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diff --git a/planet.otx b/planet.otx new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b959ea7 --- /dev/null +++ b/planet.otx @@ -0,0 +1,362 @@ +\chap PLANET Teleconference (November~1978--February~1979) + +\vskip 2em +\sec messages between 1 and 211 + +\phdr{[I./1.1]}{Frank Gillette}{} + +\centerline{\it Metabasis eis allo genos} + +\vskip 2em + +To begin with, a few propositions-definitions as to what we're up to. What follows is essentially a prologue to a \dq{systems architecture} for the free-play of metaphor and trope. How wide a swath of collective unconscious can be cut into and re-assessed/re-stated/re-valued in re-appreciated light? All this is analogous to adaptive behavior between differing biological niches. Thus I would first distinguish \e{following instructions} from \e{obeying rules.} + +Rules are formulated with regard to typical, and shared situations, since their purpose is to order and codify shared ongoing exchange activity. + +Instructions are employed to prescribe certain definite performances and thus can be reformulated and communicated with relative unconcern about the context within which the activity is to take place. + +My experience---frustrating as it originally was---with the \dq{instructions} for operating the computer terminal, for instance is a \e{prima facie} case for the instructions to become unconscious in order for conscious rules to naturally emerge. + +\phdr{[199]}{Brendan O'Regan}{} + +Group communications among artists has never been systematically explored. Teleconferencing creates an extended space net that crosses time zones as well as cultural boundaries. + +Two examples of the several forms this kind of communication could take: + +\begitems\spaced\style N +* {\bf Artist-Artist Networks:} groups connected on the basis of common aesthetic interests. + +* {\bf Mentor Networks:} an extension of the open-university concept wherein the possibility of \dq{students} apprenticing to artists could be facilitated without regard to limitations of time and space. Not only would it \dq{educate.} but would also allow artists to be anywhere they choose. +\enditems + +\phdr{[210]}{Gillette}{} + +Re: the open university analogy, I can conceive of some kind of subscription which would permit the subscribing individual or institution (art institute, museum, think tank, university, gallery, etc.) to tap into the active exchange of participant signal traffic and receive summaries and update reports on the state of the game. + +\phdr{[211]}{Gillette}{} + +How effective or appropriate is the analogy drawn from Hesse's \e{glasperlenspiel} (the bead game)? + +The meta-space of the computer exchange (the pausing, phasing, the rhythm of the waiting, the receiving, the sending, the waiting again) is formidable in part because the terminal itself is so self-unassuming---all one's perceptual habits are somehow affected by the \dq{typewriter} look, e.g., all this meta-spatial exchange finally comes out on a single flow of two dimensions (in the strictest sense, three dimensions since paper has width) which is enough, mind you. But what it does require then is a set of constraints (contingency rules) that can be optimized in two dimensions but compatible with more dimensions and/or other flows of three or two dimensions. + +Terms for description: (The work of Kenneth Burke, Michel Foucault, Ross Ashby are the resources that immediately come to mind.) A new kind of kinematic graph is what we're groping for here---a mapping of the exchange of flow---to indicate its experiential novelty. + +A modal unit is what is necessary, a unit of measure, of criteria analogous to the octave for the musician, the arithmetician's \e{double,} the geometer's \e{circle.} + +In classical aesthetics the quest is for the elementary forms of intuition. How would such equivalence of the \dq{elementary forms of intuition} be engaged as a common pool of criteria serving the tissue of contingencies that is \e{play?} + +The scale of a thing\slash process refers to the number of distinctions within the system described. + +{\bf Scale:} The \e{distinctions} between identical parts is numerical. The distinction between non-identical parts is the degree, or measure, of difference. + +There are parallels here to the laws of combination in geometry. The attributes of geometric space according to Poincare are: (1) It is continuous; (2) It is infinite; (3) It has three dimensions; (4) It is homogeneous, that is to say that all its points are identical to one another; (5) It is isotropic. + +How analogous are these attributes to the meta-space or the epistemological playing field of this exchange? In a sense, these first primitive exchanges (about exchanges) are the beginnings of a natural history---complete with a future archaeology. + +How do we arrive at common terms of description? For a start I would suggest distinguishing art from science. A definition of objective evidence in science is equal to evolution of a private sensibility in art. A new mythopoetic strategy would flux between the hard (\dq{in the metal}) evidence of the world's constituted parts and the \dq{soft} private