in Sydney, I find myself still condi- tioned by internal diaspora, the disaffection of settlement, the flight from existence in relation to roots which crumble at approach. From childhood on, I have been effectively displaced, returning to sites of disavowal, originating within just another family drama. So consulting, I emphasize both community and total access, the communica- tion among neighbors with limited means perhaps, dreaming myself of an inexhaustible richness in friendships and institutions where I never felt at home. If home is where the heart is, it travels with me, childhood and other traumas tailored neatly into adult vectors of policy. I can only wonder again whether I see the world clearly, if at all, whether the in- itself in fact comprises the realm of simulacra as well. And whether this tawdry biography is not at the originary locus of theor- etical position and desire... If anideological thrust possessed serrated edges, I would find nonetheless _slippage_ at my sight/site; through the cracks, returning to memorization and _passing._ Jerzy Kosinski remains a dark mentor. He did not, could not, acknowledge the _day._ ___________________________________________________________________________ - Is Being On-Line a Good Thing in Itself? 1. Is anything a good in itself? 2. Can good be defined outside of cultural function? 3. Do questions #1 and #2 imply a cultural transcendent? 1. On-line connects one to the world. 2. On-line opens one to the loves and hatreds of the world. 3. On-line opens up one's community to external influences. 4. One's community becomes one among others. 5. One is opened to difference and differance. 6. The world's information sources are at one's disposal. 7. On-line permits the recuperation of institutional content (medical, social, educational) by the individual. 8. On-line permits access to institutional power, bypassing traditional channels of command and filtering. 9. On-line realigns the family drama. 1. On-line is inevitable. 2. On-line becomes increasingly seamless, virtual, and corporate. 3. On-line expands and deepens the institutionalization of delivery. 4. An educated public can hack the delivery: redeliver. 5. The common or ultimate good is not hacker-based. 1. Can _anything_ be in-itself? 2. Is goodness _a thing?_ 3. Entities are emergent/submergent; therefore goodness is the product of evacuation. 4. The reification occasioned by on-line (ranging from protocol to compression standards to file frameworks) is counter-productive to _events_ and liminalities of traditional or insular cultures. 1. Therefore, like Cohen's results with the continuum hypothesis in set theory, the in-itself, goodness, culture, the subject, and being on-line are, if not totally, at least nearly independent of one another. _________________________________________________________________________ - Want I wanted to write something about how the organization of Internet sites in Nova Scotia utilizes a lot of lateral interrelationships to create a distributed network of power. Then I wanted to contrast that with some of the institutions I teach in, in the United States, and how these are or- ganized according to a hierarchical model. I wanted to point out how the latter creates a sense of disunity, and a situation in which sustainabil- ity becomes highly problematic, while the former, because of redundancy and the diffusion of power, is more likely to be homeostatic and psycho- logically fulfilling. I wanted to point out further how such a model would be of use in many situations, as long as there was a sense of releasement from the top down - how, in other words, decisions would be "dropped" from above, questioned and seen as _tools_ from below. I would have gone on to say that disagreement tends to dissipate with this model, or rather re- solve into action with less stress than otherwise. I would have further considered the hierarchical model, indicating how decisions from above ap- pear as _inscriptions,_ wrytings creating their own domains, and that such domains would be taken as a fait accompli, a disavowal, disempowerment. I would want to show that the anarcho-syndicalist model of the Internet is in fact a _better_ form of organization, one which could be taken as a new and different paradigm than those previously applied, even ones utilizing the holarchic approaches presaged by people such as Arthur Koestler and David Bohm. I would then have wondered if I had been too abstract in my presentation, and whether it was clearly understood. I would have further considered whether a concrete example were necessary, and probably, as is my wont, would have let the text flow in one or another direction, think- ing through a subjunctive as if it were just around the corner, or a fu- ture given by the relative absence of metaphor or argument, or considera- tions derived from anything other than a network of developments. __________________________________________________________________________ - Cheat This is a complicated course to chart, but thinking recently about _chea- ting_ has been productive; a magazine article pointed out its prevalence and relation to mimicry, and it seems a universal moment in terms of con- siderations of gender-swapping on the Net. Cheating is a form of _passing,_ and this passing is based in similitude of a part for the whole; _something,_ some _punctum,_ must appear as _something else,_ something normative, previously assigned within the sememe of one or another organism. Thus cheating is based on the metonym- ic, and this opens a realm of investigation, flexing metonymy as a _dis- solution_ of the real, and metaphor as a recuperation. The metonymic slides across the theoretic, as the locus of both empathetic magic and the fetish, and again _standing-in_ is paramount, the operations of surface appearances, translucencies, dismemberments, disembodiments. One could assign a calculus, in fact, to this, a primary semiotics, of the order of Thom's work on catastrophic linguistics. One can _see_ where this is going, towards the thetic or originary of the symbolic, the _coagulation_ of the real through inscription, and emergence of entity. _Cheating_ is thus a _forking_ as well, against which an implicit rhetoric of ethics is constructed, as if the metonymic were in fact _fixed,_ on or within the order of proper names as rigid designators. To _cheat_ is to reaffirm the possible, and language itself is born from an inessential corruption. __________________________________________________________________________ - Fragment Language is born in corruption only by _virtue_ of the ethical; nonetheless, the ethical always already comes after the fact. _______________________________________________________________________ - Fragment The major philosophical question of the moment: How can a distributed network lead to the emergence of entities - _and conversely,_ how can entities divest themselves of ontic portent, in the process of (re)- distribution? ________________________________________________________________________ - Fragment Virtue is reason which has become energy. (Friedrich