path: root/eies.otx

\chap EIES Teleconference (January--May, 1981)

\sec 1/31/81 (Position Paper)

\ehdr{Brendan O'Regan}{[1/31/81]}{The Responsive Environment---An Expanded Concept of the Museum Environment and the Art Event}

The majority view of the museum environment is that it is a \dq{place} for art to be viewed by an audience. The majority view of the art work is that, whatever the medium or process involved, it is something \dq{made} by the artist in some other location which is then brought to the museum environment to be viewed by others. Various attempts to break away from these accepted norms, whether in terms of the \dq{happenings} of the Sixties, the \dq{performance pieces} of the Seventies, or other departures from tradition in music and painting, are well known and documented. Only a few of these efforts can be said to have even attempted to embrace some of the possibilities inherent in some of the new technologies of the last two decades: The efforts of the Experiments in Art and Technology group and the Cybernetic Serendipity Exhibition are possibly the most well known here.

However, none of these projects or \dq{movements} have ever specifically embraced the nature of some of the emerging technologies for their own special properties. Rather they \dq{added them on} as an additional set of options for the artist, for reasons which emanated from the aesthetic text \e{before} the advent of these possibilities. There has yet to be any direct expansion of the aesthetic text that both stems from and embraces these new possibilities. Until this happens, it is unlikely that the level of \dq{technological effect} will be transcended.

The present project both stems from, \e{and} is set directly in, the milieu of a special selection of the new communications technologies. Indeed, the grounds on which the selection itself is being made (which will be an inherent and on-going part of the various phases of the project) is itself part of a decision as to how the aesthetic text can be meaningfully expanded. Specifically, the selection of technologies to date has been made from those which collapse the process of time, space and information.

At the outset, the capacities of each may appear familiar:

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* The \dq{instant} transmission of personal text across global communications networks, accessible now to everyone possessing a telephone and simple computer terminal.

* The immediate and semi-immediate two-way exchange of graphic imagery---from slow-scan still images to full-colour two-way video linkages, also global in extent.

* The expanded \dq{augmented human intellect} of individuals or self-selecting groups that form the membership of the expanding global computer data and communications networks.
\enditems

Each of these systems has its current \e{raison d'être,} both financial and functional. Separately, they each could have \dq{application} to art in forms that are familiar to us. Few groups however have concerned themselves with implications and possibilities inherent in the emerging \e{synergies} of such systems operating in linkage between themselves, a multi-disciplinary group of artists, scientists and scholars and a specially designed environment capable of displaying and responding to the products of all three interacting on a global, real, \e{and} delayed-time basis.

Perhaps the only precedent for this set of possibilities comes to us from several disparate, though symbiotically linked, groups. One major group is the Defense Department in the form of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Army. Historically, it has been this group that has almost single-handedly stimulated and funded the development and creation of the first global computer network appropriately called ARPANET. This same search for expanded military options today is providing the thrust toward discovering the possible advantages inherent in linking high technologies with their:
 
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* Capacity for memories with random-access to image and text, both moving and still.

* Capacity to provide \dq{infinite} choice to the viewer\slash learner thereby allowing the ultimate in individualized learning of the operation\slash maintenance of complex classified weapons, or the terrain of foreign power's secret bases.

* Ability to rapidly assimilate, cross-correlate, and abstract salient data from the works literature on any subject, in any language, at a speed which functionally collapses the research task from a decade of work to a day of retrieval time.
\enditems

What kinds of characteristics do these uses have in common that differ significantly from how these expanded options may be applied to art?

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* The first and most obvious difference is that these uses are rooted in \e{teleological} concerns. The differences in capability between the various technologies are subdued to the achievement of specific purposes, deemed valuable to ARPA. This is in stark contrast to the attitude of \dq{adding in} these capabilities for the artist.

* The teleological goal produces the need for synthesis of the technological options. This leads to a modus operandi grounded in the idea of \e{experiential simulation} for the learner\slash interacters of complex situations that are otherwise unavailable. The simulation basis of these uses then serves as the context which attempts to draw forth a synthesis of integrated output from the technologies that smoothly interfaces with the needs of the human perception in the learning mode. (There is another aspect to this which we will deal with later: What is the impact on the human nervous system of this special kind of information environment?)

* These uses have built into them an inherent sensibility to the highly individual nature of each potential user. They achieve this by attempting to provide a menu of options for entry\slash exploration of the system designed to interface with the anticipated need of the user. The sophistication of our ability to divine the proper structure of these options is only at its beginning stages---this relates back to the point made at the end of 2. In effect this is technological simulation of experience \dq{in the hands of the user} as opposed to the \dq{eye of the beholder.}
\enditems

With slight changes in language, all three of these points could be statements about art, and yet these options have never been used for making art. It is true that small steps toward this have been taken from time to time by artists using various combinations of video\slash assemblage technologies and media as well as art with primitive viewer-interaction built into it, thus moving, slightly beyond the \dq{beholder paradigm} in art. However, the combinatorial power of the complex mix envisaged as the goal of this project has never been assembled to date.

As with the advent of almost any new technology, there are some new characteristics of these media-in-combination which must be given special consideration. Since these are new phenomena, they are hard to characterize; at first, they appear to be \dq{invisible} but eventually they have the power to \dq{make or break} the whole process.

Now we must explore something of the structural landscape of this cluster of disciplines, with the aim of outlining the elements of an epistemology of the aesthetic text that both stems from and includes the new possibilities in technologies that collapse space, time and information.

We shall see very shortly that any attempt to articulate an image of the operations---actual or potential, of what we shall from now on refer to as \dq{Space-Time-Information Collapse} (STIC) technologies---will require some use of terms from disciplines that concern themselves with complex phenomena, network and systems phenomena, neuro- and psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence. In addition, we will need contributions from philosophy, logic, and aesthetics. To some this may provoke a raised eyebrow as it would appear to be a list that is spread over a terrain where the ice is very thin and the water terribly deep. However, this has always been both the curse and the strength of the field of cybernetics and the many other disciplines it has either spawned or influenced.

\ehdr{Brendan O'Regan}{[1/31/81]}{Teleconferencing User Characteristics: Usage Level, Understanding and Participation in Computer Network Processes.}

As with any system of communication, there are procedures to be followed if effective communication is to take place. Computer teleconferencing is no exception. There have been enough people on sufficiently diverse groups of systems at this point so that some rather general observations can be made about their behavior, this difference between \dq{good} and \dq{bad} uses of these systems, and most important the kinds of conditions that need to be established if effective use is to A) occur, B) continue for a reasonable length of time and C) reach a level where it is possible to achieve specific goals beyond the task of \dq{mastering the system.}

In our case, all of these aspects need to be addressed with an even greater degree of discernment than usual because unlike other types of groups, who remain largely as message\slash data users, our specific need is to evolve uses beyond this level, to include the aesthetic, artistic, philosophical and even spiritual realms. This will require facility beyond the norm---for at least all of the organizers, if not indeed for a significant portion of those ultimately chosen to become part of the Whitney Communications Project.

To begin to grasp what these distinctions may mean, let's look at some of what is now known about the \dq{norms} of teleconferencing. The following statements are abstracted from the book: \booktitle{The Network Nation: Human Communication Via Computer}, Chapter 3, \dq{Social and Psychological Processes in Computerized Conferencing.} Summarizing findings about social\slash psychological processes on computer networks, Hiltz and Turoff write:

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* Users evolve specialized norms with respect to the use of the facilities, communications and writing style. The acquisition of these norms by individuals/groups appears to be an important learning process on such systems.

* User participation in conferencing in an active sense of contributing items seems to require some degree of usage above the basic level of learning the mechanics. This may be a second-level learning plateau related to established norms.

* Users will gain facility as time passes, so that their input rates become higher than usual typing rates. For large groups, the time required to send and receive communications will drop below that required for other media, such as telephone or face-to-face meetings.

* The user's short term memory may be a factor in conditioning frequency of interaction with the system, Users tend to become conditioned so that, on the average, they have about 7 items to send or receive per interaction.