sensibilities of individual expressions of that world. + +\e{\dq{The substance of man is obscure to himself}} ---Jacques Maritain + +I think the first part of this three way metalogue could be an introduction of terms. To begin to restate the sentiment and mythic-key of Genesis at the next pass in the trajecting spiral. + +Much of this, I \e{think,} has to do with a primal sense of play and conceptual alchemy. To rearticulate the mystery and terror of \dq{being} at all, in the belief that anything exists at all, is the first realization of difference. As existence (in the character of human consciousness) posits non-existence, existence posits art and eternal search. + +\Q{I take it that the kind of aptitude for what is called \dq{verbal behavior} (which includes the acquiring of symbol-systems generally, such as music, painting, sculpture, dance, etc.) can be posited as the differentia that defines us empirically as our specific kind of animal. Such \dq{arbitrary, conventional} symbol-systems have come and gone since the days of pre-history when our kind began developing these aptitudes, the ability to do so being grounded in the body as a physiological organism. This minimum equivalent of what in metaphysics or theology would be called \dq{mind} or \dq{spirit} would involve a social or collective medium. Anthropologists would assign it to the real of \dq{culture} as distinct from \dq{nature,} though in its primitive states the two realms might not look much different from each other, as adjoining things seen from a distance seem to merge. + +As our terms for images, concepts, ideas, properties, attitudes, paradigms, perspectives, situations, processes, relationships, etc. took form, they became in effect a universe of their own. Also, the mediums using these purely symbolic devices made possible the kinds of attention and communication that gradually led to the invention and distribution of tools (with corresponding methods and attitudes). And thus we now confront the gradual accumulation of man-made new-things that constitute what we call the institutions of \dq{technology.}} +\Qs{Kenneth Burke, \booktitle{Variations on \dq{Providence}}} + +\Q{Certainly, as a proposition, the division between true and false is neither arbitrary, nor modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent. Putting the question in different terms, however---asking what has been, what still is, throughout our discourse, this will to truth which has survived throughout so many centuries of our history; or if we ask what is, in its very general form, the kind of division governing our will to knowledge---then we may well discern something like a system of exclusion (historical, modifiable, institutionally constraining) in the process of development. + +It is undoubtedly, a historically constituted division. For, even with the sixth century Greek poets, true discourse---in the meaningful sense---inspiring respect and terror, to which all were obliged to submit, because it held sway over all and was pronounced by men who spoke as of right, according to ritual, meted out justice and attributed to each his rightful share; it prophesied the future, not merely announcing what was going to occur, but contributing to its actual event, carrying men along with it and thus weaving itself into the fabric of fate. And yet, a century later, the highest truth no longer resided in what discourse was, nor in what it did: it lay in what was said. The day dawned when truth moved over from the ritualized act---potent and just---of enumeration to settle on what was enunciated itself: its meaning, its form, its object and its relation to what it referred to. A division emerged between Hesiod and Plato, separating true discourse from false; it was a new division for, henceforth, true discourse was no longer considered precious and desirable, since it had ceased to be discourse linked to the exercise of power. And so the Sophists were routed.} +\Qs{Michel Foucault, \booktitle{The Discourse on Language}} + +\Q{It is also clear that many of the tests used for measuring \dq{intelligence} are scored essentially according to the candidate's power of appropriate selection. Thus one test shows the child a common object and asks its name: out of all words the child must select the proper one. Another test asks the child how it would find a ball in a field; out of all the possible paths the child must select one of the suitable few. Thus it is not impossible that what is commonly referred to as \dq{intellectual power} may be equivalent to \dq{power of appropriate selection.} Indeed, if a talking Black Box were to show high power of appropriate selection in such matters---so that, when given difficult problems it persistently gave correct answers---we could hardly deny that it was showing the behavioral equivalent of \dq{high intelligence.} If this is so, and as we know that power of selection can be amplified, it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be amplified. Let no one say that it cannot be done, for the gene-patterns do it every time they form a brain that grows up to be something better than the gene---pattern could have specified in detail. What is new is that we can now do it synthetically, consciously, deliberately.