Schlegel) _________________________________________________________________________ - Tukundi-bi 'If (a man) jostle the daughter of a man, (and) the possession of her interior make let fall'* he will lose the possession of his interior And if (there is) (a man) and a law and the law is written and assigned a column (and if) the column is given a silver number, then the man will obey that silver number If (a man) is assigned a silver number, then that man will be given a ship-domain based on the extension of that silver number and if (a man) lives in that interior then he will obey that ship-domain or he will lose his ship-interior If (a man) trembles the daughter of an interior and if a woman trembles the possession of an interior which is a loss then he (will become) a ship-interior and he (will become) the possessor of a ship-interior ---------------------------------------------------- *from an early Sumerian code of laws in Clay, Miscellaneous Inscriptions in the Yale Babylonian Collection, Volume I, Yale Oriental Series, Baby- lonian Texts. _______________________________________________________________________ - Replacement Reading and the Seal of Approval (1988-96) Discourse is deployed into the personage: one alienated state against another. Thus speech is composed, not of the orientation of 'cognitive domains,' but of individuals close to the zero degree of annihilation. Neverthe- less, speech itself is close to the full cloth; it spills everywhere, in the form of folds, eccentric spaces, idle conversation, fractality. The chattering of signifiers. Against one or another personage, against nothing at all. It takes the seal of approval. It takes the seal of approval to cut back, restrain, discourse, so that a thread or rod may emerge: This is the only text you need. It is compulsive to carry the text, in the form of a book, manuscript; in the form of a satchel or bag; in the form of a recording, film, file, vid- eo. So that the spill garners weight. But this text, and its location, gives the seal of approval, grants the seal of approval: This is the only text you need. There is nothing to replace. There is no exchange. There is no commerce, no spectacle. There is an alienated personage on the margin, inhabiting the text as a form of defense or sublimation. This is the only text she needs or is needed. This is the only text he needs or is needed. What results is the reordering of displacements, which must not be allowed to continue: displacements in which the whole world makes its appearance. So in the stead of this. What is avoided, on the level of the alienated personage close to annihilation - what is avoided is a form of remittance. That this is the only text I need. That this in the form of exchange must be displaced. In order to avoid annihilation. In order to speak, or pro- ceed elsewhere. An inhabitation in which the 'I' is buried, elsewhere in the sentence (sentenced elsewhere in this sentence). Or in the replacement reading. The text which grants the seal of approval. The text which leaves you off, one point or another, but a point coming up, and this text could never be that text, nor could any other text fulfill the function of sub- stitution. __________________________________________________________________________ - Distance I have been trying to help a new subscriber from Iran, who can't connect with listserv properly. To give you an idea of the distances/problems in- volved in this: ping -s alborz.nic.ir PING alborz.nic.ir: 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=0. time=6957. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=3. time=6568. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=5. time=6242. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=7. time=6506. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=13. time=5176. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=15. time=8030. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=18. time=10126. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=20. time=11625. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=23. time=8896. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=25. time=8864. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=27. time=7705. ms ICMP Source Quench from hades.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.99.10) for panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4) to 193.188.132.16 port 49773 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=30. time=6832. ms ICMP Source Quench from hades.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.99.10) for panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4) to 193.188.132.16 port 39612 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=31. time=7208. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=33. time=7453. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=34. time=7782. ms ICMP Source Quench from hades.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.99.10) for panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4) to 193.188.132.16 port 24557 ICMP Source Quench from hades.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.99.10) for panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4) to 193.188.132.16 port 14496 ICMP Source Quench from hades.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.99.10) for panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4) to 193.188.132.16 port 4427 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=41. time=6295. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=42. time=5791. ms 64 bytes from 193.188.132.16: icmp_seq=48. time=6611. ms ^C ----PING Statistics---- 57 packets transmitted, 19 packets received, 66% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 5176/7368/11625 traceroute alborz.nic.ir traceroute to alborz.nic.ir (193.188.132.16), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 xenyn-eid-E0-1.nyc.access.net (198.7.0.126) 2 ms 3 ms 2 ms 2 sl-dc-12-S3/2-T1.sprintlink.net (144.228.122.5) 125 ms 11 ms 255 ms 3 icm-dc-2-F1/0.icp.net (144.228.20.103) 11 ms 207 ms 16 ms 4 icm-dc-3-F2/0.icp.net (198.67.131.33) 13 ms 11 ms 10 ms 5 198.67.131.178 (198.67.131.178) 137 ms 137 ms 137 ms 6 Vienna-EBS1.Ebone.NET (192.121.159.145) 194 ms 250 ms 182 ms 7 Vienna-RBS.ACO.net (192.121.159.154) 190 ms 171 ms 200 ms 8 cell.aco.net (193.171.23.82) 199 ms 178 ms 178 ms 9 ecstasy.cc.univie.ac.at (193.171.14.11) 172 ms 214 ms 183 ms 10 saturn.