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- Apr 11, 12Some thoughts on the New Aesthetic.
A few days ago Bruce Sterling posted an “Essay on the New Aesthetic”, summing up his most recent thoughts after a panel at SXSW, similarly titled “The New Aesthetic – Seeing like digital devices”. The focal point of definition for this New Aesthetic is well documented and a gestalt emerges quite quickly on the New Aesthetic tumblr, a juxtaposition of quotes, images, sensations, videos highlighting myriad examples of that which its curators are recognizing is already happening.
In short, New Aesthetic touches in some sense the bleeding of the virtual dimension into the actual and our increasing reflection of our own methods of sensing in machines, and vice versa. What’s surprising about Bruce’s usually sardonic critique of modern culture is that he acknowledges his own excitement and novelty with NA, that perhaps it does indeed holds the potential for something new…
I’ve felt this viscerally on spacecollective through these past years. We’ve watched the work of Andy Gilmore reflect us into fractal gradients, Xaos exploring on his canvas the poiesis of becoming, Gavin Keech exploring the hypersciences through the lens of experience, Gabriel Shalom in our many conversations about digital aura recognition (AUREC), hypercubism & object orientation and Wildcat recontextualizing the role of the knowmad in relation to aesthetics.
Robin Sloan boils it down to a general axiom(?) of NA on her blog:
the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once
…it becomes clear you aren’t aiming for fidelity in these transitions from physical to digital and back. That’s where your work gets exposed to a whole new set of tools—really, a whole new physics.
However there are several conceptual hurdles that require consideration and recontextualization that need to occur before I can rally behind the New Aesthetic. Our hybrid futures imply that we are moving at a pace of transformation to which we are little aware on a moment by moment basis.
The Machinomorphic Counter-strike
In 1957, Russel Kirsch took the first digital photo – a 5x5cm picture of his infant son. When deciding how to render the ones and zeros, Kirsch decided on the seemingly logical choice at the time — square pixels. For this, he apologizes.
“The logical thing was not the only possibility,” Kirsch said. Those pixels could have been any shape he desired. But he went with square; a decision he has since described as “something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.” (full article)
In the fascination of ‘seeing like machines’, we have been anthropomorphizing our machines, imbuing them with very human metaphors. What’s not recognized as widely is the backwash – the feedback and echoes of machinomorphic [PDF] influence – where we begin to associate the qualities of machines into our conception of ourselves. Pixels have a harsh, grinding feel to them, utterly unnatural considering there are no straight lines in nature, gestalt is not linear, nor binary – yet in our mad digitalization of our experience, of course we grab onto this, the most glaringly obvious representation of the prison of our sensory experience to break loose of these relative freedoms. Machine vision must push beyond the prison of the rectangle, and that’s why we’re shredding and bleeding our media and its representations, grind it, shatter it, work to break through to something more organic.
A chunk of Bruce’s essay nearer to the end demands a recontextualization of our relationship with machines:
I will hammer that iron nail a bit more, in case you aren’t getting it yet. Because this is the older generation’s crippling hangup with their alleged “thinking machines.” When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having “thought,” “memory,” and nowadays “sight” and “hearing.” Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see.
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.
When establishment becomes artificial and possibility begoes natural, process flows being. Implicit in the arrival at the phrase which can potentially embody and arrive at a recontextualized aesthetic, is a departure, from what we know and have known. these realizations are what we encase as objects, juxtaposing through fluid curation that together, reveals a certain directionality, trajectory that we are still grasping at.
The sensing of objects within the construct of machines still lacks a cohesive ontology – ontologies are about structuring meaning, and we humans have difficulty enough coming to common agreements by way of our differently evolved subjectivities and contexts, we are a long ways from providing machines with the conceptual substrate to handle the complexity of human intersubjectivity. The intersubjectivity of any context, indeed to have a consensus reality, depends on our ability to come to agreements about meaning – we struggle with the very first step -with methods of classification of objects, and defining their relations, as this need for context induces a sort of multiplexed fragmentation. We struggle with methods of classification of objects, and defining their relations, as the need for context induces a sort of multiplexed fragmentation. The question of intelligence in our machines, a morbid fascination playing with the uncanny valley, at the same time inviting us to engage with it as higher and higher resolution refractions bounce around the collective subconscious (which also must exist if there is to be any ‘collectively intelligent’). Sterling calls us to engage with machines as they are, not how we would imbue them with our characteristics or vice versa.
These objects, somewhat objects of our desire, are comprised of processes, nested within each other at varying layers of abstraction. What is even more profound, only being hinted at, at least in the conversation surrounding the New Aesthetic, is the machine computability of our cultural activity and archetypal interpretations by machines, natural language processing, entity extraction, semantic tech and hybrids like amazon’s mechanical turk. It is not just the geographical or physical machine vision but the cultural, that we must think deeply and tread carefully in relation with machines, lest we eat our own tails in a pornographic desire to get to know ourselves through the technological immediation of machine-processed experience. Our own vision – physiological, cultural, social – is being refracted through the fractures in our ability to conceive the implications of the different lenses we view technology through – never quite familiar and sometimes difficult keeping our equilibrium in such a fast-changing landscape.
In meantime the examples of NA continue to become more fluid, integrated, in going deeper into that glitch we’ve found its not actually all that glitchy once you get in there, that is, more like a phase space or grey area, between on/off, yes/no, not pinpointed at a specific coordinate but rather multiple possibilities in a spectrum of coordinates. Daito Manabe’s various collaborations exemplify this blend uniquely, in turns haunting, frantic, ghostly, yet even more real because of it, immediately taking us to a liminal space. Liminality is key to NA, because it is that inbetween that enables us to explore our intuition, NA can, at its best open a door for us to inhabit this liminal space between virtual and actual, reflect our interpretation the happenings of now predictively to expand our awareness.
The New Aesthetic is Infosyn-aesthetic
Derived from latin, synaesthesia is broken down into “syn”, which means union, and “esthesia”, sensation. A union of sensation. When used as a common term, synesthesia is used to describe the condition of when someone is aware of their senses mixing. In other words, the stimulation of one sense will trigger a response in another sense.