} +\Qs{W. Ross Ashby, \booktitle{An Introduction to Cybernetics}} + +\break +\sec messages numbered between 383 and 877 + +\phdr{[383]}{Gillette}{Notes on generating computer argot} + +\begitems\spaced\style n +* This \dq{aesthetic} activity is fundamentally no different from any other form of problem-solving. The question now is discovering and identifying the problems to be solved. +* One of the resources of poetic license is to liken a thing to any other thing, or to \dq{speak} of it as another thing. In simile and metaphor a thing is assigned to a class, alloted character, and likened to things other than those implied by the system of classification built into its private logic and argot. This is the case in all language. There are no a priori limits on what or how many metaphors can be made. Players may initiate \e{beginnings} of an infinitely complex, integrated web of multiplying analogy, metaphor, and trope, Each is directly related to its immediate and adjacent \dq{neighbors} but uniquely different and etiologically separate from more distant paradigms. How to make this system aesthetically tangible and coherent to an observer outside the system is the first responsibility of its players. +\enditems + +The \e{raison d'etre} is a coherent, systematic structure directed at expanding the aesthetic-ideational range in this medium. Any attempt to impose a spurious unity (or clarity) on the parameters of interaction will elicit instead a pseudo-clarity at the expense of cutting into the marrow. At this stage of sophistication with the medium, this is the pre-dawn. + +\phdr{[387]}{O'Regan}{Re: 383-Cybernautics} + +What metaphors can there possibly be for such an activity? \e{Cybernautics} is an appropriate metaphor in that it distinguishes from \e{cybernetician} and from \e{cybernetics.} The activity is possessed of temporal and multi-channel qualities that seem to have parallels in Wagnerian counterpoint. Is it possible metaphors are capable of imparting richness to the referred? Here, all metaphors seem weaker than the thing itself. + +\phdr{[391]}{David Ross}{} + +Introduction of any new medium necessarily results in a new field of metaphors. Here we have to deal with dialogue woven into participants' lives, not as with the hated telephone intruding into consciousness. This presents a radically new way of communicating that is genuinely novel. Our primary task is to elicit the quiddity of the medium at hand. + +\phdr{[396]}{O'Regan}{Re: 383} + +The beast is the on-going issue and its capacity to bend all areas of discourse. We are not bombarded into the familiar landscape of full blown presence. We are deprived and enriched at the same time, hence the discovery of unfamiliar capacities. + +\phdr{[397]}{Gillette}{} + +Kenneth Burke introduced the idea of \dq{perspectives by incongruity.} The unity of incongruity, I think, is \dq{in the metal} of this system. + +\phdr{[401]}{}{} + +The simplest structure in any cybernetic/cybernautic loop is the \dq{kinematic} flow between three variables which are invariables in their permanence: +\begitems\spaced\style n +* living systems +* machine systems +* theoretical systems. +\enditems This is the \e{first} division. + + +\phdr{[405]}{O'Regan}{} + +Postulate a tracking process wherein participants pursue all related lines of thought and their respective logics. + +\phdr{[410]}{Gillette}{} + +I think it's something like this. Each player functions as heuristic filter generating transforms in tandem with others in identical conditions. Radially structured and non-linear, we are as collagists with the ideational debris of Western culture, engaged in \e{pattern creation} with the natural parameters of \e{this} technology read as a set of contingencies and constraints. In other words, \e{nature.} + +\phdr{[416]}{O'Regan}{} + +No one has anything but cute analogies for why synchronicity actually occurs. In truth, it does, bound by rules we rarely get the opportunity to explore. This tool provides a time-series method for generating and analyzing such phenomena. I suspect such concurrences are more mediated by the right hemisphere than by the left. + +\phdr{[423]}{Ross}{} + +The implied narrative that follows the randomized sequencing of our thoughts reads as a topology of a \e{shared thinking experience} more like a group of dreams edited by another dreamer than anything I can reference. + +\phdr{[453]}{Gillette}{} + +This is in some ways like Eliot's concept of \dq{difficult poetry.} \dq{First, there may be personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way\ld\ or difficulty may be due to novelty.