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.1.8) 196 ms 195 ms 196 ms 11 * hades.cc.univie.ac.at (131.130.99.10) 208 ms 230 ms 12 * * * 13 * * * 14 *^C ping -s neda.net.ir /usr/etc/ping: unknown host neda.net.ir host neda.net.ir neda.net.ir mail is handled by alborz.nic.ir host alborz.nic.ir alborz.nic.ir has address 193.188.132.16 alborz.nic.ir mail is handled by helios.edvz.univie.ac.at alborz.nic.ir mail is handled by alborz.nic.ir and so forth... _______________________________________________________________________ - Film Thoughts as a Guide to Past and Future Everything Well, we're in the midst of jurying the experimental section of a short film and video festival here in New York, and here are some overall char- acteristics that might be of interest (please note these do not apply to each and every film, of course): _Technology_ is treated in both film and video as mechanical, electrical, or connected with the automobile. Shots out of windshields predominate. Favorite objects include: Water (_always_ a favorite), lightbulbs, morose stares by young men, twigs, tree branches against sky (often rotating), shifts (dresses of sorts), and eyes. Objects which have lost ground from last year: Train tracks and breasts (female). Mood: More morose than ever, less autobiographical, post Sonic Youth sound-tracks, depoliticized, oddly asexual, de-energized for the most part - a kind of lassitude or languor sets in. Mood implications: The _elegaic_ seems predominant, signaling the end of independent film and video beneath the signifier of government intent on eliminating the last futile radical gestures of the artworld. Surprises: A great lack of community, as someone pointed out - characters, where they appear at all, almost never relate to one another. The edginess of Godard or the avant-garde has given way to a now empty existentialism in the Sartrean sense (Nausea for example). One is born and borne alone in the world; a certain romanticism which continues to exist only points in- ward, towards itself, the uselessness of the romantic fallacy recognized, and "things fall apart." Sound: Almost always non-sync, occasionally looped, use of "somber" elec- tronic tones, from cello range downward. Musics of great portent which are never answered. Voices are often inadvertently muffled, almost inaudible, as if the _saying_ of things would lead to immediate withdrawal. Motto: Tragedies are not permitted, and this robs the fates of their energy. ____________________________________________________________________________ Self-Portrait with Computer As a child, I loved and played with a Japanese abacus my father brought me from Korea. In highschool, I learned log and loglog sliderules, but I was terrible at differential calculus, and this seeming _inability_ has followed me throughout my life. In 1968, Greg Johnson and I built an analog music synthesizer, employing some of the features of the Moog synthesizer of the time; I used this in numerous recordings and performances until 1988. In 1971, I did a series of video/text pieces, using various computers; I did none of the programming myself. The two main works to come out of that period were 4320 and Typed Glossolalia. 4320 took advantage of Charles Strauss' programming on the IBM 360 with a graphics engine; he had programmed a three-dimensional projection of a hypercube which could be manipulated with various controls, including joystick. I sat various subjects down at the controls, and asked them to "move" through four-dimensional space, turning the hypercube orthogonally so it became a cube, turning the cube orthogonally so it became a square, and reducing the square to a point - hence dimensions 4/3/2/0. The various videotapes, photographs, and texts that came from the project documented the subjects' abilities to move through these spaces, inhabit them - an early version of cyberspatiality. The Typed Glossolalia piece involved random typing into a computer, which then attempted, through time series analysis, to find patters - i.e. to see if human determinism existed in actuality. The idea was, that if such determinism existed, there would be predictability involved. As far as the analysis went, there wasn't, but this was also dependent on some thinking about Newton's equations in the calculus of finite differences. (Greg Johnson did the programming here.) Around 1977, I bought a TI59 programmable calculator, which used a variety of assembly language. I made a number of pieces with it, investigating the behavior of the machine at its limits. I still continue work in this di- rection, programming a Psion 3A similarly, but with more complex tools at hand. I also began a language program on the TI59. In 1977-78, I was at the University of California, Irvine, Art Department. The Computer Department gave me free reign on a Terak minicomputer, with ten inch floppies, and I taught myself UCSD Implementation Pascal. I pro- duced a number of works, including an active hypertext piece/editor - the user would type into the machine, and the machine would alter the lines according to predetermined and/or random procedures, including word sub- stitution, phrase substitution, noise, and so forth. I also created a second program, using the Turtle work designed by Papert among others, in order to create a drawing on the screen; the drawing was produced directly by the string of text which appeared at the bottom, typed in by the user. Eventually the two would collide and obliterate each other, and the process would begin again. I spent a great deal of time working to create "aesthetically pleasing" drawings, according to the then conceptual neo-geometric aesthetic. During this same year, I worked on Buchla and Moog synthesizers together, chaining three of them for various pieces produced in the basement of the UCI Music Department. In 1983, I bought a small TR computer from Radio Shack, without any memory or disk capability at all. It cost $100 and I used it for programming var- ious functions and examining their behavior; I also made a number of ster- eo photographs and films using it, including a journey through a four-dim- ensional ellipsoid. I was programming only in Basic. Some of the results of this work are also in my Disorders of the Real, 1988, but assembled from texts and work completed 1984-85. I had also used, that year, a small Timex computer which I bought for $25, with a primitive interface to television; I created a number of films us- ing it as well. In 1986-7, Denise de la Cerda and I set up an analog music studio with numerous analog computer components, both factory-built and handmade; as Damaged Life, we performed and recorded with them. In 1993, I began using an old IBM XT on the Net, and programming in Basic on it, later Qbasic on a Compaq Presario 486/25 and this current AST 486/ 33. The programs included everything from simple artificial life demon- strations, to various studies of fractal and chaos theory. The computer has become more of a window to other machines; using a linux box in 1995 at Parsons, I modified a Nuts talker, following earlier work on an lpmud residing still in DOS. In 1992, I set up my own small analog video studio here in New York. In 1992-4, I had three residencies at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, where I used two Amigas plus an analog video synthe- sizer to produce works dealing with sexuality and postmodern geography; these were shown in a series of shows at Millennium Film in New York and elsewhere. In 1994-5, I taught myself the proper use of the Chinese and Japanese abacuses, working them for meditation and some video works. Between the dates above, there was straightforward film/video/photography and writing above all. Computers came in and out of my life, centered around particular concerns; the writing remained and remains a constant. I never could program well, but I