Synesthesia is not something that has been added, but has always existed. A multisensory awareness is something that has been lost from conscious awareness in the majority of people….We know more that we think we know. The multisensory, synesthetic view of reality is only one things that we are sure has been lost from consciousness. – Dr. Richard Cytowic
The addition of info-, the union of information and sensation. Our new sensors and extension of our senses into the domain of the virtual, gives us the conceptual construct to interact with information therefore extending our relations and conception of the environment, each other and ourselves. The emergence of this hyperconnectivity fundamentally changes the dynamics of human interaction through morphing our symbolic languages. We desperately need to upgrade our current conceptions of communication, on the fly, now and forever more.
The role of cultivating these sensitivities is that of the aesthetic curators of information, as critical relevancies and metabolic reactors within an infocology (information ecology), engaged in aesthetic management. Working towards something more inherently flexible, capable of unmanagement, free flowing with immersion into the rawness of humanity. Lets build upon these signature decay trails, their radiation showing aesthetics, also in respect to establishment’s departure, into arrival of new ways…
We need new semantic and ontological frameworks to exchange meaning within and across infocologies. As we more deeply engage and interact with each other, information and our environment, a new, infosynaesthetic language is emergent through hyperconnectivity. It is in becoming that the New Aesthetic emerges, and it is emergent, for if there’s one thing to realize about our nascent infosyn-aesthetic, it is that it throws into questions the nature of networked identities, the blend of flesh and information, data, matter and the overlay of realities that result. Out of this we desire to recontextualize and understand the meaning of our relationship and evolution of our sense interfaces and our language, and the vast impact they have on our culture, politics, society as a whole.
life+ / work+ / play+ saturate in real and virtual. mind and body fuse with reality and dream. organism and environment continually connect. chemicals and frequency pulse rapidly so flow between is unity with such intense distance that requirement is recursively created to seamlessly evolve together to revive identities morphing. – @entpm
…we may now understand aesthetics as requiring an unsettling of knowledge, a dynamic, and transformative quality of engagement with the world. In this sense, Aesthetics can be said to be the foundation of our understanding the inter-subjective relational experience we have with the world. Aesthetics I see as that which disturbs the obvious, disconcerts the known, unsettles the clear and provides a way ahead in our realization of ourselves both as individuals as a culture and as a species… – Wildcat
The paradigms with which we experience information are driven by the glitches – those things rendered explicit and obvious by time and space. The artworks that are being classified as NA embody this, and whether intentionally or unintentionally call attention to an attempt for us humans at normalisation – the persistence of a contextual aesthetic ground, that is always tending to firm up on us.
NA can and should strive to have a center which is always moving – resisting crystallization while at the same time calling our attention to it. The deterritorialization of that which we know we know, or think we know. Saccades crystallize. blinking helps sight. The analog to digital smoothers are active, the seeds of which have been planted already, literally, in those being born in 2012, those who will be born into a mass-customizable, rapidly evolving ever increasing info mass. We, those already born, need to understand how we can keep pace with changing paradigms of interaction with the world on the fly, and implied in that, its influence the structure of our mind and culture itself.
Fluid, Fractal and Holographic
What we’re experiencing is exaptive, form and nonform – transforming aesthetics into tangible intangibles. Morphing between virtual and actual, before and after a particular moment has subsided in experience. As we are building these interfaces for experiential navigation of data and information for minds and intelligences to integrate with, hindsights, insights, foresights and evolution become conscious communication mechanisms to evolve upon ourselves, by living and interacting. Hyperconnectivity reveals the fluid, fractal and holographic nature of not data or information or content but experience, this itself morphs through evolutionary permutations as our code spaces are changed, modified, interpreted and re-encoded as signals and resonance.
Before being a theory aesthetics is an action, the action of undeterred insistence in refurnishing becoming.
Before being a theory aesthetics requires the necessary non-act of disclosing a shape of silence in and around minds, in and around things.
Before being a theory aesthetics is an inter-action, the empathic weaving of threads across the frontier between visible and invisible, the ephemeral mind of beyond born of encounter.
Thus before being a theory Aesthetics is possibly about the apex of our action as humans.
Aesthetics is the verb of curating becoming. – Xaos
Becoming is of emergent properties of past affinities of influence; begoing is synchronized with the emergent properties of future affinities – both of these, in reconciliation to factors of time’s relative constraints.
The quality of being, as an aesthetic phenomenon, is radically altered in the age of hyperconnectivity in a fashion that prominently features the art of becoming, not as the mimesis of an other that is not authentic, but in a fashion that re-describes the extended narrative of the individual into a multiplicity of authentic beings.
We call for the founding of a fresh narrative about our relationship with and through technology. The relevance of the New Aesthetic perhaps may be that we never try too hard to look at it directly in the eyes (which ones for that matter?), but rather keep it on the periphery of our vision, less an object but a presence, a process, and cultivate an aesthetic ground on which our senses stand. Perhaps it better be kept elusive.
New problems are continually built. Dissolving of problems builds from their solutions, formulae of creations to navigate experience beyond our relative constraints. The possible beauty of our future lies in our hands, in our very own capability to transform ourselves into curators of interest and aesthetic intelligence, a transmutation in the manner we understand the world and cohere a complexity that unfolds before us.
The New Aesthetic might not be a ‘thing’ at all. it might just be about freedom.
i don’t think i’ll settle for anything less.
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many thanks to Xaos, Wildcat, and Gavin Keech for the use of their wordplay and phrases i have taken the liberty of incorporating into this essay.
Image 1: Face Projection by Daito Manabe
Image 2: Abundance Mechanics by Gavin Keech
Image 3: the first digital image, scanned by Russel Kirsch in 1957 of his son
Image 4: Biostructure 2 by Abhominal
Image 5: Untitled by Xaos
- Mar 15, 12
by @notthisbody and @jonhaidt
“The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.”
Jonathan Haidt
This video was created to accompany Prof. Jonathan Haidt’s talk on TED titled
//Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence// see the talk herePsychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer.
Jonathan Haidt studies how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and open-minded.
At TED2012 he’s combining his work on morality with his work on happiness to talk about “hive psychology” – the ability that humans have to lose in groups pursuing larger projects, almost like bees in a hive. This hivish ability Is crucial, he argues, for understanding the origins of morality, politics, and religion.