} + +\phdr{[469]}{O'Regan}{} + +Deprivation\slash enrichment is that process which deprives us of normal cues. It activates the new one that we must pick up in order to get in tune with what the \e{others} are doing\slash thinking\slash about to type. This is the essence of the way in which the medium can serve to extend our normal capacities. + +\phdr{[528]}{Richard Chilgren}{} + +Glossary Index: +\begitems\spaced\style o +* pre-dawn +* unity of incongruity +* kinematic +* cybernautic +* tracking +* transformation\slash order of transforms +* heuristic filter +* pattern creation +* difficult poetry +* baby talk +* \booktitle{Finnegan's Wake} +\enditems + +\phdr{[547]}{Gillette}{} + +The beginnings of a lexicon: towards the implicit identification and regulation of time-space sequences. This spirals toward transforms unanticipated. This system, in its generalized effects, equals in scale introduction of the clock in village cultures of late Medieval Europe. + +\phdr{[599]}{}{} + +This capability (linking, say, a half dozen museums in the United States and Europe) introduces a potential for simultaneous \dq{shows} in a meta-sensory \dq{space.} It extends the participating museum's exhibition space without acquiring a single square inch of additional real estate. The means are generated, coded and sorted in the meta-sensory system; then rendered \dq{sensory} in \dq{showing} space, therefore existing in \e{infrastructural suspension.} Possible tableaux are suspended among museums with each terminal in conformance to the players' affects. \e{How} this space is programmed is the issue. + +I'm dubious of linking art to education, despite the justifiable implications. Their respective motivations are distinct. They are connected ceremonially, but educational benefits and evolutionary adjustments should be a consequence of this species of activity. + +\phdr{[877]}{Ross}{} + +It is interesting that one has to objectify parts of our face to face communication that we receive via body language of one sort or another, into the realm of the private message. When a dialogue is ongoing, I continually feel the need to contextualize my public statements with particularizing private messages, like facing a group and continually changing one's attention while speaking and listening. + +\break +\sec messages numbered between 879 and 965 + +\phdr{[879]}{Gillette}{} + +I think new manifestations of each of our kinesics will eventually emerge: verbal constructs replacing eye-contact, for instance. + +\phdr{[893]}{Ross}{} + +To quote the great Ray Johnson: \dq{Collage or perish!} + +\phdr{[940]}{Gillette}{} + +The following \dq{random} points are intended to serve as a radical-traditional prolegomenon for cybernautics: + +\begitems\spaced\style n \keepstyle +* The teleconference is characterized as meta-theater (theater in the sense of a place of action; a field of operations) in which various methodologies employ paradox and inversion \e{in seriatim.} + +* What is necessary is that, in a natural variety of ways, the work embody, accord with, and represent the precise experience upon which it depends. Its \dq{communicative} efficacy is not a separate concern, and if treated as such it would risk a fatal effect upon serious work. + +* Each player (or conference) represents a private \dq{world} or perceptual/cognitive activity, the activity is displayed and demonstrated in the process, not reported. Two central questions are: How does this technological system generate its own distinct aesthetic milieu? What is the common particularity novel to the experience? + +* The teleconference can be defined as a network of multiple connections, involving complexity, order, and hierarchy. Any private world of perceptual/cognitive activity depends upon self-defined comprehension of the whole. It can function as the theater for establishing root metaphors and analogies introduced by the unique conceptual pressures encountered in the teleconference itself. For instance, adapting ordinary language, in addition to various specialist lexicons and argots, to the novel purposes of this activity. For instance, translating certain mythical forces from their lost redemptive power to a redefined descriptive power. + +* Taking off from the physicist Margenau's concept of the \dq{Requirement of Multiple Connections} the premise is that through their definitions, constructs enter into relations with each other. The interest here leaves aside, at least for the moment, the origin and focuses on the character of the connections which constructs may enter (each conferencee represents a constellation of such constructs). These may be of two types, \e{formal} and \e{epistemic.} +\begitems\spaced +* A formal connection is one which sets a construct in a purely logical relation with another construct (construct can be read here as any message which defines a distinct point of view). They are in a sense hypothetical judgements. Classic examples of formal connections: a) the relations between geometric quantities and their axiomatic sources, or b) between the golden mean and its expression in a particular set of angles in a picture plane. One peculiarity of formal connections is that their formal character becomes less obvious (even transparent) when and if they are empirically verified. +* An epistemic connection is equivalent to and arises from a rule of correspondence which links the construct with data or evidence. Examples of epistemic connection: a) the relation between a tree and the perception of it b) between a force and an awareness of muscular exertion. One of the terms is a construct, the other is in nature. Connections are also both formal and epistemic in equal degree, as