* In accordance with social exchange theory, no participant will continue to use a conferencing system unless \dq{rewards} are greater than \dq{costs.} Among factors that increase reward for users are:

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* Ratio of items received to items sent. This increases with 1) size of active group, 2) throughout rate of the system.
* Observable increase in skill and speed in using the system. This improvement is related to the richness of the design in terms of advanced features available to user once they have mastered the basic mechanics.
* Importance of communication with system members in comparison with communication with persons not on the system; relative cost in time and money of other modes for communicating with people on the system.
\enditems\enditems

\break
\sec 2/6/81--2/10/81

\ehdr{Frank Gillette}{[2/6/81]}{Re: System and Identity}

We begin with practice. With the terminal, its keyboard, attendant software and ancillary systems. The first question: How does a method originating in art engage the full range of possibilities concealed and emergent in this technology? It is now clear, even a commonplace, that art has not confronted this kind of pragmatic pallette in its entire history. The second question: What is the continuous \dq{spindle of necessity} streaming through and connecting art's ways-and-means \e{and} the teleconference system, irrespective of discontinuity in technical means?

Tacitly, each \e{player} in the teleconference is immediately faced with the task of establishing\slash developing an identity, or characteristic signature, reflecting his interaction with the terminal and its extensions. To this end I choose to adopt Levi-Strauss' \e{bricoleur,} the attitude of mind it represents being somehow oddly suited to the initial conditions of teleconferencing. Levi-Strauss' \e{bricoleur} is preliterate, this exercise in \e{bricoleurity} is \e{postliterate.} This position is introduced in response to the swelling aggregate of perspectives, hypothesis, and sheer data that is infinitely expressed and embodied in various spectrums of dissimilar media across dissimilar times. It implies a new integrative stance towards all \dq{texts} which regards them singularly as mulch, fragments, partial views, specialties, trapped within the contexts that instigated their respective existences and affects.

The \e{bricoleur} intuitively seeks out a \e{totemic} logic with which to counterstate the world in new terms of description, i.e., the \e{bricolage.} He assumes the primitive nature of the teleconference system in a reflexive exchange with its numerous modalities and contents. He perceives the network of players to be a collective \dq{savage mind} evolving a new \dq{science of the concrete.} The \e{bricoleur} endeavors to precisely order, classify and arrange the peculiar minutiae of the immediate experience of teleconferencing.

The compelling feature of the \e{bricolage,} as a distinct way of knowing, is the apparent ease with which it enables a preliterate (or non-computer literate) \e{bricoleur} to create and establish satisfactory analogical connections between his personal (emotionally-centered) life and the life of nature (or teleconferencing) instantaneously, without hesitation. A \e{bricoleur's} totemic logic weaves its \e{myth} in order to move effortlessly from one conceptual territory to another, in order to contain and transvalue the helter-skelter of alternative explanations and an expanding inventory of \e{fuzzy sets.}

We begin with testing \dq{concretely} the potential range of metaphor and metonymy the system can bear\ld  We move from the \dq{item-centered} (or \e{phonetic}) world (in art: the \e{object}) into the \dq{relational} (or \e{phonemic}) one (in art: the \e{process}).

\ehdr{O'Regan}{[2/7/81]}{}

The notion of bricolage from Levi-Strauss is apt here in many ways, and it could be particularly appropriate if we were confining ourselves in this project to the teleconferencing process only. For now we are concerned with a shift from product to process---the process of arranging into structure the odd minuti\ae\ of the immediate experience, but also the process whereby the nature of these expanded media, via their very special interaction with human neurological process, serve as filter and amplifier of our output\slash input.

Picture this as a primitive but multi-headed Turing machine in which the distinctions between minds creating input are blurred by the manipulations of software. This is akin to the new functionalist school in philosophy, whereby analysis proceeds from a consideration of how the hardware (biological, micro-processor, what have you) is organized and not the nature of the hardware itself. This school attempts analysis of the world on the basis of how information in the world is organized, and attempts equation between similarly organized systems---whether animate or inanimate. This strikes home with the vitalist in any of us, but it also raises the ghost of Turing and even the spectre of \booktitle{Godel, Escher, Bach} with its reductionist preferences.

Frank, would you please enter the etymology and genealogy of the word aesthetic? My memory is that it comes from \e{esthetikos} meaning \dq{sense perception.} Could we break it down further? Another point: it is typical of philosophies of aesthetics to articulate terms and systems considered independent of the brain\slash mind system. Usually, the mind=brain identity is heavily embedded and then forgotten. I will argue throughout that there are real distinctions of process between variously accessible conscious states, and that these systems induce significant alterations of state, the process nature of which we should attempt to elucidate as we proceed.

I am not certain how the phonetic\slash phonemic distinction which follows Jakobson et all applies in identifying a conference as a language. Shouldn't we be referring to \dq{discourse} rather than using linguistic and specific semiotic systems references? I am not sure how the process of teleconferencing establishes this high order of \dq{cosmicity} and \dq{ambiguity.} Eco's limitation is to have such a rule dominated semiotic system (model) which is unable to deal with ambiguity and \dq{non-narrative} art (read: outside of an established code). I am not certain, to follow your references, how \dq{the rule breaking roles of ambiguity and self reference are organized into an aesthetic ideolect.} Since ideolect presumes a language, what's the language, and what do you mean by aesthetic?

\ehdr{Gillette}{[2/8/81]}{Re: On the Mnemonics of the Beautiful}

As players in the evolution of this medium we are its pre-computer literates. This is a natural setting, however, for the application of art's totemic-logic system of reciprocal connection, which exists in direct opposition to the secular, positivistic and scientific employment of the present technology. The problem introduced to teleconferencing (and its extensions) when it is treated as an aesthetic medium can be located \dq{historically} as the current manifestation of the eternally returning interrelationship between \e{art} and \e{techne.} The essential question is: What will it take for teleconferencing to evolve its own peculiar vital character and nuance?

Positioned within the aesthetic domain, teleconferencing becomes a medium of extreme potentiality. This is the immediate \e{lex eterna} governing a beginning discourse on the subject. Teleconferencing's present technical configuration is exclusively textual. But it is potentially \e{textual,} \e{imagistic,} and \e{diagrammatic.}

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: Phonetic and Phonemic}

The digital aspect of the \e{phonetic} and analog aspect of the \e{phonemic:} the matrix of players are like points in a pattern. Each point in the pattern is an ever growing/changing assembly of statements, some shared by other points in the matrix and some unique. \e{Phonetic} differences between two sounds only become actively meaningful to the native speaker when they coincide with the \e{phonemic} structure (points in a pattern) of the language in which it occurs. The players will assemble a shared (common) \dq{language} as points in the pattern intersect. Meaning in this instance stems from the contrasting or oppositional patterns of its phonemes. The potential in teleconferencing is to develop new (regained) meaning from the contrasting or oppositional (totemic) pattern of its players.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: Difference and Resemblance}

\Q{\ld the operative value of the systems of meaning and classifying commonly called totemic derives from their formal character: they are codes suitable for conveying messages which can be transposed into other codes and for expressing messages received by means of different codes in terms of their own system.}
\Qs{Levi-Strauss}

No one can observe the difference, say, between a Cimabue and a Massacio and fail to perceive, and to feel, what \e{freedom} must have meant to artists in the Cinquecento. Likewise, at some undetermined future point, an observer may perceive and feel the novel freedom resulting from the quantum paradigmatic shift in the balance of forces and dynamics governing the engagement of \e{art} and \e{techne.} A body-of-work in the domain of art is actually the successful introduction of a class of private objects or processes as archetypes of general laws, i.e., private encoding of the general. The \e{techne} of our current epoch complicates the issue of a \dq{class of private objects} and their aesthetic encoding. This new technical complexity is the semiosis, the aesthetic function of the process nominally experienced.

\Q{\ld introversive semiosis, a message which signifies itself, is indissolubly linked with the aesthetic function of sign-systems.}
\Qs{Jakobson}

As \dq{introversive semiosis,} art appears as a means for interconnecting messages in order to produce \dq{texts} (private objects\slash processes) in which the rule-breaking roles of ambiguity and self-referencing are organized into an aesthetic idiolect. Semiotically, ambiguity is defined as a mode of violating the rules of the code---to paraphrase Eco. Thus the fecund realm of \e{paradox:} an aesthetic idiolect peculiar to the work of art, which induces in its audience a sense of cosmicity---of endlessly moving beyond each established level of meaning the moment it is established, of continuously transforming \dq{its denotations into connotations.} (Jakobson) (This also relates to Barthes' account of connotation as a second order system of signification based upon denotation, involution, self-reference, discontinuity, ambiguity, transcendence, paradox: the stuff of art.)