These are ideas that Haidt develops at greater length in his new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
(text from TED.com)
Concept and editing by //notthisbody
Music by //Gorowski //Mathew Haronian***********
A collaboration of /Jonathan Haidt and /Notthisbody incorporating:
/GavinKeech
/SethHunter
/DavidLackey
/flight404
/fiercelightfilms
/beeple
/joosboxTV
/brighteyecinema
/ChrisAbbas
/mindrelic
/MichaelRamsey
/babaBC
/MuratPak
/raisingmaggie
/AngelaPalmer
/yesterday2221
/PToskovic
/bettywantsin
/theimaginaryfoundation
/JohnHilcoat
/GenkiIto
/IgnacioTorres
/Ndesign
/KimPimmel
/shlohmo
/CherylColan
/KirbyFerguson
/PageStephenson
/footage from The Sagan Series
/footage from The Fayman Series
/footage from Carl Sagan Tribute Series - Dec 25, 11
by @notthisbody and @jason_silva
INSPIRATION:
Albert-László Barabási, author of LINKED, wants you to think about NETWORKS:
“Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties. On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species. And networks pervade technology: the Internet, power grids and transportation systems are but a few examples. Even the language we are using to convey these thoughts to you is a network, made up of words connected by syntactic relationships.”
‘For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together. In the past decade, an avalanche of research has shown that many real networks, independent of their age, function, and scope, converge to similar architectures, a universality that allowed researchers from different disciplines to embrace network theory as a common paradigm.’
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and liquid networks:
“Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and part of the argument is that we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up… when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents”
Patrick Pittman from Dumbo Feather adds:
“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.
“…Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.”
James Gleick, author of THE INFORMATION, has written how the cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding and how Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.. (Its an ECO-SYSTEM, an EVOLVING NETWORK)
“If you want to understand life,” Wrote Richard Dawkins, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” (AND THINK ABOUT NETWORKS!!
Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute, also believes in the pivotal role of NETWORKS:
“…Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city…. If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient.”
Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure.
An article in Reality Sandwich called Google a psychedelically informed superpowered network, a manifestation of the mycelial archetype:
“Recognizing this super-connectivity and conductivity is often accompanied by blissful mindbody states and the cognitive ecstasy of multiple “aha’s!” when the patterns in the mycelium are revealed. That Googling that has become a prime noetic technology (How can we recognize a pattern and connect more and more, faster and faster?: superconnectivity and superconductivity) mirrors the increased speed of connection of thought-forms from cannabis highs on up. The whole process is driven by desire not only for these blissful states in and of themselves, but also as the cognitive resource they represent.The devices of desire are those that connect,” because as Johnson says “CHANCE FAVORS THE CONNECTED MIND”.
Geoffrey WEST on The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations:
blog.ted.com/2011/07/26/qa-with-geoffrey-west/Stephen Johnson’s LONG VIEW
nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html?pagewanted=all
dumbofeather.com/blog/post/on-slime-molds-and-sewage-steven-johnson-s-origin-of-the-idea/
guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/19/steven-johnson-good-ideas?cat=science&type=articleBARABASI’s Scale Free Networks:
scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scale-free-networksManuel Lima’s Visual Complexity:
visualcomplexity.comPaul Stammets Myceilum is everywhere:
realitysandwich.com/google_and_myceliation_consciousness***********
A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating:
/Aaron Koblin
/Andrea Tseng
/Genki Ito
/ItoWorld
/Dominic
/Cheryl Colan
/TheNightElfik
/Paulskiart
/Grant Kayl
/blyon
/resonance
/gtAlumniMag
/Katie Armstrong
/Page Stephenson
/Jesse Kanda
/Jared Raab
/Angela Palmer
/elliottsellers
/flight404
/Pedro Miguel Cruz
/Takuya Hosogane
/kimpimmel
/Rob Whitwort - Oct 04, 11
A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating
/elliottsellers
/flight404
/dangoods
/proxelltv
/kimpimmel
/undream
/brighteyecinema
/hsgn
/beeple
/cerealspiller
/Tim Borgmann
/Shawn Knol
/Andrew Filippone Jr.
/Felix Norton-Barsalou
/Daniel Zagórski
/urbanintdesign - Sep 21, 11
by @notthisbody and @jason_silva
Creation besides being the opposite of annihilation, is the constant state of readjustment, repurposing and in that way curating – whether that be particles of thought, or feelings reflected in the bits of virtual representations. So we are just recontextualizing to reveal some patterns and point out to what is less obvious when we are glaring at the pieces from close and in their silo.
Which is what we did with this short remix/mash-up in collaboration with the performing philosopher Jason Silva.
“Ecstasy is the experience of becoming “epiphanized” by rapturous AWE. The goal of this video is to epiphanize you.” says Jason Silva about You are a Receiver.
***********
A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating:
/beeple
/clemento
/csisman
/flight404
/genki
/mato
/zfilms - Apr 25, 11
Our friends at Immersive Tech, a non-profit advocacy and network hub for immersive technologies, invited us to present at the “Era of Experience” – an informal evening of presentations and conversations by leaders in the space. It touches upon the subjects of data, interfaces and telesynaesthesia.
See the post and presentation on Metamaps.
- Jan 21, 11
After a successful 10 week mission to Haiti, the Floating Doctors have been docked in Roatan, Honduras for the last 6 months. This video provides a personal glimpse into their day-to-day operations, as well as what they’ve learned thus far, how they’ve grown as an organization and what lies in the near future.
- Nov 30, 10
CREDITS::
Artist :: Jai Uttal jaiuttal.com
Album :: Thunder LoveWith :: Nubia Teixeira, Ezra Gopal and Jai Uttal
Produced and Directed by Notthisbody
Director of photography :: Jason Joseffer jasonjoseffer.com
Asisstant Camera :: Jonathan McDermott and Genevieve Evans
Gaffer :: Keith PikusHuge thanks to all the community who made this video possible!
bit.ly/gePZ9mSpecial thanks to
Ashara Stansfield
Jennifer Fulton
Lisa Pfost - Nov 27, 10
What is Polytopia?
..a ground of engagement for all the ideas, initiatives, visions, predictions and prophecies that were spoken about there – a common ground of mutual respect.
