Difference between revisions of "Hyperlinked Memories"

Revision as of 07:17, 9 May 2010

From Banff Polymath Breakthrough: Notes to process:

Helena is back home... and she's downloading something off my computer... it's like she landed and is dragging some content slowly behind her...

How interesting. Excess content.

half of a show she watched here this morning...

The idea of always leaving something in a place.

Half of a show. How interesting!

she'll watch the second half in Oakland

The idea of "leaving behind" half of a show

The full show becomes fragmented, dispersed across time and space and event geography.

imagine watching half a movie in the theater and then going home to watch the second half on dvd

would really underscore the difference in reception...

That's a great analogy. That's very much what it is.

Cutting up something that used to be consiered short. Two hours in a theatre.

Two hours becomes lenghy.

yeah and fragmenting the suspension of disbelief

that lingering feeling of a movie stretching out....

in a way, life and interactions strech out - getting closer and further away from each other. if a movie does the same, instead of being confined to one time and space, does the movie become a more tangible, lived experience?

the strange thing about trying to find a youtube section of a vhs i watched when i was little is in finding a hyperlink to my memory.

a hyperlink to a part of your memory

nice

i think memory gets filled with representation of other things... and gets confused

The idea of bees going out into a field to gather pollen to bing back to the hive. Information is the new pollen.

like living someone else's life

And we come back to the hive and give a bee dance in the form of a hyperlink.

We live other's lives, but often the most positive parts of them when they share links.

Living someone else's life not just through stories but through fully animated videos and text. Multimedia storytelling. The story being told in the most efficient, time-sensitive and entertaining way.

"In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."

when the slow moving, non-compressed portions of life is shared, we lose attention. people learn to share the most interesting parts. and thus living someone else's life is living a positive representation of them.

Guy DeBord http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm

Rhizomes. Have you studied these?

not really....

They're strange. I've been trying to figure them out.

They're a Deleuze and Guattari thing.

yea

link?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the term "rhizome" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they opposed it to an arborescent conception of knowledge, which worked with dualist categories and binary choices. A rhizome works with horizontal and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear connections. Their use of the "orchid and the wasp" was taken from the biological concept of mutualism, in which two different species interact together to form a multiplicity (i.e. a unity that is multiple in itself). Horizontal gene transfer would also be a good illustration.

There's a large chunk of text.

thnx

It's often applied to cyberspace.

arborescent

nice word

like arborist... tree like

My professor talked about the idea of the fractal creation of value.

That as the ability to produce value increases, the difference in value become very slight.

“At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiquity”.

“At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value.”

i'm super interested in mutualism

game theory etc

as the ability to produce value increases, the difference in value becomes slight... really interesting

The idea of the haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value can be seen in T-shirt stores, ect. And the idea of Flickr accounts or Facebook apps, or iPhone apps. Sometimes the value is metastatis, cancerous -- the idea of so many apps on Facebook clogging up everyone's E-mail boxes. Until Facebook understood the crises and compressed all of the app requests into a small box. Placing them into storage -- filing them.

epidemic of value

rad

Yes! Epidemic. Fractal epidemic. Value epidemic.

this is all D&G?

No.

Some is Baudrillard’s “After the Orgy”.

cool awesome

is that one on aaaarg.org?

or do you have a pdf?

not on aaaarg

"Baudrillard employs the metaphors of fractal science..."

[he may be using the concepts of fractal science metaphorically, but that is not the same thing, since mathematics is not made out of metaphors]

"...to suggest that culture too is infinitely divisible, proliferates cancerously, leads randomly and exponentially from the particular to the general, and from stability to instability. These fluctuations lead to effects that Baudrillard, employing chaos theory, calls 'strange attractors'. This is quite beyond rationalist claims to verifiability, truth and reality." (p.6)

Jean Baudrillard - Hystericizing the Millennium http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-hystericizing-the-millennium.html

awesome thnx damn, he's faculty at the school that Althea goes to

"We don’t need digital gloves or a digital suit. As we are moving around in the world as in a synthetic image. We have swallowed our microphones and headsets, producing intense interference effects, due to the short-circuit of life and its technical diffusion" (2) In his essay Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality

Wow - didn't know Althea went there. I've been looking at that school. It has a lot of very key people there.

yeah, super impressive

Bruce Sterling, Sandy Stone, Zizek, Haraway, DJ Spooky. Joseph del Pesco

DJ Spooky!