\ehdr{[]}{[2/10/81]}{Re: Aesthetics}

Aesthetics is a loaded term. But none-the-less it is a critical issue in the teleconference discourse. It lost currency when it became exclusively associated with the formalist view of art developed by the students and followers of Croce. I have employed it deliberately with a view to igniting it in its original axiological sense. The origin of the more commonly held (and narrow) conception of aesthetics is Baumgarten's \booktitle{Aesthetica} (circa 1750). Here (in Baumgarten and most modern aesthetics) it is defined as a logic of imagination, a science of the \dq{dark ideas} known by the senses, in order to supplement logic, the science of clear and \dq{distinct} ideas known by the mind. From a contemporary (and ancient for that matter) point of view, this distinction (between dark and clear ideas) is quaint and a trifle unworkable; but by limiting the study of aesthetics to art and by defining it in so normatively narrow a fashion, it did succeed in developing a body of criticism of taste.

It is against the inertia of this conception of aesthetics that any re-introduction of the term must compare. Kant was probably the first to object to the emasculation of the term. He protested against Baumgarten's use of the word and applied it in accordance with its Greek etymology (perception by the senses, especially by feeling, seeing, hearing, etc.) to the \dq{science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception.} (Baumgarten's narrow application of the term established itself nevertheless and both meanings have persisted sort of independently. A third independent meaning, at once more narrow and more wide than Baumgarten and Kant, was introduced by Schiller in his \booktitle{Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man} (circa 1795--80). It is narrower because it refers not to perception in general but to one distinctive mode of it in particular. It is wider because the field of operation is not confined to art; this mode of perception can assert itself in response to anything whatsoever; art is a special case within the general field, though it is peculiarly and specifically designed \dq{to call forth} this response. Schiller's meaning is wider in another way too. It implies that aesthetic perception involves the whole personality. Sense-activity it certainly is, but its distinctiveness lies in the brief harmony of all the functions of the mind, feeling and thinking both, plus the fusion of both with transition states. Schiller further defined it as a state of precarious but infinitely fruitful equipoise, and as the way things dispose themselves when they are \e{contemplated for their own sake,} without reference to purposes, ends, causes, etc. Schopenhauer evolves Schiller's conception further as the aesthetic in the world's will: i.e., the aesthetic is one way among others of being related to things. What results from an aesthetic encounter, so defined, is knowledge, not mere pleasurable sensation. It is at once a detailed and intensely clear grasp of intuitive knowledge of the object\slash process nexus in its stark uniqueness.

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\sec 2/11/81--2/12/81

\ehdr{O'Regan}{[2/11/81]}{The Responsive Environment}

\Q{\ld Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live\ld}
\Qs{Einstein}

A prologue to this medium must inevitably be drenched in all its possibilities if it is to achieve significance beyond the selection of one strategy. (E.g., \e{\dq{bricoleurity}}---as with much of Levi-Strauss, it is more his method than his data that attract attention. This method here may sometimes compensate for less than nonserial immersion in the perceived distortions [relative to literate norms] imposed by consent to signal each other via the media of space-time-information-collapse technologies. What is the signal, and where is the analogue? How do we differentiate phonemic units, and how do they combine to form the \dq{phonetic}?

Recall Weiner's cybernetic injunction that the most sophisticated intelligent machine would allow digital process to be controlled by the softness of an analogue overlay­that higher form of \dq{fuzzy set} which in its plasticity allows the hard edges of precision to be directed toward non-zero set of possibilities. Herein sleeps the slumbering giant of teleonomy's analogue targets. Add too the movement toward invisibility of \dq{causes} throughout these complex, interacting networks, whose \dq{drivers} should all fool Alan Turning into thinking their desire for lunch was more than a clever program.

Here we begin work with the hierarchy, structure, and difference between \e{autopoiesis} structure\slash organization maintaining homeostasis and \e{allopoiesis} (homoeostatic operations leading to products other than the system itself) and apply our distinctions to how first-order cybernetics\slash aesthetics [of observed systems] lead to and impose order on second-order cybernetics\slash aesthetics [of observing systems].

\ehdr{[]}{[2/11/81]}{First and Second-Order Aesthetics: Perception and Process States}

Adopting Von Foerster's distinction between first and second-order cybernetics, it could be argued that there is truly first-order aesthetics, distinct from second-order process in relation to observed systems. The distinction, however, is worth maintaining since it precisely delineates differences between traditional \dq{abstract} definitions of aesthetics as objective order \dq{out there} and more recent, complex traditions, e.g., Schiller\slash Schopenhauer who express themselves in terms of a balance between the senses, intellect, and cognition of the world via the axis of \e{auto}\slash \e{allopoietic} poise of mind and object. This Romantic restoration of perceptual process is necessary for any analysis of consciousness and aesthetics and only makes it more apparent how philosophers ignored this territory which now invents data on instinct, variations on form and process of unconscious and preconscious states, as well as matters of poise between cognitive awareness and interactive acceleration possible with this technology. The terrain is less and less suitable for \dq{objective} examination with the recognition that this interaction makes possible novel process states, continually modified by the self-referential capacities of the technology: a Nietzschean dilemma transposed. All is less forbidden, because \e{even} more is permitted with higher frequency before. This dilemma was foretold by the poets and prophets of the 19\textsuperscript{th} century, but these forms represent a discontinuity in kind only now operational.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Procedures on Assembling a Glossary}

Glossary entries will be assembled throughout the conference in small groups of messages which will facilitate subsequent use via electronic editing. Thus they can be selectively deleted, modified, and added to by others. Later entries out of alphabetical order will be re-arranged to fit in sequence so that in the future (for display\slash demonstration purposes) the glossary printout can be recalled as an up-to-date document.

What follows is the first series of entries. The source is \booktitle{Mind and Nature} by Gregory Bateson with additional information from \booktitle{The Cybernetics of Cybernetics} by Heinz Von Forester. The terms entered here are chose on the basis of their relevance for the description of natural systems as a class which \e{includes} the existence of mind. Hence the base-value of Bateson's work. This choice relates to the nature of present systems as a special form of group mind, now capable operating nature. Some members of the \dq{artificial intelligensia} would, of course, argue from the functionalist view point that this system may not represent a conceptually distinct form but simply a different physical manifestation of an organizational form which already exists in intra- or inter-personal\slash brain interaction\slash communication.

\begitems\spaced\style o
* \e{co-evolution:} a stochastic of evolutionary change in which two or more systems interact in such a way that changes in system $A$ set the stage for the natural selection of changes in system $B$. Later changes in system $B$, in turn, set the stage for the selecting of more similar changes in system $A$.

* \e{homology:} a formal resemblance between two organisms (systems) such that the relations between certain parts of $A$ are similar to the relations between corresponding parts of $B$. Such formal resemblance is considered to be evidence of evolutionary relatedness.

* \e{idea:} In Bateson's epistemology, the smallest unit of mental process is a difference or distinction or news of a difference. What is called an \dq{idea} in popular speech seems to be a complex of such units. But popular speech will hesitate to call, say, the bilateral symmetry of a frog or the message of a single neural impulse an \dq{idea.}

* \e{information:} any difference that makes a difference.

* \e{stochastic:} (Greek, stochazein, to shoot with a bow at a target; that is to scatter events in a partially random manner, some of which achieve a preferred outcome.) If a sequence of events combines a random component with a selective process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to endure, that sequence is said to be stochastic.

* \e{cybernetics:} (Greek, \e{kybernetes,} steersman; Latin, \e{gubernator,} governor.)
\Q{Cybernetics is a word invented to define a new field of science. It combines under one heading the study of what in a human context is sometimes loosely described as thinking and in engineering is known as control and communication. In other words, cybernetics attempts to find common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop and a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and living organisms.}
\Qs{Norbert Weiner, \journaltitle{Scientific American}, November, 1948.}

* \e{first order cybernetics:} the cybernetics of observed systems. second order cybernetics: the cybernetics of observing systems. (Cf. Heinz Von Foerster, \booktitle{The Cybernetics of Cybernetics,} University of Illinois Press, 1974.)