Content: wildcat, spaceweaver, starwalker & notthisbody
Mapping: notthisbody & gavinkeech@ the TransVision 2010 conference in Milan
Join the conversation on SpaceCollective here, here & there.
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Videos
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- @Connoropolous u can check out @ks12's Analog Motion Graphics for some inspiration: http://t.co/xxJtI1nN
- @Connoropolous great work Connor! Cc: @technoshaman
- @amarravva @zota shiva will drink the viruses.
- Pyramid lake. Symbiosis. Gang Gang Dance. Eclipse. Ceremony. James Blake. Little Dragon. Dusty, dirty & sunburned. Back to civilization.
- Bottlenose 3 Introduces Reader and Newspaper Modules, other features...good stuff. http://t.co/5E2PL28R
- @chris23 @AnthroPunk @webjournalist @feKaylius @LukeRobertMason thanks for the tweets, gettin a sense of #are2012 from u all...
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- Condos in the Big Data Knowledge Garden [slideshare] by @gardenfelder http://t.co/HtfuNUfv
- What happens when u cross The Fly, HAL9000, Mars Attacks! & schizoanalytic cartographies? Universe Infra-Quark!
- May 03, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- An illustrated dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology - a field guide to interface culture by @caseorganic http://t.co/tKJMUULg
- In the Guardian: Data is changing the rules of engagement for how we access art and the information it reveals about us http://t.co/4agt2Uwy
- IMB Researchers have successfully stored a single data bit in only 12 atoms - http://t.co/9Sq2kab7
- Yes indeed. RT @klaitner: http://t.co/bB8JGANy < damn fine work on value accounting by @webisteme
- P.A.U.S.E.S. — the Physical Autonomous Ubiquitous Social Engagement System http://t.co/zfIZdlk5
- @janitorr in the evening there is feeling, in the morning there is meaning...
- Rhetological Fallacies: errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking - http://t.co/fjxNyq1x #metacodes
- New York Times R&D Group launches its first commercial product (for brands): http://t.co/eL9tPKeW
- Descriptive Camera: A camera which prints out a text description of the image in the viewfinder. http://t.co/PDnee1rf /via @mgorbis
- RT @jondashkyle: The title track for @anenonmusic's new LP is featured on NPR today, w artwork/design by yours truly: http://t.co/sQBHqMJA
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Tweets
- "The Qualia of my tongue" (3), by @xaoss http://t.co/vox50Pbc
- @reubenmetcalfe lets hear more abt it! anything to do w "space" and "profiteering", i'm in. if its anything else...meh... ;-)
- @jondashkyle was a odd mix, for sure. lets get together soon, kick arnd some ideas. would love to work on more examples of #infosyn
- @zota got just the recipe...@weavrs, see -> http://t.co/Sbcq91ds ...@zeroinfluencer any weavrs made from a wikipedia page of a corp yet?
- @reubenmetcalfe fo sho! tho i'm not sure what to think about the 'etc.' part :-P
- Organic Memory of the Future (2), by @xaoss - http://t.co/EkG9cRNr
- @jondashkyle tonite in hollywood, #newspace & #oldspace party! sounds like a night out for Thompson. tho there's no more tickets now..
- @jondashkyle yo did u hear about Yuri's Night here in LA?
- Becoming Infosynaesthetic - some thoughts on the New Aesthetic -> http://t.co/y2RkgoS2 #newaesthetic #infosyn
- ...and destinations of value must be both qualitative and quantitative in nature.
- as the nature of 'agreement' is subjective, accounting for sources of value, mediums through which value travels...
- Dichotomistic logic - the twelve axioms of organic logic - http://t.co/s190PcI8 /via @xaoss
- ...that blend the boundaries of individual <-> collective.
- value spaces are fluid dynamic context-sensitive, indeterminite intersubjective sets of agreements defining value flows...
- The BOOK OF COBALT: Cocoon Moon http://t.co/OIE6979o
- ..‘like a code’, is an analogy, but ‘is code’ is a metaphor & transforms in2 a techno-metaphorical process.. http://t.co/M7ltUU8i
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Photos
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Posts
- Apr 11, 12Some thoughts on the New Aesthetic.
A few days ago Bruce Sterling posted an "Essay on the New Aesthetic", summing up his most recent thoughts after a panel at SXSW, similarly titled "The New Aesthetic - Seeing like digital devices". The focal point of definition for this New Aesthetic is well documented and a gestalt emerges quite quickly on the New Aesthetic tumblr, a juxtaposition of quotes, images, sensations, videos highlighting myriad examples of that which its curators are recognizing is already happening.
In short, New Aesthetic touches in some sense the bleeding of the virtual dimension into the actual and our increasing reflection of our own methods of sensing in machines, and vice versa. What's surprising about Bruce's usually sardonic critique of modern culture is that he acknowledges his own excitement and novelty with NA, that perhaps it does indeed holds the potential for something new...
I've felt this viscerally on spacecollective through these past years. We've watched the work of Andy Gilmore reflect us into fractal gradients, Xaos exploring on his canvas the poiesis of becoming, Gavin Keech exploring the hypersciences through the lens of experience, Gabriel Shalom in our many conversations about digital aura recognition (AUREC), hypercubism & object orientation and Wildcat recontextualizing the role of the knowmad in relation to aesthetics.
Robin Sloan boils it down to a general axiom(?) of NA on his blog:the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once
...it becomes clear you aren’t aiming for fidelity in these transitions from physical to digital and back. That’s where your work gets exposed to a whole new set of tools—really, a whole new physics.
However there are several conceptual hurdles that require consideration and recontextualization that need to occur before I can rally behind the New Aesthetic. Our hybrid futures imply that we are moving at a pace of transformation to which we are little aware on a moment by moment basis.
The Machinomorphic Counter-strike
In 1957, Russel Kirsch took the first digital photo - a 5x5cm picture of his infant son. When deciding how to render the ones and zeros, Kirsch decided on the seemingly logical choice at the time — square pixels. For this, he apologizes.