in any graduated experience, from empirical to ideational and back. +\enditems +* The divisions of formal and epistemic can be applied to the ordering of messages exchanged in this system. In some sense a new distinction between art and science may be defined when each is considered as a mental domain in the search of descriptive modes. To do so also raises questions as to the validity of the standard distinction of objective and subjective. For example, absorption in the immediacy of perception\slash cognition is generally recognized as an essential characteristic of art, whereas the instrumental use of perceptions to infer and confirm theories is the typical mark of science. This system of exchange and hypothesis has the potential of synthesizing these two distinguishing attitudes. +* The teleconference can be said to have a metabolism of its own. A sort of optimum harmony of process in exchange and synthesis achieving possible tiers of novelty with discontinuous \dq{quantum} shifts establishing essential internal divisions. +\enditems + +\phdr{[963]}{O'Regan}{Re: 940} + +\begitems\spaced\style n +* Yes, teleconference as meta-theater. Any methodology is employed so that communication occurs in this medium. How do the terms \dq{paradox} and \dq{inversion} attach to specific modes of operation? +* Where is the tautology here? We only go so far with the problem of a system describing itself. I am reminded of an old question in brain research: what are the limits of a system in terms of understanding itself? This point of view pre-supposes identity of mind and brain. +* This is differently \e{distributed kind of intelligence,} different from almost any found in nature. One of the most novel particularities of this system is the existence of exponential channels of simultaneously operating dialogues. Our task will be to use, characterize, stimulate and display parallel-processing modes. +* \e{Complexity,} \e{order,} and \e{hierarchy:} These three terms are minimal coordinates by which one defines simultaneity in the system. All three become involved, as the \dq{themes} of any conference emerge, in addition to layers of sub-themes, some of which recur as others disappear. In the piece to date, the initial theme has been/is the piece itself, with the house-keeping theme of how to support it institutionally and financially. Various sub-themes have emerged and would be interesting to analyze, particularly time-lapse events. Multiple participation on several channels is a necessary threshold through which to pass in order to properly use the system. +* The system abounds in formal connections, which are mostly transparent. Hence the difficulty in describing them or in not simply obliterating their significance by succession. I submit that this terrain is virtually devoid of metaphor. +* \e{Immediate and\slash or remote perception:} This is one of the keys to the system. All the things we can think of applying the system to at this stage have probably already been done by conventional means. Depending on the order of complexity generated, we may arrive at new forms by linking this system for a new purpose. +\enditems + +\phdr{[965]}{O'Regan}{On Being Formal---The Virtues of the Opaque in Times of Immediacy} + +In discerning the nature of inter-communicational forms in the medium of teleconferencing, it is necessary to distinguish three basic modes. These are: + +\vskip 1em +\minititle{The Formal Communication Mode:} +\vskip 1em + +The tortuous path, referenced and annotated, serves to stimulate the indigestibility of the formal mode. It is, nevertheless, the mode of considered substance, no matter how stilted it may seem upon recall. It is also the stuff of legend and synthesis, all of which matter to the modus operandi of genius at work. We have all been victims of this delicious infection. Even now I can hardly resist a reference or two myself! + +\vskip 1em +\minititle{The Live Communication Mode:} +\vskip 1em + +It is serially exhilarating to a degree unexpected in advance of the experience. There is the sense of quadrophonic logic, stage whispers, asides (!) not in the script---the excitement of interchange, the challenge of response, the \e{threat} of real time. + +\vskip 1em +\minititle{The Polite Interim Response Mode:} +\vskip 1em + +But what to do when called to the cry of the hunt? Etc. Or at the arrival of ten feet of Wittgensteinian condensation? The polite---interim response mode allows the receiver to punctuate the sender's demand with a holding pattern and absorb the urgent message. + +\break +\sec messages numbered between 970 and 1128 + +\phdr{[970]}{Gillette}{} + +In regard to Brendan's trinity of modes (with its implicit critique of certain Wittgensteinian techniques)---a re-working of standard \dq{living} descriptive vocabularies (aesthetic, scientific, mystical, logico-mathematic, etc.) can do more for a fresh comprehension of the \dq{curious impending overall synthesis.} \e{This} is in the core of the matter. The exchange activity itself is either an activity resistant to definition or an activity extremely tolerant of definition, absorbing and transferring these into its own substance. The specter of failing at maintaining this inverse and paradoxical harmony of resistance to definition and wild tolerance of definition is in a line from Wallace Stevens: \dq{Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.