* \e{teleology:} the notion in evolutionary theory that purposive behavior can act as a causal agent in the structuring of systems. The term generally refers to goal-seeking behaviors.

* \e{teleonomy:} A more recent view of teleological process which suggests the goal-seeking may occur via a systemic network of possible processes, rather than \dq{naive teleology}---aiming straight at a recognized goal.

* \e{autopoiesis:} In cybernetics, this is a special case of homeostasis in which the critical variable held constant is the system's own organization.
\enditems

\ehdr{[]}{}{Responsive Environmental Technology}

There is an interesting group of people already on EIES whom we can tap for useful information on new technologies that can be added to create the basic module for artists to engage at a sophisticated level. I have been conducting my own search with these people, identifying new ones, following leads and so forth. I can continue to do this individually and transfer particularly appropriate messages, or we could initiate a technology conference of our own to tap this network directly and achieve a much faster precis of what is known. I gather that there is a public conference on \dq{Telecommunications and the Future} which I have not had time to check out yet.

\ehdr{Gillette}{[2/12/81]}{Re: The Miraculous Multiplex}

If the player's indulgence prevents his advancement to a significance beyond his \e{bricoleurity} (or one derived from the medium's \dq{drenching possibilities} (O'Regan 2\slash 11)) then it is a failure of the particular player that is up to question. This perceptual\slash cognitive approach is one of several methodologies to simultaneously generate and negotiate a great stewpot of conceptual systems, metaphors, analogies, lexicons, paradigms, mystic symbols, ancient hunches, jargons, worldviews, other methodologies and classifications that are the sub-structural mulch for a more refined methodology in the future. A refined methodology is akin to the \dq{miraculous multiplex,}(Wallace Stevens) i.e., a set of shaping principles of generation and cohesion to process and order all the vectors of depictive\slash descriptive proliferations flying in every direction.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: On the Teleconference as a Special Case}

There is a general law of systems which when paraphrased states that increases in a system's complexity brings about stepwise, discontinuous increments in its functioning. The essential fact to grasp is this: these increases are not predictable. To stay alive the given must point beyond itself. Language is like the river: You can't step into the same word twice. The very idea of intellective discipline itself is subject to the Roshomon effect. Teleconferencing addresses this mobility, variability and discontinuity as a haptic maneuvering about the \dq{miraculous multiplex} continuously re-adjusting itself. \dq{\ld rooted uselessness\ld makes imagination live,} says Barthes meditating on the Eiffel Tower. Cassirer asserts that \dq{the building of intuitive reality begins when the continuous flow of sensuous phenomena begins to divide.}

\ehdr{[]}{}{Three pairs of epistemic division:}
\begitems\spaced\style n
* Heidigger's distinction between \e{calculative} and \e{mediative} thinking (or language).
* Jakobson's distinction between \e{referential} and \e{aesthetic} use of language.
* Kenneth Burke's distinction between \e{symbolic action} and \e{non-symbolic motion.}
\enditems

All three are separate ways of applying strategy within teleconferencing. (Brendan's message: its \dq{drenching possibilities.}) A central axis in the developing motif index is the arch-notion of a division of experience into fundamentals and\slash or irreducible grounds designed to distinguish one kind of thing (sensation, experience) from another. The \dq{symbolic act} of division: of introducing dualities, turbulence, difficulties in the form of a tableau (tableau is the actual adaptive variable of depiction\slash description(s) within the motif index).

\break
\sec 2/16/81--2/23/81

\ehdr{Gillette}{[2/16/81]}{Re: To Invoke the Authority of the Ineffable}

Northrop Frye, inveterate inventor of categories, speaks of classifications within the \e{iconography of the imagination:} these proto-categories in which the aesthetic imagination seeks to \e{prehend} experience. A particular player's method of prehension reduces to an actual subset of all possible iconographies within the encodable descriptive\slash depictive repetoire. From this vantage-point the teleconferencing system invites one to accommodate a less conventionally \dq{disciplined} operating bias: one that chooses to accept the system's contrastive and oppositional potential (especially at the beginning). The player goes on to discover a novel form of \dq{dialogue} (one that optimizes the parallel, co-equal novelty of the embodying technology). Heidigger, in fact, correlates excesses in the \e{calculative} method with the general state of technology (techne) itself. That is: They are inseparably intertwined. Following Heidigger, the \e{meditative} method can be employed as an antidote, or \dq{counter-statement,} to calculatively over-corrected techne. This is an expression of a way in which art \e{contains} science.

\ehdr{[]}{[2/17/81]}{Re: Epistemorphic Difference}

\rightline{\dq{The contour escapes me\ld} ---Cezanne}

Following the scholastic adage that whenever you encounter a contradiction you must make a distinction, the \e{bricoleur} submits Peirce's idea that beliefs are really rules-for-action. (The old chestnut \e{substance}\slash \e{attribute} distinction suggests itself as an initial division.)

William James (one hell of a pioneer in haptic maneuvering, if there ever was one) judges the truth of an idea by a measure of its \dq{cash value.} \dq{True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not.} What is the \dq{cash value} of these teleconferencing methods?

Adopting James' notion of up-to-snuff \dq{cash value} as a necessary criterion of index-acceptance with Nabokov's definition of art paraphrased as \e{the reality we extract from reality:} It comes down to yet another division combining the attributes of \e{universality} and \e{necessity.} \e{Teleconference-value} of an entry must perforce be subject to a kind of natural selection based (in part) upon the pragmatic fascination it selects as \dq{a reality.}

Each \dq{reality} opens upon the realm of the semi-factual, bringing into bas relief the epiphenomena of \dq{factual} experience. \dq{Meaning} (including desired \dq{cash-value} ends) changes from the \e{first order pattern} \dq{take} to subsequent \e{second order pattern} \dq{expansions} generating an analogue of what the logician calls \e{factual conditions} (viz: one of the jointly \e{sufficient conditions} for a certain state or even \e{necessitates} that state of event. That is, what is \e{necessary} will have a way of meeting its \e{sufficient} conditions.)

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: On the Making of Epistemorphs}

The following originates with paradigm-fragments that have remained with the \e{bricoleur,} that have impressed themselves upon his intuition, having passed through the private filters of subjective validation. For example, from something as crusty as Hobbes' \booktitle{Leviathan} this strange rhyme: \dq{Words are wise men's counters; they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.} Here is another chard, another refracting \dq{mind-facta} to rub against the Hobbesian assessment: \dq{The words remained in his heart like a burning fire} and \dq{because ye speak this word, behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and his people wood, and it shall devour them.} (Jeremiah 10:9, 5:14). Metaphors enfolding back on language are in a class by themselves because they speak with what they point at. This is especially acute when the messaging system is exclusively textual. Jeremiah and Hobbes both suggest a \e{cor irrequietem} hovering around the capacity for language, for words. They imply a restless discontent growing into anxiety over their apparent power.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: \dq{The eye believes and its communion takes} ---Wallace Stevens}

Problematically, art fluctuates between the optical and haptic. To receive a tactile sensation by simply seeing something vs. the haptic reconversion of the sensation: the felt is seen. Haptic is that element in the aesthetic experience that is grasped independently of optical-formal considerations (interpretations). Teleconferencing (as a network of bricoleurs) is haptic-simply incapable, as yet to seriously address the optical dimension. The felt in this case is a mode of discourse: a collective text building up from initial definitions.

\ehdr{James Harithas}{[2/17/81]}{}

I would be more at home in the agrarian, mytho-poetic thought of Ancient Greece which leads to the \booktitle{Iliad} and the proto-philosophical speculations of Hesiod. I agree, however, that the \e{bricoleur} is an initial and, simultaneously, initiatory process, a means of entering the technology at the most elementary level. Greek thought and language provide a more sophisticated layering. \e{Bricolage} concentrates on use of the basic codes of duality, identity, analogy, and comparison; and in addition, the creative process of stream of consciousness, collage, other forms of relativism, and by extension, catastrophe models, puns, etc.