could and can create elegant mathemati- cal graphics, demonstrating various structures which continue to interest me. I've learned over and over again my own limitations, begging others to help me with one or another language, or even implement some of my ideas directly. This is as far as I've gotten, and always so short of time, as far as I will ever get. __________________________________________________________________________ - Gruel Shhh... In Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 13, Rilke writes, as if Christina Rossetti responds: Wo sonst Worte waren, fliessen Funde, aus dem Fruchtfleisch ueberrascht befreit. Wagt zu sagen, was ihr Apfel nennt. Which is translated by Norton: Where otherwise words were, flow discoveries, freed all surprised out of the fruit's flesh. Dare to say what you call apple. The _daring_ is the presence of language which is already defeated, but returns _within the sonnet itself_ as Apfel. So that the murk resolves, an early production of _wryting_ (in the technical sense) in the form of a _wager_ or strategy which encapsulates emergence, modalities, within a word, Rilke's reportage. But then, "Where otherwise words were, flow" as if a dialectic is estab- lished between mouthings and othering (above, Rilke states "Tod und Leben in den Mund," "death and life into the mouth" followed by "Ich ahne," "I sense"). The opening of the sonnet is the opening of the mouth which engorges from "Voller Apfel, Birne und Banane," "Full round apple, pear and banana," until the presiding of the last moment of exculpation, "O Erfahrung, Fuehlung, Freude --, riesig!" "O experience, sensing, joy --, immense!" (When you talk and chew together, when your mouth opens, reveals food half-digested, dribbles across your full lips, their corners garnering secrets, runnels overhanging the reach of chin, neck, smeared sweat, sweet juices between your breasts - when all devolves _accordingly,_ time suckles, open-houred at your honeyed nipples.) And mouths open over the poem, over your body, mouthings mouth bodies giv- ing them their forms - here a primitive topology, that of the revelation of the interior, world gone inside-out, no other matrix. Or a Jordan curve, silent imperturbable _description_ of the interior, the perching of the rim, not here however which, like plum dumplings, is swollen, almost to the point of moist feces, flooded bodies, I'd say silent embarrassed smiles given to the world above. ________________________________________________________________________ - Conferencing Let's think about conferencing a bit more. I mentioned in a previous text that a conference should possess three components, to reach the maximum demographics - a gateway Web page with graphics at a maximum of 30k; a system of one to three email lists (preferably listserv) in order to fos- ter discussion based on papers that would be on the page; and a talker that would be useful for synchronous discussion. And I was, and still am, of the opinion that little more is needed for reasonable in-depth confer- encing; the only thing missing would be whiteboard. There are currently organizations experimenting with IRC as well, not so much for the chat (although that, too), but for the dcc ability to send files quickly back and forth. But IRC is subject to netsplit, and unless one has a separate server, to hacking as well. Let us think further about the phenomenology (in the descriptive sense) of the three components mentioned above. The first, the gateway, is by and large a _data-base,_ a registration-and-retrieval node. It is the library of the conference, containing its primary materials. Within the Freudian model, it is the _super-ego,_ articulating and frameworking everything else. Registration occurs through the gateway page, which is then a rite of passage as well. The second component, the system of email lists, is the Freudian ego, the relative centering and decentering of positions - both extensions and con- tradictions of the gateway data-base. If the data-base is _time zero,_ lagless and inert, the email list system is temporal retardation; posts are _plateaus,_ and threads guide them in the sense of formal structure. Messages are temporally ordered, but there are discrete intervals between them (even if the interval is zero). A measuring-process is at work. Ar- chives return the list to stabilized data-bases, and might be made avail- able at the gateway site. I would say that most of the conference _labor_ would occur through the lists - as well as most of the _networking._ After all, each post is accompanied by a personal return-address. The third component, the talker for synchronous discussion, both repro- duces the "liveliness" of an off-line conference, and provides the least useful content. It does, however, create both a sense of belonging (one "joins" the on-line conference, not only by formal registration through the gateway, but also by participating in live discussion - the guarantee of _speaking_ as a rite of passage), and a sense, rightly or wrongly, of the speech of others, their personalities and rhetorical tropes in real time. The talker relates well to the id, flow, driving-mechanism; in a sense, it creates the greatest sense of risk for the participants. Eventually, these modalities will be superseded or extended to include live video and audio; this is a certainty. The give-and-take of talker _typing_ will be a thing of the past, pleasing the managerial class which tends to abjure any sort of manual labor (reading and writing on email lists is unavoidable if one wants depth, but then, who wants depth?). Two things will occur: the dominance of id-fluxes across the conference as a whole, and a sense of _authenticity_ in relation to the alterity of the other, as a result of the relative _granularity_ of audio/video, com- pared to the coolness and introjection/projection of text-only. A third result might well be increased skimming of _content_ - particular- ly cultural/rhetorical (as opposed to political/corporate/operational), since the audio/video rush will tend to dominate. The email lists, curren- tly the major source of thoughtful response, will suffer; id will over- power superego, which will be relegated to the bureaucratese of the sec- retariat. (Note by the way that the content-division above has repercus- sions in terms of simulacra and critical theory. These oppositions aren't _necessarily_ oppositions, but play out as-if.) In the meantime, however, the three components, running across lean mach- ines, software, and applications, provide the best approach to extended conferencing with broad demographics. __________________________________________________________________________ - information. You have no messages on your Answering Machine. Please type '@unmorph' to save your default shape for morphing. Message 836 on *Chatter (#4399): Date: Tue Aug 6 23:17:01 1996 EDT From: Sandra (#15756) To: *Chatter (#4399) Subject: Being Here If I send this message to you, I am here; when I come on another time I will be greeted by an announcement that I have arrived, come on, and written this, in order to come on again, be greeted