"The logical thing was not the only possibility," Kirsch said. Those pixels could have been any shape he desired. But he went with square; a decision he has since described as "something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since." (full article)
In the fascination of 'seeing like machines', we have been anthropomorphizing our machines, imbuing them with very human metaphors. What's not recognized as widely is the backwash - the feedback and echoes of machinomorphic [PDF] influence - where we begin to associate the qualities of machines into our conception of ourselves. Pixels have a harsh, grinding feel to them, utterly unnatural considering there are no straight lines in nature, gestalt is not linear, nor binary - yet in our mad digitalization of our experience, of course we grab onto this, the most glaringly obvious representation of the prison of our sensory experience to break loose of these relative freedoms. Machine vision must push beyond the prison of the rectangle, and that's why we're shredding and bleeding our media and its representations, grind it, shatter it, work to break through to something more organic.
A chunk of Bruce's essay nearer to the end demands a recontextualization of our relationship with machines:I will hammer that iron nail a bit more, in case you aren’t getting it yet. Because this is the older generation’s crippling hangup with their alleged “thinking machines.” When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having “thought,” “memory,” and nowadays “sight” and “hearing.” Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see.
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.
When establishment becomes artificial and possibility begoes natural, process flows being. Implicit in the arrival at the phrase which can potentially embody and arrive at a recontextualized aesthetic, is a departure, from what we know and have known. these realizations are what we encase as objects, juxtaposing through fluid curation that together, reveals a certain directionality, trajectory that we are still grasping at.
The sensing of objects within the construct of machines still lacks a cohesive ontology - ontologies are about structuring meaning, and we humans have difficulty enough coming to common agreements by way of our differently evolved subjectivities and contexts, we are a long ways from providing machines with the conceptual substrate to handle the complexity of human intersubjectivity. The intersubjectivity of any context, indeed to have a consensus reality, depends on our ability to come to agreements about meaning - we struggle with the very first step -with methods of classification of objects, and defining their relations, as this need for context induces a sort of multiplexed fragmentation. The question of intelligence in our machines, a morbid fascination playing with the uncanny valley, at the same time inviting us to engage with it as higher and higher resolution refractions bounce around the collective subconscious (which also must exist if there is to be any 'collectively intelligent'). Sterling calls us to engage with machines as they are, not how we would imbue them with our characteristics or vice versa.
These objects, somewhat objects of our desire, are comprised of processes, nested within each other at varying layers of abstraction. What is even more profound, only being hinted at, at least in the conversation surrounding the New Aesthetic, is the machine computability of our cultural activity and archetypal interpretations by machines, natural language processing, entity extraction, semantic tech and hybrids like amazon's mechanical turk. It is not just the geographical or physical machine vision but the cultural, that we must think deeply and tread carefully in relation with machines, lest we eat our own tails in a pornographic desire to get to know ourselves through the technological immediation of machine-processed experience. Our own vision - physiological, cultural, social - is being refracted through the fractures in our ability to conceive the implications of the different lenses we view technology through - never quite familiar and sometimes difficult keeping our equilibrium in such a fast-changing landscape.
In meantime the examples of NA continue to become more fluid, integrated, in going deeper into that glitch we've found its not actually all that glitchy once you get in there, that is, more like a phase space or grey area, between on/off, yes/no, not pinpointed at a specific coordinate but rather multiple possibilities in a spectrum of coordinates. Daito Manabe's various collaborations exemplify this blend uniquely, in turns haunting, frantic, ghostly, yet even more real because of it, immediately taking us to a liminal space. Liminality is key to NA, because it is that inbetween that enables us to explore our intuition, NA can, at its best open a door for us to inhabit this liminal space between virtual and actual, reflect our interpretation the happenings of now predictively to expand our awareness.
The New Aesthetic is Infosyn-aesthetic
Derived from latin, synaesthesia is broken down into “syn”, which means union, and “esthesia”, sensation. A union of sensation. When used as a common term, synesthesia is used to describe the condition of when someone is aware of their senses mixing. In other words, the stimulation of one sense will trigger a response in another sense.Synesthesia is not something that has been added, but has always existed. A multisensory awareness is something that has been lost from conscious awareness in the majority of people....We know more that we think we know. The multisensory, synesthetic view of reality is only one things that we are sure has been lost from consciousness. - Dr. Richard Cytowic
The addition of info-, the union of information and sensation. Our new sensors and extension of our senses into the domain of the virtual, gives us the conceptual construct to interact with information therefore extending our relations and conception of the environment, each other and ourselves. The emergence of this hyperconnectivity fundamentally changes the dynamics of human interaction through morphing our symbolic languages. We desperately need to upgrade our current conceptions of communication, on the fly, now and forever more.
The role of cultivating these sensitivities is that of the aesthetic curators of information, as critical relevancies and metabolic reactors within an infocology (information ecology), engaged in aesthetic management. Working towards something more inherently flexible, capable of unmanagement, free flowing with immersion into the rawness of humanity. Lets build upon these signature decay trails, their radiation showing aesthetics, also in respect to establishment's departure, into arrival of new ways...
We need new semantic and ontological frameworks to exchange meaning within and across infocologies. As we more deeply engage and interact with each other, information and our environment, a new, infosynaesthetic language is emergent through hyperconnectivity. It is in becoming that the New Aesthetic emerges, and it is emergent, for if there's one thing to realize about our nascent infosyn-aesthetic, it is that it throws into questions the nature of networked identities, the blend of flesh and information, data, matter and the overlay of realities that result. Out of this we desire to recontextualize and understand the meaning of our relationship and evolution of our sense interfaces and our language, and the vast impact they have on our culture, politics, society as a whole.life+ / work+ / play+ saturate in real and virtual. mind and body fuse with reality and dream. organism and environment continually connect. chemicals and frequency pulse rapidly so flow between is unity with such intense distance that requirement is recursively created to seamlessly evolve together to revive identities morphing. - @entpm
...we may now understand aesthetics as requiring an unsettling of knowledge, a dynamic, and transformative quality of engagement with the world. In this sense, Aesthetics can be said to be the foundation of our understanding the inter-subjective relational experience we have with the world. Aesthetics I see as that which disturbs the obvious, disconcerts the known, unsettles the clear and provides a way ahead in our realization of ourselves both as individuals as a culture and as a species... - Wildcat
The paradigms with which we experience information are driven by the glitches - those things rendered explicit and obvious by time and space. The artworks that are being classified as NA embody this, and whether intentionally or unintentionally call attention to an attempt for us humans at normalisation - the persistence of a contextual aesthetic ground, that is always tending to firm up on us.
