Audio: Secret Machines, First Wave Contact.

Pretence- an artful or simulated semblance; “under the guise of friendship he betrayed them”

The rape of [the] creative praxis must bear in mind certain maxims formulated by SemanticWill in a sex-drunken stupor:

1. Subject matter must be broadly empathetic.
2. The Stance should be direct and uncomplicated.
3. An Argument should be compulsively developed.
4. Emphasis should focus on a minimum of three levels of abstracted meaning or correlations, preferably in more than 3 dimensions.

“Art not ashamed to publish thy disease?”
–Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 1591

As of this date, there are no known viruses which can infect merely through reading a mail message.
–U.S. Computing Incident Advisory Capability Report, Dec. 6, 1994

This doesn’t mean I’m viral (certainly not like @armano). I was thinking this morning about the ideas related to the “Wisdom of Crowds,” and that there should exist a steady theoretical tradition of looking at crowds as the self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta-species. As autonomous entities existing independent from the cognitive processes of the individuals it is made of, consciously acting in the world. When looking for factual proof of the existence of such a sim-active, instead of viral-like adaptive, intelligence, one can only start by assuming that this entity must produce some observable patterns. Patterns we can isolate and possibly decode.

Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand with influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin.
[William Butler Yeats – 1888]

SemanticWill‘s words for Saturday.01.10.09:

Praxis is the process by which a theory or lesson becomes part of lived experience through a cycle of action-reflection-action[1]. ““It’s about how we live. It’s about everything we do; it surrounds us.”[2]

Incunabulum, n. An incunabulum is a book, single sheet, or image that was printed — not handwritten — before the year 1501 in Europe.

Ecphrasis, v. Ecphrasis or ekphrasis (from Greek ek out + phrasis speaking, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name) in modern times is taken to be the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art while anciently the word applied to a description of any things, persons, or even human experiences.

Example of Ecphrasis:

Thetis’ silver feet took her to Hephaestus’ house,
A mansion the lame god had built himself…
She found him at his bellows, glazed with sweat
As he hurried to complete his latest project,
Twenty cauldrons on tripods to line his hall
With golden wheels at the base of each tripod.
….He was getting these ready,
Forging the rivets with inspired artistry.
[Homer, Iliad, 18:398, Lombardo translation]

What is [it[being SemanticWill's article[text exhibiting patterns]]]?

An article by the personification|persona SemanticWill should not be defined. Defining a SemanticWill article would be like defining what water cascading through synapses is, or what a codex of insanity is, or what an experimental hypermedia art installation is. “I do not like that presumptuous Philosophy which in its rage of explanation allows no xyz, no symbol representative of the vast Terra Incognita of Knowledge, for the Facts and Agencies of Mind and matter reserved for future Explorers.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Perhaps it would be better to |de|-define the x,y,z of what I write. It is not a diary, it is not dated, it is not autobiography per se, it is not a dreambook. It is the recursive processing of meta-narratives within a multi-dem conceptual simulated space. It is the intertextuality of Mendelbrot. It is not the underlying algorithm, it is the recognized pattern of lies and truths woven together. Pattern recognition, I was thinking, is useful when you think about the nonlinearity of the creative process. Which, of course, reminds me of something Toffler, great cybernetic fallacio-mechanism that he is:

“Today, the technologies of deception are developing more rapidly than the technologies of verification. Which means we can use a television camera, plus special effects, plus computers, etc. to falsify reality so perfectly that nobody can tell the difference. And the consequences of that eventually could be a society in which nobody believes, everybody knows that seeing is not believing, and nobody believes anything. With the exception of a small minority that decides to believe one thing fanatically. And that’s a dangerous social/cultural situation.

One of the consequences of living through a period like this, which is in fact a revolutionary period, is that the entire structure of society and the processes of change become nonlinear. And nonlinearity I think is defined almost by the statement that ‘small inputs can have large consequences.’ While large inputs can sometimes have very small consequences. That also means in a political sense that very small groups can, under a given set of circumstances, achieve power. And that is a very threatening idea for anything remotely resembling what we believe to be democracy. So we’re going into a period, I think, of high turbulence and considerable danger, along with enormous possibilities.”
[interview with Alvin Toffler, in Modulations: A History of Electronic Music]

The reader returns to a previously-visited node of writing and eventually departs along a new path. Some of the things I write create recurrence and so express the presence of structure. Kolb’s “Socrates In The Labyrinth” discusses the role of in argumentation-augmentation, showing how hypertext cycles emerge naturally from traditional argumentative forms. Cyclical repetition also modulates the experience of the hypertext, emphasizing key points while relegating others to the background. I may break a cycle automatically by using relative or conditional links, or may use breadcrumbs to guide the user to depart along a new trajectory. Relying on breadcrumbs to break cycles is far more common in other’s writing than mine, but that’s because I prefer to hold the reader captivated while vultures peck at their eyes.