by an announcement - that I have left a trace behind, that the trace is not a spoor, that the trace is all there is, but that there is comfort, cold comfort to be sure, in that, comfort in the way of a greeting, as Sandra finds herself once again, if only as @find, locating a part of herself slivered and of no consequence in the middle of a (dis)located email list beyond which no one travels, in this or any other direction. Sandra -------------------------- _________pmc_______________________________________________________________ 03:06 /world pmc @read next on *Chatter ___________________________________________________________________________ - CD and Tattoo I finally installed an external CD-ROM drive on three computers here, with considerable difficulty - configuring the partitions and config.sys in particular. Now that it's running, I find I must create icons in some ca- ses but not in others - for the disks to run, blessed be the disks. But I want to ask: Is this the future of sound and sight? Weaving my way through fast-forward or fast-backward information-shuttles creates cubism out of hypertext, shifting planes which attend to extraneous elements designed to seduce and retard. The entire _affair_ is just that, one of seduction. My favorite disk to date is Chinese Comment Idiom and Games, created for Chinese children to learn the rudiments of the written language. I do not understand a word of it; there is a Tetris game with four characters per piece - as the piece descends, they're _spoken_ by a friendly voice. Un- known speech piles on unknown, a pure blessing-matrix of sound coupled with a much-too-slow game. But I am aware totally that I am in the _virga_ of the unknown, that it will never come to fruition, that it is the _text_ which opens portals, postures alterity, presences the resided world for what it is and is not. Now is this the future of sound and sight, and of body, taste, touch, and smell, broken up into shattered planes of menus, not manifolds or mem- branes stretched almost to the tearing point, the rip-tide - a future in which the body is simultaneously cut and sutured, remolded and discarded? I would call this a cyborgia of pure absence, neither ghost nor uncanny, but continuous dissection and momentary micro-reintegration. The skin of the shape-rider sloughs at each moment of construct, but no one waits around to read the desultory tattoos upon it, or the retardation of the tales they tell. They're _all_ in this pattern, engorge/disgorge: the _anorectic future,_ of which I have had much to say, elsewhere. __________________________________________________________________________ From sondheim@panix.comThu Aug 8 23:24:34 1996 Date: Thu, 8 Aug 1996 23:23:11 -0400 From: Alan Sondheim Subject: I could not sleep at night. Justice "If there is to be hope, we must all betray our countries." (John le Carre, The Russia House.) _______________________________________________________________________ Happy days are again! Everyone is full of joy! I jump up in Brooklyn, clicking heel in pure air! But wait! I need to travel to foreign country! I look up and down my block! I am so shy I look my feet! Happy feet! Are here again! They jump me up! But wait! I write you this Hello! It is Just Like Visit! To You I am Just Like Visit! Hello! Finland! Spain! Do you want to be my country! Hello! Now I sit here and wait for you Hello! Alan! Hi! _____________________________________________________________________ - Badly Written Post but An Interesting Quote Herbert Schiller, in Information Inequality: One more time in American history, a new communications technology is being promoted with uncritical acclaim, while it is being turned over to corporate management. Cautionary voices, and there are a few, point out the folly of the current policy. George Brown, for example, the former chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, insists that "Our most serious problems are social problems for which are there no technical solutions, only human solutions." So, too, Les Brown, veteran TV critic and observer, playfully notes "The Seven Deadly Sins of the Digital Age," which he sees as: "1. Inequality; 2. Commercial exploitation and in- formation abuse; 3. Threats to personal privacy; 4. The disintegration of community; 5. Instant plebiscites and the distortion of democracy; 6. The tyranny of gatekeepers, and 7. The loss of public service values and soc- ial responsibility." These warnings remain unacceptable to dominant think- ing and there is no reason, therefore, to believe that the information highway outcome will be more satisfactory than media technology uses have been throughout the twentieth century. -----------------------------------------------| I want only to note here, that on these lists, while five of the Sins have been discussed repeatedly, instant plebiscites and gatekeeper tyranny have not. I find the latter has taken on the characteristics of a social field, rather than problems based primarily on top-down decisions - there are many instances in which hackers or techies exert far too much power in other areas of decision-making. While I tend to love these concerns, within the free fields of networking Lan and Wan (some wonderful advice recently on hacking Dos from Windows in 2600's second to last issue, won- derful for an amateur like myself), techies tend to side against the arts vis-a-vis the _humanities_ - it's that old situation of two cultures again. I've seen this play out in all sorts of various ways. And hackers or techies pull the strings in cases where decisions might be better made by people directly concerned or involved with social issues. These people are often seen as surface (and judging by some of their writing on CMC, many of them are). I'm wandering, tired, and apologize, but there is a germ of something in the above that needs attention. The issue of plebiscites is even more complicated and important - and rarely discussed - although, come to think of it, consider sites like Firefly or my.yahoo.com - intelligent agent sites - as plebiscite-based and you find an oddly perturbing narcissism and decathecting from the social in the midst of information management that is supposed to ultimately create more time and space for real life and all its socio-cultural responsibilities... ________________________________________________________________________ You Earth! Near dawn, near five in the morning here, I am going to sleep; this day, I have napped far too much, out of necessity, unable to stay awake, my schedule in shambles But I do rise and I am privileged to see the great cycles of the day and night softly shutter our planet, and this is a privilege that could only come through Internetting everywhere For I see you signing off and signing on, one by one by one, whole con- tinents of you, the Australians now towards evening as my body trembles waiting for tomorrow-here, Europe bleary with morning logins, America sleeping soundly behind me And some of you greet me on MOO or talker or ytalk or email, beginning or ending your day as proclamations embrace the world, small dreaming in my hands, planet-earth