NA can and should strive to have a center which is always moving - resisting crystallization while at the same time calling our attention to it. The deterritorialization of that which we know we know, or think we know. Saccades crystallize. blinking helps sight. The analog to digital smoothers are active, the seeds of which have been planted already, literally, in those being born in 2012, those who will be born into a mass-customizable, rapidly evolving ever increasing info mass. We, those already born, need to understand how we can keep pace with changing paradigms of interaction with the world on the fly, and implied in that, its influence the structure of our mind and culture itself.
Fluid, Fractal and Holographic
What we're experiencing is exaptive, form and nonform - transforming aesthetics into tangible intangibles. Morphing between virtual and actual, before and after a particular moment has subsided in experience. As we are building these interfaces for experiential navigation of data and information for minds and intelligences to integrate with, hindsights, insights, foresights and evolution become conscious communication mechanisms to evolve upon ourselves, by living and interacting. Hyperconnectivity reveals the fluid, fractal and holographic nature of not data or information or content but experience, this itself morphs through evolutionary permutations as our code spaces are changed, modified, interpreted and re-encoded as signals and resonance.Before being a theory aesthetics is an action, the action of undeterred insistence in refurnishing becoming.
Before being a theory aesthetics requires the necessary non-act of disclosing a shape of silence in and around minds, in and around things.
Before being a theory aesthetics is an inter-action, the empathic weaving of threads across the frontier between visible and invisible, the ephemeral mind of beyond born of encounter.
Thus before being a theory Aesthetics is possibly about the apex of our action as humans.
Aesthetics is the verb of curating becoming. - Xaos
Becoming is of emergent properties of past affinities of influence; begoing is synchronized with the emergent properties of future affinities - both of these, in reconciliation to factors of time's relative constraints.
The quality of being, as an aesthetic phenomenon, is radically altered in the age of hyperconnectivity in a fashion that prominently features the art of becoming, not as the mimesis of an other that is not authentic, but in a fashion that re-describes the extended narrative of the individual into a multiplicity of authentic beings.
We call for the founding of a fresh narrative about our relationship with and through technology. The relevance of the New Aesthetic perhaps may be that we never try too hard to look at it directly in the eyes (which ones for that matter?), but rather keep it on the periphery of our vision, less an object but a presence, a process, and cultivate an aesthetic ground on which our senses stand. Perhaps it better be kept elusive.
New problems are continually built. Dissolving of problems builds from their solutions, formulae of creations to navigate experience beyond our relative constraints. The possible beauty of our future lies in our hands, in our very own capability to transform ourselves into curators of interest and aesthetic intelligence, a transmutation in the manner we understand the world and cohere a complexity that unfolds before us.
The New Aesthetic might not be a 'thing' at all. it might just ben about a functional freedom of expression.
i don't think i'll settle for anything less.
- IMS.
{crossposted to the notthisbody blog}
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many thanks to Xaos, Wildcat, and Gavin Keech for the use of their wordplay and phrases i have taken the liberty of incorporating into this essay.
Image 1: Face Projection by Daito Manabe
Image 2: Abundance Mechanics by Gavin Keech
Image 3: the first digital image, scanned by Russel Kirsch in 1957 of his son
Image 4: Biostructure 2 by Abhominal
Image 5: Untitled by Xaos - Dec 25, 11
“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected." - Patrick Pittman
A collaboration of Notthisbody & Jason Silva. - Oct 03, 11
This video is inspired, in part, by the ideas explored in David Deutsch’s new book, THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY. We hope it moves you.
In our work, we use the tools of editing: we juxtapose 'transcalar' imagery, cutting and overlapping the very small and the very large... From the nano to the galactic, stretching and compressing time, we feature time lapse to reveal the repetitive and recurring patterns across different scales of reality. The aim is to provide multiple perspectives all at once, whose simultaneous presentation might cause spontaneous epiphanies. “These patterns are omnipresent, but only when we see these patterns in a more compressed mode of presentation to we start to attend to them as such.” — This is KEY!
Paul Stamet's superb book, Mycelium Running, begins with a discussion of what Stamets calls the mycelial archetype. He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure.
A recent profile of Stephen Johnson on Dumbo Feather described his work like this:
“Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behaviour of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge."
On their own, these areas of study are fascinating. Together, a more profound view takes shape.
The article continues, "Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.”
PERFORMING PHILOSOPHY:
Our stated goal is to re-ignite the art of the "performing philosophers" ... like Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller... A post from Wildcat here on Space Collective speaks about “thinkers who act as substantial agents of change, who drastically alter the infocologies they interact with, in the process transforming and meshing the different dimensions in which our minds operate.”
We care about the pleasures derived in forming new connections, mash-ups and innovative solutions for the next step in human evolution.
We are working to articulate our understanding through the creation of recombinant media mashups meant to epiphanize audiences——the creating and sharing of awe; "performance philosophy" in an age of collapsing boundaries and exponential creativity.
Artist Michael Garfield referred to it as "playing hopscotch across illusory divides in the intertidal zone between technology and spirituality, science and art, self and other, individual and collective.”
The director of the Imaginary Foundation described our work as “some kind of Ontological DJ'ing, recompiling the source code of western philosophy by mixing and mashing it up into a form of recombinant creativity, which (hopefully) elevates our understanding from the dry and prosaic, into the sensual and transcendent.”
“The goal is to prove a fresh framework and a new narrative to fill our old storytelling needs in our ever-increasing process of self-description.”
Information technologies have become instruments of mind expansion, sensorial scaffoldings that increase and augment our capacity to process greater amounts of information, allowing us to extract richer gradients of meaningful data about the world and our experience.
Whether its a telescope, a microscope or a marijuana joint, we need to think of these tools as aids, contact lenses through which we can see so much more than before.
In the digital dimension we use the term resolution. Certainly we can appreciate how much more can be 'revealed' by having higher resolution..... and technology offering complex visualizations literally ups the resolution of our internal and external perceptions .
