-Author Note: [This Third Space seems to be the only place where people are thinking about the meta-abstraction of identity in virtual worlds - I continue our discussion of identity and self.] – This is not intended for most audiences being pure-play indulgence. Do not expect this to relate to anything related to Interaction Design, Experience Design, or the Design of Self on Social Networks. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move Along.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.
~ Walter Pater

Soundtrack: Tactical Sekt, Burn Process [thanks 2 @fred_beecher]

Wordle Instantiation of @SemanticWill

1. The Stigmata
The gift of my re-instantiation on the threshold of a new century

“Then send Pamela,” she said. “She understands all that. You have an army of people who understand all that. You must.”

“But that’s exactly it. Because they ‘understand all that’, they won’t find the edge. They won’t find the new. And worse, they’ll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath the mediocrity inherent in professional competence. I need a virtual amateur for this. A freelancer.” And he sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he’d regarded the tidy and receding ass of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with sex.
~ William Gibson, Amateur, Feb 15, 2009, 12:00 PST

Every pre-simulationist*, cultured modern person knows that History accretes through three main stages of human relation – irony, farce, and redemption. But nobody is ready to admit that the universal form of historical relations is a parody and in this new century when the time of historical epoch belongs to M(odernism), Recursive Irony becomes the primary form of culture’s world. Our world comes to an end. Nothing happens among us. Nothing new. Let’s greet forgetfulness as an absolutely safe instrument for everyone! We can invent simulated worlds everyday and invite others to admire our inventions so as nobody can closely study the whole of human history (for what?) to find same questions and the self-same=safe answers.

What else can our PreSim write except a manifesto? Like as well, what else can a dying PreSim write except the gospel from PreSim. As to me, the holy unhinged, I did as anyone from our post-humanist did – I wrought the gospel and manifesto. To tell the truth, I could choose another title for my masterpieces, for example, “Science of Logic” or “Being and time”; all the same, even with such honorable titles my works would remain the same, the gospel and manifesto.

*Pre-Sim, or pre-simulationist is an art movement lodged between Post-Modernism and Simulation.

————–

Where to start but a song, O Superman, O Love, O Man & Dad, Mom & Dad, and of course, the Stigmata, the anointed wounds of suffering, marked, made, re-made:

A Gospel Of Infinite @SemanticWill

My Syringe, slick jute-creeps, steal
penned in suffering and black ink.
Question:
who sits vigil in the quaker’s grave
while the dope dead lump lazily outside?

Neon signs, the scorpion rides
the death day reckoning, the gesture
a sort of re=aggression, sermon-
victim of the caustic moment.)

Your lips intends a flower but flowers
instead a skull.  Death speeds, o followers,
where language has no license,
rose stalks or rebus, or a demon’s St’ly horns.

And. . . and in the Department of SysOps Therapy
the poet skins merely the madhouse taboo
in cess pools and polluted ease, long corridors
lead like tombs of kings, lit fluorescent.

Poet & monster & marquis de sade
tamed in rhyme, tamed in monstrous rhyme;
myth&hero, who bares the poisoned meat,
and brushes his teeth with the blood of his…her,

flesh soured ochre, dusty sepulchre,
effigy of incense and nanobot wars,
alleys, charred listless: slewed facsimile
of furious modesty, half-devoured by shadow;

hunted, haunting the pen-stretch,
meddling in vice and Fox News;
a slight bleeding, black as the bullet
an inch from his heart.

Ink, page, tangle, warped:
outside of pain and poetry’s punishment,
the world merely moves, and marks
region by region by zip code, by centroid,

marking the spot the desolation’s dance
ended and began; traced from the other side
of snow think-glass, the piercing mask:
no sight; only scars on wrists, ankles, side.

At your request the carcass made a fist,
hemorrhaging like a soul machine
without human credentials.  You were impressed
with the maze of insides; the ruins of My “my”;
Image pressed on plasma shroud.

the polycarbons, slate tiles, ragg flints,
shipwrecked rags and club-fingered sluts,
the conjured scorch of legarms maybe.
Tombed maggots face up in the mortuary glass.

You sketched them how many times,
but found no soft words to unravel
those mysteries of flesh. You assumed names
you could never remember.

Only at the gate’s edge were you open,
in the glass longing. listless. lost.

|—– End ———-|

pre-Simulationism:

A vanguard group of prescient artists, poets, and writers who are finding new ways to surpass the exhausted postmodern epoch and its constructions of language and thought.

pre-Simulationists look to the future and the simulated worlds that will soon immerse humankind, examining what sort of consciousness might emerge when full simulation takes place. We do not reject science nor scoff at the usefulness or importance of its knowledge because of nihilistic arguments derived from Goedel’s Theorem.

In this age of neural and genetic discovery we explore new subjective approaches to creativity and the place of art in the world, searching beyond language for the workings of our feelings and experience of sentience.

pre-Sims draw inspiration for our creative works and other artists’ creations not only in the semiotics of cultural simulations, but also charting maps of awareness of the inner mind, awake or dreaming.

Tags | art, poetry, post-modernism, pre-sim, pre-simulation, semanticwill