The question of how to use \e{bricolage} effectively as a machine language is still moot. I assume Frank means that any poetic analogy assumes a factual or philosophical reality within the discourse he constructs, where objects or objective statements function as metaphors. I'm confident there is no difference between our illusive aesthetic and our pure, haptic sense of reality.

\ehdr{John G. Hanhardt}{[2/17/81]}{}

I have some questions on the use of linguistic and semiotic terminology which seems to define something other than what the textual production of teleconferencing suggests. If we are talking about the relation between communication structure of a text and its grammatical structure, there is no one-to-one relation between the two. We must establish a more general mode of textual analysis than that proposed by strict linguistic and semiotic models. The function which determines the textual process is its communicative function. Perhaps we should interpret texts as systems? Thus if we suggest that each system is a process directed through its function, then by extension the communicative function determines the textual constituents. Different types of texts differ through different types of textual function---not as dialects in relation to each other but as different processes which share in a network of interrelated components. The different components, manifestations, of this structure are correlated by the communicative purpose of different texts. It seems that teleconferencing networks are engaged in this type of interrelatedness, and analysis is not based on particular linguistic properties but on more abstract features such as dynamics and cohesiveness.

\ehdr{Gillette}{[2/22/81]}{Re: On Simularity}

\Q{\ld  in their games, dreams or wild imaginings\ld individuals never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repetoire that it should be possible to define.} 
\Qs{Levi-Strauss}

(James refers to association by \e{simularity} as the \dq{electric aptitude for analogy.}) The act of linking together with the principle of \dq{assonance} is in effect a grounding in an optimum density of reference where the processes of allusion arising from each referent intersect. Allusive economy evolves as the density of reference builds-up.

\ehdr{[]}{[2/22/81]}{Re: Terms for Conference Glossary}

\e{Metaphor:}

\Q{Metaphora consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else: the transference (\e{epi-phora}) being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on the grounds of analogy.}
\Qs{Aristotle}

\Q{[Metaphor consists in] the presentation of the facts of one category in the idioms appropriate to another.}
\Qs{Gilbert Ryle}

\Q{Metaphor is a devise for seeing something in terms of something else\ld a metaphor tells us something about one character considered from the point of view of another character. And to consider $A$ from the point of view of $B$ is, of course, to use $B$ as a \e{perspective} upon $A$.}
\Qs{Kenneth Burke}

\Q{However appropriate in one sense a good metaphor may be, in another sense there is something inappropriate about it. This inappropriateness results from the use of a sign in a sense of different from the usual, which use (is called) \e{sort-crossing.} Such sort-crossing is the first defining feature of metaphor.}
\Qs{Colin Turbane}

Metaphor is the genus in which the following are species:
\begitems\spaced\style o
* analogy
* trope
* metonymy
* synecdoche
* catachresis
\enditems

\ehdr{Harithas}{[2/23/81]}{}

I understand the \e{bricoleur} as one possessing a method of abstraction based on the use of psycho-social cultural debris, that is, on fragmentary experience from any information which by itself may be random or incoherent, as long as it is interesting to the \e{bricoleur.} The \e{bricoleur} reorganizes this information into myth, ritual, art, or medicine according to his specialization and purpose. This approach not only acknowledges as its own the medium of collage, but it defines the techniques used by the Surrealist. It explains the Surrealist use of signs culled from psychological processes and juxtapositions. Bricolage is the base method of Surrealist inquiry and later of Pop Art which deals with subliminal content more particularly.

This method seems too conveniently and literally dependent on memory, on totemic (i.e., atavistic and intuitive) forms of classification which in turn establish their need for inventories of various kinds. This is a limitation of sorts. I see art as being in essence virtually free from the strictures of memory (as for example the Abstract Expressionists) and as involved in a process which leads to creating through access to an expanded consciousness, one which occurs through the recognition or revelation of \dq{something out of nothing.} The artist may elaborate this \dq{something} by transforming it after the fact into a cultural artifact through the appropriate \e{stylistic} language or, alternatively, through some kind of figuration.

In other words, the artist does not simply have to establish formal systems which address social or mythological longings and aspirations; rather he develops a visual language based on his experience with categories of feeling which are untouched, unknown and \dq{out there} beyond the reaches of memory but innate to some mysterious potential of the mind. This may be just a definition of expanded memory, but I prefer to think it is some biological source of the freedom necessary to the creative act. On the other hand, I do see virtue in experimenting with the memory systems of the computer, together with ideas about ideas, about art and various forms of teleconferencing. This may lead to astonishing results. It is obvious to me that the final work of art may be a collage which does not simply document an exchange of ideas, but one in which the information kindles the \e{spirit} through its expression of deep feeling and shades of feeling which are new to the human mindscape.

\ehdr{O'Regan}{[2/23/81]}{}

I have recently been engaged in communication with Robert Heinmiller who is at MIT. There he manages the electronic mail communications system for the US Oceanographic Survey. This is a system of teleconferencing operations to approximately 900 ships all over the world. Apparently they make use of an unused NASA satellite. I asked him for information on their recently developed technique for sending imagery and graphics over EIES-like systems.

I think this information is of the greatest interest both for its conceptual implications for this project and as some source of ideas for the actual responsive environment technologies that might ultimately be part of assembling the museum of the future.

\break
\sec 2/23/81--4/6/81

\ehdr{Gillette}{[2/23/81]}{Re: Sort-Crossing and Bricolage}

\Q{Every message is made of signs: correspondingly, the science of signs termed \e{semiotic} deals with those general principles which underlie the structure of all.}
\Qs{Jakobson}

\Q{\ld Human beings communicate by non-verbal means which must consequently be said to be either non-linguistic (although the mode of language remains formative and dominant) or which must have the effect of \dq{stretching} our concept of language until it includes non-verbal areas, in fact such \dq{stretching} is precisely the great achievement of semiotics.}
\Qs{Terence Hawkes}

\Q{\ld in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chains of signified in such a way to counter the terror of uncertain signs.}
\Qs{Barthes}

\Q{What semiotics has discovered is that the law governing or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e., that it is articulated like a language.}
\Qs{Julia Kristeva}

\ehdr{[]}{}{Teleconference as Small Group}

\sideblock{An aside: Thus far Brendan's text assumes the characteristic identity of the cybernetic adept. It has pointed out and defined the cybernetic controls lodged in the value system created by this exchange. The \e{bricoleur} accepts and adopts these definitions, in the main; where he feels an urge to add or (presumes to) modify a definition he will enter into the glossary of terms next to the existing definition(s).}

Taking the cue from Kristeva's \dq{major constraints affecting any social practice,} teleconferencing is a novel social practice. It is, for that matter, creating artifacts and clues to its own branch of micro-sociology. As social practice, teleconferencing seems unique in its wobbly balance of oppositional dynamics. It is as if perched between \e{gemeinschaft} (the primary face-to-face community of \dq{home} and \dq{family}) and \e{gesellschaft} (the impersonal, bureaucratic society, or socio-technological order). The \e{gemeinschaft-gesellschaft} divide is a logical type of social relationship designed to embrace any society from the tiniest village to post-industrial society. Teleconferencing (in this sense) is anomalous and unique in that it \e{involutes} the primary face-to-face sense of community through the medium of an impersonal (remote) technology (a small group defined as not more than 15 in this instance). The very fact that the product is text printed on a scroll only adds to and encodes the sense of social anomaly. The social engagement is prototypical in its combination of \e{intimacy} and \e{opacity} of \e{digital remove.}

Accordingly, Parsons fits all social relations into the following (paraphrased) categories:
\begitems\spaced\style n
* \e{norms} or standards which may be \dq{universalistic} or \dq{particularistic}.
* \e{statuses} which can be achieved via work or education, ascribed or assigned.
* \e{roles} which may be specified, like that of teacher (or moderator), or diffuse, like that of father (or adept).
* \e{emotions} which are neutral or impartial, affective or partial.
\enditems

\ehdr{Harithas}{[2/25/81]}{}

I must confess to having certain expectations about the teleconferencing process itself, involving its potential to enhance and expand whatever input. Before I get into this, we need to understand its potential for making art. Is \dq{computer space,} for example, analogous to that of the primed and gessoed canvas which symbolizes the essential coherence and purity of consciousness. Is it like the space of the cathode ray tube read as sanctified ground. In forms as secular as Pop and video, the obvious commercialism notwithstanding, the context is procedural. The results may be different from their commercial counterparts, revealing themselves through symbolic forms and\slash or rituals unique to art.