} + +As for Brendan's \dq{delicious infection}---I would (driven as it drives me) draw on, in full flush of reference, my very last Kierkegaard: +\Q{The individual becomes conscious of himself as being this particular individual with particular gifts, tendencies, impulses, passions, under the influence of a particular environment, as a particular product of his milieu. He who becomes thus conscious of himself assumes all this as part of his own responsibility. At the moment of choice he is thus in complete isolation, for he withdraws from his surroundings; and yet he is in complete continuity, for he chooses himself as product; and this choice is a free choice, so that we might even say, when he chooses himself as product, he is producing himself.} + +I submit the following as entries in the glossary for this exchange. The connections between these words stem from intuitive contagion, and not necessarily a strict adherence to formal definition. They are essentials (in the cybernetic sense) as transferable to cybernautic activity. + +\begitems\spaced\style o +* \e{message:} composed of various ratios of information and noise. +* \e{feedback:} positive, in order to expand deviation in a given system performance, and negative in order to restrict deviation or maintain a steady state. +* \e{homeostasis} +* \e{redundancy} +* \e{\dq{redundancy of potential command}} +* \e{continuous and discrete} +* \e{euphony} +* \e{cacophony} +* \e{fecundity} +* \e{chaos} +* \e{incoherence/triviality} +* \e{proto-responsibility} +\enditems + +\phdr{[976]}{O'Regan}{} + +Gloss on glossary: I think we should derive the terms from further down the line. Maybe the day will come when the fecundity of my cacophony will lead away from chaos and incoherence/triviality and toward the great goddess of proto-responsibility. + +\phdr{[978]}{Gillette}{Re: Brendan on 940} + +---As to the appropriateness of \dq{paradox} and \dq{inversion} (from as classic a source as the Bible no less) is the correlation between two distinct remarks. Genesis: \dq{\ld In the beginning was the word.} and the apostle John: \dq{\ld and the word was made flesh.} This is the stuff of paradox and inversion, especially when you consider the ration of letters in most alphabets (22--26) and the chromosome ration in genes (21--26). This may be an extreme range and may include fictional documentation, but it is appropriate enough. + +\phdr{[981]}{O'Regan}{} + +On language\slash inversion\slash paradox: in the Hawaiian vocabulary there are 33 different ways to indicate a cloud, 179 terms about sweet potato alone, 225 words about the taro plant from which poi is made! + +\phdr{[991]}{}{} + +Issue alert! Message 1000 is approaching, a first time with me on this system. + +\phdr{[1000]}{Gillette}{} + +This is the millenium message, in pursuit of the millenial, poised with dispatch and referential clarity to resist all attenuation of mystery resulting from the shibbolith of our epoch: the drive toward the cosmic \dq{quick fix.} + +\centerline{Energy is eternal delight} + +\phdr{[1001]}{O'Regan}{} + +As 1001, I am glad the computer does count beyond 999. We never went this high on any conference before. Thus we didn't know what it was programmed to actually do: play Beethoven, a Mexican Samba, or an Irish jig. + +\phdr{[1005]}{}{} + +I'm here in Honolulu with Jim Dator, head of the Alternative Futures Project at the University of Hawaii. Jim is involved with many computer networks and is presently organizing a conference on science, technology and the future in Berlin. Jim wants to pose the following questions: Is science only a Western mode of knowledge? How does science as an activity change in response to new cultural pressures? What work is being done to articulate new needs and modes of inquiry in the sciences? + +\phdr{[1128]}{}{} + +On a more sinister level, the security of the entire world now rests on the controls of the just such systems, and isn't it time we explored the outer limits of this for its impact effect on communication? Such systems are integral to all security systems at the military level, and even this terminal you are all using has more sophistication than I think some of you realize, e.g., for manipulating more complex programs in larger computers ranging in use from banking to missiles. + +\break +\sec messages numbered between 1187 and 1658 + +\phdr{[1187]}{Gillette}{} + +\e{Art} said Zola is a \dq{corner of \e{Nature} seen through a temperament.