W Hotel, The Tuscany

“There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication. In the image of television, the most beautiful prototypical object of this new era, the surrounding universe and our very bodies are becoming monitoring screens.”
~ Jean Baudrillard

Time moves in one direction, memory in another. This presents problems for @SemanticWill‘s qualia and consciousness. We are engaged in the world before we are reflective. This is what Heidegger calls being-in-the-world. It means that we are thrown into a situation where we act and cannot avoid to act. It is the primarily unreflective state of active engagement directed towards the things that we care about as the world presents itself to us. Our practical artifax are ready-to-hand for action disappearing into the background of our attention, space disappearing into the background, and becoming transparent as we focus on the activities and self-reflexivity of actuated care. This is back story to the engagement of @semanticwill on twitter.

[SemanticWill] As Interface-Signifier.

Blade Runner

“So are @SemanticWill‘s writings Neo-modernist crap? Nope! Pure Simulation!”
~ Guardian

“Are we not meeting the sarcastic, iconoclastic and irreplaceable person that has always been behind the brand: Will Evans. We didn’t cream, he was nothing like @semanticwill, but we are a bit damp.”
~ Financial Times

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We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgettingness. We organize these artifacts “within” a rubric of old metaphors that now fail us. We need knew metaphors, and new interface-signifiers to mediate our experience of and interaction with our lifesteams in context of microcosm.

“Lifestreams and microcosms are the two most important cyberbody types; they relate to each other as a single musical line relates to a single chord. The stream is a “moment in space,” the microcosm a moment in time.” ~ Gelernter

Caltrans District 7 Headquarters

“Serious”, put next to “architecture”, is probably never a good idea (accept in jest). The part of me (the electoral college of me, probably) that wallows in vernacular imprecision likes to speak of, for instance, “a serious hamburger”. I meant serious in that sense. There’s a fair bit of decidedly non-serious (i.e. not Famous Name) Eighties architecture around that feels almost comically Bladerunneresque to me. Though the most extreme examples are all in Japan, which for some people probably doesn’t count. For me, living in Tokyo in the 90s, it counts.

Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse

In the other sense? Well, how about the work of the LA-based team Morphosis? I read something from those guys. I think they even gleefully declared that Bladerunner had been a big influence. I liked them. Thom Mayne, the of Morphosis, a Pritzker Prize winning practice based in Los Angeles, has argued of the need for “an architecture of resistance.” His eloquent critiques of the nature of building public buildings today (see his interviews published recently in The New York Times), most poignantly aimed at the Ground Zero debacle, point to the interdependency of architecture, politics, and urbanism.

Taipei Performing Arts Center

I sometimes think that nothing really is authentically experienced (in a hungover stupor I remarked as much to Leverenze, he shat back, and we kissed and made-up); that the first pixels were particles of ochre clay, the bison on the plains rendered in just the resolution required. The bison still function perfectly, all these millennia later, and what HiDef 1080p Sony Bravia in the world today shall we say that of in a decade? And yet the bison will be there for us, on whatever screens we have, carried out of the primal dark on some impulse we each have felt, as children, drawing. But carried nonetheless on this thing we have always been creating, this vast unlikely mechanism that carries memory in its interstices; this global, communal, prosthetic, inter-connected hallucinated dream that we have been building since before we learned to build.

We live in, have lived (experienced qualia) through, a strange time. I know this because when I was a child the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded. I know this because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was once no rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black and white, and did not run as the living run. Because the world’s attic was still untidy. Because there were old men in the Laguna Hills of my Southern California childhood who remembered a time before the VCR.

W Hotel

When I turn on the radio in mid-town Manhatten’s W Hotel and hear Kurt Cobain singing “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, I am seldom struck by the peculiarity of my situation: that a dead man sings, and is as much [r]eal as a [w]ar on CNN and conservatives teabagging across the country without so much as access to ‘The Google’ to see how farcical their behavior is. All three I can re-wind. Ad Infinitum. All (ex)ist, in that they are detached, unreal, tevo’d reproductions of simulacra, search Twitter and you can experience all these detached artifacts, deconstructed, outside time – remembered, but without context, or conversation.

W Hotel, Lobby

“We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working, playing: life is spatially and socially segmented. The house is segmented according to its rooms’ assigned purposes; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory, according to the nature of the work and operations performed in it. We are segmented in a binary fashion, following the great major dualist oppositions: social classes, but also men-women, adults-children, and so on. . . .” Dellueze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

W Hotel, Lobby Lounge

In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only just changed a Blink ago. It is something new, and I sometimes feel that, Yes! everything has changed. (This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my experience.)

Our “Now” has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecidently elastic. The half-life of media-product grows shorter still, ’til it threatens to vanish altogether, reverting into some weird quantum logic of its own, the Warholian Fifteen Minutes becoming a quark-like blink. Yet once admitted to the culture’s consensus-pantheon, certain things seem destined to be with us for a very long time indeed. This is a function, in large part, of the rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation. If this blog had pod-casts, would you all be downloading me, listening to me? Re-Wind(ing) SemanticWill, or will these be like Tweets, ephemeral. Update, @, RT, Gone. No Re-wind. A Picosecond’s of fame.

And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification, and remix) grows more universal, history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision. If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to do, merge?

The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital cybernetic Now. But then, again, perhaps there is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there, waiting for us, as we/species merge with our machines, and accelerate again.

I wonder — are we not already Cybernetic, but seem to simply need Myth to bring us to that knowledge? And is @SemanticWill simply an interface to that Myth?