\ehdr{O'Regan}{[3/4/81]}{A Scroll to the Scholar}

Twixt cathode and canvas lies an invisible rub, a roomy space with great delusion, deluge, delinquent derivations of mindscape removed from skeletal coordinates---a floating place where too much may seem unforbidden but not all permitted. The output is structured, but the interior free for the wandering. Some fear to wander, others suspect the wanderer! Imagine it axonally, synaptic flash and all! Consider it neuronally, blind alleys appall! Behold Akasha! More words than brains can hold. The empirical residue has evaporated.

\ehdr{Harithas}{[3/15/81]}{}

I would like to begin my formal relationship with the teleconference with a statement about what I shall attempt to contribute to it. Following my last entry, I wish to further clarify my ideas about the relation between the computer process and art. I wish to isolate and explore the mental process and images which belong to such aesthetic formats as Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop, the media-derived forms of the past 10 years, in order to see if and how they can be communicated through the teleconferencing process. For example, a \dq{Surrealist} analysis may involve a factual description of a particular location derived from a geographical survey, a textual account of a mythological event, and a synthetic or unrelated sound tract. This may be conveyed as pure narrative, also as random collage such that all elements are present in discontinuous relationships.

\ehdr{Steven Poser}{[3/16/81]}{}

The mixed quality of participation and observation of communication in teleconference suggests the analogy of a field of particles (as units of display, transmission, retrieval) that expand in density and elongate in time with instantaneous access to the past, a self-correcting universe moving from chaos to order.

In real time, the conference occurs to me as another place to be---contemporaneous and parallel, but allowing for travel back in time, thus historical as well. \e{Question} What is special about teleconferencing, and why is that interesting? I would adopt this provisional policy: a natural bias against unmotivated jargon, \dq{unearned} theoretical machinery, the appearance of meaning. My first problem was discovering how to talk, how to establish an implicit etiquette of discourse. I have more sympathy now for what Frank is up to. But that doesn't eliminate the need for consensus about unifying issues.

At this stage it would forfeit any possible outcome to be seduced by surrealist practice which would allow the conference to take on the figure of an exquisite corpse. Perhaps collaboration on the glossary will become the dominant subtext or repository for some emergent definitions.

\ehdr{[]}{[3/24/81]}{}

I would like to test some hunches and make explicit my own interests in our exchange. I put them in the form of two substantive theses:

\begitems\spaced\style n
* That there are very strong conceptual ties between a philosophy of mind and a philosophy of art and thus between the questions of \dq{what is thinking?} and \dq{what is art making?}
* That insofar as cybernetic concepts and models bear on the recasting of old problems toward the development of a new philosophy of mind (and\slash or epistemology of the organism, e.g., suggesting a direction or the evolution of consciousness), they are inherently and immediately relevant to the question of what art is, ought to be, and can be. And thus go to the heart of what aesthetics is supposed to be about. (Cf. Frank's glossary entry on \e{aesthetics})
\enditems

I believe that in some refined version of their intended meaning all these things are true and near the collective heart of the matter.

Is our subject the means of communication and how the conference is to be conducted? Then we are courting reflexivity, recursiveness and self-scrutiny which may deter more than help our purposes. We may get fixated on the idea that the conference is immediately an embodiment of a collective mental process, made possible by a new instrument of communication technology.

Are we engaged in creation of a collective artwork or not? If the conference proceeds on the level of ideas, it is a collective inquiry, not a collective artwork. If the resulting document is a kind of literature, that's fine; but how do we proceed as participants? The problem is this: We are using a new means of communication which allows for unprecedented modes of interaction and exchange, accelerated by speed of access and retrieval, unbound by constraints of time and space. Are we to take \e{that} as our subject and develop its epistemology and pragmatics; or do we take the technology directly into the context of art, art-making practice, and the nature of the museum?

Perhaps it is only a matter of emphasis. I don't propose to make hard distinctions, but we must discriminate between two descriptions of what we're doing:

\begitems\spaced\style A
* talking about the aesthetic implications of these kinds of systems, and
* talking about the implications of these kinds of systems for aesthetic theory.
\enditems

Our agenda is at stake here. By the first description, we ought to talk about the formal, technical, and conceptual nature of the medium of the teleconference as well as telecommunications and \dq{systems theory} along with associated pragmatic dimensions (political, psychological, etc.) in this domain.

By the second description, we should be immediately interested in the question of whether such systems give shape and access to information in ways that are relevant to thinking about \e{art,} \e{the creative process,} \e{the nature of the museum.} My feeling is that we are shooting for the second, and picking up whatever we need from the first, almost by necessity. The sense of a collective manifold of input and response (the manner in which we have chosen to conduct the conference) guarantees that the medium will be an aspect of its own subject.

\ehdr{O'Regan}{[4/6/81]}{}

Steven's last message asks legitimate questions but sets up curious circularities of argument. It is legitimate to ask: Is our subject the means of communication? This translates to: Is the only thing we are trying to do is engage in discourse about the process of teleconferencing and the conduct of a \dq{electronic discourse} about the nature of electronically mediated communication?

I hope not. It is one of our problems to get beyond being hypnotized by the details and fascination of the process in order to create collective understanding and agreement about how it can impact on or be a part of the art-making process. For those who have a high level of independent familiarity with the uses of these systems, for the purpose of communication and interaction designed to achieve other goals, such discourse would rapidly take the form of discussion on the construction of appropriate means for turning this medium into a tool suitable for the creation of art---either in forms familiar to us or unknown.

Since we are at this learning stage with the present participants, there has to be a period for the mutual creation of metaphors to guide use of this system. Given the present level of familiarity with these kinds of systems, it seems inevitable that there must be a period of Type (A) which must precede a period of Type (B).

For me, however, the goal leads toward the following:

The initiation of a collective, electronically mediated mental process to explore the aesthetic implications of this form of communication. This activity should be conducted \e{simultaneously} with several different inter-disciplinary groups, with carefully defined overlap among them. This process stands or falls on the ability of different groups to participate in the collective nature of the medium past the point of initiation.

\break
\sec 4/8/81--4/15/81

\ehdr{Gillette}{[4/8/81]}{Re: Toward a Circulus Methodicus of Interconnection}

From the player's vantage, the teleconference process derives from the engagement of metaphor and metonymy. The present juncture should be firmly grasped as a shift from a wealth of sources (often referred to as resources) to a redeployment of such sources in such manner as to recirculate their initial dissonance, or freshness in discontinuous context. The activity itself is a sufficient metaphor for summing up all the recorded dialogues and \dq{texts} within the multiple purviews of the cultures within the particular reach of teleconferencing itself. From here the system of keyboard, phone link, phantom satellite, shared time network, et al, is a proto-medium for cerebral savagery.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Teleconferencing as Neologic}

\Q{Neological theory holds that there is an interrelatedness about the world which means that almost anything may turn out to be relevant to something else, if looked at in a different light.}
\Qs{Paul Cheney}

Neologic contemplates the preverbal \e{milieux} of thought in which any particular experience was stored as a memory of what it sounded like, how old it was, in what season it happened, how hairy, how soft, how hard, etc.

When confronted with a conventional or traditional logical impasse, operational neologic advocates judgement-suspension, silence and soliloquy, distraction, and irrelevance. One uses peripheral reading, environmental scanning, metaphorical play and accidents.