beneath me as my fingers touch keys, laptop, bed and building, down deep into the rock strata beneath the dark cement, chords connecting me to you, wherever you are This amazement, this space, these points, felicitations ! The planetary membrane, inscriptions like lightning, sparks everywhere, moving through all continents, slowly gathering speed - wait, you'll see ! Dawn, haze, beautiful suns ! Hello, hello ! Good night, good night ! Good morrow ! _________________________________________________________________________ I have been working on an outline for an Internet course that will deal with issues ranging from technical to theoretical. I am giving eleven lectures of two hours each. The outline, which is quite extensive, is below; I think it may be useful, given the range of materials covered. Alan EXTENDED OUTLINE: This is a guide to all of the material that would be covered in the course, either in outline form or in detail. I presuppose no prior knowledge of the Internet. The main book is Harley Hahn, The Internet Complete Reference, Second Edition, Osborne. Take Notes! 1 Overview of the Internet: History, Demographics, Cultural Impact History: Relation to Arpanet, DOD, BBN, NSF TCP/IP The _porous_ and _redundant_ Net Dissolving the backbone Commercialization Demographics: Past and present Cultural Impact: From research to commerce From television to cable to video: interactivity Ham and CB Radio Hacking: Subversion Countries On Line: Genders On Line: Overview of Internet Applications: synchronous | asynchronous -------------|-------------- text | audio/video+ The "feel" of Unix Shell The "feel" of the World Wide Web The "feel" of off-Web applications Brief Introduction to New School Interface 2 Who Owns Information: Information Equality: Haves and Have-Nots Example: Wiring Cape Breton -------------------------------------------------------------------- Beginning Technical Material Connecting to a Unix Shell Connecting to a SLIP/PPP Account Connecting to the New School Basic uses of the Internet (brief description at this point): 1. Telnet: Remotely logging in to another machine. Internet Addresses: IP Address Internet Addresses: Domain Structure International Domain 2. FTP: File transfer, double telnet ports. 3. Email Elaborate on Email: Send, Receive, Reply, Forward, Bounce, Quote, .sigs, etc. Pine reader demo SMTP demo if possible Email address books Aliases Email attachments: The MIME format The _quality_ of email. Conversation/Formal 3 Email lists: What they are: Examples Moderated/unmoderated/sub confirm/ _depth_ Types, how to sub/unsub Address Aliases Listserv (history) Majordomo Listproc Subjects: Research: MOO-Cows, Research, E-Conf Community: Cybermind, Future Culture, FOP-L Technical: Vidpro, AOL Listowners Resource: Net-Happenings, Red Rock Eaters Community on Email lists: Death, love, divorce, marriage, sex, working-groups Cybermind Conference Flaming Moderating techniques: unsubbing someone Cross-posting Issues of empowerment, censorship Summary of material covered to date 4 Usenet Newsgroups and Newsgroup Communities, Difference between Newsgroups and Email Lists Quality of Newsgroups, all 17000 of them! Newsgroup Hierarchy, formal/informal Examples: alt.angst, alt.internet.culture, rec.pets.cats, sci.logic, alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack, alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb, alt.dirty-whores, alt.sex.bondage, alt.flame, sci.med.vision, alt.society.neutopia, alt.personals rec.radio.shortwave, various panix and netcom newsgroups, comp.unix.questions, clari.world, alt.hackers, alt.2600 Uses: Emergence, empowerment: Medical, political, sexual, hacking Tin Newsgroup Reader: Command Structure Netscape News Reader: Command Structure Yanking/searching Newsgroups: Search Strategies The alt.sex hierarchy and censorship Nature of community on newsgroups: Lack of rites of passage in relation to email lists Gopher: History, Quality, Menu-Driven Gopher URLs Gopher from prompt: Command Structure Gopher examples Veronica! 5 FTP: File Transfer Protocol Binary and Ascii Files From Prompt: Command Structure Downloading and Uploading From Browser: Command Structure Downloading and Uploading Archie Getting information on someone or on a site: Finger Whois, nslookup, dig, traceroute, ping, ping -s, host, etc. Netfind and other lookups World Wide Web: Brief Introduction (We will return to this) Text and Graphics Browsers: Lynx and Netscape URL Structure including telnet, ftp, gopher, http, html Nature of Web Sites, Web pages Limitations of Web pages ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Begin Synchronous Applications Talk, Ntalk (Bigendian/Littlendian), Ytalk Chat on the World Wide Web IRC: Channels, communities, bots, front ends: Mirc, Phoenix Command Structure Hacking, Flooding DCC for file transfer Conferencing 6 Text-Based and Graphics-Based Virtual Realities Haven: From IRC Talkers MUDs (lpmud, dikumud) MOOs including tiny fugue client History, Command Structure Communities on MOOs, MUDs, Talkers Net relationships Body on MUD, MOO, talker Injured, hungry, thirst, poor body Virtual bodies, virtual subjectivities First person, second person, third person sexualities: structure Governance issues: wizards, quota review boards Programming issues Diversity University and other teaching/conferencing applications Lily MUD and talker as total environment CuSeeMe: Receive/send, quickcam Relationship/sexual issues: voyeurism/exhibitionism K12 uses Screen refresh of still images: webcams, etc. Graphics MOOs: Avatars and representation in general Bandwidth issues ThePalace (Time Warner) Organization, iptscrae, community Talk balloons Use of .gifs Palace Server Distribution Registration Worldschat Negotiation of Space Lack of rites of passage in relation to ThePalace Other modalities Iphone Webphone Powwow 7 Subjectivity and Net Sex: Create a space and community/sex will come Projection and Introjection in Net sex and relationships The Ascii Unconscious Empowerment Writing and Wryting Address/Recognition/Protocol Virtual Subjectivity, Future Subjectivities ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Landscape The Cyber Landscape: Uses for Communication: Anything at All Common: Family (email alias lists, home pages, email) Education (MOO universities, class email lists, student home pages) Sexual (net sex, sexual support groups, IRC, alt.sex newsgroups) relationships Support-groups (medical, addictions, see Needs) Technical/Consumer (Usenet, email lists, WWW) Information/Commercial: WWW (active or passive pages) Art-Related: WWW (active or passive pages and various extensions) Reduction of Anomie: Expert Systems (linkages, invisible colleges): Needs: News (newsgroups, WWW pages, etc.) Medical (email lists, newsgroups, etc.) Organized from below (patient) Organized from above (institutional) Emotional/Psychological (IRC, email, " ") Organized from below (patient) Organized from above (institutional) Resources (scientific, hytelnet, etc., WWW, " ") Fan-Clubbing: Sports (email lists, newsgroups) Music (real audio, Iphone, Xing, etc., " ") Gaming (MUDs, IRC, email, newsgroups, etc.) Conferencing