The reader rejoins a previously-visited part of the hypertext corpus after consuming me and continues along a previously-traversed trajectory through one or more spaces by means of tags, before the cycle is broken. Revisiting a previously-visited article to read the comments, moreover, may itself provide a fresh experience because the new context (introduced by the reader by commenting, or the interchange with the author) can change the meaning of a passage even though the words remain the same. Measured and planned repetition of themes across comments, articles, connections, can reinforce the writer’s message; recursive cycles thus lend themselves not only to a variety of simulated effects, but also to familiar writerly motifs:

Hallucination was the meta-recursus made manifest, deja vu, compulsion, break-beat, ripple, canon, isobar, daydream, and theme and variation…Of time-shift there is the death of uber-morosoph SemanticWill as writer and the near disintegration of the manufactured persona…but before the self [dis] integrates, it is killed off so that the persona itself can supercede by means of simulation.

This blog is not a web site per se, it is not even writing if you prefer to see it that way, but writing seems well-suited to the ‘Idea of This Article,’ as does code. My article’s are more a kind of progressive codework (as lived reality) than manifested outcome.

“Hypertext for the writer was like the poster of Dali for the artist. This is one gambit I can start with your argument through juxtaposition, Benjamin. It beats getting befuddled with Stanley Fish ‘inter-textuality’ and the reader reading himself.” [John Walter, Comment 1, Benjamin & Work of Art, Evans]

The hypertext-space of blog articles are driven by the brutal violence of links, juxtaposed subtly (too much?) in blue suggests a feeling of being depressed – yet it also suggests other states of emotion such as being active, dynamic, visited, anchored, floating. I am waiting to be ported somewhere, anywhere, but here. But where is here? That nagging question that all of the choreographers keep asking as they invent the universe.

My articles could be pseudo-autobiographical works-in-progress, where the (personification) of [artist] who creates one surfs the electrosphere for useful  , samples it, manipulates it, remixes it, and then exhibits it in an online environment that makes it feel like something more than just a diary website – the re-contextualization makes the simulated real. This simulation is probably done in the trans-linguistic act of writing itself. The writing I speak of is more than just a diary entry with links to things I’ve found on the net and is more than just text. It is design-writing, video ecriture, mix-master-illogical mash-up audio, a color field of graphic disturbance in ascii. It is [sub]Verse-ive because it finally transcends or crowds out linear narrative – This is non-euclidean text space. Human portals are fine, they are even dandy — in fact, they may even end up being a kind of virtual dandyism strutting their stuff in net space — but they are not true blog. A true blog article is not true at all. It is pseudo. It is unreal. It is simulacra gone down the rabbit hole after Alice has taken the red pill.

The Poesis of Technopoetics

Some cognitive linguists have addressed what they view as the nonexistent split between pure rhetoric and poetic in a way that can be helpful in understanding the connection between techne and poesis, and this is important background to understanding the stitching of patterns across the hypertext-space. Here are two main claims that address the rhetoric-poesis or techne[art]/poesis integration:

• “A human person is patterns of activity in a human brain”
• “There is no distinction between common versus special language”

“A human person is patterns of activity in a human brain.”

Whatever else humans may be, they are perceivable on at least two levels: mechanism and meaning (another way of phrasing the body/mind facets of human existence). If sense experience and self perception are mediated through the brain, translated from electrical and chemical impulses into the realm of human thought, feeling and action, then ultimately everything human beings create is already part of a coded system. What we normally refer to as language (itself a code system) exists inside of and as a part of whatever bio-symbolic processes link the brain to what we interpret as the body and as the world around us.

“There is no distinction between common versus special language.”

Turner describes the connections between literature and rhetoric – in other words, the between “ordinary language” and the “special” language of poetry. By describing the metaphorical nature of normal language, he seeks to show that it uses the same elements as poetic language. Turner also argues that “Common knowledge expressing common thought is anything but simple, and its workings are not obvious. Special language expressing special thought is an exploitation of the common and to analyzed only with respect to it” . In other words, “originality” depends upon the very unoriginal, that originality is not the creation of the wholly new, but rather consists of rearranging the old in new ways. An example of how poetics/aesthetics is a matter of interpretation is the concept of “Found Art,” which can be related to the phenomenon of “found” or “reusable” images on the Web.

• “…every piece is contributing to the overall effect. Nothing is extraneous; nothing detracts.”[3]
• “it’s a common awareness, a thread that ties together people”[4]

Mental Model-Windows and Image-Schemas

Mental-model Windows are not just one thing standing in the place of another (like a metaphor), but a mapping of a whole set of relationships and entailments from one thing to another. These metaphoric sets are like “Image-Schemas”:

Image-schemas are extremely skeletal images that we use in cognitive operations. Many of our most important and pervasive image schemas are those underlying our bodily sense of spatiality. They include our image-schema of verticality, of a path leading from a source to its goal, of a forward motion, of a container (or more accurately of a bounded space with an interior and exterior, of contact, and of such orientations as up-down, front-back, and center periphery. We have many image-schemas of a part-whole relational structure[. ...] When we understand a scene, we naturally structure it in terms of such elementary image-schemas.

[Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.]

For example, the novels of Henry Miller could be considered SemanticWill-article-esque, but then again so would the so-called “diaries” of Anais Nin, not because they are diaries per se, but because they (sub)vert the diary form into what reads like an associative, pseudo-autobiographical novel. It’s her socio-linguistic poetics coupled with an energetic linking process that makes it feel so blogged. Her enigmatic jazz momentum totally eroticized by a very stylized use of language as aphrodisiacal elixir. This, I believe, is the key to blogging less it become nothing but narcissistic foreplay, and mediocre narcissistic foreplay at that, with no potential for release.

Of course, if Miller or Nin were alive today, they would probably be completely turned on by those potentials available with tools like WordPress. As always, Nin would be looking for the rhetorically-charged juice machine that proactively creates language in rhythm, and any Apparatus would do. Same with Miller, same would Semanticwill and many others of their ilk.

But don’t tell us that to cybernetic artists for whom the aestheticization of the social network is part of a post-formalist dream to turn software into erotic pictures that capture your fancy and who knows what can happen once your fancy has been captured – will it ever be released?

True articles, then, are not blogs as we know them, but as we un-know them. It incites creation – more invention – so that we have to get down and dirty into the developmental process activating the network with your own mixillogical discourse. This is blog as inventive remix juice-machine placing value on what it sees, what it links to, how it appropriates the Other and strips it of its isolation.

——————————————-

“In my mind, I point and click on You.

How will you respond?

What will you do?

How will you behave?”

——————————————-

It is rumoured, that Cocteau once said that “writing is a sickness” and Bataille said that “I write not to be mad.” And, I’m down with the sickness. One could apply this to blogging on this site too. In fact, this is the beauty of the article–if there is one to be found at all: it turns us on, plugs us in, that is, it keeps us generating new material, researching the collective unconscious of the electrosimulacra™ world for possible vector points to link to so that the pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress may have some value-added meaning + connectivity.

This value-added meaning + connectivity, when experienced in real-time telepresence, takes on the condition of the material world it is unquestionably a part of. Whoever said cybernetic space is lacking in loci has never seriously read patterns in tea leaves. Encoded data flies at light-speed to the printer, only to be dumped into its memory. Slowly, as the 0s and 1s are decoded and interpreted, machinery moves, and the original story starts reappearing as frozen black ink on a glistening white landscape, letter by letter, word by word, in perfect calligraphy, imperfections invisible to human eye. The story remains the same, the medium different. Pages are then bound and sealed. This is erotic, this is tactile — and you should recognize the pattern now.

Of course, this “ceaseless generation” of new bytes-turned-pulp material that we might call the avant-pop condition of D-I-Y web production, is a kind of proactively engaged and engaging therapeutic process that one continues as a way to further investigate this Cocteau-ian “down with the sickness,” and can lead to all kinds of outcomes whether that be a scholarly book, a novel, a hypertextualized dreamscape, a porn-dvd, an iTunes playlist, a flashed-narrative, a Facebook group, network performance, or even a de-simulated textualization like writing space that occasionally morphs into a “cite-specific work of environmental art” (where the cites are designated as links and the environment is manifested as a P2P network of associational thinkers – an artificial intelligentsia) just like what we are engaged in |Right-Fucking-Now|. [If fear I have begun making sense again. Must stop that.]

Forget helmets and data gloves. Nanobots, robots the size of a molecule, will travel through the bloodstream of your brain beaming messages to neurons that will enable the simulation of sight, sound, smell and hearing as well as emotion and sexual sensations.
[Scientific American, 10.30.2000]

One thing we can say about articles that are blogged in this hyper-real pseudospace is that they circulate consciousness in a potentially value-added network of social fulfillment and that, in very crude terms, they proactively link some of the data associated with that circulating consciousness to specific “vector-sites” of writing (editor’s note: notice how I don’t use the term “scenes of writing” – this is more because I need more coffee, so don’t read to much into it) – but they are certainly not site-specific since they are (I am) linking machines that are liable to go off at any second. That is to say: they are part of a network greater than themselves and this network is not a specific thing-in-itself but is rather more thingless-in-itself. So now it comes full circle and that paragraph above describing crowds as meta-species starts to make sense, no? Yes. That this entity must produce some observable patterns. Patterns we can isolate and possibly decode. Patterns we can re-Cognize and internalize.

Semanticwill-out. 01.10.2009 8:23:55pm EST

Tags | abstraction of self, cybernetics, gestalt laws, information spaces, information theory, media, pop culture, pre-simulation, pre-simulationism, random musings, soft machine, stream of consciousness, synthesis, will evans, william burroughs