\Q{\ld the essence of aesthetic transposition, let us say of aesthetic promotion, is to introduce onto the plane of the \e{significant} something which does not exist under this mode or under this aspect in its uncultured state\ld}
\Qs{Levi-Strauss}

\ehdr{[]}{[4/14/81]}{Re: Teleconferencing and Operational Identity}

\Q{\ld the individual observation assumes the character of a fact only when it can be related to other, analogous observations in such a way that the whole series 'makes sense'. This sense is, therefore, fully capable of being applied, as a control, to the interpretation of a new individual observation within the same range of phenomena\ld  if, however, this new individual observation definitely refuses to be interpreted according to the 'sense' of the series\ld the 'sense' of the series will have to be reformulated to include the new individual observation.}
\Qs{Panofsky}

Kuhn speaks of a \e{normal science} as any discourse which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; \e{abnormal discourse} is any which lacks such criteria. This teleconference is a manifestation of \e{abnormal discourse}. The \dq{problematics} of each teleconference \dq{message} tends to deflect the attention from the actual information in the entries themselves. The accumulated effects of the total entries of all the players would yield more than a circular wandering simply in search of explanations of the experience of experience.

There is the crude proto-beginnings of the \e{motif index}. There is the actual \e{cash value} of the \dq{content} of each of the entries taken individually or within particular patterns of context. There is primary data on the micro-sociology of this \dq{abnormal discourse.} There is the whole hairy issue (apparently an upsetting one) of defining an operational identity \dq{on the line} so to speak.

Bergson's \dq{emergent evolution} says essentially: When two or more simple (basic) entities come (fall) together they may add up in unexpected ways. This simple notion is an operating assumption of bricoleurity.

More operating assumptions: This medium (including its network aspect) is the vehicle for linkages between coincidence, chance, seriality and synchronicity (and potentially the syncopation of models, concepts, methods and epistemes). The first stage, \e{linkages}, is still in progress and is characterized by fragmentary tactics of \e{bricolage}. The next stage, \e{syncopation}, will probably be characterized less by \e{bricolage} and will be neological in its formal arrangements and refinements (including results from the kind of contingencies that now seem useless).

All this rests on the deeper assumption that art is the chief agency of \e{discontinuity} in human affairs, and that \e{discontinuity} has a vital function in the very existence of the species and is central to its survival. Art, from this perch, is the carrier of periodic, or cyclic, interventions in the equilibrium of things.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: Conventions in the Techno-Public Domain}

How do we navigate the flow of definitions and divisions, the sort-crossings emerging from the ground of textual exchange? What kinds of \dq{filters} are possible for elevating the \dq{chance} couplings of context\slash meaning into formal expressions in their own right, independent of the \e{chance} nature of their genesis?

A central feature of teleconferencing formalism is that, in part, it is a species of \dq{inner space} and, in part, \dq{techno-public domain.} (A natural meeting ground for solipsistic imperialism of every stripe.) How does this feature, the singular synthesis of public and private, determine the \dq{shape} of its information?

When each player in the network defines a distinct operational bias and embodies a set of individual working methods, how will a successful consensus emerge and evolve? How do we design a way to achieve consensus?

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: The Double Axis}

\dq{\ld a throw of dice will never abolish chance\ld} said our precursor Mallarmé. I am pulled to linguistics again in search of metaphors of the \dq{sensed} structure emerging in the content of this exchange. Jakobson's distinction between \dq{aesthetic} and \dq{referential} language seems apt and naturally fits in the following way: \dq{Poetic} language projects relationships or equivalence on the \e{paradigmatic} axis (the axis of \e{selection} and \e{substitution}) and the \e{syntagmatic} axis (the axis of \e{combination}) simultaneously.

Teleconferencing, as a \dq{command} activity, is double-axial in the same way. Players can operate within the distinct axial domains separately and linearly in Jakobson's referential sense. Or they can operate within and between the axis in random or stochastic ways, Jakobson's aesthetic sense.

\Q{If one calls \e{bricolage} the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text or a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is \e{bricoleur}.}
\Qs{Derrida}

\Q{The blurring of boundaries is not good in itself\ld\ promiscuous or hybrid\ld\ forms can easily degenerate, yet such forms are the crucible from which new and discriminating achievements have traditionally come.}
\Qs{Geoffrey Hartman}

It would appear as if Wittgenstein's \dq{language is a way of picturing} were subject to inversion: How is the picture a way of making language or \dq{languaging?}

\ehdr{[]}{[4/15/81]}{Re: Epistemorphs and Dramatistic Tension}

In the phrase of another idiom, the total discourse so far is a search for a systems architecture---a method, once stable and efficient for scanning, selecting, and integrating the combinatorial elements entered into the teleconference \dq{space} by other players, and preoccupied with different methods, other bias, separately defined needs, et al.

\e{Epistemorph} is defined as any entry into the teleconference discourse that although altered or qualified by other methods, enters the motif index of innumerable such entries (points) in a set of unequal, shifting interrelations. Thus the \e{epistemorph} is understood as the minimal meaningful unit of information (formalized or raw). At this juncture in the teleconference the \e{epistemorph} is restricted to the textual statement, but an \e{epistemorph} is potentially a diagram, an image, a text, a combination of the three.

An \e{epistemorph} is a conceptual tableau directed toward synesthesia.

Entries are described as \e{epistemorphic} when they are assertions about \e{knowing} as it bears on the conceptual-intersecting taking place at any point in the discourse. Thus the \ul{\dq{natural selection}} of \e{epistemorphs} by some inclusive (and\slash or transcending) contingencies measuring survival (or \dq{cash-value}).

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: The Engineer vs. Homo Ludens}

\vskip 1em
\centerline{View \dq{A}}
\vskip 1em

The actual and potential structure of teleconferencing is an opportune extension and enhancement of the pre-existing ways and means (methods) employed by various special cases: weather forecasting, psycholinguistics, mathematics, cybernetics, semiotic \dq{practice}---whatever. This makes better specialists by organizing data, bringing their respective clans new senses of unity or infrastructure, thereby making their progress more swift and sure. That is, from this vantage point, teleconferencing is a technological advancement which accelerates processes already in place. It will help mathematicians calculate, cyberneticians cybernate, managers manage.

\vskip 1em
\centerline{View \dq{B}}
\vskip 1em

This view concedes the compelling necessity of view \dq{A.} Yet it prefers to understand teleconferencing and related technologies in terms suggested by the inherent and open nature of the experience: to view the process heuristically; to see it as a tabula rasa; to develop procedures of wandering and play; to see it in its own right, for its own sake, but to see it askance as well.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: The Redundancy of Potential Command}

Levi-Strauss defines a code as a means of \dq{fixing signification by transposing them into terms of other significations.}

After this much hands-on experience, I can imagine each player as a code-maker, or codifier, developing multiple lines of conceptual and paradigmatic counterpoint evolving simultaneously with no single line predominating. \dq{Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy,}(Kenneth Burke) the players (each with a distinct operational style) would fulfill to the analogous \dq{letter} Warren McCulloch's \e{redundancy of potential command}.

Structurally, a player's \e{theater-of-operation} (the relation between differences) states and demonstrates complex and unpredictable analogies of experience. There is no a priori \dq{command} structure. Command becomes a function of selection. All players in the teleconference have an equal dose of potential command. At any given point in the actual discourse itself command will reside with one or a grouping of players, depending on ground rules, pragmatics, and the random unknown.

From this interplay of sensory barbs an index of \e{epistemorphs} results, as if by \dq{secretion.}

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: Metaphor and Metonymy}

A return to analogies of binary opposition, contrastive exchange, and dialectical (or dramatistic) tension in order to approximate actual and potential processes experienced in teleconferencing: The computer network generates associations by sensed likenesses (metaphors) and associations of juxtaposed unlikenesses (metonymies). This division underlies any substitution set in language, but it also is the logical prerequisite for the formation of any system out of any elements. With metaphor the justification for a connection is the similarity (or resemblance) that is sensed to exist between things, while metonymy is a means of connecting things by the notion of their temporal and spatial dissonance, by their juxtaposition. Metaphor is equated with \dq{sensed identity.} Metonymy is equated with a conceived (or perceived) difference \e{plus} \dq{necessary interrelationship.} Combinations and permutations generated by \dq{entry} choices exercised by the players constitute another, separate level of metaphor and metonymy which is independent of the players' intentions. Another bifurcation: the metaphors and metonymies designed, articulated and entered by the players, \e{and} the metaphors and metonymies resulting from (derived from) the separate entries as they rub up against or interlock with each other without prior intention.

The second tier of metaphor and metonymy within the discourse will multiply asymptotically as the structure of the \dq{entries} expands to include the diagram and the image with its text.