Community: [Wherever two-way multiply-connected communication is possible] Business: Direct and indirect marketing Information Exchanges Shared Gain and Pain: the wired or sentient environment Summary of material covered to date ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 Begin World Wide Web Netscape and the World Wide Web: General Overview: Bookmarking History Go Upload/Download Mail/Newsgroups Extensions/Telnet applications Popular File Extensions Lynx Brief Guide: [See Above under Netscape.] Commercialization and the Net Monopoly telecommunications capital Anarcho-libertarian aesthetic transformed Off-Web PPP/SLIP Applications Iphone and other Internet telephony Powwow (see above) ThePalace (") CuSeeMe (") 9 Search Engines and Search Strategies [section continuously updated] Boolean, etc. alta.vista Yahoo Inktomi, Hotbot Intelligent Agent my.yahoo.com Firefly Strategies: Generalization: inclusive sweeping Particularization: scope-narrowing Dialectic of search strategies 10 Web Pages: Design, philosophy, technique: Why have a home page? Personal Corporate Group HTML basic structure: Recommended text: HTML, The Definitive Guide, Musciano and Kennedy, O'Reilly Design: Incorporation of active forms, extensions Text-browser readable Maximum jpg, gif size Varied points of entry, speeds -------------------------------------------------------------------- Conclusions, Summary 11 Internet Present and Future: Conferencing, small scale: 1. Gateway Web Page 2. Email lists (1-3) 3. Talkers Conferencing, large scale: 1. Interactive Web Pages with Real Audio, etc. 2. Whiteboarding 3. Video Conferencing The Future: Seamless Virtual Reality Course Overview ------------------------------------------------------------------------- If the above outline is too complex, we can simplify it as follows: Week Topic 1 Overview, History, Demographics 2 Connecting, Email 3 Email Lists, Community, Summary 4 Internet Newsgroups, and Gopher 5 FTP, Chatting, Synchronous Communications 6 MUD, MOO, and Other Applications 7 Net Relationships, Subjectivity and Landscape, Summary 8 The World Wide Web and Netscape 9 Searching for Information, People, Etc. 10 Setting Up Home Pages, Introduction and Design Issues 11 Conferencing, Future of the Net, Summary ---------------------------------------------------------------- With either Outline: Assignment: Choose 1: a. Set up a home page for yourself; b. Write a paper on a topic of your choice; c. Propose a project The assignment should be underway by the fifth class. - Sucking the Net The nineteenth-century pump organ underwent different evolutionary paths in England and America, the Professor said, and we should pay careful attention to this. In England, it was all blow; the bellows pressure was above normal, and could be raised to any degree. While this created the potential for leaking, it allowed for extremely high-pressure in the system, resulting in an instrument of considerable loudness. In America, it was all suck; the bellows box was in a partial-vacuum state, and sucking created a tighter fit; there was less leakage, and less wheezing. On the other hand, the sound was softer, somewhat sweeter as well. Now, she continued, we can apply these very principles to the Internet, devising a new system of transmission. Consider servers which would no longer _serve,_ but _suck,_ guiding the packets in, by virtue of a rela- tive _absence_ at their end. Everything would rush in; the protocols are be necessary only to filter out unwanted noise allowing only what the user desires to enter his or her system, surely placed upon the lap. In sucking, of course, this noise might also prove of interest itself - one could use it to examine _snoopers._ Allowance could be made for a bit of the organic, so to speak, and a careful monitoring of listening _ears._ I was fascinated by the Professor, indeed charmed by her. And this princi- ple seemed utterly revolutionary - why had I not thought of it on my own? Just as America sucks throughout the nineteenth century, it could now suck as well on the Net, or rather suck and suckle the Net. Open ye gates, and all will come, in one or another form. And the female form, of course, can come as well as the male. I owe all of this to ruminations gained while playing my New England melo- deon, a small sucking organ I borrowed years ago from the Music Depart- ment. Meeting the Professor, of whom I had heard for years, her brilliant yet quaint theories, only put the nail in the box, hammering her findings deep into my head, in a manner that could be taught and spoken of, and passed on to you, the reader, hoping that you are sucked as well. _________________________________________________________________________ Wizards, Politics One saying I am fond of: Build an application and both community and net sex will come. Another: Every MOO is a panopticon. Every wizard can change just about everything. The degree of power is frightening. But another saying: Build a MOO and there is politics. And the politics always develops back-room, in part because of whisper, page, email, etc. The point? To develop _another_ database with a sysadmin who couldn't hack it himself. To develop one with PGP or similar built in, translation based on passwords. To have these passwords external to the MOO. Or: Build a talker in which .private automatically encrypts its contents. Have the keys shared by interior players. The _addiction_ to the MOO is the addiction to the political, to the wages and fortunes of men and women simmering at love and war. It would happen anywhere. Here it is stronger and said. Here it is a foundation of spent lives, lives spent. I found myself. Meet me in the corner. _________________________________________________________________________ Defining Truth I'm typing again blood-red letters against black, the slight purples I had been using beginning to pulsate on the screen, slow sinusoidal waveforms as if a sea-change had flooded the terminal, loading wet transparency shimmering across skin and sky together. Blood-red, anarchy and communism, march across the screen, closing the lid on the history of the twentieth century: I salvage the colors for this text and none other, returning shortly to the blankness of black against white, imitation pages lost forever. Likewise, ASCII which may well disappear, possesses its regimented charac- ter, letters slotted into an X-Y grid of pre-existing compartments. This metaphoric and bleary reconstitution of _mass-man_ gives way to spatially self-determining symbols - as if there were an essential freedom and hand- craftedness at the heart of computer-mediated-communication. Eventually, communication becomes a drowning-pool of technologies, black waters at the bottom, white symbols at the top - almost too-white, the color of surgical sterilization. White devolves once again into the rain- bow and we're given colors we had abandoned. We swear we never know they existed. We gesture approvingly towards certain combinations. They're charted. is not among them. The clock ticks as the text proceeds. It's disovered that the truest replies are the quickest answered. Truth is