} We have a \dq{field} of temperaments (variously programmed) defining a spread of association and lateral interconnection. Each temperament is amply supplied with its own endemic assumptions and intellectual habits bred by unique and peculiar methods and requirements. + +Among them, in this case, is a susceptibility to a kind of metaphysical pathos, but all this is self-conscious prologue to what follows (in part a response to Dator's remarks on the status of Western science and the role of synthesis in actively generating unexpected paradigms from ancient traditions, art, science, technology, poetic speculation, fiction, politics). + +\begitems\spaced\style n +* Randomly the premise begins with the concept of \e{resonance} in form and in information. In \e{art} it is grounded in the quality of objective replica of the subjective (the privately felt). In \e{science,} the activity of replication equates with access to the structure of the thing itself, regardless of its division between subjective (privately validated) and objective (consensually validated) associations. +* Science is associated with repeatable abstract operations and their consequent logical reasoning, while art is the articulation---the perennial restatement---of experience through \e{sensory} observation. The issue is to further distinguish these separate ways of knowing, with their respective attributes keying the opposing essentials towards the evolution of heterogeneity. +* Paraphrasing Darwin---from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent (paradoxically integrated) heterogeneity. +* \e{Providing freedom from blind instinct.} +* Paraphrasing the classical criteria of evolutionary change---descent with adaptive modification and origination of new types. \e{Type} is employed as the strategic pattern of \e{individuals.} +* The pressure of constant modification effect differently the choice of \dq{mode} and its subsequent methods. For example, in art: the evolution in sculpture through modification from Myron to Praxiteles. In painting, from Giotto through Raphael to Veronese. You cannot discuss these respective lines of development without, consciously or otherwise, commenting on certain aspects and attributes of, respectively, the Greek and Italian cultures of their times. The pressures of modification emerge from the outside to effect the eternal interior of subjective \e{form.} In science, there is, significantly, much less of this in the truths it articulates, they being somewhat immune to the context of specific cultures (Lysenko not withstanding), i.e., they are in some sense meta-cultural truths. Art (and its evolutions, senses, processes) is always imbedded deeply in its cultural conditions as it is effected and directed by specific individuals. Think of Galileo's problem of coaxing the Vatican to peer into his scope and observe the \dq{impure} moons of Jupiter. +* Art lives off the presence of paradox, and science tries to eradicate it. But paradox is illusive and subtle and moves elsewhere, like the writing finger, showing up in the most unexpected places without an alibi or sense of restraint. Hence the eternal dynamic of science. +* In the highest expression of \e{art} the paradox is converted into a quality of mystery or awe or even enthusiastic wonderment (as in Blake, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Whitman). From the opposite side (according to Aldous Huxley) all art begins \dq{with each artist} while science is externally dependent upon the evolution of evidence. Quantum changes in \e{art} are of a different internal character than science. +* From the perspective of the Nominalist, an art (or Art) can have no existence apart from its concrete embodiments drawn from the receptacle of traits by which it is defined. +\enditems + +\phdr{[1201]}{}{} + +Science, concerned with processes and \dq{processing} is not properly concerned with substance (that is, it is not concerned with \dq{being} as poetics and certain strains of art are). Hence, it need not be concerned with motivation. All I need know is \e{correlation.} The limits of science, \e{qua science,} do not go beyond the statement that, when certain conditions are met, certain new conditions may be expected to follow. In art, motivation is imbedded in discontinuity---conditions be damned. + +\phdr{[1207]}{}{} + +To quote the indomitable Marianne Moore: \dq{The power of the visible is the invisible.} This is crucial to the art\slash science distinction. To quote her again: \dq{dramatize a meaning always missed by the externalist.} Too often weak \dq{science} has to do exclusively with the external, while weak art has to do with the invisible having no apparent connection with the visible. + +\phdr{[1225]}{}{} + +More on the art\slash science dichotomy: scientific explanation of phenomena does not necessarily diminish the \e{mystery} in the universe, but it does not actively promote it either. That is the domain of art. Religion cultivates respect for it, but only art revels in it, taking it on in all its grittyness. + +\phdr{[1330]}{Charles Frazier}{The Paper Museum} + +Two images from Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi form the substructure of the following thoughts: the undefined physical structure of the game itself and the picture of the central character, Joseph Knecht, slipping beneath the glacial waters of the lake. + +In a forward to the translation by Richard and Clara Winston, Theodore Ziolowski described the glass bead game as \dq{an act of mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are perceived as simultaneously present and vitally alive.