Different Scales and perspectives of reality show how much of what we perceive is dictated by our point of view—literally by where we are and how we think. The most exhilarating realization, then, is that we all have the power to shape our experience by our linguistic and creative choices."A random scrap of information can trigger just the right conceptual collision. It’s hard to know which scrap might do the trick, but that’s the beauty of things like social networks, interconnectivity, and these kinds of media mashups — they constantly produce potential sparks, for free.” - Seth Godin
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A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating the work of:
/elliottsellers
/flight404
/dangoods
/proxelltv
/kimpimmel
/undream
/brighteyecinema
/hsgn
/beeple
/cerealspiller
/Tim Borgmann
/Shawn Knol
/Andrew Filippone Jr.
/Felix Norton-Barsalou
/Daniel Zagórski
/urbanintdesign - Sep 15, 11
Creation besides being the opposite of annihilation, is the constant state of readjustment, repurposing and in that way curating into a becoming - whether that be particles of thought, or feelings reflected in the bits of virtual representations. So we are just recontextualizing to reveal some patterns and point out to what is less obvious when we are glaring at the pieces from close and in their silo.
A collaboration of Notthisbody & Jason Silva.
Full context: The Creation and Sharing of Awe - Aug 10, 11RealiTTY is a series of dense, insightful media meditations on language, information, reality, technology and transhumanism by Miles Hingston.
IntroductionReality is a battle of opposing metaphors playing out/in the canvas of the collective mindscape. — Miles Hingston (The Author)
I hate to formalize things in this way, but this material is not designed to appease academic or scientific types necessarily because I choose not compete within the narrow boxes that they want to place people in, this will be discussed further in the next section. The nature of this material is purely speculative, but it does assume atleast some familiarity with the concepts described here. At the very least you do need to be open minded enough to challenge your perception of reality and entertain new ideas, a closed mind is a decaying mind.
To investigate anything is to admit prejudice, if I seek to prove the reality of my beliefs to other people then I betray my own doubts. To have an opinion on something requires me to overlook an infinite number of possibilities and to separate myself into the marginal and relative realm of rational thought.To arrive at the truth once in your life you have to rid yourself of all the opinions that you have received and reconstruct anew from the foundation, all the systems of your knowledge. — René Descartes
As a final disclaimer, this material is in no way intended to be comprehensive and/or complete as it is very much a creative work and should be considered preliminary to your own further investigation. Information is neutral, it is neither good nor bad, do what you want with it.
Information and Simulated Reality
Digital physics sees everything as information, it provides a different way of describing what is happening at the quantum level. Seeing as the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behaviour can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information and every change of state is a change in information. From this it can be said that the history of the universe is in effect a huge and ongoing quantum computation.
The Shape of Information
Information is like a "meta-substance" if you like (meta meaning beyond or above), yet it is embedded in the metaphor we choose to describe it by. Consider that the subatomic particles and quantum processes which scientists describe are what shamanistic and ancient cultures would consider spirits and deities.
Thoughts and Illusions
Think of the human brain like a radio transmitter/receiver, the brain is tuned in to a small spectrum of reality. It then further filters this in order to make our reality seem more congruent. My own experiences with psychedelics lead me to consider that there are different frequencies which the brain can tune in to and in doing so it is possible to pick up other "alien" realities, after all, all dimensions are occupying the same space. It is impossible for us to know an "objective reality", we are in a very real sense encased within a bubble, a cocoon, our nervous system is a buffer into the void of ultimate mystery, even science has it's limits in what it can explain phenomenologically.
Language and Reality
Saying that everything is information isn't very helpful for people who like to believe that there is a physical reality out there, it means essentially that the World is an abstraction, malleable by our interpretation and merely a collection of prevailing beliefs. Information as a linguistic object is a rather undiscerning metaphor. Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination, yet it is much more pervasive in everyday life than most people assume. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
Symbolic Representation
Robert Anton Wilson once remarked that "we are trapped in linguistic constructs, the only reality we know is the one we manufacture". We are immersed within a culture of symbols, as Gothe said "everything is a symbol", this woeful abstraction and sheathing of the reality destroys the outer World and fills the inner World with emptiness. The more involved this internal representational system is, the more distanced we are from the reality around us. Other connections and cognitive perspectives are inhibited and substituted by the alienation of symbolic representation.
Meme Morphing Machines
A meme is a cognitive or behavioural pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one, because of this they are often called "mind viruses". For example looking both ways before you cross the road is a meme. In general memes do not work on your rational mind but rather they affect your unconscious, emotionally entangled, decision-making processes. Another way of thinking about memes is as ideas or neoligisms that distribute themselves through a population. In a very real sense we are a collection of other peoples' minds. Memes become the entrenched thoughts and behavioural characteristics of our personalities. Since ideas get fixed in our minds they become our reality, often for our entire lives. - Mar 13, 11
In the lack of scripted narrative - the fiction resembles reality - personal and collective. Using the form of an altered Census [not Demographic but Emographic] - reporting to none, the goal is to set out to seek faces, emotions, events, eyes, myths and stories, energies opposed to numbers, colors, institutionalized Gods and capitalist rituals.
4 Emographers set out for a 10 day round trip around Macedonia equipped with video and photo machines, ninja accessories, notebooks and pencils to find out what they will discover. The result is a feature film split in 5 parts – each a round trip on its own dwelling in a given theme. In the lack of scripted narrative – the fiction resembles reality – personal and collective. Using the form of an altered Census [not Demographic but Emographic] – reporting to none, the goal is to set out to seek faces, emotions, events, eyes, myths and stories, energies opposed to numbers, colors, institutionalized Gods and capitalist rituals. Set between two cycles of the presidential elections of 2009 – combining interrogation and torture of the open lens we go and see how the people live. In a country where the contrast of social landscapes, mutation of principles, coloring of minds of the masses, modification of recent history is an old news waiting to be herd and talked about, we travel and seek the imperfection of the moments with which we build a topographic essay on Macedonia. Dissecting the genealogy of power to reveal the deep wounds and substitute them with an open constructive dialogue and effective action. - Feb 16, 11
Having participated in the development of the Polytopia Project since its outset here on SpaceCollective, my primary focus and passion has been to make inroads into conceptualizing, innovating and developing the tools/interfaces/utlities/system architectures that facilitate and contribute to the emergence of a polytopian mind habitat.