)

Bruce Sterling has been giving lectures on what his books have created.

don't know him

They're very good lectures. He understands system theory very well.

any videos of him?

I will try to condence a concise idea of him.

ok

In the 1980s, Bruce Sterling became a leader of the "cyberpunk" revolution -- a literary movement that combined the artistic ambition of science fiction's 1960s New Wave with the hard-core speculation associated with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke. Cyberpunk's chief theme was the way technologies evolve us even as we evolve them, and its influence can be seen in almost every science fiction writer of note today, from Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds to Cory Doctorow.

He gives scathing keynotes at tech conferences, seemingly seeming omniscient and omnipotent at the same time, towering above others in his ability to understand long timescales.

nice idea, but evolution here is only a metaphor... real evolution takes hundreds if not thousands of years....

I'm always interested in looking for the influencers. Often the most popular writers are influenced by someone less known. I try to find out who they were influenced by.

good idea

good thing to do with artists as well

(Night passes)

Okay - here's what I said I'd send you this morning:

I think we were discussing types of evolution. There's also the idea of hastening evolution by external prosthetics. Cutting off millions of years of evolution by externalizing memories by means of a mobile device that one can add and subtract data from at will. Also the idea of being able to quickly slough off that external prosthetic (throwing out a phone and grabbing a new one with better features).

thnx

Akin to the idea of a Saber Tooth tiger being able to take out the teeth and throw them at animals. This is what cavemen did with spears. Externalizing their teeth and claws so they didn't have to evolve them. Joseph del Pesco

ah... interesting 1:11 PM

externalizing teeth

I've just read this book called Faster, by James Gleick. http://fasterbook.com/reviewpw.shtml One part says that 95% of things that are filed (put into a filing cabinet) are never taken out again. This was from some corporate research report or something. I wonder if this is similar to our brains or how we use computers.

The idea of externalized memory on a device, external physicality through the extension of claws. I think most of our innovations have been to extend the physical self. Hammers, clothing, ect.

right... 1:13 PM

i'm with you

Vehicles transport the physical self, but now computers transport the mental self and store memories. One cannot store something in a hammer, unless one makes a pouch attached to it. Even then, what one can store in that pouch is still physical.

so do we need new ways of socializing out externalized memories? new behaviors?

socializing our... rather

And I think I talked about this in my Pecha Kucha preso, but the shape of a hammer hasn't changed for thousands of years - but computers have. They seem to be melting and evaporating. Getting compressed, smaller and smaller.

right because they're mostly software rather than hardware

evolutionary psychology operates on the idea that the brain comes with software... built into our DNA Amber Case 11/28/09 1:15 PM Yeah - there's this great point about that by Micheal Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State who studies YouTube. He talks about two friends who are telling stories to each othr. Joseph del Pesco 11/28/09 1:15 PM language, social learning, etc 11/28/09 1:15 PM

link? Amber Case 11/28/09 1:15 PM Technically, one's social klout can be raised in a group situation if one tells an awesome story. But now it is if someone has the best hyperlink to an externalized momory or externalized story. They play the story for their friends instead of telling it to them. They've externalized their memories and storytelling. 11/28/09 1:16 PM

Yeah - let me grab a link. 11/28/09 1:16 PM

This is long, but good. An anthropological introduction to YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU Joseph del Pesco 11/28/09 1:16 PM ok - i watch 11/28/09 1:16 PM

Valerio and I are computing in the second floor lounge if you want to join us Amber Case 11/28/09 1:17 PM Aweseome. Oh! That sounds nice. I'll be there in perhaps 15 min. Joseph del Pesco 11/28/09 1:17 PM k 11/28/09 1:17 PM

a presto Amber Case 11/28/09 1:17 PM We're becoming telepathic - humans, in general.