} + +For Hesse the bead game was a symbol of the human imagination, not requiring a specific physical form, the game is the focal point of a province of the spirit called Castalia (the Parnassian spring sacred to the muses). Castalia is set apart from society. Culture is isolated from \dq{reality} to develop in untainted isolation. + +The fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism caused Hesse to reject the separation of culture from the existing social reality. + +Joseph Knecht, central figure in the novel and living Magister Ludi---Master of the Bead Game, eventually rejects the game as overly linear. Tragically this decision came too late. His ignorant body was not prepared for nature. He leaves Castalia to find work as a tutor and, following his pupil, dives into a glacial lake, realizing too late that a life of meditation has not prepared his body for survival in the simple element of cold water. + +The older schools of thought that developed in China and Central Asia were balances between linear and holistic thought. This balance was expressed within the landscape through crafts and architecture. I am particularly drawn to China and Persia. Their arts express an extraordinary unity that is yet unformed in the society that I live in. There is a language of surface older than written or oral language. It is spoken by the body. + +Jalaluddin Rumi told of man evolving from the crystal, plant, fish, bird, animal, man to angel: storing within the flesh memories of all levels of life. In support of this holistic family tree is a basic proposition from Sufism: +\Q{In the realm of phenomena there are only connections without cause: no phenomenon is the cause of another. All causality is in the divine names, in the incessant renewal of their epiphanies. Thus identity of a being does not stem from any empirical continuity of his eternal hexeity. In the realm of the manifest there is only a succession of likes from instant to instant.} +\Qs{Henri Corbin, \booktitle{The Creative Imagination of I'bn Arabi}} + +Islamic cosmological doctrine is structured on a profound understanding of the psychological behavior of man. This sense of unity is a manifold of conscious patterns constructed to correspond to the physiology and internal geography of the body. + +\phdr{[1581]}{Gillette}{} + +The teleconference seems to possess all the seeds for an authentically new species of \e{semiotic freedom.} This stage represents (in its first primitive forms) the invention of \dq{terms} for another kind of conceptual diversity. The oscillation from metaphor to metonymy and back creates the beginning of \e{syntactics} (intuitions of possible links and permutations) and \e{synecdochic} thinking (the mapping of transforms into motives of search which translate \dq{objects} into \dq{events}). + +\phdr{[1658]}{Gillette}{Summing up cybernautics} + +\begitems\spaced\style n +* In one fundamental sense the conference skirted with a dangerous mistake (made elsewhere often enough)---that is, to adopt or \dq{take-over} a vocabulary from cybernetics or information theory and then apply it to problems and descriptive models derived from \dq{mechanistic} sources and pre-existing motives. To adopt such argots and vocabularies is to adopt a different set of epistemological premises. If the \dq{problem} itself were rephrased in cybernetic terms (and constraints) it may not exist (to be addressed) at all. Its mechanistic essence is resolved in the transition from one descriptive mode to another. It is a question of the relation between vernacular choice and a given perceptual belief, of disregarding assumption in the shift, of not clogging the transition with immiscible entities. +* We \dq{players} have glimpsed the potential for a transcontextual resource \dq{bank.} Everything comes into play toward synthesis without stop (metaphysical, informational, epistemological). All is mulch, any given recapitulation, in turn, also mulch for the next round of synthesis---paradigm, myth and symbolic system connected, disconnected, reconnected in permutating equilibrium. All is \dq{post-ideological.} No single set of conceptual boundaries is considered unalterable, or immune from the second-order change. +* \dq{A poem is the dance of an attitude,} wrote Kenneth Burke, and the \dq{players} are the chorus line. +* Compared to Hesse's monks and their bead-computer, this system represents the advance of \e{homo ludens} over \e{australopithecus.} The curve is asymptotic. It ranges from Duns Scotus to the \dq{cut-ups} of William Burroughs. From occult grammars (Kabbalah, I Ching) to particle physics (quarks, quasars), yarrow sticks and Tarot in one sentient ball of wax. From the fundamental Vedantic notion of Sat, Chit, and Ananda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss) to schemes for paying teleconference rent. +* It is germane to note that the linguistic root of the word \e{religion} derives from \dq{reconnect,} i.e., from the Latin \e{ligare} and \e{religare.} We have barely scratched the surface on the issue of the contradistinct attributes of art and science. Their respective traditions, methods, and truths serve as a fecund nexus with which to begin again and fin again along the riverrun, whence it all begins again. +\enditems |