Together with Gavin Keech (@gavinkeech), Gunther Sonnenfeld (@goonth), Brendan Howley (@brendanhowley) and our selfs (@notthisbody), we have formed an entity called ThinkState - a creative innovation consultancy that is building UBIQUID.US - values-driven creative tools for the collaborative economy.
With awareness of inspiration stemming from the Polytopia Project within all of us involved, we wish to publish the statement below, contributed to be each of us, assembled based on our shared affinities and values.
The intention is that this statement can be hacked, examined, ripped apart, adopted, adapted by any and all who find use for it - so that perhaps we can define a kind of mutual commitment statement suited to a Polytopian perspective.
These core characteristics and principles are strongly inspired from the Polytopia presentation and map that were created in November 2010.
As well, I would like to thank and credit Spaceweaver, whose text I have taken the liberty of adapting under the heading "How we desire to be free".
We welcome any and all who would like to join the conversation around these affinities.
Fluid Fractal Organism - Participation and Fusion
from Entanglement Personas/Metaconstructs by @gavinkeechThe below text also exists at http://piratepad.net/FFO for live, collaborative editing.
FLUID FRACTAL ORGANISM STATEMENT
THIS STATEMENT is made this _______ day of ______, 2011, to set forth the stated intention of [entities involved] to continue in a collaborative and cooperative fluid fractal organism (FFO) - for profit and social benefit around their common affinities.
This letter sets forth the vision statement and key characteristics under which the entities of the FFO intend to develop a partnership agreement and act from a business perspective.
Key Characteristics
Key characteristics of the ThinkState FFO include:
[entities involved] will endeavor to cooperate with one another to develop aesthetic interfaces and utilities that- transition and evolve current socio-economic models
- lead to the emergence of collaborative marketplaces
- co-create value through the leveraging of affinities around shared narratives
- monetize that value through ethical re-sale and incentivization of personal data
- volumize and visualize that data via immersive technologies
- enhance emergent properties and multiplicity
- contribute and reciprocate with the open-source community
- ...create a ground of engagement for entities to interact and nourish one another: the coordinating layer of both the web of our strategic partnerships and the web itself
Guiding Principles
The principles of the cooperative relationship are:- All initiatives will be tested towards their potential to mutually and reciprocally enhance entities
- By all means practicable, all initiatives will strengthen co-emergent interests
- An ambience of partner cooperation will allow for mutually agreed-upon concurrent agendas
- Critical decisions will be undertaken in an ambience of openness and directed dialogue
- All value co-creation will be undertaken in an ambience of transparency
- These principles we place before personalities.
How we desire to be free
Technology offers the possibility of analyzing and directing the mental processes involved in computing our choices towards an optimized state of freedom.
By developing interfaces and utilities, we might find greater degrees of personal and collaborative freedom not only by means of increased computing resources and information access, but also by upgrading the very way we compute.
If we gain sufficient understanding of how mental processes arise, we can begin to devise general methods of ridding them from unnecessary redundancies and increasing their aesthetic and creative qualities.
This is our mission: to utilize the sciences of the mind, providing us with powerful insights and tools to help us optimize individual and collaborative freedoms.
Termination
When we no longer feel we share common affinities, we must arrange to fluidly be able to move past that block to continue with the affinities that we do still have in common, if we so desire.
Concurrent agendas are possible by transparent best practices, which in turn respect the vision that we have set forward.
No longer sharing specific affinities does not render collaboration mutually exclusive.
A recognition of these characteristics and principles is the bedrock of our collaboration: we will, each of us, make best efforts to continue to evolve those characteristics and principles, guided by balancing what is best for all of us against what is best for our company.
Entire Understanding
This Statement contains the mutual understanding between the sentient entities with respect to its subject matter and supersedes any prior understandings and agreements between them with respect thereto.
Signed,
_______________________
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??????????????????????? - Feb 08, 11
infosynaesthesia & memetabiosis :: biological. neurological and physical :: science and art merge, as the embodiment platform...
...a grounds of engagement to extend from; water to organism...environment, shape, then to sky ...
..looping in on itself where the holographic state becomes the foundation for extension.
Daito Manabe and Ei Wada performing at Transmediale 2011
Laser Face Projection
Scorelight, a laser-based artificial synesthesia instrument - Dec 03, 10
#Inforhythms are an experiment in aural representations of annotations or metadata of information. In collaboration with Gabe Noel of Vosotros (which by the way has some great music, all licensed Creative Commons, we have started initial experiments of assigning tonal values to specific sets of metadata.
See picture big HERE
Download audio HERE
We have started by assigning aural information to the elements of IEML (information economy meta language). IEML is a representational language created by Pierre Levy (@plevy) that can act as a coordinating language between multiple ontologies. It is a system to represent and express facets of our subjectively experienced, unique worldview. Since it is meant to be understood by a computer (and is expressed in a notational syntax), the core elements combine exponentially and opens the possibility (theoretically at this stage) to compute the semantic distance between meanings.
We are at the beginning of our explorations into #inforhythms – a potentially retooling of our auditory perception through the creation of aural metadata representational systems, with the intent to create usable AR (or #aurec) interfaces that allow us to perceive, experience and interact with the multiple auras of metadata always surrounding us. This in turn opens up one vector of telesynaesthetic language.
More to come soon. - Oct 31, 10
I had the pleasure to meet several other polytopians in the flesh recently at the TransVision 2010 conference in Milan. It was both an excuse to get together after working for so long on the net, as well as a chance to suss out current ideas, attitude, approaches and thought happening in the transhumanist community.
Polytopia - Our Mind Habitat in the Infoverse
Although we were not initially going to present, after the first day we felt that the Polytopia Project fills a void of sorts...a ground of engagement for all the ideas, initiatives, visions, predictions and prophecies that were spoken about there - a common ground of mutual respect.
We created a map, over the next two days, and gardened it until we felt comfortable with a distilled presentation of some of the fundamentals of what we agreed a polytopia(s) to be.
This map can be seen as continually evolving - as the conversation continues to grow around these concepts we will be modifying and adding in more layers to the map, including multiple aesthetic representations of the content.
The presentation below is the same content as the map above. Best viewed in fullscreen.
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Content: wildcat, spaceweaver, starwalker and notthisbody
Mapping: notthisbody
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