\break
\sec 4/16/81--4/21/81 

\ehdr{Frank Gillette}{[4/16/81]}{Re: Proliferation of Sources}

\Q{The point at which the process [proliferation] begins, or rather at which growth begins, is the point at which ambiguity has been reached. The ambiguity that is so favorable to the poetic mind is precisely the ambiguity favorable to resemblance.}
\Qs{Wallace Stevens}

\Qs{Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace upon the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.}
\Qs{Virginia Woolf}

\Q{The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the \e{whole} existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.}
\Qs{T.S. Eliot}

\Q{Every image is a restatement of the subject of the image in the terms of an attitude.}
\Qs{Wallace Stevens}

\ehdr{[]}{[4/20/81]}{Re: Teleconferencing and Binary Analogs}

Among other things there is a potential for a sub-discourse in the relative methodological peculiarities of science and art (and\slash or science versus art).

Kierkegaard answered Hegel by opposing the impersonal rationality of history with the irrational reality of the individual. The dynamics initiated by these antipodes (complete with the \dq{personality traits} of each) continues to exist in the present. The teleconference \dq{space} is the theater-of-operations in which these antipodal orientations engage each other's \dq{texts.}

\dq{Text} is understood as a body of \dq{data} in any sort of units or elements: sounds played, phones uttered, acts effected, colors applied, sentences written, stars contemplated, geographical features surveyed, which smack of systematization, given an observer. From such units or elements, systematically apprehended, are derived music, speech, actions, paintings, paragraphs, constellations, maps, respectively. (Re: Levi-Strauss, Boon, et al)

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: Parallels between Teleconferencing et al and Video}

If our \dq{reality} is merely a subset of possibilities, then, in Barthes' words \dq{techniques are developed and intended to fix the floating chain of signified in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.} Video can be appreciated as the means to a radical naturalism grounded in observational method and ways of viewing. It fixes (records) specific events which are basically undifferentiated from the unrecorded (unfixed) specific events around them. By juxtaposing sets of observed events in \dq{real time,} a novel range of intentional and non-intentional associations and meanings emerges. How or why one image is \dq{selected} over another, or how and why one image is recontextualized with another, is a matter of subjective codes and ciphers employed by the observer. The \dq{observer} in video and the player in teleconferencing are parallel.

The \dq{teleframe,} the monitor's convex and sinosoidal screen, delivers a phenomenalist paradox with every image, whatever its content. There is an impacted spacial immediacy accompanied by a temporal anteriority (or temporal remoteness) with every synchronized duration of images. \e{Spacial immediacy} and \e{temporal anteriority}, experienced simultaneously, is the equivalent to having the sense of \e{being there} with the sense of \e{having-been-there}.

Barthes calls the photograph (and by extension: cinema and video) a \dq{decisive mutation} of the \dq{informational economies.} \dq{The denoted image naturalizes the symbolic message\ld} In video the symbolic or connotative message unfolds in real time (heard as well as seen) via subjectively chosen signs composed of angle-of-vision, focal length, orientation to horizon, frame composition. It is possible therefore to speak of the density of connotation in a given video composition. The complexity of symbolic (or connoted) elements is reflected in the flow of natural (or factual) denoted events. What is represented becomes transformed by virtue of the method or strategy of representation.

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: Transformations Across Systems of Sensory Orders}

\Q{\ld their inscription in networks of generalities infinitely articulated in the genealogies of a structure of whose crossweaving, coupling, switching, detouring, branching can never be derived merely by a semantic or formal rule\ld}
\Qs{Derrida}

Premise: Art and science possess radically distinct epistemic affiliations. Practices within the domain of one or the other establish a different \e{kind} of knowledge. Art and science represent competing epistemologies. This terminal---Texas Instruments model 765 with bubble memory (hard and soft network) is an instrument of science. It is imbued with the perceptual bias and cognitive habits of the normally practiced \dq{scientific method.} The hunch is that art's ways and means are sufficiently protean to complement the paradox of \e{terminal adaptation.} \dq{Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor of that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.} (Julian Jaynes)

\ehdr{[]}{}{Re: The Core of the Matter}

\Q{In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity.}
\Qs{Simone Weil}

Teleconferencing, as currently constituted, has produced its own kind of conceptual metric. Its chief characteristics lie in the vagaries of ambivalent ebb and flow. What's going in is uncertain, and the rules for uncertainty are found in the powers of irrelevant thinking. An increase in certainty (explicit goals, minimum contingency) will be accompanied by an increase in coherent relevance. Until this threshold is established and/or synchronized, play is atomized among players and, when present, reflects a player's own particulars which the uncertainty of the situation has drawn. This condition rubs up against what is central to the process, the issue of identity, or a defined and expressed \e{modus operandi} evident in the actual text of the teleconference.

Thus far two distinct positions have emerged: the \e{Cybernetic Adept} and the \e{Bricoleur}.

The \e{Cybernetic Adept's} position is clear:

It associates the descriptive principles of cybernetics with ideal operational methods in teleconferencing. The shift to a more complex and inclusive procedure is seen as the result of a more expanded and efficient utilization of already available alternatives or as a result of the introduction of new hardware. The Cybernetic Adept is alert to the nuances of change in computer and allied technologies, possessing a most sophisticated grasp of what is practicable and when. Naturally, this provides for a quick and sure grasp of what is potentially possible, given the circumstances.

The \e{Bricoleur's} position is less clear:

Whereas the Cybernetic Adept is direct, the Bricoleur throws curves, beginning with an intuition of necessity that originates in the actual experience of the terminal sending\slash receiving entries. Its working hypothesis is that the \dq{network} creates a field of metaphoric interconnections apprehended as an intangible theater-of-operations whose limits and boundaries are unknown, but knowable. 

\ehdr{Poser}{[4/21/81]}{}

Brendan's phrase \dq{the expansion of the aesthetic text} sticks in my mind. My best guess is that this \dq{text} is the constellation of sensibilities, concepts of what constitutes the work of art, ideas about its syntax, its mode of address to the audience, how it means, the conceptual shape and poetics of objects that would link them to a particular historical sensibility. It would include a sense of strategy, of conviction as to its formal shape and sufficiency, the sense of wholeness and meaningfulness that prompts its being put forward as a work.

Then he says that there has been no \dq{direct expansion of the aesthetic text that both stems from and embraces the new technologies}---that efforts to date have simply \dq{added them on as effects for reasons which emanated from the aesthetic text before the advent of these possibilities.}

I take this to mean that, as a matter of historical fact, the uses of new technologies have been basically ornamental or pressed into the service of an extrinsic or preconceived aesthetic. The contrast is to an immanent aesthetic, one that is discovered within the medium as a consequence of investigating its specific nature and special properties. I am wary of the idea that significant advances in sensibility, in scientific model-making, and creative work generally are best thought of in terms of the medium they are expressed in. Yet acquisition of a new instrument can be catalytic in the formation of new ideas. Brendan writes that what we're doing stems from and is directly within some of the newest technology available which makes possible a conscious expansion of the aesthetic text.

Specifically, we are involved with the means of collapsing the processes of time, space, and information. But what is the nature of the expansion inherent in that collapse?

I am interested in Bateson, for example, because within his work are the rudiments of a new picture of the psyche. If anything in history gives us a new idea of what art is, it is a new model of the nature of the mind. If epistemology can be understood as part of the natural history of the human species, then we are at the access points to new ideas about art, thinking, and creative activity. Cybernetic modes will influence aesthetics, but only a new brain can make new art.

One recent example of \dq{expansion of the aesthetic text} is the appropriation of the context of sculpture which allowed artists to see sculptural form in processes, activities, and events extended and disembodied in time and space. This clear conceptual leap brings into existence a new object and creates a new ontology by which to \dq{frame} new objects.

The questions we are addressing here (and I take many of Frank's entries this way) are procedural: How do we formulate, by our participation in a teleconference, a poetics of thought and interaction that gives content to new concepts of shapeliness? Are these concepts immanent in the technology or do they rather adhere to the climate of mind around these instruments? The technology seems to offer a way of reconceptualizing the realm of the mind; since art-making and the total experience of art seems most like a form of thought, if our models of the mind and organism evolve, so must the ecology of art.