given a definition. _______________________________________________________________________ - Slowdown I just bought a Hewlett Packard 110 laptop for $15, without a power sup- ply. Made in 1984, it's one of the first laptops, with a small screen; I can't power it up until I find more data on it. It's only twelve years old, and already an antique. The speed-up of the Net, however, which last year reduced, in the popular imagination, a physical year to four Web-years, seems to have slowed down again. Java has exhausted itself as a headliner. There's an inert force working all the time with text-based applications. The Web's still mostly unavailable vis-a-vis cable modems, and remains slow. The only people making money on the Net seem to be associated with reflexive businesses, i.e. businesses which promote the Web and the people promoting the Web. I believe the slow-down has also occurred with overall demographics - the exponential slope is beginning to level. At the moment it may be a situa- tion of overkill. Note that bad publicity is on the rise again - the AOL 19-hour glitch (which isn't that unusual for an ISP), a 14-year-old sodom- ized on Long Island by someone who initially approached him through the Net, and so forth. Not to mention all the doom-saying death-of-the-human essays floating around. (Not to mention the feeling of Web-burnout, use of _cool/kewl_ and still my unfavorite demon, _killer app._) The slow-down is great, if it's really happening. Maybe things will deep- en. I've noticed a slow growth in the Cybermind list (we're mentioned in Harley Hahn's The Internet Complete Reference, by the way), after months of remaining at around 270. We're currently near 315-330, depending on the day. People hopefully are moving towards other kinds of discourse and dialogic than what "Web-surfing" alone has to offer. Now if anyone could send me information on the HP 110 power supply and cables... __________________________________________________________________________ Many many circumstances man Read the writings I have written after I have died; read it and reread it. Read the body of my work, the work of my body: You will hear my voice. The larger the body the greater the voice; the greater the voice, the more the circumstances. Read the textual body and keep me alive in many many circ- umstances. I will be the Many many circumstances man to you. ___________________________________________________________________________ Kyberspace The phenomenology of traditional space within a software application in- volves a movement across directories, links, subprograms, or procedures. The individual using the application constructs an internal history file which often is bi-directional, forward/backward. Lars Pensj|'s lpmud and database (worked on also by Olaf Kolbu) offers a maze in which entered directions (north/east/south/west) do not necessarily result in the abil- ity to construct a _coherent_ internal representation or "mental map" since a _random function is involved._ The maze consists of five rooms, with an escape; beyond the escape, however, one may wander endlessly among them, _as if the space were continually unfolding._ A _second wandering,_ by virtue of the random function, would produce an entirely different result. Before continuing, I present a summary below of one of the maze rooms (maze3.c) - not the code itself (the summary is slightly modified to the extent I have also modified the maze in my reconfiguring the lpmud data- base library): -----------------------------------------------------------BEGIN The Interior Enfolded Indefinite Maze (as Defined by Lars Pensj| and Olaf Kolbu) ------------------------------------------------- [the exit number is an integer] [the short title is "Invagination"] [The long title is "Enfolded Invagination"] ["You can choose to go North, South, East, or West."] [Begin and Reset] [Let the exit number = a random integer times 4] [If exit number = 0,1,2,3 create an action in which player is moved to equivalent space 1,2,3,4,5 with 5 exit - the action dependent on a com- bination of player's call (North, South, East, or West) and exit number (i.e. if North and exit number then {action1} else {action2}.] -----------------------------------------------------------END Now what comes to mind immediately is this: Create a _recursive space_ that repeatedly calls itself until an exit configuration is reached, appearing - for the play hirself - equivalent to the above. In this case, the program/room is a _singularity_ that continually and randomly unfolds, _from the perspective of the player, and the player's internal represen- tation of the space._ A further development includes the notion of a _code string,_ XYZ, each taking the value of one of "n" "s" "e" "w". This gives us 64 possibili- ties. As the player continually enters in directions, the program parses the string, looking for the match; the match leads to exit. (We are not randomizing the player's input here.) A. Consider XYZ _built-in_; then the maze appears simply solvable. Return to the recursive space, and the same input will produce the same output. B. Consider XYZ _randomly-generated_; then the maze appears as the maze3.c example above; the difference is only that random generation is called upon only once. C. Consider A and B in combination; then the maze appears solvable, and is - but there is also _leakage_ - for example, "esw" may be built-in, but exit-operative only 30% of the time. I think of this literally in relation to the concept of a leaky signifier, whose content always includes an es- cape-clause or "curlicue." Now all of this could be built as well, say, into a MOO space: A single room from the viewpoint of coding/parent, but one that appears multiple, with escape routes that continually resonate with one another, with other rooms with identical or different descriptions... What is fascinating in all of this is the _broken mapping_ between surface and deep structure. Admittedly, in CMC, mapping are broken all over the place, but this example is fragmented in a manner recuperating postmodern geography, a singularity harboring multiplicity, the multiplicity from the viewpoint of the player almost toppling the psychogeography of the applic- ation. For mental maps no longer hold in these regions (I have coded MOO rooms in which _A_ leads to _B_ with the exit "down" and _B_ leads back to _A_ with "down" - and lpmud rooms in which "north" from _A_ leads to _B_ but "west" from _B_ leads to _A_, etc.) - and the regions are, in fact, in a state of flux, upheaval. The mazes and recursive spaces emphasize these fictions, and their phenomenology vis-a-vis the player. And I think in the long run, they provide a different sort of foundation for thinking about Kyberspace than gender/switching, MOO and talker transport, and IRC phen- omena, all of which have a fluid but more or less coherent Euclidean sub- structure. maze3.c lends itself _elsewhere,_ related directly to the sick- nesses of virtual reality, within and without the textual domain of pre- sence, desire, and projection. __________________________________________________________________________